Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synthetic Biodegradable Polymers Used in Controlled Drug Delivery System: An Overview

Polymers are becoming increasingly important in the field of drug delivery. The pharmaceutical applications of polymers range from their use as binders in tablets to viscosity and flow controlling agents in liquids, suspensions and emulsions. Use of polymer is now extended to controlled release and targeting drug delivery system. Polymers are obtained from natural source as well as synthesized chemically. Polymers are classified as biodegradable and nonbiodegradable. Biodegradable polymers have been widely used in biomedical applications because of their known biocompatibility and biodegradability. The present review gives an overview of the different biodegradable polymers that are currently being used in the development of controlled drug delivery system.
Evaluation of Nasal Mucociliary Transport Rate by99mTc-Macroaggregated Albumin Rhinoscintigraphy in Woodworkers

Woodworkers in the furniture industry are exposed to wood dust in their workplaces. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of occupational wood dust exposure on the nasal mucociliary transport rates (NMTRs) in woodworkers. Twenty five woodworkers and 30 healthy controls were included in this study. Wood dust concentration in workplaces was measured using the sampling device. 99m Tc-macroaggregated albumin (99mTc-MAA) rhinoscintigraphy was performed, and NMTR was calculated in all cases. In statistical analysis, an independent samples t-test was used to compare NMTR of woodworkers and control subjects. We found that the mean NMTR of the woodworkers was lower than that of the healthy controls. However, there was not a statistically significant difference between them (P = 0.066). In conclusion, our findings suggested that wood dust exposure may not impair nasal mucociliary transport rate in woodworkers employed in joinery workshops.
Sumoylation of p45/NF-E2: Nuclear Positioning and Transcriptional Activation of the Mammalian β-Like Globin Gene Locus

ABSTRACT NF-E2 is a transcription activator for the regulation of a number of erythroid- and megakaryocytic lineage-specific genes. Here we present evidence that the large subunit of mammalian NF-E2, p45, is sumoylated in vivo in human erythroid K562 cells and in mouse fetal liver. By in vitro sumoylation reaction and DNA transfection experiments, we show that the sumoylation occurs at lysine 368 (K368) of human p45/NF-E2. Furthermore, p45 sumoylation enhances the transactivation capability of NF-E2, and this is accompanied by an increase of the NF-E2 DNA binding affinity. More interestingly, we have found that in K562 cells, the β-globin gene loci in the euchromatin regions are predominantly colocalized with the nuclear bodies promyelocytic leukemia protein (PML) oncogenic domains that are enriched with the PML, SUMO-1, RNA polymerase II, and sumoylatable p45/NF-E2. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assays further showed that the intact sumoylation site of p45/NF-E2 is required for its binding to the DNase I-hypersensitive sites of the β-globin locus control region. Finally, we demonstrated by stable transfection assay that only the wild-type p45, but not its mutant form p45 (K368R), could efficiently rescue β-globin gene expression in the p45-null, erythroid cell line CB3. These data together point to a model of mammalian β-like globin gene activation by sumoylated p45/NF-E2 in erythroid cells.
Optimal False-Positive-Free Bloom Filter Design for Scalable Multicast Forwarding

Large-scale information dissemination in multicast communications has been increasingly attracting attention, be it through uptake in new services or through recent research efforts. In these, the core issues are supporting increased forwarding speed, avoiding state in the forwarding elements, and scaling in terms of the multicast tree size. This paper addresses all these challenges-which are crucial for any scalable multicast scheme to be successful-by revisiting the idea of in-packet Bloom filters and source routing. As opposed to the traditional in-packet Bloom filter concept, we build our Bloom filter by enclosing limited information about the structure of the tree. Analytical investigation is conducted and approximation formulas are provided for optimal-length Bloom filters, in which we got rid of typical Bloom filter illnesses such as false-positive forwarding. These filters can be used in several multicast implementations, which are demonstrated through a prototype. Thorough simulations are conducted to demonstrate the scalability of the proposed Bloom filters compared to its counterparts.
Investigation of joint hypermobility in individuals with hyperbilirubinemia.

OBJECTIVE Benign joint hypermobility syndrome refers to hypermobile individuals with musculoskeletal symptoms in the absence of any systemic rheumatic disease; its prevalence is approximately 0.5%. In animal studies, bilirubin has been shown to reduce fibrosis induced by bleomycin. It has been suggested that bilirubin leads to hypermobility that affects the structure or function of collagen. In addition, our observation is that hypermobility occurs more often in patients with indirect hyperbilirubinemia. In this study, we aimed to evaluate hypermobility in patients with indirect hyperbilirubinemia. MATERIAL AND METHODS We recruited 120 consecutive patients with indirect hyperbilirubinemia from a tertiary gastroenterology outpatient clinic and examined them for hypermobility. Hypermobility was evaluated using the Beighton criteria, and other relevant clinical findings were recorded. In addition, a group of healthy individuals (n=107) without hyperbilirubinemia were included as controls. RESULTS The mean ages of the patients and controls were 33.4±12.9 and 36.2±11.2 years, respectively (p=0.09). In total, 100 (83%) patients and 78 (73%) controls were male (p=0.075). The mean indirect bilirubin levels were 1.44±0.66 mg/dL in the patient group and 0.37±0.18 mg/dL in the control group. Based on the Beighton score, 23 patients (19.2%) in the patient group and 3 (2.8%) individuals in the control group had joint hypermobility. The difference between the groups was statistically significant (p<0.001). CONCLUSION According to the results of our study, findings of joint hypermobility are more frequent in patients with indirect hyperbilirubinemia than in controls.
Contextual descriptors improving credibility of keypoint matching: Harris-Affine, Hessian-Affme and SIFT feasibility study

The paper proposes CONSIFT descriptors which are the rotation-variant modification of SIFT (primarily for affine-invariant keypoints). CONSIFT of a keypoint K is its SIFT computed relatively to the orientation defined by the location of another keypoint L (and concatenated with similarly computed SIFT for keypoint L relatively to the location of K). It is additionally recommended that K and L are extracted by different detectors of complementary properties (e.g. Harris-Affine and Hessian-Affine). The paper evaluates CONSIFT performances over the benchmark dataset. Surprisingly, performances of CONSIFT are nearly equivalent to SIFT. However, the intersection of SIFT-based and CONSIFT-based matches is a highly discriminative tool which rejects most of correspondences which are incorrect in a wider context. Since the method does not require any consistency verification over groups of preliminary matched keypoints (and its memory usage is acceptable) it can be instrumental in large-scale CBVIR systems.
Cell-mediated immune responses and loss of hepatitis B e-antigen (HBeAg) during successful lamivudine and famciclovir combination therapy for chronic replicating hepatitis B virus infection.

Nucleoside analogues have been used as monotherapy for chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, and in most cases a rapid drop is seen in the viral load shortly after the start of therapy, to a 190% drop after 4–8 weeks [1]. Once therapy is stopped, relapses are common, and during prolonged treatment periods the emergence of resistance is common [2]. Recently it was shown that the combination of lamivudine and famciclovir had a synergistic inhibitory effect in vitro in the duck hepatitis virus model [3]. There have been conflicting reports on the activation of endogenous HBV-specific cellular immune responses during nucleoside analogue monotherapy [4, 5], in contrast to those detected during a-IFN therapy or spontaneous seroconversion from positivity for hepatitis B early antigen (HBeAg) to positivity for antibodies to HBeAg (anti-HBe) [6, 7]. Since it is generally believed that these responses are of importance in resolving HBV infections, the absence of an activated endogenous cellular immune response during nucleoside monotherapy is consistent with low HBeAg–to–anti-HBe seroconversion rates [1]. To benefit from a potential synergistic effect and to delay or inhibit the evolution of resistance to lamivudine and famciclovir, combination therapy can be used. A 76-year-old man with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and posttransfusion chronic HBV infection with compensated cirrhosis in a nonreplicative stage after seroconversion from HBeAgto anti-HBe–positivity in February 1997 was found to have reactivated infection in October 1997. During the reactivation, transaminase concentrations increased, HBeAg reappeared, serum HBV DNA levels increased, and the patient became less well clinically. Treatment with famciclovir (500 mg twice weekly) and lamivudine (150 mg daily) was started on 3 December 1997 and continued until 17 May 1999. Serum levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), bilirubin, creatinine, and hemoglobin, as well as the WBC count and differential counts, were closely monitored. Levels of HBV DNA (tested by Amplicor; Roche Laboratories, Nutley, NJ), hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), HBeAg, and anti-HBe were determined by standard assays (Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago, IL). The proliferative and cytokine responses to hepatitis B core antigen (HBcAg) and HBeAg in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were monitored by in vitro
Low inductance switching for SiC MOSFET based power circuit

Wide Band Gap power semiconductor switching devices offer superior performance compared to an equivalent Si power device. SiC MOSFETs can be competitive when compared to Si IGBTs of the same voltage class, whilst offering greater benefits at high switching frequencies. Operating SiC MOSFETs at high switching frequencies imposes significant challenges, including: Ringing and voltage overshoot issues, making accurate high bandwidth measurements, and the requirement for a high-performance gate drive circuit. This paper presents a prototype low inductance PCB design for a SiC MOSFET switching circuit. In addition, a linear current gate-drive circuit and a high bandwidth on-board measurement system have been developed and the designs for these are presented. The measurement system showed good agreement with the external probe measurements and superior bandwidth. Hard-switching tests with a 900V SiC MOSFET showed that the dVDS/dt becomes largely invariant to changes in load current when using a current source gate drive. The measured dVDS/dt slew rates are compared with the dVDS/dt slew rates estimated from the parameter values given in the SiC MOSFET datasheet, and the two sets of results show good agreement. In this paper, the performance of an optimised circuit is successfully demonstrated and the benefits are discussed.
Dielectric barrier discharges: Pulsed breakdown, electrical characterization and Chemistry

The application of atmospheric pressure discharges in new fields like environmental protection, surface treatment or life-sciences requires a profound knowledge on the plasma parameters and properties. This includes the characterization of the breakdown processes triggering plasma chemistry, the proper determination of the electrical parameters and the description of the dominant chemical pathways. This contribution aims to present new approaches regarding these three topics for pulsed driven Dielectric Barrier Discharges (DBDs) in particular. Fast electrical, optical and spectroscopic methods enable the study of ignition, breakdown statistics and spatio-temporally resolved development of pulsed DBD microdischarges. The determination of electrical parameters such as discharge current, gas gap voltage, instantaneous power and energy as well as the charge transferred through the gas gap is based on a simple equivalent circuit which is consistent with sinusoidal-voltage driven or miniature pulsed driven DBDs. The characterization of the dominant chemical pathways of advanced plasma processes discusses also several examples including secondary effects, such as adsorption-enhanced VOC conversion by DBD plasma treatment.
Fine Particle Receptor Modeling in the Atmosphere of Mexico City

Abstract Source apportionment analyses were carried out by means of receptor modeling techniques to determine the contribution of major fine particulate matter (PM2.5) sources found at six sites in Mexico City. Thirty-six source profiles were determined within Mexico City to establish the fingerprints of particulate matter sources. Additionally, the profiles under the same source category were averaged using cluster analysis and the fingerprints of 10 sources were included. Before application of the chemical mass balance (CMB), several tests were carried out to determine the best combination of source profiles and species used for the fitting. CMB results showed significant spatial variations in source contributions among the six sites that are influenced by local soil types and land use. On average, 24-hr PM2.5 concentrations were dominated by mobile source emissions (45%), followed by secondary inorganic aerosols (16%) and geological material (17%). Industrial emissions representing oil combustion and incineration contributed less than 5%, and their contribution was higher at the industrial areas of Tlalnepantla (11%) and Xalostoc (8%). Other sources such as cooking, biomass burning, and oil fuel combustion were identified at lower levels. A second receptor model (principal component analysis, [PCA]) was subsequently applied to three of the monitoring sites for comparison purposes. Although differences were obtained between source contributions, results evidence the advantages of the combined use of different receptor modeling techniques for source apportionment, given the complementary nature of their results. Further research is needed in this direction to reach a better agreement between the estimated source contributions to the particulate matter mass.
Multiple Pattern Databases

A pattern database is a heuristic function stored as a lookup table. This paper considers how best to use a fixed amount (m units) of memory for storing pattern databases. In particular, we examine whether using n pattern databases of size m/n instead of one pattern database of size m improves search performance. In all the domains considered, the use of multiple smaller pattern databases reduces the number of nodes generated by IDA*. The paper provides an explanation for this phenomenon based on the distribution of heuristic values that occur during search.
GAPDH is critical for superior efficacy of female bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells on pulmonary hypertension.

AIMS Pulmonary arterial hypertension, a chronic lung disease, remains an unacceptable prognosis despite significant advances in conventional therapies. Stem cell therapy represents a novel and effective modality. This study was aimed to add new insight in gender differences of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells on therapy against pulmonary arterial hypertension and the underlying mechanism. METHODS AND RESULTS By in vivo experiments, we showed for the first time female bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells possessed a better therapeutic potential against monocrotaline-induced pulmonary arterial hypertension in C57BL/6J mice compared with male counterparts. In vitro experiments demonstrated superior function of female bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells in cell proliferation, migration and [Ca(2+)]i kinetics. Moreover, we unexpectedly found that, compared with male ones, female bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells had a higher expression level of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase and manipulations of its expression in female or male bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells profoundly affected their cellular behaviours and therapeutic efficacies against pulmonary arterial hypertension. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase plays a critical role in determining the superior functions of female bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells in cell therapy against pulmonary arterial hypertension by regulating [Ca(2+)]i signal-associated cellular behaviours.
Performance Enhancement of the RFID Epc Gen2 Protocol by Exploiting Collision Recovery

Maximizing the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) performance is one of the main challenges in application domains, such as logistics and supply chain management, where the undesired effect of Tag collisions can significantly degrade the speed of the inventory process. The dominating UHF EPC Class-1 Generation2 (EPC Gen2) protocol only specifies collision avoidance algorithms but makes no provision for collision resolution. In this paper, performance enhancement of the EPC Gen2 standard exploiting Tag collision recovery is demonstrated, for the first time, in real time with measurements. Three simple and effective approaches to handle successful Tag acknowledgments of recovered collided packets are proposed and implemented on a software-defined Reader and programmable Tags. The attained benefits over the conventional EPC Gen2 MAC scheme are significant: the throughput per time slot is increased by 72% while the overall time required to inventory the Tag population is reduced by 26%. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the validity of the achieved results are confirmed by the good agreement with simulations reported in the literature.
A CLINICAL AND BEHAVIOURAL STUDY OF HIV INFECTED SUBJECTS-A COMPARISON WITH STD SUBJECTS

SUMMARY Eightyfive HIV seropositive subjects (M: 42;F:43) were compared with an equal number STD subjects negative for HIV. They formed 1.6% of the total number (N =5287) screened in the STD OP. Heterosexual transmission was predominant. A significantly higher promiscuity and a larger number of sex partners and contacts were observed in the female but not the male HIV subjects. The ages at first coital experience were similar in both the groups. There was no difference in the occurrence of either STDs or psychiatric illness at index examination between the two groups. The symptom profile of psychiatric illness in the HIV subjects did not differ from that of the controls. The HIV subjects had more of physical diagnoses than the controls. The psychological responses to the ‘disclosure’ of seropositivity were noted. The closeness of HIV and STD groups on many factors and its implication for management and health education are commented upon.
Approximation algorithms for 2-stage stochastic optimization problems

Uncertainty is a facet of many decision environments and might arise for various reasons, such as unpredictable information revealed in the future, or inherent fluctuations caused by noise. Stochastic optimization provides a means to handle uncertainty by modeling it by a probability distribution over possible realizations of the actual data, called scenarios. The field of stochastic optimization, or stochastic programming, has its roots in the work of Dantzig [4] and Beale [1] in the 1950s, and has since increasingly found application in a wide variety of areas, including transportation models, logistics, financial instruments, and network design. An important and widely-used model in stochastic programming is the 2-stage recourse model: first, given only distributional information about (some of) the data, one commits on initial (first-stage) actions. Then, once the actual data is realized according to the distribution, further recourse actions can be taken (in the second stage) to augment the earlier solution and satisfy the revealed requirements. The aim is to choose the initial actions so as to minimize the expected total cost incurred. The recourse actions typically entail making decisions in rapid reaction to the observed scenario, and are therefore more costly than decisions made ahead of time. Thus there is a trade-off between committing initially, having only imprecise information while incurring a lower cost, and deferring decisions to the second-stage, when we know the input precisely but the costs are higher. Many applications can be modeled this way, and much of the textbook of Birge and Louveaux [2] is devoted to models and algorithms for this class of problems. A commonly cited example involves a setting where a company has to decide where to set up facilities to serve client demands. Typically the demand pattern is not known precisely at the outset, but one might be able to obtain, through simulation models or surveys, statistical information about the demands. This motivates the following 2-step decision process: in the first-stage, given only distributional information about the demands (and deterministic data for the facility opening costs), one must decide which facilities to open initially; once the client demands are realized according to this distribution, we can extend the solution by opening more facilities, incurring a recourse cost, and we have to assign the realized demands to open facilities. This is the 2-stage stochastic uncapacitated facility location problem. The recourse costs are usually higher than the original ones (because opening a facility later would involve deploying resources with a small lead time); these costs could be different for the different facilities, and could even depend on the realized scenario.
An Adaptive Routing Scheme for Heterogeneous Data-Flows Using Openflow

In this paper, we propose an open flow controller that takes into account different application's needs such as latency, bandwidth, reliability, network jitter, etc and optimizes the flow on a combination of such factors. It is a dynamic system that constantly keeps track of these parameters and adapts to changes happening in the network and pushes updated rules on the fly to the switches. Such a system can efficiently route traffic in data-center by routing packets from different applications in separate routes as per requirement, thereby utilizing the resources more judiciously. We built a prototype controller using POX and studied its routing characteristics extensively. We used network-bandwidth, latency and reliability as the parameters to test the system and simulated the network using mininet and found that the system was able to balance these three parameters for different loads according to the requirements.
Identifying Fault-Prone Software Modules Using Feed-Forward Networks: A Case Study

Functional complexity of a software module can be measured in terms of static complexity metrics of the program text. Classifying software modules, based on their static complexity measures, into different fault-prone categories is a difficult problem in software engineering. This research investigates the applicability of neural network classifiers for identifying fault-prone software modules using a data set from a commercial software system. A preliminary empirical comparison is performed between a minimum distance based Gaussian classifier, a perceptron classifier and a multilayer layer feed-forward network classifier constructed using a modified Cascade-Correlation algorithm. The modified version of the Cascade-Correlation algorithm constrains the growth of the network size by incorporating a cross-validation check during the output layer training phase. Our preliminary results suggest that a multilayer feed-forward network can be used as a tool for identifying fault-prone software modules early during the development cycle. Other issues such as representation of software metrics and selection of a proper training samples are also discussed.