Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magnetic Resonance Elastography and Biomarkers to Assess Fibrosis From Recurrent Hepatitis C in Liver Transplant Recipients

Background. Imaging techniques evaluating liver stiffness (magnetic resonance elastography [MRE]) and biomarkers may be useful indicators of fibrosis stage in hepatitis C virus (HCV)+patients. Our aim was to compare the accuracy of MRE and biomarkers in staging fibrosis because of recurrent HCV in liver transplant (LT) recipients with hepatocellular carcinoma. Methods. Liver magnetic resonance imaging and MRE, FIBROSpectII, aspartate aminotransferase-to-platelet ratio index (aspartate aminotransferase [AST]: platelet index), AST:alanine aminotransferase ratio, and magnetic resonance imaging/MRE-guided biopsies targeting the stiffest regions (right and left lobes) were performed in HCV+LT recipients. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV)/negative predictive value (NPV), and likelihood ratios were calculated for the best cutoff by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results. Thirty-two recipients were included: 28 men, age 60 (±6.4) years, and time since LT 3.25 (±1.68) years. Both MRE (P=0.0001) and FIBROSpectII (P=0.009) were significantly different between no fibrosis and more than or equal to stage 1 groups, whereas aspartate aminotransferase-to-platelet ratio index and AST:alanine aminotransferase ratio were not different. Areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve were 0.87 for MRE and 0.84 for FIBROSpectII. MRE cutoff of 3.81 kPa had 87.5% sensitivity, 79.2% specificity, 58.3% PPV, and 95.0% NPV; FIBROSpectII cutoff of 42 had 87.5% sensitivity, 70.0% specificity, 53.8% PPV, and 93.3% NPV for detection of more than or equal to stage 1 fibrosis. Two patients had high MRE values because of unexpected acute rejection and portal vein thrombosis. Conclusions. MRE and FIBROSpectII are highly sensitive in detecting fibrosis due to recurrent HCV. Both are limited by the low specificity/PPV and confounding because of other graft complications. Values below the MRE and FIBROSpectII cutoffs, however, strongly suggest the absence of fibrosis and may avert the need for protocol biopsy staging.
Structural basis for the acyl chain selectivity and mechanism of UDP-N-acetylglucosamine acyltransferase

UDP-N-acetylglucosamine (UDP-GlcNAc) acyltransferase (LpxA) catalyzes the first step of lipid A biosynthesis, the reversible transfer of the R-3-hydroxyacyl chain from R-3-hydroxyacyl acyl carrier protein to the glucosamine 3-OH group of UDP-GlcNAc. Escherichia coli LpxA is highly selective for R-3-hydroxymyristate. The crystal structure of the E. coli LpxA homotrimer, determined previously in the absence of lipid substrates or products, revealed that LpxA contains an unusual, left-handed parallel β-helix fold. We have now solved the crystal structures of E. coli LpxA with the bound product UDP-3-O-(R-3-hydroxymyristoyl)-GlcNAc at a resolution of 1.74 Å and with bound UDP-3-O-(R-3-hydroxydecanoyl)-GlcNAc at 1.85 Å. The structures of these complexes are consistent with the catalytic mechanism deduced by mutagenesis and with a recent 3.0-Å structure of LpxA with bound UDP-GlcNAc. Our structures show how LpxA selects for 14-carbon R-3-hydroxyacyl chains and reveal two modes of UDP binding.
Interaction of Cationic Antimicrobial Peptides with Model Membranes*

A series of natural and synthetic cationic antimicrobial peptides from various structural classes, including α-helical, β-sheet, extended, and cyclic, were examined for their ability to interact with model membranes, assessing penetration of phospholipid monolayers and induction of lipid flip-flop, membrane leakiness, and peptide translocation across the bilayer of large unilamellar liposomes, at a range of peptide/lipid ratios. All peptides were able to penetrate into monolayers made with negatively charged phospholipids, but only two interacted weakly with neutral lipids. Peptide-mediated lipid flip-flop generally occurred at peptide concentrations that were 3- to 5-fold lower than those causing leakage of calcein across the membrane, regardless of peptide structure. With the exception of two α-helical peptides V681n and V25p, the extent of peptide-induced calcein release from large unilamellar liposomes was generally low at peptide/lipid molar ratios below 1:50. Peptide translocation across bilayers was found to be higher for the β-sheet peptide polyphemusin, intermediate for α-helical peptides, and low for extended peptides. Overall, whereas all studied cationic antimicrobial peptides interacted with membranes, they were quite heterogeneous in their impact on these membranes.
(Bio)Aesthetic Geographies and the Governance of Biopedagogical Spect(ato)rs

Believing that “place matters” to biopower and to the governance of the new public health, we examine how a children’s hospital setting might be interpreted as a biopedagogical site. We take as the starting point of our analysis a treatment room in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)—Canada’s largest pediatric hospital. This particular room, dubbed Cujo’s Crease Satellite Anesthesia Room, was funded by donations from Curtis “Cujo” Joseph, a former Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender in the National Hockey League (NHL). Using trompe l’œil techniques, an artist transformed the room to look like a Toronto Maple Leafs locker room. We examine the range of possible meanings that might be taken up in Cujo’s Crease, paying particular attention to the biopolitical and cultural intersections among medicine, hockey, and biocitizenship. We argue that specific visual signs are employed to mobilize the discourses required by the space: masculinity, hockey as a national civilizing project, normative bodies, health care in a neoliberal age, and the NHL as benevolent care-giving corporation. We concluded that the discursive regimes of Cujo’s Crease are not innocent but are implicated in (bio)economical and biopedagogical imaginaries that render the sick child’s body as an assemblage of neoliberalism’s biocitizenship projects.
Superiority, Competition, and Opportunism in the Evolutionary Radiation of Dinosaurs

The rise and diversification of the dinosaurs in the Late Triassic, from 230 to 200 million years ago, is a classic example of an evolutionary radiation with supposed competitive replacement. A comparison of evolutionary rates and morphological disparity of basal dinosaurs and their chief “competitors,” the crurotarsan archosaurs, shows that dinosaurs exhibited lower disparity and an indistinguishable rate of character evolution. The radiation of Triassic archosaurs as a whole is characterized by declining evolutionary rates and increasing disparity, suggesting a decoupling of character evolution from body plan variety. The results strongly suggest that historical contingency, rather than prolonged competition or general “superiority,” was the primary factor in the rise of dinosaurs.
Why Stare Decisis?

All Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are sunk. This might generate a time-inconsistency problem. From an ex-ante perspective, Courts will have the (ex-post) temptation to be excessively lenient. This observation is at the root of the principle of stare decisis. Stare decisis forces Courts to weigh the benefits of leniency towards the current parties against the beneficial effects that tougher decisions have on future ones. We study these dynamics and find that stare decisis guarantees that precedents evolve towards ex-ante efficient decisions, thus alleviating the Courts’ time-inconsistency problem. However, the dynamics do not converge to full efficiency
Automated feature extraction and identification of colon carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE To assess an automated algorithm, developed for the classification of normal and cancerous colonic mucosa, using geometric analysis of features and texture analysis. STUDY DESIGN Twenty-one images were analyzed, 10 from normal and 11 from cancerous mucosa. The classification was based on a regularity index dependent on shape, object orientation for establishing parallelism and five texture features derived using the co-occurrence image analysis method. RESULTS Geometric analysis yielded an overall classification accuracy of 80%. The corresponding sensitivity and specificity were 94% and 64%, respectively. Using texture analysis, the overall classification accuracy was 90%, with a sensitivity and specificity of 82% and 100%, respectively. CONCLUSION This initial study demonstrated that geometric and texture analysis techniques show promise for automated analysis of colon cancer.
Informal costs of dementia care: estimates from the National Longitudinal Caregiver Study.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of the study was to examine on a national level the informal costs of caring for elderly community-dwelling male veterans with dementia by female caregivers and the relationships between informal costs and disease severity, and between informal costs and dementia problem behaviors. METHODS Female primary caregivers were drawn from the first wave (N = 2043) of the National Longitudinal Caregiver Study, a survey of informal caregivers of elderly male veterans diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia. Cost measures include the following four items: value of caregiving time, caregiver's lost income, out-of-pocket expenditures for formal caregiving services, and caregiver's excess health costs. Disease severity was indexed by the number of impairments in activities of daily living. Patient's problem behaviors were measured using the Behavior Rating Scale-Dementia. RESULTS The annual cost of providing informal care to elderly community-dwelling veterans with dementia was estimated to be $18,385 per patient in 1998. The larger components of this cost are caregiving time ($6,295) and caregiver's lost earnings ($10,709). All aspects of costs increase with disease severity and problem behavior. Most of this cost increase derives from the increased caregiving time required for the provision of physical care. DISCUSSION This study provides a comprehensive estimate of the excess costs that result from providing informal dementia care in the community. Unlike previous studies, our estimates excluded costs that caregivers would have incurred if they had not been caregivers. Therefore, results reported here reflect only costs due to informal dementia care.
Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation

ABSTRACT This article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britain's imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.
FPGA Implementation of a Low Power Doppler Invariant BFSK Receiver

Arkesh, Vikram Bangalore. FPGA Implementation of a Low Power Doppler Invariant BFSK Receiver (Under the guidance of Dr Paul D. Franzon) A non coherent frequency shift keying (FSK) receiver architecture is designed potentially for low power applications. The receiver incorporates a 16 point Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for symbol detection and can withstand large Doppler shifts. Almost all the design units of the receiver are digital designs for better power efficiency and reliability. The receiver functions on one bit data processing and supports data rates of 10kbps, 1kbps and 100bps. Co-ordinate rotation (CORDIC) algorithm is used for complex multiplications while computing FFT, evading the use of power hungry multipliers. The design and simulation of the receiver is carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The MATLAB model is translated to a XILINX FPGA hardware model using system generation features of the XILINX development system. The hardware model is synthesized to a virtex2 XILINX FPGA and various performance parameters are extracted. A control system for symbol and timing detection is designed and modeled in VHDL, synthesized to XILINX hardware and interfaced to the receiver. FPGA IMPLEMETATION OF A LOW POWER DOPPLER INVARIANT BFSK RECEIVER
Real-Time Distributed Sensor-Assisted mHealth Applications on the Internet-of-Things

Existing sensor-assisted mHealth applications would benefit from large-scale sharing of sensor information in real-time. Existing communication solutions are however limited in this respect, because of centralized application-level communication. In response to this, we presents a distributed communication solution for mHealth applications which circumvents these limitations. Our Internet-of-Things architecture enables mHealth applications to utilize information from sensors and wireless sensor networks via a peer-to-peer overlay, where sensor information is organized in an information model which is stored in the overlay itself. We present a proof-of-concept application and evaluation results regarding the architecture's real-time capabilities. The results indicate that a fully distributed architecture can support real-time sensing in mHealth applications and the support is available as an open source platform, MediaSense. Current work is focused on evaluating scalability in very large scale scenarios using field trials.
The Social Functioning Questionnaire: A Rapid and Robust Measure of Perceived Functioning

Background: The Social Functioning Questionnaire (SFQ), an eight-item selfreport scale (score range 0–24), was developed from the Social Functioning Schedule (SFS), a semi-structured interview which has been used primarily with non-psychotic patients and has good test-retest and inter-rater reliability as well as construct validity. The SFQ was developed following the need for a quick assessment of perceived social function. Aims: To give further details of old and new data sets from studies involving over 4000 subjects assessed with the SFQ illustrating its epidemiological and clinical associations. Method: New data were analysed from a national epidemiological study, a comparison of key-worker and subject versions of the SFQ, and reanalysis of data from three earlier clinical studies, of psychiatric emergencies, general practice psychiatric patients and those with recurrent psychotic illnesses. These data were examined further to determine their range, their relationship to other clinical measures, and change over time in clinical trials. Results: The population mean score in 4164 subjects was 4.6 and the data from all studies suggested that a score of 10 or more indicated poor social functioning. Those presenting as psychiatric emergencies had the poorest social function (mean 11.4) and psychiatric patients from general practice the best function (mean 7.7) of the clinical populations. The eight item scores had a normal distribution in psychiatric populations and a skewed one in a normal population; scores were relatively stable over the short (weeks) and long-term (months), and were high in the presence of acute mental health disturbance and personality disorder, giving support to the validity of the scale. The results from a UK sample of a randomly selected population specifically weighted for ethnic minorities showed similar social function across groups.
High-frequency measurements of TSV failures

Due to a lot of thermal and mechanical loads during TSV process or post TSV process such as metallization and die stacking, disconnection failure can occur which results in 3D IC yield loss. Thus, a non-destructive diagnostic method by using one point probing for TSV failures is proposed to detect and differentiate TSV failure types and locations. With the fabricated test vehicles with disconnection failures, high-frequency measurements are conducted to verify the proposed diagnostic method, and full and partial disconnection failure is analyzed based on the high-frequency measurement results.
Head and Neck OTOTOXICITY AFTER RADIOTHERAPY FOR HEAD AND NECK TUMORS

Purpose: To investigate the incidence of radiation-induced ototoxicity according to the total dose delivered to specific parts of the auditory system, fractionation, and chemotherapy. Methods and Materials: Records of 325 patients treated for primary extracranial head and neck tumors with curative intent who received radiotherapy between 1964 and 2000 (median follow-up, 5.4 years) were retrospectively reviewed. Reconstructions of the treatment plans were generated to estimate the doses received by components of the auditory system. Results: Radiotherapy-induced morbidity developed in 41.8% of patients (external ear, 33.2%; middle ear, 28.6%; and inner ear, 26.8%). Univariate/multivariate analyses indicate that total dose received by parts of the auditory system seem to be significant, though fractionation and chemoradiation may contribute to the incidence of ototoxicities. Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) was observed in 49 patients (15.1%). Univariate and multivariate analyses indicated that age (p 0.0177 and p 0.005) and dose to cochlea (p < 0.0001 and p < 0.0001) were significant, and chemoradiation (p 0.0281 and p 0.006) may increase the incidence of SNHL. Five-year and 10-year actuarial risk of clinically overt SNHL increased to 37% (p > 0.0001) above doses of 60.5 Gy compared to 3% at doses below 60.5 Gy. For patients treated with adjuvant chemotherapy, clinically overt SNHL increased to 30% compared to 18% in the no-chemotherapy group at 10 years (p 0.0281). Conclusion: Radiotherapy toxicity was observed in all parts of the auditory system with median doses for incidence varying between 60 Gy to 66 Gy. Total dose to organ seems to be a significant factor though fractionation and chemo-radiation may contribute to ototoxicities. © 2007 Elsevier Inc.
Prediction-Based Resource Allocation for OFDM in Wireless Channels

We extend our previous work on optimal dynamic resource allocation in wireless environments to incorporate prediction of the frequency-selective OFDM channel. We briefly summarize our previous work and its exploitation of convexity for the resource allocation problem in point-to-point digital wireless communication links. We introduce channel prediction to overcome latency associated with symbol recovery, channel estimation, and channel-state feedback, which previously restricted resource allocation algorithms to implementation in slowly-fading channel environments. The resource-allocation framework is augmented with channel prediction functionality, and we demonstrate its use with a channel model exhibiting frequency-selective fading with a limited time autocorrelation. Results are presented, illustrating successful implementation, and we conclude with an outline of the course of future investigation to make channel-prediction-based resource allocation a viable technique in practical OFDM systems
Dynamic Analysis of the Actively-Controlled Segmented Mirror of the Thirty Meter Telescope

Current and planned large optical telescopes use a segmented primary mirror, with the out-of-plane degrees of freedom of each segment actively controlled. The primary mirror of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) considered here is composed of 492 segments, with 1476 actuators and 2772 sensors. In addition to many more actuators and sensors than at existing telescopes, higher bandwidths are desired to partially compensate for wind-turbulence loads on the segments. Control-structure interaction (CSI) limits the achievable bandwidth of the control system. Robustness can be further limited by uncertainty in the interaction matrix that relates sensor response to segment motion. The control system robustness is analyzed here for the TMT design, but the concepts are applicable to any segmented-mirror design. The key insight is to analyze the structural interaction in a Zernike basis; rapid convergence with additional basis functions is obtained because the dynamic coupling is much stronger at low spatial-frequency than at high. This analysis approach is both computational efficient, and provides guidance for structural optimization to minimize CSI.
Evaluating Topic-Word Review Analysis for Understanding Student Peer Review Performance

Topic modeling is widely used for content analysis of textual documents. While the mined topic terms are considered as a semantic abstraction of the original text, few people evaluate the accuracy of humans’ interpretation of them in the context of an application based on the topic terms. Previously, we proposed RevExplore, an interactive peer-review analytic tool that supports teachers in making sense of large volumes of student peer reviews. To better evaluate the functionality of RevExplore, in this paper we take a closer look at its Natural Language Processing component which automatically compares two groups of reviews at the topicword level. We employ a user study to evaluate our topic extraction method, as well as the topic-word analysis approach in the context of educational peer-review analysis. Our results show that the proposed method is better than a baseline in terms of capturing student reviewing/writing performance. While users generally identify student writing/reviewing performance correctly, participants who have prior teaching or peer-review experience tend to have better performance on our review exploration tasks, as well as higher satisfaction towards the proposed review analysis approach.
Hyperreactivity to endotoxin in mice infected with mycobacteria. Induction and elicitation of the reactions.

In the mouse, the parenteral injection of whole mycobacteria, cord factor or mycobacterial cell walls induces a 100 to 500,000 fold decrease in the acute i/v LD50 of endotoxic lipopolysaccharide (LPS) of Gram-negative organisms. Non-specific hyperreactivity of this kind is more easily induced by infection with living mycobacteria than by injection of dead organisms, and more easily when these are injected intravenously than intraperitoneally; but BCG and other strains of low virulence are as effective as fully virulent strains such as H37Rv or Vallee. The hyperreactivity reaches a maximum at 7–9 days and persists for at least 3 weeks. All of four strains of mice tested behaved similarly.
Region and object segmentation algorithms in the Qimera segmentation platform

In this paper we present the Qimera segmentation platform and describe the different approaches to segmentation that have been implemented in the system to date. Analysis techniques have been implemented for both region-based and object-based segmentation. The region-based segmentation algorithms include: a colour segmentation algorithm based on a modified Recursive Shortest Spanning Tree (RSST) approach, an implementation of a colour image segmentation algorithm based on the K-Means-with-Connectivity-Constraint (KMCC) algorithm and an approach based on the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm applied in a 6D colour/texture space. A semi-automatic approach to object segmentation that uses the modified RSST approach is outlined. An automatic object segmentation approach via snake propagation within a level-set framework is also described. Illustrative segmentation results are presented in all cases. Plans for future research within the Qimera project are also discussed.