Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computer-aided measurement of liver volumes in CT by means of geodesic active contour segmentation coupled with level-set algorithms.

PURPOSE Computerized liver extraction from hepatic CT images is challenging because the liver often abuts other organs of a similar density. The purpose of this study was to develop a computer-aided measurement of liver volumes in hepatic CT. METHODS The authors developed a computerized liver extraction scheme based on geodesic active contour segmentation coupled with level-set contour evolution. First, an anisotropic diffusion filter was applied to portal-venous-phase CT images for noise reduction while preserving the liver structure, followed by a scale-specific gradient magnitude filter to enhance the liver boundaries. Then, a nonlinear grayscale converter enhanced the contrast of the liver parenchyma. By using the liver-parenchyma-enhanced image as a speed function, a fast-marching level-set algorithm generated an initial contour that roughly estimated the liver shape. A geodesic active contour segmentation algorithm coupled with level-set contour evolution refined the initial contour to define the liver boundaries more precisely. The liver volume was then calculated using these refined boundaries. Hepatic CT scans of 15 prospective liver donors were obtained under a liver transplant protocol with a multidetector CT system. The liver volumes extracted by the computerized scheme were compared to those traced manually by a radiologist, used as "gold standard. " RESULTS The mean liver volume obtained with our scheme was 1504 cc, whereas the mean gold standard manual volume was 1457 cc, resulting in a mean absolute difference of 105 cc (7.2%). The computer-estimated liver volumetrics agreed excellently with the gold-standard manual volumetrics (intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.95) with no statistically significant difference (F = 0.77; p(F < or = f) = 0.32). The average accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and percent volume error were 98.4%, 91.1%, 99.1%, and 7.2%, respectively. Computerized CT liver volumetry would require substantially less completion time (compared to an average of 39 min per case by manual segmentation). CONCLUSIONS The computerized liver extraction scheme provides an efficient and accurate way of measuring liver volumes in CT.
A note on the stability properties of the Euler methods for solving stochastic differential equations

In this paper we study the linear stability properties of the Euler methods for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) applied with constant stepsize. W e extend the T-stability defined by Saito and Mitsui [10] from weak solutions to strong solutions. The extended definition of T-stability is equivalent to the asymptotic stability property of a numerical method applied to the linear test equation, which is also studied by Higham [5]. As the T stability property has a strong relationship with the number of steps, T (A ) stability is defined in this paper. W e prove that the implicit Euler method is T-stable for certain values of the linear test problem and give the T (A ) stability regions of the Euler methods. The numerical results indicate that the definition of T(A)-stability is meaningful.
Implantation Trends and Patient Profiles for Pacemakers and Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators in the United States: 1993–2006

Background: Prior studies of cardiac rhythm management devices (pacemakers [PM] and implantable cardioverter defibrillators [ICD]) utilization in the United States have been limited to the Medicare population. We evaluated the national trends for the implantation of PMs and ICDs including the burden of device replacement.
A Novel Approach for LTCC Packaging Using a PBG Structure for Shielding and Package Mode Suppression

A packaging solution for multifunctional modules up to an operating frequency of 50 GHz based on Low Temperature Cofired Ceramics (LTCC) is presented in this paper. A Ball Grid Array (BGA) as well as a Land Grid Array (LGA) transition from Printed Circuit Board (PCB) into a surface mounted module are proposed. They use a Photonic Bandgap (PBG) structure to suppress the excitation of parasitic modes e.g. by the SMT interconnect. This approach provides process tolerant transitions as well as it allows the integration of wave guide structures in buried layers. This measure provides a greater flexibility in the design of microwave circuits and a major potential for miniaturisation of microwave subsystems.
What’s ‘New’ About New Forms of Organizing?

In order to assess whether new theories are necessary to explain new forms of organizing or existing theories suffice, we must first specify exactly what makes a form of organizing “new. ” We propose clear criteria for making such an assessment and show how they are useful in assessing if and when new theories of organizing may truly be needed. We illustrate our arguments by contrasting forms of organizing often considered novel, such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Oticon, against their traditional counterparts. We conclude that even when there may be little that existing theory cannot explain about individual elements in these new forms of organizing, opportunities for new theorizing lie in understanding the bundles of co-occurring elements that seem to underlie them and why the same bundles occur in widely disparate organizations.
Does Intra-abdominal Desmoid Disease Affect Patients With an Ileal Pouch Differently Than Those With an Ileorectal Anastomosis?

BACKGROUND: Nobody has analyzed the sequelae of desmoids according to the type of surgery that precipitated them. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to determine whether the clinical effects of abdominal desmoids would be worse in patients with restorative proctocolectomy than in patients with ileorectal anastomosis. DESIGN: This is a retrospective, database study. PATIENTS: Included were patients with familial adenomatous polyposis who had undergone proctocolectomy with IPAA or colectomy and ileorectal anastomosis, and subsequently developed an intra-abdominal desmoid tumor. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome measures were the clinical course of the desmoids; morbidity, and the requirement for stoma. RESULTS: There were 86 patients: 49 had restorative proctocolectomy and 37 had ileorectal anastomosis. Patient demographics were similar. Average follow-up was 9.8 years (range, 2.7–23.8) and 16.3 years (range, 2.3 – 42.9). Treatment of the desmoids included surgery (64.4% vs 65.6%), medical therapy (69.4% vs 59.5%), chemotherapy (36.2% vs 30.0%), and radiotherapy (4.5% vs 10.0%), and was the same for each group. The overall complication rate of desmoids was similar, approaching 70%. The risk of individual complications was also similar (bleeding (2.0% vs 0.0%), fistula (10.2% vs 13.5%), bowel obstruction (32.7% vs 48.6%), pain (34.7% vs 21.6%), and death related to desmoid tumors (2.0% vs10.8%)); 38.8% of the restorative proctocolectomy group and 51.4% the ileorectal group had surgery for desmoid tumor complications (P = .21), and 22.4% and 22.2% of patients ultimately had permanent stomas. LIMITATIONS: This study was limited by the relatively small numbers of patients. CONCLUSION: The morbidity associated with desmoid tumors has not been shown to differ, whether they arise after restorative proctocolectomy or ileorectal anastomosis.
Issues in Modelling the Financial Distress and Bankruptcy of Companies

Paper presents selected issues in designing and implementing models for financial distress and/or bankruptcy of companies. Major topics include: (1) definition of financial distress, (2) approaches to specify the distress variable, (3) aims and extent of the research on distress, (4) quantitative approaches in the field, including the attempt by Campbell, Hilscher and Szilagyi (2008), (5) survey of recent papers on the topic published in Poland.
Determinants of B2B salespersons' performance and effectiveness: a review and synthesis of literature

Purpose – Review articles on B2B salespersons' performance in the recent past have been limited. This paper seeks to provide a review, focusing on the conceptualizations of the salespersons' performance construct, and its determinants, in a B2B context. A synthesis of the relevant predictors is presented, and new customer‐centric measures of performance in industrial selling are also proposed.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an exhaustive review and synthesis of the conceptual and empirical studies on salespersons' performance and effectiveness. It also posits a set of propositions from a customer‐centric perspective.Findings – Far too many individual‐level variables are used as predictors of a B2B salesperson's performance and effectiveness. Future research must focus on context‐specific selling situations to identify the contextual skills required to perform the critical customer‐centric activities, rather than by using generic models that fail to apply to all situations.Research limitat.
CALL FOR PAPERS Cell Signaling: Proteins, Pathways and Mechanisms Thiol-based antioxidants elicit mitochondrial oxidation via respiratory complex III

Thiol-based antioxidants elicit mitochondrial oxidation via respiratory complex III. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol oxidation is widely accepted as a precursor to deleterious cellular function. On the other hand, an awareness of the role of reductive stress as a similar pathological insult is emerging. Here we report early dynamic changes in compartmentalized glutathione (GSH) redox potentials in living cells in response to exogenously supplied thiol-based antioxidants. Noninvasive monitoring of intracellular thiol-disulﬁde exchange via a genetically encoded biosensor targeted to cytosol and mitochondria revealed unexpectedly rapid oxidation of the mitochondrial matrix in response to GSH ethyl ester or N -acetyl- L -cysteine. Oxidation of the probe occurred within seconds in a concentration-dependent manner and was attenuated with the membrane-permeable ROS scavenger tiron. In contrast, the cytosolic sensor did not respond to similar treatments. Surprisingly, the immediate mitochondrial oxidation was not abrogated by depolarization of mitochondrial membrane potential or inhibition of mitochondrial GSH uptake. After detection of elevated levels of mitochondrial ROS, we systematically inhibited multisubunit protein complexes of the mitochondrial respiratory chain and determined that respiratory complex III is a downstream target of thiol-based compounds. Disabling complex III with myxothiazol completely blocked matrix oxidation induced with GSH ethyl ester or N -acetyl- L -cysteine. Our ﬁndings provide new evidence of a functional link between exogenous thiol-containing antioxidants and mitochondrial respiration. differences between GEE treatment and control to monitor mitochondrial oxidative stress were determined with Tukey’s test. Statistical signiﬁcance was determined at the 0.05 level.
Intelligent Texture Alignment for Kimono Design

A yukata is a type of traditional Japanese kimono. An alignment of its texture pattern is an important factor of the yukata design. In this study, we developed a design support system for the texture alignment of the yukata as a Web service, which can be used on a mobile phone. Texture images of the kimono cloth are stored in an image database. The user can select a desired texture through a mobile phone and the texture alignment is performed automatically based on the traditional rules for the yukata design. By using this design support system, a female customer can easily order the yukata, which satisfies their favors.
Monitoring value‐in‐use of e‐service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate an approach to managerially monitoring customer‐experienced value of e‐services. The need for this study is based on a lack of models of e‐service value applying a value‐in‐use approach on the one hand, and on the other hand the increasing need for managerially viable techniques to diagnose customers' views of e‐service value.Design/methodology/approach – The approach, customized for but not limited to e‐services, employs four principal value dimensions (technical, functional, temporal and spatial) anchored in service quality and value research to capture e‐service value. The approach has two new characteristics. It focuses on relative joint evaluations of benefits and sacrifice and on the degree of customer activation. The empirical study based on a large‐scale web survey of users' evaluations of a travel agency's web service illustrates how the approach can be used.Findings – The theoretically based approach showed in the empirical study tha.
The Turkish version of perceived support and control in birth scale

Abstract Objective: This is a methodological study carried out to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Support and Control in Birth Scale (SCIB). Methods: This study included 339 post-partum women. The validity of the Turkish version of the scale was assessed in terms of content and construct validity. Reliability was evaluated using the internal consistency coefficient, the test–retest correlation coefficient and the item correlation between the subscales. Results: The internal consistency coefficient of the scale was 0.84 (p < 0.01). There were significant correlations between sub-scales (rho = 0.122, 0.129, 0.263, p < 0.05), and the test–retest correlation coefficient of the scale was also significant (rho = 0.86, α = 0.000). As in the original scale, a three-factor structure was examined, which explained 42.85% of the total variance. The model was verified by a confirmatory factor analysis. Conclusion: The Turkish version of the SCIB is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring the perceived support and control during birth among Turkish women.
A New Approach to Fault Diagnostics for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines Using Electromagnetic Signature Analysis

This paper proposes a novel approach to health monitoring and multifault detection in permanent magnet synchronous machines using direct flux measurement with search coils. Unlike other spectrum-based fault detection schemes, only the fundamental frequency component of the measured voltage is utilized for fault detection. Therefore, the performance of the proposed scheme is not affected by nonstationary speed or harmonics introduced by the power supply. In addition, location of interturn short circuits and direction of static eccentricity can be detected, which have never been done by any other scheme. In spite of the invasive nature of the technique, it is very suitable for mission-critical applications and emerging applications such as off-shore wind turbines, hybrid vehicle technology, and military applications, where early detection of faults is of paramount importance. 2-D simulations using finite element analysis have been presented to validate the proposed method under different operating conditions. Experimental introduction of stator interturn short circuit, demagnetization, and static eccentricity has been discussed, and the proposed scheme is experimentally implemented to examine its effectiveness.
Structural Analysis of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 CRF01_AE Protease in Complex with the Substrate p1-p6

ABSTRACT The effect of amino acid variability between human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) clades on structure and the emergence of resistance mutations in HIV-1 protease has become an area of significant interest in recent years. We determined the first crystal structure of the HIV-1 CRF01_AE protease in complex with the p1-p6 substrate to a resolution of 2.8 Å. Hydrogen bonding between the flap hinge and the protease core regions shows significant structural rearrangements in CRF01_AE protease compared to the clade B protease structure.
An Extension to Local Network Alignment using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)

Local alignment is done on biological networks to find common conserved substructures belonging to different organisms. Many algorithms such as PathBLAST (Kelley et al., 2003), Network-BLAST (Scott et al., 2006) are used to align networks locally and they are generally good at finding small sized common substructures. However, these algorithms have same failures about finding larger substructures because of complexity issues. To overcome these issues, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is used. The study done by (Qian and Yoon, 2009), uses HMMs to find optimal conserved paths in two biological networks where aligned paths have constant path length. In this paper, we aim to make an extension to the local network alignment procedure done in (Qian and Yoon, 2009) to find common substructures in varying length sizes between the biological networks. We again used same algorithm to find k-length exact matches from networks and we used them to find common substructures in two forms as sub-graphs and extended paths. These structures do not need to have the same number of nodes and should satisfy the predefined similarity threshold (s0). The other parameter is the length of exact paths (k) formed from biological networks and choosing a lower k value is faster but bigger values might be needed in order to balance the number of matching paths below s0.
A 4-year analysis of caesarean delivery in a Nigerian teaching hospital: One-quarter of babies born surgically

Summary Between January 2001 and December 2004, a total of 2,922 deliveries were conducted at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu. Caesarean section accounted for 740 deliveries, an incidence of 25.3%. A total of 62.2% of caesarean sections were done as emergencies, while 37.8% were done as elective procedures and 64.8% were booked patients. Repeat caesarean sections accounted for 59.2% of elective cases and 18.7% of emergency cases. Fetal distress was responsible for 11. 6% of emergency cases, however 35.6% of babies delivered for clinically diagnosed fetal distress had Apgar scores 7 and above. A total of 85.6% of patients were between 25 – 29 years of age; 31% were primigravida, while 54.4% were Gravida 2 – 4. There were seven (0.6%) maternal deaths and 73 (9.2%) stillbirths. It was concluded that reduction of primary caesarean section rate and repeat caesarean rates should be the main target of any strategy to reduce caesarean section rate. Other measures to reduce the caesarean section rate and recommendations are discussed.
Hardware Trojans classification for gate-level netlists using multi-layer neural networks

Recently, due to the increase of outsourcing in IC design and manufacturing, it has been reported that malicious third-party IC vendors often insert hardware Trojans into their products. Especially in IC design step, it is strongly required to detect hardware Trojans because malicious third-party vendors can easily insert hardware Trojans in their products. In this paper, we propose a machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection method for gate-level netlists using multi-layer neural networks. First, we extract 11 Trojan-net feature values for each net in a netlist. After that, we classify the nets in an unknown netlist into a set of Trojan nets and that of normal nets using multi-layer neural networks. We obtained at most 100% true positive rate with our proposed method.
HOW ARE NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS INFLUENCED TO CREATE AND ADOPT INFORMATION SECURITY POLICIES

As news of cyber attacks and data breaches at corporate and government institutions have increased in frequency, the discussion as to whether nonprofit organizations are affected similarly has largely been omitted. While at first glance a typical nonprofit might not seem as valuable of a target to hackers and cyber criminals as business or public sector groups, this study finds that these organizations routinely collect and store data often targeted by digital thieves. But are they storing, transmitting, and processing this data in a safe and secure manner? The creation and adoption of a formal information security policy is often seen as the starting point for a strong information security program at an organization. This study explores the adoption as well as attitudes regarding information security policies at nonprofit organizations in two areas of Illinois.
Turf wars: what the intraorganisational conflict literature may contribute to our understanding of marketing strategy implementation

The problem of strategy non-implementation, defined here as variance between intended and enacted strategy, is important and complex but poorly understood. This paper explores the explanatory value of theories regarding intraorganisational conflict. It concludes that certain concepts from this area, notably Walton and Dutton's model of interdepartmental conflict, when augmented with ideas from the social psychology literature and empirical observations of marketing's interface with other functions, help our understanding of marketing strategy implementation. These conclusions are expressed in terms of six postulates and concomitant hypotheses that may form the basis of future work towards improving the understanding and management of strategy implementation.
Observational validation of an extended mosaic technique for capturing subgrid scale heterogeneity in a GCM

A technique called extended mosaic (EM) was designed to allow the subgrid scale interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere to extend vertically. EMaddresses a limitation of previously existing techniques, and has been shown to have an important impact on the simulated climate in global models. The present work focuses on an observational validation of the climate characteristics of a general circulation model using EM, based on a set of 10-yr simulations with each of EM and the standard mosaic technique (M), driven by climatological sea surface temperatures. Model simulations using EM show improvements in many aspects of the mid-latitude climate and in wintertime air temperature over Alaska and Western Canada and in the pattern of the Australian monsoon precipitation over land. An example of a degradation in the EM simulation is the temperature over southern South America in wintertime.
Middlemen in Limit Order Markets

We model high-frequency traders in electronic markets. We ask how the presence of such middlemen may affect welfare. We find that middlemen process public information faster than the average investor. As such, they can play a positive or a negative role. On the positive side, when they enter a market they can raise welfare by solving a pre-existing adverse selection problem. In that case their entry is accompanied by a rise in trade and a fall in bid-ask spreads, and they can raise welfare by up to 30% of the gap between its equilibrium level and its first-best level. On the negative side, they can create or exacerbate an adverse- selection problem, in which case spreads rise and trade declines. Our evidence on this score is mixed. On the one hand, middlemen’s participation lowers spreads but, on the other, it also lowers trade.
ARXPS characterization of InGaP/GaAs heterointerface grown by MOVPE

This paper studies the chemical composition of the hetereointerface of the semiconductors InGaP/GaAs, grown by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), by means of X-ray Photoelectrons Spectroscopy (XPS) by two methods: conventional XPS with Ar+ sputtering and by angle resolved XPS (ARXPS). Firstly, from the corrected Auger parameter for different angles, we have determined the depth of the Ga oxide in the superficial GaAs layer by environmental contamination and we have studied its influence in the interface. The thickness of Ga2O3 is only of some Armstrong and it no presents an important influence in the interface.