Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of beating- versus arrested-heart revascularization on cardiac autonomic regulation and arrhythmias.

BACKGROUND Altered autonomic regulation after cardiac operations precipitates cardiac arrhythmias, affects repolarization, and increases the risk of sudden cardiac death. We sought to clarify how the 2 different techniques of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), namely conventional CABG using cardiopulmonary bypass (on-pump) and beating-heart CABG without cardiopulmonary bypass (off-pump), affect cardiac autonomic regulation and arrhythmic disturbances postoperatively. METHODS We included 57 consecutive patients, 28 in the on-pump group and 29 in the off-pump group. The electro-cardiographic recordings were performed on the preoperative day and the fourth, seventh, and twenty-eighth day after operation. Fifteen-minute digital recordings were taken; one channel was used to record electrocardiogram and the other breathing. Detailed analyses of arrhythmia, heart rate, and heart rate variability indices were performed on respective days to assess sympathetic and parasympathetic modulation of the heart and relate it to detected arrhythmic disturbances. RESULTS Total power, low-frequency power, which indicates baroreceptor-mediated sympathetic modulation, and high-frequency power, indicating parasympathetic vagal modulation, declined significantly in both groups after CABG (P < .001); however, 7 days after CABG, total and high-frequency power were better preserved in the off-pump group. Mean RR interval was longer in the off-pump group at 7 (P= .006) and 28 days (P= .008) after surgery. The total incidence of arrhythmic events was higher in the on-pump group on the seventh day (P = .017, adjusted odds ratio = 8.6, 95% confidence interval 1.4-80.3). CONCLUSIONS The results show profound impairment of cardiac autonomic regulation after CABG, showing better preserved cardiac autonomic modulation 7 days after beating-heart revascularization. Evidence suggests that slower restoration of heart rate and increased incidence of arrhythmic events after CABG using cardiopulmonary bypass are the result not only of impaired cardiac autonomic regulation but also of the involvement of additional factors of nonautonomic origin.
Evaluation of Direct Speech Translation Method Using Inductive Learning for Conversations in the Travel Domain

This paper evaluates a direct speech translation Method with waveforms using the Inductive Learning method for short conversation. The method is able to work without conventional speech recognition and speech synthesis because syntactic expressions are not needed for translation in the proposed method. We focus only on acoustic characteristics of speech waveforms of source and target languages without obtaining character strings from utterances. This speech translation method can be utilized for any language because the system has no processing dependent on an individual character of a specific language. Therefore, we can utilize the speech of a handicapped person who is not able to be treated by conventional speech recognition systems, because we do not need to segment the speech into phonemes, syllables, or words to realize speech translation. Our method is realized by learning translation rules that have acoustic correspondence between two languages inductively. In this paper, we deal with a translation between Japanese and English.
Trait Rumination Predicts Elevated Evening Cortisol in Sexual and Gender Minority Young Adults

Stress may contribute to illness through the impaired recovery or sustained activity of stress-responsive biological systems. Rumination, or mental rehearsal of past stressors, may alter the body’s stress-responsive systems by amplifying and prolonging exposure to physiological mediators, such as cortisol. The primary aim of the current investigation was to test the extent to which the tendency to ruminate on stress predicts diminished diurnal cortisol recovery (i.e., elevated evening cortisol) in a sample of sexual and gender minority young adults. Participants included 58 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults (Mage = 25.0, SD = 4.1) who completed an initial online survey that assessed trait rumination and current depressed mood. Participants completed daily evening questionnaires and provided salivary cortisol samples at wake, 45 min post-wake, 12 h post-wake, and at bedtime over seven consecutive days. Trait rumination predicted significantly higher cortisol concentrations at bedtime, but was unrelated to other cortisol indices (e.g., morning cortisol, diurnal slope, total output). The association with trait rumination was not accounted for by daily negative affect, and was largely independent of depressed mood. These results have implications for identifying and treating those who may be at risk for impaired diurnal cortisol recovery and associated negative health outcomes.
Validating Navigation Time Prediction Models for Menu Optimization

Authors of menu optimization methods often use navigation time prediction models without validating whether the model is adequate for the site and its users. We review the assumptions underlying navigation time prediction models and present a method to validate these assumptions offline. Experiments on four web sites show how accurate the various model features describe the behavior of the users. These results can be used to select the best model for a new optimization task. In addition, we find that the existing optimization methods all use suboptimal models. This indicates that our results can significantly contribute to more effective menu optimization.
A new fuzzy interpolative reasoning method based on the areas of fuzzy sets

Fuzzy interpolative reasoning is an important inference technique for sparse fuzzy rule-based systems. In this paper, we present a new fuzzy interpolative reasoning method for sparse fuzzy rule-based systems based on the areas of fuzzy sets. The proposed method can guarantee the normality and the convexity of the conclusion and can deal with fuzzy interpolative reasoning with complicated membership functions, such as hexagons, polygons and Gaussians. Moreover, the proposed method can deal with the situation when the antecedents and the consequents of fuzzy rules belong to different kinds of membership functions. We use several examples to compare the fuzzy interpolative reasoning results of the proposed method with the ones of the existing methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more suitable to deal with fuzzy interpolative reasoning than the existing methods. The proposed method provides a useful way to deal with fuzzy interpolative reasoning in sparse fuzzy rule-based systems.
Mouse and touchscreen selection in the upper and lower visual fields

Neuroanatomical evidence indicates the human eye's visual field can be functionally divided into two vertical hemifields, each specialized for specific functions. The upper visual field (UVF) is specialized to support perceptual tasks in the distance, while the lower visual field (LVF) is specialized to support visually-guided motor tasks, such as pointing. We present a user study comparing mouse- and touchscreen-based pointing for items presented in the UVF and LVF on an interactive display. Consistent with the neuroscience literature, we found that mouse and touchscreen pointing were faster and more accurate for items presented in the LVF when compared to pointing at identical targets presented in the UVF. Further analysis found previously unreported performance differences between the visual fields for touchscreen pointing that were not observed for mouse pointing. This indicates that a placement of interactive items favorable to the LVF yields superior user performance, especially for systems dependent on direct touch interactions.
A Comparative study of Agile Software Development Methodology and traditional waterfall model

This paper will focus on traditional SDLC method like Waterfall model and will brief on comparative study of same with Agile. Traditional SDLC models like Waterfall model is sequential development methodology where output of one development phase becomes input for other. To brief cons, like risk of failure are high and process itself is not flexible for change. Agile software development methodology is widely used software development process which overcomes the drawbacks of traditional software development methods.It provides means for rapid development and great deal of flexibility to adopt new changes during development process. The primary data collection method was interviews of the industryexpertise. The secondary source of data is reference books and Internet articles. This paper will help to understand basics of Agile methodology. Keywords-Agile methods,Agile methodology, Software development, Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC)
Thioredoxin-2 Inhibits Mitochondrial Reactive Oxygen Species Generation and Apoptosis Stress Kinase-1 Activity to Maintain Cardiac Function

Background— Thioredoxin 2 (Trx2) is a key mitochondrial protein that regulates cellular redox and survival by suppressing mitochondrial reactive oxygen species generation and by inhibiting apoptosis stress kinase-1 (ASK1)–dependent apoptotic signaling. To date, the role of the mitochondrial Trx2 system in heart failure pathogenesis has not been investigated. Methods and Results— Western blot and histological analysis revealed that Trx2 protein expression levels were reduced in hearts from patients with dilated cardiomyopathy, with a concomitant increase in ASK1 phosphorylation/activity. Cardiac-specific Trx2 knockout mice develop spontaneous dilated cardiomyopathy at 1 month of age with increased heart size, reduced ventricular wall thickness, and a progressive decline in left ventricular contractile function, resulting in mortality due to heart failure by ≈4 months of age. The progressive decline in cardiac function observed in cardiac-specific Trx2 knockout mice was accompanied by the disruption of mitochondrial ultrastructure, mitochondrial membrane depolarization, increased mitochondrial reactive oxygen species generation, and reduced ATP production, correlating with increased ASK1 signaling and increased cardiomyocyte apoptosis. Chronic administration of a highly selective ASK1 inhibitor improved cardiac phenotype and reduced maladaptive left ventricular remodeling with significant reductions in oxidative stress, apoptosis, fibrosis, and cardiac failure. Cellular data from Trx2-deficient cardiomyocytes demonstrated that ASK1 inhibition reduced apoptosis and reduced mitochondrial reactive oxygen species generation. Conclusions— Our data support an essential role for mitochondrial Trx2 in preserving cardiac function by suppressing mitochondrial reactive oxygen species production and ASK1-dependent apoptosis. Inhibition of ASK1 represents a promising therapeutic strategy for the treatment of dilated cardiomyopathy and heart failure.
The Role of the Ferric Uptake Regulator (Fur) in Regulation of Helicobacter pylori Iron Uptake

Background. Availability of the essential nutrient iron is thought to vary greatly in the gastric mucosa, and thus the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori requires regulatory responses to these environmental changes. Bacterial iron‐responsive regulation is often mediated by Ferric Uptake Regulator (Fur) homologs, and in this study we have determined the role of H. pylori Fur in regulation of H. pylori iron uptake.
Principal manifolds and Bayesian subspaces for visual recognition

We investigate the use of linear and nonlinear principal manifolds for learning low dimensional representations for visual recognition. Three techniques: principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA) and nonlinear PCA (NLPCA) are examined and tested in a visual recognition experiment using a large gallery of facial images from the "FERET" database. We compare the recognition performance of a nearest neighbour matching rule with each principal manifold representation to that of a maximum a posteriori (MAP) matching rule using a Bayesian similarity measure derived from probabilistic subspaces, and demonstrate the superiority of the latter.
Direct Interaction with Large-Scale Display Systems using Infrared Laser tracking Devices

Existing large scale display systems generally adopt an indirect approach to user interaction. This is due to the use of standard desktop-oriented devices, such as a mouse on a desk, to control the large wall-sized display. By using an infrared laser pointer and an infrared tracking device, a more direct interaction with the large display can be achieved, thereby reducing the cognitive load of the user and improving their mobility. The challenge in designing such systems is to allow users to interact with objects on the display naturally and easily. Our system addresses this with hotspots, regions surrounding objects of interest, and gestures, movements made with the laser pointer which triggers an action, similar to those found in modern web browsers (e.g. Mozilla and Opera). Finally, these concepts are demonstrated by an add-in module for Microsoft® PowerPoint® using the NaturalPointTM Smart-NavTM tracking device.
Enhanced Working Memory Binding by Direct Electrical Stimulation of the Parietal Cortex

Recent works evince the critical role of visual short-term memory (STM) binding deficits as a clinical and preclinical marker of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). These studies suggest a potential role of posterior brain regions in both the neurocognitive deficits of Alzheimer’s patients and STM binding in general. Thereupon, we surmised that stimulation of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) might be a successful approach to tackle working memory deficits in this condition, especially at early stages. To date, no causal evidence exists of the role of the parietal cortex in STM binding. A unique approach to assess this issue is afforded by single-subject direct intracranial electrical stimulation of specific brain regions during a relevant cognitive task. Electrical stimulation has been used both for clinical purposes and to causally probe brain mechanisms. Previous evidence of electrical currents spreading through white matter along well defined functional circuits indicates that visual working memory mechanisms are subserved by a specific widely distributed network. Here, we stimulated the parietal cortex of a subject with intracranial electrodes as he performed the visual STM task. We compared the ensuing results to those from a non-stimulated condition and to the performance of a matched control group. In brief, direct stimulation of the parietal cortex induced a selective improvement in STM. These results, together with previous studies, provide very preliminary but promising ground to examine behavioral changes upon parietal stimulation in AD. We discuss our results regarding: (a) the usefulness of the task to target prodromal stages of AD; (b) the role of a posterior network in STM binding and in AD; and (c) the potential opportunity to improve STM binding through brain stimulation.
Spatial transformations of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images

The authors address the problem of applying spatial transformations (or "image warps") to diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images. The orientational information that these images contain must be handled appropriately when they are transformed spatially during image registration. The authors present solutions for global transformations of three-dimensional images up to 12-parameter affine complexity and indicate how their methods can be extended for higher order transformations. Several approaches are presented and tested using synthetic data. One method, the preservation of principal direction algorithm, which takes into account shearing, stretching and rigid rotation, is shown to be the most effective. Additional registration experiments are performed on human brain data obtained from a single subject, whose head was imaged in three different orientations within the scanner. All of the authors' methods improve the consistency between registered and target images over naive warping algorithms.
Impact of Overlay Routing on End-to-End Delay

The prosperity of various real-time applications triggers significant challenges for the Internet to meet the critical end-to-end delay requirements. This paper investigates the feasibility and practical issues of using overlay routing to improve end-to-end delay performance, with the analysis of round trip time data collected over three months by the all pairs pings project between each pair of hundreds of nodes on the Planet- Lab. The results show: 1) overlay routing has the potential to reduce the round trip time by 40 milliseconds and increase network connectivity by 7% on average; 2) even simple static overlay paths can reduce end-to-end delay, while the dynamic algorithm does better; 3) Over 80% of the shortest overlay paths have no more than 4 hops, and a simple algorithm leveraging only one relay node can efficiently take the advantages of overlay routing.
CcpA Regulates Central Metabolism and Virulence Gene Expression in Streptococcus mutans

ABSTRACT CcpA globally regulates transcription in response to carbohydrate availability in many gram-positive bacteria, but its role in Streptococcus mutans remains enigmatic. Using the fructan hydrolase (fruA) gene of S. mutans as a model, we demonstrated that CcpA plays a direct role in carbon catabolite repression (CCR). Subsequently, the expression of 170 genes was shown to be differently expressed (≥2-fold) in glucose-grown wild-type (UA159) and CcpA-deficient (TW1) strains (P ≤ 0.001). However, there were differences in expression of only 96 genes between UA159 and TW1 when cells were cultivated with the poorly repressing substrate galactose. Interestingly, 90 genes were expressed differently in wild-type S. mutans when glucose- and galactose-grown cells were compared, but the expression of 515 genes was altered in the CcpA-deficient strain in a similar comparison. Overall, our results supported the hypothesis that CcpA has a major role in CCR and regulation of gene expression but revealed that in S. mutans there is a substantial CcpA-independent network that regulates gene expression in response to the carbohydrate source. Based on the genetic studies, biochemical and physiological experiments demonstrated that loss of CcpA impacts the ability of S. mutans to transport and grow on selected sugars. Also, the CcpA-deficient strain displayed an enhanced capacity to produce acid from intracellular stores of polysaccharides, could grow faster at pH 5.5, and could acidify the environment more rapidly and to a greater extent than the parental strain. Thus, CcpA directly modulates the pathogenic potential of S. mutans through global control of gene expression.
An Automated System for Garment Texture Design Class Identification

Automatic identification of garment design class might play an important role in the garments and fashion industry. To achieve this, essential initial works are found in the literature. For example, construction of a garment database, automatic segmentation of garments from real life images, categorizing them into the type of garments such as shirts, jackets, tops, skirts, etc. It is now essential to find a system such that it will be possible to identify the particular design (printed, striped or single color) of garment product for an automated system to recommend the garment trends. In this paper, we have focused on this specific issue and thus propose two new descriptors namely Completed CENTRIST (cCENTRIST) and Ternary CENTRIST (tCENTRIST). To test these descriptors, we used two different publically available databases. The experimental results of these databases demonstrate that both cCENTRIST and tCENTRIST achieve nearly about 3% more accuracy than the existing state-of-the art methods.
Longitudinal genetic analysis of plasma lipids.

The consensus from published studies is that plasma lipids are each influenced by genetic factors, and that this contributes to genetic variation in risk of cardiovascular disease. Heritability estimates for lipids and lipoproteins are in the range . 48 to . 87, when measured once per study participant. However, this ignores the confounding effects of biological variation measurement error and ageing, and a truer assessment of genetic effects on cardiovascular risk may be obtained from analysis of longitudinal twin or family data. We have analyzed information on plasma high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and triglycerides, from 415 adult twins who provided blood on two to five occasions over 10 to 17 years. Multivariate modeling of genetic and environmental contributions to variation within and across occasions was used to assess the extent to which genetic and environmental factors have long-term effects on plasma lipids. Results indicated that more than one genetic factor influenced HDL and LDL components of cholesterol, and triglycerides over time in all studies. Nonshared environmental factors did not have significant long-term effects except for HDL. We conclude that when heritability of lipid risk factors is estimated on only one occasion, the existence of biological variation and measurement errors leads to underestimation of the importance of genetic factors as a cause of variation in long-term risk within the population. In addition our data suggest that different genes may affect the risk profile at different ages.
Towards an Automatic Blind Spot Camera: Robust Real-time Pedestrian Tracking from a Moving Camera

In this paper, we present a real-time pedestrian tracker that combines a robust appearance-based pedestrian detector with application-specific constraints and motion information. The targeted application is the automatic detection of vulnerable road users in blind spot cameras on trucks. This application imposes several challenges that need to be tackled. Vulnerable road users are a very diverse class, and we need a high precision and recall rate with real-time performance. Here, we present a first step towards such an automatic detection system. The novelty of our approach is the extension of a robust pedestrian detector towards real-time performance. The information from the appearance-based detector is used in combination with motion-based estimations to efficiently reduce the search space for the appearance-based detector in consecutive frames. This results in a multi-pedestrian tracker from a moving camera which is both optimized in terms of accuracy and speed. We recorded several data sequences to evaluate our pedestrian tracker, and performed initial experiments with promising results.
A Preliminary Taxonomy for Software Failure Impact

Software quality is of strategic importance to decision makers in enterprises. When software fails, the resulting impact on a business can be severe. So far software failure has been mainly studied from the perspective of the developer by examining error prevention and correction through software testing and debugging. Even with a robust development process, software is almost never free of errors and thus failures will occur after the initial development process is completed and the software is installed and in use in an enterprise. Understanding the impact of such production software failures on enterprises, however, is complex and little research has been done on it. This paper starts the process of understanding the enterprise impact of software failure by developing a categorization, or taxonomy, of software failure impacts on the enterprise. We show how the resulting taxonomy can be applied to support practitioners and researchers in their efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise impact of software failures.