Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automated detection of left atrium boundary in intracardiac echocardiography during atrial fibrillation ablation

Intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) is used during radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of atrial fibrillation to visualize and reconstruct left atrium (LA) anatomy and catheter placement, as well as to monitor potential complications, including the most harmful esophageal injuries. However, esophagus' dynamic interface with LA posterior wall (LAPW) can be only roughly depicted by any available echo-based method. In clinical practice, at best, LAPW contour is manually traced (MT) on ICE images by the cardiologist, a procedure which is cumbersome and time-consuming. Accordingly, the present study aimed detecting LAPW position automatically by ICE during RFA. To identify LA borders a procedure based on level-set method and pixel clustering was applied. Algorithm was tested on 9 ICE acquisitions. Two series of LA contours were compared with MT LA boundaries by linear regression, Bland-Altman analysis, Dice coefficient and Hausdorff distance. Mean analysis time was 1 sec/frame. Detected contours were fairly concordant with MT ones. The developed technique permits automated and accurate detection of LAPW and may be the preliminary step towards additional analysis including dynamic quantification of esophagus real-time position' changes and its distance from the LAPW.
The Nature of Developmental Dyslexia in a Transparent Orthography

ABSTRACT The present study aimed to explore the nature of developmental dyslexia in a language considered to have a transparent orthography, namely, Dutch. We assessed the accuracy and efficiency of decoding words and pseudowords with four lengths as well as three types of phonological ability in 2,760 typical children and 397 peers with dyslexia across Grades 3–6. For typical readers, decoding levels across the grades were found to be largely a matter of increasing speed. For the readers with dyslexia, difficulties manifested themselves for both accuracy and efficiency of decoding but more for pseudowords than for words. The readers with dyslexia were also more sensitive to word-length effects on decoding. The phonological abilities of the children with dyslexia lagged behind as well. It is concluded that in Dutch, children with dyslexia show a phonological deficit and persistent problems with assembling phonology during the phonological recoding of orthographic representations.
Long-Term Variability of the Hard X-ray Source GRS 1758-258: GRANAT/SIGMA Observations

The results of GRANAT/SIGMA hard X-ray observations of GRS 1758-258 in 1990-1998 are presented. The source lies at ~5\arcdeg from the Galactic Center and was within the SIGMA field of view during the GRANAT surveys of this region. The total exposure time of the Galactic Center was 11x10^6 s. The regular SIGMA observations revealed strong variability of the source: the 40-150 keV flux varied at least by a factor of 8 on a time scale of a year, between less than 13 mCrab and ~100-110 mCrab. The average flux was ~60 mCrab in 1990-1998. The source's spectrum is well fitted by a power law with a photon index \alpha ~1.86 in the energy range 40 to 150 keV and becomes steeper at energies above ~100 keV. The radio and hard X-ray properties of GRS 1758-258 are similar to those of another Galactic Center source, 1E1740.7-2942. GRS 1758-258 and 1E1740.7-2942 are the two brightest hard X-ray sources in the Galactic Center region. Both sources have radio jets, similar X-ray luminosities (~10^37 erg/s), and spectra, and exhibit variations in the hard X-ray flux on long times scales by a factor of ~10 or more . In contrast to most of the known black hole candidates, which are X-ray transients, GRS 1758-258 and 1E1740.7-2942 were detected by SIGMA during most of the observations in 1990-1998. Assuming that this behavior of the sources implies the suppression of accretion-disk instability in the region of partial hydrogen ionization through X-ray heating, we impose constraints on the mass of the optical companion and on the orbital period of the binary system.
Expression of connexins in embryonic mouse neocortical development

During embryonic development, young neurons migrate from the ventricular zone to the cortical plate of the cerebral cortex. Disturbances in this neuronal migration have been associated with numerous diseases such as mental retardation, double cortex, Down syndrome, and epilepsy. One possible cause of these neuropathologies is an aberration in normal gap junctional communication. At least 20 connexin (Cx) genes encode gap junction proteins in mice and humans. A proper understanding of the role of specific connexins in the developing brain requires the characterization of their spatial and temporal pattern of expression. In the current study we performed all the experiments on mouse developing cortex at embryonic days (E) 14, 16, and 18, timepoints that are highly active with regard to cortical development. Using reverse transcription‐polymerase chain reaction, Western blot analysis, and immunohistochemistry, we found that among the family of gap junction proteins, Cx26, Cx36, Cx37, Cx43, and Cx45 were expressed in the developing cortex of mice, Cx30 and Cx32 were absent, while Cx40 was expressed at a very low level. Our results demonstrate that Cx26 and Cx37 were evenly distributed in the cortical layers of developing brain, while Cx36 and Cx43 were more abundant in the ventricular zone and cortical plate. Cx45 distribution appeared to be more abundant at E18 compared to the other timepoints (E14 and E16). Thus, the present study provides identification and the distribution pattern for Cxs associated with cortical development during normal neuronal migration. J. Comp. Neurol. 504:298–313, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Novelty detection from an ego-centric perspective

This paper demonstrates a system for the automatic extraction of novelty in images captured from a small video camera attached to a subject's chest, replicating his visual perspective, while performing activities which are repeated daily. Novelty is detected when a (sub)sequence cannot be registered to previously stored sequences captured while performing the same daily activity. Sequence registration is performed by measuring appearance and geometric similarity of individual frames and exploiting the invariant temporal order of the activity. Experimental results demonstrate that this is a robust way to detect novelties induced by variations in the wearer's ego-motion such as stopping and talking to a person. This is an essentially new and generic way of automatically extracting information of interest to the camera wearer and can be used as input to a system for life logging or memory support.
Draft Paper: Do Not Quote, Cite, or Redistribute Climate Change Risk Management in Transnational River Basins: the Rhine Saskia Van Pelt 1 and Rob Swart

Most adaptive responses to climate change are on national, regional or local scales and currently, many national governments across Europe are developing adaptation programmes without paying much attention to the international dimension. Responsibility and authority for adaptation strategies are distributed over different institutional levels, which includes international actors in the case of transnational systems. This poses a major challenge to effective development and implementation of adaptation measures. To base adaptation policies on the best scientific and technical knowledge, it is important to understand both the potential climate impacts, as well as the capacity of social and natural systems to adapt. Both are characterized by large uncertainties at different geographical scales that range from individual and local to regional and global. This paper discusses the adaptation activities that have been or are being developed in the Rhine basin at all relevant scales, taking into account the match of supply and demand of scientific information and the use of uncertainties by policy makers. Results of this research show that policy choices relating to water safety are as much influenced by political priorities as by evolving scientific insights. In general communication of uncertainties in river basin adaptation only covers a small part of the spectrum of prevailing uncertainties, e.g. by using only one model and one scenario. Two approaches are taken: the dominant top-down approach links adaptation options to impacts projected by climate and impact models and a bottom-up approach looking at the climate resilience of development plans that incorporate a broad range of issues. Positive experiences with the latter suggest that this method may be applied more widely. Finally, development and implementation of adaptation options derived from integrated analysis at the full river basin level rather than within the boundaries of the riparian countries can offer new opportunities but will also meet with many practical challenges.
A web-based user-profile generator: foundation for a recommender and expert finding system

The objective of our research is to create a universal tool for recommending non-visited interesting web pages as well as experts working in the same field of specialty. We accentuate practical adaptability of user profiles. User profiles are generated on the basis of Suffix Tree Clustering (STC) algorithm, which is similar to creating an inverted list of phrases occurring in a document collection. We are computing similarity of characteristic phrases identified by STC in order to find clusters of phrases. Phrases linked by similarity relationships form a phrase association graph. Clusters of phrases generated by our tool define interests of each user. We have tested the system by means of various document collections, such as Reuters Corpus Volume One – RCV1, 20Newsgroups, CTK – Czech Press Agency and Reuters-21578. Experimental results based on our extensive simulations as well as real-life environment are presented in the paper. Precision of our recommender system is 85 to 95 %.
Time-Changed Bessel Processes and Credit Risk

The Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV) model is mathematically presented and then used in a Credit-Equity hybrid framework. Next, we propose extensions to the CEV model with default: firstly by adding a stochastic volatility diffusion uncorrelated from the stock price process, then by more generally time changing Bessel processes and finally by correlating stochastic volatility moves to the stock ones. Properties about strict local and true martingales in this study are discussed. Analytical formulas are provided and Fourier and Laplace transform techniques can then be used to compute option prices and probabilities of default.
A low-latency and energy efficient forward handover scheme for LTE-femtocell networks

Femtocells are small, inexpensive, low power cell sites, which are used to improve indoor capacity and coverage. They are generally consumer deployed and are connected to their own wired broadband backhaul connections. A large number of femtocell deployments in long term evolution (LTE) networks are highly anticipated. One of the main technical challenges of LTE-femtocell networks is the handover between a femtocell and the macrocell due to non availability of direct communication links between femto eNBs and macro eNBs. Due to small femtocell coverage areas, frequent handovers between femtocells and macrocells take place. Therefore, a fast handover scheme using small signaling overhead is required for LTE-femtocell networks to support fast and seamless handovers. The S1-based handover scheme specified in the LTE standards for handover between eNBs, which are not directly connected through X2 interface, can also be used for handover between a femtocell and a macrocell. However, the latency of a S1-based handover increases significantly with the Internet delay as HeNBs are connected to eNBs through public Internet. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient handover scheme to facilitate handovers between femtocells and macrocells. We also introduce a novel concept of the Temporary Area Partners (TAP) network, which consists of the mobile user equipment connected through device-to-device communication. Due to aforesaid TAP network, the proposed handover scheme will be more robust than the forward and S1-based handover schemes. Our delay performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has much lower latency than the existing S1-based and forward handover schemes.
SVM-based Human Cell Detection Technique using Histograms of Oriented Gradients

An automatic human cell detection system is proposed in this article. Histograms of Oriented Gradients are used for cell feature extraction. A robust search procedure, using variable sized sliding windows, is performed for cell localization in grayscale images. The proposed sliding-window based search algorithm is used in combination with a non-linear SVM-based feature vector classification technique. Some successful experiments are described in this paper. Key-Words: object-class detection, cell detection, HOG features, window-based search algorithm, SVM classifier
Seeing a Mycobacterium-Infected Cell in Nanoscale 3D: Correlative Imaging by Light Microscopy and FIB/SEM Tomography

Mycobacteria pose a threat to the world health today, with pathogenic and opportunistic bacteria causing tuberculosis and non-tuberculous disease in large parts of the population. Much is still unknown about the interplay between bacteria and host during infection and disease, and more research is needed to meet the challenge of drug resistance and inefficient vaccines. This work establishes a reliable and reproducible method for performing correlative imaging of human macrophages infected with mycobacteria at an ultra-high resolution and in 3D. Focused Ion Beam/Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB/SEM) tomography is applied, together with confocal fluorescence microscopy for localization of appropriately infected cells. The method is based on an Aclar poly(chloro-tri-fluoro)ethylene substrate, micropatterned into an advantageous geometry by a simple thermomoulding process. The platform increases the throughput and quality of FIB/SEM tomography analyses, and was successfully applied to detail the intracellular environment of a whole mycobacterium-infected macrophage in 3D.
Acoi: A system for Indexing Multimedia Objects

textabstractIn this paper, we present a system that combines independent feature detector programs with multimedia database technology to provide a semantic rich index to multimedia data items on the World Wide Web. First, we introduce a grammatical framework, called feature grammars, which forms the indexing schema. Feature grammars are an extension of context-free grammars with active symbols (e.g., multimedia feature detectors) that may invoke feature detector programs. The Acoi system reads in the grammar, compiles it and executes it against a data source, e.g. a multimedia object. The derived parse tree is used as an index to this data source. Its structure closely resembles that of semi-structured (XML) documents. Then, we present the architecture of our implementation on top of Monet, our extensible main memory database system. In this implementation, feature grammars are used as a description of the execution sequence of the indexing program. We show how the resulting parse tree can be stored efficiently in Monet. A SQL-like query language enables users to use the feature grammar as a schema for query formulation to retrieve both index values and the original data sources. Throughout the paper, we illustrate the concepts with a running example of a grammar used for indexing HTML pages and multimedia objects on the World Wide Web.
metaP-Server: A Web-Based Metabolomics Data Analysis Tool

Metabolomics is an emerging field that is based on the quantitative measurement of as many small organic molecules occurring in a biological sample as possible. Due to recent technical advances, metabolomics can now be used widely as an analytical high-throughput technology in drug testing and epidemiological metabolome and genome wide association studies. Analogous to chip-based gene expression analyses, the enormous amount of data produced by modern kit-based metabolomics experiments poses new challenges regarding their biological interpretation in the context of various sample phenotypes. We developed metaP-server to facilitate data interpretation. metaP-server provides automated and standardized data analysis for quantitative metabolomics data, covering the following steps from data acquisition to biological interpretation: (i) data quality checks, (ii) estimation of reproducibility and batch effects, (iii) hypothesis tests for multiple categorical phenotypes, (iv) correlation tests for metric phenotypes, (v) optionally including all possible pairs of metabolite concentration ratios, (vi) principal component analysis (PCA), and (vii) mapping of metabolites onto colored KEGG pathway maps. Graphical output is clickable and cross-linked to sample and metabolite identifiers. Interactive coloring of PCA and bar plots by phenotype facilitates on-line data exploration. For users of commercial metabolomics kits, cross-references to the HMDB, LipidMaps, KEGG, PubChem, and CAS databases are provided. metaP-server is freely accessible at http://metabolomics.helmholtz-muenchen.de/metap2/.
Beam Search in Incremental Rule Learning

This paper describes ICN, an incremental version of the CN2 rule learning system. Unlike other incremental rule learning systems which learn rules gradually, adding and removing conditions in a hill-climbing search, ICN learns or unlearns each rule “all at once,” using beam search as in CN2. In batch training and testing with the forest cover prediction problem, ICN performs nearly as well as CN2. ICN’s efficient incremental algorithm, however, allows it to learn from much more data. When trained and tested incrementally on the entire forest cover data set (581,012 instances), ICN’s performance exceeds that of the best known classifier for this problem.
Case digitalo – a range of virtual and augmented reality solutions in construction application

We describe a range of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) solutions applied during the planning and construction of VTT’s new head offices, the Digitalo (“Digital House”) in Espoo, Finland. During the building phase as well as in later evaluations 2003-2006, the various approaches used for Digitalo’s visualisation included: radiosity rendering by still images; immersive virtual reality visualisation; mobile outdoors augmenting; augmented scale model; augmented web camera; 3D landscapes; and interior design by means of virtual and augmented reality. We employed various display devices ranging from HMD video glasses to CAVE screens, and from PDA’s to varying kinds of PC solutions. Some of our solutions, for example the augmented web camera and scale model systems, have not been previously presented and they appear here for the first time. Also, we describe the current status of the applied methods, as well as directions for future research. Altogether, we believe this case study to be among the most comprehensive ones in the world to include such a wide variety VR/AR techniques applied in a single building project.
Unseen and unheard? Women managers and organizational learning

Purpose This paper aims to use (in)visibility as a lens to understand the lived experience of six women managers in the headquarters of a large multinational organization in the UK to identify how “gender” is expressed in the context of organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach The researchers take a phenomenological approach via qualitative data collection with a purposeful sample – the six female managers in a group of 24. Data were collected through quarterly semi-structured interviews over 12 months with the themes – knowledge, interaction and gender. Findings Organizations seek to build advantage to gain and retain competitive leadership. Their resilience in a changing task environment depends on their ability to recognize, gain and use knowledge likely to deliver these capabilities. Here, gender was a barrier to effective organizational learning with women’s knowledge and experience often unseen and unheard. Research limitations/implications This is a piece of research limited to exploration of gender as other, but ethnicity, age, social class, disability and sexual preference, alone or in combination, may be equally subject to invisibility in knowledge terms; further research would be needed to test this however. Practical implications Practical applications relate to the need for organizations to examine and address their operations for exclusion based on perceived “otherness”. Gendered organizations cause problems for their female members, but they also exclude the experience and knowledge of key individuals as seen here, where gender impacted on effective knowledge sharing and cocreation of knowledge. Social implications The study offers further evidence of gendered organizations and their impacts on organizational effectiveness, but it also offers insights into the continues social acceptance of a masculinized normative model for socio-economic practice. Originality/value This exploration of gender and organizational learning offers new insights to help explain the way in which organizational learning occurs – or fails to occur – with visibility/invisibility of one group shaped by gendered attitudes and processes. It shows that organizational learning is not gender neutral (as it appears in mainstream organizational learning research) and calls for researchers to include this as a factor in future research.
Pallas: An Application-Driven Task and Network Simulation Framework

With the help of simulation tools, users can evaluate new proposals in cluster environment efficiently. However, current cloud simulators cannot meet the needs of application-driven simulation scenarios. In this paper, we propose Pallas, a task and network simulation framework that supports various cloud applications. Task-aware network scheduling and network-perceived task placement algorithms can be easily implemented in Pallas. We present the architecture and main components of Pallas and evaluate its effectiveness by comparing algorithm improvements to the actual results.
Improving Rule-Based Classifiers Induced by MODLEM by Selective Pre-processing of Imbalanced Data

In the paper we discuss inducing rule-based classifiers from imbalanced data, where one class (a minority class) is under-represented in comparison to the remaining classes (majority classes). To improve the ability of a classifier to recognize this class, we propose a new selective pre-processing approach that is applied to data before inducing a rule-based classifier. The approach combines selective filtering of the majority classes with focused over-sampling of the minority class. Results of a comparative experimental study show that our approach improves sensitivity for the minority class while preserving the ability of a classifier to recognize examples from the majority classes.
A 5-GHz CMOS Frequency Synthesizer With an Injection-Locked Frequency Divider and Differential Switched Capacitors

A phase-locked loop (PLL)-based frequency synthesizer at 5 GHz is designed and fabricated in 0.18-mum CMOS technology. The power consumption of the synthesizer is significantly reduced by using an injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) as the first frequency divider in the PLL feedback loop. The synthesizer chip consumes 18 mW of power, of which only 3.93 mW is consumed by the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and the ILFD at 1.8-V supply voltage. The VCO has the phase noise of - 104 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset and an output tuning range of 740 MHz. The chip size is 1.1 mm times 0.95 mm.