Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors associated with uptake of home-based HIV counselling and testing and HIV care services among identified HIV-positive persons in Masaka, Uganda

ABSTRACT We investigated uptake of home-based HIV counselling and testing (HBHCT) and HIV care services post-HBHCT in order to inform the design of future HBHCT programmes. We used data from an open-label cluster-randomised controlled trial which had demonstrated the effectiveness of a post-HBHCT counselling intervention in increasing linkage to HIV care. HBHCT was offered to adults (≥18 years) from 28 rural communities in Masaka, Uganda; consenting HIV-positive care naïve individuals were enrolled and referred for care. The trial's primary outcome was linkage to HIV care (clinic-verified registration for care) six months post-HBHCT. Random effects logistic regression was used to investigate factors associated with HBHCT uptake, linkage to care, CD4 count receipt, and antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation; all analyses of uptake of post-HBHCT services were adjusted for trial arm allocation. Of 13,455 adults offered HBHCT, 12,100 (89.9%) accepted. HBHCT uptake was higher among men [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.20, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.07–1.36] than women, and decreased with increasing age. Of 551 (4.6%) persons who tested HIV-positive, 205 (37.2%) were in care. Of those not in care, 302 (87.3%) were enrolled in the trial and of these, 42.1% linked to care, 35.4% received CD4 counts, and 29.8% initiated ART at 6 months post-HBHCT. None of the investigated factors was associated with linkage to care. CD4 count receipt was lower in individuals who lived ≥30 min from an HIV clinic (aOR 0.60, 95%CI = 0.34–1.06) versus those who lived closer. ART initiation was higher in older individuals (≥45 years versus <25 years, aOR 2.14, 95% CI = 0.98–4.65), and lower in single (aOR 0.60, 95% CI = 0.28–1.31) or divorced/separated/widowed (aOR 0.47, 95% CI = 0.23–0.93) individuals versus those married/cohabiting. HBHCT was highly acceptable but uptake of post-HBHCT care was low. Other than post-HBHCT counselling, this study did not identify specific issues that require addressing to further improve linkage to care.
Eliminating errors due to position uncertainty in coaxial airline based measurement of material parameters

The Nicolson-Ross-Weir (NRW) method is a classic technique for the measurement of complex permittivity and permeability of materials at RF and microwave frequencies. The method is based on the measurement of transmission and reflection coefficients of the material under test and subsequently, extracting the material parameters through a non-linear inversion process. The NRW method has a limitation on the thickness of the sample to be less than λ/2. The Stepwise NRW method that relies on seeking the correct branch in the inversion process, overcomes the limitation on the thickness on the sample. Both the methods rely on the reflection and transmission coefficients, which is obtained from two-port S-parameters measurements, by inserting the material under test inside a transmission line. In this work, a coaxial airline is used for the transmission line measurement. The de-embedding of the S-parameters, to obtain the reflection and transmission coefficients, requires the position/location of the sample inside the coaxial airline. This can potentially introduce errors due to position uncertainties. We propose a technique to estimate the position of the material under test inside the coaxial airline that eliminates inaccuracies due to positioning errors in the extraction process. The proposed technique relies on the symmetry of S-parameters to estimate the errors in the position of the material placed inside the coaxial airline. Subsequent de-embedding of S-parameters is performed taking into account the estimated error in the position of the material under test. Measurements and investigations are performed using both the NRW and stepwise NRW techniques illustrating the improvement in the accuracy of the measured material parameters.
Fractures of the Wrist and Hand

Introduction The hand is one of the most important organs of human body serving multiple day to day functions and, as such, disability resulting from poorly managed fractures of the hand can have huge implications for patients. This not only includes incapacity to complete actions of daily living but also inability to satisfactorily undertake many forms of employment. This not only has implications for the individual but also socio-economic implications.
Sensorless position and velocity estimation of two wheeled inverted pendulum mobile robot

One of the problem with complex machines is the sensor used to measure the outputs or the states of the machine. The sensors are prone to noise and add to design complexity. To overcome these problems, sensorless techniques are used as substitutes to common physical sensors. This paper presents sensorless estimation of position and velocity of a two wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) mobile robot, using the robot model. The model is developed using identification method, and shows acceptable estimation of both the position and velocity of the robot in meters and meter per second respectively.
Medical images protection and authentication using hybrid DWT-DCT and SHA256-MD5 hash functions

This paper deals with a blind digital watermarking technique for the ownership protection and content authentication of X-ray and MRI medical images. Extreme care is required before embedding watermarking information in medical images, to protect the image quality to avoid the wrong diagnosis. The proposed watermarking technique contains a robust watermark for the ownership protection and fragile watermarks for the content authentication. In the watermarking technique, the medical image is divided into regions and the watermark information is embedded in both the transform domain and the spatial domain. The proposed watermarking technique was successfully tested on a variety of X-ray and MRI medical images and offered high peak signal to noise ratios, similarity structure index measure values and wavelet domain signal to noise rations.
Bayesian Multichannel Audio Source Separation Based on Integrated Source and Spatial Models

This paper presents new statistical methods of multichannel audio source separation based on unified source and spatial models that, respectively, represent the generative process of latent source spectrograms and that of observed mixture spectrograms. One possibility of the source model is a factor model based on nonnegative matrix factorization that represents each time-frequency (TF) bin as the weighted sum of basis spectra. Another possibility is a mixture model inspired by latent Dirichlet allocation that exclusively classifies each TF bin into one of basis spectra. Similarly, the spatial model can either be a factor model that represents each TF bin as the weighted sum of source spectra or a mixture model that classifies each bin into one of those spectra. To unify these models in a principled manner and incorporate prior knowledge of a microphone array, we propose hierarchical Bayesian models of all the source–spatial combinations (factor–factor, mixture–factor, factor–mixture, and mixture–mixture models) and derive efficient Gibbs sampling algorithms for posterior inference. Experimental results showed that the proposed unified models outperformed the state-of-the-art method using only the spatial mixture model. Among the four unified models, the spatial factor model tended to work better than the spatial mixture model in exchange for larger computational cost, and the choice of source models had a little impact on the performance and computational cost.
The association between the RAGE G82S polymorphism, sRAGE and chronic periodontitis in Taiwanese individuals with and without diabetes.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The present study investigated the association between the RAGE G82S polymorphism, the plasma levels of sRAGE and chronic periodontitis in subjects with and without diabetes mellitus (DM). MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 230 patients with DM and 264 non-DM participants were recruited for this study. Genotyping of the RAGE G82S polymorphism was accomplished using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism, and associations were analyzed with the chi-squared test and logistic regression analysis. RESULTS In the non-DM group, the chi-squared test showed that the frequency distributions of the G82S polymorphism were significantly different between chronic periodontitis and non-chronic periodontitis subjects (χ(2) = 8.39, p = 0.02). A multivariate logistic regression model showed that the (G82S + S82S) genotypes were associated with a significantly increased risk of chronic periodontitis development compared to the G82G genotype (adjusted odds ratio = 2.06, 95% confidence interval: 1.08-4.07). In the DM group, there was no association between the G82S polymorphism and chronic periodontitis development when a multivariate logistic regression was performed. Plasma levels of sRAGE were significantly higher in subjects with the G82G genotype compared to those with the (G82S + S82S) genotypes in both the non-DM (856.6 ± 332.0 vs. 720.4 ± 311.4 pg/mL, p = 0.003) and DM groups (915.3 ± 497.1 vs. 603.5 ± 298.3 pg/mL, p < 0.0001). However, there was no difference in plasma sRAGE levels between chronic periodontitis and non-chronic periodontitis subjects in both the DM and non-DM groups. Moreover, when the subjects were further sub-divided by the G82S polymorphism, the difference in plasma levels of sRAGE between chronic periodontitis and non-chronic periodontitis subjects in the DM and non-DM groups remained statistically insignificant. CONCLUSIONS The present study revealed that the RAGE G82S polymorphism was associated with chronic periodontitis in the non-DM group but not in the DM group. Our results also showed that the plasma levels of sRAGE were significantly higher in subjects with the RAGE G82G genotype, and this correlation was not affected by the presence of chronic periodontitis in the DM and non-DM groups.
Ontological Templates for Regulating Access to Sensitive Medical Data in the Cloud

By embracing the cloud computing paradigm for storing and processing electronic medical records (EMRs), modern healthcare providers are able to realise significant cost savings. However, relinquishing control of sensitive medical data by delegating their storage and processing to third-party cloud providers naturally raises significant security concerns. One way to alleviate these concerns is to devise appropriate policies that infuse adequate access controls in cloud services. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous nature of these services, coupled with the dynamicity inherent in cloud environments, hinder the formulation of effective and interoperable policies that are appropriate for the underlying domain of application. To this end, this work adopts the ontological templates proposed in [5] for the representation of access control policies in the medical sector. By capturing the knowledge that must be infused into an access control policy, these templates sufficiently address the needs of the underlying domain of application in which such a policy is to be enforced; at the same time, they facilitate developers in infusing adequate access controls to their cloud applications.
ComicQA: contextual navigation aid by hyper-comic representation

This paper proposes a system, ComicQA, that provides a hyper-comic showing solutions to a user having problems. The ComicQA system identifies the user's situation through question-answering and represents the problem and its solution in comic stories, from which we expect the user to easily grasp not only the solution for the focused problem but also its context. We show two use cases of the system's application, namely troubleshooting for an electric appliance and navigating a museum exhibition tour.
Automatic detection of ST depression on ECG

Automatic and quick detection of abnormal signals in electroencephalogram (ECG) could help cardiovascular patients. The optimal threshold value of correlation coefficients was explored to judge ST depression from the abnormal ECG signals. The optimal threshold was determined by the cross validation analysis based on a correlation coefficient between the ECG data on the template in ST depression and other diseases. As the results of this analysis, the optimal threshold of the correlation coefficient was around 0.8 in both the linear and spline interpolation. Moreover, the calculated threshold was little affected by the type of linear or spline interpolation and data length (100, 200, and 300 points for the normalization). These results could be useful for setting the application of smartphones or tablets to reduce the computation time in online analysis.
Energetic material detonations and related structural material deformation behaviour under high strain rate loading

It is a pleasure to introduce this issue of Materials Science and Technology focusing on the linked themes of energetic (explosive) materials and the associated deformation behaviour of structural materials at high strain rates, coordinated by Professor R. W. (Ron) Armstrong of the University of Maryland. To someone familiar with structural materials, whose function is to maintain integrity when subjected to service loads, energetic materials represent a complete antithesis, since their function is to explode with great violence when required to do so, yet remain safe to store and handle until the explosion is triggered. Recent advances in understanding of these materials, accompanied by the development of characterisation and test techniques with high spatial and temporal resolution, make a series of articles on this topic particularly timely. As the introductory review by Armstrong and Elban illustrates, it is only relatively recently that the extensive physical and chemical property knowledge base on reference energetic materials has been interpreted in what might be considered a materials science framework, introducing models to link crystallography and microstructure to composite properties of energetic material formulations. Mechanical initiation of detonation has been convincingly interpreted, via localised hot spots, in terms of dislocation theory, and the progress of the explosion front is explained in terms of the propagation of a shock wave, as described by Walley et al. In the review by Remington et al., the mechanical behaviour of structural materials is investigated at the highest measurable loading rates.
Shrinkage Cracking Resistance of Blast Furnace Slag Blended Cement Concrete - Influencing Factors and Enhancing Measures

Use of blast-furnace slag fine powder blended cement is an important option for lowering carbon emission in the concrete construction sector. However, concrete with blended cement (hereafter denoted as BFS concrete) has been believed vulnerable to shrinkage cracking and its use in building construction has been avoided except for underground structural elements in Japan. To develop the use of BFS concrete in building construction, quantitative evaluation of its shrinkage cracking resistance is necessary. The scope of this study included experimental verification of shrinkage resistance of BFS concrete, in which the effects of ambient temperature were emphasized, and restraint shrinkage cracking tests with BFS concrete subjected to three levels of ambient temperatures of 10, 20 and 30°C compared with normal concrete. To improve crack resistance, an improved BFS concrete using additives such as water retaining shrinkage reducing agent (SRA) was added to the experiments. As a result, the following two major conclusions were obtained: 1) The crack resistances of BFS concrete deteriorated due to increasing free shrinkage strain at high temperatures, while this was not the case for the normal concrete, and 2) water retaining type SRA dramatically improved the crack resistance of BFS concrete at high temperatures.
A fast CLSM undersampling image reconstruction framework with precise stage positioning for random measurements

Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) is a powerful non-destructive optical measurement system. Recently, compressive sensing (CS) is applied to the field of CLSM for high speed scan by reducing the number of sampled data required to reconstruct an accurate imaging information. However, the CS recovery algorithm employed in CLSM applications is iteration-based optimization method of which computation complexity is relatively high. In this paper, we propose a non-iteration-based deep residual convolutional neural network compressive sensing reconstruction framework (DRCNN-CSR) in end-to-end manner. Both of the computation time and the quality of reconstructed image are largely improved with this novel model. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other existing reconstruction algorithm under a wide range of undersampling rates with respect to reconstruction quality comparison. In addition, CS is based on predefined random location sampling; consequently, the fast and precise positioning of scanner is required. We design the adaptive control algorithm for a piezo-driven stage to implement the CS approach in CLSM imaging; the stability of our control system design is proved by Lyapunov theorem.
Public/private tweet classification method to prevent posting to wrong accounts

Corporations, municipalities, and governments have public Twitter accounts from which they send advertisements, publicity, and announcements. If such public account holders also have private accounts, posts might be sent from the wrong account. In this paper, we propose a classification method for public/private tweets using machine learning. As one classification feature, we use the tweet format and end-of-sentence expressions because these features are not confined to tweet content. We experimentally compared the classifiers built for multiple account holders and one general classifier.
X-ray microtomography studies of localised corrosion and transitions to stress corrosion cracking

Abstract Two forms of high resolution X-ray tomographic experiments (i.e. synchrotron based X-ray microtomography and desktop microfocus computed X-ray tomography) are demonstrated in the present paper to illustrate the wide application of these techniques for qualitative and quantitative studies of localised corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking. Specifically, synchrotron based X-ray tomography was used to investigate the localised corrosion morphology within aluminium specimens when exposed in situ to a chloride environment while microfocus computed X-ray tomography was used to investigate the morphology and quantify the transition from localised corrosion to stress corrosion cracking in steel specimens exposed ex situ to a simulated corrosive condensate environment.
Modeling Edge Recombination in Silicon Solar Cells

A new approach to model edge recombination in silicon solar cells is presented. The model accounts for recombination both at the edge of the quasi-neutral bulk as well as at an exposed space-charge-region (SCR), the latter via an edge-length-specific diode property with an ideality factor of 2: a localized <italic>J<sub>02</sub><sub>,</sub> </italic><sub>edge</sub>. The model is implemented in Quokka3, where the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $J_{02,edge}$</tex-math></inline-formula> is applied locally to the edges of the three-dimensional geometry, imposing less simplifying assumptions compared with the common way of applying it as an external diode. A “worst-case” value for <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J_{02,{\rm{edge}}}$</tex-math> </inline-formula>, assuming very high surface recombination, is determined by fitting to full detailed device simulations which resolve the SCR recombination. A value of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim \text{19 nA/cm}$</tex-math></inline-formula> is found, which is shown to be largely independent of device properties. The new approach is applied to model the impact of edge recombination on full cell performance for a substantial variety of device properties. It is found that recombination at the quasi-neutral bulk edge does not increase the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J_{02}$</tex-math></inline-formula> of the dark <italic>J–V</italic> curve, but still shows a nonideal impact on the light <italic>J–V</italic> curve similar to the SCR recombination. This needs to be considered in the experimental evaluation of edge losses, which is commonly performed via fitting <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$J_{02}$</tex-math></inline-formula> to dark <italic>J–V</italic> curves.
Enhance speaker segmentation by elaborating utterance detection

In this paper, we introduce an elaborate utterance detection algorithm to enhance speaker segmentation. Silence detector, further divider and audio type classifier are employed in this elaborate utterance detection, to make this algorithm adaptive for both silent and noisy environments. Open-set verification testing has taken on the Hub4-NE broadcasts database. The experiment results show that this enhanced segmentation method can provide better information for speaker models.
A Simple Approach to Enhance the Performance of Complex-Coefficient Filter-Based PLL in Grid-Connected Applications

In recent years, a large number of three-phase phase-locked loops (PLLs) have been developed. One of the most popular ones is the complex coefficient filter-based PLL (CCF-PLL), which benefits from a sequence selective filtering ability. This feature enables the CCF-PLL to selectively reject/extract disturbances before the PLL control loop while maintaining an acceptable dynamic behavior. The aim of this letter is presenting a simple yet effective approach to enhance the standard CCF-PLL performance without requiring any additional computational load.
Improving Web Sites Performance Using Edge Servers in Fog Computing Architecture

In this paper, we consider web optimization within Fog Computing context. We apply existing methods for web optimization in a novel manner, such that these methods can be combined with unique knowledge that is only available at the edge (Fog) nodes. More dynamic adaptation to the user's conditions (eg. network status and device's computing load) can also be accomplished with network edge specific knowledge. As a result, a user's web page rendering performance is improved beyond that achieved by simply applying those methods at the web server or CDNs.
Downlink Spectral Efficiency of Distributed Massive MIMO Systems With Linear Beamforming Under Pilot Contamination

In this paper, the downlink spectral efficiency of multicell multiuser distributed massive MIMO systems with linear beamforming is studied in the presence of pilot contamination. According to the levels of effective channel gain information at user side, we provide the lower bound and upper bound on user ergodic achievable downlink rate. Due to the different access distance from each user to different remote antenna units, the entries of user channel vectors are no longer identically distributed in distributed massive MIMO systems, which makes the spectral efficiency analysis challenging. Using the properties of Gamma distributions together with the approximate methods for nonisotropic vectors, we derive tractable, but accurate closed-form expressions for the rate bounds with maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming in distributed massive MIMO systems. Based on these expressions, user ultimate achievable rates are also given when the ratio of the total number of transmit antennas to the number of users goes to infinity. It is shown that MRT and ZF beamforming achieve the same ultimate rate no matter what levels of effective channel gain information at user side. Numerical results show that ZF achieves better performance gain and faster convergence speed than MRT. When the coherence interval is large, the downlink beamforming training scheme is more preferable for the distributed massive MIMO systems.