Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Atomic layer deposited aluminum oxide and Parylene C bi-layer encapsulation for biomedical implantable devices

Biomedical implantable devices have been developed for both research and clinical applications, to stimulate and record physiological signals in vivo. Chronic use of biomedical devices with thin-film-based encapsulation in large scale is impeded by their lack of long-term functionality and stability. Biostable, biocompatible, conformal, and electrically insulating coatings that sustain chronic implantation are essential for chipscale implantable electronic systems. Even though many materials have been studied to for this purpose, to date, no encapsulation method has been thoroughly characterized or qualified as a broadly applicable long-term hermetic encapsulation for biomedical implantable devices. In this work, atomic layer deposited Al2O3 and Parylene C bi-layer was investigated as encapsulation for biomedical devices. The combination of ALD Al2O3 and CVD Parylene C encapsulation extended the lifetime of coated interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) to up to 72 months (to date) with low leakage current of ~ 15 pA. The long lifetime was achieved by significantly reducing moisture permeation due to the ALD Al2O3 layer. Moreover, the bi-layer encapsulation separates the permeated moisture (mostly at the Al2O3 and Parylene interface) from the surface contaminants (mostly at the device and Al2O3 interface), preventing the formation of localized electrolyte through condensation. Al2O3 works as an inner moisture barrier and Parylene works as an external ion barrier, preventing contact of AI2O3 with liquid water, and slowing the kinetics of alumina corrosion. Selective removal of encapsulation materials is required to expose the active sites for interacting with physiological environment. A self-aligned mask process with three steps was developed to expose active sites, composed of laser ablation, oxygen plasma etching, and BOE etching. Al2O3 layer was found to prevent the formation of microcracks in the iridium oxide film during laser ablation. Bi-layer encapsulated iridium oxide had higher charge injection capacity and similar electrochemical impedance compared with Parylene C coated iridium oxide film after deinsulation. The Al2O3 and Parylene C bi-layer encapsulation was applied to Utah electrode array (UEA)-based neural interfaces to study its long-term performance. The median tip impedance of the bi-layer encapsulated wired Utah electrode array increased slowly during the 960 days of equivalent soak testing at 37 °C. Impedance for Parylene coated UEA dropped 50% to 75% within 6 months. In addition, bi-layer coated fully integrated Utah array-based wireless neural interfaces had stable power-up frequencies at ~910 MHz and constant RF signal strength of -50 dBm during the 1044 days of equivalent soaking time at 37 °C. This is much longer than lifetime achieved with Parylene C coating, which was about one year at room temperature.
Online scheduling protocol design for energy-efficient TWDM-OLT

The design of energy-efficient optical network units (ONUs) in passive optical networks (PONs) has been studied extensively in the literature. Time- and wavelength- division multiplexed PONs, a widely accepted future access technology, offer an additional opportunity to save energy at the OLT along with the existing energyefficient ONU design due to the idle periods (voids) created by scheduling. Existing proposals utilize few of the available wavelengths (active wavelengths) for scheduling, and energy efficiency is achieved by switching off the OLT receivers associated with the remaining wavelengths. In this paper we reason that, subject to a delay bound of the upstream data, the voids created due to scheduling in the active wavelengths remain unutilized and thus create ample opportunity for saving energy at the OLT. Further, we show that modifications of the conventional method provide a limited scope of utilizing these voids for energy efficiency. Thus, we deviate from the conventional methodology and propose a novel online scheduling protocol which aims at minimizing the number of voids in all wavelengths. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement in energy efficiency, as compared to existing proposals, without affecting the algorithmic complexity.
Potential applications of curcumin and curcumin nanoparticles: from traditional therapeutics to modern nanomedicine

Abstract Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) is one of the potent, nontoxic, and major bioactive components present in turmeric. The major drawbacks of curcumin are low absorption and poor bioavailability. The present review highlights on the methods for the fabrication of curcumin nanoparticles and their applications in treatment of cancer and wound infections. Curcumin nanoparticles possess remarkable antibacterial, antiviral, and antiprotozoan activity. Hence, curcumin nanoparticle-loaded nano-gel, microemulsion, and nano-cream can be used for drug delivery.
Sacral dural arteriovenous fistulas: a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge – single-centre experience of 13 cases and review of the literature

Background Sacral dural arteriovenous fistulas (DAVFs) are rare vascular abnormalities of the spine characterised by slowly progressive symptoms that can mimic different myelopathy disorders. Object To report our single Institution experience with sacral DAVFs. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the clinical records of patients admitted from 1 January 2006 to 31 December 2016 with a diagnosis of sacral DAVFs, treated by endovascular embolisation or surgical clipping. Clinical presentation, imaging characteristics, treatment results and follow-up were analysed. Results We identify 13 patients with sacral DAVFs supplied by lateral sacral arteries. Clinical presentation was characterised by different degrees of motor weakness and sphincter disturbances. In all patients, spinal MRI showed spinal cord hyperintensities with enhancement and prominent perimedullary vessels. Selective internal iliac angiography was mandatory to identify the exact location of the fistula. A complete embolisation was achieved in eight patients performing a single endovascular embolisation and in three patients performing a single surgical disconnection: two patients required combined procedures. Follow-up imaging showed a complete resolution of the spinal cord hyperintensities in 81% of patients and a reduction of the intramedullary enhancement in 91%. Gait improvement was observed in 73% of patients, while remaining stable in 27%. Sphincter disturbances improved in 36% of patients and remained stable in 64%. Conclusion Awareness of sacral location of DAVFs is critical because standard spinal angiography will not identify sacral supplies, unless internal iliac arteries are properly examined. In our experience, the endovascular treatment show results comparable to surgery when the fistula point is correctly disconnected.
Hadoop techniques for concise investigation of big data in multi-format data sets

The examination of various sorts of content substance in sending sends, social online diaries, messages, get-togethers and diverse sorts of printed correspondence constitutes what we call content investigation. Content examination is material to most organizations: it can help partition an incredible of many messages; you can separate customer's comments and request in get-togethers; you can perform appraisal examination using content examination via evaluating productive or discouraging impression of an association, assortment, otherwise product. Content investigation has in like manner considered as substance extraction, and is a subset of the Accepted Communication Handling (ACH) foundation, distinguished as the building up twigs of simulated intellects, when an excitement for understanding substance at first made. At the present time Content Investigation is every now and again measured as the accompanying step in Big Data examination. Content Investigation has different subsets: Content Extraction, Named Individual Identification, Semantic system remarked on region's depiction, and some more A extensive variety of machine robotized structures are delivering broad measure of data in different structures like honest information, content substance, and bio-metric data that builds up the term Big Data. In this Research article we are having extraction issues, troubles, and utilization of these sorts of Big Data with the possibility of gigantic data estimations. Here we are discussing web based systems administration data examination, content based investigation, content data examination, their issues and expected application zones. It will move researchers to address these issues of limit, organization, and recuperation of data known as Big Data.
Secure Multiantenna Cognitive Wiretap Networks

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of a multiantenna cognitive wiretap network, where the secondary transmitter (Alice) communicates with the secondary receiver (Bob) in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). Specifically, we consider both half-duplex (HD) and full-duplex (FD) operations. For the HD, maximal-ratio combining (MRC) is adopted at Bob, while for the FD, we propose two jamming schemes to deteriorate the quality of the eavesdropper's channel, i.e., selection combining/selection jammer (SC/SJ) and SC/zero forcing beamforming (SC/ZFB). Assuming Rayleigh fading, exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability of the cognitive wiretap network are derived. In addition, we also provide simple asymptotic approximations for the secrecy outage probability under two distinct scenarios, depending on the quality of the main and wiretap channels. From the analytical results and numerical simulations, it is concluded that all the proposed schemes outperform the SC scheme; all the proposed schemes achieve full diversity when the main channel is much better than the eavesdropper's channel; MRC outperforms SC/SJ and SC/ZBF in the low interference threshold regime, while the opposite holds in the high interference one; and SC/ZFB always achieves better performance than SC/SJ, albeit with higher complexity.
Efficiency of chemometric methodology for characterization of In/CuPc films on HOPG and InSb based on ultraviolet photoelectron spectra

Photoemission spectroscopy offers the possibility to study on the interface formation of copper phthalocyanine exposed to indium. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of using chemometric treatment in the characterization of In/CuPc films on HOPG and InSb substrates based on ultraviolet photoelectron spectra (UPS). The main advantage of using chemometric methods is that there is no need to construct of line intensities models to gain valuable information. The experimental data sets have a bilinear mathematical structure and, therefore, they can be subjected to principal component analysis (PCA). The results of PCA showed that the principal component loadings provide useful information about the changes in the line intensities and the peak positions. The obtained graphical models of data, in a simple way, enabled the determination of new supplementary information concerning the role of the individual chemical compounds in terms of In/CuPc interface formation. Moreover, chemometric classification method such as cluster analysis (CA) allowed identifying the subgroups of samples according to a specific property of formed components.
An HMM-based Farsi OCR

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the digital encoding of printed and handwritten characters from an image file created through a scanner or other optical imaging devices. In other words, OCR is a software program that converts image-texts into computerized or digital text (figure 1) . While OCR has been extensively used as the basic application of different learning methods in machine learning literature for a few decades now, few researches have been done specifically for the language Farsi which is mainly due to cursive nature of Farsi scripts.
De Novo Assembly and Characterization of the Xenocatantops brachycerus Transcriptome

Grasshoppers are common pests but also have high nutritional and commercial potential. Xenocatantops brachycerus Willemse (Orthoptera: Acrididae) is an economically important grasshopper species that is reared in China. Using the IlluminaHiSeqTM 4000 platform, three transcriptomes of the adult male, adult female, and nymph of X. brachycerus were sequenced. A total of 133,194,848 clean reads were obtained and de novo assembled into 43,187 unigenes with an average length of 964 bp (N50 of 1799 bp); of these, 24,717 (57.23%) unigenes matched known proteins. Based on these annotations, many putative transcripts related to X. brachycerus growth, development, environmental adaptability, and metabolism of nutritional components and bioactive components were identified. In addition, the expression profiles of all three transcriptome datasets were analyzed, and many differentially expressed genes were detected using RSEM and PossionDis. Unigenes. Unigenes with functions associated with growth and development exhibited higher transcript levels at the nymph stage, and unigenes associated with environmental adaptability showed increased transcription in the adults. These comprehensive X. brachycerus transcriptomic data will provide a useful molecular resource for gene prediction, molecular marker development, and studies on signaling pathways in this species and will serve as a reference for the efficient use of other grasshoppers.
Mechanical properties and fracture toughness of phenolic resin

The present study investigated fracture and various mechanical properties of phenolic resin. It appears that while in the linear elastic region, measured modulus is independent of loading mode, the ultimate strengths differ considerably in the three types of loading used: tension, three point bending, and compression. The concepts of linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) are applied to characterize the fracture behaviour of phenolic resin in terms of fracture toughness K IC . and G IC , respectively under slow and impact loading using pre-notched test specimens in three point bending. It is found that K IC is an adequate criterion for fracture and may be related to G IC by using the Irwin-Kies formula.
Reorienting in Virtual 3D Environments: Do Adult Humans Use Principal Axes, Medial Axes or Local Geometry?

Studies have shown that animals, including humans, use the geometric properties of environments to orient. It has been proposed that orientation is accomplished primarily by encoding the principal axes (i.e., global geometry) of an environment. However, recent research has shown that animals use local information such as wall length and corner angles as well as local shape parameters (i.e., medial axes) to orient. The goal of the current study was to determine whether adult humans reorient according to global geometry based on principal axes or whether reliance is on local geometry such as wall length and sense information or medial axes. Using a virtual environment task, participants were trained to select a response box located at one of two geometrically identical corners within a featureless rectangular-shaped environment. Participants were subsequently tested in a transformed L-shaped environment that allowed for a dissociation of strategies based on principal axes, medial axes and local geometry. Results showed that participants relied primarily on a medial axes strategy to reorient in the L-shaped test environment. Importantly, the search behaviour of participants could not be explained by a principal axes-based strategy.
Crack propagation characterisation of bituminous mixtures using a four-point bending notched specimen test

Fracture behaviour of bituminous mixture has been increasingly studied in the last decade for a more comprehensive and detailed approach which could be taken into account in the pavement design process. This study presents an investigation at the Université of Lyon/Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'Etat (ENTPE) on fracture behaviour of bituminous mixtures during crack propagation. The four-point bending notched fracture test which has been designed at ENTPE was used. A quite new methodology, which makes it possible to characterise fracture behaviour of tested mixtures during crack propagation tests, has been proposed and applied for these tests thanks to an improved crack length determination approach based on inverse analysis. According to this methodology, different fracture parameters such as fracture toughness and fracture energy can be evaluated at different moments during the crack propagation test for a given advancement of the crack tip.
Structural health monitoring of a cable-stayed bridge using wireless smart sensor technology: data analyses

This paper analyses the data collected from the 2nd Jindo Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge in Korea that is a structural health monitoring (SHM) international test bed for advanced wireless smart sensors network (WSSN) technology. The SHM system consists of a total of 70 wireless smart sensor nodes deployed underneath of the deck, on the pylons, and on the cables to capture the vibration of the bridge excited by traffic and environmental loadings. Analysis of the data is performed in both the time and frequency domains. Modal properties of the bridge are identified using the frequency domain decomposition and the stochastic subspace identification methods based on the output-only measurements, and the results are compared with those obtained from a detailed finite element model. Tension forces for the 10 instrumented stay cables are also estimated from the ambient acceleration data and compared both with those from the initial design and with those obtained during two previous regular inspections. The results of the data analyses demonstrate that the WSSN-based SHM system performs effectively for this cable-stayed bridge, giving direct access to the physical status of the bridge.
Factors Associated With Persistence of Plasma HIV-1 RNA During Long-term Continuously Suppressive Firstline Antiretroviral Therapy

Abstract Background Persistence of plasma HIV-1 RNA during seemingly effective antiretroviral thereapy (ART) is incompletely understood. Using an ultrasensitive assay, this cross-sectional study investigated residual plasma HIV-1 RNA in subjects maintained on firstline ART with continuous viral load suppression <50 copies/mL for ≤15 years without recognized viral load blips or treatment interruptions and explored its relationship with the duration of suppressive ART, efavirenz concentrations in plasma, 2-LTR circular HIV-1 DNA (2-LTRc DNA) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, and cellular (CD4 plus CD26/CD38/CD69; CD8 plus CD38/HLA-DR/DP/DQ) and soluble (sCD14, sCD27, sCD30, IL-6) markers of immune activation in peripheral blood. Methods Residual plasma HIV-1 RNA, total HIV-1 DNA and 2-LTRc DNA were quantified by real-time and digital droplet PCR. Cellular (CD4 plus CD26/CD38/CD69; CD8 plus CD38/HLA-DR/DP/DQ) and soluble (sCD14, sCD27, sCD30, IL-6) markers of immune activation were measured by flow cytometry and ELISA. Results Residual plasma HIV-1 RNA and 2-LTRc DNA were detected in 52/104 (50%) and 24/104 (23%) subjects, respectively. Among subjects with detectable HIV-1 RNA, 50/52 showed levels ≤11 copies/mL. In adjusted analyses, HIV-1 RNA levels were 0.37 log10 copies/mL higher with each log10 U/mL increase in sCD27 (95% confidence interval, 0.01–0.73; P = .02). No significant association was found between residual plasma HIV-1 RNA and other explored parameters. Conclusions These findings point to an ongoing relationship between plasma HIV-1 RNA and selected markers of immune activation during continuously suppressive ART. The novel direct association with levels of sCD27 warrants further investigation.
Optimization studies on thermal and mechanical manufacturing processes for multifilament superconducting tape and wire

Optimization Studies on Thermal and Mechanical Manufacturing Processes for Multifilament Superconducting Tape and Wire. (August 2003) Burak Basaran, B.S., Osmangazi University, Turkey; M.S., Gazi University, Turkey Co-Chairs of Advisory Committee: Dr. Mustafa Yavuz Dr. Peter M. McIntyre There are many parameters that significantly affect the electrical performance of ceramic-core superconducting composite wire and tapes, which remain ambiguous and require more labor on their optimization. BSCCO 2212 has not been paid the attention and investment it deserves. In this regard, all optimization efforts were made for BSCCO 2223. In our work, a practical and inexpensive manufacturing method, thermally and mechanically optimized for Pb doped BiSrCaCuO 2212 superconducting multifilament (38 filaments) wires and tapes, was successfully employed. Optimized parameters can be classified under material, mechanical (deformation) and heat treatment (thermal) subgroups. Parameters involved with materials included investigation of deformation behavior of two different sheath metals; pure silver and 0.02% magnesia dispersion reinforced silver alloy. Pb doped BiSrCaCuO 2212 ceramic superconductor powder, the other source of material related parameters, was synthesized following the “Thermal Codecomposition or Wet Mix” method. Fabrication of mono and multifilament wires with Oxide Powder in Tube (OPIT) method followed next. Optimization of drawing deformation was practiced to achieve the best ceramic grain alignment and smoother ceramic powder core/metal sheath interface in order to avoid “sausaging” in wires. Rolling of the wire products into tapes by following different deformation regimes was the other manufacturing stage of the project. Variable and constant reduction-per-pass deformation paths were employed to reveal their effects on our composites with distinct
Immunogenicity of a DNA Vaccine Encoding Ag85a-Tb10.4 Antigens from Mycobacterium Tuberculosis.

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis is a life threatening disease that is partially prevented by BCG vaccine. Development of more effective vaccines is an urgent priority in TB control. Ag85a and Tb10.4 are the members of culture filter protein (CFP) of M. tuberculosis that have high immunogenicity. OBJECTIVE To analyze the immunogenicity of Ag85a-Tb10.4 DNA vaccine by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). METHODS In this study a previously described plasmid DNA vaccine encoding Ag85a-Tb10.4 was used to examine its capability in the stimulation of immune responses in an animal model. Female BALB/c mice were vaccinated with 100 μg of purified recombinant vector intramuscularly 3 times at two-week intervals and the levels of five cytokines including IFN-γ, IL-12, IL-4, IL-10 and TGF-β were measured. RESULTS The levels of IFN-γ and IL-12 for the mice following immunization with Ag85A-Tb10.4 was significantly greater than that of the BCG and control group (p<0.05). However, there was no significant difference in the levels of IL-4, IL-10 and TGF-β between groups. CONCLUSION IFN-γ and IL-12 Th1 cytokines increased significantly in mice vaccinated with Ag85a-TB10.4 DNA vaccine in comparison to the control and BCG groups. Our results may serve as a groundwork for further research into the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis.