Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extracting Cardiac Information From Medical Radar Using Locally Projective Adaptive Signal Separation

Electrocardiography is the gold standard for electrical heartbeat activity, but offers no direct measurement of mechanical activity. Mechanical cardiac activity can be assessed non-invasively using, e.g., ballistocardiography and recently, medical radar has emerged as a contactless alternative modality. However, all modalities for measuring the mechanical cardiac activity are affected by respiratory movements, requiring a signal separation step before higher-level analysis can be performed. This paper adapts a non-linear filter for separating the respiratory and cardiac signal components of radar recordings. In addition, we present an adaptive algorithm for estimating the parameters for the non-linear filter. The novelty of our method lies in the combination of the non-linear signal separation method with a novel, adaptive parameter estimation method specifically designed for the non-linear signal separation method, eliminating the need for manual intervention and resulting in a fully adaptive algorithm. Using the two benchmark applications of (i) cardiac template extraction from radar and (ii) peak timing analysis, we demonstrate that the non-linear filter combined with adaptive parameter estimation delivers superior results compared to linear filtering. The results show that using locally projective adaptive signal separation (LoPASS), we are able to reduce the mean standard deviation of the cardiac template by at least a factor of 2 across all subjects. In addition, using LoPASS, 9 out of 10 subjects show significant (at a confidence level of 2.5%) correlation between the R-T-interval and the R-radar-interval, while using linear filters this ratio drops to 6 out of 10. Our analysis suggests that the improvement is due to better preservation of the cardiac signal morphology by the non-linear signal separation method. Hence, we expect that the non-linear signal separation method introduced in this paper will mostly benefit analysis methods investigating the cardiac radar signal morphology on a beat-to-beat basis.
Closed-Loop Acoustic Stimulation During Sleep in Children With Epilepsy: A Hypothesis-Driven Novel Approach to Interact With Spike-Wave Activity and Pilot Data Assessing Feasibility

Slow waves, the electroencephalographic (EEG) hallmark of deep sleep, can be systematically manipulated by acoustic stimulation: stimulation time-locked to the down phase of slow waves reduces, whereas stimulation time-locked to the up phase increases slow waves. Spike-waves during sleep seem to be related to slow waves, raising the question of whether spike-waves can be systematically influenced by such acoustic stimulation. In five pediatric patients, all-night EEG was recorded, combined with real-time slow wave detection. Throughout the night, acoustic stimulation was performed in a 3 × 5-min-block design (no stimulation—stimulation—no stimulation). Tones were applied time-locked either to the up or to the down phase of the detected slow waves in an alternating pattern. All patients tolerated the acoustic stimulation during sleep well. They showed high sleep quality and no signs of clinical or non-convulsive electrographic seizures. Our preliminary analysis shows no systematic effect of acoustic stimulation on spike-wave activity. Moreover, with our stimulation approach tones were distributed over a rather broad phase-range during the DOWN or UP stimulation and showed inter-individual differences in their distribution. In this study, we applied for the first time an acoustic closed-loop slow wave stimulation tool for a non-invasive manipulation of spike-wave activity. Thus, our pilot data show that closed-loop acoustic stimulation is feasible and well tolerated in children with spike wave activity during sleep. Improved precision in phase targeting and personalized stimulation parameters in a larger sample of subjects might be needed to show systematic effects.
Collateral Sensitivity of Parthenolide via NF-κB and HIF-α Inhibition and Epigenetic Changes in Drug-Resistant Cancer Cell Lines

Parthenolide (PT) is a sesquiterpene lactone isolated from Tanacetum parthenium. In this study, PT showed varying cytotoxic effects against different solid tumor cell lines. HCT116 (p53+/+) colon carcinoma cells and their parental HCT116 knockout p53 (p53-/-) cell lines showed a resistance degree of 2.36. On the other hand, wild-type U87.MG cells or cells transfected with a deletion-activated EGFR cDNA (U87.MGΔEGFR) exhibited slight sensitivity toward PT. Multidrug-resistant MDA-MB-231-BCRP cells were even more sensitive toward PT than sensitive MDA-MB-231-pcDNA cells with a resistance degree of 0.07 (collateral sensitivity). To the best of our knowledge, hypersensitivity (collateral sensitivity) in MDA-MB-231-BCRP cell line is reported in this study for the first time. We attempted to identify the mechanism of collateral sensitivity. Firstly, we found that PT bound to IKK preventing IκBα degradation and eventually inhibition of the nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) pathway. Down-regulation of hypoxia inducing factor 1-alpha (HIF-1α) in MDA-MB-231-BCRP resistant cells may be a second mechanism, since it is a target gene of NF-κB. Moreover, PT also showed epigenetic effect by inhibition of HDAC activity as shown using both molecular docking and HDAC activity assay. Based on COMPARE and hierarchical cluster analyses, we found gene expression profiles that predicted sensitivity or resistance of 47 tumor cell lines toward PT. Interestingly, pathway analyses of gene expression profiles revealed NF-κB and HIF signaling as top networks of these genes, cellular functions and canonical pathways influencing the activity of PT against tumor cells. In conclusion, PT exerted profound cytotoxic activity against various cancer cell lines mainly against BCRP-overexpressing tumor cells, suggesting PT as novel candidate for cancer treatment.
A Fast Transient Absorption Study of Co(AcAc)3

The study of transition metal coordination complexes has played a key role in establishing quantum chemistry concepts such as that of ligand field theory. Furthermore, the study of the dynamics of their excited states is of primary importance in determining the de-excitation path of electrons to tailor the electronic properties required for important technological applications. This work focuses on femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy of Cobalt tris(acetylacetonate) (Co(AcAc)3) in solution. The fast transient absorption spectroscopy has been employed to study the excited state dynamics after optical excitation. Density functional theory coupled with the polarizable continuum model has been used to characterize the geometries and the electronic states of the solvated ion. The excited states have been calculated using the time dependent density functional theory formalism. The time resolved dynamics of the ligand to metal charge transfer excitation revealed a biphasic behavior with an ultrafast rise time of 0.07 ± 0.04 ps and a decay time of 1.5 ± 0.3 ps, while the ligand field excitations dynamics is characterized by a rise time of 0.07 ± 0.04 ps and a decay time of 1.8 ± 0.3 ps. Time dependent density functional theory calculations of the spin-orbit coupling suggest that the ultrafast rise time can be related to the intersystem crossing from the originally photoexcited state. The picosecond decay is faster than that of similar cobalt coordination complexes and is mainly assigned to internal conversion within the triplet state manifold. The lack of detectable long living states (>5 ps) suggests that non-radiative decay plays an important role in the dynamics of these molecules.
RaFM: Rank-Aware Factorization Machines

Factorization machines (FM) are a popular model class to learn pairwise interactions by a low-rank approximation. Different from existing FM-based approaches which use a fixed rank for all features, this paper proposes a Rank-Aware FM (RaFM) model which adopts pairwise interactions from embeddings with different ranks. The proposed model achieves a better performance on real-world datasets where different features have significantly varying frequencies of occurrences. Moreover, we prove that the RaFM model can be stored, evaluated, and trained as efficiently as one single FM, and under some reasonable conditions it can be even significantly more efficient than FM. RaFM improves the performance of FMs in both regression tasks and classification tasks while incurring less computational burden, therefore also has attractive potential in industrial applications.
Influence of Stress on Liver Circadian Physiology. A Study in Rainbow Trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, as Fish Model

In vertebrates stress negatively affects body homeostasis and triggers a battery of metabolic responses, with liver playing a key role. This organ responds with altered metabolism, leading the animal to cope with the stress situation, which involves carbohydrate and lipid mobilization. However, metabolism among other physiological functions is under circadian control within the liver. Then, metabolic homeostasis at system level involves circadian timing systems within tissues and cells, and collaborate with each other. During chronic stress, cortisol maintains the liver metabolic response by modulating carbohydrate- and lipid-related metabolism. Stress also disrupts the circadian oscillator within the liver in mammals, whereas little information is available in other vertebrates, such as fish. To raise the complexity of this process, other candidates may mediate in such effect of stress. In fact, sirtuin1, a link between cellular sensing of energy status and circadian clocks, participates in the response to stress in mammals, but no information is available in fish. Considering the role played by liver in providing energy for the animal to deal with an adverse situation, and the existence of a circadian oscillator within this tissue, jeopardized liver circadian physiology during stress exposure might be expected. Whether the physiological response to stress is a well conserved process through the phylogeny and the mechanisms involved in such response is a question that remains to be elucidated. Then, we provide information at this respect in mammals and show comparable results in rainbow trout as fish animal model. Similar to that in mammals, stress triggers a series of responses in fish that leads the animal to cope with the adverse situation. Stress influences liver physiology in fish, affecting carbohydrate and lipid metabolism-related parameters, and the circadian oscillator as well. In a similar way than that of mammals different mediators participate in the response of liver circadian physiology to stress in fish. Among them, we confirm for the teleost rainbow trout a role of nuclear receptors (rev-erbβ), cortisol, and sirt1. However, further research is needed to evaluate the independent effect of each one, or the existence of any interaction among them.
Improved geometric specular antialiasing

Shading filtering proposed by Kaplanyan et al. [2016] is a simple solution for specular aliasing. It filters a distribution of microfacet normals in the domain of microfacet slopes by estimating the filtering kernel using derivatives of a halfway vector between incident and outdoing directions. However, for real-time rendering, this approach can produce noticeable artifacts because of an estimation error of derivatives. For forward rendering, this estimation error is increased significantly at grazing angles and near edges. The present work improves the quality of the original technique, while decreasing the complexity of the code at the same time. To reduce the error, we introduce a more efficient kernel bandwidth that takes the angle of the halfvector into account. In addition, we optimize the calculation of an isotropic filter kernel used for deferred rendering by applying the proposed kernel bandwidth. As our implementation is simpler than the original method, it is easier to integrate in time-sensitive applications, such as game engines, while at the same time improving the filtering quality.
Prevalence and factors associated with liver steatosis as measured by transient elastography with controlled attenuation parameter in HIV-infected patients

Objective:To assess the prevalence and factors associated with significant hepatic steatosis (SHS, steatosis involving ≥10% hepatocytes) in HIV-infected patients. Design:A prospective, cross-sectional study. Methods:Five hundred and five HIV-infected patients were included in this study. All patients underwent a transient elastography examination with the controlled attenuation parameter (CAP). SHS was defined using the previously identified CAP cut-off of 238 dB/m. We analysed the associations between SHS and demographics, metabolic data, coinfections and drug therapy. Results:SHS was detected in 201 (40%) patients. Individuals with and without plasma HIV RNA of 50 copies/ml or less presented SHS in 168 (42%) and 33 (31%) cases, respectively (P = 0.030). Patients with SHS compared with those without SHS presented higher median (IQR) BMI [BMI, 25.6 (22.5–28) vs. 22.3 (20.3–24.2) kg/m2; P < 10–6], DBP [79 (72–85) vs. 74 (68–81) mmHg; P = 0.0001], fasting plasma glucose [95 (87–106) vs. 91 (84–97) mg/dl; P = 0.002] and triglycerides [128 (92–189) vs. 109 (80–167) mg/dl; P = 0.002], and lower HDL cholesterol [44 (37–54) vs. 48 (40–59), mg/dl; P = 0.004]. In multivariate analysis, the only factor associated with SHS was BMI [per unit increase, adjusted odds ratio (95% confidence interval) 1.34 (1.22–1–47); P < 10–6]. Conclusion:SHS measured by CAP is highly prevalent among HIV-infected patients. High BMI is the main predictor of SHS in this setting.
The Impact of the Time Interval Between Radiation and Hyperthermia on Clinical Outcome in Patients With Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer

The benefit of hyperthermia combined with radiotherapy is well-acknowledged for patients with locally advanced cervical cancer (LACC) (1-3). However, recently a discussion evolved on the optimal time interval between radiotherapy and hyperthermia. Kroesen et al. (4) recently reported a retrospective analysis of factors influencing clinical results of treatment with radiotherapy and hyperthermia in a large cohort of locally advanced cervical cancer patients (LACC) at ErasmusMC in Rotterdam. They concluded that there is no detrimental effect of prolonged intervals on clinical outcome within a time frame of 4 h between radiotherapy and hyperthermia. Kroesen et al. thereby explicitly dismissed the findings of Van Leeuwen et al. (5) in a smaller cohort of LACC patients treated at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) of the University of Amsterdam. In that study longer time intervals and lower tumor temperatures were both found to have a highly negative effect on in-field tumor control (time interval: P = 0.021, in multivariable analysis p = 0.007) and overall survival (idem: P = 0.015, in multivariable analysis p = 0.012), where it is important to note that the median time intervals between radiotherapy and hyperthermia were ∼60 and ∼90 min for the short and long time interval subgroups of patients, respectively.
Increasing Access to Care for Brazos Valley, Texas: A Rural Community of Solution

Compared with their urban counterparts, rural populations face substantial disparities in terms of health care and health outcomes, particularly with regard to access to health services. To address ongoing inequities, community perspectives are increasingly important in identifying health issues and developing local solutions that are effective and sustainable. This article has been developed by both academic and community representatives and presents a brief case study of the evolution of a regional community of solution (COS) servicing a 7-county region called the Brazos Valley, Texas. The regional COS gave rise to multiple, more localized COSs that implemented similar strategies designed to address access to care within rural communities. The regional COS, known as the Brazos Valley Health Partnership, was a result of a 2002 health status assessment that revealed that rural residents face poorer access to health services and their care is often fragmented. Their localized strategy, called a health resource center, was created as a “one-stop shop” where multiple health and social service providers could be housed to deliver services to rural residents. Initially piloted in Madison County, the resource center model was expanded into Burleson, Grimes, and Leon Counties because of community buy-in at each of these sites. The resource center concept allowed service providers, who previously were able to offer services only in more populous areas, to expand into the rural communities because of reduced overhead costs. The services provided at the health resource centers include transportation, information and referral, and case management along with others, depending on the location. To ensure successful ongoing operations and future planning of the resource centers, local oversight bodies known as health resource commissions were organized within each of the rural communities to represent local COSs. Through collaboration with local entities, these partnerships have been successful in continuing to expand services and initiating health improvements within their rural communities.
Bacteria-Killing Type IV Secretion Systems

Bacteria have been constantly competing for nutrients and space for billions of years. During this time, they have evolved many different molecular mechanisms by which to secrete proteinaceous effectors in order to manipulate and often kill rival bacterial and eukaryotic cells. These processes often employ large multimeric transmembrane nanomachines that have been classified as types I–IX secretion systems. One of the most evolutionarily versatile are the Type IV secretion systems (T4SSs), which have been shown to be able to secrete macromolecules directly into both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. Until recently, examples of T4SS-mediated macromolecule transfer from one bacterium to another was restricted to protein-DNA complexes during bacterial conjugation. This view changed when it was shown by our group that many Xanthomonas species carry a T4SS that is specialized to transfer toxic bacterial effectors into rival bacterial cells, resulting in cell death. This review will focus on this special subtype of T4SS by describing its distinguishing features, similar systems in other proteobacterial genomes, and the nature of the effectors secreted by these systems and their cognate inhibitors.
Improved scheduling of virtual machines on cloud with multi-tenancy and resource heterogeneity

There is an increasing demand of HPC-aware clouds to perform High Performance Computations rather than HPC-unaware clouds. Since renting saves lot of cost and time, people are moving towards cloud environments rather than owning costly supercomputers. There are many cloud providers in the market, and hence there is much of research going on for providing HPC-aware clouds, as HPC applications requires more computations compared to other applications. In this paper we describe an approach to allocate cloud resources by identifying the type of the virtual machine (storage-intensive or compute-intensive). We also present an algorithm which statically schedules the virtual machines (VM) to the CPUs based on CPU affinity. We observed that the performance of HPC applications is consistently better by statically scheduling the VMs allocation, when compared with default host operating system scheduling policy on an environment with multi-tenancy and heterogeneity. We obtain a speedup of upto 10% with our static scheduling when compared with default host operating system scheduling policy.
Cortical Contribution during Active and Passive Pedaling: A Preliminary Study

Recognizing neuro-motor control process of human locomotion is challenging and the progress was limited due to the complex dynamic control progress and the motion artifacts. We applied Adaptive Mixture Independent Component Analysis (AMICA) to explore the voluntary cortical contribution during pedaling process and compared the difference between active and passive pedaling in this preliminary study. We explored the power spectral density, source localization, and event-related spectral perturbations of selected independent components (ICs). The results demonstrated typical IC clusters during pedaling, and various cortical regions contribute differently to the locomotion control process. The active and passive pedaling showed different activation pattern in the cortex, but no significant difference was found, further study is still necessary to confirm the cortical contribution difference for different pedaling conditions.
An AC/DC alternating power flow algorithm based on forward-backward sweep method for the distribution network with SST

Solid state transformer(SST) is an energy flow operation device of Energy Internet, in order to research the operation of SST and its effect on the power flow calculation in distribution network, an AC/DC alternating power flow algorithm based on forward-backward sweep method(FBSM) for the distribution network with SST(DNWS) is proposed. In this paper, the steady-state model and control methods of SST are analyzed in detail. Then, the DNWS is partitioned into three parts: AC system 1 connected to SST, SST and AC system 2 connected to SST according to its structural features. In this network, the overall distribution of power flow is calculated by the algorithm in which the DC power flow calculation is nested in the AC power flow calculation that is based on FBSM. Elaborating the ability of power flow regulation of SST and SST's control methods, the algorithm can calculate the control variables and state variables of SST and can take into account the SST loss more accurately. Finally, the validity and correctness of the algorithm are verified by the example results.
Subtalar Joint Arthrodesis Using a Single Lag Screw

Background: This study tested the hypotheses that fusing the subtalar joint with a single lag screw from the posteroinferior calcaneus to the anterior talar neck is an effective technique and that factors affecting the time to fusion can be identified. Methods: Between October, 1995, and July, 2002, the senior author (RAM) performed 101 isolated subtalar arthrodeses using a technique of single lag-screw fixation from posteroinferior to anterosuperior across the posterior facet of the subtalar joint combined with the application of an autograft taken from the floor of the sinus tarsi and anterior process. The average patient age was 52 (range 17 to 82) years. There were 52 women (53 arthrodeses) and 48 men (48 arthrodeses). Eight of 101 (8%) arthrodeses were revisions. The indications included posttraumatic arthritis (45), posterior tibial tendon dysfunction (18), failed prior ankle joint fusion (14), idiopathic disorders (12), hindfoot coalition (7), rheumatoid arthritis (3), and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (2). Fifteen of 101 patients (15%) smoked an average of 0.9 ± 0.5 pack of cigarettes per day. Results: Two of 101 joints did not fuse, resulting in an overall fusion rate of 98%. The average time to fusion was 12.3 ± 3.4 weeks. The presence of a prior ankle fusion significantly prolonged the time to fusion of the subtalar joint (11.9 ± 2.3 vs. 14.9 ± 7.0, p = .003). Other factors, including smoking, revision surgery, patient age, and patient sex, did not affect time to fusion. The fixation screw was removed in 13 of 101 (13%) joints at an average of 8.8 ± 0.5 months. Conclusions: Using a single 7.0-mm lag screw across the posterior facet of the subtalar joint results in fusion of the subtalar joint in 98% of patients. A prior ankle arthrodesis delays the time to fusion of the subtalar joint by 3 weeks. This is a simple and reliable technique for achieving fusion of the subtalar joint.