Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increasing injection frequency enhances the survival of injected bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells in a critical limb ischemia animal model

Critical limb ischemia (CLI) is one of the most severe forms of peripheral artery diseases, but current treatment strategies do not guarantee complete recovery of vascular blood flow or reduce the risk of mortality. Recently, human bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been reported to have a paracrine influence on angiogenesis in several ischemic diseases. However, little evidence is available regarding optimal cell doses and injection frequencies. Thus, the authors undertook this study to investigate the effects of cell dose and injection frequency on cell survival and paracrine effects. MSCs were injected at 106 or 105 per injection (high and low doses) either once (single injection) or once in two consecutive weeks (double injection) into ischemic legs. Mice were sacrificed 4 weeks after first injection. Angiogenic effects were confirmed in vitro and in vivo, and M2 macrophage infiltration into ischemic tissues and rates of limb salvage were documented. MSCs were found to induce angiogenesis through a paracrine effect in vitro, and were found to survive in ischemic muscle for up to 4 weeks dependent on cell dose and injection frequency. In addition, double high dose and low dose of MSC injections increased vessel formation, and decreased fibrosis volumes and apoptotic cell numbers, whereas a single high dose did not. Our results showed MSCs protect against ischemic injury in a paracrine manner, and suggest that increasing injection frequency is more important than MSC dosage for the treatment CLI.
Homology Modeling of Human Muscarinic Acetylcholine Receptors

We have developed homology models of the acetylcholine muscarinic receptors M₁R-M₅R, based on the β₂-adrenergic receptor crystal as the template. This is the first report of homology modeling of all five subtypes of acetylcholine muscarinic receptors with binding sites optimized for ligand binding. The models were evaluated for their ability to discriminate between muscarinic antagonists and decoy compounds using virtual screening using enrichment factors, area under the ROC curve (AUC), and an early enrichment measure, LogAUC. The models produce rational binding modes of docked ligands as well as good enrichment capacity when tested against property-matched decoy libraries, which demonstrates their unbiased predictive ability. To test the relative effects of homology model template selection and the binding site optimization procedure, we generated and evaluated a naïve M₂R model, using the M₃R crystal structure as a template. Our results confirm previous findings that binding site optimization using ligand(s) active at a particular receptor, i.e. including functional knowledge into the model building process, has a more pronounced effect on model quality than target-template sequence similarity. The optimized M₁R-M₅R homology models are made available as part of the Supporting Information to allow researchers to use these structures, compare them to their own results, and thus advance the development of better modeling approaches.
Ripple Phase Behavior in Mixtures of DPPC/POPC lipids: SAXS and SANS Studies

Multilayer membranes of DPPC (l,2–dipalmitoyl–sn–glycero–3–phosphatidylcholine) and mixture DPPC/POPC (1–palmitoyl–2–oleoyl–sn–glycero–3–phosphatidylcholine) in excess of water were investigated by small angle X–ray scattering and neutron small angle scattering. Structural parameters of lipid bilayers were determined in a wide temperature range. It was shown that addition of the POPC to the DPPC/H2O does not change the temperature of the DPPC main phase transition Tm. The observed phase separation occurs for the system DPPC/POPC/H2O up to the pre-transition temperature Tr (gel phase – ripple phase) of the DPPC multilayers.
ESTIMATION OF DOMINANT TREE SIZE IN CONIFEROUS STANDS USING LANDSAT TM DATA

LANDSAT TM data cannot resolve size of individual trees directly since the 30-meter pixel cell is too large. However, an estimate of dominant tree size within a coniferous stand of trees can be obtained based on two factors associated with tree size: ecological conditions and textural variability. Classifying the various ground conditions associated with varying ecological environments provided information on probable tree size. Also, information about textural variability across groupings of pixels was useful in segregating trees of differing size. A brightnessgreenness-wetness transformation combined with additional textural layers was useful in a hybrid classification scheme utilizing unsupervised and supervised procedures. A plot of brightness vs. greenness displayed patterns associated with ground conditions that could be correlated with tree size.
Android smartphone usage as a pedestrian tracking system

Location-based applications need to determine one's position by means of his smartphone. Satellite navigation is not able to work properly in indoor environment and alternatives are required. In this paper, an Android smartphone is used as an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to track a person in an indoor environment. Two different sensors fusion techniques are evaluated and compared through an experimental study; the Un-scented Kalman filter sensor fusion algorithm and the Madgwick fusion algorithm. The evaluation shows an accumulated error less than 0.8% of traveled distance for both sensor fusion techniques.
Tooth autotransplantation as a pillar for 3D regeneration of the alveolar process after severe traumatic injury: A case report

In dental traumatology, the loss of teeth and the supporting alveolar bone in children compromise the proper development of maxillofacial structures and also limit the solutions that can be offered. In this case report, multidisciplinary management is described of a child with a significant loss of alveolar bone and associated teeth due to a traffic accident at 8 years of age. The management involved staged teeth autotransplantation into surgically prepared sites with bone expanders, orthodontic treatment and dental implants. The 3D regeneration of the alveolar process was successfully stimulated by teeth autotransplantation. At the 4-year follow-up visit, evaluation of the autotransplanted teeth and the implants indicated a successful outcome for the patient.
A Dynamic User Interface Based BCI Environmental Control System

ABSTRACT In this study, a dynamic user interface (UI) is proposed in visual P300 Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) based environmental control system. A head-mounted Augmented Reality (AR) glass is used as the interactive media, which is used to assists the BCI system to build the dynamic UI with the scene in subject’s field of view. In the dynamic UI, based on the objects detected by the AR glass, options are dynamically generated. The subject can assign tasks by selecting different options in the dynamic UI. Five subjects successfully completed the task of controlling household appliances and navigating wheelchairs to designated destinations. Compared to static UI, the proposed dynamic UI has a 17.4% improvement in time delay. On average, only 1.9% of the commands resulted in incorrect operations. The dynamic UI makes progress in reducing time delay and incorrect operations. The proposed system provides a brand-new interactive method in BCI based applications.
HTTP Tunnel Trojan Detection Model Based on Deep Learning

Aiming at reducing the high False Negative rate of the existing Trojan horse detection method based on behavior, this paper utilized the sequence characteristics of tunnel Trojan communication extracted from the transport layer and the bi-directional recurrent neural network in deep learning to build a HTTP tunnel Trojan detection model. The experimental result showed that the deep learning-based detection model reduced the false positive rate of normal network traffic and improved the Trojan detection rate. We also found that the deep learning-based detection model reduced the feature selecting and data cleaning process of generating samples and improved the easy-using of the HTTP tunnel Trojan detection model.
Human Platelets Possess Tyrosylprotein Sulfotransferase (TPST) Activity

Summary Tyrosine sulfation is a widespread modification of secreted proteins including several coagulation proteins synthesized in the liver. Since factor V, a tyrosine-sulfated protein, is also synthesized in megakaryocytes, we determined whether platelets posses tyrosylprotein sulfotransferase (TPST) activity. Using the synthetic substrate EAY, substantial TPST activity (0.405 ± 0.049 pmol EAY-SO4 formed min−1 mg−1) was detected in platelet homogenates. This activity could not be accounted for by contaminating leukocytes, erythrocytes or plasma. The K m of platelet TPST for EAY was 3.7 μM and V max 0.09 pmol/min. For the cofactor 3' phosphoadenosine 5' phosphosulfate (PAPS) the K m was 1.7 μM and V max 0.11 pmol/min. The PAPS analogue 3', 5'-adenosine diphosphate inhibited platelet TPST with an IC50 of 15.4 μM. These findings suggest that tyrosine sulfation of factor V will occur in megakaryocytes. Platelets may be a useful source for further study of TPST.
COMPARISON OF DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTIC MODELS FOR RECOGNIZING TEXTUAL ENTAILMENT

Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) is an important task in many natural language processing. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of distributional semantic model (DSM) in RTE task. Word2Vec and GloVe are recent methods that suitable for learning DSM using a large corpus and vocabulary. Seven distributional semantic models (DSM) generated using Word2Vec and GloVe were compared to get the best performer for RTE. To our knowledge, this paper is the first study of various DSM on RTE. We found that DSM improves entailment accuracy, with the best DSM is GloVe trained with 42 billion tokens taken from Common Crawl corpus. We also found the size of vocabulary size in DSM does not guarantee higher accuracy.
Improving Performance of Bio-radars for Remote Heartbeat and Breathing Detection by using Cyclostationary Features

In this paper we present a continuous wave radar created using a software defined radio platform that uses doppler effect to measure the heart-rate and breathing. The measurements are evaluated using a classic energy detection method and a cyclic spectrum estimation technique, then the two methods are compared. The results show that by taking advantaging of the cyclic autocorrelation of the bio-signals we can get better detection than the usual energy detection.
Induction of Nonpigmented Variants of Erwinia herbicola by Incubation at Supraoptimal Temperatures

Several strains of Erwinia herbicola produce white variants at high frequency when grown in yeast beef broth at 37 C. The relationships of the variants of E. herbicola Y46 to the parent strain have been studied with respect to cultural, morphological, physiological and serological features. All the white variants are auxotrophic, showing a requirement for thiamine, and no instance of reversion was observed. Representative variants show reactions similar to the parent strain on treatment with both virulent and temperate phages. Possible mechanisms by which the variants could arise are indicated.
A Multidomain Pseudospectral Mode Solver for Optical Waveguide Analysis

We propose a pseudospectral mode solver for optical waveguide mode analysis formulated by the frequency-domain Maxwell equations. Special attention is paid upon identifying the required boundary operator for the formulation and the relationships between the derived operator and the physical boundary conditions. These theoretical results are adopted into a Legendre pseudospectral multidomain computational framework to compute the propagation characteristics of optical waveguides. Numerical experiments are conducted, and the expected spectral convergence of the scheme is observed for smooth problems and for problems having field jumps at material interfaces. For dielectric waveguides with sharp corners, the spectral convergence is lost due to the singular nature of fields at the corner. Nevertheless, compared with other methods, the present formulation remains as an efficient approach to obtain waveguide modes.
Dynamic, Robust Locomotion for a Non-Anthropomorphic Biped

This work presents a dynamic walking controller for a high-bandwidth torque-controlled non-anthropomorphic bipedal robot. A simplified model with passive stability characteristics is leveraged along with feedback linearization techniques, actively adjusted footstep positions, and swing leg trajectories that minimize the creation of additional moments, to make the robot follow a desired velocity under different environmental circumstances. Tests to show the approach’s robustness to external forces and imperfect terrain (e.g. stairs, obstacles, ramps) are demonstrated in simulation. Dynamic stability of the approach is analyzed through a limit cycle analysis.
Bits Through Queues With Feedback

In their seminal 1996 paper, Anantharam and Verdú showed that feedback does not increase the capacity of a queue under First-in-First-Out service policy and exponentially distributed service time. Since the channel has memory, this negative result raises the question whether it extends to other non-trivial combinations of service policy and service time. This paper addresses this question by providing two sufficient conditions under which feedback either increases capacity or does not increase capacity. The first is a sufficient condition on the service time distribution for feedback to increase capacity under First-In-First-Out service policy. The second is a sufficient condition for feedback not to increase capacity and is general in that it depends on the output distribution of the queue, but explicitly depends neither on the queue policy nor on the service time distribution. This condition is satisfied, for instance, by queues with Last-Come-First-Serve service policy and bounded service times.
Assessment of the rates and characteristics of the short-term supply of medication (Tider) from an integrated healthcare delivery system in the United States

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to describe the rate of medication short-term supply dispensings (tider), patient and medication characteristics associated with a tider, and costs for tider dispensings in an integrated healthcare delivery system in Colorado, United States. Methods: This was a retrospective study conducted in an integrated healthcare delivery system’s outpatient clinics. All patients who had a prescription dispensed for a study medication at any of the system’s 28 outpatient pharmacies during the first quarter of 2016 were included. A tider was identified as a 3-day supply of a prescription medication that was dispensed at no charge to a patient. The quarterly tider rate and the per member per month (PMPM) cost of tiders were estimated. Patient and medication characteristics associated with a tider were assessed. Results: A total of 444,225 study medications were dispensed for 135,907 patients during the study period. There were 3,430 (0.77%, 95%CI 0.75%:0.80%) medications dispensed as a tider. The PMPM cost of tider medications and their dispensing fees was USD 0.03. There were 1,092 (0.8%) and 134,815 (99.2%) patients who did and did not, respectively, have at least one tider dispensed during the study period. Patient characteristics strongly associated with having had a tider dispensed included being older, male, and a Medicare beneficiary. Cardiovascular and neuromuscular medications had the highest rates of tider dispensing. Conclusions: The rate of tider dispensing was relatively low; however, approximately one out of 125 patients had at least one tider. Patients who had a tider were more likely to be older, female, a Medicare beneficiary, and having had a previous tider dispensing and a higher burden of chronic disease. The tider medication was more likely to be a cardiovascular or neuromuscular medication class and more likely to be dispensed on a weekend. The total cost of dispensing a tider appears reasonable since the benefits of providing patients with needed medications likely outweigh the cost. Future studies should be performed to assess the impact of tider dispensing on health outcomes.
Inhibition of Histone Deacetylases Alters Allelic Chromatin Conformation at the Imprinted U2af1-rs1 Locus in Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells*

Most loci that are regulated by genomic imprinting have differentially methylated regions (DMRs). Previously, we showed that the DMRs of the mouse Snrpn andU2af1-rs1 genes have paternal allele-specific patterns of acetylation on histones H3 and H4. To investigate the maintenance of acetylation at these DMRs, we performed chromatin immunoprecipitation on trichostatin-A (TSA)-treated and control cells. In embryonic stem (ES) cells and fibroblasts, brief (6-h) TSA treatment induces global hyperacetylation of H3 and H4. In ES cells only, TSA led to a selective increase in maternal acetylation at U2af1-rs1, at lysine 5 of H4 and at lysine 14 of H3. TSA treatment of ES cells did not affect DNA methylation or expression of U2af1-rs1, but was sufficient to increase DNase I sensitivity along the maternal allele to a level comparable with that of the paternal allele. In fibroblasts, TSA did not alter U2af1-rs1 acetylation, and the parental alleles retained their differential DNase I sensitivity. AtSnrpn, no changes in acetylation were observed in the TSA-treated cells. Our data suggest that the mechanisms regulating histone acetylation at DMRs are locus and developmental stage-specific and are distinct from those effecting global levels of acetylation. Furthermore, it seems that the allelic U2af1-rs1acetylation determines DNase I sensitivity/chromatin conformation.
Endothelial Binding of Beta Toxin to Small Intestinal Mucosal Endothelial Cells in Early Stages of Experimentally Induced Clostridium Perfringens Type C Enteritis in Pigs

Beta toxin (CPB) is known to be an essential virulence factor in the development of lesions of Clostridium perfringens type C enteritis in different animal species. Its target cells and exact mechanism of toxicity have not yet been clearly defined. Here, we evaluate the suitability of a neonatal piglet jejunal loop model to investigate early lesions of C. perfringens type C enteritis. Immunohistochemically, CPB was detected at microvascular endothelial cells in intestinal villi during early and advanced stages of lesions induced by C. perfringens type C. This was first associated with capillary dilatation and subsequently with widespread hemorrhage in affected intestinal segments. CPB was, however, not demonstrated on intestinal epithelial cells. This indicates a tropism of CPB toward endothelial cells and suggests that CPB-induced endothelial damage plays an important role in the early stages of C. perfringens type C enteritis in pigs.
Mid-air interactions above stereoscopic interactive tables

Stereoscopic tabletops offer unique visualization capabilities, enabling users to perceive virtual objects as if they were lying above the surface. While allowing virtual objects to coexist with user actions in the physical world, interaction with these virtual objects above the surface presents interesting challenges. In this paper, we aim to understand which approaches to 3D virtual object manipulations are suited to this scenario. To this end, we implemented five different techniques based on the literature. Four are mid-air techniques, while the remainder relies on multi-touch gestures, which act as a baseline. Our setup combines affordable non-intrusive tracking technologies with a multi-touch stereo tabletop, providing head and hands tracking, to improve both depth perception and seamless interactions above the table. We conducted a user evaluation to find out which technique appealed most to participants. Results suggest that mid-air interactions, combining direct manipulation with six degrees of freedom for the dominant hand, are both more satisfying and efficient than the alternatives tested.
Recommending and Localizing Change Requests for Mobile Apps Based on User Reviews

Researchers have proposed several approaches to extract information from user reviews useful for maintaining and evolving mobile apps. However, most of them just perform automatic classification of user reviews according to specific keywords (e.g., bugs, features). Moreover, they do not provide any support for linking user feedback to the source code components to be changed, thus requiring a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task. In this paper, we introduce ChangeAdvisor, a novel approach that analyzes the structure, semantics, and sentiments of sentences contained in user reviews to extract useful (user) feedback from maintenance perspectives and recommend to developers changes to software artifacts. It relies on natural language processing and clustering algorithms to group user reviews around similar user needs and suggestions for change. Then, it involves textual based heuristics to determine the code artifacts that need to be maintained according to the recommended software changes. The quantitative and qualitative studies carried out on 44,683 user reviews of 10 open source mobile apps and their original developers showed a high accuracy of ChangeAdvisor in (i) clustering similar user change requests and (ii) identifying the code components impacted by the suggested changes. Moreover, the obtained results show that ChangeAdvisor is more accurate than a baseline approach for linking user feedback clusters to the source code in terms of both precision (+47%) and recall (+38%).
Provisioned sink placement in heterogeneous sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), consisting of many small low powered nodes, are applied into different scenarios. These nodes sense surrounding environments and deliver back collected data periodically or on-demand. The overall delay experienced in the delivery process is almost always proportional to the number of hops of data delivery paths. For time-critical applications, such delay is most desirable to be bounded. Most of existing works deploy additional relay nodes to shorten data delivery paths. In contrast, this paper introduces additional sinks such that each sensor can reach at least one sink in a bounded number of hops. Specifically, this paper formulates provisioned sink placement problem in senor networks composed by sensors of Heterogeneous wireless broadcast regions. Then the problem is proved to be NP-complete and subsequently one heuristic algorithm is presented to obtain approximate solutions.
In vitro propagation of Pluchea lanceolata, a medicinal plant, and effect of heavy metals and different aminopurines on quercetin content

SummaryAn effcient regeneration protocol has been developed from leaf explants of Pluchea lanceolata, a medicinally important plant of the family Asteracea. Nodular callus was initiated from young leaf segments cultured on Wood and Braun medium containing 2.0% sucrose (WB) supplemented with kinetin. On WB+5.0 mg l−1 kinetin, 100% plant regeneration with 14±0.5 plantlets was obtained. Regenerated plantlets with well-developed root systems were transferred to pots and subsequently to the field. With respect to the effect of metals on morphogenic events and quercetin content of the cultures, lower concentrations of CuSO4 proved to be beneficial but higher concentrations were detrimental. The presence of 200 μM ZnSO4 or 150 μM CuSO4 also resulted in the highest level of quercetin in regenerants. The yield of quercetin in culture varied with stages of differentiation.