Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 1-V CMOS preprocessing chip for ECG measurements

In this work, a low-voltage, low-power signal processing chip for ECG measurements has been designed and manufactured. The circuit includes a continuous time, offset-compensated preamplifier with amplification of 40 dB, an 8/sup th/-order Butterworth switched-opamp, switched-capacitor (SO-SC) filter with a passband of 8 Hz - 30 Hz, a 32-kHz crystal oscillator, an SO-SC postamplifier and a bias circuit. The whole circuit operates with supply voltages of 1 V - 1.8 V and the average current consumption is only about 3 /spl mu/A. Therefore, the circuit is very suitable for portable applications, like heart rate detectors.
AFTER STROKE : COMPARING PROXIES ’ AND PATIENTS ’ PERCEPTIONS

Objective: This study aimed: (i) to determine the level of agreement between responses of people with stroke and their proxies on a participation questionnaire, and (ii) to explore patient and proxy characteristics related to disagreement between their responses. Design: Cross-sectional study. Subjects: A total of 40 community-dwelling people with stroke and their proxies (total n = 80). Methods: Participants were evaluated separately in face-toface interviews using the Assessment of Life Habits questionnaire (LIFE-H 3.1), which documents participation in daily activities and social roles. Sociodemographic and clinical variables, such as severity of motor impairment and cognitive functions, were also collected. Results: Moderate to excellent agreement was found for the LIFE-H total score (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC): 0.82), daily activities (ICC: 0.87) and social roles (ICC: 0.73) sub-scores. Proxies perceived more disruptions in participation than patients in several life domains (p = 0.035–0.001), but the differences between their scores were generally not clinically meaningful. Severity of motor disabilities was the best predictor of disagreement between patients and proxies. Conclusion: These acceptable levels of agreement support the use of proxy responses to estimate the participation of people unable to respond themselves. However, some characteristics contributing to disagreement between respondents, such as severity of motor disabilities, should be considered when interpreting proxy information.
Optimal current amplitude range for fault tolerant control of four-phase doubly salient electromagnetic motor

The influences of current amplitudes on four-phase 24/18-pole doubly salient electro-magnetic motor(DSEM) under fault-tolerant operation are studied in this paper. Taking average output torque, output torque ripple and stator copper losses into consideration, the optimal fault-tolerant current amplitude (FTCA) range is obtained. A four-phase full-bridge converter with two bilateral switches is applied to the fault-tolerant drive system. Once the fault of one phase open-circuit occurs, the bilateral switch connected to the faulty phase is switched on and the FTCA of the remaining three phases are adjusted to obtain the same excitation torque as that of normal operation. And the stator copper loss is analyzed as well. The relationship of average output torque, output torque ripple and FTCA are validated through co-simulations of Maxwell and Simplorer. At last, an optimal FTCA range, which ensures high output torque, low output torque ripple and low stator copper loss, is obtained.
Localization and classification of target surfaces using two pairs of ultrasonic sensors

Ultrasonic sensors have been widely used in recognizing the working environment for a mobile robot. However, their intrinsic problems, such as the specular reflection, the wide beam angle, and the slow propagation velocity, require an excessive number of sensors to be integrated to achieve the various sensing goals. This paper proposes new measurement scheme which uses only two sets of ultrasonic sensors to determine the location and the type of target surface. By measuring the time difference between the returned signals from the target surface, which are generated by two transmitters with 1 ms difference, it classifies type and determines the pose of the target surface. Since the proposed sensor system uses only the two sets of ultrasonic sensors to recognize and localize the target surface, it significantly simplifies the sensing system and reduces the signal processing time so that the working environment can be recognized in real time.
A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research

Movement of individual organisms is fundamental to life, quilting our planet in a rich tapestry of phenomena with diverse implications for ecosystems and humans. Movement research is both plentiful and insightful, and recent methodological advances facilitate obtaining a detailed view of individual movement. Yet, we lack a general unifying paradigm, derived from first principles, which can place movement studies within a common context and advance the development of a mature scientific discipline. This introductory article to the Movement Ecology Special Feature proposes a paradigm that integrates conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks for studying movement of all organisms, from microbes to trees to elephants. We introduce a conceptual framework depicting the interplay among four basic mechanistic components of organismal movement: the internal state (why move? ), motion (how to move? ), and navigation (when and where to move? ) capacities of the individual and the external factors affecting movement. We demonstrate how the proposed framework aids the study of various taxa and movement types; promotes the formulation of hypotheses about movement; and complements existing biomechanical, cognitive, random, and optimality paradigms of movement. The proposed framework integrates eclectic research on movement into a structured paradigm and aims at providing a basis for hypothesis generation and a vehicle facilitating the understanding of the causes, mechanisms, and spatiotemporal patterns of movement and their role in various ecological and evolutionary processes. ”Now we must consider in general the common reason for moving with any movement whatever. “ (Aristotle, De Motu Animalium, 4th century B.C.)
Intuitive and Smart Editing of Three-Dimensional Geometric Heart Valve Apparatus Models from Cardiac CT Data

In cases of aortic valve diseases, diagnosis and subsequent interventional planning are highly facilitated by deriving exact threedimensional geometric models of a patient’s aortic valve apparatus from Cardiac Computed Tomography Angiography data. Fully-automatic approaches to do so however lack in absolute reliability and manual editing of the initially detected geometric model is often required. We therefore present an interactive editing method for this scenario – in particular for editing the aortic root model – based on the As-Rigid-As-Possible (ARAP) surface modeling paradigm, which allows efficient, robust, intuitive and physically plausible deformations of three-dimensional geometric models. The user constrains a model’s surface by setting and moving handles – the so-called constraints – while the remaining, and only the remaining, free part of the surface is deformed automatically in a way such that the global shape is preserved in real-time. We extended the classical ARAP approach for our scenario by an energy smoothness regularization to overcome non-smooth artifacts at constrained positions. We furthermore incorporated the use of image evidence-based cues in the interactive workflow such that handles can be made “snap” into visible 3-D surface indicators. We evaluated our method in a user study regarding intuitiveness, achievable accuracy, inter-user variability, required time and robustness. The participants started with an initial average meshto-mesh surface error of 1.65 mm and achieved after 50 mouse clicks on average and less than 3.5 minutes an average error of 0.48 mm with respect to an expert-defined ground truth. The inter-user variability was 0.43 mm.
SousChef: Mobile Meal Recommender System for Older Adults

Nowadays, following a healthy diet is a challenge, either due to the large variety of food and ingredient combination possibilities or due to the lack of knowledge required to make healthy choices. This problem is even more patent amongst older adults. Although some recommender systems and applications have been proposed with aim to monitor calorie consumption and/or to suggest healthy recipes to general consumers, no similar solution was yet presented focused on older adults’ needs. In this work, a mobile meal recommender system, SousChef, for this target group is presented. This system is capable of creating a personalized meal plan based on the information provided by the user, including the anthropometric measures, personal preferences and activity level. The nutritional recommendations and the application was thought and designed for older adults, presenting friendly user interfaces and following the guidelines of a nutritionist. Tests with users were conducted in order to ascertain recipe and nutritional plan suitability as well as usability of the mobile application. Results showed that more than 70% of the older adult participants were satisfied with the meal plan suggestions and with the simplicity of the SousChef
Street Food Environment in Maputo (STOOD Map): a Cross-Sectional Study in Mozambique

Background Street food represents a cultural, social, and economic phenomenon that is typical of urbanized areas, directly linked with a more sedentary lifestyle and providing a very accessible and inexpensive source of nutrition. Food advertising may contribute to shaping consumers’ preferences and has the potential to drive the supply of specific foods. Objective The purpose of this study is to characterize the street food offerings available to the urban population of Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique, and the billboard food advertising in the same setting. Methods People selling ready-to-eat foods, beverages, or snacks from venues such as carts, trucks, stands, and a variety of improvised informal setups (eg, shopping carts, trunks of cars, sides of vans, blankets on the sidewalk, etc) will be identified in the district of KaMpfumu. We will gather information about the actual food being sold through direct observation and interviews to vendors, and from the billboard advertising in the same areas. A second phase of the research entails collecting food samples to be analyzed in a specialized laboratory. The street food environment will be characterized, overall and according to socioeconomic and physical characteristics of the neighborhood, using descriptive statistics and spatial analysis. The study protocol was approved by the National Committee for Bioethics for Health in Mozambique. Results Data collection, including the identification of street food vending sites and billboard advertising, started on October 20, 2014, and lasted for 1 month. The collection of food samples took place in December 2014, and the bromatological analyses are expected to be concluded in August 2015. Conclusions The district of KaMpfumu is the wealthiest and most urbanized in Maputo, and it is the area with the highest concentration and variety of street food vendors. The expected results may yield important information to assess the nutritional environment and the characteristics of the foods to which a great majority of the urban population living or working in Maputo are exposed. Furthermore, this study protocol provides a framework for a stepwise standardized characterization of the street food environment, comprising 3 steps with increasing complexity and demand for human and technical resources: Step 1 consists of the evaluation of food advertising in the streets; Step 2 includes the identification of street food vendors and the characterization of the products available; and Step 3 requires the collection of food samples for bromatological analyses. This structured approach to the assessment of the street food environment may enable within-country and international comparisons as well as monitoring of temporal trends.
A Phosphorylation-dependent Export Structure in ROMK (Kir 1.1) Channel Overrides an Endoplasmic Reticulum Localization Signal*

The cell surface density of functional Kir1.1 (ROMK, KCNJ1) channels in the renal collecting duct is precisely regulated to maintain potassium balance. Here, we explore the mechanism by which phosphorylation of Kir1.1a serine 44 controls plasmalemma expression. Studies in Xenopus oocytes, expressing wild-type, phosphorylation mimic (S44D), or phosphorylation null (S44A) Kir1.1a, revealed that phosphorylation of serine 44 is required to stimulate traffic of newly synthesized channels to the plasma membrane through a brefeldin A-sensitive pathway. ROMK channels were found to acquire mature glycosylation in a serine 44 phosphorylation-dependent manner, consistent with a phosphorylation-dependent trafficking step within the endoplasmic reticulum/Golgi. Serine 44 neighbors a string of three “RXR” motifs, reminiscent of basic trafficking signals involved in directing early transport steps within the secretory pathway. Replacement of the arginine residues with alanine (R35A, R37A, R39A, R41A, or all Arg to Ala) did not restore cell surface expression of the phospho-null S44A channel, making it unlikely that phosphorylation abrogates a nearby RXR-type endoplasmic reticulum (ER) localization signal. Instead, analysis of the compound S44D phospho-mimic mutants revealed that the neighboring arginine residues are also necessary for cell surface expression, identifying a structure that determines export in the biosynthetic pathway. Suppressor mutations in a putative dibasic ER retention signal, located within the cytoplasmic C terminus (K370A, R371A), restored cell surface expression of the phosphonull S44A channel to levels exhibited by the phospho-mimic S44D channel. Taken together, these studies indicate that phosphorylation of Ser44 drives an export step within the secretory pathway to override an independent endoplasmic reticulum localization signal.
Research on the theory and schemes of STTC

Space Time Trellis Code is based on a combination of the delay diversity and the TCM Codes. It is helpful to use Space Time Trellis Code to improve the wireless transmission rate and the reliability. The model, the encoding method and the decoding algorithm of the Space Time Trellis Code systems are discussed in this paper. Then, the trellis of Space Time Trellis Code is analyzed and the coding process of Space Time Trellis Code is specifically explained. Finally, the bit error rate and the frame error rate performances are analyzed, the simulation results are provided for the Space Time Trellis coding systems.
A Systolic FFT Architecture for Real Time FPGA Systems

Abstract : MIT Lincoln Laboratory has recently developed a new systolic FFT architecture for FPGAs. This architecture utilizes a parallel design to provide high throughput and excellent numerical accuracy. Using this design, an 8192-point real-time FFT, operating at 1.2 billion samples per second and performing 78 Gops with 70 dB of accuracy, fits on a single Xilinx Virtex II 8000.
Pulmonary ventilation and gas exchange in bronchiectasis

The subdivisions of the lung volume, pulmonary mechanics, and resting steady state pulmonary transfer factor were measured in 31 patients with bronchographically proven bronchiectasis. In seven patients the process of gas exchange was further investigated by fractionating the total alveolar-arterial oxygen tension gradient into diffusion, distribution, and true shunt components. A restrictive type of ventilatory defect with varying degrees of airway obstruction was observed in a majority of the patients; the airway obstruction was partially reversed by a bronchodilator. Dynamic compliance was usually decreased and the pulmonary resistance increased. Pulmonary transfer factor was decreased in proportion to the number of segments involved. Vital capacity, maximum breathing capacity, and dynamic compliance bore a less significant correlation with the extent of disease. The degree of airway obstruction, as judged by pulmonary resistance, was independent of the extent of disease. All the patients were hypoxaemic and some had hypercapnia as well. The alveolar-arterial oxygen tension gradient was widened primarily because of distributional abnormalities and, to some extent, by the presence of true right-to-left shunts. The latter amounted to 13·6% of the total cardiac output. Surgical resection of the affected lobe or segments resulted in a further deterioration of all the parameters of pulmonary function tested.
Cytopathology of pulmonary adenocarcinoma with a single histological pattern using the proposed International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer/American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society (IASLC/ATS/ERS) classification

Guidelines for histological subtyping in patients with surgically resected lung adenocarcinoma (ADC) were recently proposed by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer/American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society. The objective of the current study was to investigate the cytomorphology of these subtypes of ADC in cases with matched histology specimens demonstrating a single pure subtype.
Discussions of Knee Joint Segmentation

Knee joint is one of the frequently injured or damaged components of the human motion system. This paper provides an overview of the current segmentation techniques for knee joint from medical imaging, such as computerized tomography (CT) and MR (magnetic resonance). Segmentation techniques, strategies and system for the knee joint segmentation are discussed, followed by the review of how the different segmentation methods are used in specific structures. Discussions of the knee joint segmentation and future work are presented.
Multilingual Distant Supervised Relation Extractors Combining Multiple Feature Types

A well-known drawback in building machine learning semantic relation detectors for natural language is the lack of a large number of qualified training instances for the target relations in multiple languages. Even when good results are achieved, the datasets used by the state-of-the-art approaches are rarely published. In order to address these problems, this work presents an automatic approach to build multilingual semantic relation detectors through distant supervision combining two of the largest resources of structured and unstructured content available on the Web, DBpedia and Wikipedia. We map the DBpedia ontology back to the Wikipedia text to extract more than 100.000 training instances for more than 90 DBpedia relations for English and Portuguese languages without human intervention. First, we mine Wikipedia articles to find candidate instances for relations described in the DBpedia ontology. Second, we preprocess and normalize the data filtering out irrelevant instances. Finally, we use the normalized data to construct regularized logistic regression detectors that achieve an F-Measure above 80% for both English and Portuguese languages. In this paper, we also compare the impact of different types of features on the accuracy of the trained detector, demonstrating significant performance improvements when combining lexical, syntactic and semantic features. Both the datasets and the code used in this research are available online.
An ultrawideband bandpass filter using broadside-coupled microstrip-coplanar waveguide structure

This paper presented an ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter using broadside-coupled microstrip-coplanar waveguide structure. The filter consists of a microstrip line coupled to a coplanar waveguide (CPW) that was fabricated on the ground of the microstrip line. The proposed filter has been simulated, fabricated and measured for UWB system. The measured results demonstrated the UWB properties from 3.0 GHz to 10.63 GHz (-10 dB bandwidth) and the potential to be wider. A threesection filter shown insertion loss at central frequency is about 0.32 dB and very flat over the whole band. The group delay, which is important to an impulse radio UWB system, is about 0.42 ns over the most central band and less than 0.95 ns over the whole band. The filter also exhibited a good performance outside the band, both at low frequency end (to meet FCC limit) and high frequency end higher than 18 GHz with insertion loss larger than 30 dB.
SYMPATRIC HOST RACE FORMATION AND SPECIATION IN FRUGIVOROUS FLIES OF THE GENUS RHAGOLETIS (DIPTERA, TEPHRITIDAE)

The origin and evolution of species and host racesl in certain phytophagous insect groups have long been a source of disagreement among evolutionary biologists. The rapid establishment of new host races by some stenophagous insects on introduced plants, as well as various other aspects of their biology and distribution, has led several biologists to suggest that new host races and species may arise sympatrically (Brues, 1924; Thorpe, 1930; Smith, 1941; Haldane, 1959; Alexander and Bigelow, 1960; Bush, 1966). Others regard geographic isolation as a prerequisite for speciation in all groups of sexually reproducing animals (for examples see Mayr, 1963). The difficulty in resolving whether either one or the other, or both, modes of speciation may occur in these insects stems directly from the paucity of detailed studies of wild stenophagous insects. Our information on these insects has been derived primarily from studies made over the past hundred years on a few economically important plant pests. One such group that has received particular attention is the Holarctic and Neotropical genus Rhagoletis whose larvae feed within the developing fruits of many plant species such as cherries, blueberries, apples, currants, rose hips, walnuts, and tomatoes. The objective of this paper is to point out how the biological attributes of these flies may have permitted new forms to arise rapidly in the absence of geographical barriers to gene flow.
General Bistatic SAR Data Processing Based on Extended Nonlinear Chirp Scaling

General bistatic SAR (BiSAR) data are more challenging to process than their translational invariant counterparts because the transmitter and the receiver have unequal velocities or/and nonparallel tracks. Although several algorithms have been used to process the data in general cases, these can work only in small invariant regions of the azimuth-variant problem because of the complicated configurations. In this letter, an extended nonlinear chirp scaling (NLCS) is proposed to address this problem. The key is to use the vector analysis of the instantaneous slant ranges to extract the azimuth-variant components. Furthermore, a new perturbation function based on the principle of NLCS used to precompensate the data. The simulation results show that our algorithm can handle data with more complicated bistatic cases than the existing algorithms.
Initiation of thyroid-hormone action.

ALTHOUGH the biologic importance of the thyroid gland has been recognized for the past century, the properties of the hormone are still understood in terms of the diverse and apparently unrelated physiologic and biochemical derangements that characterize the hypothyroid and hyperthyroid states. In part, the relatively slow progress in elucidation of the molecular basis of thyroid-hormone action can be attributed to the lack of a well defined set of target tissues and to the lack of a universally recognized model for in vitro study of the biochemistry of the hormone's effects. During the past two years, however, the recognition of .