Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Personalized articulated atlas with a dynamic adaptation strategy for bone segmentation in CT or CT/MR head and neck images

This paper presents a novel segmentation method for the joint segmentation of individual bones in CT- or CT/MR- head and neck images. It is based on an articulated atlas for CT images that learned the shape and appearance of the individual bones along with the articulation between them from annotated training instances. First, a novel dynamic adaptation strategy for the atlas is presented in order to increase the rate of successful adaptations. Then, if a corresponding CT image is available the atlas can be enriched with personalized information about shape, appearance and size of the individual bones from that image. Using mutual information, this personalized atlas is adapted to an MR image in order to propagate segmentations. For evaluation, a head and neck bone atlas created from 15 manually annotated training images was adapted to 58 clinically acquired head andneck CT datasets. Visual inspection showed that the automatic dynamic adaptation strategy was successful for all bones in 86% of the cases. This is a 22% improvement compared to the traditional gradient descent based approach. In leave-one-out cross validation manner the average surface distance of the correctly adapted items was found to be 0.6 8mm. In 20 cases corresponding CT/MR image pairs were available and the atlas could be personalized and adapted to the MR image. This was successful in 19 cases.
Semantic Relationships Extraction for Entities in WIS

Web Integration System (WIS) provides abundant structured information about entities in a domain. Inter- relationships for entities in WIS are valuable for further analysis and decision-making. It is not rare that an entity pair has more than one semantic relationship. However, existing researches on relation extraction ignore this situation and they as- sume that one entity pair has only one semantic relationship. This paper focuses on mining multi-semantic relationships for a giving entity in WIS. We first extract related entities and corresponding contexts from web texts, then propose a clustering algorithm to cluster the related entities into different subsets, where each subset represents a semantic relation- ship to the entity. Finally we adjust the result clusters by merging semantic similar clusters together. The highlight of the algorithm is that we cluster the entities based on every single context instead of the overall contexts related. We evaluate our method by comparing it with the state-of-the-art approach using real-world dataset generated by search engine. The results show that the proposed approach is efficient in mining multi-semantic relationships for the giving entity from WIS.
Sex differences in coronary heart disease and stroke mortality: a global assessment of the effect of ageing between 1980 and 2010

Background Cardiovascular disease mortality rates are well known to be lower in women than men and to increase with age. Whether these sex and age effects have changed over recent decades, and how much they differ by country, is unclear. Method From the WHO Mortality Database, we obtained age-specific and sex-specific coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke mortality rates for the world's most populous countries with data available between 1980 and 2010. We calculated age-specific, country-specific and period-specific men-to-women CHD and stroke mortality rate ratios for 26 countries and compared the differences between and within countries over time. Results CHD and stroke mortality decreased substantially between 1980 and 2010 in most countries, in both sexes. Mostly there was an attenuation of the effect of ageing over calendar time, more so in men than in women. CHD mortality was higher in men than in women throughout adulthood, but the magnitude of the difference varied by age. Men-to-women CHD mortality rate ratios were 4–5 in middle age (30–64 years) and 2 thereafter (65–89 years). Stroke mortality was more similar between sexes, with men-to-women stroke mortality rate ratios of around 1.5–2 until old age. Conclusions While CHD and stroke mortality rates declined considerably between 1980 and 2010 in both sexes, there was some indication for stronger age-specific reductions in CHD in men than women. Mortality from CHD and stroke remains higher among men than women until old age across a range of economically, socially and culturally diverse countries.
Semantic Navigator : Use of Semantic Data in Web Navigation

Semantic web search engines can take advantage of machineunderstandable data published on the Web to provide more precise search results and advanced query capabilities. Semantic data embedded in web documents (serialized as RDFa or microformats, for example) can be used in conjunction with a semantic web search engine to provide a better web navigation experience. We present Semantic Navigator, a Mozilla Firefox extension than brings advantages of semantic search to ordinary users. Semantic Navigator detects semantic data in web documents and with the aid of a semantic web search engine, it enables users to easily navigate to related documents containing information about a selected resource or about one of its properties.
Mining Invariants from SaaS Application Logs (Practical Experience Report)

The increasing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) stresses the need of solutions to predict failures and avoid service interruptions, which invariably result in SLA violations and severe loss of revenue. A promising approach to continuously monitor the correct functioning of the system is to check the execution conformance to a set of invariants, i.e., properties that must hold when the system is deemed to run correctly. In this paper we propose a framework and a tool to automatically discover invariants from application logs and to online detect their violation. The framework has been applied on 9 months of log events from a real-world SaaS application. Results show that the proposed tool is able to automatically select 12 invariants with a stringent goodness of fit criteria out of more than 500 potential relationships. We also show the usefulness of our approach to detect runtime issues from logs in the form of violations of selected invariants, corresponding to silent errors that usually go unnoticed by the system maintenance personnel, even if they could represent symptoms of upcoming service failures.
An enhanced fall detection system for elderly person monitoring using consumer home networks

Various fall-detection solutions have been previously proposed to create a reliable surveillance system for elderly people with high requirements on accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. In this paper, an enhanced fall detection system is proposed for elderly person monitoring that is based on smart sensors worn on the body and operating through consumer home networks. With treble thresholds, accidental falls can be detected in the home healthcare environment. By utilizing information gathered from an accelerometer, cardiotachometer and smart sensors, the impacts of falls can be logged and distinguished from normal daily activities. The proposed system has been deployed in a prototype system as detailed in this paper. From a test group of 30 healthy participants, it was found that the proposed fall detection system can achieve a high detection accuracy of 97.5%, while the sensitivity and specificity are 96.8% and 98.1% respectively. Therefore, this system can reliably be developed and deployed into a consumer product for use as an elderly person monitoring device with high accuracy and a low false positive rate.
Control of asgE Expression during Growth and Development of Myxococcus xanthus

ABSTRACT One of the earliest events in the Myxococcus xanthusdevelopmental cycle is production of an extracellular cell density signal called A-signal (or A-factor). Previously, we showed that cells carrying an insertion in the asgE gene fail to produce normal levels of this cell-cell signal. In this study we found that expression of asgE is growth phase regulated and developmentally regulated. Several lines of evidence indicate thatasgE is cotranscribed with an upstream gene during development. Using primer extension analyses, we identified two 5′ ends for this developmental transcript. The DNA sequence upstream of one 5′ end has similarity to the promoter regions of several genes that are A-signal dependent, whereas sequences located upstream of the second 5′ end show similarity to promoter elements identified for genes that are C-signal dependent. Consistent with this result is our finding that mutants failing to produce A-signal or C-signal are defective for developmental expression of asgE. In contrast to developing cells, the large majority of the asgE transcript found in vegetative cells appears to be monocistronic. This finding suggests that asgE uses different promoters for expression during vegetative growth and development. Growth phase regulation ofasgE is abolished in a relA mutant, indicating that this vegetative promoter is induced by starvation. The data presented here, in combination with our previous results, indicate that the level of AsgE in vegetative cells is sufficient for this protein to carry out its function during development.
Segmentation Similarity and Agreement

We propose a new segmentation evaluation metric, called segmentation similarity (S), that quantifies the similarity between two segmentations as the proportion of boundaries that are not transformed when comparing them using edit distance, essentially using edit distance as a penalty function and scaling penalties by segmentation size. We propose several adapted inter-annotator agreement coefficients which use S that are suitable for segmentation. We show that S is configurable enough to suit a wide variety of segmentation evaluations, and is an improvement upon the state of the art. We also propose using inter-annotator agreement coefficients to evaluate automatic segmenters in terms of human performance.
Quantitative Assessment of Operational Security: Models and Tools *

Abstract This paper proposes a novel approach to help computing system administrators inmonitoring the security of their systems. This approach is based on modeling thesystem as a privilege graph exhibiting operational security vulnerabilities and ontransforming this privilege graph into a Markov chain corresponding to all possiblesuccessful attack scenarios. A set of tools has been developed to generateautomatically the privilege graph of a Unix system, to transform it into thecorresponding Markov chain and to compute characteristic measures of theoperational system security.Keywords: quantitative security evaluation, privilege graph, Markov modeling 1. Introduction Computing system security relies mostly on users, operators and administrators, and eventhe best designed system, if badly operated, would be unsecure. Most authentication andprotection mechanisms can be diverted by malicious or careless users, then allowing possibleintruders to perform security breaches. This is not surprising since most users are lessinterested in security than in efficiency, flexibility and cooperation with other users.A scrupulous system administrator should try to maintain the best security for his systemwith the least incidence on user operation. It is thus tremendously important to assess thesecurity level of the operational system and to monitor the evolution of this security level withrespect to system configuration modifications, application or operation changes andenvironment evolution.This paper develops an approach to evaluate the security of operational computing systems.Examples are taken from Unix™ systems, but the approach could be extended to otheroperating systems and to distributed systems as well. Section 2 shows how to model acomputing system in a way exhibiting vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a possible
Research needs for the development of evidence‐based systems of classification for physical, vision, and intellectual impairments

The purpose of classification in Paralympic sport is to promote participation in sport by people with disabilities by minimizing the impact of eligible types of impairment on the outcome of competition. This chapter provides detail on key elements of research design and measurement methods required for the development of evidence-based classification, thereby assisting researchers to improve the effectiveness of classification-focused research. It is divided into two sections. The first provides a brief overview of the structure of Paralympic sport, highlighting what sports must do to ensure that their classification systems are compliant with the requirements of the IPC. The second section provides a summary of how the principles articulated in the Position Stand can be operationally translated into programs of research, paying particular attention to important differences between physical, vision, and intellectual impairment. The chapter presents several steps, each of which represents an essential stage required for developing evidence-based systems of classification.
Beyond Gender Stereotypes in Language Comprehension: Self Sex-Role Descriptions Affect the Brain’s Potentials Associated with Agreement Processing

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent.
Implementation of a Wireless Multi-Carrier Acoustic Modem using Error Control Coding

In Digital Communication Systems, especially high-speed modems, it is desirable to increase the bit rate while maintaining the same bandwidth without seriously impairing transmission quality. Single-Carrier systems provide a decent bit rate, but Multi-Carrier systems give bit rates that are several orders higher. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) services and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) are multi-carrier methods that are suited for this type of application. ADSL is used in two-wire line telephone services and OFDM is used in Wireless applications. Work done in a modem application that employs OFDM concepts and Reed-Muller Error Correcting codes is presented in this paper. The modem was implemented using the MATLAB numerical computation software package.
MagiCrowd: A crowd based incentive for location-aware crowd sensing

Mobile devices have become more and more powerful with lots of embedded sensors providing sensibility of various data, which makes crowd sensing a compelling paradigm followed by emerging applications. In this paper, we design a crowd based incentive mechanism to stimulate participants joining sensing campaigns with consideration of location privacy. In our incentive, MagiCrowd, we creatively cluster the participants as several atomic crowds to bargain with the crowd sensing campaigner. We propose K-least to cluster the participants and achieve K-anonymity location privacy. Negotiated Bargain Theory is introduced to determine the incentive payoffs and Penalty Allocation is designed to allocate the gross crowd rewards. MagiCrowd can achieve high participation rate, rational reward and location privacy. We discuss the proposed incentive in depth and conduct thorough experiments to evaluate the desirable properties.
Leaned teamwork fattens workplace innovation: the relationship between task complexity, team learning and team proactivity

Our aim is to contribute to research on workplace innovation by identifying tasks within industrial Lean Production Systems (LPS) that can trigger the involvement of teams in workplace innovation. Previous research has shown negative effects of LPS for employees’ motivation, learning, and innovation processes. The principles of job design of production tasks, e.g., standardization and routinization, are seemingly opposed to a job design that supports team’s engagement in workplace innovation. In this study, we explored relations between task complexity, team learning, and proactivity. Work task analysis was conducted at baseline among 41 teams to capture the complexity of different work tasks. Eight months later, employees completed a questionnaire about team-learning processes, and managers rated each team’s proactivity. Three kinds of tasks were identified. The results showed that the main work task and supplementary tasks gave no input to the team’s learning process. Mediation analysis showed that additional work tasks, taking little time, have an impact on team proactivity through team learning. A conclusion is that teams within LPS can be engaged in workplace innovation depending on how they take on additional tasks, as these impact team learning. The implications for future research and practice are discussed.
High-Level Diversity of Dinoflagellates in the Natural Environment, Revealed by Assessment of Mitochondrial cox1 and cob Genes for Dinoflagellate DNA Barcoding

ABSTRACT DNA barcoding is a diagnostic technique for species identification using a short, standardized DNA. An effective DNA barcoding marker would be very helpful for unraveling the poorly understood species diversity of dinoflagellates in the natural environment. In this study, the potential utility for DNA barcoding of mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 (cox1) and cytochrome b (cob) was assessed. Among several primer sets examined, the one amplifying a 385-bp cob fragment was most effective for dinoflagellates. This short cob fragment is easy to sequence and yet possess reasonable taxon resolution. While the lack of a uniform gap between interspecific and intraspecific distances poses difficulties in establishing a phylum-wide species-discriminating distance threshold, the variability of cob allows recognition of species within particular lineages. The potential of this cob fragment as a dinoflagellate species marker was further tested by applying it to an analysis of the dinoflagellate assemblages in Long Island Sound (LIS) and Mirror Lake in Connecticut. In LIS, a highly diverse assemblage of dinoflagellates was detected. Some taxa can be identified to the species and some to the genus level, including a taxon distinctly related to the bipolar species Polarella glacialis, and the large number of others cannot be clearly identified, due to the inadequate database. In Mirror Lake, a Ceratium species and an unresolved taxon were detected, exhibiting a temporal transition from one to the other. We demonstrate that this 385-bp cob fragment is promising for lineage-wise dinoflagellate species identification, given an adequate database.
Reconciling Household Surveys and National Accounts Data Using a Cross Entropy Estimation Method

This paper presents an approach to reconciling household surveys and national accounts data. The problem is how to use the information provided by the national accounts data to re-estimate the household weights used in the survey so that the survey results are consistent with the aggregate data. The estimation approach uses an estimation criterion based on an entropy measure of information. The survey household weights are treated as a prior. New weights are estimated that are close to the prior and that are also consistent with the additional information. This approach is implemented to reconcile household survey data and macro data for Madagascar. The results indicate that the approach is powerful and flexible, supporting the efficient use of information from a variety of sources to reconcile data at different levels of aggregation in a consistent framework.
Investigation and design of smart frequency agility control system using compact CRLH-TL for communication and radar applications

Metamaterials is a rapidly evolving field of research that covers a vast range of artificial structures and electro-magnetic properties. Resulting from this, there is no universally accepted definition of what is meant by a meta-material. It is generally agreed that metamaterials are artificial media with unusual properties not found in their constituent materials. The composite right / left-handed transmission lines (CRLH-TLs) are the metamaterials with both of the RH and the LH properties. In this paper, study and design of smart frequency agility control system has been introduced and investigated. The proposed CRLH-TL has been evaluated using a commercial software. The final proposed system with smart control unit has been fabricated and the scattering characteristics have been illustrated using network analyzer to meet the multifunction requirements for communication and radar applications.
Lung cancer: clinical presentation and specialist referral time

Many textbooks describe symptoms and signs of lung cancer but refer to old series of patients. To update knowledge about lung cancer presentation, a study was carried out on 1,277 consecutive lung cancer patients, who were seen in a single Institution from January 1989 to October 2002. A set of 33 anthropometric, clinical, physical, laboratory, radiological, pathological and follow-up variables was prospectively recorded for all patients. In addition, information was obtained concerning symptoms of alarm (i.e. potential concern), times to specialist referral and the mix of symptoms at presentation. Patients were carefully followed-up and their subsequent clinical course was recorded. Casual discovery with absence of symptoms occurred more frequently towards the end of the study period and the prevalence of chest pain became less common. No other time-dependent changes were found in the presenting symptoms. Delay in specialist referral was longer when presentation was provoked by cough or by the occurrence of systemic symptoms, such as weight loss, anorexia and asthenia. Referral delay was longer towards the end of the study, perhaps related to an increase in the number of elderly patients with co-morbidities. Both alarm and prevalence symptoms were strong predictors of the clinical outcome, as found in both univariate analysis (favourable: casual discovery and chest infection; unfavourable: chest pain, dyspnoea, systemic symptoms and symptoms of local or systemic dissemination) and in multivariate analysis (favourable: chest infection). Early presentation of lung cancer is characterised by a specific symptomatic pattern. Knowledge of this pattern may help to improve the rate of early diagnosis.
Performance analysis of switched diversity over correlated Ricean fading channels

In this paper the performance of dual branch switch and stay (SSC) diversity receivers over correlated and non-identical Ricean fading channels is analyzed. For that purpose, a new model, based on linear transformation of correlated Ricean random variables into uncorrelated ones, is proposed. In that manner, it is enabled to apply standard procedure for performance analysis of uncorrelated signals. Probability density function (PDF), cumulative density function (CDF) and moment generating function (MGF) of the signal at the output of diversity combiner are derived. Furthermore, outage probability and bit error rate, assuming BPSK (Binary Phase Shift Keying) mapping of the input data, of the considered dual diversity system are determined.