Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gadolinium retention in the dentate nucleus and globus pallidus is dependent on the class of contrast agent.

PURPOSE To compare changes in signal intensity (SI) ratios of the dentate nucleus (DN) and the globus pallidus (GP) to those of other structures on unenhanced T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images between linear and macrocyclic gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs). MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was approved by the ethical committee of the University of Heidelberg (reference no. S-324/2014). Owing to the retrospective character of the study, the ethical committee did not require any written informed consent. Two groups of 50 patients who underwent at least six consecutive MR imaging examinations with the exclusive use of either a linear GBCA (gadopentetate dimeglumine) or a macrocyclic GBCA (gadoterate meglumine) were analyzed retrospectively. The difference in mean SI ratios of DN to pons and GP to thalamus on unenhanced T1-weighted images from the last and first examinations was calculated. One-sample and independent-sample t tests were used to assess the difference in SI ratios for both groups, and regression analysis was performed to account for potential confounders. RESULTS The SI ratio difference in the linear group was greater than 0 (mean DN difference ± standard deviation, 0.0407 ± 0.0398 [P < .001]; GP, 0.0287 ± 0.0275 [P < .001]) and significantly larger (DN, P < .001 and standardized difference of 1.16; GP, P < .001 and standardized difference of 0.81) than that in the macrocyclic group, which did not differ from 0 (DN, 0.0016 ± 0.0266 [P = .680]; GP, 0.0031 ± 0.0354 [P = .538]). The SI ratio difference between the last and first examinations for the DN remained significantly different between the two groups in the regression analysis (P < .001). CONCLUSION This study indicates that an SI increase in the DN and GP on T1-weighted images is caused by serial application of the linear GBCA gadopentetate dimeglumine but not by the macrocyclic GBCA gadoterate meglumine. Clinical implications of this observation remain unclear.
Extreme Mitogenomic Variation in Natural Populations of Chaetognaths

Abstract The extent of within-species genetic variation across the diversity of animal life is an underexplored problem in ecology and evolution. Although neutral genetic variation should scale positively with population size, mitochondrial diversity levels are believed to show little variation across animal species. Here, we report an unprecedented case of extreme mitochondrial diversity within natural populations of two morphospecies of chaetognaths (arrow worms). We determine that this diversity is composed of deep sympatric mitochondrial lineages, which are in some cases as divergent as human and platypus. Additionally, based on 54 complete mitogenomes, we observed mitochondrial gene order differences between several of these lineages. We examined nuclear divergence patterns (18S, 28S, and an intron) to determine the possible origin of these lineages, but did not find congruent patterns between mitochondrial and nuclear markers. We also show that extreme mitochondrial divergence in chaetognaths is not driven by positive selection. Hence, we propose that the extreme levels of mitochondrial variation could be the result of either a complex scenario of reproductive isolation, or a combination of large population size and accelerated mitochondrial mutation rate. These findings emphasize the importance of characterizing genome-wide levels of nuclear variation in these species and promote chaetognaths as a remarkable model to study mitochondrial evolution.
Side population cells in highly enriched CD34‐positive cells from peripheral blood progenitor cells identify an immature subtype of hematopoietic progenitor cells but do not predict time to engraftment in patients treated with high‐dose therapy

Objective: A Hoechst 33342 dye efflux assay can be used to define a population of immature hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC) that are called side population (SP) cells. Previously, SP cells examined from bone marrow (BM) and peripheral blood progenitor cells (PBPC) were found to be predominantly CD34 negative.
Exploiting domain knowledge for Object Discovery

In this paper, we consider the problem of Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery (LROD) as the long-term goal of discovering novel objects in the environment while the robot operates, for as long as the robot operates. As a first step towards LROD, we automatically process the raw video stream of an entire workday of a robotic agent to discover objects. We claim that the key to achieve this goal is to incorporate domain knowledge whenever available, in order to detect and adapt to changes in the environment. We propose a general graph-based formulation for LROD in which generic domain knowledge is encoded as constraints. Our formulation enables new sources of domain knowledge-metadata-to be added dynamically to the system, as they become available or as conditions change. By adding domain knowledge, we discover 2.7× more objects and decrease processing time 190 times. Our optimized implementation, HerbDisc, processes 6 h 20 min of RGBD video of real human environments in 18 min 30 s, and discovers 121 correct novel objects with their 3D models.
Estimating Personal Exposures from Ambient Air Pollution Measures: Using Meta-Analysis to Assess Measurement Error

Background: Although ambient concentrations of particulate matter ⩽10 &mgr;m (PM10) are often used as proxies for total personal exposure, correlation (r) between ambient and personal PM10 concentrations varies. Factors underlying this variation and its effect on health outcome–PM exposure relationships remain poorly understood. Methods: We conducted a random-effects meta-analysis to estimate effects of study, participant, and environmental factors on r; used the estimates to impute personal exposure from ambient PM10 concentrations among 4,012 nonsmoking, participants with diabetes in the Women’s Health Initiative clinical trial; and then estimated the associations of ambient and imputed personal PM10 concentrations with electrocardiographic measures, such as heart rate variability. Results: We identified 15 studies (in years 1990–2009) of 342 participants in five countries. The median r was 0.46 (range = 0.13 to 0.72). There was little evidence of funnel plot asymmetry but substantial heterogeneity of r, which increased 0.05 (95% confidence interval = 0.01 to 0.09) per 10 µg/m3 increase in mean ambient PM10 concentration. Substituting imputed personal exposure for ambient PM10 concentrations shifted mean percent changes in electrocardiographic measures per 10 µg/m3 increase in exposure away from the null and decreased their precision, for example, −2.0% (−4.6% to 0.7%) versus −7.9% (−15.9% to 0.9%), for the standard deviation of normal-to-normal RR interval duration. Conclusions: Analogous distributions and heterogeneity of r in extant meta-analyses of ambient and personal PM2.5 concentrations suggest that observed shifts in mean percent change and decreases in precision may be generalizable across particle size.
RESHAPING THE INTERFACE BETWEEN MARKETING AND OPERATIONS IN GLOBALIZING FURNITURE SUPPLY CHAINS Work-in-progress paper

Over the past few decades, international fragmentat ion of production and offshore outsourcing have remarkably altered the organization of Western supply chains. Particularly in low-tech, manufacturing sectors, the fast spread of global pr oduction network has forced managers to reconsider the configuration of their supply chains , including the alignment between marketing and operations. Although the marketing-operations i nterface (MOI) is crucial in supply chain management, the understanding of globalization’s ef fects on this process remains uncertain and unclear. By focusing on the furniture industry in U SA and Italy, this paper uses a multiple case study to address the evolution of MOI in globalizin g supply chains. Findings suggest that the relationship between marketing and operations in su pply chains is contingent on dynamics of internationalization. Acknowledging the exploratory nature of this study, this article also indicates room further improvement and research development.
An automatic vehicle detection method based on traffic videos

A vision-based vehicle detection method is presented in this paper. The proposed method is composed of two steps, i.e., hypothesis generation and hypothesis verification. An adaptive background modeling and updating method is proposed to detect foreground regions in video sequences. With the prior knowledge of the vehicle appearance, the possible vehicle locations are extracted from the foreground regions and the touched vehicles are separated. Finally, hypothesized regions are verified by comparing their appearances with vehicle model. The performance of the proposed method is verified on videos captured under versatile conditions, and good results are achieved even in heavy traffic conditions.
Program dependence analysis of concurrent logic programs and its applications

In this paper a formal model for program dependence analysis of concurrent logic programs is proposed with the following contributions. First, two language-independent program representations are presented for explicitly representing control flows and/or data flows in a concurrent logic program. Then based on these representations, program dependences between literals in concurrent logic programs are defined formally, and a dependence-based program representation named the Literal Dependence Net (LDN) is presented for explicitly representing primary program dependences in a concurrent logic program. Finally, as applications of the LDNs, some important software engineering activities including program slicing, debugging, testing, complexity measurement, and maintenance are discussed in a programming environment for concurrent logic programs.
Replantation of the foot.

to draw a further distinction between a previable and a viable fetus. The first is one which is unable to function as a self-sustaining whole independently of the mother," whereas the viable fetus is able to do that. And the Group recommends that 20 weeks rather than the traditional 28 weeks should be taken as the dividing line between the two -that is, as prima facie proof of viability. The use of fetal tissues has long been necessary in virology, cancer research, immunology, and other work, and research with the whole, previable fetus is conducted to study development and deformity among other things. Even at this stage stringent precautions are needed to ensure that such studies are ethical, necessary, and likely to be informative. The Group therefore recommends that the fetuses used must weigh less than 300 g, that whether a particular fetus is used must rest with the medical attendants at its birth and not with the intending research worker, and that the research should be carried out in departments directly related to a hospital and only with the sanction of its ethical committee. Research on a viable fetus is an entirely different matter. There can be no doubt of an overriding ethical obligation to sustain its life. As the report says, "it is both unethical and illegal to carry out any experiments on it which are inconsistent with treatment necessary to promote its life, although in many instances the techniques used to aid a distressed fetus are so new that they are in some degree experimental. " When Mr. Norman St. John-Stevas, M.P., declared in May 1970 that aborted live fetuses had been sold for medical experiments2 he was raising the temperature of an already rather feverish subject, and it is regrettable that his name is not among those of the individuals who submitted evidence to the Advisory Group, though the Group was set up as a direct consequence of his allegations. Its Report expresses the general opinion of the medical profession in condemning the buying and selling of fetuses, for any traffic of this kind would be obnoxious to doctors. And the concern it expresses throughout for the observance of impeccable standards of ethics is a valuable reminder that the fetus is a potential human being-a patient, not an experimental animal.
Ontology-Driven Data Preparation for Association Mining

Ontologies can convey domain semantics to various phases of a KDD application through a mapping established between ontology entities and columns of the data matrix. The approach implemented in the Ferda tool focuses on providing support for the data preparation phase. Information about important data values and column groupings, once injected into a domain ontology, can be re-peatedly used for creating meaninfgul categories for attributes and for deﬁning mining tasks producing association hypotheses well-interpretable in the domain context. Tests on real data have been carried out in the domain of cardiology.
Biocomposites of Poly(Lactic Acid) and Cellulose Nanofibers from Cassava Pulp

Cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) were used as biobased fillers to prepare poly(lactic acid) (PLA)-based biocomposites. Cellulose nanofibers were extracted from cassava pulp (CP) by acid hydrolysis method. Before submitted to acid treatment, CP was pre-treated by alkali and bleaching treatments. The biocomposites were prepared by melt mixing, followed by hot melt pressing. In order to improve the compatibility of CNFs with PLA matrix, glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) grafted poly (lactic acid) (PLA-g-GMA) was used as a compatibilizer. PLA-g-GMA was prepared by grafting of GMA onto PLA chain via melt mixing using an internal mixer. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrograph shows that most nanofibers with the diameter in the range of 10-30 nm and immeasurable length were obtained. The appearance of two new peaks at 49.07 and 44.71 ppm in the carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (13C-NMR) spectrum of PLA-g-GMA, which represent the carbons of the epoxy group of GMA, confirms that GMA was successfully grafted onto PLA chain. The morphology of biocomposites, characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), reveals that without using PLA-g-GMA, the poor dispersion of CNFs in PLA matrix was observed. In contrast to that, with using PLA-g-GMA, the dispersion of CNFs in PLA matrix was improved. Moreover, the impact strength results show that by incorporating 1.0 wt% CNFs into PLA matrix and using PLA-g-GMA as a compatibilizer, the impact strength of biocomposites was slightly enhanced compared to that of pure PLA.
Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA) is Useful for Assessing the Nutritional Status of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Cross-sectional Study

Abstract Malnutrition is prevalent in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) but is often neglected in clinical practice. This study examined the usefulness of the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) for assessing the nutritional status of patients with COPD. We recruited 83 patients with COPD in stable condition from the pulmonary rehabilitation unit of a medical center in northern Taiwan. Each patient was interviewed with a structured questionnaire to elicit personal and health-related data, and measured for anthropometric and blood biochemical indicators. Nutritional status was rated with two Taiwanese-specific versions of the MNA, MNA-T1 and MNA-T2. Fat-free mass was measured with bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), and exercise capacity indicators with the 6-Minute Walk Test. The two MNA versions showed high agreement (kappa = 0.949) in predicting the nutritional risk, and both versions predicted the FFMI well (area under the curve of the Receiver Operating Characteristics = 0.804, p < 0.001 for MNA-T1; and 0.813, p < 0.001 for MNA-T2). MNA scores decreased with increasing disease severity and were highly correlated with FFMI, BMI, mid-arm circumference, calf circumference, and oxygen saturation at rest and during exercise (all p < 0.01). The MNA score was positively correlated with FEV1, FVC and 6-minute walking distance, and negatively correlated with GOLD stages (all p < 0.05). However, the MNA score was not significantly correlated with blood biochemical indicators, perhaps due to inflammatory status associated with COPD. The MNA appears appropriate for rating the nutritional risk of patients with COPD. Routine use of the MNA may help reduce the risk of malnutrition in patients with COPD.
UPC: Experiments with Joint Learning within SemEval Task 9

This paper describes UPC's participation in the SemEval-2007 task 9 (Marquez et al., 2007). We addressed all four subtasks using supervised learning. The paper introduces several novel issues: (a) for the SRL task, we propose a novel reranking algorithm based on the re-ranking Perceptron of Collins and Duffy (2002); and (b) for the same task we introduce a new set of global features that extract information not only at proposition level but also from the complete set of frame candidates. We show that in the SemEval setting, i.e., small training corpora, this approach outperforms previous work. Additionally, we added NSD and NER information in the global SRL model but this experiment was unsuccessful.
Jotmail: a voicemail interface that enables you to see what was said

Voicemail is a pervasive, but under-researched tool for workplace communication. Despite potential advantages of voicemail over email, current phone-based voicemail UIs are highly problematic for users. We present a novel, Web-based, voicemail interface, Jotmail. The design was based on data from several studies of voicemail tasks and user strategies. The GUI has two main elements: (a) personal annotations that serve as a visual analogue to underlying speech; (b) automatically derived message header information. We evaluated Jotmail in an 8-week field trial, where people used it as their only means for accessing voicemail. Jotmail was successful in supporting most key voicemail tasks, although users' electronic annotation and archiving behaviors were different from our initial predictions. Our results argue for the utility of a combination of annotation based indexing and automatically derived information, as a general technique for accessing speech archives.
An OADM based on cascaded phase-shifted linearly chirped fiber grating and Mach-Zehnder interferometer

In this paper, a new structure of optical add-drop multiplexer based on cascaded phase shifted linearly chirped fiber Bragg grating (CPSLCFBG) and Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) is proposed. The spectrum of drop port and output port of the OADM is analyzed using transmission matrix method by optimizing of CPSLCFBG with Cap apodization function. At the port of the drop and the output, which has equidistant multi channels with almost equal output power and very narrow bandwidth, even about 40 channels, and the transmission performance is very good.
Multiagent Reasoning with Belief Contexts II: Elaboration Tolerance

As discussed in previous papers, belie] conte. ~a are a powerful ud appropriate formalism for the representation and implementation of propositional attitudes in a multiagent environment, In this paper we show that a formalization using belief contexts is also elaboration tolerant. That is, it is able to cope with minor changes to input problems without major revisions. Elaboration tolerance is a vital property for building situated agents: it allows for adapting and re-uling a previous problem representation in different (but related) situations, rather than building a new representation from scratch. We substantiate our claims by discussing a number of variations to a paradigmatic case study, the Three Wise Men problem.
Randomized, placebo-controlled, phase III study of oxaliplatin, fluorouracil, and leucovorin with or without PTK787/ZK 222584 in patients with previously treated metastatic colorectal adenocarcinoma.

PURPOSE Treatment options for patients with previously treated metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) are limited, and treatments with differing mechanisms of action are needed. PTK787/ZK 222584 (PTK/ZK) is a novel oral angiogenesis inhibitor with therapeutic potential for the treatment of solid tumors. METHODS Patients (N = 855) were randomly assigned to treatment with PTK/ZK or placebo once daily in combination with oxaliplatin, fluorouracil, and leucovorin (FOLFOX4). Stratification factors included WHO performance status (PS; 0 v 1 to 2) and lactate dehydrogenase ([LDH] ≤ 1.5× the upper limit of normal [ULN] v > 1.5 × ULN). Treatment was given until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. The primary end point was overall survival (OS); secondary end points included progression-free survival (PFS), safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of PTK/ZK. RESULTS No statistically significant differences were seen between the treatment groups for the overall comparison of OS. With PTK/ZK and placebo, respectively, median OS was 13.1 and 11.9 months (hazard ratio [HR], 1.00; 95% CI, 0.87 to 1.16; P = .957). Median PFS was longer with PTK/ZK than with placebo (5.6 and 4.2 months, respectively; HR, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.71 to 0.96; P = .013). An exploratory, post hoc analysis demonstrated improved PFS in patients with high LDH, regardless of WHO PS (HR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.48 to 0.83; P < .001). CONCLUSION PTK/ZK in combination with FOLFOX4 did not improve OS of patients with pretreated mCRC but did improve PFS. The effect of PTK/ZK was more pronounced in patients with high LDH at baseline.
A Robust Iterative Shape-From-Shading Algorithm with Modified Transforming Matrix

We present a new simple iterative shape-from-shading algorithm, which gives greater numerical stability and as a result more accurate shapes than the previous one. The Jacobi’s iterative method is applied to the difference between the image and the reflectance function of the three depth parameters to get an iterative relation, which is then modified so that all the eigenvalues of the inverting matrix consist of three squared terms. This prevents the determinant of the matrix from being null to a great degree, resulting in a more accuracy of the shape estimate. We also rotate the coordinates by an arbitrary angle, when needed, to improve the reconstruction with no such shape distortions as stripe-like ones and with a resolution enhancement. Computer experiments were made using several synthetic and real images to show its effectiveness.
The Interplay of Power and Religion in Nigeria from Colonization to Democratization

Nigeria is one of the most populous Muslim countries of the world where religion has been a major factor in politics. Specifically, Islam has played and continued to play notable role in politics in the country whose constitution and rule of law are of secular orientation. Yet, there has not been a systematic study devoted to the political activities or participation of Muslim organizations in governance in the country. This article investigates the interplay of power and religion in Nigeria during her colonial period and the first 40 years of her political independence namely, as well as the role of Muslim organizations in electoral processes and democratization in the country during that period. Questions addressed are as follows: What was the nature of religious identities in Nigeria during this period? How did religious identities of the citizens impact on politics in the country during the period? What roles did Nigerian Muslim organizations play in politics during the period and to what extent were they reckoned with as a force for democratization in the political process. The study is historical and also critical and analytical in method. It has the potential to provide the country a clear direction on the ideal role of religious bodies in a political process in view of the nature of the relationship between state and civil society of which religious organizations are a part. Such a contribution is capable of shaping, influencing or curbing the growing and excessively militant dimension of political Islam in the country.