Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Severe Obesity in Young Women and Reproductive Health: The Danish National Birth Cohort

Background Little is known about reproductive health in severely obese women. In this study, we present associations between different levels of severe obesity and a wide range of health outcomes in the mother and child. Methods From the Danish National Birth Cohort, we obtained self-reported information about prepregnant body mass index (BMI) for 2451 severely obese women and 2450 randomly selected women from the remaining cohort who served as a comparison group. Information about maternal and infant outcomes was also self-reported or came from registers. Logistic regression was used to estimate the association between different levels of severe obesity and reproductive outcomes. Principal Findings Subfecundity was more frequent in severely obese women, and during pregnancy, they had an excess risk of urinary tract infections, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and other hypertensive disorders which increased with severity of obesity. They tended to have a higher risk of both pre- and post-term birth, and risk of cesarean and instrumental deliveries increased across obesity categories. After birth, severely obese women more often failed to initiate or sustain breastfeeding. Risk of weight retention 1.5 years after birth was similar to that of other women, but after adjustment for gestational weight gain, the risk was increased, especially in women in the lowest obesity category. In infants, increasing maternal obesity was associated with decreased risk of a low birth weight and increased risk of a high birth weight. Estimates for ponderal index showed the same pattern indicating an increasing risk of neonatal fatness with severity of obesity. Infant obesity measured one year after birth was also increased in children of severely obese mothers. Conclusion Severe obesity is correlated with a substantial disease burden in reproductive health. Although the causal mechanisms remain elusive, these findings are useful for making predictions and planning health care at the individual level.
Isolated revision of the acetabular component using alumina-on-alumina bearings without a metal sleeve: A preliminary study

Introduction: There has been a debate on the use of ceramic-on-ceramic coupling with the retained femoral stem in isolated acetabular revision. The purpose of this study was to retrospectively review the results and complications of isolated revision of the acetabular component using alumina-on-alumina bearings. Methods: Between August 2010 and December 2013, 22 patients (23 hips) with a mean age of 60.74 years (40–73) underwent isolated revision of the acetabular component from metal-on-polyethylene to alumina-on-alumina bearings without using a metal sleeve on the undamaged trunnion. All patients completed clinical and radiographic evaluation. Results: At a mean follow-up of 3 years (2–5.5), all patients had a significant improvement in the clinical outcome, including Harris Hip Score (84.9 vs. 43, p < 0.001), West Ontario McMaster University Osteoarthritis Index Score (14.4 vs. 49.2, p < 0.001), and visual analogue pain score (1.42 vs. 6.63, p < 0.001). Complications included one aseptic loosening of the acetabular component and three noisy hips (click only). No fracture of the ceramic bearings, dislocation, infection, or squeaking noise were observed in any of the patients. Conclusion: Isolated revision of the acetabular component to alumina-on-alumina bearings on the undamaged trunnion may be considered if there is no available titanium sleeves. Our study showed a satisfactory early outcome with minimal complications. However, a longer term follow-up study is necessary.
Situation-Aware Dynamic Service Coordination in an IoT Environment

The Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure with numerous diverse physical devices are growing up rapidly, which need a dynamic services coordination approach that can integrate those heterogeneous physical devices into the context-aware IoT infrastructure. This paper proposes a situation-aware dynamic IoT services coordination approach. First, focusing on the definition of formal situation event pattern with event selection and consumption strategy, an automaton-based situational event detection algorithm is proposed. Second, the enhanced event-condition-action is used to coordinate the IoT services effectively, and also the collaboration process decomposing algorithm and the rule mismatch detection algorithms are proposed. Third, the typical scenarios of IoT services coordination for smart surgery process are also illustrated and the measurement and analysis of the platform’s performance are reported. Finally, the conclusions and future works are given.
Sentiment Lexicon Enrichment Using Emotional Vector Representation

With the explosive growth of social media sites, an enormous amount of opinionated data has become numerically documented online. The explosion of this kind of data gives rise of new areas: sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Our purpose in this paper is to determine the polarity of Facebook comments "positive or negative" using machine learning-based approach. This approach requires an adequate vector representation of linguistic units (words or sentences) to obtain better classification performance. For this reason, we present a new emotional vector representation of words which can faithfully translate their semantic and sentimental characteristics, based on emotion symbols. Furthermore, we propose an enrichment step that aims to enlarge the lexicon and dynamically update word representation according to new contexts. Finally, by using these word representations, we present the comments in the same feature space to classify them and predict their polarity. We use Support Vector Machines to show that our emotional vector representation of lexicon's word and its enrichment significantly improves accuracy for sentiment analysis problem compared with the well-known bag-of-words vector representations, using dataset derived from Facebook. Our results are also consistent and effective.
The feasibility of Cassia fistula gum with polyaluminium chloride for the decolorization of reactive dyeing wastewater

In order to find a new environmental-friendly coagulant that can partially replace conventional polyaluminium chloride (PAC) which was shown to be toxic to aquatic environment, gum extracted from seeds of Cassia fistula Linn. (CF) was investigated in decolorization of reactive dyes Blue 19 (RB19) and Black 5 (RB5) using jar-test experiments. The optimal results showed that crude CF gum (at pH 10, initial dye concentrations (IDC) of 100 and 50 mg L-1, gum dosages 200 and 300 mg L-1, reaction time 30 and 45 min, and agitation speed 60 rpm) did not achieve high degrees of decolorization in RB5 and RB19 (55.7 and 62.0 %, respectively) as compared with PAC coagulant (97.2 and 94.4 %, respectively) at the same IDC and reaction time. Whereas when CF gum was used in combination with PAC, decolorization efficiencies of both dyes reached over 92 % at 40 % volume fraction of gum. These results indicated the potential of using CF gum as a “green” coagulant or as a contributing factor to color removal of textile wastewater.
A fingerprint of the epileptogenic zone in human epilepsies

Identifying an electrical biomarker of epileptogenicity would facilitate epilepsy surgery. Using time-frequency analysis during the pre-ictal-to-ictal transition, Grinenko et al. identify a fingerprint of the epileptogenic zone, which they validate through machine learning. The time-frequency pattern is consistent with a pathophysiological role of fast inhibitory interneurons in seizure onset.
Real-Time Contrast Enhancement to Improve Speech Recognition

An algorithm that operates in real-time to enhance the salient features of speech is described and its efficacy is evaluated. The Contrast Enhancement (CE) algorithm implements dynamic compressive gain and lateral inhibitory sidebands across channels in a modified winner-take-all circuit, which together produce a form of suppression that sharpens the dynamic spectrum. Normal-hearing listeners identified spectrally smeared consonants (VCVs) and vowels (hVds) in quiet and in noise. Consonant and vowel identification, especially in noise, were improved by the processing. The amount of improvement did not depend on the degree of spectral smearing or talker characteristics. For consonants, when results were analyzed according to phonetic feature, the most consistent improvement was for place of articulation. This is encouraging for hearing aid applications because confusions between consonants differing in place are a persistent problem for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss.
Continuous authentication using one-class classifiers and their fusion

While developing continuous authentication systems (CAS), we generally assume that samples from both genuine and impostor classes are readily available. However, the assumption may not be true in certain circumstances. Therefore, we explore the possibility of implementing CAS using only genuine samples. Specifically, we investigate the usefulness of four one-class classifiers OCC (elliptic envelope, isolation forest, local outliers factor, and one-class support vector machines) and their fusion. The performance of these classifiers was evaluated on four distinct behavioral biometric datasets, and compared with eight multi-class classifiers (MCC). The results demonstrate that if we have sufficient training data from the genuine user the OCC, and their fusion can closely match the performance of the majority of MCC. Our findings encourage the research community to use OCC in order to build CAS as it does not require knowledge of impostor class during the enrollment process.
Circular Permutation of Red Fluorescent Proteins

Circular permutation of fluorescent proteins provides a substrate for the design of molecular sensors. Here we describe a systematic exploration of permutation sites for mCherry and mKate using a tandem fusion template approach. Circular permutants retaining more than 60% (mCherry) and 90% (mKate) brightness of the parent molecules are reported, as well as a quantitative evaluation of the fluorescence from neighboring mutations. Truncations of circular permutants indicated essential N- and C- terminal segments and substantial flexibility in the use of these molecules. Structural evaluation of two cp-mKate variants indicated no major conformational changes from the previously reported wild-type structure, and cis conformation of the chromophores. Four cp-mKates were identified with over 80% of native fluorescence, providing important new building blocks for sensor and complementation experiments.
Evolving artificial pain from fault detection through pattern data analysis

Fault detection is a classical area of study in robotics and extensive research works have been dedicated to investigate its broad applications. As the breath of robots applications requiring human interaction grow, it is important for robots to acquire sophisticated social skills such as empathy towards pain. However, it turns out that this is difficult to achieve without having an appropriate concept of pain that relies on robots being aware of their own body machinery aspects. This paper introduces the concept of pain, based on the ability to develop a state of awareness of robots own body and the use of the fault detection approach to generate artificial robot pain. Faults provide the stimulus and defines a classified magnitude value, which constitutes artificial pain generation, comprised of synthetic pain classes. Our experiment evaluates some of synthetic pain classes and the results show that the robot gains awareness of its internal state through its ability to predict its joint motion and generate appropriate artificial pain. The robot is also capable of alerting humans whenever a task will generate artificial pain, or whenever humans fails to acknowledge the alert, the robot can take a considerable preventive actions through joint stiffness adjustment.
Nonstochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with Graph-Structured Feedback

We present and study a partial-information model of online learning, where a decision maker repeatedly chooses from a finite set of actions, and observes some subset of the associated losses. This naturally models several situations where the losses of different actions are related, and knowing the loss of one action provides information on the loss of other actions. Moreover, it generalizes and interpolates between the well studied full-information setting (where all losses are revealed) and the bandit setting (where only the loss of the action chosen by the player is revealed). We provide several algorithms addressing different variants of our setting, and provide tight regret bounds depending on combinatorial properties of the information feedback structure.
Comparison of methods for estimating premorbid intelligence

ABSTRACT To evaluate impact of neurological injury on cognitive performance it is typically necessary to derive a baseline (or “premorbid”) estimate of a patient’s general cognitive ability prior to the onset of impairment. In this paper, we consider a range of common methods for producing this estimate, including those based on current best performance, embedded “hold/no-hold” tests, demographic information, and word reading ability. Ninety-two neurologically healthy adult participants were assessed on the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV; Wechsler, D. (2008). Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (4th ed.). San Antonio, TX: Pearson Assessment. ) and on two widely used word reading tests: National Adult Reading Test (NART; Nelson, H. E. (1982). National Adult Reading Test (NART): For the assessment of premorbid intelligence in patients with dementia: Test manual. Windsor: NFER-Nelson. ; Nelson, H. E. , & Willison, J. (1991). National Adult Reading Test (NART). Windsor: NFER-Nelson. ) and Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR; Wechsler, D. (2001). Wechsler Test of Adult Reading: WTAR. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation. ). Our findings indicate that reading tests provide the most reliable and precise estimates of WAIS-IV full-scale IQ, although the addition of demographic data provides modest improvement. Nevertheless, we observed considerable variability in correlations between NART/WTAR scores and individual WAIS-IV indices, which indicated particular usefulness in estimating more crystallised premorbid abilities (as represented by the verbal comprehension and general ability indices) relative to fluid abilities (working memory and perceptual reasoning indices). We discuss and encourage the development of new methods for improving premorbid estimates of cognitive abilities in neurological patients.
Superdimensional Metamaterial Resonators From Sub-Riemannian Geometry

We propose a fundamentally new method for the design of metamaterial arrays, valid for any waves modeled by the Helmholtz equation, including scalar optics and acoustics. The design and analysis of these devices is based on eigenvalue and eigenfunction asymptotics of solutions to Schr\"odinger wave equations with harmonic and degenerate potentials. These resonators behave superdimensionally, with a higher local density of eigenvalues and greater concentration of waves than expected from the physical dimension, e.g., planar resonators function as 3- or higher-dimensional media, and bulk material as effectively of dimension 4 or higher. Applications include antennas with a high density of resonant frequencies and giant focussing, and are potentially broadband.
Gender and Weight Shape Brain Dynamics during Food Viewing

Hemodynamic imaging results have associated both gender and body weight to variation in brain responses to food-related information. However, the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of gender-related and weight-wise modulations in food discrimination still remain to be elucidated. We analyzed visual evoked potentials (VEPs) while normal-weighted men (n = 12) and women (n = 12) categorized photographs of energy-dense foods and non-food kitchen utensils. VEP analyses showed that food categorization is influenced by gender as early as 170 ms after image onset. Moreover, the female VEP pattern to food categorization co-varied with participants' body weight. Estimations of the neural generator activity over the time interval of VEP modulations (i.e. by means of a distributed linear inverse solution [LAURA]) revealed alterations in prefrontal and temporo-parietal source activity as a function of image category and participants' gender. However, only neural source activity for female responses during food viewing was negatively correlated with body-mass index (BMI) over the respective time interval. Women showed decreased neural source activity particularly in ventral prefrontal brain regions when viewing food, but not non-food objects, while no such associations were apparent in male responses to food and non-food viewing. Our study thus indicates that gender influences are already apparent during initial stages of food-related object categorization, with small variations in body weight modulating electrophysiological responses especially in women and in brain areas implicated in food reward valuation and intake control. These findings extend recent reports on prefrontal reward and control circuit responsiveness to food cues and the potential role of this reactivity pattern in the susceptibility to weight gain.
Stereoisomers of Saponins in Panax notoginseng (Sanqi): A Review

Panax notoginseng (Sanqi), a traditional Chinese medical drug which has been applied to medical use for over four centuries, contains high content of dammarane-type tetracyclic triterpenoid saponins. A number of stereoisomeric dammarane-type saponins exist in this precious herb, and some are particularly regarded as “biomarkers” in processed notoginseng. Contemporary researches have indicated that some saponin stereoisomers may show stereospecific pharmacological activities, such as anti-tumor, antioxidative, anti-photoaging, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, and neuro-protective activities, as well as stereoselective effects on ion channel current regulation, cardiovascular system, and immune system. The current review provides a comprehensive overview of chemical compositions of raw and processed P. notoginseng with a particular emphasis on saponin stereoisomers. Besides, the pharmacological and pharmacokinetic researches, as well as determination and biotechnological preparation methods of stereoisomeric saponins in notoginseng are discussed extensively.
Piroxicam/β-cyclodextrin complex included in cellulose derivatives-based matrix microspheres as new solid dispersion-controlled release formulations

New formulations capable to enhance piroxicam (PRX) water solubility and at the same time to control and adjust its release have been developed. For this purpose, two methods have been used and combined to achieve this goal, namely complexation and microencapsulation by O/W emulsion solvent evaporation. In order to modify the drug release, first, microparticles composed of pure PRX and ethylcellulose (EC) or mixtures of EC and hydroxypropylmethylcellulose (HPMC) were prepared, and then, other micropaticles containing the β-cyclodextrin/piroxicam (β-CD/PRX) complex obtained by the solvent evaporation technique and EC or a mixture of EC and HPMC were produced and tested. These formulations were characterized by FT-IR, XRD, optical microscopy, and SEM methods. Drug dissolution tests were carried out in acidic media at pH = 1.2 and 37°C. Depending on the microparticles composition, their size (d10) ranged between 49 μ. m and 121 μ. m and PRXloaded varied from 10.8 % to 27.7 %. The effect of complexation and HPMC polymer on the drug release was investigated; the results demonstrated that the Higuchi’s release constant significantly increased when using the EC/HPMC mixture as a matrix with pure PRX or only EC as a matrix with the β-CD/PRX complex. The results are remarkably promising since the combination of these processes provided new SD-CR formulations of piroxicam which enabled simultaneous enhancement and control of its release from the carriers.
An extended Kalman filter for quaternion-based orientation estimation using MARG sensors

Presents an extended Kalman filter for real-time estimation of rigid body orientation using the newly developed MARG (magnetic, angular rate, and gravity) sensors. Each MARG sensor contains a three-axis magnetometer, a three-axis angular rate sensor, and a three-axis accelerometer. The filter represents rotations using quaternions rather than Euler angles, which eliminates the long-standing problem of singularities associated with attitude estimation. A process model for rigid body angular motions and angular rate measurements is defined. The process model converts angular rates into quaternion rates, which are integrated to obtain quaternions. The Gauss-Newton iteration algorithm is utilized to find the best quaternion that relates the measured accelerations and earth magnetic field in the body coordinate frame to calculated values in the earth coordinate frame. The best quaternion is used as part of the measurements for the Kalman filter. As a result of this approach, the measurement equations of the Kalman filter become linear, and the computational requirements are significantly reduced, making it possible to estimate orientation in real time. Extensive testing of the filter with synthetic data and actual sensor data proved it to be satisfactory. Test cases included the presence of large initial errors as well as high noise levels. In all cases the filter was able to converge and accurately track rotational motions.
Ursolic Acid Suppresses Interleukin-17 (IL-17) Production by Selectively Antagonizing the Function of RORγt Protein*

Th17 cells have recently emerged as a major player in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases via the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-17, IL-17F, and IL-22. The differentiation of Th17 cells and the associated cytokine production is directly controlled by RORγt. Here we show that ursolic acid (UA), a small molecule present in herbal medicine, selectively and effectively inhibits the function of RORγt, resulting in greatly decreased IL-17 expression in both developing and differentiated Th17 cells. In addition, treatment with UA ameliorated experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. The results thus suggest UA as a valuable drug candidate or leading compound for developing treatments of Th17-mediated inflammatory diseases and cancer.