Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterizations of Polysulfone/Ferrihydrite Mixed Matrix Membranes for Water/Wastewater Treatment

This study aimed to investigate the effects of ferrihydrite (Fh) nanoparticle loading on the physicochemical properties of polysulfone (PSf) membranes fabricated via the phase inversion method. The morphologies and physicochemical properties of prepared Fh and PSf/Fh mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) were characterized using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X‐ray diffraction analysis (XRD), Fourier transmission infra‐red (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), pure water flux analysis, contact angle measurement, and membrane porosity analysis. FTIR study indicated that a new O‐H band was formed when Fh was added into the membrane matrix. SEM analysis showed the formation of typical asymmetric membrane structures with elongated fingerlike and looser porous layers. Increasing the loading of Fh significantly enhanced membrane pure water flux from 230.2 L/m2•h (M‐Fh 0%) to 726.6 L/m2•h (M‐Fh 15.3%), attributed to the improved membranes structures, membranes wettability, surface roughness, and overall porosity. The findings suggest incorporation of Fh into PSf membranes improves physicochemical properties of the membranes which are applicable for water/wastewater treatment.
Improving D2D communications using 3D beamforming in 5G wireless networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication and beamforming technology are identified as promising innovations in the next generation wireless ecosystem. D2D technology allows direct communication between devices, which will be a key technology to meet the 5G's requirements in terms of delay and throughput. In this regard, resource allocation and interference management are two major challenges. In this paper we present a centralized architecture to manage discovery phase for D2D communications in 5G. Furthermore, we propose the three dimensional (3D) beamforming technique as a way to manage interferences when D2D communication is used. Numerical evaluation shows improvement in terms of outage probability, reachable throughput and energy consumption.
How to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis with surrogate endpoint: renal denervation in patients with resistant hypertension (DENERHTN) trial as an example

Abstract Whilst much uncertainty exists as to the efficacy of renal denervation (RDN), the positive results of the DENERHTN study in France confirmed the interest of an economic evaluation in order to assess efficiency of RDN and inform local decision makers about the costs and benefits of this intervention. The uncertainty surrounding both the outcomes and the costs can be described using health economic methods such as the non-parametric bootstrap. Internationally, numerous health economic studies using a cost-effectiveness model to assess the impact of RDN in terms of cost and effectiveness compared to antihypertensive medical treatment have been conducted. The DENERHTN cost-effectiveness study was the first health economic evaluation specifically designed to assess the cost-effectiveness of RDN using individual data. Using the DENERHTN results as an example, we provide here a summary of the principle methods used to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis.
LncRNA LINC00880 promotes cell proliferation, migration, and invasion while inhibiting apoptosis by targeting CACNG5 through the MAPK signaling pathway in spinal cord ependymoma

The present study was to investigate the effect of lncRNA LINC00880 targeting CACNG5 on cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and apoptosis in spinal cord ependymoma (SCE) through the MAPK signaling pathway. GEO database was used to download gene expression data related with SCE (GSE50161 and GSE66354) and annotation file. LncRNA with differential expression was predicted by Multi Experiment Matrix website (MEM). The target gene was analyzed by KEGG pathway enrichment analysis. SCE tissues and adjacent tissues were collected. The positive expression of CACNG5 protein was tested by immunohistochemistry. Expression of LINC00880, CACNG5, and MAPK signaling pathway‐related proteins was measured with qRT‐PCR and Western blotting. Cell proliferation, migration, invasion, cycle, and apoptosis were detected using MTT, Transwell assay, Scratch test, and Flow cytometry. SCE tissues showed increased LINC00880 expression. CACNG5 was a target gene of LINC00880 and correlated with MAPK signaling pathway. Compared with adjacent tissues, SCE tissues showed lower positive expression of CACNG5. Compared with the blank group, LINC00880 expression was higher in the LINC00880 vector and LINC00880 vector + CACNG5 vector groups, and lower in the si‐LINC00880 and si‐LINC00880 + si‐CACNG5 groups; in the LINC00880 vector and si‐CACNG5 groups, expression of survivin, p38MAPK, ERK1/2, JNK1/2/3 increased and CACNG5 and Bax expression reduced, the proliferation, invasion and migration of tumor cells increased, and apoptosis rate decreased. Opposite results were found in the si‐LINC00880 and CACNG5 vector groups. The findings indicate that lncRNA LINC00880 targeting CACNG5 inhibits cell apoptosis and promotes proliferation, migration, and invasion in SCE through the MAPK signaling pathway.
Hybrid dynamic thermal management method with model predictive control

Dynamic thermal management methods are important to control the temperature of microprocessor at runtime and improve the reliability performance of the chip. In this paper, a model predictive control based dynamic thermal management method is proposed with hybrid thermal regulation techniques combining task migration and dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) methods. The new method is able to track the specified safe temperature ceiling, reduce processor performance degradation, and lower temperature variation among different cores.
Opinion mining and semantic analysis of touristic social networks

In the context of a Regional Platform of Innovation for future tourism, we define a model and a decision support system for semantic analysis of social networks embedding networks of opinions, aiming at representing and understanding territorial uses coming out from digital marks. The territorial and touristic observatory we develop behind a digital platform is designed to complete usual tools of economic intelligence, helping in governance and in the identification of touristic products and services of tomorrow, so as to foster the rise of territorial economy. In the early stage of the project, the contributions we present are (1) a social semantic graph structure, (2) the definition of semantic degree centrality, (3) a process and definitions for interfacing semantic networks of opinions with social semantic networks of uses, and (4) a first use case experimentation. Public deployment is planned for 2013 and economical impacts will be measured on next years.
Advocating the Development of Next-Generation High-Relaxivity Gadolinium Chelates for Clinical Magnetic Resonance

Abstract The question of improved relaxivity, and potential efficacy therein, for a next-generation of magnetic resonance gadolinium chelates with extracellular distribution and renal excretion, which could also be viewed from the perspective of dose, is addressed on the basis of historical development, animal experimentation, and human trials. There was no systematic evaluation that preceded the choice of 0.1 mmol/kg as the standard dose for human imaging with the gadolinium chelates. In part, this dose was chosen owing to bloodwork abnormalities seen in phase I and phase II studies. Animal investigations and early clinical trials demonstrated improved lesion detectability at higher doses in the brain, liver, and heart. By designing an agent with substantially improved relaxivity, higher enhancement equivalent to that provided with the conventional gadolinium agents at high dose could be achieved, translating to improved diagnosis and, thus, clinical care. Implicit in the development of such high-relaxivity agents would be stability equivalent to or exceeding that of the currently approved macrocyclic agents, given current concern regarding dechelation and gadolinium deposition in the brain, skin, and bone with the linear agents that were initially approved. Development of such next-generation agents with a substantial improvement in relaxivity, in comparison with the current group of approved agents, with a 2-fold increase likely achievable, could lead to improved lesion enhancement, characterization, diagnosis, and, thus, clinical efficacy.
Damage To Gate Oxides In Reactive Ion Etching

The damage incurred during reactive ion etching is studied by using MOS capacitors with various sizes of surface metal pads attached to the gate electrode as charge collectors. Wet oxides show a sharper breakdown distribution and a higher resistance to plasma damage than dry oxides. High resolution electron microscopy shows that the Si/Si02 interfaces of dry oxides are much rougher than that of wet oxides both in terms of the extrusion heights and spacings. An anomalous leakage current in negative-gate IV characteristics was found for fully processed CMOS transistors and capacitors with metal pad antenna, indicating the nature of electrostatic induced hole trapping near the polysilicon gate/SiO2 interface. These residual trapped charges may be due to hole tunneling from gate electrode into oxide from an induced positive-gate bias. Breakdown characteristics are significantly degraded when electrons are injected from the polysilicon gate as opposed to injection from the silicon substrate. The most prominent effect of the electrostatic damage is the degradation in breakdown voltages of the defective oxides.
Sensor/actuator system for internet delays and packet losses

Network delays and packet losses are two critical parameters for the performance of networked control systems (NCS) in non-deterministic packet networks, such as the Internet. To avoid the need of a remote location, the laboratory experiences in teleoperation or telerobotics uses network simulators to reproduce the delays and packet losses. This paper presents an Internet emulation system that performs as a sensor of Internet delays and packet losses and as an actuator that reproduces these parameters into a local data flow. The paper presents some comparative results and makes a performance analysis of the whole system.
Titanium contacts to graphene: process-induced variability in electronic and thermal transport

Contact resistance (RC) is a major limiting factor in the performance of graphene devices. RC is sensitive to the quality of the interface and the composition of the contact, which are affected by the graphene transfer process and contact deposition conditions. In this work, a linear correlation is observed between the composition of Ti contacts, characterized by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and the Ti/graphene contact resistance measured by the transfer length method. We find that contact composition is tunable via deposition rate and base pressure. Reactor base pressure is found to effect the resultant contact resistance. The effect of contact deposition conditions on thermal transport measured by time-domain thermoreflectance is also reported. Interfaces with higher oxide composition appear to result in a lower thermal boundary conductance. Possible origins of this thermal boundary conductance change with oxide composition are discussed.
The utility of diagnostic tests for enteric fever in endemic locations

Enteric fever, an infection caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi and serovar Paratyphi A, is common and endemic in many areas of the Asian and African continents. In endemic areas, diagnostic tests are needed to diagnose acute cases for clinical management, to detect convalescent and chronic fecal carriage and for contact tracing. A suitable test may also allow an assessment of disease burden in a community to determine the need for vaccination programs. Each specific role may warrant a dedicated test, utilizing different samples, targets and methods to serve their respective purpose. Current diagnostic methods are poor. Blood culture is insufficiently sensitive and technically demanding, and bone marrow culture, although more sensitive, is infrequently performed. Antibody- and antigen-detection tests lend themselves to point-of-care format but remain insufficiently sensitive and specific for this role. There are concerns about the sensitivity of nucleic acid amplification tests and they have not become widely adopted. However, new approaches using genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, in vivo-induced antigen and immunoaffinity proteomics-based technologies are being employed to identify new antigens, gene targets and metabolic products that could be used as a basis for more effective diagnostic tests. If novel tests are to be credible and widely used they require rigorous evaluation in endemic areas in studies with appropriate selection of patients, adequate sample sizes and proper attention to a gold standard reference. Here, we discuss the range of methods currently used for diagnosing enteric fever in endemic locations and we suggest new technologies which may improve enteric fever diagnostics over the coming years.
Temperature dependence and ZTC bias point evaluation of sub 20nm bulk multigate devices

Temperature dependence is of utmost importance for the performance and power dissipation analysis. This work investigates the temperature dependence of bulk double-gate FinFET and Trigate MOSFET devices. Additionally, it is also evaluated the analysis for the Zero Temperature Coefficient (ZTC) condition. The results indicate that the increase in leakage current can reach more than 40X when compared to nominal temperature for high-performance applications. Trigate devices have shown to be more sensitive to these variations with difference of up 19.7% in Ioff current compared to FinFETs.
Novel monoamine oxidase A knock out mice with human-like spontaneous mutation

A novel line of mutant mice [monoamine oxidase A knockout (MAOAA863T KO)] harboring a spontaneous point nonsense mutation in exon 8 of the MAO A gene was serendipitously identified in a 129/SvEvTac colony. This mutation is analogous to the cause of a rare human disorder, Brunner syndrome, characterized by complete MAO A deficiency and impulsive aggressiveness. Concurrent with previous studies of MAO A KO mice generated by insertional mutagenesis (‘Tg8’), MAOAA863T KO lack MAO A enzyme activity and display enhanced aggression toward intruder mice. MAOAA863T KO, however, exhibited lower locomotor activity in a novel, inescapable open field and similar immobility during tail suspension compared with wild type, observations which differ from reports of Tg8. These findings consolidate evidence linking MAO A to aggression and highlight subtle yet distinctive phenotypical characteristics.
Accuracy of radiotherapy dose calculations based on cone-beam CT: comparison of deformable registration and image correction based methods

Radiotherapy dose calculations based on cone-beam CT (CBCT) images can be inaccurate due to unreliable Hounsfield units (HU) in the CBCT. Deformable image registration of planning CT images to CBCT, and direct correction of CBCT image values are two methods proposed to allow heterogeneity corrected dose calculations based on CBCT. In this paper we compare the accuracy and robustness of these two approaches. CBCT images for 44 patients were used including pelvis, lung and head & neck sites. CBCT HU were corrected using a ‘shading correction’ algorithm and via deformable registration of planning CT to CBCT using either Elastix or Niftyreg. Radiotherapy dose distributions were re-calculated with heterogeneity correction based on the corrected CBCT and several relevant dose metrics for target and OAR volumes were calculated. Accuracy of CBCT based dose metrics was determined using an ‘override ratio’ method where the ratio of the dose metric to that calculated on a bulk-density assigned version of the same image is assumed to be constant for each patient, allowing comparison to the patient’s planning CT as a gold standard. Similar performance is achieved by shading corrected CBCT and both deformable registration algorithms, with mean and standard deviation of dose metric error less than 1% for all sites studied. For lung images, use of deformed CT leads to slightly larger standard deviation of dose metric error than shading corrected CBCT with more dose metric errors greater than 2% observed (7% versus 1%).
Experimental demonstration of 16 Gbit/s millimeter-wave communications using MIMO processing of 2 OAM modes on each of two transmitter/receiver antenna apertures

This paper reports an experimental demonstration of a 16 Gbit/s millimeter-wave communication link using MIMO processing of 2 OAM modes on each of two transmitter/receiver antenna apertures. Two groups of multiplexed OAM beams, each containing OAM beams of ℓ =1 and +3 are generated and transmitted through two transmitter apertures respectively. The two transmitter apertures are separated with a certain distance such that the two groups of OAM beams are spatially overlapping at the receiver aperture plane. Each channel carries 1-GBaud 16-QAM signals at the same carrier frequency of 28 GHz. Our experimental results show that MIMO equalization processing can help mitigate the interferences from the other OAM channels and the BER performance of each channel improves significantly after MIMO processing. Our results indicate that OAM multiplexing and traditional spatial multiplexing combined with MIMO processing can be compatible and complementary with each other.
Influence of seam type with wave absorbing sponge on shielding effectiveness for electromagnetic shielding clothing

Seam type belongs to one of the most basic and independent factor for electromagnetic shielding clothing sewing, which is the main cause of the leakage of electromagnetic wave. Therefore, the seam type design becomes the key to the design of high electromagnetic shielding clothing. Wave absorbing sponge has good wave absorbing property. But there is no relative research on applying wave absorbing sponge to electromagnetic shielding clothing. This study chose hem seam type and double top-stitched seam type. In these 2 seam types, the wave absorbing sponge was added in different ways. This study used 3-m anechoic chamber method to test samples. The influence of different seam types on shielding effectiveness for electromagnetic shielding fabric was discussed. The sleeves of electromagnetic shielding clothing were taken as an example to evaluate their application for further study. The results exhibited that the shielding effectiveness of seam types have obvious improvement after adding wave absorbing sponge. With the different seam types, the shielding effectiveness of seam types also change. The shielding effectiveness of double top-stitched seam type is higher than that of hem seam type in totally. The seam type is with wave absorbing sponge, whose shielding effectiveness is higher than that without wave absorbing sponge. Choosing hem seam type and adding wave absorbing sponge are applied to the sleeve of electromagnetic shielding clothing. The shielding effectiveness of electromagnetic shielding clothing is improved. The research provides a basis for the design, production and evaluation of high performance electromagnetic shielding clothing.
Detecting hospital-acquired infections: A document classification approach using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting

Hospital-acquired infections pose a significant risk to patient health, while their surveillance is an additional workload for hospital staff. Our overall aim is to build a surveillance system that reliably detects all patient records that potentially include hospital-acquired infections. This is to reduce the burden of having the hospital staff manually check patient records. This study focuses on the application of text classification using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting to the problem. Support vector machines and gradient tree boosting have never been applied to the problem of detecting hospital-acquired infections in Swedish patient records, and according to our experiments, they lead to encouraging results. The best result is yielded by gradient tree boosting, at 93.7 percent recall, 79.7 percent precision and 85.7 percent F1 score when using stemming. We can show that simple preprocessing techniques and parameter tuning can lead to high recall (which we aim for in screening patient records) with appropriate precision for this task.
Semi-supervised domain adaptation via convolutional neural network

Semi-supervised visual domain adaptation is devoted to adapting a model learned in source domain to target domain where there are only a few labeled samples. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised cross-domain image recognition method which unifies the feature learning and recognition model training into a convolutional neural network framework. Based on a few labeled samples and massive unlabeled samples in the source and target domains, we specially design three branches for class label, domain label and similarity label prediction which simultaneously optimizes the network to generate image features that are domain invariance and inter-class discriminative. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective for learning robust cross-domain image recognition model, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the widely used visual domain adaptation benchmark.
Gender Identification via Reposting Behaviors in Social Media

Social media has drawn scientists’ attention due to their potential values for health and marketing, among other activities. To effectively exploit such huge online resources by using incomplete user profiles, which are very common on social media sites and can be caused by user privacy settings, it is meaningful to explore user profile identification methods. In this paper, we focus on gender identification using reposting behaviors on social networks. Whereas most existing works rely on pure statistical methods, we propose a scheme that is underpinned by homophily and four intuitive methods based on it by combining knowledge of statistics and sociology. For our data set, which was obtained from Sina Weibo and contained 1039 test samples and 528k user profiles, our methods perform with 86.7% accuracy. We explore the sensitivity of our methods on the scale of the data set and find surprisingly competitive results surpassing the binary classification baseline. Finally, we further suggest possible extensions to our methods.
Bonding of polymer microstructures by UV irradiation and welding at low temperatures

A new bonding process has been developed for polymer microstructures, especially of Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), which avoids the problems caused by using adhesives or solvents or applying high temperatures. It is based on photo degradation of polymers. Moulded PMMA microchannels and microspectrometer gratings were covered with PMMA plates by ultraviolet irradiation of the joining faces and subsequent welding at low temperatures. Because of the low thermal load, structure details even in the submicrometer range remain dimensionally stable during the bonding process.