Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accuracy of rapid strep testing in patients who have had recent streptococcal pharyngitis.

BACKGROUND Some clinicians have questioned the accuracy of rapid diagnosis of group A streptococcal pharyngitis by commercial immunochemical antigen test kits in the setting of recent streptococcal pharyngitis, believing that the false-positive rate was increased because of presumed antigen persistence. METHODS We studied 443 patients--211 cases--who had clinical pharyngitis diagnosed as group A beta-hemolytic streptococcus infection in the past 28 days and compared them with 232 control patients who had symptoms of pharyngitis but no recent diagnosis of streptococcal pharyngitis. Our aim was narrowly focused to compare the rapid strep test with the culture method we used in our clinical practice. RESULTS We found that the rapid strep test in this setting showed no difference in specificity (0.96 vs 0.98); hence, the assertion that rapid antigen testing had higher false-positive rates in those with recent infection was not confirmed. We also found that in patients who had recent streptococcal pharyngitis, the rapid strep test appears to be more reliable (0.91 vs 0.70, P < .001) than in those patients who had not had recent streptococcal pharyngitis. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this study indicate that the rapid strep test is both sensitive and specific in the setting of recent group A beta-hemolytic streptococcal pharyngitis, and its use might allow earlier treatment in this subgroup of patients.
Evaluation of Urine CCA Assays for Detection of Schistosoma mansoni Infection in Western Kenya

Although accurate assessment of the prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni is important for the design and evaluation of control programs, the most widely used tools for diagnosis are limited by suboptimal sensitivity, slow turn-around-time, or inability to distinguish current from former infections. Recently, two tests that detect circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) in urine of patients with schistosomiasis became commercially available. As part of a larger study on schistosomiasis prevalence in young children, we evaluated the performance and diagnostic accuracy of these tests—the carbon test strip designed for use in the laboratory and the cassette format test intended for field use. In comparison to 6 Kato-Katz exams, the carbon and cassette CCA tests had sensitivities of 88.4% and 94.2% and specificities of 70.9% and 59.4%, respectively. However, because of the known limitations of the Kato-Katz assay, we also utilized latent class analysis (LCA) incorporating the CCA, Kato-Katz, and schistosome-specific antibody results to determine their sensitivities and specificities. The laboratory-based CCA test had a sensitivity of 91.7% and a specificity of 89.4% by LCA while the cassette test had a sensitivity of 96.3% and a specificity of 74.7%. The intensity of the reaction in both urine CCA tests reflected stool egg burden and their performance was not affected by the presence of soil transmitted helminth infections. Our results suggest that urine-based assays for CCA may be valuable in screening for S. mansoni infections.
Pearl: A Probabilistic Chart Parser

This paper describes a natural language parsing algorithm for unrestricted text which uses a probability-based scoring function to select the "best" parse of a sentence. The parser, Pearl, is a time-asynchronous bottom-up chart parser with Earley-type top-down prediction which pursues the highest-scoring theory in the chart, where the score of a theory represents the extent to which the context of the sentence predicts that interpretation. This parser differs from previous attempts at stochastic parsers in that it uses a richer form of conditional probabilities based on context to predict likelihood. Pearl also provides a framework for incorporating the results of previous work in part-of-speech assignment, unknown word models, and other probabilistic models of linguistic features into one parsing tool, interleaving these techniques instead of using the traditional pipeline architecture. In preliminary tests, Pearl has been successful at resolving part-of-speech and word (in speech processing) ambiguity, determining categories for unknown words, and selecting correct parses first using a very loosely fitting covering grammar.
Classification of Hyperspectral Images Using Kernel Fully Constrained Least Squares

As a widely used classifier, sparse representation classification (SRC) has shown its good performance for hyperspectral image classification. Recent works have highlighted that it is the collaborative representation mechanism under SRC that makes SRC a highly effective technique for classification purposes. If the dimensionality and the discrimination capacity of a test pixel is high, other norms (e.g., l 2 -norm) can be used to regularize the coding coefficients, except for the sparsity l 1 -norm. In this paper, we show that in the kernel space the nonnegative constraint can also play the same role, and thus suggest the investigation of kernel fully constrained least squares (KFCLS) for hyperspectral image classification. Furthermore, in order to improve the classification performance of KFCLS by incorporating spatial-spectral information, we investigate two kinds of spatial-spectral methods using two regularization strategies: (1) the coefficient-level regularization strategy, and (2) the class-level regularization strategy. Experimental results conducted on four real hyperspectral images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed KFCLS, and show which way to incorporate spatial-spectral information efficiently in the regularization framework.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 10-6-2011 EFFECTS OF INFORMATION SYSTEM INTENT OF MANAGERS ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATION : CASE OF SELECTED E-GOVERNMENT PROJECTS IN TWO CITY ADMINISTRATIONS IN ETHIOPIA Lemma

The importance of management support in information systems (IS) implementation has been emphasized in previous studies. In line with this, research on critical success factors in IS projects implementation and management is increasingly recognizing the importance of non-technical factors, such as leadership. However, despite its importance, there is lack of empirical evidence to clarify the role of top managers IS intent on IS implementation. This paper, thus, argues for the need for greater inquiry into the field of management support for IS implementation success. It will provide an empirical investigation of the influence of IS strategic intent of managers on IS effectiveness in two city administrations in Ethiopia. The research will be conducted as an interpretive case study in the selected two public institutions. Information Systems projects from these two setups will be selected and the role and extent of IS intent of managers in relation to each project will be studied in detail. Interview items will be adapted from related previous studies. By so doing, this research is aimed at increasing our understanding of managers’ role in facilitating success of IS implementation in organizations.
Detection of Dirofilaria immitis in mid-western arid Argentina

Dirofilariosis, caused by Dirofilaria immitis and D. repens, is (re-) emerging worldwide. Dogs are the main reservoirs, while human infection has recently become an important focus of interest and attention. In Argentina, canine D. immitis infection has been described in eastern and northern subtropical and temperate humid regions, but never reported in mid-western arid regions so far. In this research note we report for the first time the occurrence of autochthonous human and canine D. immitis infection in the region.
Blocklength-Limited Performance of Relaying Under Quasi-Static Rayleigh Channels

In this paper, the blocklength-limited performance of a relaying system is studied, where channels are assumed to experience quasi-static Rayleigh fading while at the same time only the average channel state information (CSI) is available at the source. Both the physical-layer performance (blocklength-limited throughput) and the link-layer performance (effective capacity) of the relaying system are investigated. We propose a simple system operation by introducing a factor based on which we weight the average CSI and let the source determine the coding rate accordingly. We show that both the blocklength-limited throughput and the effective capacity are quasi-concave in the weight factor. Through numerical analysis, we investigate the relaying performance with average CSI while considering perfect CSI scenario and direct transmission as comparison schemes. We observe that relaying is more efficient than direct transmission in the finite blocklength regime. Moreover, this performance advantage of relaying under the average CSI scenario is more significant than under the perfect CSI scenario. Finally, the speed of convergence (between the blocklength-limited performance and the performance with infinite blocklengths) in relaying system is faster in comparison to the direct transmission under both the average CSI scenario and the perfect CSI scenario.
A thermoelastic transversely isotropic thick walled cylinder/disk application: An analytical solution and study

A continuum theory is utilized to represent the thermoelastic behavior of a thick walled composite cylinder that can be idealized as transversely isotropic. A multiaxial statement of the constitutive theory employed is presented, as well as the out of the plane of isotropy, plane stress, and plane strain reductions. The derived analytical solution presented is valid for a cylindrical tube or thin disk with a concentric hole, subjected to internal and/or external pressure and a general radial temperature distribution. A specific problem examined is that of a thick walled cylinder subjected to an internal and external pressure loading and a linear radial temperature distribution. The results are expressed in nondimensional form and the effects on the response behavior are examined for various material properties, fiber orientation and types of loadings.
Fabrication of vertical mirrors using plasma etch and KOH:IPA polishing

A new approach to etch structures with vertical sidewalls in Si is presented in this paper. This process reduces the loading effect in deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and maintains a uniform etch profile and etch rate throughout the wafer. Shallow areas were patterned under the regions to be removed. The wafer was then bonded to a pyrex wafer which acts as a handle wafer and as a package lid for packaging MEMS devices. Uniform width narrow channels encompassing these shallow patterns were then subjected to long through wafer DRIE. These narrow channels maintain uniform etch rates while patterning structures with various fill factors on the same wafer. Various structures were etched with vertical side walls across the 550 µm thick Si wafer. Average side wall angles of 89.8° were obtained with just 0.3° variation across the 4″ Si wafer. The process showed resistance to slight variations in DRIE parameters with a negligible effect on the sidewall profile. Additionally, the verticality of the structures was improved to 90.08° by performing KOH:IPA wet etching on the plasma etched surfaces. Once characterized, the same processes can be used for various shape/size structures. These etched vertical mirrors were used to assemble a corner cube retroreflector.
Effects of Short-Term Continuous Subcutaneous Insulin Infusion on Fasting Plasma Fibroblast Growth Factor-21 Levels in Patients with Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Background To investigate the effects of short-term continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) on plasma fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF-21) levels in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus (nT2DM). Method Sixty-eight patients with nT2DM (nT2DM group), and 52 gender-, age- and body mass index (BMI) -matched normal glucose tolerance (NGT group) controls participated in the study. 30 nT2DM patients with FBG≥14.0 mmol/L were treated with CSII for 2 weeks, and were underwent a euglycemic–hyperinsulinemic clamp pre- and post-treatment. Plasma FGF-21 concentrations were measured with a commercial ELISA kit. The relationship between plasma FGF-21 levels and metabolic parameters was also analyzed. Results Fasting plasma FGF-21 levels were higher in the nT2DM group than in NGT groups (1.60±0.08 vs. 1.13±0.26 µg/L, P<0.01). In nT2DM patients, fasting plasma FGF-21 concentrations were significantly decreased after CSII treatment for 2 weeks (1.60±0.08 vs.1.30±0.05 µg/L, P<0.05), accompanied by a significant increase in the whole body glucose uptake (M value) and blood glucose control. The changes in plasma FGF-21 levels (ΔFGF-21) were positively associated with the amelioration of insulin resistance shown by the changes in M value. Conclusion Plasma FGF-21 level is associated with whole body insulin sensitivity and significantly reduced following short-term CSII treatment.
Partial 18 monosomy in the cyclops malformation.

The morphologic and cytologic findings have been described in a newborn infant with cyclops but without malformation involving other systems. A cytologic abnormality was found consisting of a deletion of the short arms of one of the E chromosomes, which on the basis of size and radioautographic studies has been identified as a number 18 chromosome. These findings resemble those of another patient with cyclops malformation and suggest the presence of a characteristic chromosomal defect in this unusual teratism. On the other hand, the different abnormalities in other cases of partial monosomy 18 illustrates the phenotypic variability which can be observed in association with apparently similar chromosomal aberrations.
Laplacian Regularized Subspace Learning for interactive image re-ranking

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has attracted substantial attention during the past few years for its potential applications. To bridge the gap between low level visual features and high level semantic concepts, various relevance feedback (RF) or interactive re-ranking (IR) schemes have been designed to improve the performance of a CBIR system. In this paper, we propose a novel subspace learning based IR scheme by using a graph embedding framework, termed Laplacian Regularized Subspace Learning (LRSL). The LRSL method can model both within-class compactness and between-class separation by specially designing an intrinsic graph and a penalty graph in the graph embedding framework, respectively. In addition, LRSL can share the popular assumption of the biased discriminant analysis (BDA) for IR but avoid the singular problem in BDA. Extensive experimental results have shown that the proposed LRSL method is effective for reducing the semantic gap and targeting the intentions of users for an image retrieval task.
Oculus–Spark Perimetry Compared with 3 Procedures of Glaucoma Morphologic Analysis (GDx, HRT, and OCT)

Purpose To compare diagnostic capabilities and agreement between Oculus-Spark perimetry and 3 procedures of glaucoma morphologic analysis. Methods A total of 102 normal eyes and 104 consecutive eyes with suspected or confirmed glaucoma (1 eye per subject) were analyzed in a prospective observational case-control study, using Spark strategy (Oculus Easyfield Perimeter), Heidelberg retinal tomograph (HRT), Zeiss laser polarimetry (GDx), and Cirrus optical coherence tomography (OCT). Results Spark first phase lasted 37 seconds and all 4 phases 2:34 minutes. Specificities and sensitivities were as follows: Spark mean deviation (MD) first phase (95.1%, 85.6%), MD second and final phases (95.1%, 86.5%), GDx–nerve fiber indicator (95.1%, 57.4%), HRT–Reinhard Burk discriminant function (95.1%, 52.9%), HRT glaucoma probability score (95.1%, 71.2%), Cirrus OCT vertical cup/ disc ratio (96.1%, 85.6%), and Cirrus OCT retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (95.1%, 68.0%). Diagnostic agreement between second and final Spark MD phases was kappa=0.92; between phase 1 Spark/MD and Cirrus OCT/vertical C/D ratio was kappa=0.78. Agreements between the 2 Cirrus OCT indices was kappa=0.69 and between the 2 HRT indices was kappa=0.559. The correlation coefficient between second and final MD and PSD was 0.99, and 0.98 between the number of scotomatous points. There was high concordance in scotoma position in both phases (kappa=0.86). The linear correlation coefficients between the morphologic indices were 0.48–0.78, and between morphologic and functional indices 0.51–0.76. Correlation coefficients comparing morphologic and functional indices were similar in the first and the last phase (p>0.05 in all cases). Conclusions Spark perimetry appears to show useful sensitivity and specificity, even in the first phase, and good agreement with the morphology.
Miniaturized Wide-Range Field-Emission Vacuum Gauge

Miniaturized vacuum gauges (MVGs) for the measurement range 5.7times10−7 to 1.1times10−2 mbar were fabricated in a self-aligned approach using focused ion beam (FIB) nanoma-chining and reactive ion etching (RIE). The MVG consists of two properly insulated electrodes integrated on top of an atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip, forming a coaxial embodiment. The special design enables us to vary the cathode-anode separation and the turn-on voltage changes accordingly. The experiments show that the MVGs operate at low bias potential and demonstrate very good I-P dependence over a wide pressure range.
Hidden spectral peak trajectory model for phone classification

It is well known that spectrogram readers can classify different phones from their spectral-time characteristics, such as the formants. In this paper we present a novel acoustic model for phone classification based on the implicit estimation of the spectral peak trajectory as a polynomial time function. By making use of the known relationship between the spectral peak information and the cepstral coefficients, cepstral-based phone trajectories are built as functions of the hidden spectral trajectories. This captures the intuitive formant trajectories in the spectral domain while allowing speech modeling to be done in the more familiar cepstral domain. We have evaluated this hidden spectral peak trajectory model in both vowel classification and phone classification tasks. On a simple single Gaussian model, the hidden spectral peak trajectory model outperforms the HMM on both vowel and phone classification tasks. The new method can also be combined with the HMM model. This combination performs better than a more complex HMM with similar number of parameters.
Learning visual motion in recurrent neural networks

We present a dynamic nonlinear generative model for visual motion based on a latent representation of binary-gated Gaussian variables. Trained on sequences of images, the model learns to represent different movement directions in different variables. We use an online approximate inference scheme that can be mapped to the dynamics of networks of neurons. Probed with drifting grating stimuli and moving bars of light, neurons in the model show patterns of responses analogous to those of direction-selective simple cells in primary visual cortex. Most model neurons also show speed tuning and respond equally well to a range of motion directions and speeds aligned to the constraint line of their respective preferred speed. We show how these computations are enabled by a specific pattern of recurrent connections learned by the model.
Prime and Primitive Ideals of a Class of Iterated Skew Polynomial Rings

Hodges and Levasseur described the primitive spectra of quantized coordinate rings of SL3 [14], and then of SLn [15]. These results established a close connection between primitive ideals, torus action, and Poisson geometry. The proofs relied on explicit computations involving generators and relations. Subsequently, Joseph generalized the Hodges–Levasseur program to semisimple algebraic quantum groups [17]. Hodges et al. then expanded Joseph’s work to include certain multiparameter deformations [16]. These papers rely less on concrete calculations and more on deeper, more conceptual, techniques. It is a natural and important question, then, as to how the preceding theory might apply to other algebras, particularly other algebras arising in the study of quantum groups. Goodearl and Letzter established parallel results for certain iterated skew polynomial rings [13], with application to quantum Weyl algebras and to some quantum coordinate rings.
Optimal Feedback Interval for Temporally-Correlated Multiantenna Channel

Assuming perfect channel state information (CSI), the receiver in a point-to-point multiantenna channel can compute the optimal transmit beamforming vector that maximizes channel capacity. The transmitter, which is not able to estimate the CSI, obtains the quantized transmit beamforming vector via a rate-limited feedback channel. We assume that time evolution of both MIMO and MISO channels can be modeled as the first-order autoregressive process parameterized by a temporal-correlation coefficient. For a limited number of feedback bits, we would like to find out how often the feedback update should take place. Applying a large system limit and random vector quantization (RVQ), we derive the integer optimization problem, which determines the optimal feedback interval that maximizes the average capacity. The analytical results show that the optimal feedback interval depends on the temporal correlation coefficient, available feedback, and the number of transmit and receive antennas.
A Surface Approximation Method for Image and Video Correspondences

Although finding correspondences between similar images is an important problem in image processing, the existing algorithms cannot find accurate and dense correspondences in images with significant changes in lighting/transformation or with the non-rigid objects. This paper proposes a novel method for finding accurate and dense correspondences between images even in these difficult situations. Starting with the non-rigid dense correspondence algorithm [1] to generate an initial correspondence map, we propose a new geometric filter that uses cubic B-Spline surfaces to approximate the correspondence mapping functions for shared objects in both images, thereby eliminating outliers and noise. We then propose an iterative algorithm which enlarges the region containing valid correspondences. Compared with the existing methods, our method is more robust to significant changes in lighting, color, or viewpoint. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to extend our surface approximation method to video editing by first generating a reliable correspondence map between a given source frame and each frame of a video. The user can then edit the source frame, and the changes are automatically propagated through the entire video using the correspondence map. To evaluate our approach, we examine applications of unsupervised image recognition and video texture editing, and show that our algorithm produces better results than those from state-of-the-art approaches.
Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs

Food webs aim to provide a thorough representation of the trophic interactions found in an ecosystem. The complexity of empirical food webs, however, is leading many ecologists to focus dynamic ecosystem studies on smaller microcosm or mesocosm studies based upon community modules, which comprise three to five species and the interactions likely to have ecological relevance. We provide here a structural counterpart to community modules. We investigate food-web ‘motifs’ which are n-species connected subgraphs found within the food web. Remarkably, we find that the over- and under-representation of three-species motifs in empirical food webs can be understood through comparison to a static food-web model, the niche model. Our result conclusively demonstrates that predation upon species with some ‘characteristic’ niche value is the prey selection mechanism consistent with the structural properties of empirical food webs.