Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design of Underactuated Steerable Electrode Arrays for Optimal Insertions

This paper addresses the design of wire actuated steerable electrode arrays for optimal insertions in cochlear implant surgery. These underactuated electrode arrays are treated as continuum robots which have an embedded actuation strand inside their flexible medium. By pulling on the actuation strand, an electrode array assumes a minimum-energy shape. The problems of designing optimal actuation strand placement are addressed in this paper. Based on the elastic modeling of the steerable electrode arrays proposed in this paper, an analytical solution of the strand placement is solved to minimize the shape discrepancy between a bent electrode array and a given target curve defined by the anatomy. Using the solved strand placement inside the steerable electrode array, an optimized insertion path planning with robotic assistance is proposed to execute the insertion process. Later, an optimization algorithm is presented to minimize the shape discrepancy between an inserted electrode array and a given target curve during the whole insertion process. Simulations show a steerable electrode array bending using the elastic model and robot insertion path planning with optimized strand placement. Two experiments have been conducted to validate the elastic model and algorithms.
Minimum Cuts of A Time-Varying Background

Motivated by the demand for an effective background model, robust to non-stationary environmental changes in outdoor scenes, we present a technique using Combinatorial Optimization to extract near-optimal background estimates from blocks of temporally localized frames. Using an existing graph cut technique in conjunction with subspace analysis, we demonstrate a novel background model exhibiting results superior to those achievable with the latter technique alone, and especially suitable for bac kground modelling in outdoor situations where variable lighting conditions p revail.
Modular definition of multimodal ECA communication acts to improve dialogue robustness and depth of intention

In this paper we propose a modular structure to define communication acts with verbal and nonverbal elements inspired in the SAIBA model. Our modular structure is a conceptual interpretation of the functional features of a multimodal interaction platform we have developed, with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) that implements verbal and gestural communication strategies aimed at minimising robustness and fluency problems that are typically encountered in spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs). We conclude that it is useful to add a pre-verbal level on top of the FML-BML scheme in the SAIBA framework, and we propose a category extension for FML to account for communication elements that have to do with the speaker’s non-declared intentions.
Adolescent and Adult Children of Parents with Parkinson's Disease: Incorporating Their Needs in Clinical Guidelines

Purpose. To compare the quality of life (QoL) and emotional well-being of the offspring of parents with Parkinson's disease (PD) and multiple sclerosis (MS) and to consider results in light of current UK clinical guidelines. Methods. 143 adolescent and adult children of parents with PD and MS were postally administered the Parental Illness Impact Scale and a measure of emotional well-being. Results. Minimal differences were observed between the two groups in both QoL and emotional well-being. Levels of mild to moderate depression were substantially greater than those of the general population. Conclusions. The nonsignificant differences reported indicate a similar degree of impact across the two conditions assessed. A significant body of evidence demonstrates the considerable impact of parental MS, with the needs of children being acknowledged in current clinical guidelines. There is a need to similarly acknowledge the potential impact of parental Parkinson's in UK guidelines for PD.
Failure modes and effects analysis based on fuzzy TOPSIS

This paper proposes a more reasonable failure evaluation structure using fuzzy weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). To fully reflect the importance of risk factors severity (S), occurrence (O) and detection (D). It considers integrating both subjective weights and objective weights to avoid failure modes from being underestimated, or overestimated. For ranking fuzzy TOPSIS is adopted to get the closeness coefficient for each failure mode. A case is provided to illustrate the applications and benefits of proposed FMEA method.
Lymphangiosis as a predictor of outcome in patients with primary diffusely infiltrative adenocarcinoma of the colon and rectum.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationships between outcome and clinicopathological factors, DNA flow cytometrical characteristics, and postoperative adjuvant therapy in patients with primary diffusely infiltrative colorectal adenocarcinoma. DESIGN Inception cohort study. SETTING A medical center that offers a mixture of primary, secondary, and tertiary care services. PATIENTS Among 7035 patients undergoing resection of primary colorectal adenocarcinoma from 1980 to 1996, 37 patients with a pathological diagnosis of primary diffusely infiltrative tumor were selected. All patients had received regular follow-up until February 28, 1998, or until death. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Cancer-specific survival compared by log-rank test and Cox regression model. RESULTS Univariate analyses revealed tumor stage (stages II-III vs. stage IV, P = .01) and severity of lymphangiosis (absent/mild vs. moderate/severe, P = .04) were significant in predicting outcome. A proliferative index of greater than 20% was insignificant (P = .08) in predicting outcome. In a Cox regression model, TNM stage and lymphangiosis were independently correlated with a worse outcome. When compared with tumors having less severe lymphangiosis, the odds ratio of death due to cancer in cases of tumors with moderate to severe lymphangiosis was 2.4 (95% confidence interval, 1.0-5.6; P = .05). CONCLUSION Lymphangiosis and TNM stage were independently predictive of outcome in patients with primary diffusely infiltrative colorectal cancer.
Investigation of the Lack of Common Understanding in the Discipline of Enterprise Architecture : A Systematic Mapping Study

The number of publications, along with the organization of new conferences are a couple of the relevant elements that usually indicate the progress of an area of study over the years. This is definitely true in the case of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) discipline, which went from having its first journal article published in 1989 to over two hundred published articles by 2015. But in spite of this evolution, EA is still suffering from a considerable lack of common understanding. It has become very important to investigate the current state of affairs concerning the EA discipline through its relevant publications in order to shed some light on this challenge. 171 journal papers published between 1990 and 2015 were systematically selected and examined in order to accomplish this investigation. The quantitative and qualitative findings of this examination show that EA is a young discipline which raises a growing interest in recent years. This examination also confirms the lack of common understanding in EA, which can be observed in the different descriptions of the term "enterprise architecture," and in the diversity of perspective with regards to the whole discipline. Several issues related to this lack has been reported, such as multidisciplinary issue, language issue, structure of research and mode of observation issues. The major issue concerns the absence of enough research to shed some light on this challenge. In addition to this investigation, helpful directions for future research in this area was proposed.
Microwave-Assisted Preparation of Mo2C/CNTs Nanocomposites as Efficient Electrocatalyst Supports for Oxygen Reduction Reaction

Nanostructured Mo2C/CNTs composites have been synthesized by using a novel methodology of microwave-assisted thermolytic molecular precursor with Mo(CO)6 as single source precursor. Pt electrocatalysts supported on the Mo2C/CNTs composites were prepared by using the modified ethylene glycol method. The resulting Mo2C/CNTs and Pt−Mo2C/CNTs were characterized by inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The rotating disk electrode experiments were used to measure electrocatalytic activity for oxygen reduction reaction. The results showed highly dispersed sphere-like Mo2C and Pt particles with 3−6 nm can be prepared upon CNTs by the above-mentioned methods. The formation process of Mo2C includes the following steps: decomposition of Mo(CO)6 precursor to the metallic Mo and CO, CO dismutation reaction, formation of the MoOxCy by the metallic Mo and CO, the MoOxCy carburiza.
Give me the full picture : Using computer vision to understand visual frames and political communication

Political communication is a central element of several political dynamics. Its visual component is crucial in understanding the origin, characteristics and consequences of the messages sent between political figures, media and citizens. However, visual features have been largely overlooked in Political Science. Thus, this article dissects the structure, and content of visual material, and assesses its relationship with political attitudes. More specifically, the article focuses on depictions of protests and demonstrations. In the first part of this project, I implement computer vision and image retrieval techniques to measure and understand messages conveyed in pictures. The article presents and details the implementation of a Bag of (Visual) Words (BoVW), an intuitive and accessible technique for the extraction and quantification of visual features that allows researchers to build an Image-Visual Word (I-VW) matrix that emulates the Document-Term matrix in text analysis. For the purposes of this article, I validate the BoVW approach using a structural topic model setting to identify relevant political features of images of protests. Preliminary results show that conservative newspapers depict protests in darker and nocturnal settings more often than liberal outlets. The article introduces and illustrates the use of a useful technique for the analysis and measurement of messages in pictures.
Influence of Absorption Materials on the Sound Quality in a Car

Sound absorption material has been developed for the reduction of interior noise for long time. In recent research of sound absorption material, not only noise the reduction but also the improvement of the perceived quality has been required. This paper represents the influence of absorption materials on the perceived quality of interior sound in a passenger car. The perceived quality of interior sound can be objectively evaluated by a sound index. In order to develop this sound index, the change of interior sound caused by the change of property of absorption material should be predicted. In the paper, the model for the prediction of interior sound was developed based on signal processing and acoustic ray tracing. The model was used for the generation of several interior sounds corresponding to several absorption materials. The passenger subjectively evaluated the perceived quality of the generated sounds. Psychoacoustic metrics for the generated sounds were obtained based on the theory of psychoacoustic. The correlation between the subjective rating and the psychoacoustic metrics was calculated. The correlated psychoacoustic metrics were used for the production of the sound index. The sound index was successfully validated with experimental work. This sound index was finally applied to estimate the perceived quality of interior sound according to the change of the property of absorption materials attached to the interior wall of engine room in a car.
Computing Crowd Consensus with Partial Agreement (Extended Abstract)

Crowdsourcing has been widely established as a means to enable human computation at large-scale, in particular for tasks that require manual labelling of large sets of data items. Answers obtained from heterogeneous crowd workers are aggregated to obtain a robust result. However, existing methods for answer aggregation are designed for discrete tasks, where answers are given as a single label per item. In this paper, we consider partial-agreement tasks that are common in many applications such as image tagging and document annotation, where items are assigned sets of labels. Going beyond the stateof-the-art, we propose a novel Bayesian nonparametric model to aggregate the partial-agreement answers in a generic way. This model enables us to compute the consensus of partiallysound and partially-complete worker answers, while taking into account mutual relations in labels and different answer sets. An evaluation of our method using real-world datasets reveals that it consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of precision, recall, and scalability.
Adaptation and validation of the dispositional hope scale for adolescents

This paper describes the psychometric features and the validation process of the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale (ADHS) for adolescents in the south of Brazil. This scale measures the Hope construct in terms of pathways and agency. The ADHS was translated to Portuguese and underwent a reverse translation. A sample of 450 students, from 14 to 18 years old (M=16.8 years, SD=3.4, 56% female), answered the ADHS, the Hope Index, the LOT-R and the Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale. A factorial analysis with varimax rotation showed that the scale is unidimensional and that its internal consistency was adequate (Cronbach's alpha = .80). No significant gender differences were found. Correlations of ADHS with the other constructs presented evidence of convergent validity in the present study.
Tunable elastic modulus in Mn-based antiferromagnetic shape memory alloys

Compared with the normal relation between temperature (T) and elastic modulus (E) in most materials, martensitic transformation (MT) and magnetic transition could result in the softening of elastic modulus (dE/dT > 0) within a narrow range of T (<100 °C). It becomes possible in MnFeCu alloys to tune this range and broaden it to about 200 °C through combining MT and paramagnetic-antiferromagnetic (P-A) transition. The alloying elements and their contents play a key role in making MT separate from P-A transition, in which first-order MT made a greater contribution to this maximum value than second-order P-A transition. The intrinsic mechanism is that MT can continue causing the modulus to soften even after the P-A transition ends. This wide range keeps stable under different cooling/heating rates. An expression for dE/dT is deduced based on the proposed free energy model and the corresponding theoretical curve (dE/dT-T) gives a reasonable explanation on the experimental results in MnFeCu alloys. A modulus–temperature–composition phase diagram is obtained to describe such critical behaviors and it is found that there exists a specific triangle zone in which dE/dT > 0. The present results may enrich approaches to designing new functional materials, e.g. the elastic and Elinvar alloys.
Evaporation Estimation of Rift Valley Lakes: Comparison of Models

Evapotranspiration (ET) accounts for a substantial amount of the water flux in the arid and semi-arid regions of the World. Accurate estimation of ET has been a challenge for hydrologists, mainly because of the spatiotemporal variability of the environmental and physical parameters governing the latent heat flux. In addition, most available ET models depend on intensive meteorological information for ET estimation. Such data are not available at the desired spatial and temporal scales in less developed and remote parts of the world. This limitation has necessitated the development of simple models that are less data intensive and provide ET estimates with acceptable level of accuracy. Remote sensing approach can also be applied to large areas where meteorological data are not available and field scale data collection is costly, time consuming and difficult. In areas like the Rift Valley regions of Ethiopia, the applicability of the Simple Method (Abtew Method) of lake evaporation estimation and surface energy balance approach using remote sensing was studied. The Simple Method and a remote sensing-based lake evaporation estimates were compared to the Penman, Energy balance, Pan, Radiation and Complementary Relationship Lake Evaporation (CRLE) methods applied in the region. Results indicate a good correspondence of the models outputs to that of the above methods. Comparison of the 1986 and 2000 monthly lake ET from the Landsat images to the Simple and Penman Methods show that the remote sensing and surface energy balance approach is promising for large scale applications to understand the spatial variation of the latent heat flux.
Moving chairs in Starbucks: Observational studies find rice-wheat cultural differences in daily life in China

More people in wheat-growing northern China were sitting alone and moved a chair blocking the aisle in cafes than people in the rice-farming south. Traditional paddy rice farmers had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most wheat farmers did not. We observed people in everyday life to test whether these agricultural legacies gave rice-farming southern China a more interdependent culture and wheat-farming northern China a more independent culture. In Study 1, we counted 8964 people sitting in cafes in six cities and found that people in northern China were more likely to be sitting alone. In Study 2, we moved chairs together in Starbucks across the country so that they were partially blocking the aisle (n = 678). People in northern China were more likely to move the chair out of the way, which is consistent with findings that people in individualistic cultures are more likely to try to control the environment. People in southern China were more likely to adjust the self to the environment by squeezing through the chairs. Even in China’s most modern cities, rice-wheat differences live on in everyday life.
Significant Association of the MDM2 T309G Polymorphism with Breast Cancer Risk in a Turkish Population

Background: Breast cancer is a leading cause of death in women worldwide. Genetic polymorphisms have been reported to be important etiological factors. Murine double minute 2 (MDM2) T309G interacts with p53 and mutations in p53 are present in approximately 50% of all cancers. However, it has been reported that effect of the polymorphism on breast cancer risk may vary in different populations. Here, we therefore investigated whether there is an association between MDM2 T309G (rs2279744) polymorphism and breast cancer in a Turkish population. Materials and Methods: We analysed 110 patients with breast cancer and 138 matched? controls. For genotyping, polymerase chain reaction and restriction length fragment polymorphism methods were used. Results: A significant difference was observed between case and control groups with regard to the distribution of the MDM2 T309G polymorphism (p<0.05). There was a significantly higher frequency of the TT genotype in the control group (p=0.028; OR, 2.42; 95% CI, 1.09-5.37). However, we did not find any relationships among tumor grade and metastasis status and this polymorphism. Conclusion: This study indicates that the MDM2 T309G polymorphism GG genotype and the TG+GG combination may be risk factors for breast cancer in our Turkish population.
Neurological Sequelae and Clinical Outcomes After Lung Transplantation

Background Neurological complications are common after lung transplantation. However, no large cohort studies have examined the incidence, predictors, and clinical significance of neurological events sustained by lung transplant recipients. Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of a consecutive series of lung transplant recipients, transplanted at Duke University Medical Center between May 2014 and February 2017 (n = 276). Early neurological complications (ie, occurring during the first week after transplant) were documented by transplant mental health specialists and included delirium, ischemic injury, and posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. Analyses accounted for age, native disease, sex, type of transplant, lung allocation score, and primary graft dysfunction. The objectives of the study were to characterize the prevalence and predictors of early neurological sequelae (NSE), occurring during the first week posttransplant, and the association between NSE and subsequent clinical outcomes, including length of stay and mortality. Results Neurological sequelae were common, occurring in 123 (45%) patients. Fifty-seven patients died over a follow-up interval of 2.1 years. The most common NSE were postoperative delirium (n = 110 [40%]) and posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (n = 12 [4%]), followed by stroke/transient ischemic attack and neurotoxicity. Higher lung allocation score was the strongest predictor of delirium. The presence of a NSE was associated with longer length of hospital stay (32 days vs 17 days, P < 0.001) and greater mortality (hazard ratio, 1.90; 95% confidence interval, 1.09-3.32], P = 0.024), with the greatest mortality risk occurring approximately 2 years after transplantation. Conclusions Neurological events are relatively common after lung transplantation and associated with adverse clinical outcomes.
Evaluation of Ondansetron and Low Dose Propofol for Control of Emetic Symptoms during Cesarean Delivery with Spinal Anesthesia

Nausea and vomiting during cesarean delivery are distressing to the patients and a disturbance to the surgeon. Propofol is believed to have antiemetic properties. In recent studies, continuous infusion of a subhypnotic dose of propofol was effective for reducing emetic symptoms during cesarean delivery without clinical serious adverse events. Ondansetron had been used prophylactic to reduce the incidence of intraoperative nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing cesarean section under regional anesthesia. 60 ASA I and II parturient, between the age of 21 and 38, scheduled for elective cesarean delivery were enrolled. Patients were randomized to receive either propofol 1mg kg -1 hr -1 (GP) or ondansetron 4 mg (GO). The patients were evaluated for the presence of nausea, retching and vomiting. Also, severity of nausea, satisfaction with the study drug and degree of sedation, was evaluated at the end of the observation period. Patients with complete response (no nausea or vomiting) were significantly high in GO group compared to GP. Incidence of nausea, retching, and vomiting in GP was high and significant when compared to GO. No patient in GO need rescue, while two patients in GP were received ondansetron 4 mg as rescue. Ondansetron 4 mg is more effective than propofol 1 mg kg -1 hr -1 to prevent emetic symptoms during and postdelivery in patients undergoing cesarean section under spinal anesthesia. Moreover, ondansetron reduced requirement for further rescue antiemetic which may provides great benefit.