Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Liver transplant outcome: a comparison between high and low MELD score recipients.

OBJECTIVE To compare low and high MELD scores and investigate whether existing renal dysfunction has an effect on transplant outcome. METHODS Data was prospectively collected among 237 liver transplants (216 patients) between March 2003 and March 2009. Patients with cirrhotic disease submitted to transplantation were divided into three groups: MELD > or = 30, MELD < 30, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Renal failure was defined as a +/- 25% decline in estimated glomerular filtration rate as observed 1 week after the transplant. Median MELD scores were 35, 21, and 13 for groups MELD > or = 30, MELD < 30, and hepatocellular carcinoma, respectively. RESULTS Recipients with MELD > or = 30 had more days in Intensive Care Unit, longer hospital stay, and received more blood product transfusions. Moreover, their renal function improved after liver transplant. All other groups presented with impairment of renal function. Mortality was similar in all groups, but renal function was the most important variable associated with morbidity and length of hospital stay. CONCLUSION High MELD score recipients had an improvement in the glomerular filtration rate after 1 week of liver transplantation.
Recurrent glioblastoma multiforme: ADC histogram analysis predicts response to bevacizumab treatment.

PURPOSE To determine if apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) histogram analysis can stratify progression-free survival in patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) prior to bevacizumab treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was approved by the institutional review board and was HIPAA compliant; informed consent was obtained. Bevacizumab-treated and control patients (41 per cohort) diagnosed with recurrent GBM were analyzed by using whole enhancing tumor ADC histograms with a two normal distribution mixture fitting curve on baseline (pretreatment) magnetic resonance (MR) images to generate ADC classifiers, including the overall mean ADC as well as the mean ADC from the lower curve (ADC(L)). Overall and 6-month progression-free survival (as defined by the Macdonald criteria) was determined by using Cox proportional hazard ratios and the Kaplan-Meier method with log-rank test. RESULTS For bevacizumab-treated patients, the hazard ratio for progression by 6 months in patients with less than versus greater than mean ADC(L) was 4.1 (95% confidence interval: 1.6, 10.4), and there was a 2.75-fold reduction in the median time to progression. For the control patients, there was no significant difference in median time to progression for the patients with low versus high ADC(L) (hazard ratio, 1.8; 95% confidence interval: 0.9, 3.7). For bevacizumab-treated patients, pretreatment ADC more accurately stratified 6-month progression-free survival than did change in enhancing tumor volume at first follow-up (73% vs 58% accuracy, P = .034). CONCLUSION Pretreatment ADC histogram analysis can stratify progression-free survival in bevacizumab-treated patients with recurrent GBM.
Preemptive Scheduling of Tasks with Reliability Requirements in Distributed Hard Real-Time Systems

Real-time systems are being extensively used in applications that are mission-critical and life-critical, such as space exploration, aircraft avionics, and robotics. These mission critical systems are mainly parallel or distributed systems that are embedded into complex, even hazardous environments, under tight constraints on timeliness and dependability of operations. It is therefore extremely important that these hard real-time systems must be reliable, i.e., task deadlines be met even in the presence of certain faults or failures. In this paper, we address the problem of supporting timeliness and dependability in a real-time system at the level of task scheduling. We consider the problem of scheduling a set of tasks, each of which, for fault-tolerance purpose, has multiple versions, on a number of processors, such that the number of processors used is minimized. Two scheduling algorithms are proposed and evaluated using simulation. It is shown that the algorithms produce near-optimal schedules. The results presented in this paper is a part of our on-going research effort to address the problem of supporting timeliness and fault-tolerance in a distributed / parallel system.
IDENTIFICATION OF GLUTATHIONE-DERIVED METABOLITES FROM AN IP RECEPTOR ANTAGONIST

The metabolic fate of three aromatic carboxylic acid analogs under evaluation as prostaglandin I2-preferring receptor antagonists was studied. The initial analog with unsubstituted phenyl groups was subject to a complex set of aromatic oxidative biotransformations. By introduction of one or two fluorines, these pathways were inhibited. All three analogs were metabolized to a wide variety of carboxylic acid conjugates. Among these were several conjugates formed via secondary metabolism and oxidation of acyl glutathione intermediates. Two of the structure classes, represented by the S-methyl-N-cysteinylglycine conjugate and the N-cysteinylglycine disulfide conjugates, have been described only rarely in the literature. The related S-oxide of the S-methyl-N-cysteinylglycine conjugate and the N,S-bis-acyl derivative of cysteinylglycine are here described for the first time as conjugate metabolites of car boxylic drugs.
Fault-Decoupled Instantaneous Frequency and Phase Angle Estimation for Three-Phase Grid-Connected Inverters

Frequency and phase angle estimation is a key aspect for grid-connected inverters that are required to guarantee low-voltage fault-ride-through capability. Over the past two decades, a number of estimation algorithms have been proposed, mostly based on the well-known phase-locked loop (PLL). It has been demonstrated that standard PLLs do not perform correctly in abnormal grid conditions, due to the oscillations produced in the frequency and phase angle estimates by the voltage harmonics. This paper introduces a new, general approach to harmonic decoupling and presents a highly intuitive and simple scheme, applying it to an αβ-PLL; compensation of any desired number of harmonic components is possible. Two implementations of this decoupling scheme are presented. It is shown that the performances of the resulting fault-decoupled PLLs are comparable with those of other advanced frequency and phase angle estimation structures.
Boolean Queries for News Monitoring: Suggesting New Query Terms to Expert Users

In this paper, we evaluate query suggestion for Boolean queries in a news monitoring system. Users of this system receive news articles that match their running query on a daily basis. Because the news for a topic continuously changes, the queries need regular updating. We first investigated the users' working process through interviews and then evaluated multiple query suggestion methods based on pseudo-relevance feedback. The best performing method generates at least one relevant term among 5 suggestions for 25% of the searches. We found that expert users of news retrieval software are critical in their selection of query terms. Nevertheless, they judged the demo application as clear and potentially useful in their work. Copyright © 2016 for the individual papers by the paper's authors.
The effect of Macrotyloma uniflorum seed on bile lithogenicity against diet induced cholelithiasis on mice

Background: The seeds of Macrotyloma uniflorum Lam. (Family Fabaceae) contain extractable total and tannins with reported hepatoprotective, hypocholesterolemic and antioxidant activity. In this study, dietary M. uniflorum seed, methanolic and acetone extracts (ME and AE) were examined for their bile-antilithogenic potential. Materials and Methods: Mice fed with 1% cholesterol and 0.5% cholic acid lithogenic (LG) diet for 8 weeks resulted in cholesterol super saturation in gallbladder bile, which promotes the formation of cholesterol gallstones (CGSs). Results: AE reduced the CGS incidence by 60.21%, and serum total cholesterol, triglyceride (TG), very low density lipoprotein (LDL) and LDL compared to control animals. Seed extracts at 300 mg/kg dose markedly reduced biliary cholesterol (BC) and decreased bile salt content. The ratio of BC to phospholipid which was 2.64 in the LG diet group was reduced to 1.57-1.35 in the M. uniflorum seed extracts treated groups. Liver cholesterol and TG were decreased significantly by feeding of ME and AE at 300 mg/kg dose. AE significantly reversed the changes in apolipoproteins A-I and C-II level disturbed by LG diet. Conclusions: M. uniflorum seed exerted antilithogenic influence by decreasing the cholesterol hyper-secretion into bile and increasing the bile acid output, thus decreasing the formation of LG bile in mice. The effect was maximum in the AE as it also reduced papillary proliferation of gallbladder and fatty degeneration of the liver. The potential antilithogenic effect of the AE of M. uniflorum may be due to antioxidant property of its rich total polyphenol and tannins content.
Optimality self online monitoring (OSOM) for performance evaluation and adaptive sensor fusion

The performance of a tracking filter can be evaluated in terms of the filterpsilas optimality conditions. Testing for optimality is necessary because the estimation error covariance as provided by the filter is not a reliable indicator of performance, which is known to be ldquooptimisticrdquo (inconsistent) particularly when there are model mismatches and target maneuvers. The conventional root-mean square (RMS) error value and its variants are widely used for performance evaluation in simulation and testing but it is not feasible for real-time operations where the ground truth is hardly available. One approach for real-time reliability assessment is optimality self online monitoring (OSOM) investigated in this paper. Statistical tests for optimality conditions are formulated. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate their possible use in evaluation and adaptation.
Feasibility Studies of EMTP Simulation for the Design of the Pulsed-Power Generator Using MPC and BPFN for Water Treatments

In this paper, a pulsed-power generator that consists of a magnetic pulse compressor (MPC) and a Blumlein-type pulse forming network (BPFN) has been developed. The pulsed-power generator can be operated with high repetition rate, long lifetime, and high reliability for water treatments such as sterilization of microorganisms, decomposition of harmful materials, and ozone generation. An informative explanation about the simulation methodology using electromagnetic transient program was presented in order to give guidance for more efficient design of the pulsed-power generator with MPC and BPFN. The comparison study of the simulation result with the experimental result was carried out. As a result, it was found that the simulation results and the experimental results with the manufactured MPC and BPFN showed a reasonable agreement. In addition, a large volume of streamer discharge was successfully generated in water with the developed system
Transcription of Russian conversational speech

This paper presents initial work in transcribing conversational telephone speech in Russian. Acoustic seed models were derived from other languages. The initial studies are carried out with 9 hours of transcribed data, and explore the choice of the phone set and use of other data types to improve transcription performance. Discriminant features produced by a Multi Layer Perceptron trained on a few hours of Russian conversational data are contrasted with those derived from well-trained networks for English telephone speech and from Russian broadcast data. Acoustic models trained on broadcast data filtered to match the telephone band achieve results comparable to those obtained with models trained on the small conversation telephone speech corpus.
Evaluation of a noise-robust DSR front-end on Aurora databases

This paper describes a noise-robust front-end designed within a collaboration of Motorola, France Télécom and Alcatel for the ETSI standardization of the advanced front-end for distributed speech recognition (DSR). The proposed algorithm is based on the cumulative knowledge in the three companies’ history in the areas of noise reduction, speech enhancement as well as other related fields. The major components of this algorithm are noise reduction, waveform processing, cepstrum calculation, blind equalization, and voice-activity detection. In the evaluation of the proposed front-end on Aurora 2 and Aurora 3 databases we obtained an average error rate reduction of 52.75% and 51.51%, respectively, when compared to the WI007 ETSI MFCC-based DSR front-end performance.
Sequenz und Sequenz-Struktur: Vergleiche und deren Anwendung für die Struktur- und Funktionsvorhersage von Proteinen

Zusammenfassung der Inaugural-Dissertation Name: Reinhard Schneider Titel: Sequenz und Sequenz-Struktur Vergleiche und deren Anwendung fur die Struktur- und Funktionsvorhersage von Proteinen Betreuer: Prof. Dr. K. C. Holmes (MPI fur medizinische Forschung, Heidelberg) Durch die sogenannten Genomprojekte wird es in den nachsten Jahren zu einer enormen Vergroserung der biologischen Sequenzdatenbanken kommen. Eine unabdingbare Voraussetzung zur Nutzung dieses Rohmaterials stellt dabei die Analyse dieser Sequenzdaten mit Hilfe rechnergestutzter Methoden dar. Eines der Hauptanwendungsgebiete von Rechnern fur die Funktions- und Strukturvorhersage von Proteinen werden dabei selektive Datenbanksuche nach biologisch signifikanten Ahnlichkeiten sein. Zur Signifikanzabschatzung eines Proteinsequenzvergleiches (Alignment) wurde ein empirisch abgeleiteter Homologieschwellenwert definiert. Wichtigstes Merkmal ist dabei eine starke Abhangigkeit von der Lange des betreffenden Alignments. Diese Signifikanzabschatzung ermoglicht sowohl den Ausschlus von nicht verwandten Proteinen, wie auch die Detektion von schwachen Sequenzverwandtschaften. Aufgrund der Allgemeingultigkeit des Homologieschwellenwertes kann er als einfacher und effizienter zusatzlicher Filter fur andere Methoden, wie z.B. schnelle Datenbanksuchen, verwendet werden. Es wurde ein neuer Algorithmus fur den multiplen Sequenzvergleich entwickelt, der eine relativ geringe rechnerische Komplexitat besitzt. Das Hauptmerkmal dieses Algorithmus besteht in der Ableitung von sogenannten positionsabhangigen Konservierungsgewichten, die als zusatzliche Parameter im dynamischen Programmieralgorithmus verwendet werden und zu einer deutlich gesteigerten Sensitivitat bei Datenbanksuchen fuhrt. Die programmiertechnische Auslegung des Algorithmus erlaubt die zukunftige Erweiterung auf den Vergleich einer Sequenz gegen ein Sequenzprofil bzw. den Vergleich zweier Sequenzprofile. Um auch zukunftig sensitive Datenbanksuchen in einer vertretbaren Rechenzeit durchfuhren zu konnen,, wurde das Programm auf parallele Rechner portiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, das mit den heute verfugbaren massiv parallelen Rechnern ein beinahe interaktives Arbeiten moglich ist. Aufbauend auf dieser Arbeit wird derzeit im Rahmen eines europaischen Projektes die Implementierung der Profilmethoden auf Parallelrechner der neuesten Generation durchgefuhrt und der Nutzen fur das industrielle “Protein design” bestimmt. Mit Hilfe des Homologieschwellenwertes konnte eine Datenbank fur homologie-abgeleitete Proteinstrukturen (HSSP) entwickelt werden. Diese Datenbank wird der Offentlichkeit auf verschiedenen Wegen zuganglich gemacht und hat sich als ein gewisser Standard etabliert. Die Datenbank findet dabei Verwendung im automatisierten dreidimensionalen Modellbau von Proteinstrukturen, sowie als Hilfsmittel und Datengrundlage fur ein weitgestecktes Feld von statistischen und anderen theoretischen Arbeiten. Die Verwendung der Datenbank hat einen entscheidenden Beitrag bei der Entwicklung des…
Cell biology and immunology of Leishmania

Summary: More than 20 years ago, immunologists discovered that resistance and susceptibility to experimental infection with the intracellular protozoan Leishmania major was associated with the development of T‐helper 1 (Th1)‐ and Th2‐dominated immune responses, respectively. This infectious disease model was later used to identify and assess the role of key factors, such as interleukin‐12 (IL‐12) and IL‐4, in Th1 and Th2 maturation. While infection by Leishmania remains a popular model for immunologists who wish to assess the role of their favorite molecule in T‐cell differentiation, other investigators have tried to better understand how Leishmania interact with its insect and mammalian hosts. In this review, we discuss some of these new data with an emphasis on the early events that shape the immune response to Leishmania and on the immune evasion mechanisms that allow this parasite to avoid the development of sterilizing immunity and to secure its transmission to a new host.
Preparation of Ultrafine Poly(ε-Caprolactone) Fibers Containing Silver Nanoparticles via Electrospinning Method

Electrospun poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) fibers containing silver nanoparticles were successfully prepared from PCL solutions added silver collide. The silver collide were obtained by N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF) reducing silver nitrate (AgNO3). The effects of PCL concentration and the content of silver nanoparticles on composite fibers morphology were characterized by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). The existence of Ag nanoparticles on the electrospun fibers was approved by X-Ray diffraction (XRD). Simultaneously, the contact angles of fiber membranes were measured. The results indicated that uniform fibers were obtained when PCL concentration was 9wt%, the average diameter of fiber was significantly decreased as increasing the amount of silver collide, and Ag nanoparticles were successfully incorporated into the PCL fibers.
Chiral plasmonics

We present a comprehensive overview of chirality and its optical manifestation in plasmonic nanosystems and nanostructures. We present a comprehensive overview of chirality and its optical manifestation in plasmonic nanosystems and nanostructures. We discuss top-down fabricated structures that range from solid metallic nanostructures to groupings of metallic nanoparticles arranged in three dimensions. We also present the large variety of bottom-up synthesized structures. Using DNA, peptides, or other scaffolds, complex nanoparticle arrangements of up to hundreds of individual nanoparticles have been realized. Beyond this static picture, we also give an overview of recent demonstrations of active chiral plasmonic systems, where the chiral optical response can be controlled by an external stimulus. We discuss the prospect of using the unique properties of complex chiral plasmonic systems for enantiomeric sensing schemes.
System design using Khan process networks: the Compaan/Laura approach

New emerging embedded system platforms in the realm of high-throughput multimedia, imaging, and signal processing will consist of multiple microprocessors and reconfigurable components. One of the major problems is how to program these platforms in a systematic and automated way so as to satisfy the performance need of applications executed on these platforms. In this paper, we present our system design approach as an efficient solution to this programming problem. We show how for an application written in Matlab, a Kahn process network specification can automatically be derived and systematically mapped onto a target platform composed of a microprocessor and an FPGA. Furthermore, we illustrate how the mapping approach is applied on a real-life example, namely an M-JPEG encoder.
Synapsis and catalysis by activated Tn3 resolvase mutants

The serine recombinase Tn3 resolvase catalyses recombination between two 114 bp res sites, each of which contains binding sites for three resolvase dimers. We have analysed the in vitro properties of resolvase variants with ‘activating’ mutations, which can catalyse recombination at binding site I of res when the rest of res is absent. Site I × site I recombination promoted by these variants can be as fast as res × res recombination promoted by wild-type resolvase. Activated variants have reduced topological selectivity and no longer require the 2–3′ interface between subunits that is essential for wild-type resolvase-mediated recombination. They also promote formation of a stable synapse comprising a resolvase tetramer and two copies of site I. Cleavage of the DNA strands by the activated mutants is slow relative to the rate of synapsis. Stable resolvase tetramers were not detected in the absence of DNA or bound to a single site I. Our results lead us to conclude that the synapse is assembled by sequential binding of resolvase monomers to site I followed by interaction of two site I-dimer complexes. We discuss the implications of our results for the mechanisms of synapsis and regulation in recombination by wild-type resolvase.
Traitor: Associating Concepts using the World Wide Web

We use Common Crawl's 25TB data set of web pages to construct a database of associated concepts using Hadoop. The database can be queried through a web application with two query interfaces. A textual interface allows searching for similarities and differences between multiple concepts using a query language similar to set notation, and a graphical interface allows users to visualize similarity relationships of concepts in a force directed graph.
The different roles of social learning in vocal communication

While vocal learning has been studied extensively in birds and mammals, little effort has been made to define what exactly constitutes vocal learning and to classify the forms that it may take. We present such a theoretical framework for the study of social learning in vocal communication. We define different forms of social learning that affect communication and discuss the required methodology to show each one. We distinguish between contextual and production learning in animal communication. Contextual learning affects the behavioural context or serial position of a signal. It can affect both usage and comprehension. Production learning refers to instances where the signals themselves are modified in form as a result of experience with those of other individuals. Vocal learning is defined as production learning in the vocal domain. It can affect one or more of three systems: the respiratory, phonatory and filter systems. Each involves a different level of control over the sound production apparatus. We hypothesize that contextual learning and respiratory production learning preceded the evolution of phonatory and filter production learning. Each form of learning potentially increases the complexity of a communication system. We also found that unexpected genetic or environmental factors can have considerable effects on vocal behaviour in birds and mammals and are often more likely to cause changes or differences in vocalizations than investigators may assume. Finally, we discuss how production learning is used in innovation and invention, and present important future research questions. Copyright 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Direct surface extraction from 3D freehand ultrasound images

This paper presents a new technique for the extraction of surfaces from 3D ultrasound data. Surface extraction from ultrasound data is challenging for a number of reasons including noise and artifacts in the images and nonuniform data sampling. A method is proposed to fit an approximating radial basis function to the group of data samples. An explicit surface is then obtained by iso-surfacing the function. In most previous 3D ultrasound research, a pre-processing step is taken to interpolate the data into a regular voxel array and a corresponding loss of resolution. We are the first to represent the set of semi-structured ultrasound pixel data as a single function. From this we are able to extract surfaces without first reconstructing the irregularly spaced pixels into a regular 3D voxel array.