Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EHealth Acceptance and New Media Preferences for Therapy Assistance Among Breast Cancer Patients

Background Electronic health (eHealth) and mobile communication-based health care (mHealth) applications have been increasingly utilized in medicine over the last decade, and have facilitated improved adherence to therapy regimens in patients with chronic conditions. Due to the long duration of breast cancer therapy, and the long course of disease in metastatic breast cancer, a need for more intensified physician-patient communication has emerged. Various support mechanisms, including new media such as mHealth and eHealth, have been proposed for this purpose. Objective The aim of this study was to analyze the correlation between sociodemographic factors, as well as health status of breast cancer patients, and their current utilization of new media, or their willingness to use Internet and mobile phone apps for improvement of therapy management. Methods The survey for this study was conducted anonymously during the 2012 Mamazone Projekt Diplompatient meeting (Augsburg, Germany), which hosted approximately 375 participants per day. A total of 168 questionnaires were completed. The questionnaire aimed to assess sociodemographic status, disease patterns, and current use of new media (ie, Internet, mobile phone, and mobile phone apps) in breast cancer patients. Habits and frequency of use for these new technologies, as well as patients’ affinity towards eHealth and mHealth tools for therapy management improvement, were investigated. Results Almost all participants used the Internet (95.8%, 161/168), with 91.5% (151/165) also utilizing this technology for health-related issues. Approximately 23% (38/168) of respondents owned a mobile phone. When asked about their preferences for therapy assistance, 67.3% (113/168) of respondents were interested in assistance via the Internet, 25.0% (42/168) via mobile phone, and 73.2% (123/168) via call center. Patients diagnosed with breast cancer <5 years before the survey were significantly more interested in a call center than patients diagnosed >5 years before survey participation. Conclusions The vast majority of breast cancer patients accept the Internet for therapy assistance, which indicates that eHealth is a promising medium to improve patient-physician communication. Such technologies may improve individual disease management and ultimately lead to an enhanced adherence to therapy regimens.
Comparison of Contact Lens Corrected Quality of Vision and Life of Keratoconus and Myopic Patients

Purpose To compare and analyze changes in vision quality, subjective symptoms, and psycho-social satisfaction in keratoconus and myopic patients following the wearing of contact lenses. Methods This study enrolled 25 keratoconus and 25 myopic patients with corrected vision over 0.8 according to the Snellen chart due to treatment with contact lenses. Patients were surveyed prior to the wearing of contact lenses, and again after three months of contact lens usage with a questionnaire about quality of vision and life. The changes in visual function, visual symptoms, and psycho-social well-being before and after contact lens usage were analyzed. Results The keratoconus patients' overall degree of satisfaction was higher than the overall degree of satisfaction of myopic patients, and the motivation for contact lens usage and purpose of contact lens treatment were different in the two groups. Keratoconus patients experienced greater changes in satisfaction, particularly in satisfaction during night activities, short-distance work, and the reading of fine print. Furthermore, they experienced fewer dry eye symptoms but greater foreign body sensations than patients with myopia following treatment with contact lenses. No statistically significant differences in social role functions existed between the two groups. Keratoconus patients had a lower expectation of visual acuity recovery before treatment with contact lenses (Mann-Whitney U-test, p = 0.049) compared to myopic patients, and more anxiety about vision loss following treatment (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p = 0.018) compared to their level of anxiety about vision loss before treatment with contact lenses. Conclusions Although the same treatment was applied, keratoconus and myopic patients experienced different types of discomfort and areas of improvement in contact lens corrected vision. Therefore, not only corrected vision, but also subsequent improvement and discomfort outcomes should be considered by patients when choosing contact lens treatment. For patients with mild keratoconus, contact lens treatment may be an efficacious first treatment modality.
A 0.5 V bulk‐driven voltage follower/DC level shifter and its application in class AB output stage

A simple realization of a 0.5 V bulk‐driven voltage follower/direct current (DC) level shifter designed in a 0.18 µm CMOS technology is presented in the paper. The circuit is characterized by large input and output voltage swings and a DC voltage gain close to unity. The DC voltage shift between input and output terminals can be regulated in a certain interval around zero, by means of biasing current sinks. An application of the proposed voltage follower circuit for realization of a low‐voltage class AB output stage has also been described in the paper. Finally, the operational amplifier exploiting the proposed output stage has been presented and evaluated in detail. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On the multi‐input second‐order sliding mode control of nonlinear uncertain systems

This note addresses the multi‐input second‐order sliding mode control design for a class of nonlinear multivariable uncertain dynamics. Among the most important peculiarities of the considered control problem, the considered sliding vector variable has a uniform vector relative degree [2,2, … ,2] with respect to the vector control variable, and only the sign of the sliding vector and of its derivative are available for feedback. Additionally, the symmetric part of the state‐dependent control matrix is supposed to be positive definite. Under some further mild restrictions on the uncertain system's dynamics, a control algorithm that realizes a multi‐input version of the ‘twisting’ second‐order sliding mode control algorithm is suggested. Simple controller tuning conditions are derived by means of a constructive Lyapunov analysis, which demonstrates that the suggested control algorithm guarantees the semiglobal asymptotic convergence to the sliding manifold. Simulation results, which confirm the good performance of the proposed scheme and investigate the actual accuracy obtained under the discrete‐time implementation effects, are given. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Domain adaptive sparse representation-based classification

In recent years, sparse representation and dictionary learning methods have produced state-of-the-art results in many biometric recognition problems such as face, gait and iris recognition. However, when sparse representation-based classification methods are confronted with situations where the training data has different distribution than the test data, their performance degrades significantly. In this paper, we propose a general sparse representation-based classification method that learns projections of data in a space where the sparsity of data is maintained. We propose an efficient iterative procedure for solving the proposed optimization problem. One of the key features of the proposed method is that it is computationally efficient as the learning is done in the lower-dimensional space. Various experiments on mobile active authentication datasets consisting of face and screen touch gestures show that our method is able to capture the meaningful structure of data and can perform significantly better than many competitive domain adaptation algorithms.
Strengthening Acute Flaccid Paralysis Surveillance Through the Village Polio Volunteers Program in Somalia

Background Surveillance for cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) is a key strategy adopted for the eradication of polio. Detection of poliovirus circulation is often predicated on the ability to identify AFP cases and test their stool specimens for poliovirus infection in a timely manner. The Village Polio Volunteers (VPV) program was established in 2013 in a bid to strengthen polio eradication activities in Somalia, including AFP surveillance, given the country's vulnerability to polio outbreaks. Methods To assess the impact of the VPV program on AFP surveillance, we determined case counts, case-reporting sources, and nonpolio AFP rates in the years before and after program introduction (ie, 2011-2016). We also compared the stool specimen adequacy rates and timeliness of cases reported by VPVs to those reported by other sources. Results In the years after program introduction, VPVs accounted for a high proportion of AFP cases reported in Somalia. AFP case counts rose from 148 cases in 2012, the year before program introduction, to 279 cases in 2015, when VPVs accounted for 40% of reported cases. Further, from 2012 to 2015, the nonpolio AFP rate improved from 2.8 to 4.8 cases per 100000 persons aged <15 years. Stool specimen adequacy rates have been consistently high, and AFP cases have been detected in a timelier manner since the program was introduced. Conclusions Given the impact of the VPV program on improving AFP surveillance indicators in Somalia, similar community-based programs could play a crucial role in enhancing surveillance activities in countries with limited healthcare infrastructure.
Understanding retweeting behaviors in social networks

Retweeting is an important action (behavior) on Twitter, indicating the behavior that users re-post microblogs of their friends. While much work has been conducted for mining textual content that users generate or analyzing the social network structure, few publications systematically study the underlying mechanism of the retweeting behaviors. In this paper, we perform an interesting analysis for the problem on Twitter. We have found that almost 25.5% of the tweets posted by users are actually retweeted from friends' blog spaces. Our investigation unveils that for the retweet behaviors, some statistics still follows the power law distribution, while some others violate the state-of-the-art distribution for Web. Based on these important observations, we propose a factor graph model to predict users' retweeting behaviors. Experimental results on the Twitter data set show that our method can achieve a precision of 28.81% and recall of 37.33% for prediction of the retweet behaviors.
What Is the Impact of Physical Activity and Physical Function on the Development of Multimorbidity in Older Adults Over Time? A Population-Based Cohort Study

Abstract Background Multimorbidity is recognized internationally as having a serious impact on health outcomes. It is associated with reduced quality of life, increased health care utilization, and future functional decline. Physical activity is associated with good health and psychological well-being. The aim of this study was to identify the impact of physical activity and physical function on the development and worsening of multimorbidity over time. Methods Using The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), we analyzed 4,823 participants ≥50 years with and without multimorbidity. Multimorbidity was defined as the presence of ≥2 chronic conditions. Development of multimorbidity was measured as the accrual of additional conditions over a 2-year period. Physical activity and physical function were measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), gait speed (m/sec), and grip strength (kg). Results Sixteen groups of chronic conditions were included in analyses. 53.7% of included participants had multimorbidity at baseline and 71.7% at follow-up. Six hundred and thirty-eight of 2,092 (30.4%) participants without multimorbidity and 1,005 of 2,415 (41.6%) with existing multimorbidity developed new condition/s. Gait speed (relative risk [RR] = 0.67, confidence interval [CI]: 0.49–0.90), grip strength (RR = 0.98, CI: 0.97–0.99), and age (compared to 50–59 years, 60–69: RR = 1.30, CI: 1.11–1.52; ≥70: RR = 1.35, CI: 1.03–1.77) were significantly associated with the development of multimorbidity and accrual of additional conditions. Conclusion These results show that physical function is associated with the development and worsening of multimorbidity over time. They support the recent National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (NICE) Guidance on multimorbidity that suggests that patients with multimorbidity and reduced gait speed should be identified and targeted for interventions to improve health outcomes.
Predicting structured metadata from unstructured metadata

Enormous amounts of biomedical data have been and are being produced by investigators all over the world. However, one crucial and limiting factor in data reuse is accurate, structured and complete description of the data or data about the data—defined as metadata. We propose a framework to predict structured metadata terms from unstructured metadata for improving quality and quantity of metadata, using the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) microarray database. Our framework consists of classifiers trained using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) features and a second approach based on topics modeled using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model (LDA) to reduce the dimensionality of the unstructured data. Our results on the GEO database show that structured metadata terms can be the most accurately predicted using the TF-IDF approach followed by LDA both outperforming the majority vote baseline. While some accuracy is lost by the dimensionality reduction of LDA, the difference is small for elements with few possible values, and there is a large improvement over the majority classifier baseline. Overall this is a promising approach for metadata prediction that is likely to be applicable to other datasets and has implications for researchers interested in biomedical metadata curation and metadata prediction. Database URL: http://www.yeastgenome. org/
Could Sorafenib Disclose New Prospects as Bridging Therapy to Liver Transplantation in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Background-Aim: There are few data on the use of sorafenib as bridging therapy for patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) waiting for Liver Transplantation (LT). Methods: Six HCC patients were treated with sorafenib before LT at our Institution following the Italian Drug Agency guidelines: they had well compensated cirrhosis (Child-Pugh class A), intermediate stage HCC, good general conditions (performance status 0) and they were not suitable for loco-regional therapies. Results: Three patients received sorafenib until LT, whereas the other three cases required treatment discontinuation before LT. During the post-surgery period no deaths and anastomotic complications were observed. The four patients receiving Sorafenib for more than 2 months before LT were recurrence-free 27 to 41 months after surgery. Conversely, tumor recurrence leading to patient death was found in the other 2 cases. Conclusion: We think that these findings justify the start of a phase II study in a larger patient population.
Convex Relaxations for Pose Graph Optimization With Outliers

Pose graph optimization consists in the estimation of a set of poses from pairwise measurements and provides a formalization for many problems arising in mobile robotics and geometric computer vision. In this letter, we consider two-dimensional pose estimation problems in which a subset of the measurements is spurious. Our first contribution is to develop robust estimators that can cope with heavy-tailed measurement noise, hence increasing robustness to the presence of outliers. Since the resulting estimators require solving nonconvex optimization problems, we further develop convex relaxations that approximately solve those problems via semidefinite programming. We then provide conditions for testing the exactness of the proposed relaxations. Contrary to existing approaches, our convex relaxations do not rely on the availability of an initial guess for the unknown poses, hence they are more suitable for setups in which such guess is not available (e.g., multirobot localization, recovery after localization failure). We tested the proposed techniques in extensive simulations, and we show that some of the proposed relaxations are indeed tight (i.e., they solve the original nonconvex problem exactly) and ensure accurate estimation in the face of a large number of outliers.
Meta-Analysis of miRNAs and Their Involvement as Biomarkers in Oral Cancers

Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Recent studies have highlighted the role of miRNA in disease pathology, indicating its potential use as an early diagnostic marker. Dysregulated expression of miRNAs is known to affect cell growth, and these may function as tumor suppressors or oncogenes in various cancers. The main objective of this study was to characterize the extracellular miRNAs involved in oral cancer (OC) that can potentially be used as biomarkers of OC. A total of 318 miRNAs involved in oral carcinoma were shortlisted. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of oral carcinoma from reported experiments were identified. Common genes between lists of DEGs of OC of each miRNA were identified. These common genes are the targets of specific miRNA, which may be used as biomarkers of OC. A list of significant biomarkers for cancer was generated like CDH2 and CDK7, and functional enrichment analysis identified the role of miRNAs in major pathways like cell adhesion molecules pathway affected by cancer. We observed that at least 25 genes like ABCF3, ALDH2, CD163L1, and so forth are regulated by a maximum number of miRNAs; thereby, they can be used as biomarkers of OC.
Differential Effects of Prenatal Stress in 5-Htt Deficient Mice: Towards Molecular Mechanisms of Gene × Environment Interactions

Prenatal stress (PS) has been shown to influence the development of the fetal brain and to increase the risk for the development of psychiatric disorders in later life. Furthermore, the variation of human serotonin transporter (5-HTT, SLC6A4) gene was suggested to exert a modulating effect on the association between early life stress and the risk for depression. In the present study, we used a 5-Htt×PS paradigm to investigate whether the effects of PS are dependent on the 5-Htt genotype. For this purpose, the effects of PS on cognition, anxiety- and depression-related behavior were examined using a maternal restraint stress paradigm of PS in C57BL6 wild-type (WT) and heterozygous 5-Htt deficient (5-Htt +/−) mice. Additionally, in female offspring, a genome-wide hippocampal gene expression profiling was performed using the Affymetrix GeneChip® Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Array. 5-Htt +/− offspring showed enhanced memory performance and signs of reduced anxiety as compared to WT offspring. In contrast, exposure of 5-Htt +/− mice to PS was associated with increased depressive-like behavior, an effect that tended to be more pronounced in female offspring. Further, 5-Htt genotype, PS and their interaction differentially affected the expression of numerous genes and related pathways within the female hippocampus. Specifically, MAPK and neurotrophin signaling were regulated by both the 5-Htt +/− genotype and PS exposure, whereas cytokine and Wnt signaling were affected in a 5-Htt genotype×PS manner, indicating a gene×environment interaction at the molecular level. In conclusion, our data suggest that although the 5-Htt +/− genotype shows clear adaptive capacity, 5-Htt +/− mice –particularly females– at the same time appear to be more vulnerable to developmental stress exposure when compared to WT offspring. Moreover, hippocampal gene expression profiles suggest that distinct molecular mechanisms mediate the behavioral effects of the 5-Htt genotype, PS exposure, and their interaction.
Impact of Guard Time Length on IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH Energy Consumption

The IEEE 802.15. 4-2015 standard defines a number of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols for low-power wireless communications in the IoT. Originally defined in the IEEE 802.15. 4e amendment, TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping) is among the proposed mechanisms. TSCH is a scheme aiming to guarantee network reliability by keeping nodes time-synchronised at the MAC layer. In order to ensure successful communication between a sender and a receiver, the latter starts listening shortly before the expected time of a MAC layer frame's arrival. The offset between the time a node starts listening and the estimated time of frame arrival is called guard time and it aims to reduce the probability of missed frames due to clock drift. In this poster, we investigate the effect of the guard time duration on energy consumption. We identify that, when using the 6tisch minimal schedule, the most significant cause of energy consumption is idle listening during guard time. Therefore, the energy-efficiency of TSCH can be significantly improved by guard time optimisation. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki operating system, show that an efficient configuration of guard time may reduce energy consumption by up to 30%, without compromising network reliability.
Surface and bulk interactions of ionic and nonionic surfactants

The fluorescence parameter 11/13 of pyrene was used to detect the interaction between anionic and nonionic surfactants (SDS and C,PhE,,) in the bulk solution. In addition, the change in the air-water interface was investigated by surface tension over the interaction range. In the range of [SDS] = 10-5-10-1 M, the interaction is divided into three regions. In each region, the results from these two methods were compared and used to interpret the phenomena with each other. The foamate technique was used to estimate the change in the composition of surfactant at the air-water interface, and the trend of the change in foamate composition for several points in three regions is identical with that observed in the y vs. [SDS] plot and supports the interpretation. Also, the comicellar composition, the activity in the comicelle, and the monomer concentration for SDS and C9PhElo were theoretically calculated. The trends of these calculated data are parallel to those of the experimental observations.
Directed self-assembly of nanorod networks: bringing the top down to the bottom up

Self-assembled electrodeposited nanorod materials have been shown to offer an exciting landscape for a wide array of research ranging from nanophotonics through to biosensing and magnetics. However, until now, the scope for site-specific preparation of the nanorods on wafers has been limited to local area definition. Further there is little or no lateral control of nanorod height. In this work we present a scalable method for controlling the growth of the nanorods in the vertical direction as well as their lateral position. A focused ion beam pre-patterns the Au cathode layer prior to the creation of the anodized aluminium oxide (AAO) template on top. When the pre-patterning is of the same dimension as the pore spacing of the AAO template, lines of single nanorods are successfully grown. Further, for sub-200 nm wide features, a relationship between the nanorod height and distance from the non-patterned cathode can be seen to follow a quadratic growth rate obeying Faraday’s law of electrodeposition. This facilitates lateral control of nanorod height combined with localized growth of the nanorods.