Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automated Cell Parameters Extraction in Early Embryo Development using 3 D Optical Coherence

Only 20-30% of current clinical in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles result in a live birth because of difficulty in predicting viability of embryos. Recent work based on morphological parameters using 2-D images at a single stage of development has shown some promise for viability prediction of embryos at early stages its development. We propose a novel method of exploiting time-lapse 3-D images from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) to search for additional parameters indicative of embryo viability. This project delineates an image-processing tool to automate extraction of parameters that will be assessed for their correlation to embryo viability. The image-processing tool estimates 3-D shape of the cell and the number of cells, while also giving nucleus position and granularity of cytoplasmic activity during the cell division process. Given that we were able to collect cell division data only up to two-cell stage, we show here that the method consistently estimate parameter to fit the 3-D shape of cell, and track the number of cells in different embryo test images. We also show that this algorithm can consistently localize the nucleus in different embryos during the resting phase of cell cycle. Keywords—OCT; embryo viability; morphological image processing; cell detection; IVF
Theoretical analyses on a class of nested RKHS's

One of central topics of kernel machines in the field of machine learning is a model selection, especially a selection of a kernel or its parameters. In our previous work, we discussed a class of kernels forming a class of nested reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces with an invariant metric; and proved that the kernel corresponding to the smallest reproducing kernel Hilbert space, including an unknown true function, gives the optimal model. In this paper, we consider a class of kernels forming a class of nested reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces whose metrics are not always invariant and show that a similar result to the invariant case is not obtained by providing a counter example using a class of Gaussian kernels.
Subsequent Infections in Survivors of Sepsis

Purpose: Sepsis is a devastating condition with considerable mortality. The causes of long-term mortality are poorly understood. To test the hypothesis that patients with sepsis are more susceptible to recurrent infections and death due to infectious complications, we investigated the outcomes of patients who survived sepsis, with regard to the incidence of recurrent infections and mortality. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study of the patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) for sepsis from 2001 to 2002 who achieved 30-day survival (sepsis survivors [SSs], N = 78) and a control group of patients admitted to the ICU for noninfectious conditions with a similar severity of illness (N = 50) was performed. The primary end point was the number of recurrent infections in the first year posthospitalization. Results: The SSs group had higher rates of infections following hospital discharge compared to controls. Using a multivariable model, having survived sepsis was the strongest predictor of the development of subsequent infections (rate ratio [RR]: 2.83, P= .0006), the need for rehospitalization for infection in the year after the initial hospitalization (RR: 3.78, P = .0009), and postdischarge mortality (hazard ratio = 3.61, P = .003). Conclusions: Critically ill patients who survive sepsis have an increased risk of recurrent infections in the year following their septic episode that is associated with increased mortality.
Greenselect Phytosome for Borderline Metabolic Syndrome

The beneficial effects of Greenselect Phytosome, a proprietary lecithin formulation of a caffeine-free green tea catechin extract, were evaluated in a controlled registry study on 50 asymptomatic subjects borderline for metabolic syndrome factors and with increased plasma oxidative stress. After 24 weeks of intervention, improvement in weight, blood lipid profile, and blood pressure positioned 68% of subjects in the treatment arm out of the metabolic syndrome profile, while 80% of the subjects in the control group still remained in their initial borderline disease signature. Compared to the control (lifestyle and dietary changes alone), Greenselect Phytosome was especially effective for weight/waist changes. These results highlight the relevance of addressing multiple factors involved in the development of metabolic syndrome with a pleiotropic agent capable of improving the beneficial effects of lifestyle and dietary changes and foster the attainment of a globally improved health profile.
Associations among indicators of depression in Medicaid-eligible community-dwelling older adults.

PURPOSE The purpose of this research was to examine associations among 2 separate Minimum Data Set-Home Care (MDS-HC) depression measures (the Depression Rating Scale [DRS] and medical diagnosis of depression) with billed antidepressant medications in Medicaid paid claim files. DESIGN AND METHODS The sample for this cross-sectional research included 3,041 Medicaid-eligible older adult participants in a Home and Community Based Waiver Program and used data from the MDS-HC, Version 1 and Medicaid Paid Claim Files. Sensitivity and specificity analyses, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, and t tests were utilized. RESULTS DRS scoring indicated that 15.4% of participants had behaviors indicative of depression, whereas 42% had a medical diagnosis of depression noted in the MDS-HC. Of those with a medical diagnosis of depression, 51% had a prescribed antidepressant medication. ROC analysis suggested that the DRS was a poor distinguisher of participants with and without a medical diagnosis of depression or prescribed antidepressant medications. IMPLICATIONS Approximately half of Medicaid-eligible older adults medically diagnosed with depression were treated pharmacologically. Longitudinal research is recommended to assess responsiveness of the DRS over time to pharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions for depression.
Validation of an Ontology-based Approach for Enhancing Human Simulation in General Assembly Environments

—Ergonomic simulation plays an important role as a decision-support tool when validating product designs, assembly processes, and manufacturing operation designs to improve the safety of workers in their associated work environments. In order to maintain competitiveness in the recent dynamic global marketplace, industrial companies are achieving cost savings through the application of ergonomic digital human simulation in the early phases of the product lifecycle process. Nevertheless, resulting benefits can be reduced or even over powered because of the high time, effort and cost requirement needed to build simulation models. In this paper, we assess an ontology-based approach for enhancing human simulation to overcome these challenges. This approach consists of using an ontology model to store re-usable virtual assembly simulation knowledge. Information stored in the ontology helps to build simulation environments quickly using an operator task library to implement digital human dynamic motions. This paper presents a detailed case study using an automotive headlamp installation task scenario to validate the approach. The resulting proof of concept system integrates a General Motors general assembly ontology, University of Michigan human motion models and the operator task library with the Siemens Classic Jack commercial digital human modeling software.
Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Gene Polymorphism Modifies the Effect of Coffee Intake on Incidence of Acute Coronary Events

Background The role of coffee intake as a risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD) has been debated for decades. We examined whether the relationship between coffee intake and incidence of CHD events is dependent on the metabolism of circulating catecholamines, as determined by functional polymorphism of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene. Methodology/Principal Findings In a cohort of 773 men who were 42 to 60 years old and free of symptomatic CHD at baseline in 1984–89, 78 participants experienced an acute coronary event during an average follow-up of 13 years. In logistic regression adjusting for age, smoking, family history of CHD, vitamin C deficiency, blood pressure, plasma cholesterol concentration, and diabetes, the odds ratio (90% confidence interval) comparing heavy coffee drinkers with the low activity COMT genotype with those with the high activity or heterozygotic genotypes was 3.2 (1.2–8.4). Urinary adrenaline excretion increased with increasing coffee intake, being over two-fold in heavy drinkers compared with nondrinkers (p = 0.008 for trend). Conclusions/Significance Heavy coffee consumption increases the incidence of acute coronary events in men with low but not high COMT activity. Further studies are required to determine to which extent circulating catecholamines mediate the relationship between coffee intake and CHD.
Workspace importance sampling for probabilistic roadmap planning

Probabilistic roadmap (PRM) planners have been successful in path planning of robots with many degrees of freedom, but they behave poorly when a robot's configuration space contains narrow passages. This paper presents workspace importance sampling (WIS), a new sampling strategy for PRM planning. Our main idea is to use geometric information from a robot's workspace as "importance" values to guide sampling in the corresponding configuration space. By doing so, WIS increases the sampling density in narrow passages and decreases the sampling density in wide-open regions. We tested the new planner on rigid-body and articulated robots in 2-D and 3-D environments. Experimental results show that WIS improves the planner's performance for path planning problems with narrow passages.
Fatigue-damage evolution of notched composite multilayered structures under tensile loads

The problems discussed in the present paper are well-known both from the theoretical (numerical) and experimental point of view. The novelty of our approach depends on the application of hybrid experimental methods and a comparison of their effectiveness in the description of complicated fatigue problems arising in the analysis of the behavior of laminated panels with open holes and subjected to tensile loading. Three experimental methods were used: infrared thermography (passive), structural health monitoring (active), and digital image correlation. The experimental investigations were supplemented by the finite element description of the problem dealing mainly with the static behavior, monitoring the development and final fracture of composites. The considerations concern laminated panels oriented at ±45° with different types of holes, i.e., vertical elliptical, horizontal elliptical, and circular.
Fast Synopsis for Moving Objects Using Compressed Video

With the increasing volume of video data, how to analyze and browse video in a fast and effective way has become an urgent problem in applications. This letter proposes a novel video synopsis method in compressed domain for browsing video captured by static cameras. Synopsis video is a video abstraction, which displays moving objects from different periods simultaneously on the primary background contents of original video. To overcome the low efficiency of traditional video synopsis for compressed video, our method presents a new graph cut algorithm to extract objects tubes and meanwhile gives a fast solution to minimize energy function in compressed domain. Experimental results in H.264 video have demonstrated the high-efficiency of this new video synopsis scheme for massive video browsing.
Fiber length reduction during shearing in polymer processing

In recent years a continuously rising demand of short-fiber-reinforced thermoplastics has been noted. The reason for the rising demand are the excellent weight specific mechanical properties compared to non-reinforced thermoplastics. The mechanical properties of the compound of high-strength fibers and the ductile matrix polymer is based on complex physical relations in which the fiber length is a major influencing factor. When processing short fiber-reinforced thermoplastics with screw machines (injection molding, extrusion) the fiber length is a resulting material property that is, to some extent, influenced by the process parameters. The extent of the influence and the effects of the process parameters have been carried out in many different studies, mainly with parameter variations. Nevertheless, the influence of the shearing stress on the fiber breaking is also physically modelled. However, the influences of different fiber contents are not taken into account.To investigate the correlation between th.
Contraction theory approach to generalized decentralized cyclic algorithms for global formation acquisition and control

This paper presents a new approach to distributed nonlinear formation control, inspired by recent results on properties of cyclic topologies. Tools from contraction theory are used in the analysis of nonlinear control laws that only employ local information to globally converge to a formation. Specifically, a generalization of the cyclic pursuit extended to develop properties not addressed before such as non-rotating arrays, global convergence to a specific size, and time/state varying gains. Experiments on the International Space Station using the SPHERES testbed validate their properties and effectiveness for formation flight missions where specific array geometry is a metric of interest.
The PI3K/Akt pathway mediates the nongenomic cardioprotective effects of estrogen following trauma-hemorrhage.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the nongenomic actions of E2 have any beneficial effect on cardiac function following trauma-hemorrhage and whether those effects are mediated via the PI3K/Akt pathway. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA Since studies suggest that both genomic and nongenomic pathways are involved in mediating the salutary effects of 17beta-estradiol (estradiol) following trauma-hemorrhage, we examined if the nongenomic effects of estradiol on cardiac function after trauma-hemorrhage involve the PI3K/Akt pathway. METHODS Male Sprague-Dawley rats ( approximately 300 g) underwent trauma-hemorrhage (mean blood pressure, 40 mm Hg for 90 min, then resuscitation). Estradiol conjugated to bovine serum albumin (BSA) (estradiol-BSA; 1 mg/kg estradiol) with or without estrogen receptor antagonist (ICI 182,780), PI3K inhibitor (Wortmannin), or vehicle was injected intravenously during resuscitation. At 2 hours after trauma-hemorrhage or sham operation, cardiac output, stroke volume, heart rate, mean arterial pressure, and +/-dP/dt were measured. Cardiomyocyte PI3K, p-Akt, Akt protein expressions and apoptosis were also determined. One-way ANOVA and Tukey's test were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS Cardiac output, stroke volume, and +/-dP/dt decreased significantly after trauma-hemorrhage. Administration of estradiol or estradiol-BSA significantly improved these parameters of cardiac function. Although trauma-hemorrhage decreased cardiomyocyte PI3K protein expression and Akt phosphorylation (p-Akt), estradiol or estradiol-BSA treatment following trauma-hemorrhage prevented such decreases in cardiomyocyte PI3K protein expressions and p-Akt. The increase in cardiomyocyte apoptosis was also prevented in rats receiving estradiol-BSA. Co-administration of ICI 182,780 or Wortmannin abolished beneficial effects of estradiol-BSA on cardiac functions following trauma-hemorrhage. CONCLUSION The PI3K/Akt pathway plays a critical role in mediating the nongenomic salutary effects of estradiol on cardiac function following trauma-hemorrhage.
More Than Just Another Pretty Face: Embodied Conversational Interface Agents

Introduction Both animals and humans manifest social qualities. Dogs recognize dominance and submission, stand corrected by their superiors, demonstrate consistent personalities, and so forth. On the other hand, only humans communicate using language, and carry on conversations with one another. And the skills of conversation have developed in humans in such a way as to exploit all of the unique affordances of the human body. We make complex representational gestures with our prehensile hands, gaze away and towards one another out of the corners of our centrally-set eyes, and use the pitch and melody of our flexible voices to emphasize and clarify what we are saying. Perhaps because conversation is so defining of humanness and human interaction, the metaphor of face-to-face conversation has been applied to human-computer interface design for quite some time. One of the early arguments for the utility of this metaphor gave a list of features of face-to-face conversation that could be fruitfully applied to human-computer interaction, including mixed initiative, non-verbal communication, sense of presence, rules for transfer of control ([9]). However, although these features have gained widespread recognition, human – computer conversation has only very recently become more than a metaphor. That is, it is only just recently that designers have taken the metaphor seriously enough to attempt to design a computer that could hold up its end of the conversation.
An approach to the risk analysis of diabetes mellitus type 2 in a health care provider entity of Colombia using business intelligence

Business intelligence provides organizations with the ability to maintain a competitive advantage in the market. This property can be used in wide fields such as health care where lower costs and early prevention of patients are the main goals. This article develops an approach to the use of business intelligence to achieve a centralized clinical data and apply data mining, particularly the use of association rules. All this in order to find risk factors associated with diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2) and the way healthcare providers perform the management of this disease. The experiment was conducted using a database of patients with DM2 treated by a health care provider entity in Colombia.
Integrated headway adaptation with collision avoidance system for intelligent vehicles

In this paper, an integrated headway adaptation (HA) with collision avoidance (CA) system is proposed to be associated with a human factor aspect for driving assistance. The maneuver in the CA strategy is developed based on the idea that warning or potential crash information generally can be graded such that the driver need not react to a discrete on/off warning. The control law for the HA strategy is designed by using a modified sliding surface to achieve driving comfort requirement and also stability in car-following. To simulate the speed controlling of human drivers, the throttle and brake actuation is directed by the regulation control which is designed based on a human reasoning approach. A description of an experimental vehicle and real traffic testing in highways and urban-like tracks shows the potential and validness of the integrated system.
Heterogeneity-Based Files Placement in Hadoop Cluster

Hadoop which is an open source software framework uses MapReduce framework to process data. But its current implementation there is no direct support for file formats as well as it does not take heterogeneity amongst the cluster into consideration. With default block placement policy it distributes the data randomly. When there is heterogeneous environment so it's hard to utilise the power of each node correctly this may cause performance degradation. In proposed work we have added format specific data distribution amongst the nodes by using computational power of each node. So by experimentation, results shows there is improvement in the Map performance, MapReduce performance and overall performance of Hadoop in heterogeneous cluster.
Composing compound libraries for hit discovery--rationality-driven preselection or random choice by structural diversity?

AIMS In order to identify new scaffolds for drug discovery, surface plasmon resonance is frequently used to screen structurally diverse libraries. Usually, hit rates are low and identification processes are time consuming. Hence, approaches which improve hit rates and, thus, reduce the library size are required. METHODS In this work, we studied three often used strategies for their applicability to identify inhibitors of PqsD. In two of them, target-specific aspects like inhibition of a homologous protein or predicted binding determined by virtual screening were used for compound preselection. Finally, a fragment library, covering a large chemical space, was screened and served as comparison. RESULTS & CONCLUSION Indeed, higher hit rates were observed for methods employing preselected libraries indicating that target-oriented compound selection provides a time-effective alternative.
The effect of NBI on UWB time-hopping systems

This letter presents an analysis of the effect of narrowband interference (NBI) on ultrawideband (UWB) time-hopping (TH) systems in the presence of multipath fading using both analytical derivations and simulations. Our analysis demonstrates that NBI may be an issue in some instances. In addition, we suggest three NBI suppression schemes for combating NBI in UWB TH systems. Single-link performance of these schemes in conjunction with a Rake-type receiver structure is estimated for both the ideal all-Rake receiver and the simpler partial-Rake receiver in an indoor environment. Two UWB pulse shapes that meet the Federal Communications Commission rules for UWB communications are considered in the investigation.
Optical properties of nano-hole array with randomly designed surface

Various optical properties originated from the surface plasmon resonance have been much studied, as the example of extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) arising in the metallic thin film with a nano-hole array (NHA). In the analytical chemistry, these phenomena can be applied to the sensors for viruses and bacteria based on the peak shift caused by the change in surrounding refractive index. We have clarified that the amount of EOT peak shift can be enhanced by designing the surface structure of NHA with the random nano-spikes. The results indicate the two cases that the peak shift is enhanced with and without the EOT, which leads to the understanding of the applicable range of random NHA design.
Primary structure and functional analysis of the lysis genes of Lactobacillus gasseri bacteriophage phi adh

The lysis genes of the Lactobacillus gasseri bacteriophage phi adh were isolated by complementation of a lambda Sam mutation in Escherichia coli. Nucleotide sequencing of a 1,735-bp DNA fragment revealed two adjacent coding regions of 342 bp (hol) and 951 bp (lys) in the same reading frame which appear to belong to a common transcriptional unit. Proteins corresponding to the predicted gene products, holin (12.9 kDa) and lysin (34.7 kDa), were identified by in vitro and in vivo expression of the cloned genes. The phi adh holin is a membrane-bound protein with structural similarity to lysis proteins of other phage, known to be required for the transit of murein hydrolases through the cytoplasmic membrane. The phi adh lysin shows homology with mureinolytic enzymes encoded by the Lactobacillus bulgaricus phage mv4, the Streptococcus pneumoniae phage Cp-1, Cp-7, and Cp-9, and the Lactococcus lactis phage phi LC3. Significant homology with the N termini of known muramidases suggests that phi adh lysin acts by a similar catalytic mechanism. In E. coli, the phi adh lysin seems to be associated with the total membrane fraction, from which it can be extracted with lauryl sarcosinate. Either one of the phi adh lysis proteins provoked lysis of E. coli when expressed along with holins or lysins of phage lambda or Bacillus subtilis phage phi 29. Concomitant expression of the combined holin and lysin functions of phi adh in E. coli, however, did not result in efficient cell lysis.