Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biochemical and Molecular Actions of Nutrients Carbohydrate Fractions from Cooked Fish Promote Iron Uptake by Caco-2 Cells 1

The objective of this study was to isolate and characterize the meat factor(s) that enhances nonheme iron bioavailability using various analytical and in vitro cell culture techniques. Nonheme iron bioavailability was measured via radiolabeled iron uptake or ferritin formation in Caco-2 cells. Fish haddock fillet was cooked and lyophilized to be used as the muscle tissue of choice because of its low intrinsic iron content. It was demonstrated that the low pH of the stomach (pH 2.0) was the primary factor responsible for initiating the enhancing effect of fish on nonheme iron uptake. Subsequently, cooked fish samples were titrated with HCl to pH 2.0 and incubated for 1 h without digestive enzymes to release the factor(s) from the fish. The supernatant of this acidic digest was then used as a starting material for the meat factor isolation procedures. Fractions generated through Sephadex G-25 size exclusion increased Caco-2 cell iron uptake approximately 9-fold. Subsequent chromatography of these fractions via C18 reverse-phase HPLC were conducted, and enhancing activity was observed only in the “injection peak. ” This observation coupled with protein measurement and amino acid composition analysis revealed that the active fractions contained negligible amounts of proteins or amino acids. Active fractions were highly enriched with carbohydrates. Subsequent chromatography via high performance anion exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection yielded 3 active peaks that increased Caco-2 cell iron uptake 3.4to 4.9-fold. Our results indicate that specific carbohydrates contribute to the enhancing effect of meat on iron uptake by the enterocyte. These carbohydrates may be oligosaccharides originating from glycosaminoglycans in the extracellular matrix of muscle tissue. J. Nutr. 134: 1681–1689, 2004.
An accurate prognostic staging system for hepatocellular carcinoma patients after curative hepatectomy

The aim of this study was to develop an accurate predictive system for prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients after hepatectomy. We pooled data of clinicopathological features of 234 HCC patients who underwent curative hepatectomy. On the basis of the pooled data, we established a simple predictive staging system (PS score) scored by the mathematical product of tumor number and size, and degree of liver function. We compared the prognostic abilities of the PS score (score 0–3) with those of six well-known clinical staging systems. Then, we found that there were significant differences (P<0.05) in both disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) between patients with different PS scores (PS score 0 vs. 1; PS score 1 vs. 2), and there was a significant difference in DFS, but not OS, between patients with PS score 2 and those with PS score 3. Moreover, the PS score had smaller values of the Akaike information criterion for both DFS and OS than any of the six well-known clinical staging systems. These results suggest that the PS score serves as a simple, accurate predictor for the prognosis of HCC patients after hepatectomy.
Tyack, Charles S. M. and Camic, Paul M. (2017) Touchscreen interventions and the wellbeing of people with dementia and caregivers: a systematic review

Background: Dementia can have significant detrimental impacts on the wellbeing of those with the disease and their carers. A range of computer-based interventions, including touchscreen-based interventions have been researched for use with this population in the hope that they might improve psychological wellbeing. This article reviews touchscreen-based interventions designed to be used by people with dementia, with a specific focus in assessing their impact on wellbeing. Method: The data bases, PsycInfo, ASSIA, Medline, CINAHL and Cochrane were searched for touchscreen-based interventions designed to be used by people with dementia with reported psychological wellbeing outcomes. Methodological quality was assessed using Pluye et al.’s (2011) Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT)
Tri-split tRNA is a transfer RNA made from 3 transcripts that provides insight into the evolution of fragmented tRNAs in archaea

Transfer RNA (tRNA) is essential for decoding the genome sequence into proteins. In Archaea, previous studies have revealed unique multiple intron-containing tRNAs and tRNAs that are encoded on 2 separate genes, so-called split tRNAs. Here, we discovered 10 fragmented tRNA genes in the complete genome of the hyperthermoacidophilic Archaeon Caldivirga maquilingensis that are individually transcribed and further trans-spliced to generate all of the missing tRNAs encoding glycine, alanine, and glutamate. Notably, the 3 mature tRNAGly's with synonymous codons are created from 1 constitutive 3′ half transcript and 4 alternatively switching transcripts, representing tRNA made from a total of 3 transcripts named a “tri-split tRNA. ” Expression and nucleotide sequences of 10 split tRNA genes and their joined tRNA products were experimentally verified. The intervening sequences of split tRNA have high identity to tRNA intron sequences located at the same positions in intron-containing tRNAs in related Thermoproteales species. This suggests that an evolutionary relationship between intron-containing and split tRNAs exists. Our findings demonstrate the first example of split tRNA genes in a free-living organism and a unique tri-split tRNA gene that provides further insight into the evolution of fragmented tRNAs.
Flexibility Concept: Facilitating Post-Sale Changes In Online Reservation Systems

The implementation concept of virtual intermediate, so called intelligent systems, to Business to Consumer (B2C) applications enhances the flexibility of B2C systems up to a certain level. This paper raises the question if the current intermediate systems are flexible enough? Current intelligent intermediate systems provide flexibility only in terms of general information, which could be more useful in taking decisions with respect to pre-sale flexibility. Actual replacement of human agent with a virtual intermediate system could be attainable in a post- sale flexibility scenario, if it is really supported in terms of 'flexibility'. In this paper we propose how to deal post-sale flexibility in online airline reservation systems. This is achieved with the help of different scenarios related to customer service life cycle. This paper proposes incorporation of missing stages within the customer service life cycle, intended to enhance the functionality of existing systems.
Image inpainting using colour and gradient features

In this work we propose a new inpainting algorithm for color images. It is a patch-based algorithm that replicates some small areas across the image into the unknown area, in order to obtain a complete image with no visual differences between the original part and the reconstructed one. In this proposal we use color and gradient features to calculate the similarity between small windows of the image. The results show that our algorithm is able to obtain final results with better textures than the ones that only take into account the color features.
The cost-effectiveness of long-term antiviral therapy in the management of HBeAg-positive and HBeAg-negative chronic hepatitis B in Singapore

Summary. The purpose of this study was the economic evaluation of short‐duration treatments of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and longer duration antiviral treatment for up to 5 years. Two 10‐health state Markov models were developed for hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)‐positive and HBeAg‐negative CHB patients respectively. The perspective of this economic evaluation was the Singapore healthcare system and CHB patient. The models followed cohorts of HBeAg‐positive and HBeAg‐negative CHB patients, respectively, over a period of 40 years, by which time the majority of the cohorts would have died if left untreated. Costs and benefits were discounted at 5% per annum. Annual rates of disease progression and the magnitude of treatment effects were obtained from the literature, with a focus on data obtained in Asian patients and meeting the criteria for therapy as described in internationally recognized management guidelines. Short‐course therapy with α‐interferon, or 1‐year treatment with pegylated interferon α‐2a, lamivudine or adefovir had limited impact on disease progression. In contrast, treatment of CHB with antiviral therapy for 5 years substantially decreased the rate of disease progression. Treatment with lamivudine for 1‐year is highly cost‐effective compared with no treatment of CHB but has limited effect on reducing the rate of disease progression. Compared with 1‐year treatment with lamivudine, sequential antiviral therapies for up to 5 years (i.e. lamivudine plus adefovir on emergence of lamivudine resistance or adefovir plus lamivudine on emergence of adefovir resistance) are highly cost‐effective by international standards. These conclusions are robust to uncertainties in model inputs and are consistent with the findings of other recently published studies.
Master-equation approach to stochastic neurodynamics.

A master-equation approach to the stochastic neurodynamics proposed by Cowan [in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3, edited by R. P. Lippman, J. E. Moody, and D. S. Touretzky (Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, 1991), p. 62] is investigated in this paper. We deal with a model neural network that is composed of two-state neurons obeying elementary stochastic transition rates. We show that such an approach yields concise expressions for multipoint moments and an equation of motion. We apply the formalism to a (1+1)-dimensional system. Exact and approximate expressions for various statistical parameters are obtained and compared with Monte Carlo simulations
Dynamic Texture Synthesis via Image Reconstruction

This paper addresses the problem of synthesizing continuous and infinitely varying stream of texture videos by doing operations on finite texture videos. Given an input texture video, such as flame, water, smoke, etc, we can synthesize a longer texture video holding the same texture appearance. Dynamic textures have been modeled as linear dynamic systems (LDS) by unfolding the video frames into column vectors and modeling their dynamic trajectory as time evolves. After the vectors are projected onto a lower dimensional space by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), dynamic texture synthesis is achieved by driving the system with random noise. However, because of its over-simplified appearance model and under-constrained dynamic model. It is usually hard to synthesize long and visual pleasing texture video sequences. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic texture synthesis framework via creatively fitting the basic LDS with a newly developed patch reconstruction technique to efficiently enhance high quality texture details while maintaining the temporal coherence of the reconstructed texture patches. The patch reconstruction technique is inspired by locally linear embedding (LLE) and based on the assumption that small patches in the low-and high-quality images form manifolds with similar local geometry. The newly synthesized patches are finally stitched together by graph cuts to make up the output texture videos. Experiments on standard dynamic texture databases demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance on synthesizing dynamic textures.
Clinician-Driven Automated Classification of Limb Fractures from Free-Text Radiology Reports

The aim of this research is to report initial experimental results and evaluation of a clinician-driven automated method that can address the issue of misdiagnosis from unstructured radiology reports. Timely diagnosis and report- ing of patient symptoms in hospital emergency departments (ED) is a critical component of health services delivery. However, due to disperse information resources and vast amounts of manual processing of unstructured information, a point-of-care accurate diagnosis is often difficult. A rule-based method that considers the occurrence of clinician specified keywords related to radiological findings was developed to identify limb abnormalities, such as fractures. A da- taset containing 99 narrative reports of radiological findings was sourced from a tertiary hospital. The rule-based method achieved an F-measure of 0.80 and an accuracy of 0.80. While our method achieves promising performance, a number of avenues for improvement were identified using advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
ATP Induces Synaptic Gene Expressions in Cortical Neurons: Transduction and Transcription Control via P2Y1 Receptors

Studies in vertebrate neuromuscular synapses have revealed previously that ATP, via P2Y receptors, plays a critical role in regulating postsynaptic gene expressions. An equivalent regulatory role of ATP and its P2Y receptors would not necessarily be expected for the very different situation of the brain synapses, but we provide evidence here for a brain version of that role. In cultured cortical neurons, the expression of P2Y1 receptors increased sharply during neuronal differentiation. Those receptors were found mainly colocalized with the postsynaptic scaffold postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95). This arises through a direct interaction of a PDZ domain of PSD-95 with the C-terminal PDZ-binding motif, D-T-S-L of the P2Y1 receptor, confirmed by the full suppression of the colocalization upon mutation of two amino acids therein. This interaction is effective in recruiting PSD-95 to the membrane. Specific activation of P2Y1 (G-protein-coupled) receptors induced the elevation of intracellular Ca2+ and activation of a mitogen-activated protein kinase/Raf-1 signaling cascade. This led to distinct up-regulation of the genes encoding acetylcholinesterase (AChET variant), choline acetyltransferase, and the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor subunit NR2A. This was confirmed, in the example of AChE, to arise from P2Y1-dependent stimulation of a human ACHE gene promoter. That involved activation of the transcription factor Elk-1; mutagenesis of the ACHE promoter revealed that Elk-1 binding at its specific responsive elements in that promoter was induced by P2Y1 receptor activation. The combined findings reveal that ATP, via its P2Y1 receptor, can act trophically in brain neurons to regulate the gene expression of direct effectors of synaptic transmission.
Green Technologies and RFID : Present and Future

─ RFID systems are proliferating in everyday applications. In this paper, the authors present a unified approach that relies on the development of novel low-cost inkjet-printed platforms with optimized metallization trace and effective integration of diodes for enhanceddiscrimination capability applications. Potentially, the presented approach could set the foundation for the first generation of truly “green” RFID-
A Collaborative Framework for Similarity Enforcement in Synthetic Scaling of Relational Datasets

Researchers and developers use benchmarks to compare their algorithms and products. A database benchmark must have a dataset. To be application-specific, this dataset should be empirical. However, the dataset may be too small, or too large, for the benchmarking experiments. The dataset must, therefore, be scaled to the desired size. To ensure the scaled dataset is similar to the original dataset, previous work typically specifies or extracts a fixed set of properties from the original dataset, then uses these properties to generate synthetic data for the scaled dataset. However, this approach becomes increasingly intractable as the property set gets larger, so a new solution is necessary. This paper proposes ASPECT, which adopts a different approach, for relational datasets. The user first selects a sizescaler to synthetically scale the empirical dataset to a desired size, then uses a tool to tweak the scaled dataset to enforce each target property. ASPECT provides the interface for these tools to collaborate in this tweaking process. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that ASPECT can efficiently and effectively enforce similarity in such a generated dataset.
J ul 2 01 5 Convergence of Laplacian spectra from random samples

Eigenvectors and eigenvalues of discrete graph Laplacians are often used for manifold learning and nonlinear dimensionality reduction. It was previously proved by Belkin and Niyogi [3] that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian converge to the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the manifold in the limit of infinitely many data points sampled independently from the uniform distribution over the manifold. Recently, we introduced Point Integral method (PIM) [8, 15] to solve elliptic equations and corresponding eigenvalue problem on point clouds. We have established a unified framework to approximate the elliptic differential operators on point clouds. In this paper, we prove that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues obtained by PIM converge in the limit of infinitely many random samples independently from a distribution (not necessarily to be uniform distribution). Moreover, one estimate of the rate of the convergence is also given.
A Certificateless Ordered Sequential Aggregate Signature Scheme Secure against Super Adverssaries

Certificateless cryptosystem is a hybrid scheme of traditional PKI and ID-based scheme and has positive aspects of both of PKI and ID-based cryptosystem, i.e. solving key escrow problem and certificate management problem simultaneously. Cryptographic schemes constructed in such a hybrid setting, generally called certificateless setting, retain these positive aspects and have been extensively studied recently. To the best of our knowledge, an ordered sequential aggregate signature (OSAS) scheme, which is a signature scheme verifying both the validity of a document and a signing order of a group of signers, has never been proposed in the certificateless setting. Therefore we propose an OSAS scheme in a certificateless setting called certificateless ordered sequential aggregate signature (CLOSAS) scheme. Our proposed scheme has advantages in its communication cost and the security proof. In particular, its signature size is fixed with respect to the number of signers, and the security is proven in the random oracle model against super adversaries that are the strongest adversary in certificateless signature scheme. Our scheme resists KGC’s malicious activities associated with key escrow and forgery of signatures as long as both of each user and KGC involve directly in a key generation.
Autonomic dysfunction (sweating responses) in multiple sclerosis.

Bladder disturbances andsexual impotence are commonanddistressing disorders occurring inmultiplesclerosis. Miller, Simpson, andYeates (1965) foundbladder complaints occurring atsometimeof thedisease in78%of297patients, andin52%of themithadpersisted foroversixmonths, while sexual impotence duetophysical disease occurred in 44%oftheir patients. Although these disturbances areknowntoarise frominvolvement ofperipheral orcentral autonomic pathways (Kuntz, 1947; Bors andComarr, 1960), thelesions ofmultiple sclerosis arerestricted tothecentral nervous system and consequently theymustarise fromdisruption of central pathways. To ourknowledge nospecific study hasbeenmadeon autonomic dysfunction occurring inmultiple sclerosis. Wehave, accordingly, investigated thesympathetic nervous system inthis disease bymeansofeliciting thesweating responses toheat, todrugs, andto distension oftheurinary bladder, since these procedures areeasytocarry outandcanberepeated withconsistent results. METHOD
Logistics benefits and challenges: The case of SMEs in a South African local municipality

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the lifeblood of every economy. However, in order for them to sustain their role of contributing to the mainstream economy, SMEs have to implement effective strategies in all of their business operations, inclusive of logistics. The function of logistics is important to SMEs because it is the quintessence of the organisation’s relationship with suppliers and customers. The aim of this study was to investigate the challenges encountered as well as the benefits realised by SMEs during the implementation of logistics strategies. A quantitative approach using the cross-sectional descriptive survey technique was used in which a three-section questionnaire was administered to a randomly selected sample of 131 SME owners and managers in Emfuleni Local Municipality in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Data analysis was conducted using simple descriptive statistics. The results of the study reveal that financial constraints, the lack of logistics skills among the workforce, high costs of information technology and rapid technological advancements were the most important challenges to SMEs. Challenges related to inventory and environmental management emerged as the least relevant. Enhanced competitive advantage, increased sales and a reduction in operational costs were the most important benefits to SMEs. Reduction in labour turnover and innovation emerged as the least important benefits. Based on the findings, several recommendations were proposed. Key Words: SME, benefits, challenges, Emfuleni Local Municipality
Efficient Smart CMOS Camera Based on FPGAs Oriented to Embedded Image Processing

This article describes an image processing system based on an intelligent ad-hoc camera, whose two principle elements are a high speed 1.2 megapixel Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The latter is used to control the various sensor parameter configurations and, where desired, to receive and process the images captured by the CMOS sensor. The flexibility and versatility offered by the new FPGA families makes it possible to incorporate microprocessors into these reconfigurable devices, and these are normally used for highly sequential tasks unsuitable for parallelization in hardware. For the present study, we used a Xilinx XC4VFX12 FPGA, which contains an internal Power PC (PPC) microprocessor. In turn, this contains a standalone system which manages the FPGA image processing hardware and endows the system with multiple software options for processing the images captured by the CMOS sensor. The system also incorporates an Ethernet channel for sending processed and unprocessed images from the FPGA to a remote node. Consequently, it is possible to visualize and configure system operation and captured and/or processed images remotely.