Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrophysiological Characterization of the Polyspecific Organic Cation Transporter Plasma Membrane Monoamine Transporter

Plasma membrane monoamine transporter (PMAT) is a polyspecific organic cation (OC) transporter that transports a variety of endogenous biogenic amines and xenobiotic cations. Previous radiotracer uptake studies showed that PMAT-mediated OC transport is sensitive to changes in membrane potential and extracellular pH, but the precise role of membrane potential and protons on PMAT-mediated OC transport is unknown. Here, we characterized the electrophysiological properties of PMAT in Xenopus laevis oocytes using a two-microelectrode voltage-clamp approach. PMAT-mediated histamine uptake is associated with inward currents under voltage-clamp conditions, and the currents increased in magnitude as the holding membrane potential became more negative. A similar effect was also observed for another cation, nicotine. Substrate-induced currents were largely independent of Na+ but showed strong dependence on membrane potential and pH of the perfusate. Detailed kinetic analysis of histamine uptake revealed that the energizing effect of membrane potentials on PMAT transport is mainly due to an augmentation of Imax with little effect on K0.5. At most holding membrane potentials, Imax at pH 6.0 is approximately 3- to 4-fold higher than that at pH 7.5, whereas K0.5 is not dependent on pH. Together, these data unequivocally demonstrate PMAT as an electrogenic transporter and establish the physiological inside-negative membrane potential as a driving force for PMAT-mediated OC transport. The important role of membrane potential and pH in modulating the transport activity of PMAT toward OCs suggests that the in vivo activity of PMAT could be regulated by pathophysiological processes that alter physiological pH or membrane potential.
TEMPORAL COURSE OF THE RELAXATION OF BINOCULAR DUCTION (FUSION) MOVEMENTS.

Introduction Perhaps the most commonly employed test of binocular muscle balance involves transferring an occluder from one eye to its fellow and then either noting the resulting movement of the eyes or asking the patient to report on the direction of the "jump. " We do not know what the nature of the movement of the covered eye is in the first few seconds after it is covered. Yet it is just this movement which determines the result of the test. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the results of an investigation of the temporal course of this very simple type of eye movement, the relaxation of a horizontal duction. * The statement that the relaxation of a duction constitutes a simple type of eye movement requires a comparison with other types of eye movement which are uncomplicated by accommodation or pupillary contraction. Saccadic movements of the eye
Transforming Potential of the Herpesvirus Oncoprotein MEQ: Morphological Transformation, Serum-Independent Growth, and Inhibition of Apoptosis

ABSTRACT Marek’s disease virus (MDV) induces the rapid development of overwhelming T-cell lymphomas in chickens. One of its candidate oncogenes, meq (MDV Eco Q) which encodes a bZIP protein, has been biochemically characterized as a transcription factor. Interestingly, MEQ proteins are expressed not only in the nucleoplasm but also in the coiled bodies and the nucleolus. Its novel subcellular localization suggests that MEQ may be involved in other functions beyond its transcriptional potential. In this report we show that MEQ proteins are expressed ubiquitously and abundantly in MDV tumor cell lines. Overexpression of MEQ results in transformation of a rodent fibroblast cell line, Rat-2. The criteria of transformation are based on morphological transfiguration, anchorage-independent growth, and serum-independent growth. Furthermore, MEQ is able to distend the transforming capacity of MEQ-transformed Rat-2 cells through inhibition of apoptosis. Specifically, MEQ can efficiently protect Rat-2 cells from cell death induced by multiple modes including tumor necrosis factor alpha, C2-ceramide, UV irradiation, and serum deprivation. Its antiapoptotic function requires new protein synthesis, as treatment with a protein synthesis inhibitor, cycloheximide, partially reversed MEQ’s antiapoptotic effect. Coincidentally, transcriptional induction of bcl-2 and suppression of bax are also observed in MEQ-transformed Rat-2 cells. Taken together, our results suggest that MEQ antagonizes apoptosis through regulation of its downstream target genes involved in apoptotic and/or antiapoptotic pathways.
Material Based Boundary Detection in Hyperspectral Images

Boundary detection in hyperspectral image (HSI) is a challenging task due to high data dimensionality and the that is distributed over the spectral bands. For this reason, there is a dearth of research on boundary detection in HSI. In this paper, we propose a spectral-spatial feature based statistical co-occurrence method for this task. We adopt probability density function (PDF) to estimate the co-occurrence of features at neighboring pixel pairs. Such cooccurrence is rare at the boundary and repeated within a region. To fully explore the material information embedded in HSI, joint spectral-spatial features are extracted at each pixel. The PDF values are then used to construct an affinity matrix for all pixels. After that, a spectral clustering algorithm is applied on the affinity matrix to produce boundaries. Our algorithm is evaluated on a dataset of real-world HSIs and compared with two alternative approaches. The results show that the proposed method is very effective in exploring object boundaries from HSI images.
Black holes with varying flux: a numerical approach

We present a numerical study of type IIB supergravity solutions with varying Ramond-Ramond flux. We construct solutions that have a regular horizon and contain nontrivial five- and three-form fluxes. These solutions are holographically dual to the deconfined phase of confining field theories at finite temperature. As a calibration of the numerical method we first numerically reproduce various analytically known solutions including singular and regular nonextremal D3 branes, the Klebanov-Tseytlin solution and its singular nonextremal generalization. The horizon of the solutions we construct is of the precise form of nonextremal D3 branes. In the asymptotic region far away from the horizon we observe a logarithmic behavior similar to that of the Klebanov-Tseytlin solution.
Automated methodology for gastric endoscopy in an e-health environment

With the increased stomach cancer patients in recent decade, endoscopy became one of the major examination tools for diagnosis. In conventional endoscopy, physicians are required to stay through the whole examination, which leads to an increased burden for both physicians and patients. Based on this observation, we introduce an automated gastric endoscopy by utilizing conventional endoscopes with object recognition algorithms. We then propose a cancer diagnosis system which can work in cooperation with any e-health system. In the e-health environment, the proposed system can pre-determine whether the patient has cancer or not. Based on the pre-determined result, the physicians are requested to conduct more accurate diagnosis on the existence of the cancer. In addition, it can automatically save its decision in the e-health system, which enables physicians and patients to access the record later.
Joint Wyner–Ziv/Dirty-Paper Coding by Modulo-Lattice Modulation

The combination of source coding with decoder side information (the Wyner-Ziv problem) and channel coding with encoder side information (the Gel'fand-Pinsker problem) can be optimally solved using the separation principle. In this work, we show an alternative scheme for the quadratic-Gaussian case, which merges source and channel coding. This scheme achieves the optimal performance by applying a modulo-lattice modulation to the analog source. Thus, it saves the complexity of quantization and channel decoding, and remains with the task of ldquoshapingrdquo only. Furthermore, for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the scheme approaches the optimal performance using an SNR-independent encoder, thus it proves for this special case the feasibility of universal joint source-channel coding.
Role of the Reverse Transcriptase, Nucleocapsid Protein, and Template Structure in the Two-step Transfer Mechanism in Retroviral Recombination*

Template switching during reverse transcription promotes recombination in retroviruses. Efficient switches have been measured in vitro on hairpin-containing RNA templates by a two-step mechanism. Pausing of the reverse transcriptase (RT) at the hairpin base allowed enhanced cleavage of the initial donor RNA template, exposing regions of the cDNA and allowing the acceptor to base pair with the cDNA. This defines the first or docking step. The primer continued synthesis on the donor, transferring or locking in a second step. Here we determine the enzyme-dependent factors that influence template switching by comparing the RTs from human immunodeficiency virus, type 1 (HIV-1), and equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV). HIV-1 RT promoted transfers with higher efficiency than EIAV RT. We found that both RTs paused strongly at the base of the hairpin. While stalled, HIV-1 RT made closely spaced cuts, whereas EIAV RT made only a single cut. Docking occurred efficiently at the multiply cut but not at the singly cut site. HIV-1 nucleocapsid (NC) protein stimulated strand transfers. It improved RNase H activity of both RTs. It allowed the EIAV RT to make a distribution of cuts, greatly stimulating docking at the base of the hairpin. Most likely, it also promoted strand exchange, allowing transfers to be initiated from sites throughout the hairpin. Minor pause sites beyond the base of the hairpin correlated with the locking sites. The strand exchange properties of NC likely promote this step. We present a model that explains the roles of RNase H specificity, template structure, and properties of NC in the two-step transfer reaction.
A review on Stochastic Matched Filter based denoising methods for SAS images despeckling

Detection and classification of underwater mines with synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) images is a challenge that can be performed in studying either the echoes or the shadows of mines. But, as any images obtained with a coherent system, SAS images are highly corrupted by the speckle noise, which reduces spatial and radiometric resolutions. So such a noise can be very disturbing for the interpretation and the automatic analysis of SAS images. To reduce the speckle level, filtering methods are generally used but all of them strongly deteriorate either the shadow or the echo of the mine. The purpose of this article is to compare several stochastic matched filter based denoising methods, in order to determine which of them is the most appropriate to enhance both echoes and shadow mines. Results obtained on real SAS data are presented and discussed.
The Role of Simulation Input Model- Ing in a Successful Simulation Study

In this paper we explain the important role of simulation input modeling in a successful simulation study. Two pitfalls in simulation input modeling are then presented and we explain how any analyst, regardless of their knowledge of statistics, can easily avoid these pitfalls through the use of U niFit II. We use a set of real-world system data to demonstrate how the package automatically specifies, evaluates, and ranks candidate probability distributions, and then assists an analyst in deciding whether the " best " candidate probability distribution provides an adequate representation of the data. If no candidate probability distribution provides an adequate fit, then UniFit II can define an empirical distribution function. In either case, the probability model can be automatically expressed in the analyst's simulation software. We then consider the general case of selecting a probability distribution in the absence of data. As an example, we show how U niFit II can be used to create busy-time and downtime models for machines that are subject to random breakdowns. In this section we shall describe simulation input modeling and show consequences that might result if this important, but sometimes neglected, activity is performed improperly. We then suggest that with the use of UniFit II any simulation analyst can perform simulation input modeling more quickly and with greater accuracy than would otherwise be possible. One of the most important activities in a successful simulation study is that of representing each source of system randomness by a probability distribution. For example in a manufacturing system, processing times, operating times before failure, and repair times for a machine should usually be modeled by probability distributions. In this paper we use the phrase " simulation input modeling " to mean the process of choosing a probability distribution for each random component of the system under study and expressing this representation in a form that can be used with the analyst's choice of simulation software. In Sections 2 and 3 we will demonstrate how an analyst can easily and accurately choose an appropriate probabilistic representation-using the UniFit II software. 1.2 Two Pitfalls In Simulation Input Modeling The second author has identified a number of pitfalls that can undermine the success of simulation studies (Law and Kelton 1991, Law and MeComas 1989), Two of these pitfalls relate directly to simulation input modeling and are summarized in this section. 1.2. 1 Pitfall Number 1: Replacing a Distribution by its …
A Similarity Measure for Automatic Audio Classification

This paper presents recent results using statistics generated by a MMl-supervised vector quantizer as a measure of audio similarity. Such a measure has proved successful for talker identification, and the extension from speech to general audio, such as music, is straightforward. A classifier that distinguishes speech from music and non-vocal sounds is presented, as well as experimental results showing how perfect classification accuracy may be achieved on a small corpus using substantially less than two seconds per test audio file. The techniques a presented here may be extended to other applications and domains, such as audio retrieval-by-similarity, musical genre classification, and automatic segmentation of continuous audio.
A Unified Framework for Scope Learning via Simplified Shallow Semantic Parsing

This paper approaches the scope learning problem via simplified shallow semantic parsing. This is done by regarding the cue as the predicate and mapping its scope into several constituents as the arguments of the cue. Evaluation on the BioScope corpus shows that the structural information plays a critical role in capturing the relationship between a cue and its dominated arguments. It also shows that our parsing approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art chunking ones. Although our parsing approach is only evaluated on negation and speculation scope learning here, it is portable to other kinds of scope learning.
Electro-Optical Characteristics of Liquid Crystal Device With Nanoscale Molybdenum Trioxide $(\hbox{MoO}_{3})$ Thin Films

The liquid crystal (LC) alignment of molybdenum trioxide (MoO3) thin layers through ion-beam (IB) irradiation leads to LC alignment characteristics that are superior to those obtained with rubbed polyimide (PI) layers. We found that LC alignment states on a thin MoO3 layer are influenced by changes in IB irradiation energy. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis showed that the binding intensities of the Mo peaks that significantly decreased at IB irradiation energies greater than 2400 eV can homogeneously align with the LC and MoO3 molecules. An examination of the electro-optical characteristics revealed that MoO3 gave rise to a fast LC response time when compared to the PI layer.
A Negative Index Metamaterial-Inspired UWB Antenna with an Integration of Complementary SRR and CLS Unit Cells for Microwave Imaging Sensor Applications

This paper presents a negative index metamaterial incorporated UWB antenna with an integration of complementary SRR (split-ring resonator) and CLS (capacitive loaded strip) unit cells for microwave imaging sensor applications. This metamaterial UWB antenna sensor consists of four unit cells along one axis, where each unit cell incorporates a complementary SRR and CLS pair. This integration enables a design layout that allows both a negative value of permittivity and a negative value of permeability simultaneous, resulting in a durable negative index to enhance the antenna sensor performance for microwave imaging sensor applications. The proposed MTM antenna sensor was designed and fabricated on an FR4 substrate having a thickness of 1.6 mm and a dielectric constant of 4.6. The electrical dimensions of this antenna sensor are 0.20 λ × 0.29 λ at a lower frequency of 3.1 GHz. This antenna sensor achieves a 131.5% bandwidth (VSWR < 2) covering the frequency bands from 3.1 GHz to more than 15 GHz with a maximum gain of 6.57 dBi. High fidelity factor and gain, smooth surface-current distribution and nearly omni-directional radiation patterns with low cross-polarization confirm that the proposed negative index UWB antenna is a promising entrant in the field of microwave imaging sensors.
Early vestibular processing does not discriminate active from passive self-motion if there is a discrepancy between predicted and actual proprioceptive feedback.

Most of our sensory experiences are gained by active exploration of the world. While the ability to distinguish sensory inputs resulting of our own actions (termed reafference) from those produced externally (termed exafference) is well established, the neural mechanisms underlying this distinction are not fully understood. We have previously proposed that vestibular signals arising from self-generated movements are inhibited by a mechanism that compares the internal prediction of the proprioceptive consequences of self-motion to the actual feedback. Here we directly tested this proposal by recording from single neurons in monkey during vestibular stimulation that was externally produced and/or self-generated. We show for the first time that vestibular reafference is equivalently canceled for self-generated sensory stimulation produced by activation of the neck musculature (head-on-body motion), or axial musculature (combined head and body motion), when there is no discrepancy between the predicted and actual proprioceptive consequences of self-motion. However, if a discrepancy does exist, central vestibular neurons no longer preferentially encode vestibular exafference. Specifically, when simultaneous active and passive motion resulted in activation of the same muscle proprioceptors, neurons robustly encoded the total vestibular input (i.e., responses to vestibular reafference and exafference were equally strong), rather than exafference alone. Taken together, our results show that the cancellation of vestibular reafference in early vestibular processing requires an explicit match between expected and actual proprioceptive feedback. We propose that this vital neuronal computation, necessary for both accurate sensory perception and motor control, has important implications for a variety of sensory systems that suppress self-generated signals.
Cloud Network Infrastructure as a Service : An Exercise in Multi-Domain

Cloud computing is now a successful and wellunderstood example of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. This paper explores how to extend IaaS clouds to other kinds of substrate resources beyond servers and storage, and to link these elements together in a coordinated, multi-provider “web” of cloud infrastructure services. The vision is to enable cloud applications to request virtual servers at multiple points in the network, together with bandwidth-provisioned network pipes and other network resources to interconnect them. We outline new software to orchestrate end-to-end connections over multi-layer networks, coordinated with Eucalyptus clouds and other resources at the edge. We present results from a demonstration experiment with the prototype, and discuss various architectural challenges arising in multi-domain cloud computing with dynamic circuit networks.
A prospective, multicentre study of moxifloxacin concentrations in the sinus mucosa tissue of patients undergoing elective surgery of the sinus.

A pharmacokinetic study was carried out to determine moxifloxacin concentrations in sinus tissue, after oral moxifloxacin 400 mg once daily for 5 days to patients with chronic sinusitis, undergoing elective sinus surgery. Patients were randomly allocated to one of seven treatment groups, in which tissues were sampled 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 24 or 36 h post-dose. A control group with non-infected nasal polyps was also included. Forty-eight patients (13 female, 35 male, mean age 47.1 years) were allocated to one of each active treatment group (n = 42) or to the control group (n = 6). Tissue and plasma samples were taken simultaneously and stored frozen until assayed by HPLC. Thirty-nine patients were fully valid for pharmacokinetic analysis. The geometric mean moxifloxacin plasma concentration increased from 2.32 mg/L at 2 h to a maximum of 3.37 mg/L at 4 h post-dose, decreasing to 0.37 mg/L at 36 h post-dose. The moxifloxacin concentration in sinus mucosa was consistently greater than that in plasma being 4.56-5.73 mg/kg from 2 to 6 h and 2.81-1.25 mg/kg from 12 to 36 h post-dose. The elimination rates in plasma and sinus tissues were similar. The tissue/plasma ratio was c. 200% between 2 and 6 h, and up to 328.9% at 36 h. Results were similar whatever the site of tissue sampling (maxillary sinus, anterior ethmoid sinus or nasal polyps). Tissue levels exceeded the MIC(90) of all pathogens commonly causing acute sinusitis (e.g. 5-30 x MIC for Streptococcus pneumoniae: 0.25 mg/L). These results sup-port the use of moxifloxacin 400 mg once daily as a regimen for the treatment of sinus infections.
Signal Threshold Adaptation for Vertical Handoff in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The convergence of heterogeneous wireless access technologies has been envisioned to characterize the next generation wireless networks. In such converged systems, the seamless and efficient handoff between different access technologies (vertical handoff) is essential and remains a challenging problem. The heterogeneous co-existence of access technologies with largely different characteristics results in handoff asymmetry that differs from the traditional intra-network handoff (horizontal handoff) problem. In the case where one network is preferred, the vertical handoff decision should be carefully executed, based on the wireless channel state, network layer characteristics, as well as application requirements. In this paper, we study the performance of vertical handoff using the integration of 3G cellular and wireless local area networks as an example. In particular, we investigate the effect of an application-based signal strength threshold on an adaptive preferred-network lifetime-based handoff strategy, in terms of the signalling load, available bandwidth, and packet delay for an inter-network roaming mobile. We present an analytical framework to evaluate the converged system performance, which is validated by computer simulation. We show how the proposed analytical model can be used to provide design guidelines for the optimization of vertical handoff in the next generation integrated wireless networks.