Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Readability Formulas and User Perceptions of Electronic Health Records Difficulty: A Corpus Study

Background Electronic health records (EHRs) are a rich resource for developing applications to engage patients and foster patient activation, thus holding a strong potential to enhance patient-centered care. Studies have shown that providing patients with access to their own EHR notes may improve the understanding of their own clinical conditions and treatments, leading to improved health care outcomes. However, the highly technical language in EHR notes impedes patients’ comprehension. Numerous studies have evaluated the difficulty of health-related text using readability formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), and Gunning-Fog Index (GFI). They conclude that the materials are often written at a grade level higher than common recommendations. Objective The objective of our study was to explore the relationship between the aforementioned readability formulas and the laypeople’s perceived difficulty on 2 genres of text: general health information and EHR notes. We also validated the formulas’ appropriateness and generalizability on predicting difficulty levels of highly complex technical documents. Methods We collected 140 Wikipedia articles on diabetes and 242 EHR notes with diabetes International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision code. We recruited 15 Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users to rate difficulty levels of the documents. Correlations between laypeople’s perceived difficulty levels and readability formula scores were measured, and their difference was tested. We also compared word usage and the impact of medical concepts of the 2 genres of text. Results The distributions of both readability formulas’ scores (P<.001) and laypeople’s perceptions (P=.002) on the 2 genres were different. Correlations of readability predictions and laypeople’s perceptions were weak. Furthermore, despite being graded at similar levels, documents of different genres were still perceived with different difficulty (P<.001). Word usage in the 2 related genres still differed significantly (P<.001). Conclusions Our findings suggested that the readability formulas’ predictions did not align with perceived difficulty in either text genre. The widely used readability formulas were highly correlated with each other but did not show adequate correlation with readers’ perceived difficulty. Therefore, they were not appropriate to assess the readability of EHR notes.
Anti-Felting Properties of Wool Fabric Treated with Keratin

Anti-felting properties of knitted wool fabric treated with keratin were investigated by a laboratory scale treatment. The effects of concentration of keratin, treatment temperature and time, drying temperature on the anti-felting properties of wool were studied respectively. The study provided shrinkage data perfectly comparable with those obtained by the currently used shrink proofing processes, but with some important advantages: the total absence of chlorine in the process and the complete biodegradability of keratin without harmful and toxic chemical agents. Therefore, this method showed us the possibility of keratin treated wool fabric for industrial use.
Mammographic Density Reduction as a Prognostic Marker for Postmenopausal Breast Cancer: Results Using a Joint Longitudinal-Survival Modeling Approach

Abstract Previous studies have linked reductions in mammographic density after a breast cancer diagnosis to an improved prognosis. These studies focused on short-term change, using a 2-stage process, treating estimated change as a fixed covariate in a survival model. We propose the use of a joint longitudinal-survival model. This enables us to model long-term trends in density while accounting for dropout as well as for measurement error. We studied the change in mammographic density after a breast cancer diagnosis and its association with prognosis (measured by cause-specific mortality), overall and with respect to hormone replacement therapy and tamoxifen treatment. We included 1,740 women aged 50–74 years, diagnosed with breast cancer in Sweden during 1993–1995, with follow-up until 2008. They had a total of 6,317 mammographic density measures available from the first 5 years of follow-up, including baseline measures. We found that the impact of the withdrawal of hormone replacement therapy on density reduction was larger than that of tamoxifen treatment. Unlike previous studies, we found that there was an association between density reduction and survival, both for tamoxifen-treated women and women who were not treated with tamoxifen.
Glutamatergic synapses are structurally and biochemically complex because of multiple plasticity processes: long-term potentiation, long-term depression, short-term potentiation and scaling

Synapses are complex because they perform multiple functions, including at least six mechanistically different forms of plasticity. Here, I comment on recent developments regarding these processes. (i) Short-term potentiation (STP), a Hebbian process that requires small amounts of synaptic input, appears to make strong contributions to some forms of working memory. (ii) The rules for long-term potentiation (LTP) induction in CA3 have been clarified: induction does not depend obligatorily on backpropagating sodium spikes but, rather, on dendritic branch-specific N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) spikes. (iii) Late LTP, a process that requires a dopamine signal (and is therefore neoHebbian), is mediated by trans-synaptic growth of the synapse, a growth that occurs about an hour after LTP induction. (iv) LTD processes are complex and include both homosynaptic and heterosynaptic forms. (v) Synaptic scaling produced by changes in activity levels are not primarily cell-autonomous, but rather depend on network activity. (vi) The evidence for distance-dependent scaling along the primary dendrite is firm, and a plausible structural-based mechanism is suggested. Ideas about the mechanisms of synaptic function need to take into consideration newly emerging data about synaptic structure. Recent super-resolution studies indicate that glutamatergic synapses are modular (module size 70–80 nm), as predicted by theoretical work. Modules are trans-synaptic structures and have high concentrations of postsynaptic density-95 (PSD-95) and α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptor. These modules function as quasi-independent loci of AMPA-mediated transmission and may be independently modifiable, suggesting a new understanding of quantal transmission. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Integrating Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity. ’
Development of a Physical Environmental Observational Tool for Dining Environments in Long-Term Care Settings

Purpose This paper presents the first standardized physical environmental assessment tool titled Dining Environment Audit Protocol (DEAP) specifically designed for dining spaces in care homes and reports the results of its psychometric properties. Items rated include: adequacy of lighting, glare, personal control, clutter, staff supervision support, restraint use, and seating arrangement option for social interaction. Two scales summarize the prior items and rate the overall homelikeness and functionality of the space. Methods Ten dining rooms in three long-term care homes were selected for assessment. Data were collected over 11 days across 5 weeks. Two trained assessors completed DEAP independently on the same day. Interrater-reliability was completed for lighting, glare, space, homelike aspects, seating arrangements and the two summary scales, homelikeness and functionality of the space. For categorical measures, measure responses were dichotomized at logical points and Cohen's Kappa and concordance on ratings were determined. Results The two overall rating scales on homelikeness and functionality of space were found to be reliable intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) (~0.7). The mean rating for homelikeness for Assessor 1 was 3.5 (SD 1.35) and for functionality of the room was 5.3. (SD 0.82; median 5.5). Implications The findings indicate that the tool's interrater-reliability scores are promising. The high concordance on the overall scores for homelikeness and functionality is indicative of the strength of the individual items in generating a reliable global assessment score on these two important aspects of the dining space.
Work motivation, task delegation and job satisfaction of general practice staff: a cross-sectional study

Abstract Background. Recent research has shown that a high degree of task delegation is associated with the practise staff’s overall job satisfaction, and this association is important to explore since job satisfaction is related to medical as well as patient-perceived quality of care. Objectives. This study aimed: (1) to investigate associations between degrees of task delegation in the management of chronic disease in general practice, with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as a case and the staff’s work motivation, (2) to investigate associations between the work motivation of the staff and their job satisfaction. Methods. The study was based on a questionnaire to which 621 members of the practice staff responded. The questionnaire consisted of a part concerning degree of task delegation in the management of COPD in their respective practice and another part being about their job satisfaction and motivation to work. Results. In the first analysis, we found that ‘maximal degree’ of task delegation was significantly associated with the staff perceiving themselves to have a large degree of variation in tasks, odds ratio (OR) = 4.26, confidence interval (CI) = 1.09, 16.62. In the second analysis, we found that this perceived large degree of variation in tasks was significantly associated with their overall job satisfaction, OR = 2.81, confidence interval = 1.71, 4.61. Conclusion. The results suggest that general practitioners could delegate highly complex tasks in the management of COPD to their staff without influencing the staff’s work motivation, and thereby their job satisfaction, negatively, as long as they ensure sufficient variation in the tasks.
Deep Models of Interactions Across Sets

We use deep learning to model interactions across two or more sets of objects, such as user-movie ratings, protein-drug bindings, or ternary user-item-tag interactions. The canonical representation of such interactions is a matrix (or a higher-dimensional tensor) with an exchangeability property: the encoding's meaning is not changed by permuting rows or columns. We argue that models should hence be Permutation Equivariant (PE): constrained to make the same predictions across such permutations. We present a parameter-sharing scheme and prove that it could not be made any more expressive without violating PE. This scheme yields three benefits. First, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on multiple matrix completion benchmarks. Second, our models require a number of parameters independent of the numbers of objects, and thus scale well to large datasets. Third, models can be queried about new objects that were not available at training time, but for which interactions have since been observed. In experiments, our models achieved surprisingly good generalization performance on this matrix extrapolation task, both within domains (e.g., new users and new movies drawn from the same distribution used for training) and even across domains (e.g., predicting music ratings after training on movies).
Experimental design and analysis and their reporting II: updated and simplified guidance for authors and peer reviewers

This article updates the guidance published in 2015 for authors submitting papers to British Journal of Pharmacology (Curtis et al., 2015) and is intended to provide the rubric for peer review. Thus, it is directed towards authors, reviewers and editors. Explanations for many of the requirements were outlined previously and are not restated here. The new guidelines are intended to replace those published previously. The guidelines have been simplified for ease of understanding by authors, to make it more straightforward for peer reviewers to check compliance and to facilitate the curation of the journal's efforts to improve standards.
Efficient Offline Waveform Design Using Quincunx/Hexagonal Time-Frequency Lattices For 5G Systems

Conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) may turn to be inappropriate for future wireless cellular systems services, because of extreme natural and artificial impairments they are expected to generate. Natural impairments result from higher Doppler and delay spreads, while artificial impairments result from multisource transmissions and synchronization relaxation for closed-loop signaling overhead reduction. These severe impairments induce a dramatic loss in orthogonality between subcarriers and OFDM symbols and lead to a strong increase in intercarrier interference (ICI) and intersymbol interference (ISI). To fight against these impairments, we propose here an optimization of the transmit/receive waveforms for filter-bank multicarrier (FBMC) systems, with hexagonal time-frequency (TF) lattices, operating over severe doubly dispersive channels. For this, we exploit the Ping-pong Optimized Pulse Shaping (POPS) paradigm, recently applied to rectangular TF lattices, to design waveforms maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for hexagonal TF lattices. We show that FBMC, with hexagonal lattices, offers a strong improvement in SINR with respect to conventional OFDM and an improvement of around 1 dB with respect to POPS-FBMC, with rectangular lattices. Furthermore, we show that hexagonal POPS-FBMC brings more robustness to frequency synchronization errors and offers a 10 dB reduction in out-of-band (OOB) emissions, with respect to rectangular POPS-FBMC.
Other Conference Item Usability and Effects of an Exergame-based Gait Training Program

Background: Post-stroke recovery benefits from structured, intense, challenging, and repetitive therapy. Exergames have emerged as promising to achieve sustained therapy practice and patient motivation. This study assessed the usability and effects of exergames on balance and gait. Subjects and Methods: Sixteen elderly participants were provided with the study intervention based on five newly developed exergames. The participants were required to attend 36 training sessions; lasting for 20 minutes each. Adherence, attrition and acceptance were assessed together with (1) Berg Balance Scale, (2) 7-m Timed Up and Go, (3) Short Physical Performance Battery, (4) force platform stance tests, and (5) gait analysis. Results: Thirteen participants completed the study (18.8 percent attrition), without missing a single training session (100 percent adherence). Participants showed high acceptance of the intervention. Only minor adaptations in the program were needed based on the users’ feedback. No changes in center of pressure area during quiet stance on both stable and unstable surfaces and no changes of walking parameters were detected. Scores for the Berg Balance Scale (P = 0.007; r = 0.51), the 7-m Timed Up and Go (P = 0.002; r = 0.56), and the Short Physical Performance Battery (P = 0.013; r = 0.48) increased significantly with moderate to large effect sizes. Conclusion: Participants evaluated the usability of the virtual reality training intervention positively. Results indicate that the intervention improves gaitand balance-related physical performance measures in untrained elderly. The present results warrant a clinical explorative study investigating the usability and effectiveness of the exergame-based program in stroke patients.
Study and implement of three-wavelength oximeter to measure low oxygen saturation

The method that noninvasively measures blood oxygen with near-infrared spectroscopy is widely used.The error reason that measures bow blood oxygen saturatio with conventional two-wavelength light,measure precision was improved with three-wavelength method.The calibration experimental results showed that the three-wavelength is accurate.Through comparison of system performance test,it showed that the syetem hod high accuracy and good real-time.The system has a wide application in low oxygen staturation monitoring.
Development of a Framework for the Use of a Tool for Machine Learning and Data Mining

The “Universidad Politécnica de Aguascalientes” is an institution who’s interested in quality education, ensuring the control of the subjects that are imparted in a long term in the mayor. Taking this on account, the design and development of a Moodle platform focused on data mining was planted, this subject is currently given to ninth quarter students. In order to re-inforce the knowledge that the course has to offer, it was decided to utilize as a support tool “Weka”, it is classified as an “intelligent software”. It provides a sustenance in different areas, such as, Marketing, Manufacturing, Health, Energy, Finance, Medicine, inter alia, for its application it must be taken in account the type of assignment it is wished to realize. The purpose of this course is for the student to obtain the necessary knowledge in this field and during this process the material developed can be of use as a tool for this.
Methods for a fusion of optical coherence tomography and stereo camera image data

This work investigates combination of Optical Coherence Tomography and two cameras, observing a microscopic scene. Stereo vision provides realistic images, but is limited in terms of penetration depth. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) enables access to subcutaneous structures, but 3D-OCT volume data do not give the surgeon a familiar view. The extension of the stereo camera setup with OCT imaging combines the benefits of both modalities. In order to provide the surgeon with a convenient integration of OCT into the vision interface, we present an automated image processing analysis of OCT and stereo camera data as well as combined imaging as augmented reality visualization. Therefore, we care about OCT image noise, perform segmentation as well as develop proper registration objects and methods. The registration between stereo camera and OCT results in a Root Mean Square error of 284 μm as average of five measurements. The presented methods are fundamental for fusion of both imaging modalities. Augmented reality is shown as application of the results. Further developments lead to fused visualization of subcutaneous structures, as information of OCT images, into stereo vision.
geMsearch: Personalized Explorative Music Search

Due to the rise of music streaming platforms, huge collections of music are now available to users on various devices. Within these collections, users aim to find and explore songs based on certain criteria reflecting their current and context-specific preferences. Currently, users are limited to either using search facilities or relying on recommender systems that suggest suitable tracks or artists. Using search facilities requires the user to have some idea about the targeted music and to formulate a query that accurately describes this music, whereas recommender systems are traditionally geared towards long-term shifts of user preferences in contrast to ad-hoc and interactive preference elicitation. To bridge this gap, we propose geMsearch, an approach for personalized, explorative music search based on graph embedding techniques. As the ecosystem of a music collection can be represented as a heterogeneous graph containing nodes describing e.g., tracks, artists, genres or users, we employ graph embedding techniques to learn lowdimensional vector representations for all nodes within the graph. This allows for efficient approximate querying of the collection and, more importantly, for employing visualization strategies that allow the user to explore the music collection in a 3D-space. ACM Classification
How SMEs develop ICT-based capabilities in response to their environment: Past evidence and implications for the uptake of the new ICT paradigm

Purpose The adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has some peculiarities that may depend on the combined effect of size and the competitive environment. The purpose of this paper is to use a contingency approach to explore how SMEs develop organizational capabilities through ICT investments in response to environmental conditions. Design/methodology/approach A survey on 284 SMEs in Italy was conducted and data were analyzed with regression models for testing seven hypotheses on the environmental influence on the development of ICT-based capabilities and the role played by firm size. Findings The results show that the environment influences the development of such capabilities in a different way, depending on size. Within munificent environments, ICT-based capabilities are more diffused among larger SMEs, whereas under environmental complexity, this pattern is inverted, with larger SMEs exhibiting a more limited deployment of ICT in support of both their internally and externally oriented processes. Under environmental dynamism medium-sized firms tend to develop more internally oriented ICT capabilities, but fail in reporting superior capabilities for managing external relationships. Originality/value This paper contributes to understand the relationship between the environment and ICT investments in SMEs. Since the combined effect of size and the competitive environment may influence considerably the ICT investments in SMEs, this study investigates the organizational responses with respect to how SMEs use ICT to address their external environment. This focus provides a contribution to understand the challenges that SMEs are facing in the current technological and market environment, where changes in the ICT paradigm raise the level of complexity and dynamism and bring changes in competition levels that leave few resources for growth to SMEs.
THE ACS LCID PROJECT. X. THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF IC 1613: REVISITING THE OVER-COOLING PROBLEM

We present an analysis of the star formation history (SFH) of a field near the half-light radius in the Local Group dwarf irregular galaxy IC 1613 based on deep Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys imaging. Our observations reach the oldest main sequence turn-off, allowing a time resolution at the oldest ages of ∼1 Gyr. Our analysis shows that the SFH of the observed field in IC 1613 is consistent with being constant over the entire lifetime of the galaxy. These observations rule out an early dominant episode of star formation in IC 1613. We compare the SFH of IC 1613 with expectations from cosmological models. Since most of the mass is in place at early times for low-mass halos, a naive expectation is that most of the star formation should have taken place at early times. Models in which star formation follows mass accretion result in too many stars formed early and gas mass fractions that are too low today (the “over-cooling problem”). The depth of the present photometry of IC 1613 shows that, at a resolution of ∼1 Gyr, the star formation rate is consistent with being constant, at even the earliest times, which is difficult to achieve in models where star formation follows mass assembly.