Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategies for gallium removal after focused ion beam patterning of ferroelectric oxide nanostructures

As part of a study into the properties of ferroelectric single crystals at nanoscale dimensions, the effects that focused ion beam (FIB) processing can have, in terms of structural damage and ion implantation, on perovskite oxide materials has been examined, and a post-processing procedure developed to remove such effects. Single crystal material of the perovskite ferroelectric barium titanate (BaTiO3) has been patterned into thin film lamellae structures using a FIB microscope. Previous work had shown that FIB patterning induced gallium impregnation and associated creation of amorphous layers in a surface region of the single crystal material some 20 nm thick, but that both recrystallization and expulsion of gallium could be achieved through thermal annealing in air. Here we confirm this observation, but find that thermally induced gallium expulsion is associated with the formation of gallium-rich platelets on the surface of the annealed material. These platelets are thought to be gallium oxide. Etching using nitric and hydrochloric acids had no effect on the gallium-rich platelets. Effective platelet removal involved thermal annealing at 700 °C for 1 h in a vacuum followed by 1 h in oxygen, and then a post-annealing low-power plasma clean in an Ar/O atmosphere. Similar processing is likely to be necessary for the full recovery of post FIB-milled nanostructures in oxide ceramic systems in general.
Comparing Effects of Carrier Frequency Offset on Generalized Multi-Carrier and OFDM Systems

The carrier frequency offset (CFO) could destroy the orthogonality of OFDM subcarriers and induce the inter-carrier interference (ICI) spread. However, the generalized multi-carrier (GMC) system reflects different interference characters in the presence of CFO. In this paper, we exactly analyze the CFO effect on GMC, which multiplexes several single band single carrier based frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) streams in frequency domain, under the scenario of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. A closed-form expression of signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is derived for the GMC systems in the presence of CFO. Furthermore, the bit error rate (BER) performance analysis is also performed in comparison with the traditional OFDM system for both uncoded and coded environments. Analysis and simulation results show that the feature procedure of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) spread may condense the CFO-induced interference in the first symbol of each subband, resulting in less interference in other symbols. Such condensing procedure can provide robustness against the CFO effect, which also lies on the subband bandwidth for GMC systems. In contrast to the conventional OFDM system, GMC exhibits more robustness when each subband width is designed for 4 times larger than the subcarrier spacing.
ADMS: A Testbed for Incremental Access Methods

ADMS is an advanced database management system developed-to experiment with incremental access methods for large and distributed databases. It has been developed over the past eight years at the University of Maryland. The paper provides an overview of ADMS, and describes its capabilities and the performance attained by its incremental access methods. This paper also describes an enhanced client-server architecture that allows an incremental gateway access to multiple heterogeneous commercial database management systems. >
A Cross-sectional Study on Quality of Life among Diabetic Patients Attending Tertiary Care Hospital in Bagalkot City, Karnataka

Background: India has the large number of diabetic patients, and the number is expected to raise to 69.9 million by 2025. “Quality of life (QOL)” evaluation has emerged as an important outcome measure for chronic disease management. In diabetes, psychosocial factors have an important impact on self-care, acceptance of therapeutic regimens, treatment success, and QOL. Aims and Objectives: The aim of the study was to find out the QOL among the diabetic patients attending the outpatient department of tertiary care hospital in Bagalkot city. Methodology: It is a cross-sectional descriptive study, which was undertaken at a tertiary care hospital in Bagalkot city. The duration of the study was from August 10, 2016 to October 25, 2016. A sample size of 180 was obtained after considering the prevalence of diabetes in Karnataka as 10.22%. Patients attending the hospital for outpatient services were interviewed in their own language after obtaining the consent. QOL instrument for Indian Diabetes Patients questionnaire was used it is a reliable, valid, and sensitive tool for the assessment of diabetes-specific QOL in Indian subjects. Statistical analysis was done using Microsoft Excel 2010 and SPSS 20.1 trial version. Chi-square and Fisher’s exact test was used. Results: The mean age of study participants was 58.14 ± 13.46 years. 31.8% of the study participants were on insulin therapy. 52.3% of the males in the study had good QOL. The patients who were obese had poorer QOL than the patients with overweight and normal body mass index; this was statistically significant. Married participants had better QOL. In participants with comorbidities, QOL was poorer when compared to those without comorbidities; this difference was statistically significant. Key word: Diabetes, quality of life instrument for Indian diabetes patients, quality of life
Rotary Blood Pump Control Strategy for Preventing Left Ventricular Suction

The risk for left ventricular (LV) suction while maintaining adequate perfusion over a range of physiologic conditions during continuous flow LV assist device (LVAD) support is a significant clinical concern. To address this challenge, we developed a suction prevention and physiologic control (SPPC) algorithm for use with axial and centrifugal LVADs. The SPPC algorithm uses two gain-scheduled, proportional-integral controllers that maintain a differential pump speed (&Dgr;RPM) above a user-defined threshold to prevent LV suction, while maintaining an average reference differential pressure (&Dgr;P) between the LV and aorta to provide physiologic perfusion. Efficacy and robustness of the proposed algorithm were evaluated in silico during simulated rest and exercise test conditions for (1) &Dgr;P/&Dgr;RPM excessive setpoint (ES); (2) rapid eightfold increase in pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR); and (3) ES and PVR. Hemodynamic waveforms (LV pressure and volume; aortic pressure and flow) were simulated and analyzed to identify suction event(s), quantify total flow output (pump + cardiac output), and characterize the performance of the SPPC algorithm. The results demonstrated that the proposed SPPC algorithm prevented LV suction while maintaining physiologic perfusion for all simulated test conditions, and warrants further investigation in vivo.
Astrocyte Calcium Signaling Transforms Cholinergic Modulation to Cortical Plasticity In Vivo

Global brain state dynamics regulate plasticity in local cortical circuits, but the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms are unclear. Here, we demonstrate that astrocyte Ca2+ signaling provides a critical bridge between cholinergic activation, associated with attention and vigilance states, and somatosensory plasticity in mouse barrel cortex in vivo. We investigated first whether a combined stimulation of mouse whiskers and the nucleus basalis of Meynert (NBM), the principal source of cholinergic innervation to the cortex, leads to enhanced whisker-evoked local field potential. This plasticity is dependent on muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChR) and N-methyl-d-aspartic acid receptors (NMDARs). During the induction of this synaptic plasticity, we find that astrocytic [Ca2+]i is pronouncedly elevated, which is blocked by mAChR antagonists. The elevation of astrocytic [Ca2+]i is crucial in this type of synaptic plasticity, as the plasticity could not be induced in inositol-1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor type 2 knock-out (IP3R2-KO) mice, in which astrocytic [Ca2+]i surges are diminished. Moreover, NBM stimulation led to a significant increase in the extracellular concentration of the NMDAR coagonist d-serine in wild-type mice when compared to IP3R2-KO mice. Finally, plasticity in IP3R2-KO mice could be rescued by externally supplying d-serine. Our data present coherent lines of in vivo evidence for astrocytic involvement in cortical plasticity. These findings suggest an unexpected role of astrocytes as a gate for cholinergic plasticity in the cortex.
Datacast: A Scalable and Efficient Group Data Delivery Service for Data Centers

Reliable group data delivery (RGDD) is a pervasive traffic pattern in data centers. In an RGDD group, a sender needs to reliably deliver a copy of data to all the receivers. Existing solutions either do not scale due to the large number of RGDD groups (e.g., IP multicast) or cannot efficiently use network bandwidth (e.g., end-host overlays). We designDatacast for RGDD. Datacast turns group state management to in-network packet caching by leveraging the content centric networking (CCN) concept. It uses centrally calculated multiple edge-disjoint trees for efficient and fast data delivery. By introducing a robust rate-based congestion control, which interprets duplicated CCN interest packets as congestion signal, Datacast adapts well to varying network conditions. We have implemented Datacast using the ServerSwitch [13] platform. Our implementation shows that all the features needed in Datacast, including flexible packet filtering, source routing, and in-network packet caching, can be implemented using commodity devices. Our implementation can offload packet forwarding to switching chip for 50% nodes in a typical group with 280members and over 500 intermediate nodes. Our testbed experiments demonstrate that Datacast achieves 1.74Gb/s goodput using two 1GbE Steiner trees, it uses network bandwidth efficiently, adapts to changing traffic conditions and reacts to network failures quickly.
Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Mortality Across the Veterans Health Administration

Abstract Purpose: Equal-access health care systems such as the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) reduce financial and nonfinancial barriers to care. It is unknown if such systems mitigate racial/ethnic mortality disparities, such as those well documented in the broader U.S. population. We examined racial/ethnic mortality disparities among VHA health care users, and compared racial/ethnic disparities in VHA and U.S. general populations. Methods: Linking VHA records for an October 2008 to September 2009 national VHA user cohort, and National Death Index records, we assessed all-cause, cancer, and cardiovascular-related mortality through December 2011. We calculated age-, sex-, and comorbidity-adjusted mortality hazard ratios. We computed sex-stratified, age-standardized mortality risk ratios for VHA and U.S. populations, then compared racial/ethnic disparities between the populations. Results: Among VHA users, American Indian/Alaskan Natives (AI/ANs) had higher adjusted all-cause mortality, whereas non-Hispanic Blacks had higher cause-specific mortality versus non-Hispanic Whites. Asians, Hispanics, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders had similar, or lower all-cause and cause-specific mortality versus non-Hispanic Whites. Mortality disparities were evident in non-Hispanic-Black men compared with non-Hispanic White men in both VHA and U.S. populations for all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer (cause-specific) mortality, but disparities were smaller in VHA. VHA non-Hispanic Black women did not experience the all-cause and cause-specific mortality disparity present for U.S. non-Hispanic Black women. Disparities in all-cause and cancer mortality existed in VHA but not in U.S. population AI/AN men. Conclusion: Patterns in racial/ethnic disparities differed between VHA and U.S. populations, with fewer disparities within VHAs equal-access system. Equal-access health care may partially address racial/ethnic mortality disparities, but other nonhealth care factors should also be explored.
Ectodomain Shedding and Intramembrane Cleavage of Mammalian Notch Proteins Are Not Regulated through Oligomerization*

Intramembrane cleaving proteases such as site 2 protease, γ-secretase, and signal peptide peptidase hydrolyze peptide bonds within the transmembrane domain (TMD) of signaling molecules such as SREBP, Notch, and HLA-E, respectively. All three enzymes require a prior cleavage at the juxtamembrane region by another protease. It has been proposed that removing the extracellular domain allows dissociation of substrate TMD, held together by the extracellular domain or loop. Using γ-secretase as a model intramembrane cleaving protease and Notch as a model substrate, we investigated whether activating and inactivating mutations in Notch modulate γ-secretase cleavage through changes in oligomerization. We find that although the Notch epidermal growth factor repeats can promote dimer formation, most surface Notch molecules in mammalian cells are monomeric as are constitutively active or inactive Notch1 proteins. Using a bacterial assay for TM dimerization, we find that the isolated TMD of Notch and amyloid precursor protein self-associate and that mutations affecting Notch cleavage by γ-secretase cleavage do not alter TMD dimerization. Our results indicate that ligand-induced reversal of controlled TMD dimerization by the Notch extracellular domain is unlikely to underlie the regulatory mechanism of intramembranous cleavage.
Use of Enzyme Tests in Characterization and Identification of Aerobic and Facultatively Anaerobic Gram-Positive Cocci

SUMMARY The contribution of enzyme tests to the accurate and rapid routine identification of gram-positive cocci is introduced. The current taxonomy of the genera of aerobic and facultatively anaerobic cocci based on genotypic and phenotypic characterization is reviewed. The clinical and economic importance of members of these taxa is briefly summarized. Tables summarizing test schemes and kits available for the identification of staphylococci, enterococci, and streptococci on the basis of general requirements, number of tests, number of taxa, test classes, and completion times are discussed. Enzyme tests included in each scheme are compared on the basis of their synthetic moiety. The current understanding of the activity of enzymes important for classification and identification of the major groups, methods of testing, and relevance to the ease and speed of identification are reviewed. Publications describing the use of different identification kits are listed, and overall identification successes and problems are discussed. The relationships between the results of conventional biochemical and rapid enzyme tests are described and considered. The use of synthetic substrates for the detection of glycosidases and peptidases is reviewed, and the advantages of fluorogenic synthetic moieties are discussed. The relevance of enzyme tests to accurate and meaningful rapid routine identification is discussed.
A blind audio watermarking algorithm robust against synchronization attacks

Time Scale Modification, Mp3 Compression and random cropping are challenging problems in watermarking of audio signals. To overcome these signal processing attacks, an imperceptible, blind and secure audio watermarking algorithm is presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm calculates the watermark embedding regions (WER) based on the audio localized content analysis and then embeds watermark data in these selected regions. The selection of region of embedding is done by finding regions which are relatively invariant to synchronization attacks. This makes the embedded watermark robust to time stretching or compressing attacks. Multiresolution decomposition of the signal using wavelet domain is used in this paper for watermarking. Experimental results validate that the algorithm is robust to Time Scale Modification, Mp3 Compression and other audio signal processing attacks and maintains perceptual transparency to an accepted level with SNR above 30dB.
Data Transaction Modeling in Mobile Networks: Contract Mechanism and Performance Analysis

We consider auction mechanism design and performance analysis for data transactions in mobile social networks. Existing mobile network plans can result in some users ending a monthly plan with excess data, while others may have to pay a costly fee to buy more data. Thus we suggest data auctions with a single seller, or a multiple-seller networked data auction, that operate in mobile social networks, to deal with the asymmetry between extra unused data resources and urgent data demands. Based on earlier work on the analysis of auctions, we design the data transaction mechanism, and summarise the analysis on state transmission, stationary probabilities of the system, and the expected income for data sellers. To improve the efficiency and performance of the system, socially- aware mobility models are also proposed. The proposed data auction mechanisms and friendship-based mobility model are then simulated as operating on Flickr, a real-world online social network database. Results show that the number of data bidders in different auctions can be balanced through the proposed mobility model, and also increase the income per unit time of sellers in the networked data auction.
The Feasibility of Patient Positioning in Radiotherapy Using a Time-of-Flight Camer

Our goal is to determine an optimized image-guided setup by comparing setup errors determined by three-dimensional (3D) image guidance for radiotherapy of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients immobilized by customized thermoplastic masks. This work introduces a rigid registration framework for patient positioning in radiotherapy, based on real-time surface acquisition by a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera. In order to evaluate patient positioning, a markerless surface registration method is designed by aligning the live setup to the initial setup. We propose an efficient and robust 3D surface registration approach based on the coherent point drift (CPD). Current results show that for rigid phantom it is possible to obtain an accuracy of 1.40±0.65 mm and 0.15°±0.07° for translations and rotations respectively. The dynamics application of this system will be the next goal in terms of topics such as gating/tracking.
Early Improper Motion Detection in Golf Swings Using Wearable Motion Sensors: The First Approach

This paper presents an analysis of a golf swing to detect improper motion in the early phase of the swing. Led by the desire to achieve a consistent shot outcome, a particular golfer would (in multiple trials) prefer to perform completely identical golf swings. In reality, some deviations from the desired motion are always present due to the comprehensive nature of the swing motion. Swing motion deviations that are not detrimental to performance are acceptable. This analysis is conducted using a golfer's leading arm kinematic data, which are obtained from a golfer wearing a motion sensor that is comprised of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Applying the principal component analysis (PCA) to the reference observations of properly performed swings, the PCA components of acceptable swing motion deviations are established. Using these components, the motion deviations in the observations of other swings are examined. Any unacceptable deviations that are detected indicate an improper swing motion. Arbitrarily long observations of an individual player's swing sequences can be included in the analysis. The results obtained for the considered example show an improper swing motion in early phase of the swing, i.e., the first part of the backswing. An early detection method for improper swing motions that is conducted on an individual basis provides assistance for performance improvement.
A Role for Mitochondrial Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase (PEPCK-M) in the Regulation of Hepatic Gluconeogenesis*

Background: PEPCK-M is generally considered irrelevant for glucose production, although gluconeogenesis has never been characterized in its absence. Results: PEPCK-M loss impaired gluconeogenesis from lactate, lowered plasma glucose, insulin, and triglycerides, reduced hepatic glycogen, and increased glycerol turnover. Conclusion: Approximately a third of gluconeogenesis comes from PEPCK-M. Significance: The nutrient-sensitive PEPCK-M has been overlooked and is potentially important for metabolic diseases such as diabetes. Synthesis of phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) from oxaloacetate is an absolute requirement for gluconeogenesis from mitochondrial substrates. Generally, this reaction has solely been attributed to the cytosolic isoform of PEPCK (PEPCK-C), although loss of the mitochondrial isoform (PEPCK-M) has never been assessed. Despite catalyzing the same reaction, to date the only significant role reported in mammals for the mitochondrial isoform is as a glucose sensor necessary for insulin secretion. We hypothesized that this nutrient-sensing mitochondrial GTP-dependent pathway contributes importantly to gluconeogenesis. PEPCK-M was acutely silenced in gluconeogenic tissues of rats using antisense oligonucleotides both in vivo and in isolated hepatocytes. Silencing PEPCK-M lowers plasma glucose, insulin, and triglycerides, reduces white adipose, and depletes hepatic glycogen, but raises lactate. There is a switch of gluconeogenic substrate preference to glycerol that quantitatively accounts for a third of glucose production. In contrast to the severe mitochondrial deficiency characteristic of PEPCK-C knock-out livers, hepatocytes from PEPCK-M-deficient livers maintained normal oxidative function. Consistent with its predicted role, gluconeogenesis rates from hepatocytes lacking PEPCK-M are severely reduced for lactate, alanine, and glutamine, but not for pyruvate and glycerol. Thus, PEPCK-M has a direct role in fasted and fed glucose homeostasis, and this mitochondrial GTP-dependent pathway should be reconsidered for its involvement in both normal and diabetic metabolism.
Severely Impaired Urine-Concentrating Ability in Mice Lacking the CLC-K1 Chloride Channel

To analyze the physiological functions of CLC-K1 in vivo, we generated mice lacking CLC-K1 by targeted gene disruption. Homozygous mutant Clcnk1–/– mice produced ∼5 times more urine than Clcnk1+/– and Clcnk1+/+ mice. After 24-hour water deprivation, Clcnk1–/– mice became severely dehydrated and lethargic. Intraperitoneal injection of the V2 agonist, deamino-Cys1, D-Arg8 vasopressin, induced an increase in urine osmolarity in Clcnk1+/– and Clcnk1+/+ mice from ∼1,000 to ∼3,000 mosm/kg H2O, whereas the increase in Clcnk1–/– mice was only from ∼600 to ∼840 mosm/kg H2O, indicating nephrogenic diabetes insipidus in Clcnk1–/– mice. These results clearly established that CLC-K1 plays a major role in the urinary-concentrating mechanisms.