Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implementation, calibration and accuracy testing of an image-enhanced endoscopy system

This paper presents a new method for image-guided surgery called image-enhanced endoscopy. Registered real and virtual endoscopic images (perspective volume renderings generated from the same view as the endoscope camera using a preoperative image) are displayed simultaneously; when combined with the ability to vary tissue transparency in the virtual images, this provides surgeons with the ability to see beyond visible surfaces and, thus, provides additional exposure during surgery. A mount with four photoreflective spheres is rigidly attached to the endoscope and its position and orientation is tracked using an optical position sensor. Generation of virtual images that are accurately registered to the real endoscopic images requires calibration of the tracked endoscope. The calibration process determines intrinsic parameters (that represent the projection of three-dimensional points onto the two-dimensional endoscope camera imaging plane) and extrinsic parameters (that represent the transformation from the coordinate system of the tracker mount attached to the endoscope to the coordinate system of the endoscope camera), and determines radial lens distortion. The calibration routine is fast, automatic, accurate and reliable, and is insensitive to rotational orientation of the endoscope. The routine automatically detects, localizes, and identifies dots in a video image snapshot of the calibration target grid and determines the calibration parameters from the sets of known physical coordinates and localized image coordinates of the target grid dots. Using nonlinear lens-distortion correction, which can be performed at real-time rates (30 frames per second), the mean projection error is less than 0.5 mm at distances up to 25 mm from the endoscope tip, and less than 1.0 mm up to 45 mm. Experimental measurements and point-based registration error theory show that the tracking error is about 0.5-0.7 mm at the tip of the endoscope and less than 0.9 mm for all points in the field of view of the endoscope camera at a distance of up to 65 mm from the tip. It is probable that much of the projection error is due to endoscope tracking error rather than calibration error. Two examples of clinical applications are presented to illustrate the usefulness of image-enhanced endoscopy. This method is a useful addition to conventional image-guidance systems, which generally show only the position of the tip (and sometimes the orientation) of a surgical instrument or probe on reformatted image slices.
Trustworthy geographically fenced hybrid clouds

Adoption of hybrid clouds by enterprises has been hampered by the inability of current hybrid cloud infrastructures to provide scalable and efficient mechanisms (1) to ensure the trustworthiness and integrity of the software stack executing a hybrid application workload, or (2) to enforce governmental privacy, data jurisdiction and audit regulations by ensuring that remote data and computation do not cross specified geographic boundaries. This paper presents our vision of trustworthy geographically fenced hybrid clouds (TGHC), a generic, scalable and extensible middleware system to automatically bridge the gap between applications with their integrity and geo-fencing policies, and raw hardware infrastructure. It describes TGHCs modularly, by (a) outlining the challenges in certifying the trustworthiness of cloud computing infrastructures and in geo-fencing computation, including scalability limitations of existing solutions, (b) presenting scalable mechanisms to transform bare metal servers into trusted IaaS computing pools through integrity measurement, management and monitoring that leverage open, off-the-shelf hardware technologies like Intel TPM, (c) introducing workload specification languages to specify integrity and geo-fencing policies on hybrid workloads, and (d) extending IaaS systems to ensure that workload bursting from private data centers to public clouds uses trusted computing pools and respects geographic boundaries during initial placement of virtual machines (VMs) and further migration. We also present early results from our implementation illustrating the feasibility of our proposed architecture, and outline future research challenges in engineering and effectively using TGHCs.
Offenders with mental health problems and substance misuse: cluster analysis based on the Addiction Severity Index version 6 (ASI-6)

There is an urgent need to improve assessment and treatment among offenders with mental health problems and substance misuse (the “triply troubled”). An examination of the usefulness of the recently published Addiction Severity Index version 6 (ASI-6; Cacciola, J.S., Alterman, A.I., Habing, B., & McLellan, A.T. (2011). Recent status scores for version 6 of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI-6). Addiction, 106, 1588–1602) in classifying offenders with mental health problems and substance misuse was undertaken. A total of 207 offenders with suspect mental disorder and substance misuse about to go through a forensic psychiatric evaluation in Sweden were interviewed with the ASI-6. Data were cluster analyzed. Four distinct clusters emerged: (1) “less troubled” (n = 35), (2) “severely triply troubled” (n = 30), (3) “triply troubled with medical problems (n = 52) and (4) “working triply troubled” (n = 87). The ASI-6 proved useful in the classification of offenders with mental health problems and substance misuse.
Epoch Extraction in High Pass Filtered Speech Using Hilbert Envelope

Hilbert envelope (HE) is defined as the magnitude of the analytic signal. This work proposes HE based zero frequency filtering (ZFF) approach for the extraction of epochs in high pass filtered speech. Epochs in speech correspond to instants of significant excitation like glottal closure instants. The ZFF method for epoch extraction is based on the signal energy around the impulse at zero frequency which seems to be significantly attenuated in case of high pass filtered speech. The low frequency nature of HE reinforces the signal energy around the impulse at zero frequency. This work therefore processes the HE of high pass filtered speech or its residual by zero frequency filtering for epoch extraction. The proposed approach shows significant improvement in performance for the high pass filtered speech compared to the conventional ZFF of speech. Index Terms: Epochs, zero frequency filtering, Hilbert envelope
Simulating cheap hardware: a platform for evaluating cost-performance trade-offs in haptic hardware design

This work describes a platform devised to explore the impact on task execution in a virtual environment of the quality, and therefore cost, of the system's haptic hardware. This platform is a complex haptic interface in which hardware quality can be varied in simulation. Software intercepts the position and force signals between the haptic hardware and the virtual environment software, and alters them to supply the effect of increased friction, cogging, backlash, inertia and/or lower force output. All parameters of the introduced effects can be set independently or in combination and on a continuous scale; a primary contribution is the creation of haptically realistic effect models that are stable in combination on complex hardware. This work is part of a larger project in which we test the effect of the simulated degradations on surgeons performance in simulated laparoscopic tasks.
Relations Between Mother-Child Interactions and the Neural Correlates of Face Processing in 6-Month-Olds

Abstract Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this age is frequently noted in the behavioral and neurophysiological literature as a time of transition in which infants begin to discriminate more readily between caregivers and unfamiliar adults. We used infants' behavioral responses to an original behavioral paradigm to predict event-related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of the mother's face and a stranger's face in the same group of participants. Our results suggest that individual differences in infants' proximity-seeking behaviors during interactions with the mother correlate with their neurophysiological responses to the mother's face as opposed to an unfamiliar face for the Nc component of t.
Proposal of bulk LTSA to realize low antenna impedance for real time millimeter wave imaging front-end

Active Millimeter-Wave (MMW) imaging is to be applied to security systems. Envelope phase detection (EPD) method will realize both short scanning time and low cost. The method uses an array of receiving antennas in combination with envelope detectors. We propose bulk linearly tapered slot antenna (LTSA) as the receiving antenna to realize low impedance. Unlike a conventional LTSA, a bulk LTSA antenna has low impedance due to its thick metallic fins. Since we detect input MMW directly, high circuit impedance often results in attenuation of envelope amplitude. The low-impedance LTSA avoids the attenuation. In this paper, we present the basic antenna characteristics and detection characteristics used with the EPD method, in particular the dependence of the fin thickness of the LTSA.
Brain size and grey matter volume in the healthy human brain

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate the influence of sex and brain size on compartmental brain volumes (grey matter, white matter, CSF) in a large and well-matched sample of neurologically normal women (n = 50) and men (n = 50). As expected, we found a significant sex difference for the absolute volumes of total brain, grey matter, white matter and CSF, with greater volumes for men. Relating these compartmental volume measures to brain volume resulting in proportional volume measures revealed a higher proportion of grey matter in women. No significant sex differences were found for white matter and CSF proportions. However, when the influence of sex was partialized out by regression analyses, brain volume explained 40–81% of the variance of the absolute grey matter, white matter and CSF volumes. Performing these regression analyses for the proportional volume measures revealed that brain volume explained ∼16% of the variance in grey matter proportion. Sex or the interaction between sex and brain volume revealed no additional predicitve values. Interestingly, the correlation between brain volume and grey matter proportion was negative, with larger brains exhibiting relatively smaller proportions of grey matter. Thus, sex is not the main variable explaining the variability in grey matter volume. Rather, we suggest that brain size is the main variable determining the proportion of grey matter.
COMMUNITY PHYLOGENETICS AND ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING Community assembly , coexistence and the environmental fi ltering metaphor

Community assembly, coexistence and the environmental filtering metaphor Nathan J. B. Kraft*, Peter B. Adler, Oscar Godoy, Emily C. James, Steve Fuller and Jonathan M. Levine Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 20742, USA; Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, 84322, USA; Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiolog ıa de Sevilla (IRNAS), CSIC, PO Box 1052, Sevilla E-41080, Spain; and Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Universitätstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
Coaching and Professional Development in Early Childhood Classrooms: Current Practices and Recommendations for the Future

Coaching is one of several professional development approaches being used in early childhood to facilitate improved teacher instruction to promote child outcomes. Despite its use, little is known about how coaching promotes teacher knowledge and skills (Sheridan, Edwards, Marvin, & Knoche, 2009). We reviewed the early childhood coaching literature to determine what specifically coaches do to promote teacher practices. Though we found that coaching with some form of professional development often improved teacher behaviors and practices and/or child outcomes, detailed descriptions about explicit coaching behaviors that were linked directly to improved teacher behaviors and practice and/or child outcomes were rarely available. To measure the impact of coaching, it seems necessary to know first what behaviors and actions coaches use—meaning the process of coaching—to then determine the impact of these behaviors and actions (Sheridan et al., 2009). We suggest specific elements be used to define future coachin.
Towards the Realization of Decentralized Online Social Networks: An Empirical Study

As the Online Social Networks (OSNs) amass un-precedented amounts of personal information, the privacy concerns gain considerable attention from the community. Apart from privacy-enabling approaches for existing OSNs, a number of initiatives towards building decentralized OSN infrastructures have emerged. However, before this paradigm becomes a serious alternative to current centralized infrastructures, some key design challenges, often conflicting with each other, have to be addressed. In this paper, we explore such design objectives concerning various system properties, namely availability, replication degree, user online times, privacy, and experimentally study the trade-offs among them based on real data sets from Facebook and Twitter. We introduce different mechanisms to model user online times in the OSN from their activity times. We demonstrate how different profile replica selection approaches significantly affect the system performance.
Vocalizing in chimpanzees is influenced by social-cognitive processes

A study in wild chimpanzees shows that cognition-influenced vocalizing is not only a human trait but also occurs in chimpanzees. Adjusting communication to take into account information available to one’s audience is routine in humans but is assumed absent in other animals, representing a recent development on the lineage leading to humans. This assumption may be premature. Recent studies show changes in primate alarm signaling to threats according to the receivers’ risk. However, a classic problem in these and other perspective-taking studies is discerning whether signalers understand the receivers’ mental states or simply are responding to their behavior. We designed experiments to exclude concurrent reading of the receivers’ behavior by simulating receivers using prerecorded calls of other group members. Specifically, we tested whether wild chimpanzees emitted differing signals in response to a snake model when simulated receivers previously emitted either snake-related calls (indicating knowledge) or acoustically similar non–snake-related calls (indicating ignorance). Signalers showed more vocal and nonvocal signaling and receiver-directed monitoring when simulated receivers had emitted non–snake-related calls. Results were not explained by signaler arousal nor by receiver identity. We conclude that chimpanzees are aware enough of another’s perspective to target information toward ignorant group members, suggesting that the integration of signaling and social cognition systems was already emerging in early hominoid lineages before the advent of more language-specific features, such as syntax.
Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation

Significance More than 50% of people now live in urban areas. By 2050 this proportion will be 70%. Urbanization is associated with increased levels of mental illness, but it’s not yet clear why. Through a controlled experiment, we investigated whether nature experience would influence rumination (repetitive thought focused on negative aspects of the self), a known risk factor for mental illness. Participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world. Urbanization has many benefits, but it also is associated with increased levels of mental illness, including depression. It has been suggested that decreased nature experience may help to explain the link between urbanization and mental illness. This suggestion is supported by a growing body of correlational and experimental evidence, which raises a further question: what mechanism(s) link decreased nature experience to the development of mental illness? One such mechanism might be the impact of nature exposure on rumination, a maladaptive pattern of self-referential thought that is associated with heightened risk for depression and other mental illnesses. We show in healthy participants that a brief nature experience, a 90-min walk in a natural setting, decreases both self-reported rumination and neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), whereas a 90-min walk in an urban setting has no such effects on self-reported rumination or neural activity. In other studies, the sgPFC has been associated with a self-focused behavioral withdrawal linked to rumination in both depressed and healthy individuals. This study reveals a pathway by which nature experience may improve mental well-being and suggests that accessible natural areas within urban contexts may be a critical resource for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world.
An approach for restructuring text content

Software engineers have successfully used Natural Language Processing for refactoring source code. Conversely, in this paper we investigate the possibility to apply software refactoring techniques to textual content. As a procedural program is composed of functions calling each other, a document can be modeled as content fragments connected each other through links. Inspired by software engineering refactoring strategies, we propose an approach for refactoring wiki content. The approach has been applied to the EMF category of Eclipsepedia with encouraging results.
Measuring Blocking Artifacts for IPTV-based Service Quality Evaluation

IPTV is a system based on IP network, which may include service by a broadband connection. In this sense, it is possible to provide various multimedia contents by using IP network with interactivity. However, since IPTV service quality may be easily affected by network degradation such as packet loss, jitter, and so on, the quality of IPTV service may not be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose an objective measure for blocking artifacts, which is one of the most important impairments experienced when enjoying IPTV. Experimental results show that the proposed measure correlates well with the subjective evaluation.
Learning to lemmatise Polish noun phrases

We present a novel approach to noun phrase lemmatisation where the main phase is cast as a tagging problem. The idea draws on the observation that the lemmatisation of almost all Polish noun phrases may be decomposed into transformation of singular words (tokens) that make up each phrase. We perform evaluation, which shows results similar to those obtained earlier by a rule-based system, while our approach allows to separate chunking from lemmatisation.
Analysis of Heterogeneous βA4 Peptides in Human Cerebrospinal Fluid and Blood by a Newly Developed Sensitive Western Blot Assay*

The βA4 peptide, a major component of senile plaques in Alzheimer's disease (AD) brain, has been found in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood of both AD patients and normal subjects. Although βA4 1-40 is the major form produced by cell metabolism and found in CSF, recent observations suggest that the long-tailed βA4 1-42 plays a more crucial role in AD pathogenesis. Here, we established new monoclonal antibodies against the C-terminal end of βA4 1-40 and 1-42, and used them for the specific Western blot detection. After optimizing the assay conditions, these antibodies detected low picogram amount of βA4, and both βA4 1-40 and 1-42 levels in CSF could be determined by direct loading of the samples. Blood levels of βA4 1-40 and 1-42 were also determined by specific immunoprecipitation followed by Western blot detection. We found that CSF βA4 1-42 level is lower in AD patients compared with non-demented controls, although there was a significant overlap between the groups. The level of βA4 1-40 in CSF, and of βA4 1-40 as well as βA4 1-42 in plasma, were not different between AD patients and controls. Besides the 4-kDa full-length βA4 band, we could also detect several N-terminal variants of βA4 in CSF and plasma of both AD patients and controls. Two N-terminally truncated βA4 species migrating at the position of 3.3 and 3.7 kDa were found in CSF, while 3.7- and 5-kDa forms were found in plasma. The relative abundance of these various species were considerably different in the CSF and plasma, suggesting that the cellular source and/or clearance of βA4 is different in these two compartments.
Sensor Node Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks based on Ionic Bond-Directed Particle Swarm Optimization

Sensor node deployment is one of the critical topics addressed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research, which determines coverage efficiency of WSNs. This paper proposes a self -organizing algorithm for enhancing the coverage for WSNs, which is so-called Ionic bond-directed particle swarm optimization (IBPSO). The proposed algorithm combines the ionic bond method with particle swarm optimization (PSO), where ionic bond method uses a judicious ionic bond between two sensor nodes to determine which node needs to move and also the path and direction of the movement and PSO is suitable for solving multi-dimension function optimization in continuous space. Simulation results demonstrate that IBPSO has more satisfactory performance on regional convergence and global searching than PSO algorithm and can implement dynamic deployment of WSNs more efficiently and rapidly.
Function-on-Function Regression with Public Health Applications

Medical research currently involves the collection of large and complex data. One such type of data is functional data where the unit of measurement is a curve measured over a grid. Functional data comes in a variety of forms depending on the nature of the research. Novel methodologies are required to accommodate this growing volume of functional data alongside new testing procedures to provide valid inferences. In this dissertation, I propose three novel methods to accommodate a variety of questions involving functional data of multiple forms. I consider three novel methods: (1) a function-on-function regression for Gaussian data; (2) a historical functional linear models for repeated measures; and (3) a generalized functional outcome regression for ordinal data. For each method, I discuss the existing shortcomings of the literature and demonstrate how my method fills those gaps. The abilities of each method are demonstrated via simulation and data application.