Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Whole-body impedance cardiography in the measurement of cardiac output.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the reliability of whole-body impedance cardiography with electrodes on wrists and ankles in the measurement of cardiac output compared with the thermodilution method. DESIGN Prospective, clinical investigation. SETTING Surgical intensive care unit and operating room at a university hospital. PATIENTS Simultaneous cardiac output measurements by thermodilution and whole-body impedance cardiography were performed in 74 patients undergoing a coronary artery bypass grafting operation. INTERVENTIONS None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS A total of 97 triplicate, simultaneous cardiac output measurements were carried out with thermodilution and whole-body impedance cardiography: 74 measurements were conducted in patients who were awake and 23 measurements were conducted during anesthesia but before the commencement of surgery. The mean cardiac output difference (bias) between the two methods was 0.25 +/- 0.81 (SD) L/min; the limits of agreement (2 SD) were-1.37 and 1.87 L/min, respectively. The repeatability value (rv = 2.83 x SD) for whole-body impedance cardiography (rv = 0.46 L/min) was considerably better than for the thermodilution method (rv = 1.05 L/min). Whole-body impedance cardiography reliably detected cardiac output changes induced by head-up tilt before anesthesia, by anesthesia induction, and by intubation. Two factors predicted the between-methods stroke volume difference: hematocrit (correlation coefficient r = -.36, r2 = .13; p < .001); and body mass index (r = .29, r2 = .08; p < .01). Using the multiple linear regression equation for correcting the stroke volume by hematocrit and body mass index, the limits of agreement (2 SD) between the methods studied were reduced to +/-1.28 L/min for cardiac output and +/-0.72 L/min/m2 for cardiac index. CONCLUSIONS There was close agreement between whole-body impedance cardiography and thermodilution in the measurement of cardiac output in patients with coronary artery disease without cardiac shunts and valvular lesions. The repeatability of the impedance method was significantly better than the repeatability of thermodilution. Whole-body impedance cardiography can be recommended for the assessment of cardiac output and its changes in the resting state. Whole-body impedance cardiography is a feasible and handy method for noninvasive and continuous measurement of cardiac output.
Virtual Endoscopy in Research and Clinical Practice

Virtual endoscopy is among the most active topics in virtual medicine and medical imaging. It focuses on the virtual representation of minimally invasive procedures for training, planning and diagnosis without an actual invasive intervention. In the past few years, virtual endoscopy modes have been transferred from research systems in virtually every commercial medical imaging software, but with varying quality and flexibility. This report covers concepts used in current systems in research and products, and how they might be applied to daily practice in health care. Specifically, I will start with an introduction into virtual endoscopy and the related medical field. This will also include typical scenarios of virtual endoscopy applications as they appear in clinical practice. This part will be followed by a discussion of the technical issues of virtual endoscopy and how they are addressed in currently available systems. Among these issues are navigation through the respective body organ and the orientation aids for the users. In addition, I will highlight the different rendering techniques used and its impact on rendering speed and quality.
Design of a sliding mode observer for sensorless control of SPMSM operating at medium and high speeds

This paper presents design of a sliding mode observer (SMO) for sensorless control of surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor (SPMSM) operating at medium and high speeds. The proposed SMO design uses saturation function instead of signum function which is commonly used in the conventional SMO design. The advantage and novelties of the proposed SMO design lie in the following aspects. First, the proposed design is simple in computing. The saturation function naturally smoothes the estimated back-emf signal, while in the conventional SMO design, an extra low pass filter has to be applied to smooth the discontinuous switching signals. Second, the proposed SMO is easy to implement because the design allows intuitive selection and tuning of observer parameters. Third, the estimation performance is analytically studied and the proposed SMO reveals accurate estimation of the rotor position. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulations and experimental testings.
Using Comparable Corpora to Adapt a Translation Model to Domains

Statistical machine translation (SMT) requires a large parallel corpus, which is available only for restricted language pairs and domains. To expand the language pairs and domains to which SMT is applicable, we created a method for estimating translation pseudo-probabilities from bilingual comparable corpora. The essence of our method is to calculate pairwise correlations between the words associated with a source-language word, presently restricted to a noun, and its translations; word translation pseudo-probabilities are calculated based on the assumption that the more associated words a translation is correlated with, the higher its translation probability. We also describe a method we created for calculating noun-sequence translation pseudo-probabilities based on occurrence frequencies of noun sequences and constituent-word translation pseudo-probabilities. Then, we present a framework for merging the translation pseudo-probabilities estimated from in-domain comparable corpora with a translation model learned from an out-of-domain parallel corpus. Experiments using Japanese and English comparable corpora of scientific paper abstracts and a Japanese-English parallel corpus of patent abstracts showed promising results; the BLEU score was improved to some degree by incorporating the pseudo-probabilities estimated from the in-domain comparable corpora. Future work includes an optimization of the parameters and an extension to estimate translation pseudo-probabilities for verbs.
A variation-adaptive retiming method exploiting reconfigurability

In this article we present a variation-aware post placement and routing (P&R) retiming method to counteract process variation in FPGAs. Variation-aware retiming takes into account exact variation maps (measured on FPGAs) as opposed to statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) which models process variation with statistical distributions. Experiments are conducted using variation maps measured from 100 Cyclone III FPGAs, and the retiming algorithm is applied using MATLAB. We have shown that for circuits with several retiming choices of equivalent logic depth, up to 30% delay improvement can be achieved for a given variation coefficient of σ/μ = 0.3.
Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells: an up-to-the-minute review

Recent advances in nuclear reprogramming technology allow the transformation of terminally differentiated, adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells whose phenotype is indistinguishable from that of embryonic stem cells. This leap forward enables the creation of patient-specific pluripotent cell lines that carry disease genotypes. These cell lines could be used both as in vitro models for the study of disease and as potential sources of material for cell replacement therapy. Ultimately, a greater understanding of the process by which cellular identity is shaped and altered may allow the generation of particular cell types for the treatment of degenerative disease.
On the Mathematics of Music: From Chords to Fourier Analysis

Mathematics is a far reaching discipline and its tools appear in many applications. In this paper we discuss its role in music and signal processing by revisiting the use of mathematics in algorithms that can extract chord information from recorded music. We begin with a light introduction to the theory of music and motivate the use of Fourier analysis in audio processing. We introduce the discrete and continuous Fourier transforms and investigate their use in extracting important information from audio data.
Revisiting the concept of lineage in prokaryotes: a phylogenetic perspective

Mutation and lateral transfer are two categories of processes generating genetic diversity in prokaryotic genomes. Their relative importance varies between lineages, yet both are complementary rather than independent, separable evolutionary forces. The replication process inevitably merges together their effects on the genome. We develop the concept of “open lineages” to characterize evolutionary lineages that over time accumulate more changes in their genomes by lateral transfer than by mutation. They contrast with “closed lineages,” in which most of the changes are caused by mutation. Open and closed lineages are interspersed along the branches of any tree of prokaryotes. This patchy distribution conflicts with the basic assumptions of traditional phylogenetic approaches. As a result, a tree representation including both open and closed lineages is a misrepresentation. The evolution of all prokaryotic lineages cannot be studied under a single model unless new phylogenetic approaches that are more pluralistic about lineage evolution are designed.
An auction approach to resource allocation with interference coordination in LTE-A systems

We propose a resource allocation scheme based on the auction algorithm that aims at minimizing inter-cell interference (ICI) in multi-carrier LTE-A systems. The prices paid for resources by cell-edge users are infrequently exchanged between adjacent cells to help deciding who needs a specific resource the most. Furthermore, the Relative Narrowband Transmit Power (RNTP) indicator that is exchanged between cells in the LTE-A system is exploited to minimize the information exchange rate. When RNTP is used, only resources that suffer interference higher than a certain threshold are considered in the price exchange mechanism. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the cell-edge throughput. The use of RNTP not only minimizes the exchange overhead, especially in a multi-carrier scenario, but it also improves the system performance as the cell neighbors would not avoid using a resource unless they are the culprit interferers to the original cell that uses it.
Activating concepts by activating experiential traces: investigations with a series of anagram solution tasks

According to the experiential-simulations view of language, words automatically activate experiential traces that stem from the reader’s interactions with their referents. Here, we focus on the corresponding influence in the opposite direction. By means of an anagram-solving task we investigated whether activating spatial experiential traces would activate the corresponding concepts, which in turn facilitates access to associated words. Participants solved anagrams of nouns associated with the ocean or the sky (e.g. dolphin = “dplhion” or cloud = “cdulo”). In six experiments we provided additional context information such as positional information (presenting the anagram at the top or the bottom of the screen), or pictorial information that either matched the ocean and sky theme or not, or both positional and pictorial information. Anagrams were solved faster when the position of the anagram was congruent with the location of the noun’s referent in the real world, but only when presented on the background of an ocean-sky picture. Thus, activating experiential traces indeed seems to activate related concepts but positional information alone is not enough to find facilitation in an anagram solving task. Rather what is needed is a whole set of traces that sufficiently narrow down the number of related concepts.
Semantic Role Labeling as Sequential Tagging

In this paper we present a semantic role labeling system submitted to the CoNLL-2005 shared task. The system makes use of partial and full syntactic information and converts the task into a sequential BIO-tagging. As a result, the labeling architecture is very simple. Building on a state-of-the-art set of features, a binary classifier for each label is trained using AdaBoost with fixed depth decision trees. The final system, which combines the outputs of two base systems performed F1=76.59 on the official test set. Additionally, we provide results comparing the system when using partial vs. full parsing input information.
The relationship between compassion, interpersonal communication apprehension, narcissism and verbal aggressiveness

This investigation explores the relationship between compassion, interpersonal communication apprehension, narcissism, and verbal aggressiveness in friendship relationships. First, it discusses the novel construct of compassion for others and its inverse relationship to constructs such as interpersonal communication apprehension, narcissism, and verbal aggressiveness in friendship communication. Second, it examines whether there are gender differences in compassion, interpersonal communication apprehension (CA), narcissism, and verbal aggressiveness. Participants were 613 undergraduate students who completed the Compassion Scale, PRCA-24, Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale, and the Verbal Aggressiveness Scale. Data were analyzed using Pearson Product-moment correlations to examine the associations among the variables of interest and Independent-sample t-tests to investigate sex differences. The results of this study revealed that compassion was inversely correlated with interpersonal CA, narcissism, and verbal aggressiveness. Sex differences were also found in compassion, interpersonal CA, and verbal aggressiveness.
On-chip MOS PVT variation monitor for slew rate self-adjusting 2×VDD output buffers

A novel PVT (Process, Voltage, Temperature) detection and compensation technique is proposed to automatically adjust the slew rate of a 2×VDD output buffer. The threshold voltage (Vth) of PMOSs and NMOSs varying with process, voltage, and temperature deviation could be detected, respectively. The proposed design is implemented using a typical 90 nm CMOS process to justify the performance. By adjusting output currents, the slew rate of output signal could be compensated over 26% and the maximum data rate is 330 MHz.
Enhancement of human immunodeficiency virus type 1‐DNA vaccine potency through incorporation of T‐helper 1 molecular adjuvants

Summary: It is clear that the development of a safe and effective vaccine for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV‐1) remains a crucial goal for controlling the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome epidemic. At present, it is not clear what arm of the immune response correlates with protection from HIV‐1 infection or disease. Therefore, a strong cellular and humoral immune response will likely be needed to control this infection. Among different vaccine alternatives, DNA vaccines appeared more than a decade ago, demonstrating important qualities of inducing both humoral and cellular immune responses in animal models. However, after several years and various clinical studies in humans, supporting the safety of the HIV‐DNA vaccine strategies, it has become clear that their potency should be improved. One way to modulate and enhance the immune responses induced by a DNA vaccine is by including genetic adjuvants such as cytokines, chemokines, or T‐cell costimulatory molecules as part of the vaccine itself. Particularly, vaccine immunogenicity can be modulated by factors that attract professional antigen‐presenting cells, provide additional costimulation, or enhance the uptake of plasmid DNA. This review focuses on developments in the coadministration of molecular adjuvants for the enhancement of HIV‐1 DNA‐vaccine potency.
Experimental Results with Forward Erasure Correction and Real Video Streaming in Hybrid Wireless Networks

In a heterogeneous MANET, based on wireless LANs linked together by satellite, the overall channel efficiency is impaired by multiple effects, because of multipath fading in the terrestrial segment and atmospheric fading on the satellite link. In this paper we address this issue by applying forward erasure correction codes (FZC) to MPEG-4 video sequences exchanged by the hosts of a hybrid network, made of a satellite link and a wireless LAN using 802.11b devices. A standard video streaming application runs on one end of the satellite link while, at the other end, a wireless ad hoc network receives the multicast video stream. This work aims at demonstrating the improvement in quality of service (QoS) of the video transmitted in the hybrid network. The main parameters measured are the packet loss, the delivery delay, and the overhead in bandwidth occupancy imposed by the use of FZC. The received video is then evaluated by using a MOS (mean opinion score) procedure
Maximum likelihood estimation of the decoupling parameters in a GEM-based RBF training algorithm with censored data

In this paper a novel procedure for training radial basis function (RBF) networks in the presence of censored data is presented. The proposed technique is based on a decomposition determined by decoupling parameters which are estimated by maximum likelihood. The censorship considers that some outputs are missing, but classification intervals containing them are observed. Convergence of the algorithm is proved by showing that it can be framed as a GEM (generalized expectation-maximization)-based training method. Hence, the possibility to adapt a GEM algorithm to deal with censored data without assuming known error variances is proved. The robustness of the algorithm is illustrated via a simulation example.
Corporate wiki users: results of a survey

A survey of 168 corporate wiki users was conducted. Findings indicate that corporate wikis appear to be sustainable. Users stated three main types of benefits from corporate wikis: enhanced reputation, work made easier, and helping the organization to improve its processes. These benefits were seen as more likely when the wiki was used for tasks requiring novel solutions and the information posted was from credible sources. Users acknowledged making a variety of contributions, which suggests that they could be categorized as "synthesizers" and "adders". Synthesizers" frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders" contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.
What Is an Attributive Adjective?

Abstract Peter Geach's distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has become part of the technical apparatus of philosophers, but no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. Geach's discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion yields both a more defensible version of Geach's arguments that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are attributive and a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity.
Optimal Routing on Delay Tolerant Grids

Delay (or disruption) tolerant networks may be modeled as a Markovian evolving graph [1]. We present experimental evidence showing that considering multiple (possibly not shortest) paths instead of one fixed (greedy) path can decrease the expected time to deliver a packet on such a network by as much as 65 per cent depending on the probability that an edge exists in a given time interval. We provide theoretical justification for this result by studying a special case of the Markovian evolving grid graph. We analyze a natural algorithm for routing on such networks and show that it is possible to improve the expected time of delivery by up to a factor of two depending upon the probability of an edge being up during a time step and the relative positions of the source and destination. Furthermore we show that this is optimal, i.e., no other algorithm can achieve a better expected running time. As an aside, our results give high probability bounds for Knuth’s toilet paper problem [10].
Autophagy as a Therapeutic Target in Diabetic Nephropathy

Diabetic nephropathy is a serious complication of diabetes mellitus, and its prevalence has been increasing worldwide. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify a new therapeutic target to prevent diabetic nephropathy. Autophagy is a major catabolic pathway involved in degrading and recycling macromolecules and damaged organelles to maintain intracellular homeostasis. The study of autophagy in mammalian systems is advancing rapidly and has revealed that it is involved in the pathogenesis of various metabolic or age-related diseases. The functional role of autophagy in the kidneys is also currently under intense investigation although, until recently, evidence showing the involvement of autophagy in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy has been limited. We provide a systematic review of autophagy and discuss the therapeutic potential of autophagy in diabetic nephropathy to help future investigations in this field.
Lower-dimensional Relaxations of Higher-dimensional Orthogonal Packing

Consider the feasibility problem in higher-dimensional orthogonal packing. Given a set I of d-dimensional rectangles, we need to decide whether a feasible packing in a d-dimensional rectangular container is possible. No item rotation is allowed and item edges are parallel to the coordinate axes. Typically, solution methods employ some bounds to facilitate the decision. Various bounds are known, e.g., the volume bound, Lagrangian and/or continuous relaxation of ILP models, conservative scales, dimension reduction. We generalize two types of one-dimensional bounds. The first type leads to contiguous 1D stock cutting, where items of each type are situated in consecutive bins. The second type leads to standard 1D stock cutting, we call it bar and slice relaxations. Contiguous 1D cutting leads to a new model for orthogonal packing which shares the combinatorial structure of the interval graph model of Fekete and Schepers. We compare the strength of the relaxations. Bar and slice relaxations are rather strong and have the advantage of quick computability. Moreover, we propose a method to combine these relaxations in different dimensions by probing on the packing intersection variables. This allows us to solve many infeasible benchmark instances without any branching. Moreover, we considered some benchmark strippacking instances from the literature. We could close some of them using the new bounds.