Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relation between EMG signal activation and time lags using feature analysis during dynamic contraction

This study examined the effects of electromyographic (EMG) signals from Biceps Brachii (BB) muscle on the root mean square (RMS)-time relationships during dynamic contraction. Ten healthy and right hand dominated male subjects were volunteered for the experiments. The RMS features were extracted from the corresponding EMG signals (amplitude of the full wave EMG) for 10 seconds in 5 minutes intervals between each trial. Ten seconds (or 10000 ms) were divided into 4 time lags to identify the muscle activity and relationship between EMG and time using different statistical analysing techniques, such as mean, regression analysis, correlation, ANOVA, and coefficient of variation (CoV) for muscle activity variation. The results shows that large positive linear association between EMG and endurance time where the points are close to the linear trend line (R squared = 0.93 and F-ratio = 453.1). Signal steadiness is better during last time lags (1.66% during 7501-10000 ms) compared to initial time duration (10.35% during 0-2500 ms).
Novel application of flow propagation velocity and ischaemia‐modified albumin in analysis of postexercise cardiac function in man

The present study employed novel echocardiographic tools and cardiac markers to obtain a greater understanding of the aetiology and time course of altered cardiac function and cardiac damage following prolonged exercise and, in particular, the possible role of transient ischaemia within these phenomena. Fourteen runners in the 2004 London Marathon were assessed pre‐, immediately post‐, 1 h post‐ and 24 h postcompletion of the race. Left ventricular function was examined echocardiographically using 2‐D, M‐mode, tissue Doppler imaging and flow propagation velocity (Vp). Venous blood samples were analysed for N‐terminal pro‐B‐type natriuretic peptide (proBNP), cardiac troponin T (cTnT) and ischaemia‐modified albumin (IMA). Left ventricular (LV) diastolic filling was altered on completion of the race, as indicated by significant decreases in mean early to late diastolic myocardial wave (E′:A′) ratio and Vp (from 1.82 ± 0.9 to 1.32 ± 0.32, and from 67.5 ± 9.3 to 60.2 ± 8.2 cm s−1, respectively, P < 0.05), accompanied by an increase in proBNP (from 21.6 ± 11 to 47.08 ± 19.5 pg l−1, P < 0.05). The observed reduction in LV diastolic filling following completion of a marathon, unrelated to changes in heart rate or loading parameters, indicates an intrinsically mediated change in diastolic filling. Exercise‐induced elevations in cTnT in nine individuals (range, 0.023–0.37 μg l−1) were indicative of minor cardiac damage. A significant reduction in IMA was observed after the marathon (from 63.68 ± 9.83 to 44.94 ± 16.13 Um l−1, P < 0.05), unrelated to the alterations in cardiac function, proBNP or cTnT. The absence of an elevation in IMA suggests that exercise‐induced myocardial ischaemia did not occur and therefore could not explain the changes in cardiac function or biomarkers. Future studies in this area should investigate alternative diagnostic tools for the detection of transient ischaemia, and other potential mechanisms, in order to extend the understanding of this phenomenon.
Compressive Stress, Shear Stress, and Displacement Study on Different Structured Dental Implant: 3-Dimensional Finite Element Analysis

This paper presents the use of 3-dimensional finite element analysis (3D-FEA) on dental implant prosthetics. The current research focuses on four patents (three models of United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and a new conceptual design model) of dental implant threads. The 3D-FEA is performed on dental implant models, with compressive forces of 100 N, and a shear force of 50 N with the force angle of 45 (degree) with the normal line respectively. The compressive stress, shear stress, and displacement analysis is conducted at four different areas, including abutment, implant, cortical bone, and cancellous bone. Findings from this research provide guidelines for new product design of dental implant prosthetics with stress distribution and displacement characteristics. The maximum stress occurred in dental implant prosthetic and the surrounding bone analysis are less than the yield strength of materials. Hence the design is safe.
SVM : Reduction of Learning Time

Training a support vector machine (SVM) leads to a quadratic optimization problem with bound constraints and one linear equality constraint. Despite the fact that this type of problem is well understood, there are many issues to be considered in designing an SVM learner. In particular, for large learning tasks with many training examples, off-the-shelf optimization techniques for general quadratic programs quickly become intractable in their memory and time requirements. Here we propose an algorithm which aims at reducing the learning time, this algorithm is based on the decomposition method proposed by Osuna dedicated to optimizing SVMs: it divides the original optimization problem into sub problems computable by the machine in terms of CPU time and memory storage, the obtained solution is in practice more parsimonious than that found by the approach of Osuna in terms of learning time quality, while offering similar performances.
Perceptual evaluation of tone mapping operators

For years, 24-bit images effectively using 256 values for each color channel wereconsidered accurate enough to be used in the creation and display of photorealisticimagery. On the other end, photographers knowing the limitation of cameras andﬁlms would never attempt to photograph a scene including a light source placed inthe camera’s ﬁeld of vision. However, as a result of global illumination renderingand high dynamic range (HDR) imaging [DM97], it is now common to generateimages spanning a huge range of luminance. Dealing with such images in elec-tronic form requires extending ﬁle formats that are restricted to too few luminancevalues and colors. An even more serious issue is effective displaying/printing ofthose images using media with limited dynamic range (both in reproducible lumi-nance values and color gamut). The ﬁrst limitation was successfully addressed in different pixel encoding for-mats. A simple approach relies on using three ﬂoating point numbers for eachpixel RGB values, however, this leads to excessive ﬁle sizes. The HDR imagesize can be reduced to four bytes for each pixel using the RGBE format [War91],in which a common exponent and a mantissa are assumed for each channel thusallowing a wide dynamic range with little storage overhead. Another format, thelogLuv encoding for tiff images [Lar98] separates a logarithmic representation ofluminance and aCIE
Optimizing bioinformatics workflows for data analysis using cloud management techniques

With the rapid development in recent years of high-throughput technologies in the life sciences, huge amounts of data are being generated and stored in databases. Despite significant advances in computing capacity and performance, an analysis of these large-scale data in a search for biomedically relevant patterns remains a challenging task. Scientific workflow applications support data-mining in more complex scenarios that include many data sources and computational tools, as commonly found in bioinformatics. A scientific workflow application is a holistic unit that defines, executes, and manages scientific applications using different software tools. Existing workflow applications are process- or data- rather than resource-oriented. Thus, they lack efficient computational resource management capabilities, such as those provided by Cloud computing environments. Insufficient computational resources disrupt the execution of workflow applications, wasting time and money. To address this issue, advanced resource monitoring and management strategies are required to determine the resource consumption behaviours of workflow applications for a dynamical allocation and deallocation of resources. In this paper, we present a novel Cloud resource monitoring technique and a knowledge management strategy to manage computational resources for workflow applications in order to guarantee their performance goals and their successful completion. We present the design description of these techniques, demonstrate how they can be applied to scientific workflow applications, and present first evaluation results as a proof of concept.
A new algorithm for computing visibility graphs of polygonal obstacles in the plane

Given a set of $h$ pairwise disjoint polygonal obstacles with a total of $n$ vertices in the plane, the vertex-vertex visibility graph is an undirected graph whose nodes are vertices of the obstacles and whose edges are pairs of visible vertices. The vertex-edge and edge-edge visibility graphs are defined similarly. Ghosh and Mount gave a well-known output-sensitive $O(n\log n+k)$ time algorithm for computing these visibility graphs, where $k$ is the size of the corresponding graph. By developing new techniques based on an extended corridor structure, we augment Ghosh and Mount’s algorithm to build these visibility graphs in $O(n+h\log h+k)$ time, after the free space is triangulated. The new algorithm improves Ghosh and Mount’s algorithm by reducing its additive $O(n\log n)$ time factor to $O(n + h\log h)$. Like Ghosh and Mount’s algorithm, our algorithm can also compute several important structures such as the funnel structure and the enhanced visibility graph, which may have other applications.
SAR and panchromatic image fusion based on region features in nonsubsampled contourlet transform domain

Focusing on the fusion of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and panchromatic images, a novel fusion algorithm based on the imaging characteristic of the SAR image is presented. Two measurements named region information entropy and ratio of region mean are presented in the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain so that the SAR image can be split into roughness regions, smoothness regions and highlight point target regions. The algorithm performs the different fusion rules for each particular region independently. Experimental results show that the fused image not only joins the target information in the SAR image that is difficult to identify in the panchromatic image but also preserves the spatial resolution of the panchromatic image. The algorithm performs significantly better than the wavelet transform and the pixel-based NSCT.
Kinase Inhibitor Screening Identifies Cyclin-Dependent Kinases and Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 as Potential Modulators of TDP-43 Cytosolic Accumulation during Cell Stress

Abnormal processing of TAR DNA binding protein 43 (TDP-43) has been identified as a major factor in neuronal degeneration during amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). It is unclear how changes to TDP-43, including nuclear to cytosolic translocation and subsequent accumulation, are controlled in these diseases. TDP-43 is a member of the heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) RNA binding protein family and is known to associate with cytosolic RNA stress granule proteins in ALS and FTLD. hnRNP trafficking and accumulation is controlled by the action of specific kinases including members of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. However, little is known about how kinase pathways control TDP-43 movement and accumulation. In this study, we used an in vitro model of TDP-43-positve stress granule formation to screen for the effect of kinase inhibitors on TDP-43 accumulation. We found that while a number of kinase inhibitors, particularly of the MAPK pathways modulated both TDP-43 and the global stress granule marker, human antigen R (HuR), multiple inhibitors were more specific to TDP-43 accumulation, including inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) and glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3). Close correlation was observed between effects of these inhibitors on TDP-43, hnRNP K and TIAR, but often with different effects on HuR accumulation. This may indicate a potential interaction between TDP-43, hnRNP K and TIAR. CDK inhibitors were also found to reverse pre-formed TDP-43-positive stress granules and both CDK and GSK3 inhibitors abrogated the accumulation of C-terminal TDP-43 (219–414) in transfected cells. Further studies are required to confirm the specific kinases involved and whether their action is through phosphorylation of the TDP-43 binding partner hnRNP K. This knowledge provides a valuable insight into the mechanisms controlling abnormal cytoplasmic TDP-43 accumulation and may herald new opportunities for kinase modulation-based therapeutic intervention in ALS and FTLD.
Grasp quality measures based on point-cloud input

Developing robotic systems for selective harvesting is an important but challenging task due to the complicated nature of the task and the environment. Robotic selective harvesting comprises three major components: detection, grasping and manipulation. It is important in such a task is to embed perception capabilities within grasp planning and execution. To this end we have developed grasp quality measures that can be determined based on a 3D point-cloud. The grasp quality measures were integrated into a graspability map representation, which is an efficient method for representing grasp quality of various wrist poses about the object. To test measure validity, a physical and a matched virtual environment were developed. Grasp quality in both environments was measured and compared, and results show a high correlation between them (above 90%). This asserts the validity of the developed measures. An additional measure based on empirical analysis of human harvesting motion was integrated in the grasp quality measure to form a correspondence between computed graspability map and graspability maps based on the empirical study.
Pi-Calculus in Logical Form

Abramsky's logical formulation of domain theory is extended to encompass the domain theoretic model for pi-calculus processes of Stark and of Fiore, Moggi and Sangiorgi. This is done by defining a logical counterpart of categorical constructions including dynamic name allocation and name exponentiation, and showing that they are dual to standard constructs in functor categories. We show that initial algebras of functors defined in terms of these constructs give rise to a logic that is sound, complete, and characterises bisimilarity. The approach is modular, and we apply it to derive a logical formulation of pi-calculus. The resulting logic is a modal calculus with primitives for input, free output and bound output.
Impulsivity in Subclinical Borderline Personality Individuals Using a Delay Discounting Task with Social Incentives

Impulsivity was examined in a subclinical sample of college students with borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits . Using the Borderline Personality Questionnaire (BPQ; Poreh et al. , 2006) participants were screened for high and low BPD traits. Twenty-six high-BPD and twenty-four low-BPD participants were compared on impulsivity. Impulsivity was assessed using a self­ report measure (BIS1 1 ; Patton, Stanford & Barratt, 1 995) and three laboratory tasks, the Go Stop Impulsivity Paradigm (Dougherty, Mathias, & Marsh, 2003 ), a delay discounting task (Dixon, Jacobs, & Sanders, 2006) with monetary incentives and a delay discounting task with social incentives. Past research has shown that highand low-BPD individuals do not discount monetary rewards differently (Dom, De Wilde, Hulstijn, Van Den Brink, & Sabbe, 2006). The present study replicated these results. In addition, the present research hypothesized that high­ BPD individuals would discount social rewards more steeply. Results, however, showed no differences between groups in social discounting, nor did high-BPD individuals discount social rewards at a significantly greater rate than monetary rewards, as was expected. Still, there was a significant main effect, showing that, overall, participants discounted social rewards more steeply than monetary rewards. Contrary to what was expected, there was no difference between groups on the Go Stop Impulsivity Paradigm. Results did confirm the hypothesis that high-BPD participants were more impulsive than low-BPD participants on the BIS1 1 . These results suggest that the two groups differ on impulsivity according to self-report measures, but that delay discounting does not discriminate between groups regardless of the reinforcer.
Shape-dependent maximal controllable sets for constrained discrete-time TS systems

In previous research by the authors, asymptotically necessary and sufficient conditions for shape-independent stability analysis and stabilisation of TS fuzzy systems were provided. This work discusses how to incorporate into them some shape-dependent constraints affecting memberships (only). In this way, a family of polyhedral sets is obtained, certified to belong to the (shape-dependent) domain of attraction, whose accuracy increases as a Polya complexity parameter is incremented.
Measuring distributional semantic effects in syntactic variation

Introduction and previous work A number of papers in the quantitative syntax literature have proposed that semantic dependencies between words affect their relative order in a sentence [13, 15]. This idea is an extension of the very general principle stating that (syntactically) related words tend to occur next to each other [4]. This principle is known under various names in syntax and in the language processing literature, such as early immediate constituents, locality, and dependency length minimisation [12, 8, 18, 7]. Semantic and syntactic relations between words are highly correlated notions and it is difficult to tease apart the syntactic from the purely semantic effects on word adjacency. Lohse et al. (2004) [15] unambiguously identifies a semantic pressure favouring adjacent orders in verb-particle construction in English. A verb-particle transitive phrase can have two alternative word orders: verb-particle split order (1) and verb-particle adjacent order (2).
Population‐based study of the effect of gene expression profiling on adjuvant chemotherapy use in breast cancer patients under the age of 65 years

Gene expression profiling (GEP) testing can help to predict the risk of cancer recurrence and guide decisions about adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer (BC). However, no prior US studies have evaluated the relation between GEP testing and the use of adjuvant chemotherapy by women treated in a general oncology practice.
Interferon-beta-1b protects against multiple sclerosis-induced endothelial cells apoptosis.

Disruption of the blood-brain-barrier (BBB) due to endothelial cell (EC) injury is an essential step in formation of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions. We investigated the role of endothelial cell (EC) apoptosis in the pathophysiology of MS, studying the therapeutic effect of IFN-beta-1b against MS sera-induced endothelial apoptosis. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells were treated with sera from patients with active MS (in relapse), MS in remission, or sera from healthy volunteers (each n = 5). Apoptosis was assessed by annexin V-propidium iodide staining. Effects of IFN-beta-1b on EC apoptosis were tested at increasing doses (10, 100, and 1000 U/ml). Nitrite (NO₂-⁻) levels were determined in culture supernatants. EC apoptosis was increased by sera from exacerbating MS patients, but not remission, compared to healthy individuals (p less than 0.001). Effects were blocked by IFN-beta-1b at 10 U/ml (p less than 0.05), but not higher doses, and was associated with increased NO/NO₂- production (less than 0.05). EC apoptosis leading to disruption of the BBB may play a role in MS etiology and represents a novel therapeutic mechanism of action for IFN-beta-1b in MS therapy.
Use of variance estimation in the multi-armed bandit problem

An important aspect of most decision making problems concerns the appropriate balance between exploitation (acting optimally according to the partial knowledge acquired so far) and exploration of the environment (acting sub-optimally in order to refine the current knowledge and improve future decisions). A typical example of this so-called exploration versus exploitation dilemma is the multi-armed bandit problem, for which many strategies have been developed. Here we investigate policies based the choice of the arm having the highest upper-confidence bound, where the bound takes into account the empirical variance of the different arms. Such an algorithm was found earlier to outperform its peers in a series of numerical experiments. The main contribution of this paper is the theoretical investigation of this algorithm. Our contribution here is twofold. First, we prove that with probability at least $1-\beta$, the regret after $n$ plays of a variant of the UCB algorithm (called $\beta$-UCB) is upper-bounded by a constant, that scales linearly with $\log(1/\beta)$, but which is independent from $n$. We also analyse a variant which is closer to the algorithm suggested earlier. We prove a logarithmic bound on the expected regret of this algorithm and argue that the bound scales favourably with the variance of the suboptimal arms.
Effects of Pubertal Cannabinoid Administration on Attentional Set-Shifting and Dopaminergic Hyper-Responsivity in a Developmental Disruption Model of Schizophrenia

Background: Adolescent exposure to cannabinoids in vulnerable individuals is proposed to be a risk factor for psychiatric conditions later in life, particularly schizophrenia. Evidence from studies in animals has indicated that a combination of repeated pubertal cannabinoid administration with either neonatal prefrontocortical lesion, isolation rearing, or chronic NMDA receptor antagonism administration induces enhanced schizophrenia-like behavioral disruptions. The effects of adolescent exposure to CB1 receptor agonists, however, have not been tested in a developmental disruption model of schizophrenia. Methods: This was tested in the methylazoxymethanol (MAM) model, in which repeated treatment with the synthetic cannabinoid agonist WIN 55,212-2 (WIN; 1.2mg/kg) was extended over 25 days throughout puberty (postnatal days 40–65) in control and MAM rats. The rats received 20 injections, which were delivered irregularly to mimic the human condition. Adult rats were tested for attentional set-shifting task and locomotor response to amphetamine, which was compared with in vivo recording from ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA) neurons. Results: MAM-treated rats showed impairment in the attentional set-shifting task, augmented locomotor response to amphetamine administration, and an increased number of spontaneously active DA neurons in the VTA. Interestingly, pubertal WIN treatment in normal animals induced similar changes at adulthood as those observed in MAM-treated rats, supporting the notion that adolescence exposure to cannabinoids may represent a risk factor for developing schizophrenia-like signs at adulthood. However, contrary to expectations, pubertal WIN administration did not exacerbate the behavioral and electrophysiological changes in MAM-treated rats beyond that observed in WIN-treated saline rats (Sal). Indeed, WIN treatment actually attenuated the locomotor response to amphetamine in MAM rats without impacting DA neuron activity states. Conclusions: Taken together, the present results indicate that the impact of cannabinoids during puberty/adolescence on schizophrenia models is more complex than may be predicted.