Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Growth and Structure of ZnO Nanorods on a Sub-Micrometer Glass Pipette and Their Application as Intracellular Potentiometric Selective Ion Sensors

This paper presents the growth and structure of ZnO nanorods on a sub-micrometer glass pipette and their application as an intracellular selective ion sensor. Highly oriented, vertical and aligned ZnO nanorods were grown on the tip of a borosilicate glass capillary (0.7 µm in diameter) by the low temperature aqueous chemical growth (ACG) technique. The relatively large surface-to-volume ratio of ZnO nanorods makes them attractive for electrochemical sensing. Transmission electron microscopy studies show that ZnO nanorods are single crystals and grow along the crystal’s c-axis. The ZnO nanorods were functionalized with a polymeric membrane for selective intracellular measurements of Na+. The membrane-coated ZnO nanorods exhibited a Na+-dependent electrochemical potential difference versus an Ag/AgCl reference micro-electrode within a wide concentration range from 0.5 mM to 100 mM. The fabrication of functionalized ZnO nanorods paves the way to sense a wide range of biochemical species at the intracellular level.
Scene boundary detection via video self-similarity analysis

We present a novel framework for analyzing video using self-similarity. Video scenes are located by analyzing inter-frame similarity matrices. The approach is flexible to the choice of similarity measure and is robust and data-independent because the data is used to model itself. We present the approach and its application to scene boundary detection. This is shown to dramatically outperform a conventional scene-boundary detector that uses a histogram-based measure of frame difference.
HLA allele and haplotype frequencies in the Albanian population and their relationship with the other European populations

Human leucocyte antigen (HLA) alleles are very interesting markers in identifying population relationships. Moreover, their frequency distribution data are important in the implementation of donor–recipient registry programs for transplantation purposes and also in determining the genetic predisposition for many diseases. For these reasons, we studied the HLA class I and II allele and haplotype frequencies in 160 healthy, unrelated Albanian individuals originating from all regions of the country. The HLA genotyping was performed through a 2‐digit resolution SSOP method. The data were analysed with Arlequin and Phylip programs. No deviation was found from the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. A total of 17 A*, 30 B*, 12 Cw*, 13 DRB1* and 5 DQB1* alleles were identified. The six most frequent HLA‐A‐B‐DRB1 haplotypes were A*02–B*18–DRB1*11 (5.60%), A*02–B*51–DRB1*16 (4.74%), A*01–B*08–DRB1*03 (3.48%), A*24–B*35–DRB1*11 (2.77%), A*02–B*51–DRB1*13 (2.21%), A*24–B*35–DRB1*14 (1.89%). Interestingly, 12 HLA‐A‐B‐Cw‐DRB1‐DQB1 haplotypes occurred at a frequency >1%. When compared with the other populations, a close relationship was found with North Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Turkish, Cretan, Serbian, Croatian and Italian populations. A higher differentiation in allele frequency level was found with Western Europe populations. These data are the first report of HLA allele and haplotype distribution in an Albanian population inside this country. When compared with other populations, their distribution frequencies show close similarities with neighbouring populations of the entire Balkan area.
Reconstruction of the corneal epithelium with induced marrow mesenchymal stem cells in rats

Purpose To explore the feasibility of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) transdifferentiating into corneal epithelial cells in a limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD) model in rats. Methods Rat MSCs were isolated and purified using a gradient isolation procedure. The cells were induced by rat corneal stromal cells (CSCs) in a transwell co-culture system. The induced MSCs were identified by immunofluorescence staining, flow cytometry, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A corneal LSCD model was produced in the right eyes of 48 rats by alkali injury. The eyes of 12 rats without any transplant served as controls (Group 1). Amniotic membranes (AM; Group 2), uninduced MSCs (Group 3), or MSCs induced by CSCs (Group 4), were transplanted onto the cornea of the model (n=12 each). The therapeutic effects of the four groups were evaluated by slit lamp observation, hematoxylin and eosin staining, immunohistochemistry staining, and confocal laser corneal microscopy. Results Cultivated MSCs were positive for CD29, CD44, and CD90, but negative for CD34, CD45, CD133, and CK12, with typical MSCs characteristics revealed by SEM. After co-culture with CSCs, the induced MSCs expressed positive staining for CK12 with corneal epithelial cell characteristics confirmed by SEM; the induced MSCs were unchanged on the amnion. Compared with the other three groups, the corneal opacity, fluorescence staining, and neovascularization grades were significantly decreased in the induced MSCs group, both on postoperative week four and ten. Conclusion MSCs induced by CSCs can transdifferentiate into corneal epithelial cells in vitro. The induced MSCs on an amniotic membrane have remarkable effects on the treatment of corneal alkali burn and the reconstruction of the corneal surface of rats.
Choice between schedules of reinforcement with and without response-pacing requirements

Choice Between Schedules of Reinforcement With and Without Response-Pacing Requirements Leigh Schrimpf Differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) and differential-reinforcement-of-high-rate (DRH) schedules specify a certain pace of responding eligible for reinforcement. The present study assessed the value of a paced schedule of reinforcement using a concurrent-chains schedule. Pigeon’s pecks on the left and right initial-link keys led to one of two terminal-link VI 60-s schedules, programmed on the center key. Completion of a terminal-link schedule always led to access to grain. The value of a terminal-link schedule was measured by the initial-link choice proportions. In the baseline, pecks on either initial-link key produced access to one of two unpaced terminal-link schedules every 60 s, on average. In subsequent experimental conditions, a paced and unpaced terminal-link was available. In the paced conditions restrictions were placed on interresponse times (IRTs) that would be eligible for reinforcement. These restrictions were based on a percentile of baseline IRT distribution. For the DRH conditions, IRTs had to be shorter than the 25 percentile of the distribution and for the DRL conditions IRTs had to be longer than the 75 percentile of the distribution. These durations were adjusted using a changing criterion design. Pacing contingencies had effects on initial and terminal link behavior. Terminal-link response rates were raised above baseline rates in the DRH conditions, and were lowered below baseline rates in the DRL conditions. Three of four pigeons showed an increase in choice for the unpaced schedule when compared to baseline, indicating an increase in value for the unpaced schedules. An analysis of the reinforcement and choice ratios indicate that these differences in value were not due to differences in reinforcement rate.
Methodological analysis of immunocytochemical screening for disseminated epithelial tumor cells in bone marrow.

The emerging clinical relevance of bone marrow micrometastasis has prompted several investigations, using a variety of immunocytochemical approaches. The present study was designed to evaluate some of the variables affecting the immunocytochemical detection of individual epithelial tumor cells in bone marrow. Using an alkaline phosphatase-antialkaline phosphatase staining technique, we evaluated bone marrow aspirates from 358 patients with primary carcinomas of the breast (n = 150), lung (n = 66), prostate (n = 42), or colorectum (n = 100). Individual tumor cells in cytological preparations were detected with monoclonal antibody (MAb) CK2 to the epithelial cytokeratin component 18 (CK18), which has been validated in extensive clinical studies. In addition, the utility of the broad-spectrum MAb A45-B/B3 was explored in this study. The high specificity of MAbs CK2 and A45-B/B3 was supported by analysis of bone marrow from 75 noncarcinoma control patients and by double-marker analysis with MAbs to mesenchymal marker proteins (CD45 and vimentin). In contrast, MAbs E29 and HMFG1, directed to mucin-like epithelial membrane proteins, cross-reacted with hematopoietic cells in 26.7-42.7% of all samples tested. The majority of the 154 positive samples (43.0%) from cancer patients displayed less than 10 CK18-positive cells per 8 x 10(5) marrow cells analyzed. The detection rate, however, was affected by blood contamination of the aspirate, the number of aspirates analyzed, and the number of marrow cells screened per aspiration site. Comparative immunostaining of bone marrow specimens with MAbs CK2 and A45-B/B3 indicated that downregulation of CK18 in micrometastatic carcinoma cells occurs in about 50% of the 172 samples analyzed, regardless of the primary tumor origin. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A Wavelet-Chaos Methodology for Analysis of EEGs and EEG Subbands to Detect Seizure and Epilepsy

A wavelet-chaos methodology is presented for analysis of EEGs and delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma subbands of EEGs for detection of seizure and epilepsy. The nonlinear dynamics of the original EEGs are quantified in the form of the correlation dimension (CD, representing system complexity) and the largest Lyapunov exponent (LLE, representing system chaoticity). The new wavelet-based methodology isolates the changes in CD and LLE in specific subbands of the EEG. The methodology is applied to three different groups of EEG signals: 1) healthy subjects; 2) epileptic subjects during a seizure-free interval (interictal EEG); 3) epileptic subjects during a seizure (ictal EEG). The effectiveness of CD and LLE in differentiating between the three groups is investigated based on statistical significance of the differences. It is observed that while there may not be significant differences in the values of the parameters obtained from the original EEG, differences may be identified when the parameters are employed in conjunction with specific EEG subbands. Moreover, it is concluded that for the higher frequency beta and gamma subbands, the CD differentiates between the three groups, whereas for the lower frequency alpha subband, the LLE differentiates between the three groups
Use of gentamicin in children with cystic fibrosis.

The use of gentamicin was studied in 80 patients with cystic fibrosis complicated by severe chronic pulmonary infection due to Pseudomonas. Gentamicin was administered intramuscularly or intravenously in a dose of 7 mg/kg per 24 hr not exceeding a total daily dose of 180 mg. In some cases, 16-20 mg four times a day was administered by aerosol. Clinical, bacteriologic, hematologic, renal, hepatic, and pulmonary evaluations were carried out. Gentamicin was well tolerated and appears to be a relatively nontoxic drug when used at this dose. It was clinically effective in controlling severe pseudomonas pulmonary infection in patients with cystic fibrosis.
Laplace Control Variates: a New Swindle Laplace Control Variates: a New Swindle

The central computational problem in Bayesian analysis is that of computing the posterior expectation of one or more quantities of interest|a ratio of two often-intractable integrals. The method of Laplace gives an approximation to this ratio that depends only on asymptotic features of the function of interest and the posterior density function, in a neighborhood of the posterior mode. Monte Carlo integration ooers a convergent sequence of numerical approximations to the posterior mean. These two methods have complementary shortcomings: Laplace's method is quick and needs only local information, but may be misleading if the local asymptotics do not reeect the tail behavior of the posterior density or the function of interest; Monte Carlo integration can be slow to converge. Here the two methods are synthesized by using Laplace's method to give a control variable for accelerating the convergence of a Monte Carlo approximation to the integral, with precision estimate.
Interactive tracker - a semi-automatic video object tracking and segmentation system

A novel strategy for video object segmentation in normal video frames, which is an indispensable preprocessing of the object based video encoding in the MPEG-4 standard, is presented. It is a semi-automatic strategy, which combines the efficiency (speed) of automatic segmentation and the accuracy of manual segmentation. Initially, the object contour in the first frame is specified interactively by a user using a computer-aided tool based on our improved Intelligent Scissors. The frames following then undergo an automatic region-based object tracking process. A user interface is designed to display the object tracking result and allow the user to observe it during the tracking process. The user can suspend the process when the result is considered inaccurate or unacceptable, and interactively correct the object contour in the first frame containing the unacceptable result with the proposed computer-aided tool. The automatic region-based tracking process can then be resumed with the corrected object contour as the new initial object contour. This tracking-correcting cycle can be repeated until the end of the video clip is reached.
A Power-Efficient and Self-Adaptive Prediction Engine for H.264/AVC Decoding

Prediction, including intra prediction and inter prediction, is the most critical issue in H.264/AVC decoding in terms of processing cycles and computation complexity. These two predictions demand a huge number of memory accesses and account for up to 80% of the total decoding cycles. In this paper, we present the design and VLSI implementation of a novel power-efficient and highly self-adaptive prediction engine that utilizes a 4 times 4 block level pipeline. Based on the different prediction requirements, the prediction pipeline stages, as well as the correlated memory accesses and datapaths, are fully adjustable, which helps to reduce unnecessary decoding operations and energy dissipation while retaining the fixed real-time throughput. Compared with conventional designs, this paper has the advantage of higher efficiency and lower power consumption due to the elimination of all redundant operations and the wide employment of the pipeline and parallel processing. Under different prediction modes, our design is able to decode each macroblock within 500 cycles. A prototype H.264/AVC baseline decoder chip that utilizes the proposed prediction engine is fabricated with UMC 0.18-mu CMOS 1P6 M technology. The prediction engine contains 79 K gates and 2.8 kb single-port on-chip SRAM, and occupies half of the whole chip area. When running at 1.5 MHz for QCIF 30 f/s real-time decoding, the prediction engine dissipates 268 muW at a 1.8-V power supply.
Neuromonitoring : The Concept of Targeted Therapy Revisited

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) appear as one of the most prominent causes of death, responsible for 50,000 deaths each year in the United States and in Europe and result in major neurological, psychological and social impairment in survivors. Since TBI are most often the consequence of road traffic accidents, they primarily target young patients and represent, therefore, a major economical burden. In response to this major threat, neuroscientists have engaged themselves into an intense and sustained effort for the development of therapeutic solutions that may affect the outcome of TBI, leading to extensive research pointing at various pathophysiological pathways and identifying numerous key factors in the generation of neuronal damage. As an anticipated outcome of this research, numerous drugs were developed, eliciting several encouraging animal studies though none of them has shown any significant benefit in successive clinical trials [1]. In the absence of any significant pharmacological breakthrough, TBI management has mostly focused on the control of increased intracranial pressure (ICP). For decades, impairment of cerebral metabolism has been attributed to impaired oxygen delivery mediated by reduced cerebral perfusion through the swollen cerebral parenchyma. Accordingly, control of ICP elevation has been advocated for restoration of previously compromised cerebral perfusion as a sine qua non condition for improvement of cerebral metabolism. At the beginning of the past decade, Rosner et al. proposed the elevation of cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) for optimization of cerebral hemodynamics [2]. Despite some criticism related to the absence of solid physiological evidence, the concept of CPP management gained a wide acceptance, and various CPP thresholds were introduced as an additional neuromonitoring-based targeted therapy [3]. The concept of CPP management itself is based on the assumption of preserved cerebral autoregulation, at least to some level, and on manipulations of blood volume and systemic arterial pressure necessary for CPP increase. As such, CPP management stresses the importance of evaluation of autoregulation as a true monitoring modality prior implementation of significant and otherwise potentially harmful hemodynamic manipulations [4, 5]. Further studies investigating cerebral blood flow (CBF) in TBI patients failed to disclose a useful correlation between CPP and CBF, suggesting that CBF could not be accurately estimated by means of CPP [6]. As a consequence, the need for CBF assessment lead to the implementation of alternative neuromonitoring modalities such as jugular bulb oxymetry, transcranial Doppler or near-infrared transcranial spectroscopy representing surrogates for CBF though eventually enhancing the need for definite …
Increasing attack resiliency of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

An ad hoc or sensor network that is employed for security sensitive applications is expected to tolerate a certain quantity of maliciously behaving nodes. Algorithms must be designed in a way to withstand attacks such as manipulation and injection of messages. End-to-end security mechanisms, albeit desirable, are generally too costly with regard to the limited computational resources available in sensor networks. We propose and evaluate a robust, scalable scheme for interleaved message authentication, which approximates security guarantees of end-to-end schemes.
Tsc3p Is an 80-Amino Acid Protein Associated with Serine Palmitoyltransferase and Required for Optimal Enzyme Activity*

Serine palmitoyltransferase catalyzes the first step of sphingolipid synthesis, condensation of serine and palmitoyl CoA to form the long chain base 3-ketosphinganine. TheLCB1/TSC2 and LCB2/TSC1 genes encode homologous proteins of the α-oxoamine synthase family required for serine palmitoyltransferase activity. The other α-oxoamine synthases are soluble homodimers, but serine palmitoyltransferase is a membrane-associated enzyme composed of at least two subunits, Lcb1p and Lcb2p. Here, we report the characterization of a third gene,TSC3, required for optimal 3-ketosphinganine synthesis inSaccharomyces cerevisiae. S. cerevisiae cells lacking theTSC3 gene have a temperature-sensitive lethal phenotype that is reversed by supplying 3-ketosphinganine, dihydrosphingosine, or phytosphingosine in the growth medium. The tsc3 mutant cells have severely reduced serine palmitoyltransferase activity. TheTSC3 gene encodes a novel 80-amino acid protein with a predominantly hydrophilic amino-terminal half and a hydrophobic carboxyl terminus that is membrane-associated. Tsc3p coimmunoprecipitates with Lcb1p and/or Lcb2p but does not bind as tightly as Lcb1p and Lcb2p bind to each other. Lcb1p and Lcb2p remain tightly associated with each other and localize to the membrane in cells lacking Tsc3p. However, Lcb2p is unstable in cells lacking Lcb1p and vice versa.
Maximizing Nonmonotone Submodular Functions under Matroid or Knapsack Constraints

Submodular function maximization is a central problem in combinatorial optimization, generalizing many important problems including Max Cut in directed/undirected graphs and in hypergraphs, certain constraint satisfaction problems, maximum entropy sampling, and maximum facility location problems. Unlike submodular minimization, submodular maximization is NP-hard. In this paper, we give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for maximizing any nonnegative submodular function subject to multiple matroid or knapsack constraints. We emphasize that our results are for nonmonotone submodular functions. In particular, for any constant $k$, we present a $(\frac{1}{k+2+\frac{1}{k}+\epsilon})$-approximation for the submodular maximization problem under $k$ matroid constraints, and a $(\frac{1}{5}-\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for this problem subject to $k$ knapsack constraints ($\epsilon>0$ is any constant). We improve the approximation guarantee of our algorithm to $\frac{1}{k+1+\frac{1}{k-1}+\epsilon}$ for $k\geq2$ partition matroid constraints. This idea also gives a $(\frac{1}{k+\epsilon})$-approximation for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to $k\geq2$ partition matroids, which is an improvement over the previously best known guarantee of $\frac{1}{k+1}$.
Assessing the Accuracy of Point & Teleport Locomotion with Orientation Indication for Virtual Reality using Curved Trajectories

Room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) systems have arrived in users' homes where tracked environments are set up in limited physical spaces. As most Virtual Environments (VEs) are larger than the tracked physical space, locomotion techniques are used to navigate in VEs. Currently, in recent VR games, point & teleport is the most popular locomotion technique. However, it only allows users to select the position of the teleportation and not the orientation that the user is facing after the teleport. This results in users having to manually correct their orientation after teleporting and possibly getting entangled by the cable of the headset. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate three different point & teleport techniques that enable users to specify the target orientation while teleporting. The results show that, although the three teleportation techniques with orientation indication increase the average teleportation time, they lead to a decreased need for correcting the orientation after teleportation.