Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of Vessels from Retinal ImageAnalysis

Retinal Blood vessel morphology can be an important indicator for many diseases such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension and arteriosclerosis. The measurement of geometrical changes in retinal veins and arteries can be applied to a variety of clinical studies. The spotlight of this paper is developing the screening system with the aim of highly accurate and automated analysing tool for the ophthalmologists and the retinal researchers. Segmentation of the retinal blood vessels is an assistance to understand more about its morphology and will provide a better source of information for studying the various related diseases. Analysis is implicated with automated vessel tracing and registration of sub pixel accuracy. The correct identification of blood vessels will lead to the best diagnosis. The two problems addressed in this scheme are; the automatic vessel extraction which means the segmentation of the vessels with good accuracy and the identification of all vessels from the segmented vascular structure as finding the optimal vessel forest in the graph given a set of constraints. It could be the lay concrete on the future screening services of the ophthalmologic amenities.
Common Protein Biomarkers Assessed by Reverse Phase Protein Arrays Show Considerable Intratumoral Heterogeneity in Breast Cancer Tissues

Proteins are used as prognostic and predictive biomarkers in breast cancer. However, the variability of protein expression within the same tumor is not well studied. The aim of this study was to assess intratumoral heterogeneity in protein expression levels by reverse-phase-protein-arrays (RPPA) (i) within primary breast cancers and (ii) between axillary lymph node metastases from the same patient. Protein was extracted from 106 paraffin-embedded samples from 15 large (≥3 cm) primary invasive breast cancers, including different zones within the primary tumor (peripheral, intermediate, central) as well as 2-5 axillary lymph node metastases in 8 cases. Expression of 35 proteins including 15 phosphorylated proteins representing the HER2, EGFR, and uPA/PAI-1 signaling pathways was assessed using reverse-phase-protein-arrays. All 35 proteins showed considerable intratumoral heterogeneity within primary breast cancers with a mean coefficient of variation (CV) of 31% (range 22-43%). There were no significant differences between phosphorylated (CV 32%) and non-phosphorylated proteins (CV 31%) and in the extent of intratumoral heterogeneity within a defined tumor zone (CV 28%, range 18-38%) or between different tumor zones (CV 24%, range 17-38%). Lymph node metastases from the same patient showed a similar heterogeneity in protein expression (CV 27%, range 18-34%). In comparison, the variation amongst different patients was higher in primary tumors (CV 51%, range 29-98%) and lymph node metastases (CV 65%, range 40-146%). Several proteins showed significant differential expression between different tumor stages, grades, histological subtypes and hormone receptor status. Commonly used protein biomarkers of breast cancer, including proteins from HER2, uPA/PAI-1 and EGFR signaling pathways showed higher than previously reported intratumoral heterogeneity of expression levels both within primary breast cancers and between lymph node metastases from the same patient. Assessment of proteins as diagnostic or prognostic markers may require tumor sampling in several distinct locations to avoid sampling bias.
Synthesis, structural and optical characterisation of c admium sulphide nanoparticles

Cadmium sulphide nanoparticles of uniform size have been synthesized at room temperature via wet chemical precipitation method using cadmium chloride and sodium sulphide with methanol as capping agent. The microstructure and morphology of the synthesized CdS nanoparticles have been characterized by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy analysis. XRD pattern reveals that as-synthesized CdS nanoparticles exhibit both sphalerite and wurtzite phases. The size of the particles calculated by Debye Scherrer formula according to the XRD spectra has been found to be about 13-17 nm. X-ray peak broadening analysis has been used to calculate the crystalline size and lattice strain by the Williamson-Hall (W-H) plot. The optical properties of the sample have been studied by UV-Visible and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The existence of blue shift in UV-visible spectroscopy reveals the quantum confinement effect of CdS nanoparticles. The photoluminescence spectrum shows two broad bands centered at 422 and 538 nm.
Schwann cell development in embryonic mouse nerves

Previously we proposed that Schwann cell development from the neural crest is a two‐step process that involves the generation of one main intermediate cell type, the Schwann cell precursor. Until now Schwann cell precursors have only been identified in the rat, and much remains to be learned about these cells and how they generate Schwann cells. Here we identify this cell in the mouse and analyze its transition to form Schwann cells in terms of timing, molecular expression, and extracellular signals and intracellular pathways involved in survival, proliferation, and differentiation. In the mouse, the transition from precursors to Schwann cells takes place 2 days earlier than in the rat, i.e., between embryo days 12/13 and 15/16, and is accompanied by the appearance of the O4 antigen and the establishment of an autocrine survival circuit. Beta neuregulins block precursor apoptosis and support Schwann cell generation in vitro, a process that is accelerated by basic fibroblast growth factor 2. The development of Schwann cells from precursors also involves a change in the intracellular survival signals utilized by neuregulins: To block precursor death neuregulins need to signal through both the mitogen‐activated protein kinase and the phosphoinositide‐3‐kinase pathways although neuregulins support Schwann cell survival by signaling through the phosphoinositide‐3‐kinase pathway alone. Last, we describe the generation of precursor cultures from single 12‐day‐old embryos, a prerequisite for culture studies of genetically altered precursors when embryos are non‐identical with respect to the transgene in question. J. Neurosci. Res. 56:334–348, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Distributed model predictive control of irrigation canals

Irrigation canals are large-scale systems, consisting of many interacting components, and spanning vast geographical areas. For safe and efficient operation of these canals, maintaining the levels of the water flows close to pre-specified reference values is crucial, both under normal operating conditions as well as in extreme situations. Irrigation canals are equipped with local controllers, to control the flow of water by adjusting the settings of control structures such as gates and pumps. Traditionally, the local controllers operate in a decentralized way in the sense that they use local information only, that they are not explicitly aware of the presence of other controllers or subsystems, and that no communication among them takes place. Hence, an obvious drawback of such a decentralized control scheme is that adequate performance at a system-wide level may be jeopardized, due to the unexpected and unanticipated interactions among the subsystems and the actions of the local controllers. In this paper we survey the state-of-the-art literature on distributed control of water systems in general, and irrigation canals in particular. We focus on the model predictive control (MPC) strategy, which is a model-based control strategy in which prediction models are used in an optimization to determine optimal control inputs over a given horizon. We discuss how communication among local MPC controllers can be included to improve the performance of the overall system. We present a distributed control scheme in which each controller employs MPC to determine those actions that maintain water levels after disturbances close to pre-specified reference values. Using the presented scheme the local controllers cooperatively strive for obtaining the best system-wide performance. A simulation study on an irrigation canal with seven reaches illustrates the potential of the approach.
Impact analysis of emotion in figurative language

Due to the implicit traits embedded in tweets, handling figurative languages appear as the most trending topics in computational linguistics. While recognition of a single language is hard to capture, differentiating several languages at once is the most challenging task. To achieve this purpose, we employ a set of emotion-based features in order to individuate between humor, irony, sarcasm, satire and true. We use eight basic emotions excerpted from EmoLex supplement with tweets polarity. We apply these features in two datasets: balanced dataset (collected using hashtag-based approach) and class-imbalanced dataset (collected from streaming tweets). As a result, the model not only outperform a word-based baseline but also handle both balanced and class-imbalanced datasets in multi-figurative language detection.
Distributed Fusion Estimation With Communication Bandwidth Constraints

This technical note is concerned with the distributed Kalman filtering problem for a class of networked multi-sensor fusion systems (NMFSs) with communication bandwidth constraints. To satisfy finite communication bandwidth, only partial components of the local vector estimation signals are transmitted to the fusion center (FC) at each time step, where multiple binary variables are introduced to model this component transmitting process. A novel compensation strategy is proposed to restructure the untransmitted components of each local estimate at the FC end, and a recursive distributed fusion Kalman filter (DFKF) is designed in the linear minimum variance sense. Moreover, a simple suboptimal judgement criterion is proposed to determine a group of binary variables such that the mean square error of the designed DFKF is minimal at each time step. An illustrative example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
The Relationship between Obesity, Sleep and Physical Activity in Chinese Preschool Children

Background: Pediatric overweight and obesity has become a major public health problem in China. The goal of this study is to understand overweight and obesity in preschool children in Changsha City in the context of their sleep and physical activity. These results offer feasible proposals to reduce levels of overweight and obesity among preschool children. Methods: A total of 112 preschoolers aged three to six years old were investigated using multiple stage stratified cluster sampling and simple random sampling. Questionnaires were used to collect general information about children and their families. Body mass index (BMI) was used as an indicator of overweight and obesity. Age- and sex-specific cutoff values for Chinese children and adolescents were used to determine child weight status. Children’s sedentary time was reported by caregivers, while physical activity and sleep were recorded using fitness bracelets (Misfit Shine 2). Results: The prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity were 15.2% and 9.8% respectively. Preschool-aged children travelled 11,111 ± 3357 and 10,350 ± 2973 steps per day on weekdays and weekends respectively. The number of daily steps was not statistically different between weekdays and weekends. The amount of time spent daily doing vigorous activity on weekdays and weekends was significantly different, with an average time of 20.5 ± 31.6 min and 10.3 ± 15.3 min respectively (p = 0.002). Furthermore, 10.7% and 50.9% of children used screens for more than two hours on weekdays and weekends respectively (p < 0.001). Children slept for significantly longer on weekends (8.3 ± 0.9 h) than on weekdays (8.1 ± 0.7 h) (p = 0.037). A significantly higher proportion of students also fell asleep before 10:00 p.m. on weekends (26.8%) compared to weekdays (15.2%) (p < 0.001). Parent’s BMI values were positively correlated with child BMI, the monthly household income was negatively associated with child BMI. Male children were more likely to have a higher BMI than female children. Children who were obese were also more likely to have shorter sleep times compared to children of normal weight (p = 0.047). Conclusions: There was a high prevalence of overweight and obesity among the Chinese preschool children in this study. Students also demonstrated poor sleep and physical activity habits. Future research is necessary to explore the relationship between sleep, physical activity and weight status for young children in China.
Incorporating quality-of-service in the virtual interface architecture

User-level Networking (ULN) is gaining rapid acceptance in the commercial world with Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA), and Infiniband store recently, being touted as the interface of choice to diverse peripherals. There is an important issue with respect to ULNs that has been largely unaddressed. This is the issue of accommodating multiple communication channels (scalability) and being able to sustain the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of each of these channels. Removing the operating system from the critical path makes the scalability and QoS issue all that much harder since the supervisory role to prevent interference across channels has to be performed by the network interface. This paper argues for a different approach to structuring the processing of operations (called PVIA) on the network interface than what is widely used. This newer-approach makes it easier to incorporate QoS features, which is referred to as QoSVIA. All these mechanisms have been implemented on an actual Myrinet cluster: The results from the implementation, together with detailed simulations, illustrate the potential of QoSVIA being able to accommodate the QoS needs of a larger number of channels than the mechanisms in use today.
Empirical evaluation of circling interface with head-mounted mouse emulator users

Abstract Purpose: To evaluate the performance of the circling interface, which is an alternative interaction method for selecting and manipulating on-screen objects based on circling the target, rather than pointing and clicking. Method: We conducted empirical evaluations with actual head-mounted mouse emulator users from two different groups: individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) and individuals with cerebral palsy (CP), comparing each group’s performance and satisfaction level on pointing tasks with the circling interface to performance on the same tasks when using dwell-clicking software. Results: Across all operations, for both subjects with SCI and with CP, the circling interface showed faster performance than the dwell-clicking interface. For the single-click operation, the circling interface showed slower performance than dwell selection, but for both double-click and drag-and-drop operations, the circling interface produced faster performance. Subjects with CP required much longer time to complete the tasks compared to subjects with SCI. If errors caused by circling on an area with no target and unintentional circling caused by jerky movements and an abnormally tiny circle are automatically corrected by the circling interface, their performance accuracy with the circling interface outperformed existing solutions without a steep learning curve. Conclusions: Circling interface can be used in conjunction with existing techniques and this kind of combined approach achieve more effective mouse use for some individuals with pointing problems. It is also expected to be useful for both computer access and augmentative communication software. Implications for Rehabilitation A circling interface will improve clinical practice by providing an alternative pointing method that does not require physically activating mouse buttons and is more efficient than dwell-clicking. Being used in conjunction with existing techniques, some individuals who are head mouse users can achieve more effective mouse use. The Circling interface can also work with AAC devices.
The S-NPP VIIRS Day-Night Band On-Orbit Calibration/Characterization and Current State of SDR Products

The launch of VIIRS on-board the Suomi-National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) on 28 October 2011, marked the beginning of the next chapter on nighttime lights observation started by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s (DMSP) OLS sensor more than two decades ago. The VIIRS observes the nighttime lights on Earth through its day-night band (DNB), a panchromatic channel covering the wavelengths from 500 nm to 900 nm. Compared to its predecessors, the VIIRS DNB has a much improved spatial/temporal resolution, radiometric sensitivity and, more importantly, continuous calibration using on-board calibrators (OBCs). In this paper, we describe the current state of the NASA calibration and characterization methodology used in supporting mission data quality assurance and producing consistent mission-wide sensor data records (SDRs) through NASA’s Land Product Evaluation and Analysis Tool Element (Land PEATE). The NASA calibration method utilizes the OBCs to determine gains, offset drift and sign-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the entire mission. In gain determination, the time-dependent relative spectral response (RSR) is used to correct the optical throughput change over time. A deep space view acquired during an S-NPP pitch maneuver is used to compute the airglow free dark offset for DNB’s high gain stage. The DNB stray light is estimated each month from new-moon dark Earth surface observations to remove the excessive stray light over the day-night terminators. As the VIIRS DNB on-orbit calibration is the first of its kind, the evolution of the calibration methodology is evident when the S-NPP VIIRS’s official calibrations are compared with our latest mission-wide reprocessing. In the future, the DNB calibration methodology is likely to continue evolving, and the mission-wide reprocessing is a key to providing consistently calibrated DNB SDRs for the user community. In the meantime, the NASA Land PEATE provides an alternative source to obtain mission-wide DNB SDR products that are calibrated based on the latest NASA DNB calibration methodology.
Flower-Pop

We explore the potential use of mobile devices as a collaborative sensing system that can proactively mediate casual group conversations. In this study, we aim to investigate (i) the impacts of a mobile system's passive and active conversation facilitation and (ii) the ways in which sociocultural aspects that affect casual group conversation should be considered in the design of proactive mobile systems. Toward this goal, we developed Flower-Pop, a mobile system that monitors group conversations and visualizes interaction patterns using metaphorical expressions based on blossoms. This system provides passive facilitation as well as active facilitation modes such as proactive conversation visualization and photo sharing. The active modes can encourage inactive participants to share photos and select random people to speak. Focusing on Korea, our field study showed that Flower-Pop's mediation created smooth topic/speaker transitions and encouraged less-active speakers to better engage in group conversation. We also found that the sociocultural aspects of casual group conversation, such as the location's characteristics, social relations, and the group's interests, affected participants' use of the Flower-Pop system. Based on our findings, we discuss methods for designing mobile systems for conversation facilitation and outline how opportune sociocultural factors could be identified based on mobile devices.
Attachment style, current relationship security, and negative emotions: The mediating role of physiological regulation

Young men were subjected to laboratory inductions of anger and anxiety after undergoing a physiological assessment of vagal tone, an index of parasympathetic nervous system functioning that has been associated with emotion regulation in prior research. We tested whether: (i) young men’s emotional reactivity and recovery were associated with their global attachment style or their perceptions of security in specific, current attachment relationships; (ii) such associations were mediated by vagal tone; and (iii) such effects were moderated by the physical presence of romantic attachment figures. As predicted, vagal tone was negatively associated with attachment anxiety and positively associated with perceptions of security in current attachment relationships. Men with high perceptions of security in current relationships showed more effective recovery from laboratory-induced anger, and vagal tone mediated this association. In contrast, the physical presence of romantic attachment figures showed no association with emotional reactivity or recovery and did not moderate the aforementioned effects.
High-speed spatial frequency domain imaging with temporally modulated light

Abstract. Spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) is a wide-field diffuse optical technique used to obtain optical properties and chromophore concentrations in highly scattering media, such as biological tissue. Here, we present a method for rapidly acquiring multispectral SFDI data by modulating each illumination wavelength at a different temporal frequency. In the remitted signal, each wavelength is temporally demodulated and processed using conventional SFDI techniques. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept system capable of acquiring wide-field maps (2048×1536 pixels, 8.5×6.4 cm) of optical properties at three wavelengths in under 2.5 s. Data acquired by this method show a good agreement with a commercial SFDI imaging system (with an average error of 13% in absorption and 8% in scattering). Additionally, we show that this strategy is insensitive to ambient lighting conditions, making it more practical for clinical translation. In the future, this technique could be expanded to tens or hundreds of wavelengths without increasing acquisition time.
Investigating current techniques for opposite-hand smartwatch interaction

The small display size of smartwatches creates a challenge for touch input, which is still the interaction technique of choice. Researchers and producers have started to investigate alternative interaction techniques. Apple and Samsung, for example, introduced digital versions of classic watch components such as the digital crown and the rotatable bezel. However, it remains an open question how well these components behave in terms of user interaction. Based on a self-built smartwatch prototype, we compare current interaction paradigms (touch input, rotatable bezel and digital crown) for one-dimensional tasks, i.e. scrolling in a list, two-dimensional tasks, i.e. navigation on a digital map, and a complex navigation/zoom task. To check for ecological validity of our results, we conducted an additional study focusing on interaction with currently available off-the-shelf devices using our considered interaction paradigms. Following our results, we present guidelines on which interaction techniques to use for the respective tasks.
Malware Detection by HTTPS Traffic Analysis

In order to evade detection by network-traffic analysis, a growing proportion of malware uses the encrypted HTTPS protocol. We explore the problem of detecting malware on client computers based on HTTPS traffic analysis. In this setting, malware has to be detected based on the host IP address, ports, timestamp, and data volume information of TCP/IP packets that are sent and received by all the applications on the client. We develop a scalable protocol that allows us to collect network flows of known malicious and benign applications as training data and derive a malware-detection method based on a neural networks and sequence classification. We study the method's ability to detect known and new, unknown malware in a large-scale empirical study.