Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minilaparoscopic Colorectal Resections: Technical Note

Laparoscopic colorectal resections have been shown to provide short-term advantages in terms of postoperative pain, general morbidity, recovery, and quality of life. To date, long-term results have been proved to be comparable to open surgery irrefutably only for colon cancer. Recently, new trends keep arising in the direction of minimal invasiveness to reduce surgical trauma after colorectal surgery in order to improve morbidity and cosmetic results. The few reports available in the literature on single-port technique show promising results. Natural orifices endoscopic techniques still have very limited application. We focused our efforts in standardising a minilaparoscopic technique (using 3 to 5 mm instruments) for colorectal resections since it can provide excellent cosmetic results without changing the laparoscopic approach significantly. Thus, there is no need for a new learning curve as minilaparoscopy maintains the principle of instrument triangulation. This determines an undoubted advantage in terms of feasibility and reproducibility of the procedure without increasing operative time. Some preliminary experiences confirm that minilaparoscopic colorectal surgery provides acceptable results, comparable to those reported for laparoscopic surgery with regard to operative time, morbidity, and hospital stay. Randomized controlled studies should be conducted to confirm these early encouraging results.
A Phase 1 Study of Combotox in Pediatric Patients With Refractory B-lineage Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Background Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer in children. Combotox is a 1:1 mixture of RFB4-dgA and HD37-dgA which are immunotoxins that target the CD22 and CD19 antigens, respectively. Combotox has different toxicities and targets than chemotherapy and is, thus, a new candidate for the treatment of patients with relapsed ALL. Preclinical data have demonstrated which Combotox is effective in killing pre-B-ALL cell lines and cells from patients with pre-B ALL. Methods We designed and conducted a Phase 1 dose-escalation study using Combotox in children with refractory or relapsed B-lineage-ALL. Seventeen patients aged 1 to 16 years were enrolled in this multi-institution study. They were treated at 4-dose levels: 2 mg/m2, 4 mg/m2, 5 mg/m2, and 6 mg/m2. Results The maximum tolerated dose was 5 mg/m2 and graft versus host disease defined the maximum tolerated dose. Three patients experienced complete remission. Six additional patients experienced a decrease of >95% in their peripheral blood blast counts, and 1 patient experienced a decrease of 75%. Conclusions Combotox can be safely administered to children with refractory leukemia. It has clinically important anticancer activity as a single agent. The recommended dose for future studies is 5 mg/m2/dose.
Slowness in Movement Initiation is Associated with Proactive Inhibitory Network Dysfunction in Parkinson's Disease.

BACKGROUND Impairment in initiating movements in PD might be related to executive dysfunction associated with abnormal proactive inhibitory control, a pivotal mechanism consisting in gating movement initiation in uncertain contexts. OBJECTIVE Testing this hypothesis on the basis of direct neural-based evidence. METHODS Twelve PD patients on antiparkinsonian medication and fifteen matched healthy controls performed a simple reaction time task during event-related functional MRI scanning. RESULTS For all subjects, the level of activation of SMA was found to predict RT on a trial-by-trial basis. The increase in movement initiation latency observed in PD patients with regard to controls was associated with pre-stimulus BOLD increases within several nodes of the proactive inhibitory network (caudate nucleus, precuneus, thalamus). CONCLUSIONS These results provide physiological data consistent with impaired control of proactive inhibition over motor initiation in PD. Patients would be locked into a mode of control maintaining anticipated inhibition over willed movements even when the situation does not require action restraint. The functional and neurochemical bases of brain activity associated with executive settings need to be addressed thoroughly in future studies to better understand disabling symptoms that have few therapeutic options like akinesia.
CUNI System for WMT16 Automatic Post-Editing and Multimodal Translation Tasks

Neural sequence to sequence learning recently became a very promising paradigm in machine translation, achieving competitive results with statistical phrase-based systems. In this system description paper, we attempt to utilize several recently published methods used for neural sequential learning in order to build systems for WMT 2016 shared tasks of Automatic Post-Editing and Multimodal Machine Translation.
Complete reversal of Lambert–Eaton myasthenic syndrome synaptic impairment by the combined use of a K+ channel blocker and a Ca2+ channel agonist

Lambert–Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS) is characterized by an autoimmune‐mediated attack on presynaptic P/Q‐type Ca2+ channels at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). The current common symptomatic treatment option is 3,4‐diaminopyridine (3,4‐DAP), a potassium channel blocker that widens the presynaptic action potential, causing an increase in the amount of neurotransmitter release. This approach, however, does not completely reverse symptoms and can have dose‐limiting side‐effects. Thus, there is a need for additional treatment options. We show that GV‐58, a Ca2+ channel agonist developed from the cyclin‐dependent kinase inhibitor (R)‐roscovitine, does not significantly inhibit cell division at physiological levels of ATP. We further show that GV‐58 has a greater agonist effect when more Ca2+ channels are open, and combining GV‐58 and 3,4‐DAP elicits a supra‐additive effect that completely restores the magnitude of neurotransmitter release in LEMS model NMJs. These results suggest that a combination of GV‐58 and 3,4‐DAP is promising as a possible alternative treatment approach to LEMS and other neuromuscular diseases.
Superconvergence of Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Linear Hyperbolic Equations

In this paper, we study superconvergence properties of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for one-dimensional linear hyperbolic equations when upwind fluxes are used. We prove, for any polynomial degree $k$, the $2k+1$th (or $2k+1/2$th) superconvergence rate of the DG approximation at the downwind points and for the domain average under quasi-uniform meshes and some suitable initial discretization. Moreover, we prove that the derivative approximation of the DG solution is superconvergent with a rate $k+1$ at all interior left Radau points. All theoretical findings are confirmed by numerical experiments.
The development of a sense of control scale

In the past decades, sense of control—the feeling that one is in control of one’s actions has gained much scientific interests. Various scales have been used to measure sense of control in previous studies, yet no study has allowed participants to create a scale for rating their control experiences despite advances in the neighboring field of conscious vision has been linked to this approach. Here, we examined how participants preferred to rate sense of control during a simple motor control task by asking them to create a scale to be used to describe their sense of control experience during the task. Scale with six steps was most frequently created. Even though some variability was observed in the number of preferred scale steps, descriptions were highly similar across all participants when scales were converted to the same continuum. When we divided participants into groups based on their number of preferred scale steps, mean task performance and sense of control could be described as sigmoid functions of the noise level, and the function parameters were equivalent across groups. We also showed that task performance increased exponentially as a function of control rating, and that, again, function parameters were equivalent for all groups. In summary, the present study established a participant-generated 6-point sense of control rating scale for simple computerized motor control tasks that can be empirically tested against other measures of control in future studies.
Chapter 5 Gas Fermentation for Commercial Biofuels Production

With diminishing global reserves of crude oil and increasing demand, especially from developing countries, the pressure on oil supply will grow. Although the 2007-2010 fi‐ nancial crisis brought down the price of crude oil (per barrel) from a record peak of US $145 in July 2008, factors such as recovering global economies and political instability in the Middle East have restored the price of crude oil to the US$100 mark. At current rate of consumption, the global reserves of petroleum are predicted to be exhausted within 50 years [1, 2]. This, coupled with the deleterious environmental impacts that result from accumulating atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, the development of af‐ fordable, and environmentally sustainable fuels is urgently required. Many countries have responded to this challenge by legislating mandates and introducing policies to stimulate research and development (R&D) and commercialization of technologies that allow the production of low cost, low fossil carbon emitting fuels. For instance, the Euro‐ pean Union (EU) has mandated member countries to a target of deriving 10% of all transportation fuel from renewable sources by 2020 [3]. Between 2005 and 2010, renewa‐ ble energies such as solar, wind, and biofuels have been increasing at an average annual rate of 15-50% [4]. Renewable energy accounted for an estimated 16% of global final en‐ ergy consumption in 2009 [4].
Every breath you take

To paraphrase the ubiquitous warning applied to the perverse products of the tobacco industry, ‘breathing may be dangerous to your health’, in particular if you are a lung transplant recipient. This is especially true if you live near a major road in a region with high levels of traffic-related air pollution. Alone among solid organ transplants, the lung allograft is exposed to the ambient environment with every breath. Some environments are toxic, some more so, and the paper by Nawrot et al in Thorax presents a compelling argument that traffic air pollution is a strong component of the toxic environmental risk which has measurable and deleterious effects on pulmonary allograft function and recipient survival, accounting for 28% of deaths.1 Specifically, this landmark study reports for the first time the relationship between traffic air pollution and the development of the bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) in a large and well-characterised sample of lung transplant recipients from a region where air pollution levels are high by global standards. BOS is the major risk factor for death after lung transplantation, so it is not surprising that exposure to air traffic pollution, defined by residential proximity to a major road, was also a risk factor for death after transplantation. Importantly, other potential risk factors were rigorously examined to prevent confounding and the relationship was highly significant regardless of whether distance categories from a main road were expressed as a …
Transmission welding of glasses by femtosecond laser: Structural and mechanical properties

Femtosecond laser pulses were focused on the interface of two glass specimens. Proper use of optical and laser processing parameters enables transmission welding. The morphology of the weld cross section was studied using differential interference contrast optical microscopy. The changes in mechanical properties of the weld seams were studied through spatially resolved nanoindentation, and indentation fracture analysis was used to investigate the strength of the weld seams. In addition, a numerical model was developed to predict the absorption volumes of femtosecond laser pulses inside a transparent material. The model takes into account the temporal and spatial characteristics and propagation properties of the laser beam, and the transmission welding widths were subsequently compared with the absorption widths predicted by the model.Femtosecond laser pulses were focused on the interface of two glass specimens. Proper use of optical and laser processing parameters enables transmission welding. The morphology of the weld cross section was studied using differential interference contrast optical microscopy. The changes in mechanical properties of the weld seams were studied through spatially resolved nanoindentation, and indentation fracture analysis was used to investigate the strength of the weld seams. In addition, a numerical model was developed to predict the absorption volumes of femtosecond laser pulses inside a transparent material. The model takes into account the temporal and spatial characteristics and propagation properties of the laser beam, and the transmission welding widths were subsequently compared with the absorption widths predicted by the model.
Dosimetry for synchrotron x-ray microbeam radiation therapy

In this work different dosimetric quantities of relevance for a new kind of radiation therapy, x-ray microbeam radiation therapy, have been both calculated and measured. A detailed analysis of the microbeam dose deposition produced by a single microbeam and by an array of microbeams has been performed using Monte Carlo simulations of the radiation transport. The peak-to-valley dose ratio was found to be decreasing with depth in the irradiated object. The dose in air (or more correctly the air kerma) produced by the high-flux synchrotron-generated x-ray beam was measured with a thimble-type ionization chamber in the uncollimated beam using two different approaches. The x-ray spectrum was measured with a powder diffraction method. The radiochromic film was found useful for rapid qualitative measurements of the dose distributions produced by the microbeams. The dose inside and near an x-ray microbeam was also measured with a MOSFET detector.
Unruptured Cerebral Aneurysms Do Not Shrink When They Rupture: Multicenter Collaborative Aneurysm Study Group

BACKGROUND:The International Study of Intracranial Aneurysms found that for patients with no previous history of subarachnoid hemorrhage, small (< 7 mm) anterior circulation and posterior circulation aneurysms had a 0% and 2.5% risk of subarachnoid hemorrhage over 5 years, respectively. OBJECTIVE:To determine whether cerebral aneurysms shrink with rupture. METHODS:The clinical databases of 7 sites were screened for patients with imaging of cerebral aneurysms before and after rupture. Inclusion criteria included documented subarachnoid hemorrhage by imaging or lumbar puncture and intracranial imaging before and after cerebral aneurysm rupture. The patients were evaluated for aneurysm maximal height, maximal width, neck diameter, and other measurement parameters. Only a change of ≥ 2 mm was considered a true change. RESULTS:Data on 13 patients who met inclusion criteria were collected. The median age was 60, and 11 of the 13 patients (84.6%) were female. Only 5 patients had posterior circulation aneurysms. None of the aneurysms had a significant decrease in size. One aneurysm decreased by 1.8 mm in maximum size after rupture (7.7%). Six aneurysms had an increase in maximum size of at least 2 mm after rupture (46.2%) with a mean increase of 3.5 mm (± 0.5 mm). CONCLUSION:Unruptured aneurysms do not shrink when they rupture. The large percentage of ruptured small aneurysms in previous studies were likely small before they ruptured.
Scheduling and Dynamic Management of Applications over Grids

The work presented in this Thesis is about scheduling applications in computational Grids. We study how to better manage jobs in a grid middleware in order to improve the performance of the platform. Our solutions are designed to work at the middleware layer, thus allowing to keep the underlying architecture unmodified. First, we propose a reallocation mechanism to dynamically tackle errors that occur during the scheduling. Indeed, it is often necessary to provide a runtime estimation when submitting on a parallel computer so that it can compute a schedule. However, estimations are inherently inaccurate and scheduling decisions are based on incorrect data, and are therefore wrong. The reallocation mechanism we propose tackles this problem by moving waiting jobs between several parallel machines in order to reduce the scheduling errors due to inaccurate runtime estimates. Our second interest in the Thesis is the study of the scheduling of a climatology application on the Grid. To provide the best possible performances, we modeled the application as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and then proposed specific scheduling heuristics. To execute the application on the Grid, the middleware uses the knowledge of the application to find thebest schedule.
Inferring Conceptual Graphs

This paper investigates the mechanisms a program may use to learn conceptual structures that represent natural language meaning. A computer program named Moran is described that infers conceptual structures from pictorial input data. Moran is presented with “snapshots” of an environment and an English sentence describing the action that takes place between the snapshots. The learning task is to associate each root verb with a conceptual structure that represents the types of objects that participate in the action and the changes the objects undergo during the action. Four learning mechanisms are shown to be adequate to accomplish this learning task. The learning mechanisms are described along with the conditions under which each is invoked and the effect each has on existing memory structures. The conceptual structure Moran inferred for one root verb is shown.
Developing Feature Types for Classifying Clinical Notes

This paper proposes a machine learning approach to the task of assigning the international standard on classification of diseases ICD-9-CM codes to clinical records. By treating the task as a text categorisation problem, a classification system was built which explores a variety of features including negation, different strategies of measuring gloss overlaps between the content of clinical records and ICD-9-CM code descriptions together with expansion of the glosses from the ICD-9-CM hierarchy. The best classifier achieved an overall F1 value of 88.2 on a data set of 978 free text clinical records, and was better than the performance of two out of three human annotators.
Joint application mapping/interconnect synthesis techniques for embedded chip-scale multiprocessors

As transistor sizes shrink, interconnects represent an increasing bottleneck for chip designers. Several groups are developing new interconnection methods and system architectures to cope with this trend. New architectures require new methods for high-level application mapping and hardware/software codesign. We present high-level scheduling and interconnect topology synthesis techniques for embedded multiprocessor systems-on-chip that are streamlined for one or more digital signal processing applications. That is, we seek to synthesize an application-specific interconnect topology. We show that flexible interconnect topologies utilizing low-hop communication between processors offer advantages for reduced power and latency. We show that existing multiprocessor scheduling algorithms can deadlock if the topology graph is not strongly connected, or if a constraint is imposed on the maximum number of hops allowed for communication. We detail an efficient algorithm that can be used in conjunction with existing scheduling algorithms for avoiding this deadlock. We show that it is advantageous to perform application scheduling and interconnect synthesis jointly, and present a probabilistic scheduling/interconnect algorithm that utilizes graph isomorphism to pare the design space.
Target Type Tracking with PCR5 and Dempster's rules: A Comparative Analysis

In this paper we consider and analyze the behavior of two combinational rules for temporal/sequential attribute data fusion for target type estimation. Our comparative analysis is based on Dempster's fusion rule proposed in Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) and on the proportional conflict redistribution rule no. 5 (PCR5) recently proposed in Dezert-Smarandache theory (DSmT). We show through very simple scenario and Monte-Carlo simulation, how PCR5 allows a very efficient target type Tracking and reduces drastically the latency delay for correct target type decision with respect to Dempster's rule. For cases presenting some short target type switches, Demspter's rule is proved to be unable to detect the switches and thus to track correctly the target type changes. The approach proposed here is totally new, efficient and promising to be incorporated in real-time generalized data association-multi target tracking systems (GDA-MTT) and provides an important result on the behavior of PCR5 with respect to Dempster's rule. The MatLab source code is also provided in the paper
Analysis of the tradeoffs for the implementation of a high-radix logarithm

An analysis of the tradeoffs between area and speed for a sequential implementation of a high-radix recurrence for logarithm computation is presented in this paper The high-radix algorithm is outlined and a sequential architecture is proposed, with the use of selection by rounding of the digits and redundant representation. Estimates of the execution time and total area are obtained for n = 16, 32 and 64 bits of precision and for radix values from r = 8 to r = 1024. An analysis of the tradeoffs between area and speed is presented, showing that the most efficient implementations are obtained for radices r = 256 for 16, 32 bit and r = 128 for 64 bit computations.
A Guideline for Successful Calibration and Uncertainty Analysis for Soil and Water Assessment: A Review of Papers from the 2016 International SWAT Conference

Application of integrated hydrological models to manage a watershed’s water resources are increasingly finding their way into the decision-making processes. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a multi-process model integrating hydrology, ecology, agriculture, and water quality. SWAT is a continuation of nearly 40 years of modeling efforts conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). A large number of SWAT-related papers have appeared in ISI journals, building a world-wide consensus around the model’s stability and usefulness. The current issue is a collection of the latest research using SWAT as the modeling tool. Most models must undergo calibration/validation and uncertainty analysis. Unfortunately, these sciences are not formal subjects of teaching in most universities and the students are often left to their own resources to calibrate their model. In this paper, we focus on calibration and uncertainty analysis highlighting some serious issues in the calibration of distributed models. A protocol for calibration is also highlighted to guide the users to obtain better modeling results. Finally, a summary of the papers published in this special issue is provided in the Appendix.
Chronic intrauterine hypoxia interferes with aortic development in the late gestation ovine fetus

Non‐technical summary It is now known that adverse events in the womb leading to fetal growth impairment increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in adulthood. We show perturbed arterial development in sheep fetuses subjected to oxygen deprivation by placental dysfunction, which accounts for the majority of fetal growth restriction in developed countries. The altered structure and composition of the vascular wall exhibited by growth restricted sheep fetuses are akin to those changes present in the preclinical stage of CVD. Therefore, we reveal a plausible mechanism of CVD susceptibility in individuals growth restricted by placental dysfunction. In addition, we identified molecular factors involved in aberrant arterial formation and thus highlight the need for further investigation into these molecular pathways and possible prenatal interventions such as antioxidants.