Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ras gene mutations in patients with non-small cell lung carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in most countries, with every year's increasing incidence. At present, surgical resection of early stage disease presents the only treatment associated with a high likelihood of 5-year survival. On the other hand, patients with advanced disease have 5-year survival less than 5%. This poor prognosis is attributable largely to lack of efficient diagnostic methods for early detection and the inability to cure metastatic disease. Therefore, efforts aimed at early identification and interventions in lung cancer are of the highest importance. Mutations in ras oncogenes appear to play a significant role in the development of non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Thus, the aim of our study was to determine the incidence of H-ras and K-ras mutations in patients with NSCLC of different histological subtypes: adenocarcinomas (AC), squamous cell carcinomas (SCC), large cell carcinomas (LCC), and adenosquamous carcinomas (AC-SCC). METHODS: We analyzed 41 patients with stage I, II and III of histologically confirmed NSCLC (histological grade 2 and 3). DNA was isolated from frozen tumors by standard phenol-chloroform extraction. Mutations in exon 1 H-ras and K-ras gene were detected by PCR-SSCP method. RESULTS: Mutations in the H-ras gene were found in only 2 of 41 analyzed tumors (4.9%). The both mutations were found in SCC making the overall incidence in this histological subtype 10.5% (2 of 19). K-ras mutations were detected in 31.7% (13 out of 41) of tumors, with higher incidence in tumors of clinical stage I - 45% (9 out of 20). CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that H-ras mutations apparently play an inferior role in lung carcinogenesis. However, mutations in K-ras gene probably present an early event in genesis of NSCLC, and not only in adenocarcinomas, as the majority of previous reports indicate, but also in squamous cell carcinomas as well.
Efficient Storage and Retrieval by Content and Address of Static Files

We consider a set of static files or inventories, each consisting of the same number of entries, each entry a binary word of the same fixed length selected (with replacement) from the set of all binary sequences of that length, and the entries in each file sorted into lexical order. We also consider several retrieval questions of interest for each such file. One is to find the value of the jth entry, another to find the number of entries of value less than k. When a binary representation of such a file is stored in computer memory and an algorithm or machine which knows only the file parameters (i.e. number of entries, number of possible values per entry) accesses some of the stored bits to answer a retrieval question, the number of bits stored and the number of bits accessed per retrieval question are two cost measures for the storage and retrieval task which have been used by Minsky and Papert. Bits stored depends on the representation chosen: bits accessed also depends on the retrieval question asked and on the algorithm used. We give firm lower bounds to minimax measures of bits stored and bits accessed for each of four retrieval questions, and construct representations and algorithms for a bit-addressable machine which come within factors of two or three of attaining all four bounds at once for files of any size. All four factors approach one for large enough files.
Molecular Cloning and Expression Analysis of Eight PgWRKY Genes in Panax ginseng Responsive to Salt and Hormones

Despite the importance of WRKY genes in plant physiological processes, little is known about their roles in Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer. Forty-eight unigenes on this species were previously reported as WRKY transcripts using the next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology. Subsequently, one gene that encodes PgWRKY1 protein belonging to subgroup II-d was cloned and functionally characterized. In this study, eight WRKY genes from the NGS-based transcriptome sequencing dataset designated as PgWRKY2-9 have been cloned and characterized. The genes encoding WRKY proteins were assigned to WRKY Group II (one subgroup II-c, four subgroup II-d, and three subgroup II-e) based on phylogenetic analysis. The cDNAs of the cloned PgWRKYs encode putative proteins ranging from 194 to 358 amino acid residues, each of which includes one WRKYGQK sequence motif and one C2H2-type zinc-finger motif. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis demonstrated that the eight analyzed PgWRKY genes were expressed at different levels in various organs including leaves, roots, adventitious roots, stems, and seeds. Importantly, the transcription responses of these PgWRKYs to methyl jasmonate (MeJA) showed that PgWRKY2, PgWRKY3, PgWRKY4, PgWRKY5, PgWRKY6, and PgWRKY7 were downregulated by MeJA treatment, while PgWRKY8 and PgWRKY9 were upregulated to varying degrees. Moreover, the PgWRKY genes increased or decreased by salicylic acid (SA), abscisic acid (ABA), and NaCl treatments. The results suggest that the PgWRKYs may be multiple stress–inducible genes responding to both salt and hormones.
Reductions in Resting Blood Pressure in Young Adults When Isometric Exercise Is Performed Whilst Walking

Aerobic and isometric training have been shown to reduce resting blood pressure, but simultaneous aerobic and isometric training have not been studied. The purpose of this study was to compare the changes in resting systolic (SBP), diastolic (DBP), and mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) after 6 weeks of either (i) simultaneous walking and isometric handgrip exercise (WHG), (ii) walking (WLK), (iii) isometric handgrip exercise (IHG), or control (CON). Forty-eight healthy sedentary participants (age 20.7 ± 1.7 yrs, mass 67.2 ± 10.2 kg, height 176.7 ± 1.2 cm, male n = 26, and female n = 22) were randomly allocated, to one of four groups (n = 12 in each). Training was performed 4 × week−1 and involved either treadmill walking for 30 minutes (WLK), handgrip exercise 3 × 10 s at 20% MVC (IHG), or both performed simultaneously (WHG). Resting SBP, DBP, and MAP were recorded at rest, before and after the 6-week study period. Reductions in resting blood pressure were significantly greater in the simultaneous walking and handgrip group than any other group. These results show that simultaneous walking and handgrip training may have summative effects on reductions in resting blood pressure.
Has a Consensus NL Generation Architecture Appeared, and is it Psycholinguistically Plausible?

I survey some recent applications-oriented NL generation systems, and claim that despite very different theoretical backgrounds, these systems have a remarkably similar architecture in terms of the modules they divide the generation process into, the computations these modules perform, and the way the modules interact with each other. I also compare this 'consensus architecture' among applied NLG systems with psycholinguistic knowledge about how humans speak, and argue that at least some aspects of the consensus architecture seem to be in agreement with what is known about human language production, despite the fact that psycholinguistic plausibility was not in general a goal of the developers of the surveyed systems.
PET and SPECT Imaging of Tumor Angiogenesis

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) based functional imaging utilize radiolabeled tracers to provide information for real time visualization of physiological or biological processes in live animals or humans. Disease-related biomarkers involved in initiation and/or progression of a pathological condition are imaged by these nuclear imaging technologies which lead to early detection of abnormalities prior to the appearance of morphological changes visualized by other imaging modalities such as CT or MRI (1-3). Additional advantages of nuclear imaging approaches are high sensitivity of detection and high spatial resolution. Further they are either nonor minimally invasive and highly quantitative (4). Together, these characteristics of PET and SPECT make them an invaluable technique for monitoring some diseases and disorders.
Structural Comparison of Human Mammalian Ste20-Like Kinases

Background The serine/threonine mammalian Ste-20 like kinases (MSTs) are key regulators of apoptosis, cellular proliferation as well as polarization. Deregulation of MSTs has been associated with disease progression in prostate and colorectal cancer. The four human MSTs are regulated differently by C-terminal regions flanking the catalytic domains. Principal Findings We have determined the crystal structure of kinase domain of MST4 in complex with an ATP-mimetic inhibitor. This is the first structure of an inactive conformation of a member of the MST kinase family. Comparison with active structures of MST3 and MST1 revealed a dimeric association of MST4 suggesting an activation loop exchanged mechanism of MST4 auto-activation. Together with a homology model of MST2 we provide a comparative analysis of the kinase domains for all four members of the human MST family. Significance The comparative analysis identified new structural features in the MST ATP binding pocket and has also defined the mechanism for autophosphorylation. Both structural features may be further explored for inhibitors design. Enhanced version This article can also be viewed as an enhanced version in which the text of the article is integrated with interactive 3D representations and animated transitions. Please note that a web plugin is required to access this enhanced functionality. Instructions for the installation and use of the web plugin are available in Text S1.
Policy gradient methods for controlling systems with discrete sensor information

In most existing motion control algorithms, a reference trajectory is tracked, based on a continuous measurement of the system’s response. In many industrial applications, however, it is either not possible or too expensive to install sensors which measure the system’s output over the complete stroke: instead, the motion can only be detected at certain discrete positions. The control objective in these systems is often not to track a complete trajectory accurately, but rather to achieve a given state at the sensor locations (e.g. to pass by the sensor at a given time, or with a given speed). Model-based control strategies are not suited for the control of these systems, due to the lack of sensor data. We are currently investigating the potential of a non-modelbased learning strategy, Reinforcement Learning (RL), in dealing with this kind of discrete sensor information. Here, we describe experiments with a simple yet challenging system, where a single sensor detects the passage of a mass being pushed by a linear motor.
A comparative study using different topological representations in pattern recognition based drug activity characterization

The use of certain machine learning and pattern recognition tools for automated pharmacological drug design has been recently introduced. Different families of learning algorithms have been applied to the task of associating observed chemical properties and pharmacological activities to certain kinds of representations of the candidate compounds. In this work, several families of molecular descriptors are considered in order to establish the appropriateness of these families for a particularly challenging drug design task consisting of characterizing the analgesic properties of a relatively large number of compounds. As a second goal, the composite use of descriptors from different families and a first attempt to select the best attributes from these families is considered. As a conclusion, relatively good discrimination results can be obtained by combining the best descriptors of the different families considered.
A demonstrated optical tracker with scalable work area for head-mounted display systems

An optoelectronic head-tracking system for head-mounted displays is described. The system features a scalable work area that currently measures 10' x 12', a measurement update rate of 20-100 Hz with 20-60 ms of delay, and a resolution specification of 2 mm and 0.2 degrees. The sensors consist of four head-mounted imaging devices that view infrared lightemitting diodes (LEDs) mounted in a 10' x 12' grid of modular 2' x 2' suspended ceiling panels. Photogrammetric techniques allow the head's location to be expressed as a function of the known LED positions and their projected images on the sensors. The work area is scaled by simply adding panels to the ceiling's grid. Discontinuities that occurred when changing working sets of LEDs were reduced by carefully managing all error sources, including LED placement tolerances, and by adopting an overdetermined mathematical model for the computation of head position: space resection by collinearity. The working system was demonstrated in the Tomorrow's Realities gallery at the ACM SIGGRAPH '91 conference. CR categories and subject descriptors: I.3. 1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture three dimensional displays; I.3. 7 [Computer Graphics]: ThreeDimensional Graphics and Realism Virtual Reality Additional
An hybrid intelligent approach for real-time traffic control

This paper deals with the problem of optimally regulating planned vehicle timetables for public transport when unforeseen events occur in real-time in the network. A multicriteria problem is solved by using an integrated intelligent approach that combines agent-based techniques, Tabu search algorithm and fuzzy preference model. The agents of our model act cooperatively in order to generate efficient solutions that optimize simultaneously and separately the different regulation objectives. This optimization is performed by means of a distributed tabu search algorithm. Efficient solutions are then, classified according to a fuzzy preference model by using an interactive solutions evaluation among agents. In order to assess the distributed approach, an experimental study was carried out on the base of some scenarios of disturbances occurred in a public transportation network.
A comparison of functional and impairment-based robotic training in severe to moderate chronic stroke: a pilot study.

OBJECTIVE To compare the outcome of training the functional movement of transport of the arm and grasping an object with the alternative of training the transport of the arm in isolation. DESIGN Pretest-posttest comparison. SETTING Rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient care. PARTICIPANTS Volunteer sample of forty-seven persons with persistent hemiparesis from a single, unilateral stroke within the past one to five years. INTERVENTION Robotic therapy 3 x/week for 6 weeks for the paretic upper limb consisted of either a) sensorimotor, active-assistive impairment-based exercise during repetitive planar reaching tasks, or b) a "free-hand" approach, in which the robot assisted subjects employing the sensorimotor active-assistive exercise to transport the hand to a series of targets, where it stopped to allow the person to interact with actual objects (functional approach 1), or c) transport and manipulation, in which the robot assisted subjects employing active-assistive exercise during repetitive planar reaching tasks while grasping a simulated object and releasing it at the target or followed by grasp and release of a simulated object (functional approach 2). PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE Fugl-Meyer Assessment. RESULTS All three groups improved from pre- to post-treatment with the sensorimotor impairment based approach demonstrating the best outcome of the three approaches. CONCLUSIONS Short-term, goal-directed robotic therapy can significantly improve motor abilities of the exercised limb segments in persons with chronic stroke, but contrary to expectation, training both the transport of the arm and manipulation of an object (functionally-based approaches) did not confer any advantage over training solely transport of the arm (impairment-based approach).
Discussions on Interpretability of Fuzzy Systems using Simple Examples

Two conflicting goals are often involved in the design of fuzzy rule-based systems: Accuracy maximization and interpretability maximization. A number of approaches have been proposed for finding a fuzzy rule-based system with a good accuracy-interpretability tradeoff. Formulation of the accuracy maximization is usually straightforward in each application area of fuzzy rule-based systems such as classification, regression and forecasting. Formulation of the interpretability maximization, however, is not so easy. This is because various aspects of fuzzy rule-based systems are related to their interpretability. Moreover, user's preference should be taken into account when a single fuzzy rule-based system is to be chosen from several alternatives with different accuracy-interpretability tradeoffs. In this paper, we discuss the difficulty in measuring the interpretability of fuzzy rule-based systems using very simple examples. We do not intend to propose any new interpretability measure. Our intention is to help to activate discussions on how to measure the interpretability of fuzzy rule-based systems. Keywords— Fuzzy systems, fuzzy rules, accuracy-interpretability tradeoff, multiobjective design of fuzzy systems.
Channel aware encryption and decision fusion for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study a secure transmission scheme in a distributed detection scenario. We consider passive eavesdropping where an enemy fusion center (EFC) located in a vicinity of an ally fusion center (AFC) tries to eavesdrop on wireless communications between sensors and the AFC. To ensure confidentiality in the transmitted data from the sensors, we design a transmission strategy for the sensors, which makes the AFC properly detect an unknown target while the EFC is totally ignorant of it. Two groups of sensors are activated and encrypt their measurements in different ways by exploiting a random channel gain of wireless fading channel as a seed for encryption. To detect the target, the AFC performs LLR based fusion rules based on the channel statistics instead of instantaneous channel state information. In addition, at high signal-to-noise ratio, we show that our fusion rule at the AFC is simplified to a modified Chair-Varshney fusion rule that only requires local detection probabilities to decide the target state. Our performance evaluations show that detection performance at the AFC exponentially decays with growing the number of sensors, whereas information-theoretic perfect secrecy is achieved at the EFC.
Semantic Face Signatures: Recognizing and Retrieving Faces by Verbal Descriptions

The adverse visual conditions of surveillance environments and the need to identify humans at a distance have stimulated research in soft biometric attributes. These attributes can be used to describe a human’s physical traits semantically and can be acquired without their cooperation. Soft biometrics can also be employed to retrieve identity from a database using verbal descriptions of suspects. In this paper, we explore unconstrained human face identification with semantic face attributes derived automatically from images. The process uses a deformable face model with keypoint localisation which is aligned with attributes derived from semantic descriptions. Our new framework exploits the semantic feature space to infer face signatures from images and bridges the semantic gap between humans and machines with respect to face attributes. We use an unconstrained dataset, LFW-MS4, consisting of all the subjects from view-1 of the LFW database that have four or more samples. Our new approach demonstrates that retrieval via estimated comparative facial soft biometrics yields a match in the top 10.23% of returned subjects. Furthermore, modelling of face image features in the semantic space can achieve an equal error rate of 12.71%. These results reveal the latent benefits of modelling visual facial features in a semantic space. Moreover, they highlight the potential of using images and verbal descriptions to generate comparative soft biometrics for subject identification and retrieval.
Identification and Characterization of an Aspergillus fumigatus “Supermater” Pair

ABSTRACT The mating efficiency of 50 Aspergillus fumigatus isolates from both clinical and environmental sources was analyzed. Forty isolates completed the sexual cycle in 4 weeks with variable levels of fertility designated high, medium, or low. Two opposite-mating-type strains exhibiting the highest fertility, AFB62 (MAT1-1), isolated from a case of invasive aspergillosis, and AFIR928 (MAT1-2), isolated from the environment, were chosen as the supermater pair. Single cleistothecia obtained from a cross of the two strains harbored a minimum of 1 × 104 ascospores. The viability of ascospores increased with the age of the fruiting body, 17% at 4 weeks and reaching 95% at 20 weeks. AFB62 and AFIR928 were equally virulent in two different murine models, despite differences in their sources. High recombination frequencies were observed when the closely linked genes alb1 (AFUA_2G17600) and abr2 (AFUA_2G17530) were used as genetic markers. Comparative genome hybridization analyses revealed that only 86 genes (ca. 0.86% of the genome) are significantly diverged between AFB62 and AFIR928. The high fertility in a relatively short period, combined with a high degree of virulence and a high recombination frequency, demonstrates that the mating pair AFB62 and AFIR928 provides an excellent tool for genetic studies of A. fumigatus. IMPORTANCE Aspergillus fumigatus is a heterothallic fungal pathogen that causes life-threatening infections in immunocompromised hosts. Although heterothallism facilitates genetic study via recombinational analysis, previous work showed that a 6-month incubation period is required for the completion of sexual reproduction in this species. Such a long incubation period impedes progress in genetic research. To discover a highly fertile (supermater) pair that can complete the sexual cycle in a considerably shorter period, we screened 50 strains collected from various geographic regions for mating efficiency. We identified a highly virulent pair of supermaters that can be an invaluable tool for genetic study. Aspergillus fumigatus is a heterothallic fungal pathogen that causes life-threatening infections in immunocompromised hosts. Although heterothallism facilitates genetic study via recombinational analysis, previous work showed that a 6-month incubation period is required for the completion of sexual reproduction in this species. Such a long incubation period impedes progress in genetic research. To discover a highly fertile (supermater) pair that can complete the sexual cycle in a considerably shorter period, we screened 50 strains collected from various geographic regions for mating efficiency. We identified a highly virulent pair of supermaters that can be an invaluable tool for genetic study.
Evolutionary Modular Self-Assembly and Self-Reconfigurable Robotics: Exhaustive Review

Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. A number of studies have demonstrated the feasibility of evolutionary robotics for the synthesis of robots control and morphology. For that reason, we review the literature in this paper and discuss various aspects of evolutionary robotics including the application on modular robotics to allow self-assembly, self-reconfiguration, self-repair, and self-reproduce. Then, we outline some milestones and important modular robotic prototypes due to their importance in the field. Finally, we assess the current state of the art in the field. The motivation to blend evolutionary robotics and modular robotics literature review in one article came from our confidence that applying evolutionary robotics to optimize modular robots can generate marvelous robotic behavior.