Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incretin Effect in Women with Former Gestational Diabetes within a Short Period after Delivery

Background and Aims. Women with former gestational diabetes (fGDM) are characterized by impaired beta-cell function (BC). Incretin hormones contribute to insulin secretion after oral administration of glucose. We aimed to assess the possible role of incretins on altered insulin release in fGDM. Materials and Methods. We studied 104 fGDM women within 6 months after delivery and 35 healthy women after normal pregnancy (CNT) with a 75 g oral (OGTT) and a 0.33 g/kg intravenous (IVGTT) glucose test, both lasting 3 h. The ratio of suprabasal areas under the concentration curves for glucose (dAUCGL) and C-peptide (dAUCCP) evaluated BC during OGTT (BCOG) and IVGTT (BCIV). Incretin effect was computed in all fGDM and in fGDM with normal tolerance (fGDMNGT) and with impaired glucose regulation (fGDMIGR). Results. dAUCGL of fGDM was higher (P < 0.0001) than CNT for both tests; while dAUCCP were not different. BCOG and BCIV were lower in fGDM versus CNT (1.42 ± 0.17nmolCP/mmolGLUC versus 2.53 ± 0.61, P = 0.015 and 0.41 ± 0.03 versus 0.68 ± 0.10, P = 0.0006, respectively). IE in CNT (66 ± 4 %) was not different from that of all fGDM (59 ± 3) and fGDMNGT (60 ± 3), but higher than that of fGDMIGR (52 ± 6; P = 0.03). IE normalized to BMI was 2.77 ± 0.19 % m2/kg in CNT, higher than that of fGDMIGR (1.75 ± 0.21; P = 0.02) and also of fGDMNGT (2.33 ± 0.11; P = 0.038). Conclusion. Compromised IE characterizes fGDMIGR. In both fGDM categories, regardless their glucose tolerance, IE normalized to BMI was reduced, signifying an intrinsic characteristic of fGDM. Therefore, the diminished IE of fGDM seems to reflect an early abnormality of the general beta-cell dysfunction in the progression toward type 2 diabetes.
Impact of health information technology interventions to improve medication laboratory monitoring for ambulatory patients: a systematic review

Medication errors are a major source of morbidity and mortality. Inadequate laboratory monitoring of high-risk medications after initial prescription is a medical error that contributes to preventable adverse drug events. Health information technology (HIT)-based clinical decision support may improve patient safety by improving the laboratory monitoring of high-risk medications, but the effectiveness of such interventions is unclear. Therefore, the authors conducted a systematic review to identify studies that evaluate the independent effect of HIT interventions on improving laboratory monitoring for high-risk medications in the ambulatory setting using a Medline search from January 1, 1980 through January 1, 2009 and a manual review of relevant bibliographies. All anticoagulation monitoring studies were excluded. Eight articles met the inclusion criteria, including six randomized controlled trials and two pre-post intervention studies. Six of the studies were conducted in two large, integrated healthcare delivery systems in the USA. Overall, five of the eight studies reported statistically significant, but small, improvements in laboratory monitoring; only half of the randomized controlled trials reported statistically significant improvements. Studies that found no improvement were more likely to have used analytic strategies that addressed clustering and confounding. Whether HIT improves laboratory monitoring of certain high-risk medications for ambulatory patients remains unclear, and further research is needed to clarify this important question.
Lossless Source Coding Lecture Notes & Examples

variously referred to as source coding, lossless coding, noiseless coding or entropy coding exactly and without error, the original message. Lossless coding implies that the message may be decoded back to the original sequence of symbols. The converse of lossless coding (“lossy” coding) implies some degree of approximation of the original message. lossless coding may augment lossy coding, eg VQ indexes necessary in cases where the source message must be received without corruption, eg textual messages. Lossy coding is often employed in situations where some finite quantization or approximation is tolerable for various reasons. Perceptual considerations usually render audio and video information amenable to lossy compression techniques. Invariably lossy coding techniques are able to extract a significantly higher compression rate in any given system. The information rate, or entropy of a source, is defined in terms of the probability of occurrence Pr(si) of source symbol si H = − ∑ si∈S Pr(si) log2 {Pr(si)} bits/symbol (1)
A spatial clustering approach for efficient landmark discovery using geo-tagged photos

Geo-tagged photos enable people to share their personal experiences while visiting various vacation spots through image sharing social networks like Flickr. The geo-tag information offers a wealth of information for capturing additional information on traveler behavior, trends, opinions and interests. In this paper, we propose a landmark discovery system that aims to discover popular tourist attractions in a city by assuming that the popularity of a tourist attraction is positively dependent on the visitor statistics and also the amount of tourist uploaded photos clicked on site. It is a known fact that places with lots of geo-tagged photos uploaded to Flickr are visited more often by social-media savvy tourists, who plan their trip based on others' experiences. We propose to build a system that identifies the most popular tourist places in a particular city by using geo-tagged photos collected from Flickr and recommend the same to the user. In this paper, we present the methodology of spatially clustering the geo-tagged images and present an analysis of algorithm performance in identifying landmarks and their popularity.
Combination and boundary detection approaches on Chinese indexing

Digital libraries store materials in electronic format. Research and development in digital libraries includes content creation, conversion, indexing, organization, and dissemination. The key technological issues are how to search and display desired selections from and across large collections effectively [Schatz & Chen, 1996]. Digital library research projects (DLI-1) sponsored by NSF/ DARPA/NASA have a common theme of bringing search to the net, which is the flagship research effort for the National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the United States. A repository is an indexed collection of objects. Indexing is an important task for searching. The better the indexing, the better the searching result. Developing a universal digital library has been the dream of many researchers, however, there are still many problems to be solved before such a vision is fulfilled. The most critical is to support a cross-lingual retrieval or multilingual digital library. Much work has been done on English information retrieval, however, there is relatively less work on Chinese information retrieval. In this article, we focus on Chinese indexing, which is the foundation of Chinese and cross-lingual information retrieval. The smallest indexing units in Chinese digital libraries are words, while the smallest units in a Chinese sentence are characters. However, Chinese text has no delimiter to mark word boundaries as it is in English text. In English or other languages using Roman or Greek-based orthographies, often, spacing reliably indicates word boundaries. In Chinese, a number of characters are placed together without any delimiters indicating the boundaries between consecutive characters. In this article, we investigate the combination and boundary detection approaches based on mutual information for segmentation. The combination approach combines ngrams to form words with more number of characters. In the combination approach Algorithm 1 does not allow overlapping of n-grams while Algorithm 2 does. The boundary detection approach detects the segmentation points on a sentence based on the values and the change of values of the mutual information. Experiments are conducted to evaluate their performances. An interface of the system is also presented to show how a Chinese web page is downloaded, the text in the page filtered, and segmented into words. The segmented words can be submitted for indexing or new unknown words can be identified and submitted to a dictionary.
No Consistent Effect of ADRB2 Haplotypes on Obesity, Hypertension and Quantitative Traits of Body Fatness and Blood Pressure among 6,514 Adult Danes

Background Evidence regarding the association of variation within ADRB2, the gene encoding the beta-adrenergic receptor 2 (ADRB2) with obesity and hypertension is exceedingly ambiguous. Despite negative reports, functional impacts of individual genetic variants have been reported. Also, functional haplotypes as well as haplotype combinations affecting expression levels in vivo of ADRB2 mRNA and protein as well as receptor sensitivity have been reported. The aim of the present study was therefore to evaluate if variations within ADRB2 as haplotypes or as haplotype combinations confer an increased prevalence of obesity and hypertension among adults. Methodology/Principal Findings We genotyped five variants required to capture common variation in a region including the ADRB2 locus in a population-based study of 6,514 unrelated, middle-aged Danes. Phases of the genotypes were estimated in silico. The variations were then investigated for their combined association with obesity, hypertension and related quantitative traits. The present study did not find consistent evidence for an association of ADRB2 variants with either obesity or hypertension when variations were analysed in a case-control study. The same lack of impact was also seen in the quantitative trait analyses, apart from nominal differences on waist-to-hip ratio and systolic blood pressure between specific haplotype combinations. Conclusions/Significance In a population-based sample of 6,514 Danes we found no consistent associations between five common variants which tag the ADRB2 locus and prevalence of obesity or hypertension neither when analysed as individual haplotypes nor as haplotype pairs.
On Saturation of Web Usage by Lay Internet users

The growing presence of the Web in everyday life is inextricably connected to the exponential growth in number and variety of Web sites offering information, commerce and services. While the number of users making use of the Internet and the Web has also grown tremendously, little is known about the intensity of individual level web utilization (e.g., number of visits to Web sites) the Web and the trajectory of the change over time of such utilization. For example, we do not know whether the overall growth in Web usage is attributable to the increased numbers of users or to increased intensity of use of established users or both. This article reports the results of an analysis of eight months of longitudinal data on residential Web usage. This data was assembled as part of the HomeNet project at Carnegie Mellon University. Drawing upon recent advances in semi-parametric, group-based statistical modeling, we examine whether there are distinctive clusters of trajectories of Web usage. We find that Web users can be clustered into four groups with distinct trajectories of use. Each of these groups achieve saturation in their extent of Web usage as measured in the number of distinct Web sites they visit over time. We also develop demographic profiles of these different user groups. The results have important implications for Internet marketing strategy and public policy pertaining to the digital divide.
Mitochondria-based Renal Cell Carcinoma Subtyping: Learning from Deep vs. Flat Feature Representations

Accurate subtyping of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is of crucial importance for understanding disease progression and for making informed treatment decisions. New discoveries of significant alterations to mitochondria between subtypes make immunohistochemical (IHC) staining based image classification an imperative. Until now, accurate quantification and subtyping was made impossible by huge IHC variations, the absence of cell membrane staining for cytoplasm segmentation as well as the complete lack of systems for robust and reproducible image based classification. In this paper we present a comprehensive classification framework to overcome these challenges for tissue microarrays (TMA) of RCCs. We compare and evaluate models based on domain specific hand-crafted "flat"-features versus "deep" feature representations from various layers of a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN). The best model reaches a cross-validation accuracy of 89%, which demonstrates for the first time, that robust mitochondria-based subtyping of renal cancer is feasible
Fold removal in CT Colonography : A Physics-Based Method

Computed Tomographic Colonography (CTC) produces 2-d and 3-d images of the colon using computed tomography (CT). The main goal of CTC is to detect small lumps on the colon surface called polyps, which are known to be precursors to colon cancer. Radiologists are therefore interested in exploring the inner surface of the colon to detect polyps. Polyps may be detected by visual inspection of colon CT images and also by using computer-aided detection. The colon surface is abundant with folds that occlude polyps during visual inspection and also contribute to false positives in computer-aided polyp detection. Removal of folds should therefore improve visualization and could also improve polyp detection sensitivity. In this paper, we present a physics-based method to unfold the colon surface. The output of our algorithm is a surface in 3-d, with the folds flattened out, leaving only polyps behind. Preliminary tests of our method in mathematical phantoms and actual patient data show reductions in fold height and curvature ranging from 54.4% to 70.3%, and 36.3% to 86.1% respectively. Polyp size and curvature were reduced by only 0 to 16%, and 0 to 20%, respectively. Our method, thus, demonstrates potential for improving both visual and computer-aided detection of colonic polyps from CTC examinations.
Neural Fields with Distributed Transmission Speeds and Long-Range Feedback Delays

We introduce distributed axonal transmission speeds and a long‐range constant feedback loop into the standard neural field model. We analyze the stability of spatially homogeneous equilibrium solutions for general connectivity kernels. By studying reduced models based on the assumption of small delays, we determine the effects of the delays on the stability and bifurcations. We show in a reduced model that delayed excitatory feedback generally facilitates stationary bifurcations and Turing patterns, while suppressing the bifurcation of periodic solutions and traveling waves. The reverse conclusion holds for inhibitory feedback. In case of oscillatory bifurcations, the variance of the distributed propagation and feedback delays affects the frequency of periodic solutions and the phase speed of traveling waves. Moreover, we give a nonlinear analysis of traveling fronts and find that distributed transmission speeds can maximize the front speed.
Natural Language Dialogue System for Information Retrieval

The objective of our work is the development of a natural language dialogue system for information retrieval with multimodal input and multimedia output. Overall, the system consists of three phases: input analysis, information and knowledge management and output generation. The dialogue system is designed for consulting old Mexican historical documents. In this paper we describe the designed architecture of each of the three phases.
Controlling Swarms of Mobile Robots for Switching between Formations Using Synchronization Concept

This paper presents a synchronous control approach to swarms of mobile robots in switching between formations. According to the desired formation, a synchronization control goal is derived, based on which the position synchronization error is defined as differential position errors between very pair of two neighboring robots. A decentralized trajectory tracking controller is then developed with feedback of both position and synchronization errors, formed with a combination of feedforward and feedback controls. It is proven that this tracking controller can asymptotically converge both position and synchronization errors to zero. Simulations are performed on a group of twenty fully-actuated mobile robots in a switching task between different ellipse curves. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronous control design for the formation control.
Acceleration of a 3D target tracking algorithm using an application specific instruction set processor

In todaypsilas high-tech world, intelligent video-surveillance is becoming a part of everyday life. In addition to minimizing the need for constant monitoring by an operator, it can automatically perform tasks such as accident detection or estimation of vehicle speed. A particularly useful algorithm for video surveillance is three-dimensional target tracking but, since it is both quite computationally expensive and requires the use of two cameras, it is seldom used. In this paper, we concentrate on accelerating an implementation of 3D tracking using a multiprocessor ASIP architecture based on the Tensilica Xtensa processor. Our experiments show that a speedup factor of 22 can be achieved using an extensible platform expressly optimized for this application as opposed to using a general-purpose processor.
Evolution of Structure in Cold Dark Matter Universes

We present an analysis of the clustering evolution of dark matter in four cold dark matter (CDM) cosmologies. We use a suite of high-resolution, 17 million particle, N-body simulations that sample volumes large enough to give clustering statistics with unprecedented accuracy. We investigate a flat model with Ω0 = 0.3, an open model also with Ω0 = 0.3, and two models with Ω = 1, one with the standard CDM power spectrum and the other with the same power spectrum as the Ω0 = 0.3 models. In all cases, the amplitude of primordial fluctuations is set so that the models reproduce the observed abundance of rich galaxy clusters by the present day. We compute mass two-point correlation functions and power spectra over 3 orders of magnitude in spatial scale and find that in all of our simulations they differ significantly from those of the observed galaxy distribution, in both shape and amplitude. Thus, for any of these models to provide an acceptable representation of reality, the distribution of galaxies must be biased relative to the mass in a nontrivial, scale-dependent fashion. In the Ω = 1 models, the required bias is always greater than unity, but in the Ω0 = 0.3 models, an "antibias" is required on scales smaller than ~5 h-1 Mpc. The mass correlation functions in the simulations are well fit by recently published analytic models. The velocity fields are remarkably similar in all the models, whether they are characterized as bulk flows, single-particle, or pairwise velocity dispersions. This similarity is a direct consequence of our adopted normalization and runs contrary to the common belief that the amplitude of the observed galaxy velocity fields can be used to constrain the value of Ω0. The small-scale pairwise velocity dispersion of the dark matter is somewhat larger than recent determinations from galaxy redshift surveys, but the bulk flows predicted by our models are broadly in agreement with most available data.
Transition Trees for Cost-Optimal Symbolic Planning

Symbolic search with binary decision diagrams (BDDs) often saves huge amounts of memory and computation time. In this paper we propose two general techniques based on transition relation trees to advance BDD search by refining the image operator to compute the set of successors. First, the conjunction tree selects the set of applicable actions through filtering their precondition. Then, the disjunction tree combines each transition result. Transition trees are used to combine several transition relations, speeding up BDD search. Experiments with bidirectional symbolic blind and symbolic A* search on planning benchmarks are reported showing good performance on most IPC 2011 domains.
A Black-Scholes like model with Vasicek interest rates

In this note we use the change of numeraire technique to derive a closed-form BlackScholes like pricing formula for a European call option written on a stock for the case where the risk-free interest rate follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We compute the sensitivities of the option price with respect to the model parameters as well as the zero-bond prices. We also make a comparison between the derived and the standard Black-Scholes formulae.
TRIM66 overexpresssion contributes to osteosarcoma carcinogenesis and indicates poor survival outcome

TRIM66 belongs to the family of tripartite motif (TRIM)-containing proteins. Alterations in TRIM proteins have been implicated in several malignancies. This study was aimed at elucidating the expression and biological function of TRIM66 in osteosarcoma. Here, TRIM66 expression level was higher in osteosarcoma tissues than in normal tissues. High TRIM66 expression was correlated with high rate of local recurrence and lung metastasis, and short survival time. Then, we found that knockdown of TRIM66 in two osteosarcoma cell lines, MG63 and HOS, significantly inhibited cell proliferation and induced G1-phase arrest. Moreover, inhibition of TRIM66 in osteosarcoma cells significantly induced cell apoptosis, while remarkably inhibited cell migration, invasion as well as tumorigenicity in nude mice. Gene set enrichment analysis in Gene Expression Omnibus dataset revealed that apoptosis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling pathway-related genes were enriched in TRIM66 higher expression patients, which was confirmed by western blot analysis in osteosarcoma cells with TRIM66 silenced. In conclusion, TRIM66 may act as an oncogene through suppressing apoptosis pathway and promoting TGF-β signaling in osteosarcoma carcinogenesis. TRIM66 may be a prognostic factor and potential therapeutic target in osteosarcoma.
Association analysis for detecting significant single nucleotide polymorphisms for phosphorus-deficiency tolerance at the seedling stage in soybean [Glycine max (L) Merr.]

Tolerance to low-phosphorus soil is a desirable trait in soybean cultivars. Previous quantitative trait locus (QTL) studies for phosphorus-deficiency tolerance were mainly derived from bi-parental segregating populations and few reports from natural population. The objective of this study was to detect QTLs that regulate phosphorus-deficiency tolerance in soybean using association mapping approach. Phosphorus-deficiency tolerance was evaluated according to five traits (plant shoot height, shoot dry weight, phosphorus concentration, phosphorus acquisition efficiency and use efficiency) comprising a conditional phenotype at the seedling stage. Association mapping of the conditional phenotype detected 19 SNPs including 13 SNPs that were significantly associated with the five traits across two years. A novel cluster of SNPs, including three SNPs that consistently showed significant effects over two years, that associated with more than one trait was detected on chromosome 3. All favorable alleles, which were determined based on the mean of conditional phenotypic values of each trait over the two years, could be pyramided into one cultivar through parental cross combination. The best three cross combinations were predicted with the aim of simultaneously improving phosphorus acquisition efficiency and use efficiency. These results will provide a thorough understanding of the genetic basis of phosphorus deficiency tolerance in soybean.