Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Histological Analysis of the Human Sinoatrial Node During Growth and Aging

BackgroundFibrosis or fatty infiltration of the human sinoatrial (SA) node is generally believed to represent replacement of the SA nodal cells by connective tissue. Quantitative analysis, however, has not been performed precisely to validate the interpretation of such histological changes. Methods and ResultsThe actual volume of the SA node and its components were calculated according to the sum of the pixel number representing the colors of SA nodal cells and connective tissue in serial sections using a digital color image analyzer. Average volume occupied by the total SA nodal cells in adolescents and adults (n=7) was 3.55±0.45 mm3, which was 2.4 times greater than that in infants (n=3). The rate of increase was smaller than that of the total SA node (4.2 times, 16.68±2.56 mm3 in adolescents and adults). The considerable discrepancy in the growth ratio between the SA nodal cells and the total SA node resulted from an increase in the volume of connective tissue (7.4 times). In the elderly (n=9), the volume of total SA node and SA nodal cells actually decreased (13.10±1.85 mm3 and 2.18±0.44 mm3), whereas that of fibrous connective tissue remained unchanged. Constant DNA ploidy patterns of SA nodal cells determined by cytofluorometry indicated that SA nodal cells never synthesize DNA during growth. ConclusionsUntil adulthood, the actual volume of SA nodal cells does not decrease, although the increase in volume ratio of the interstitial tissue to the total SA node has merely given a false impression of involution of SA nodal cells. Atrophy of SA nodal cells, however, occurs during aging together with reduction of the SA node and/or infiltration of fatty tissue.
Endemic Cardiovascular Diseases of the Poorest Billion

The poorest billion people are distributed throughout the world, though most are concentrated in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) data can be sparse in low- and middle-income countries beyond urban centers. Despite this urban bias, CVD registries from the poorest countries have long revealed a predominance of nonatherosclerotic stroke, hypertensive heart disease, nonischemic and Chagas cardiomyopathies, rheumatic heart disease, and congenital heart anomalies, among others. Ischemic heart disease has been relatively uncommon. Here, we summarize what is known about the epidemiology of CVDs among the world’s poorest people and evaluate the relevance of global targets for CVD control in this population. We assessed both primary data sources, and the 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study modeled estimates in the world’s 16 poorest countries where 62% of the population are among the poorest billion. We found that ischemic heart disease accounted for only 12% of the combined CVD and congenital heart anomaly disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in the poorest countries, compared with 51% of DALYs in high-income countries. We found that as little as 53% of the combined CVD and congenital heart anomaly burden (1629/3049 DALYs per 100 000) was attributed to behavioral or metabolic risk factors in the poorest countries (eg, in Niger, 82% of the population among the poorest billion) compared with 85% of the combined CVD and congenital heart anomaly burden (4439/5199 DALYs) in high-income countries. Further, of the combined CVD and congenital heart anomaly burden, 34% was accrued in people under age 30 years in the poorest countries, while only 3% is accrued under age 30 years in high-income countries. We conclude although the current global targets for noncommunicable disease and CVD control will help diminish premature CVD death in the poorest populations, they are not sufficient. Specifically, the current framework (1) excludes deaths of people <30 years of age and deaths attributable to congenital heart anomalies, and (2) emphasizes interventions to prevent and treat conditions attributed to behavioral and metabolic risks factors. We recommend a complementary strategy for the poorest populations that targets premature death at younger ages, addresses environmental and infectious risks, and introduces broader integrated health system interventions, including cardiac surgery for congenital and rheumatic heart disease.
A platform independent tool for programming, visualization and simulation of simplified FPGAs

During the last few decades complex programmable circuits have seen a widespread usage in various digital circuit applications. One prominent example are Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Teaching FPGA technology has become an integral part of introductory digital logic courses. However, implementing Boolean functions in this technology requires understanding of several steps that are not trivial, including Boolean function decomposition, mapping the design into physical programmable units and routing. We have developed a portable Java-based tool which allows students to experiment with the required steps for arbitrary Boolean functions and to simulate the obtained implementation. In this paper, we give an overview of the developed tool and discuss its usage in class.
Kinect depth map based enhancement for low light surveillance image

High noise level from darkness and low dynamic range are two characteristics of low light surveillance image that severely degrade the visual quality. Traditional low light image enhancement methods merely use the 2D cues without the depth information of the scene. Recently, the depth based image enhancement methods are proposed to enhance the depth perception of the image. However, these depth based methods are focus on the normal light image and only enhance the local depth perception. In this paper, based on the characteristics that the depth map captured by Kinect is less affected by low light condition than color image, we propose a Kinect depth based enhancement algorithm to enlarge the dynamic range and meanwhile to enhance the depth perception for the low light surveillance image. In our algorithm, firstly, the depth level similarity is incorporated into the non-local means denoising to remove the noises while better preserve object edges. Then, the depth aware contrast stretching is performed to enlarge the dynamic range and meanwhile to enhance both globe and local depth perception for low light surveillance image. Experimental results on low light surveillance images show that our proposed algorithm achieves better perceptual quality than previous work.
Topology and Routing in Computational Capacity Evaluation of Ad hoc Networks

The Ad hoc networks are the wireless networks where the communication takes place through the different nodes. For example, in mobile Ad hoc network, the data is transmitted and received through the different mobile nodes. Other example may include the laptops, smart homes etc. Main issue in the Ad hoc network is the life time of batteries which are used by the different nodes. Battery life depends on the amount of information transmission and number of hops. For optimal use of battery life, different data routing algorithms are reported in literature. This paper basically presents the brief overview of the computational capacity maximization approaches and also summarizes the critical analysis of the existing routing protocols. In addition, this paper discusses the topology related issues. In general, the nodes are deployed randomly and most of the routing protocols refer this topology. The geometrical topology is also discussed in this paper to design the routing algorithm. With the consideration of mobility of nodes, one can design the routing algorithm where once the nodes location geometry shape is identified, the same shape can be used for the changed position of the nodes with deletion or insertion of nodes.
Category differences in brain activation studies: where do they come from?

Differences in the neural processing of six categories of pictorial stimuli (maps, body parts, objects, animals, famous faces and colours) were investigated using positron emission tomography. Stimuli were presented either with or without the written name of the picture, thereby creating a naming condition and a reading condition. As predicted, naming increased the demands on lexical processes. This was demonstrated by activation of the left temporal lobe in a posterior region associated with name retrieval in several previous studies. This lexical effect was common to all meaningful stimuli and no categoryspecific effects were observed for naming relative to reading. Nevertheless, category differences were found when naming and reading were considered together. Stimuli with greater visual complexity (animals, faces and maps) enhanced activation in the left extrastriate cortex. Furthermore, map recognition, which requires greater spatio–topographical processing, also activated the right occipito–parietal and parahippocampal cortices. These effects in the visuo–patial regions emphasize inevitable differences in the perceptual properties of pictorial stimuli. In the semantic temporal regions, famous faces and objects enhanced activation in the left antero–lateral and postero–lateral cortices, respectively. In addition, we showed that the same posterior left temporal region is also activated by body parts. We conclude that category–specific brain activations depend more on differential processing at the perceptual and semantic levels rather than at the lexical retrieval level.
Infectious disease control using contact tracing in random and scale-free networks

Contact tracing aims to identify and isolate individuals that have been in contact with infectious individuals. The efficacy of contact tracing and the hierarchy of traced nodes—nodes with higher degree traced first—is investigated and compared on random and scale-free (SF) networks with the same number of nodes N and average connection K. For values of the transmission rate larger than a threshold, the final epidemic size on SF networks is smaller than that on corresponding random networks. While in random networks new infectious and traced nodes from all classes have similar average degrees, in SF networks the average degree of nodes that are in more advanced stages of the disease is higher at any given time. On SF networks tracing removes possible sources of infection with high average degree. However a higher tracing effort is required to control the epidemic than on corresponding random networks due to the high initial velocity of spread towards the highly connected nodes. An increased latency period fails to significantly improve contact tracing efficacy. Contact tracing has a limited effect if the removal rate of susceptible nodes is relatively high, due to the fast local depletion of susceptible nodes.
Measuring the effect of cued recall on work meetings

Recent technological improvements allow us to capture an increasing share of our everyday experiences, e.g. holidays, shopping routines, or sports activities, and store them in a digital format. An interesting avenue to explore in this context is how reviewing such captured content can improve one's memories of the original events. In this position paper, we describe a planned experiment to investigate the impact of such captured recordings (and their subsequent review) on supporting work meetings. We provide the planned study procedure, explain the envisioned apparatus and metric, and describe the technology used to support the review activity.
The effects of the task context on the perceived personality of a Nao robot

lot of research has been done on whether complementary personalities or similar personalities are preferred for robots and virtual agents, but much of it has had conflicting results. In this study there is sought to clarify if the preference for a robot is affected by the task that it is performing. German and Dutch students participated in a between subjects design experiment. In total the sample consisted of 32 students. The experiment uses a validated questionnaire for determining personality. Six videos show a robot performing a certain task while interacting with a human. The robot was manipulated so that it had recognizable introvert and extravert personalities. The participant then randomly saw one of these six movies and filled in a second validated questionnaire used to acquire results. The results show that how intelligent the robot is perceived by the participants is related to the task, but how enjoyable they considered the robot wasn't related to the task that it was performing, but was instead related to the personality of the robot. How fun they considered the robot differed in one task, but the reason for this is unclear. This shows that the task must be taken into account when you want to create a robot that is perceived intelligent, the robot has to be tailored to the task if it should be perceived as intelligent as possible.
Implicit visibility and antiradiance for interactive global illumination

We reformulate the rendering equation to alleviate the need for explicit visibility computation, thus enabling interactive global illumination on graphics hardware. This is achieved by treating visibility implicitly and propagating an additional quantity, called antiradiance, to compensate for light transmitted extraneously. Our new algorithm shifts visibility computation to simple local iterations by maintaining additional directional antiradiance information with samples in the scene. It is easy to parallelize on a GPU. By correctly treating discretization and filtering, we can compute indirect illumination in scenes with dynamic objects much faster than traditional methods. Our results show interactive update of indirect illumination with moving characters and lights.
Instantaneous P- and T-wave detection: Assessment of three ECG fiducial points detection algorithms

Arrhythmia detection algorithms require the exact and instantaneous detection of fiducial points in the ECG signal. These fiducial points (QRS-complex, P- and T-wave) correspond to distinct cardiac contraction phases. The performance evaluation of different fiducial points detection algorithms require the existence of large databases (DBs) encompassing reference annotations. Up to last year, P- and T-wave annotations were only available for the QT DB. This was addressed by Elgendi et al. who provided P- and T-wave annotations to the MIT-BIH arrhythmia DB. A variety of ECG fiducial points detection algorithms exists in literature, whereas, to the best knowledge of the authors, we could not identify any single-lead algorithm ready for instantaneous P- and T-wave detection. In this work, we present three P- and T-wave detection algorithms: a revised version for QRS detection using line fitting capable to detect P- and T-wave, an expeditious version of a wavelet based ECG delineation algorithm, and a fast naive fiducial points detection algorithm. The fast naive fiducial points detection algorithm performed best on both DBs with sensitivities ranging from 73.0% (P-wave detection, error interval of ± 40 ms) to 89.4% (T-wave detection, error interval of ± 80 ms). As this algorithm detects a wave event in every search window, it has to be investigated how this affects arrhythmia detection algorithms. The reference Matlab implementations are available for download to encourage the development of high-accurate and automated ECG processing algorithms for the integration in daily life using mobile computers.
Cell-to-cell transmission of human immunodeficiency virus infection induces two distinct phases of viral RNA expression under separate regulatory control.

A cell clone persistently infected with human T cell-lymphotrophic virus type IIIB (H3B cells) contained mainly the multiply spliced (2 kb) and singly spliced (4.3 kb) species of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA. When H3B cells were co-cultured with susceptible HUT78 cells, cell fusion occurred within 4 h of cell mixing and was accompanied by a marked increase of the unspliced full-length (9.2 kb) HIV RNA. This first phase of viral RNA induction (4 to 12 h post-infection) was followed by a second phase of viral RNA synthesis from 24 h p.i. in which there were significant increases in all three species of HIV RNA. Reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors such as azidothymidine (AZT) at concentrations that abolished de novo HIV DNA synthesis, abolished the first phase but not the second phase of viral RNA synthesis in our model system. A comparable one-step cell-free virus infection showed a pattern of viral RNA synthesis similar to that of the cell-to-cell transmission of infection. However, viral RNA synthesis following cell-free virus infection was totally inhibited by RT inhibitors. The early phase (4 to 12 h) expression of 9.2 kb HIV RNA is likely to use newly synthesized HIV DNA as template; during this phase, HIV RNA and DNA syntheses occur simultaneously, with each process being dependent on the other for maximal yield. During the later (24 to 48 h) phase, all three HIV RNA species may be transcribed at least in part from proviral DNA from the original donor cells. This later phase may provide one of the mechanisms for natural spread of virus to new cells and for enhanced viral gene expression in vivo, despite the presence of AZT.
New biogeographical and morphological information on Physaloptera ngoci Le-Van-Hoa, 1961 (Nematoda: Physalopteridae) in South-east Asian rodents

During a study of the helminth fauna of 1,643 rodents trapped along the Mekong River (Thailand, Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Cambodia) in 2008–2011, the spirurid nematode Physaloptera ngoci Le-Van-Hoa, 1961 was recovered with an overall prevalence of 2.8%. Based on the original description, it was identified in nine of 23 different Murinae host species and is here reported for the first time from these three countries. A scanning electron microscopy study provides additional morphological data.
Disentangling syntax and intelligibility in auditory language comprehension

Studies of the neural basis of spoken language comprehension typically focus on aspects of auditory processing by varying signal intelligibility, or on higher‐level aspects of language processing such as syntax. Most studies in either of these threads of language research report brain activation including peaks in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and/or the superior temporal sulcus (STS), but it is not clear why these areas are recruited in functionally different studies. The current fMRI study aims to disentangle the functional neuroanatomy of intelligibility and syntax in an orthogonal design. The data substantiate functional dissociations between STS and STG in the left and right hemispheres: first, manipulations of speech intelligibility yield bilateral mid‐anterior STS peak activation, whereas syntactic phrase structure violations elicit strongly left‐lateralized mid STG and posterior STS activation. Second, ROI analyses indicate all interactions of speech intelligibility and syntactic correctness to be located in the left frontal and temporal cortex, while the observed right‐hemispheric activations reflect less specific responses to intelligibility and syntax. Our data demonstrate that the mid‐to‐anterior STS activation is associated with increasing speech intelligibility, while the mid‐to‐posterior STG/STS is more sensitive to syntactic information within the speech. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Motor inhibition and cognitive flexibility in obsessive-compulsive disorder and trichotillomania.

OBJECTIVE Problems with inhibiting certain pathological behaviors are integral to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), trichotillomania, and other putative obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders. The authors assessed and compared motor inhibition and cognitive flexibility in OCD and trichotillomania for the first time, to their knowledge. METHOD The Stop-Signal Task and the Intradimensiona/Extradimensional Shift Task were administered to 20 patients with OCD, 17 patients with trichotillomania, and 20 healthy comparison subjects. RESULTS Both OCD and trichotillomania showed impaired inhibition of motor responses. For trichotillomania, the deficit was worse than for OCD, and the degree of the deficit correlated significantly with symptom severity. Only patients with OCD showed deficits in cognitive flexibility. CONCLUSIONS Impaired inhibition of motor responses (impulsivity) was found in OCD and trichotillomania, whereas cognitive inflexibility (thought to contribute to compulsivity) was limited to OCD. This assessment will advance the characterization and classification of obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders and aid the development of novel treatments.
What If Piketty Is Right? Real Economic Costs of Rising Income Inequality

ABSTRACT Thomas Piketty's analysis of income and wealth distribution, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the most affluent, while lower and middle class real incomes have stagnated; he warns that this trend could have “potentially terrifying” results, possibly even violent revolution. This article presents evidence that growing inequality weakens the entire economy by eroding the purchasing power of the vast majority of the population and the education of the labor force, while increasing its vulnerability to future collapses of the financial markets. It agrees with Piketty's concern that the capitalist market system, driven by Adam Smith's classic reliance on the pursuit of individual self-interest, lacks mechanisms to correct these distortions, which must be addressed by new policy initiatives.
The role of environmental and controller complexity in the distributed optimization of multi-robot obstacle avoidance

The ability to move in complex environments is a fundamental requirement for robots to be a part of our daily lives. Increasing the controller complexity may be a desirable choice in order to obtain an improved performance. However, these two aspects may pose a considerable challenge on the optimization of robotic controllers. In this paper, we study the trade-offs between the complexity of reactive controllers and the complexity of the environment in the optimization of multi-robot obstacle avoidance for resource-constrained platforms. The optimization is carried out in simulation using a distributed, noise-resistant implementation of Particle Swarm Optimization, and the resulting controllers are evaluated both in simulation and with real robots. We show that in a simple environment, linear controllers with only two parameters perform similarly to more complex non-linear controllers with up to twenty parameters, even though the latter ones require more evaluation time to be learned. In a more complicated environment, we show that there is an increase in performance when the controllers can differentiate between front and backwards sensors, but increasing further the number of sensors and adding non-linear activation functions provide no further benefit. In both environments, augmenting reactive control laws with simple memory capabilities causes the highest increase in performance. We also show that in the complex environment the performance measurements are noisier, the optimal parameter region is smaller, and more iterations are required for the optimization process to converge.