Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The clinical outcomes of chronic hepatitis C in South Korea

AbstractThis prospective cohort study aimed to elucidate the clinical outcome and its related factors of chronic hepatitis C in a hepatitis B-dominant Asian region.From January 2007 to October 2012, 382 patients with chronic hepatitis C without liver cirrhosis were prospectively enrolled at 6 university hospitals, and regularly followed until Apr 2014 to identify the development of liver cirrhosis, decompensated cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and overall survival.During the median follow-up of 39.0 months (range 18.0–81.0 months), liver cirrhosis, hepatic decompensation, and HCC developed in 42 patients (11.0%), 4 patients (1.0%), and 12 patients (3.1%), respectively. The cumulative probability of development of cirrhosis at 3 years and at 5 years was 9.6% and 16.7%, respectively. That of HCC at 3 and 5 years was 1.6% and 4.5%, respectively. The 3-year and 5-year overall survival rate was 99.7% and 96.0%, respectively. Pegylated interferon-based antiviral therapy was undertaken in 237 patients (62.0%) with a sustained virologic response (SVR) rate of 74.3%. The factors related to the overall clinical outcomes were age ≥55 years (HR 2.924, P = 0.016), platelet counts <150 × 109/L (HR 3.195, P = 0.007), and the achievement of SVR (HR 0.254, P = 0.002). The clinical outcomes of this Korean chronic hepatitis C cohort were modest with minimal mortality, but significant disease progression occurred in the patients with old age, low platelet, and non-SVR after interferon-based antiviral treatment or no treatment, suggesting priority for direct acting antiviral therapy.
Novel Method of Interconnect Worstcase Establishment with Statistically-Based Approaches

In order for the interconnect effects due to process-induced variations to be applied to the designs in 0.13 μm and below, it is necessary to determine and characterize the realistic interconnect worstcase models with high accuracy and speed. This paper proposes new statistically-based approaches to the characterization of realistic interconnect worstcase models which take into account process-induced variations. The Effective Common Geometry (ECG) and Accumulated Maximum Probability (AMP) algorithms have been developed and implemented into the new statistical interconnect worstcase design environment. To verify this statistical interconnect worstcase design environment, the 31-stage ring oscillators are fabricated and measured with UMC 0.13 μm Logic process. The 15-stage ring oscillators are fabricated and measured with 0.18 μm standard CMOS process for investigating its flexibility in other technologies. The results show that the relative errors of the new method are less than 1.00%, which is two times more accurate than the conventional worstcase method. Furthermore, the new interconnect worstcase design environment improves optimization speed by 29.61–32.01% compared to that of the conventional worstcase optimization. The new statistical interconnect worstcase design environment accurately predicts the worstcase and bestcase corners of non-normal distribution where conventional methods cannot do well.
Stimulation of CD28 triggers an association between CD28 and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase in Jurkat T cells

The T cell surface molecule CD28 can provide costimulatory signals that permit the full activation of T cells. Here we demonstrate that stimulation of CD28, either by B7, its natural ligand, or by the anti- CD28 monoclonal antibody 9.3, induces an association between CD28 and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3-K) in Jurkat T cells, raising the possibility that an interaction with PI3-K contributes to CD28-mediated signaling. To examine the mechanism of the association, we synthesized tyrosine-phosphorylated oligopeptides corresponding to each of the four tyrosines in the CD28 cytoplasmic domain. When added to lysates of B7- stimulated Jurkat cells, the oligopeptide corresponding to Tyr 173 inhibits the coimmunoprecipitation of PI3-K with CD28; the other oligopeptides have no effect. Tyr 173 is contained within the sequence YMNM, a motif that is also found in the platelet-derived growth factor receptor and that, when phosphorylated, forms a high affinity binding site for the p85 subunit of PI3-K. These observations suggest that phosphorylation of Tyr 173 may mediate the interaction between CD28 and PI3-K. However, because CD28 is not known to be phosphorylated, it remains possible that CD28 interacts with PI3-K through a mechanism independent of tyrosine phosphorylation.
Seasonal Res

Autotrophic respiration may regulate how ecosystem productivity responds to changes in temperature, atmospheric [CO,] and N deposition. Estimates of autotrophic respiration are difficult for forest ecosystems, because of the large amount of biomass, different metabolic rates among tissues, and seasonal variation in respiration rates. We examined spatial and seasonal patterns in autotrophic respiration in a strobus ecosystem, and hypothesized that seasonal patterns in respiration rates at a common temperature would vary with [Nl for fully expanded foliage and fine roots, with photosynthesis for foliage, and with growth for woody tissues (stems, branches, and coarse roots). We also hypothesized that differences in [Nl would largely explain differences in maintenance or dormant season respiration among tissues. For April-November, mean respiration at 15 ' C varied from 1.5 to 2.8 nmol kg r s-' for fully expanded foliage, 1.7-3.0 for growing foliage, 0.8-1.6 for fine roots, 0.6-1.1 (sap-wood) for stems, 0.5-1.8 (sapwood) for branches, and 0.2-1.5 (sapwood) for coarse roots. Growing season variation in respiration for foliage produced the prior year was strongly related to [Nl tr* = 0.941, but fine root respiration was not related to [NJ. For current-year needles, respiration did not covary with [NJ. Night-time foliar respiration did not vary in concert with previous-day photosynthesis for either growing or fully expanded needles. Stem growth explained about one-third of the seasonal variation in stem respiration (r2= 0.381, and also variation among trees (r2 = 0.43). We did not determine the cause of seasonal variation in branch and coarse root respiration, but it is unlikely to be directly related to growth, as the pattern of respiration in coarse roots and branches was not synchronized with stem growth. Seasonal variations in temperature-corrected respiration rates were not synchronized among tissues, except foliage and branches. Spatial variability in dormant-season respiration rates was significantly related to tissue N content in foliage (r* = 0.671, stems (r* = 0.451, coarse roots (r2 = 0.361, and all tissues combined (r2 = 0.831, but not for fine roots and branches. Per unit N, rates for P. strobus varied from 0.22 to 3.4l. ~molmolN *s-r at 15C, comparable to those found for other conifers. Accurate estimates of annual autotrophic respiration should reflect seasonal and spatial variation in respiration rates of individual tissues.
Asymptotic behaviour of the porous media equation in an exterior domain

We study the asymptotic behaviour of weak solutions u (x, t) to the porous media equation in exterior domains with nontrivial boundary data which are constant in time. We prove that, when the space dimension is greater than one, this behaviour is given in the interior of the positivity set by a function, P (x), which has the same value as u in the fixed boundary and such that its m -th power, P’ (x), is harmonic in the exterior domain. We also prove that near the free boundary the asymptotic behaviour is given by a radial, self-similar solution of the porous media equation which is singular at the origin for all times. There is a whole family of such singular self-similar solutions. The precise one giving the asymptotic behaviour is determined through a process of matched asymptotics. We also show that the free boundary approaches a sphere as t ~ oo, and give the asymptotic growth rate for the radius.
Search-based failure discovery using testability transformations to generate pseudo-oracles

Testability transformations are source-to-source program transformations that are designed to improve the testability of a program. This paper introduces a novel approach in which transformations are used to improve testability of a program by generating a pseudo-oracle. A pseudo-oracle is an alternative version of a program under test whose output can be compared with the original. Differences in output between the two programs may indicate a fault in the original program. Two transformations are presented. The first can highlight numerical inaccuracies in programs and cumulative roundoff errors, whilst the second may detect the presence of race conditions in multi-threaded code. Once a pseudo-oracle is generated, techniques are applied from the field of search-based testing to automatically find differences in output between the two versions of the program. The results of an experimental study presented in the paper show that both random testing and genetic algorithms are capable of utilizing the pseudo-oracles to automatically find program failures. Using genetic algorithms it is possible to explicitly maximize the discrepancies between the original programs and their pseudo-oracles. This allows for the production of test cases where the observable failure is highly pronounced, enabling the tester to establish the seriousness of the underlying fault.
Diminutive Nouns in Miami-Illinois

Almost all Algonquian languages use diminutive suffixes on nouns and, in some languages, on verbs as well. The formation of diminutive nouns in Miami-Illinois is very complex, and much more irregular than that seen in the most closely related Algonquian languages. I discuss here patterns of diminutive noun formation in Miami-Illinois; besides comparing them to those found in its sister languages when relevant, I demonstrate which forms are unpredictable, and discuss philological problems of phonemic interpretation posed by the original records.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections for Advanced Knee Osteoarthritis: A Prospective, Randomized, Double-Blinded Clinical Trial

Background: Intra-articular injections of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) to treat symptoms of knee osteoarthritis (OA) have been successfully used in young patients and in the early stages of disease. No previous studies have analyzed outcomes of PRP injections during the late stages. Hypothesis: PRP reduces pain and leads to a more effective and lasting functional recovery than corticosteroid with local anesthetic. Study Design: Randomized controlled trial; Level of evidence, 2. Methods: A total of 75 patients with symptomatic knee OA (Kellgren-Lawrence grade 3 to 4) were enrolled in this study between August 2013 and July 2014. Patients were randomized to treatment either with a single leukocyte-reduced PRP or corticosteroid intra-articular injection. The primary variable was visual analog scale assessment at 1 month. Secondary outcomes were the Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS) and Short Form–36 (SF-36) at 1, 3, and 6 months after treatment. Patient satisfaction at final follow-up was assessed. Both groups were homogeneous and comparable in baseline characteristics. Results: All variables improved in both groups. Statistical differences between groups were not found for the majority of the outcome variables, although the magnitude of improvements tended to be greater in the PRP group. Quality-of-life differences between values at 3 and 6 months versus baseline increased significantly more in the study group (P = .05 and .03, respectively), and so did general health perception differences at 6 months (P = .018). Conclusion: A single PRP intra-articular injection is effective for relieving pain and improving activities of daily living and quality of life in late-stage knee OA. For patients with late-stage knee OA who are 67 years or older, 1 intra-articular injection of PRP has similar results to 1 shot of corticosteroid.
A Test Problem Generator for Discrete Linear L 1 Approximation Problems

Described here are the theoretmal development and computer implementation of a procedure that generates test problems for L~ esth-nation of the linear model y= Xfl + u. The generation procedure allows the user flembdlty m specifying the problem dimensions, the LI solution vector fl*, the distribution of the observed residuals ~, as well as the column rank, row repetitions, and degree of degeneracy of the matrix X The user can also specify the distributional form, mean, and variance for each independent variable An lraportant feature of the generator is that any problem it creates is guaranteed to have a umque solutmn ~ whenever X has full rank
DETERMINATION OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF MATERIALS WITH COMPLEX INNER STRUCTURE USING MICROSTRUCTURAL MODELS

Among materials with complex inner structure are ranked cellular materials, typically represented by trabecular bone and polymer or metal foams. Geometrical similarity of their internal structure allows determination of material characteristics of trabecular bone using models originally developed for analysis of polymer and metal foams. In this paper, mechanical behavior of cellular materials is studied by modeling their internal structure and analysis using Finite Element Method (FEM). Alporas aluminium foam was selected as a reference material and the material characteristics were derived from tensile loading using numerical FEM analysis. Internal structure of the foam was modeled by two different methods using voxel model created on the basis of a series of CT scans and by discretization using Gibson-Ashby's cellular model. Mechanical behavior analysis was performed in both elastic and plastic fields. The beam-only discretization is considered intentionally to investigate its suitability for modeling of closed cell foams and trabecular bone.
A single-target tracking algorithm in controlled mobility sensor networks

This paper deals with the problem of single target tracking in controlled mobility sensor networks. It thus proposes an original strategy to manage the mobility of sensor nodes, in order to improve the estimation of the positions of the target. The proposed method consists of estimating the actual position of the target, then it uses position estimates to predict a region where the target is assumed to fall in the next time-step. A structure of triangle is then defined, aiming at covering at best the predicted area. Each mobile sensor is then assigned a position at the vertices of the structure, in the way to minimize the total traveled distance by the nodes. One constraint for this technique is to maintain the total coverage of the network. For this reason, we propose to use a hybrid network, including static nodes, as well, to insure continuously the coverage of the network. Simulation results corroborate the efficiency of the proposed method compared to the target tracking methods considered for networks with static nodes.
Remote sensing image object extraction using convex geometric active contour model

The geometric active contour model is a popular method for computing the segmentation of an image into two phases, based on Mumford-Shah model. The main problem in image segmentation based this method may lead to non-convex minimization problems that it difficult to obtain a global solution. In this paper, we propose a convex relaxation of the popular K-means algorithm. Our approach is based on the vector-valued relaxation technique developed by Brown et al. (UCLA CAM Report 10-43, 2010) and Goldstein et al. (UCLA CAM Report 09-77, 2009). We applied the proposed framework to multi-object extraction problems on remote sensing images. We provide several experimental results to demonstrate that our convex model yields global solutions to the well known Mumford-Shah model.
Open vocabulary handwriting recognition using combined word-level and character-level language models

In this paper, we present a unified search strategy for open vocabulary handwriting recognition using weighted finite state transducers. Additionally to a standard word-level language model we introduce a separate n-gram character-level language model for out-of-vocabulary word detection and recognition. The probabilities assigned by those two models are combined into one Bayes decision rule. We evaluate the proposed method on the IAM database of English handwriting. An improvement from 22.2% word error rate to 17.3% is achieved comparing to the closed-vocabulary scenario and the best published result.
The Application of Ant Colony Algorithm in Land Use

This article introduced ant colony optimization into land use planning taking Hangu Management District of Tangshan as study area. Establishing land use structure optimization model based on land use change data, and then designing algorithm to run the model. after comparing the optimized land use program with current land use planning, we find the conclusion that the ant colony optimization program is more scientific and reasonable used in the land use structure optimization.
Association Between Blood Cadmium Levels and Mortality in Peritoneal Dialysis

AbstractThe negative impact of environmental exposure of cadmium has been well established in the general population. However, the effect of cadmium exposure in chronic peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients remains uncertain.A total of 306 chronic PD patients were included in this 36-month observational study. Patients were stratified into 3 groups by the tertile of baseline blood cadmium levels (BCLs): high (>0.244 &mgr;g/L, n = 101), middle (0.130–0.244 &mgr;g/L, n = 102), and low (<0.130 &mgr;g/L, n = 103) for cross-sectional analyses. Mortality rates and cause of death were recorded for longitudinal analyses.Patients in the high-BCL group were older, more likely to have diabetes mellitus, had lower levels of serum albumin and lower percentage of lean body mass than patients in the low-BCL group. A multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that logarithmic transformed BCL was independently associated with a higher risk of low turnover bone disease (odds ratio = 3.8, P = 0.005). At the end of the 36-month follow-up, 66 (21.6%) patients died. Mortality rates increased with higher BCLs (P for trend = 0.005). A Cox multivariate analysis showed that, using the low-BCL group as the reference, the high-BCL group had increased hazard ratios (HR) for all-cause mortality in chronic PD patients after adjusting for related variables (HR = 2.469, 95% confidence interval = 1.078–5.650, P = 0.043). In conclusion, BCL showed significant association with malnutrition and low turnover bone disease in chronic PD patients. Furthermore, BCL is an important determinant of mortality. Our findings suggest that avoiding environmental exposure to cadmium as much as possible is warranted in chronic PD patients.
Adaptive Iterative Decoding for Expediting the Convergence of Unary Error Correction Codes

Multimedia encoders typically generate symbols having a wide range of legitimate values. In practical mobile wireless scenarios, the transmission of these symbols is required to be bandwidth efficient and error resilient, motivating both source coding and channel coding. However, separate source and channel coding (SSCC) schemes are typically unable to exploit the residual redundancy in the source symbols, which cannot be totally reduced by finite-delay finite-complexity schemes, hence resulting in a capacity loss. Until recently, none of the existing joint source and channel codes (JSCCs) were suitable for this application since their decoding complexity rapidly increases with the size of the symbol alphabet. Motivated by this, we proposed a novel JSCC referred to as the unary error correction (UEC) code, which is capable of exploiting all residual redundancy and eliminating any capacity loss, while imposing only a moderate decoding complexity. In this paper, we show that the operation of the UEC decoder can be dynamically adapted to strike an attractive tradeoff between its decoding complexity and its error correction capability. Furthermore, we conceive the corresponding 3-D EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts for controlling this dynamic adaptation, as well as the decoder activation order, when the UEC code is serially concatenated with a turbo code. In this way, we expedite iterative decoding convergence, facilitating a gain of up to 1.2 dB compared with both SSCC and to its nonadaptive UEC benchmarkers, while maintaining the same transmission bandwidth, duration, energy, and decoding complexity.
Developing a Bayes-net based student model for an External Representation Selection Tutor

This paper describes the process by which we are constructing an intelligent tutoring system (ERST) designed to improve learners' external representation (ER) selection accuracy on a range of database query tasks. This paper describes how ERST's student model is being constructed-it is a Bayesian network seeded with data from experimental studies. The studies examined the effects of students' background knowledge-of-external representations (KER) upon performance and their preferences for particular information display forms across a range of database query types.
Compositional Semantics and Refinement of Statecharts

Statecharts is widely used as a behavioral modeling language for reactive systems for its concise and intuitive expression. It can represent the system behavior at different levels of abstraction, and therefore can represent the result of every refinement step in the process of system modeling. However, it's beyond its capability to reason about whether the model semantics of the lower level preserves that of the higher level and whether the models they describe satisfy some properties. In this aspect, the formal language XYZ/E can be used complementarily. The XYZ/E is an executable linear temporal logic. It can express both the properties and behavior of systems. In this paper, the semantics of Statecharts is defined inductively using the Basic Transition System, and its temporal semantics is expressed by an XYZ/E formula. The semantics we give is modularly compositional. The semantic preserving of different refinement steps can be guaranteed by the semantic definition directly. Models that Statecharts specify and their properties are represented in the same logic, so the assertion that a model meets its specification is expressed by logical implication.
Service selection approach for swim consumer application based on semantic annotations in SOAML architecture

The increasing complexity and demand of airspace use has motivated the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to upgrade the current Air Traffic Management (ATM). One of these new technologies that will be implemented in the airspace control system is the System Wide Information Management (SWIM). SWIM is aligned with the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SWIM standard does not implement or suggest a semantic service description. This article is concerned with modeling of consumer applications requirement services capabilities based on semantics to improve service discovery and selection. From the perspective of the consumer, it is possible to make services pre-selection that fit system requirements. Anticipating the services' pre-selection for the consumer system modeling phase, the discovery and selection can be improved. The main goal of this approach is to provide the architecture model with functional and non-functional information about services available that meets the consumer system needs. As viability test, the proposed approach was applied in a case study, a scenario in which a consumer application presents a query report integrating weather services, flight information and airport services. Model experiments show that it is possible to improve the service discovery process with pre-selection services modeled at client application.