Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Frequency 4-Dimensional Ultrasound (4DUS): A Reliable Method for Assessing Murine Cardiac Function

In vivo imaging has provided a unique framework for studying pathological progression in various mouse models of cardiac disease. Although conventional short-axis motion-mode (SAX MM) ultrasound and cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are two of the most prevalent strategies used for quantifying cardiac function, there are few notable limitations including imprecision, inaccuracy, and geometric assumptions with ultrasound, or large and costly systems with substantial infrastructure requirements with MRI. Here we present an automated 4-dimensional ultrasound (4DUS) technique that provides comparable information to cine MRI through spatiotemporally synced imaging of cardiac motion. Cardiac function metrics derived from SAX MM, cine MRI, and 4DUS data show close agreement between cine MRI and 4DUS but overestimations by SAX MM. The inclusion of a mouse model of cardiac hypertrophy further highlights the precision of 4DUS compared with that of SAX MM, with narrower groupings of cardiac metrics based on health status. Our findings suggest that murine 4DUS can be used as a reliable, accurate, and cost-effective technique for longitudinal studies of cardiac function and disease progression.
Detection of early pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with thrombospondin-2 and CA19-9 blood markers

THBS2 and CA19-9 markers in human blood improve detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Getting a head start on pancreatic cancer Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has a dismal prognosis due to a lack of diagnostics for detecting early-stage disease. Kim et al. genetically reprogrammed late-stage human PDAC cells to a stem cell–like state, enabling the reprogrammed cells to recapitulate human PDAC progression and revealing secreted candidate markers of early-stage disease. The protein thrombospondin-2 (THBS2) was screened against 746 cancer and control human plasma samples in a multiphase study. The authors report that, THBS2, in combination with the marker CA19-9, boosts detection of the early stages of PDAC in high-risk human populations. Markers are needed to facilitate early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which is often diagnosed too late for effective therapy. Starting with a PDAC cell reprogramming model that recapitulated the progression of human PDAC, we identified secreted proteins and tested a subset as potential markers of PDAC. We optimized an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using plasma samples from patients with various stages of PDAC, from individuals with benign pancreatic disease, and from healthy controls. A phase 1 discovery study (n = 20), a phase 2a validation study (n = 189), and a second phase 2b validation study (n = 537) revealed that concentrations of plasma thrombospondin-2 (THBS2) discriminated among all stages of PDAC consistently. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) c-statistic was 0.76 in the phase 1 study, 0.84 in the phase 2a study, and 0.87 in the phase 2b study. The plasma concentration of THBS2 was able to discriminate resectable stage I cancer as readily as stage III/IV PDAC tumors. THBS2 plasma concentrations combined with those for CA19-9, a previously identified PDAC marker, yielded a c-statistic of 0.96 in the phase 2a study and 0.97 in the phase 2b study. THBS2 data improved the ability of CA19-9 to distinguish PDAC from pancreatitis. With a specificity of 98%, the combination of THBS2 and CA19-9 yielded a sensitivity of 87% for PDAC in the phase 2b study. A THBS2 and CA19-9 blood marker panel measured with a conventional ELISA may improve the detection of patients at high risk for PDAC.
POLITECNICO DI TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE The Intrinsic Dimensionality of Attractiveness : A Study in Face Profiles /

The study of human attractiveness with pattern ana lysis techniques is an emerging research field. One still largely unres olved problem is which are the facial features relevant to attractiveness, how they combine together, and the number of independent parameters required for descr ibing and identifying harmonious faces. In this paper, we present a first study about this problem, applied to face profiles. First, according to sever al empirical results, we hypothesize the existence of two well separated man ifolds of attractive and unattractive face profiles. Then, we analyze with m anifold learning techniques their intrinsic dimensionality. Finally, we show th at the profile data can be reduced, with various techniques, to the intrinsic dimensions, largely without loosing their ability to discriminate between attra c ive and unattractive faces.
A Continuum Model for Slip-Twinning Interactions in Magnesium and Magnesium Alloys

Due to their high specific strength and low density, magnesium and magnesium-based alloys have gained great technological importance in recent years. However, their underlying hexagonal crystal structure furnishes Mg and its alloys with a complex mechanical behavior because of their comparably smaller number of energetically favorable slip systems. Besides the commonly studied slip mechanism, another way to accomplish general deformation is through the additional mechanism of deformation-induced twinning. The main aim of this thesis research is to develop an efficient continuum model to understand and ultimately predict the material response resulting from the interaction between these two mechanisms. The constitutive model we present is based on variational constitutive updates of plastic slips and twin volume fractions and accounts for the related lattice reorientation mechanisms. The model is applied to single- and polycrystalline pure magnesium. We outline the finite-deformation plasticity model combining basal, pyramidal, and prismatic dislocation activity as well as a convexification based approach for deformation twinning. A comparison with experimental data from single-crystal tension-compression experiments validates the model and serves for parameter identification. The extension to polycrystals via both Taylor-type modeling and finite element simulations shows a characteristic stress-strain response that agrees well with experimental observations for polycrystalline magnesium. The presented continuum model does not aim to represent the full details of individual twin-dislocation interactions, yet it is sufficiently efficient to allow for finite element simulations while qualitatively capturing the underlying microstructural deformation mechanisms.
Promotion of the Carbothermic Reduction of Chromium Ore by the Addition of Borates

Synopsis : The effect of sodium and calcium salts on the carbothermic reduction of chromium ores has been studied. Among the additives such as chlorides, carbonates, fluorides and borates, the borates was found to have the strongest promoting effect on the reduction. The rate of reduction increased remarkably with an increase in the amount of added borates, but their addition of more than 1 wt% was less effective. The effect was much more significant in the reduction step of MgCr2O4 component of chromite than that of the FeCr2O4 component. It was found that the borates facilitated the diffusion of ionic species particularly in Al2O3-containing chromite and the grain growth of metal produced. Na2B4O7 slightly promoted the Boudouard reaction, but CaB4O7 retarded it. Based on the effect of CaB4O7, it was examined which of the Boudouard reaction or the reduction of chromite with CO gas mainly controlled the carbothermic reduction of synthetic chromites and chromium ores. The results were in good agreement with those from the kinetic analyses in the previous paper.
A dose ranging phase I/II trial of the von Willebrand factor inhibiting aptamer ARC1779 in patients with congenital thrombotic thrombo - cytopenic purpura

Summary Congenital thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a very rare but potentially life-threatening disorder. This phase I/II trial compared the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics and safety of three different administration modes of the anti-von Willebrand factor (VWF) aptamer ARC1779. This was a prospective clinical trial with a partial cross-over design: three periods comprised subcutaneous injections of 50 mg of ARC1779 on seven subsequent days, a low-dose infusion of ARC1779 (0.002 mg/kg/min) for 24–72 hours and a high-dose infusion (0.004–0.006 mg/kg/min) up to 72 hours. ARC1779 concentrations were determined with high performance liquid chromatography, VWF inhibition was measured with enzyme immunoassay and platelet function was determined with the platelet function analyser (PFA-100) and impedance aggregometry. ARC1779 was well tolerated without any bleeding at concentrations spanning over three orders of magnitude. The daily s.c. injection yielded plasma levels (0.5 μg/ml) of the drug that were too low to sufficiently suppress VWF. The low-dose i.v. infusion increased platelet counts in one patient, whereas the high i.v. dose increased plasma concentrations up to 69 μg/ml, completely blocked free A1 domains, VWF-dependent platelet plug formation and enhanced platelet counts in 2/3 patients. In conclusion, infusion of ARC1779 dosedependently inhibits VWF-dependent platelet function and during infusion ARC1779 increases or stabilises platelet counts in congenital TTP. However, the tested doses, particularly the daily s.c. injections, did not correct all clinical or laboratory features of TTP.
A 52-mW 3.1–10.6-GHz Fully Integrated Correlator for IR-UWB Transceivers in 0.18 $\mu\hbox{m}$ CMOS

Correlators play key roles in impulse radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) transceivers. Multiplier-based correlator performs correlation-type demodulation in addition to select desired UWB signals by correlating incoming pulses with templates. This paper reports design and implementation of a fully integrated low-power broadband multiplier-based correlator for a 3.1-10.6-GHz fullband IR-UWB receiver in 0.18 μm CMOS that consists of a UWB multiplier core, two UWB pulse generators, single-ended-to-differential-ended converter, a first-order RC integrator with a 200-MHz bandwidth, and a buffer. Measurement results confirm desired correlation-type demodulation and correlation functions with a conversion gain of 11.03 dB, noise figure of 15.7 dB, very low power consumption of 52 mW and a 1-dB compression point of better than -0.8 dBm over a 7.5-GHz bandwidth.
Simulation Model of Surface Heterogeneity, Using Gielis' Superformula for Adaptive Methods of Image Analysis

The article presents a developed orginal model designed to increase the efficiency of the processes of the design of adaptive image analysis methods used for detection of surface defects in materials. The model was created as part of activities related to the Strategic Program – Specialized knowledge bases and expert systems for the simulation of complex processes. The methods presented in this paper make it possible to accelerate design process, including testing of algorithms developed for a wide range of surface defects, such as: cracks, discoloration, loss of materials, geometric distortion, or even the presence of defect agglomerations caused by corrosion, without the need for the acquisition of the physical image of the actual objects. This in many cases can be a significant problem for engineers who design automatic optical inspection systems, because the acquisition of test objects with specified defects which are characterized by a fixed range of values of selected parameters is not always possible. This paper presents a formal model designed to generate material defects on the surface of three-dimensional virtual objects, which is equivalent to the acquisition of actual data from vision systems. The model takes into account various surface characteristics such as their texture or roughness by using mapping by the Blinn method. The results of the use of the system developed for the classification of products represented in digital images for which image analysis algorithms have been based on so-called artificial intelligence in the form of dedicated neural networks are presented. As described in this paper, artificial neural networks are an example of adaptive models, and provide the ability to solve problems for which there are no deterministic models. The models, however, require the use of learning processes (training) with the use of extensive data sets, which in this case were generated with the use of the developed solution model.
Low Hemoglobin Concentrations Are Associated With Sarcopenia, Physical Performance, and Disability in Older Australian Men in Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Analysis: The Concord Health and Ageing in Men Project.

BACKGROUND The objective of this study is to examine associations between Hb levels and sarcopenia, low muscle strength, functional measures, and activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental ADL (IADL) disabilities in older Australian men. METHODS Men aged 70 years and older (2005-2007) from the Concord Health and Ageing in Men Project were assessed at baseline (n = 1,705), 2 years (n = 1,367), and 5 years (n = 958). The main outcome measurements were walking speed, muscle strength, ADL and IADL disabilities, and sarcopenia using the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health criteria (low appendicular lean mass adjusted for body mass index < 0.789 and poor grip strength < 26kg). Analysis was performed using Hb levels as a continuous measure, unadjusted and adjusted by age, income, body mass index, measures of health, estimated glomerular function, inflammatory markers, and medication use. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was performed to determine a threshold of Hb for each outcome. RESULTS In cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, for every 1g/dL increase in Hb, there was a significant reduction in risk of sarcopenia, slow walking speed, poor grip strength, inability to perform chair stands, and ADL and IADL disabilities in unadjusted, age-adjusted, and multivariate-adjusted analysis. The highest value of the Youden Index for Hb was 14.2g/dL for sarcopenia and grip strength, 14.5g/dL for walking speed, and 14.4g/dL for all other outcomes. CONCLUSION Declines in Hb levels over time are associated with poor functional outcomes. The risks and benefits of interventions to increase Hb among older men warrant further investigation to differentiate whether this is an active contributor to age-related debility or a passive biomarker of it.
EARNING FOR D EEP N EURAL N ETWORKS

In industrial machine learning pipelines, data often arrive in parts. Particularly in the case of deep neural networks, it may be too expensive to train the model from scratch each time, so one would rather use a previously learned model and the new data to improve performance. However, deep neural networks are prone to getting stuck in a suboptimal solution when trained on only new data as compared to the full dataset. Our work focuses on a continuous learning setup where the task is always the same and new parts of data arrive sequentially. We apply a Bayesian approach to update the posterior approximation with each new piece of data and find this method to outperform the traditional approach in our experiments. 1 BAYESIAN INCREMENTAL LEARNING Recent work has shown promise in incremental learning; for example, a set of reinforcement learning problems have been successively solved by a single model with a help of weight consolidation (Kirkpatrick et al., 2016) or Bayesian inference (Nguyen et al., 2017). In this work we focus on a specific incremental learning setting – we consider a single fixed task when independent data portions arrive sequentially. We formulate a Bayesian method for incremental learning and use recent advances in approximate Bayesian inference (Kingma & Welling, 2013; Kingma et al., 2015; Louizos & Welling, 2017) to obtain a scalable learning algorithm. We demonstrate the performance of our method on MNIST and CIFAR-10 is improved relative to a naive fine-tuning approach and can be applied to a conventional (non-Bayesian) pre-trained DNN. Consider an i.i. d. datasetD = {xi, yi}i=1. In an incremental learning setting, this dataset is divided into T parts D = {D1, . ,DT }, which arrive sequentially during training. The goal is to build an efficient algorithm that takes a model, trained on the first t−1 units of dataD1, . ,Dt−1, and retrain it on a new unit of data Dt without access to D1, . ,Dt−1 and without forgetting dependencies. The most naive deep learning approach for incremental learning is to apply the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) updates with the same loss function on the new data parts, to fine-tune the model. However, in that case, the model is likely to converge to a local optima on a new data unit without saving the information learned from the previous parts of the data. The Bayesian framework is a powerful tool for working with probabilistic models. It allows to estimate the posterior distribution p(w | D1, . . . ,Dt) over the weights w of the model. We can use the Bayes rule to sequentially update the posterior distribution in the incremental learning setting: p(w | D1, . . . ,Dt) ∝ p(Dt |w)p(w | D1, . . . ,Dt−1) (1) Unfortunately, in most cases the posterior distribution p(w | D1, . . . ,Dt) is intractable, so we can use stochastic variational inference (Hoffman et al., 2012) to approximate it. In the next section we present a scalable method for incremental learning, and study different variational approximations of the posterior distribution.
SQuAD Reading Comprehension

One important task in Natural Language Understanding is Reading Comprehension. Given a piece of text, we want to be able to answer any relevant questions. Using Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD), which is a new reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, we built a reading comprehension model that attains 75.2% F1 score and 65.0% Exact Match (EM) on the test set.
Grain Growth in Open Systems

Grain growth in open systems is analyzed for the cases of flux-driven ripening during soldering, flux-driven lateral growth during deposition of thin films, flux-driven lateral growth during reactive growth of intermediate phase, flux-driven lateral growth of antiphase domains in FCC-phase A3B and BCC-phase AB during the diffusion growth of ordered phase layer.
One-step wavelet-based processing for wandering and noise removing in ECG signals

This paper illustrates the application of the Discrete Wavelet Trans- form (DWT) to the processing of electrocardiogram (ECG) for wandering and noise suppression. The proposed scheme allows reducing the computational complexity, while its fixed-point modeling shows the expected performance of pos sible future portable hardware implementations. The system has been tested usi ng synthetic ECG signals, which allow to accurately measure the effect of the proposed processing. M oreover, results from real abdominal ECG signals acquired from pregnant women are presented in order to validate the presented ap proach.
Aging and Calorie Restriction Oppositely Affect Mitochondrial Biogenesis through TFAM Binding at Both Origins of Mitochondrial DNA Replication in Rat Liver

Aging affects mitochondria in a tissue-specific manner. Calorie restriction (CR) is, so far, the only intervention able to delay or prevent the onset of several age-related changes also in mitochondria. Using livers from middle age (18-month-old), 28-month-old and 32-month-old ad libitum-fed and 28-month-old calorie-restricted rats we found an age-related decrease in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) content and mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM) amount, fully prevented by CR. We revealed also an age-related decrease, completely prevented by CR, for the proteins PGC-1α NRF-1 and cytochrome c oxidase subunit IV, supporting the efficiency of CR to forestall the age-related decrease in mitochondrial biogenesis. Furthermore, CR counteracted the age-related increase in oxidative damage to proteins, represented by the increased amount of oxidized peroxiredoxins (PRX-SO3) in the ad libitum-fed animals. An unexpected age-related decrease in the mitochondrial proteins peroxiredoxin III (Prx III) and superoxide dismutase 2 (SOD2), usually induced by increased ROS and involved in mitochondrial biogenesis, suggested a prevailing relevance of the age-reduced mitochondrial biogenesis above the induction by ROS in the regulation of expression of these genes with aging. The partial prevention of the decrease in Prx III and SOD2 proteins by CR also supported the preservation of mitochondrial biogenesis in the anti-aging action of CR. To investigate further the age- and CR-related effects on mitochondrial biogenesis we analyzed the in vivo binding of TFAM to specific mtDNA regions and demonstrated a marked increase in the TFAM-bound amounts of mtDNA at both origins of replication with aging, fully prevented by CR. A novel, positive correlation between the paired amounts of TFAM-bound mtDNA at these sub-regions was found in the joined middle age ad libitum-fed and 28-month-old calorie-restricted groups, but not in the 28-month-old ad libitum-fed counterpart suggesting a quite different modulation of TFAM binding at both origins of replication in aging and CR.
Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels, A Primer

Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program Office plays a key part in helping NASA maintain this important role. The NASA STI Program Office is operated by Langley Research Center, the lead center for NASA's scientific and technical information. The NASA STI Program Office provides access to the NASA STI Database, the largest collection of aeronautical and space science STI in the world. The Program Office is also NASA's institutional mechanism for disseminating the results of its research and development activities. These results are published by NASA in the NASA STI Report Series, which includes the following report types: • TECHNICAL PUBLICATION. Reports of completed research or a major significant phase of research that present the results of NASA programs and include extensive data or theoretical analysis. Includes compilations of significant scientific and technical data and information deemed to be of continuing reference value. NASA's counterpart of peer-reviewed formal professional papers but has less stringent limitations on manuscript length and extent of graphic presentations. • TECHNICAL MEMORANDUM. Scientific and technical findings that are preliminary or of specialized interest, e.g., quick release reports, working papers, and bibliographies that contain minimal annotation. Does not contain extensive analysis.