Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Upper Limb Motor Dysfunction for Children with Cerebral Palsy Based on Muscle Synergy Analysis

Muscle synergies are considered to be building blocks underlying motor behaviors. The goal of this study is to explore an objective and effective method to assess the upper limb motor dysfunction of cerebral palsy (CP) children from the aspect of muscle synergy analysis. Fourteen CP children and 10 typically developed (TD) children were recruited to perform three similar upper limb motion tasks related to the movements of elbow and shoulder joints, and surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals were recorded from 10 upper arm and shoulder muscles involved in the defined tasks. Non-negative matrix factorization algorithm was used to extract muscle synergies and the corresponding activation patterns during three similar tasks. For each subject in TD group, four muscle synergies were extracted in each task. Whereas, fewer mature synergies were recruited in CP group, and many abnormal synergy structures specific to CP group appeared. In view of neuromuscular control strategy differences, three synergy-related parameters were proposed and synergy structure similarity coefficient was found to have high ability in depicting the inter-subject similarity within task and the intra-subject similarity between tasks. Seven upper limb assessment (UPA) metrics, which were defined as the combinations of synergy structure similarity coefficients of three tasks, were proposed to assess the upper limb motor function of CP children. The experimental results demonstrated that these UPA metrics were able to assess upper limb motor function comprehensively and effectively. The proposed assessment method can serve as a promising approach to quantify the abnormality of muscle synergies, thus offering potential to derive a physiologically based quantitative index for assessing upper limb motor function in CP clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation.
A Pleasant Reading of GARCH Model

Measuring and forecasting the size of the errors in any model is a must. The ARCH/GARCH, which stand for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, treat heteroskedasticity as a variance to be modeled when the variances of the error terms are not equal1. The ARCH/ GARCH corrects the least squares flaws and predict the variance of each error term. The main concern, even after the development of the “robust standard error” is the variance of the error terms and what makes them large. This problem is often found in investment where the dependent variable is the return on an asset and the variance of the return represents the risk level of those returns. In such time series analysis of return the heteroskedasticity constitutes a serious handicap. In risky periods, the expected value of the magnitude of error terms is high and during normal periods, it is not. Therefore, there is a degree of autocorrelation in the riskiness of returns. The goal of ARCH and GARCH is to provide a volatility measure in order to facilitate financial decisions.
Virtual Visual Effect of Hospital Waiting Room on Pain Modulation in Healthy Subjects and Patients with Chronic Migraine

Environmental context has an important impact on health and well being. We aimed to test the effects of a visual distraction induced by classical hospital waiting room (RH) versus an ideal room with a sea view (IH), both represented in virtual reality (VR), on subjective sensation and cortical responses induced by painful laser stimuli (LEPs) in healthy volunteers and patients with chronic migraine (CM). Sixteen CM and 16 controls underwent 62 channels LEPs from the right hand, during a fully immersive VR experience, where two types of waiting rooms were simulated. The RH simulated a classical hospital waiting room while the IH represented a room with sea viewing. CM patients showed a reduction of laser pain rating and vertex LEPs during the IH vision. The sLORETA analysis confirmed that in CM patients the two VR simulations induced a different modulation of bilateral parietal cortical areas (precuneus and superior parietal lobe), and superior frontal and cingulate girus, in respect to controls. The architectural context may interfere with pain perception, depending upon the status of subject. Many variables may change patients' outcome and support the use of VR technology to test the best conditions for their management.
Routing Protocols for Low Power and Lossy Networks in Internet of Things Applications

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications has taken the attention of several researchers. In an effort to provide interoperability and IPv6 support for the IoT devices, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the 6LoWPAN stack. However, the particularities and hardware limitations of networks associated with IoT devices lead to several challenges, mainly for routing protocols. On its stack proposal, IETF standardizes the RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) as the routing protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). RPL is a tree-based proactive routing protocol that creates acyclic graphs among the nodes to allow data exchange. Although widely considered and used by current applications, different recent studies have shown its limitations and drawbacks. Among these, it is possible to highlight the weak support of mobility and P2P traffic, restrictions for multicast transmissions, and lousy adaption for dynamic throughput. Motivated by the presented issues, several new solutions have emerged during recent years. The approaches range from the consideration of different routing metrics to an entirely new solution inspired by other routing protocols. In this context, this work aims to present an extensive survey study about routing solutions for IoT/LLN, not limited to RPL enhancements. In the course of the paper, the routing requirements of LLNs, the initial protocols, and the most recent approaches are presented. The IoT routing enhancements are divided according to its main objectives and then studied individually to point out its most important strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, as the main contribution, this study presents a comprehensive discussion about the considered approaches, identifying the still remaining open issues and suggesting future directions to be recognized by new proposals.
TCP-Friendly Multicast Congestion Control (TFMCC): Protocol Specification

This document specifies TCP-Friendly Multicast Congestion Control (TFMCC). TFMCC is a congestion control mechanism for multicast transmissions in a best-effort Internet environment. It is a single- rate congestion control scheme, where the sending rate is adapted to the receiver experiencing the worst network conditions. TFMCC is reasonably fair when competing for bandwidth with TCP flows and has a relatively low variation of throughput over time, making it suitable for applications where a relatively smooth sending rate is of importance, such as streaming media. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
Improving Speaker Diarization of TV Series using Talking-Face Detection and Clustering

While successful on broadcast news, meetings or telephone conversation, state-of-the-art speaker diarization techniques tend to perform poorly on TV series or movies. In this paper, we propose to rely on state-of-the-art face clustering techniques to guide acoustic speaker diarization. Two approaches are tested and evaluated on the first season of Game Of Thrones TV series. The second (better) approach relies on a novel talking-face detection module based on bi-directional long short-term memory recurrent neural network. Both audio-visual approaches outperform the audio-only baseline. A detailed study of the behavior of these approaches is also provided and paves the way to future improvements.
Back to Natural Fiber: Wool Color Influences Its Sensitivity to Enzymatic Treatment

There are many missed biotechnological opportunities in the developmental countries. Wool quality improvement is one of them. This study is concerning with improving the wool quality using technical enzymes. White wool proves to be more susceptible to the enzymatic treatment than blackish brown wool. This proves that the enzymatic reaction is sensitive to the natural color differences between wool fibers. A simple enzymatic method has been used to improve the wool quality as well as to investigate the changes happened in the wool fibers. Geobacillus stearothermophilus has been used under mesophilic and static cultivation conditions using wool as the main carbon source. These conditions prove to be more suitable for maintaining the fiber structure, less expensive, and reliable as an in-house biotechnological process that can be adapted everywhere. The enzyme activity in case of white wool was 4 Units/ml and for blackish brown wool was 1.5 Units/ml. Electron microscope has been used to evaluate the end result. By following the process included in this paper using probable microbial strain(s), the wool quality improvement can be applied globally and can add another value to the economy of the developmental countries.
Characteristics of Litters and Juvenile Dispersal in the Endangered Australian Skink Tiliqua adelaidensis

was discov-ered near Burra, in the midnorth of South Australia(Armstrong et al., 1993). Subsequently, several otherisolated populations have been found nearby (Milne,1999), but all occupy small areas on privately ownedfarming properties. The species is still considered rareand endangered, and management and possible trans-location to conservation areas is a high priority.Knowledge of the reproductive behavior of the speciesis vital for conservation management.Data on reproductive parameters are also vital indeveloping understanding of the evolution of life-his-tory patterns. Australia has a rich lizard fauna, butrelatively few comparative studies of demographic pa-rameters are available (Greer, 1989). The skinks (fam-ily Scincidae) make up about 57% of all d escribed spe-cies in Australia (Cogger, 1992), and any study of theevolution of life-history characters of the Scincidaeshould include data from Australian taxa.Two common methods for investigating reproduc-tive biology of lizards were unavailable for this study.The ﬁrst is to dissect preserved specimens that havebeen captured at different times of the year (e.g., Vitt,1991; Dearing and Schall, 1994). From a small sampleof museum specimens of
High Quality Point-Based Rendering System

In recent years point-based geometry has gained increasing attention as an alternative surface representation, both for efficient rendering and for flexible geometry processing of highly complex 3D-models. Based on their fundamental simplicity, points have motivated a variety of research on topics such as shape modeling, object capturing, simplification, rendering and hybrid point-polygon methods. Rendering the points is inherently a big problem due to lack of connectivity information. But lack of connectivity introduces several artifacts while in the process of rendering like aliasing and holes in the rendered model. In this report we will discuss several rendering algorithms and a new point rendering algorithm, a combination of ideas from different algorithms which includes advantages of different algorithms to give high quality rendering. Point clouds are not always feasible for real world model representation because of over sampling of planar surfaces and undersampling of high curvature parts of the model which results huge storage costs and more processing time. In this report we will also discuss a point cloud simplification algorithm which simplifies input point model by using clustering techniques.
PEG-Poly(1-Methyl-l-Tryptophan)-Based Polymeric Micelles as Enzymatically Activated Inhibitors of Indoleamine 2,3-Dioxygenase

Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) is an immunomodulating enzyme that is overexpressed in many cancers with poor prognosis. IDO suppresses T cell immunity by catabolizing tryptophan into kynurenine (KYN), which induces apoptosis in T effector cells and enhances T regulatory cells, providing a powerful immunosuppressive mechanism in tumors. Thus, major efforts for developing IDO inhibitors have been undertaken. Among them, 1-Methyl-l-Tryptophan (MLT) and 1-Methyl-d-Tryptophan (MDT) effectively inhibit IDO in preclinical tumor models and the latter is under clinical evaluation. However, both MLT and MDT present poor pharmacokinetics, with the maximum serum concentration being below their 50% inhibitory concentration value. Herein, we have developed polymeric IDO inhibitors based on MLT, which can release active MLT after enzymatic degradation, toward establishing superior antitumor immunotherapies. These polymers were prepared by ring opening polymerization of an N-phenyl carbamate (NPC) derivative of MLT that was synthesized by carbamylation with diphenyl carbonate. By using ω-amino-poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG-NH2) as the macroinitiator, we prepared amphiphilic PEG-poly(MLT) block copolymers, which self-assembled into polymeric micelles in aqueous conditions. The PEG-poly(MLT) block copolymers could be readily degraded by chymotrypsin and the micelles were able to reduce the levels of KYN in activated macrophages. These results provide a strong rationale for pursuing MLT-based polymeric micelles as tumor-targeted prodrug systems.
Sequential thallium-201 myocardial perfusion studies after successful percutaneous transluminal coronary artery angioplasty: delayed resolution of exercise-induced scintigraphic abnormalities.

To characterize the sequential changes of myocardial perfusion scintigraphy in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) after complete revascularization, 43 patients underwent exercise thallium-201 (201Tl) myocardial perfusion scintigraphy before and at 9 +/- 5 days, 3.3 +/- 0.6, and 6.8 +/- 1.2 months after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA). Only patients with single-vessel CAD, without previous myocardial infarction, and without evidence of restenosis at 6 to 9 months after PTCA were included. Perfusion scans were analyzed blindly with the use of a new quantitative method to define regional myocardial perfusion in the topographic distribution of each coronary artery, which was shown to be reproducible (r = .94 or higher and SEE of 7% or less, between repeated measures by one and two operators). At 4 to 18 days after PTCA, the mean treadmill walking time increased by 123 +/- 42 sec, mean exercise-induced ST segment depression decreased by 0.6 +/- 0.3 mm, group maximal heart rate increased by 20 +/- 9 beats/min, and group systolic blood pressure at peak exercise increased by 24 +/- 10 mm Hg, compared with pre-PTCA values (p less than .001). However, no group differences were noted in these variables between the three post-PTCA stages. Myocardial perfusion in the distribution of the affected (dilated) coronary artery, on the other hand, improved progressively. In the 45 degree left anterior oblique view for instance, myocardial perfusion increased at 9 days after PTCA (from 68 +/- 24% before PTCA to 91 +/- 9%, p less than .001) and at 3.3 months after PTCA (101 +/- 8%, p less than .05 vs 9 days after PTCA), but no further significant changes were seen at 6.8 months after PTCA (102 +/- 8%). Similar changes were noted in the other two views. No relationship between minor complications during PTCA and delayed improvement on the 201Tl was observed. Myocardial ischemia was diagnosed in 12 of the 43 scans recorded a few days after PTCA, but in none recorded at later stages. We conclude that 201Tl scans after PTCA often show delayed improvement and therefore, an abnormal myocardial perfusion scan soon after PTCA does not necessarily reflect residual coronary stenosis or recurrence.
Grid‐mapped freeze‐fracture analysis of gap junctions in gray and white matter of adult rat central nervous system, with evidence for a “panglial syncytium” that is not coupled to neurons

In white matter regions of the brain and spinal cord of adult mammals, gap junctions previously were observed linking astrocytes to astrocytes, as well as to oligodendrocytes and ependymacytes. The resulting “functional syncytium” was proposed to modulate the ion fluxes that occur during electrical activity of the associated axons. Gap junctions also have been reported linking neurons with glia, and functional neuronal‐glial coupling has been postulated. To investigate the glial syncytium and the neuron‐to‐glia coupling hypotheses, we used “grid‐mapped freeze fracture,” conventional thin‐section electron microscopy, and light microscope immunocytochemistry to examine and characterize neurons and glia in gray and white matter of adult rat brain and spinal cord. We have obtained quantitative evidence for the abundance and widespread distribution of gap junctions interlinking the three primary types of macroglia throughout both gray and white matter of the mammalian central nervous system (CNS), thereby extending the concept to that of a functional panglial syncytium. In contrast to previous reports, we show that of more than 400 gap junctions in which both participating cells were identified, none were between neurons and glia. Thus, neuronal coupling and glial coupling involved separate and distinct pathways. Finally, putative water channels (i.e., “square arrays”) were confirmed to be abundant and in close association with gap junctions in astrocytes and ependymacytes. Because the astrocyte “intermediaries” extend cytoplasmic conduits throughout gray and white matter of brain and spinal cord, from the ependymal layer to the pia‐glial limitans, and from oligodendrocytes surrounding axons to astrocyte endfeet surrounding capillaries, the proposed panglial syncytium, with its abundance of water channels and intercellular ion channels, is optimally positioned and equipped to modulate water and ion fluxes across broad regions of the CNS. J. Comp. Neurol. 388:265–292, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Research on Sharing and Aggregating of Web Learning Materials Based on GRDDL and Topic-Oriented Crawler

Reusability, sharability, and interoperability are the main research subjects of modern learning systems. A lot of e-learning standards, such as LOM, IMS, SCORM, AICC etc., have provided us many flexible reference solutions for achieving these goals. In order to construct a more flexible framework to share and reuse web learning materials between CBT vendors, LMSs, and learners, this paper defined a uniformed structure —Learning Asset (LA)—to integrate material and its metadata in a single media, proposed a two-stage metadata gleaning mechanism based on GRDDL and topic-oriented crawler to provide a flexible and high-performance searching of LA-specified metadata, figured a framework for sharing, reusing and aggregating learning content with semantic reasoning.
Trophic relationships of exotic anadromous salmonids in the southern Patagonian Shelf as inferred from stable isotopes

On the basis of their thermal preferences, salmon introduced in South America can distribute over the whole Southern Patagonian Shelf Ecosystem (SPSE). Stable isotope (δ13C andδ15N) data show that the SPSE is dominated by zooplanktivorous species (15 of 37), and its community is distributed over six trophic levels (TL), with salmonids occupying levels 4.2 to 4.9. A dual isotope mixing model was used to estimate diet proportions of adult salmonids (validated with stomach content analyses) and showed that chinook salmon (TL 4.9) and brown trout (TL 4.7) feed largely on sprats (96% and 79% predicted by the model) and were clustered together with intermediate size fish and cephalopod predators (TL 4.6‐5), a diet similar to that in their native ranges (North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans). Adult anadromous rainbow trout clustered together with zooplanktivorous species (TL 3.2‐4.4), and the model predicted a diet dominated by planktonic crustaceans (55%), very different from the diet dominated by fish and squids characteristic of adult steelhead in the North Pacific Ocean. Diet predictions based on stable isotopes for Chinook salmon were indistinguishable from direct assessments of stomach contents of fish captured by bottom trawlers and overlapped widely with the diet of Magellanic penguins. The lack of reports on captures of anadromous rainbow trout by bottom trawlers suggests that this species has a shallower distribution. Stable isotope data for rainbow trout are very similar to those of rockhopper penguins, which feed on planktonic crustaceans, fish larvae, and juveniles.
iRNAD: a computational tool for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence

MOTIVATION Dihydrouridine (D) is a common RNA posttranscriptional modification found in eukaryotes, bacteria and a few archaea. The modification can promote the conformational flexibility of individual nucleotide bases. And its levels are increased in cancerous tissues. Therefore, it is necessary to detect D in RNA for further understanding its functional roles. Since wet-experimental techniques for the aim are time-consuming and laborious, it is urgent to develop computational models to identify D modification sites in RNA. RESULTS We constructed a predictor, called iRNAD, for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence. In this predictor, the RNA samples derived from five species were encoded by nucleotide chemical property and nucleotide density. Support vector machine was utilized to perform the classification. The final model could produce the overall accuracy of 96.18% with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9839 in jackknife cross-validation test. Furthermore, we performed a series of validations from several aspects and demonstrated the robustness and reliability of the proposed model. AVAILABILITY A user-friendly web-server called iRNAD can be freely accessible at http://lin-group.cn/server/iRNAD, which will provide convenience and guide to users for further studying D modification.
Privacy Breach by Exploiting postMessage in HTML5: Identification, Evaluation, and Countermeasure

The postMessage mechanism in HTML5 enables different webpage origins to exchange information and communicate. It becomes increasingly popular among the websites that need to import contents from third-party services, such as advertisements and preferable recommendations. Ideally, a receiver function should be locally implemented in the hosting page that needs to receive third-party messages. However, in the real world, the receiver function is usually provided by a third-party service provider, and the function code is imported via the HTML "script" tag so that the imported code is deemed as from the same origin with the hosting page. In the case that a site uses multiple third-party services, all the receiver functions imported by the hosting page can receive messages from any third-party provider. Based on this observation, we identify a new information leakage threat named DangerNeighbor attacks that allow a malicious service eavesdrop messages from other services to the hosting page. We study 5000 popular websites and find that the DangerNeighbor attack is a real threat to the sites adopting the postMessage mechanism. To defeat this attack, we propose an easily deployable approach to protect messages from being eavesdropped by a malicious provider. In this approach, the site owner simply imports a piece of JavaScript code and specifies a mapping table, where messages from different origins are associated with corresponding receiver functions, respectively. The approach, which is transparent to the providers, ensures that a receiver function only receives messages from a specific origin.