Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Soft Error Resiliency Characterization on IBM BlueGene/Q Processor

Soft Error Resiliency (SER) is a major concern for Petascale high performance computing (HPC) systems. In designing Blue Gene/Q (BG/Q) [8], many mechanisms were deployed to target SER including extensive use of Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI), radiation-hardened latches [7,13], detection and correction in on-chip arrays, and very low radiation packaging materials. On the other hand, it is well known that application behavior has major impacts on the masking (or “derating” factor) in system SER calculations. The principal goal of this project is to understand the interaction between BG/Q hardware and high-performance applications when it comes to SER by performing and evaluating a chip irradiation experiment.
Host shutoff during productive Epstein–Barr virus infection is mediated by BGLF5 and may contribute to immune evasion

Relatively little is known about immune evasion during the productive phase of infection by the γ1-herpesvirus Epstein–Barr virus (EBV). The use of a unique system to isolate cells in lytic cycle allowed us to identify a host shutoff function operating in productively EBV-infected B cells. This impairment of protein synthesis results from mRNA degradation induced upon expression of the early lytic-cycle gene product BGLF5. Recently, a γ2-herpesvirus, Kaposi sarcoma herpesvirus, has also been shown to encode a host shutoff function, indicating that host shutoff appears to be a general feature of γ-herpesviruses. One of the consequences of host shutoff is a block in the synthesis of HLA class I and II molecules, reflected by reduced levels of these antigen-presenting complexes at the surface of cells in EBV lytic cycle. This effect could lead to escape from T cell recognition and elimination of EBV-producing cells, thereby allowing generation of viral progeny in the face of memory T cell responses.
Relation extraction from Traditional Chinese Medicine journal publication

This modern day, the amount of digital text documents is enormous and cover almost all fields and industry. Natural Language Processing (NLP) looks into systematically deriving information from text written in natural language. A task under NLP, Relation Extraction (ER) focus on identifying relations from natural text. It has found significant application on biomedical publications, where it has been used to identify protein-to-protein interaction and gene-to-disease relationships in biomedical publications. Such application is also effective on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) publications. This research identifies two forms of relations in TCM publications: Effect Relation and Conditional Effect Relation. This research introduces and compares two extraction approaches, in which also address some of the more Chinese-specific NLP problems, such as word segmentation and flexible syntactic structure.
Out-of-Reference Range Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone Levels in Levothyroxine-Treated Primary Hypothyroid Patients: A Multicenter Observational Study

Objective Although levothyroxine (LT4) replacement therapy for hypothyroidism has been established as safe, inexpensive and effective, many studies from different countries reported out-of-reference range thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) values for the hypothyroid patients under LT4 treatment. The aim of this study was to determine TSH levels of primary hypothyroid patients under LT4 treatment and to assess self-reported compliance with daily LT4 intake in tertiary care centers in Turkey. Design In this cross-sectional, observational study, adult patients with primary hypothyroidism, receiving LT4 treatment for at least 6 months, were included. The patients were from 12 tertiary care centers in 9 cities of Turkey. TSH and free T4 levels were recorded from patient files and self-reported compliance with daily LT4 intake was assessed by interviewing the subjects at the last visit. Results A total of 1,755 subjects (46 ± 13 years; F/M: 89.9/10.1%) with primary hypothyroidism were enrolled. Of the hypothyroid subjects, 44.8% had out-of-reference range serum TSH levels. TSH values were over the reference range (TSH > 4 mIU/L) in 26.2% and were under the reference range (TSH < 0.5 mIU/L) in 18.6% of the patients. Total duration of LT4 treatment was 5.9 ± 4.7 years and mean dose was 1.2 ± 0.6 μg/kg/day. Non-compliant patients (31.1%) had higher TSH levels (6.9 ± 16 vs 3.8 ± 0.9 mIU/L, P = 0.01) compared to compliant patients. Conclusion The results of this study revealed that nearly half of the hypothyroid patients had out-of-reference range serum TSH values, despite under LT4 treatment. Compliance with LT4 treatment seems to be one of the major determinants to reach the target TSH levels in hypothyroid patients.
Density estimation via exponential model selection

We address the problem of estimating some unknown density on a bounded interval using some exponential models of piecewise polynomials. We consider a finite collection of such models based on a family of partitions. And we study the maximum-likelihood estimator built on a data-driven selected model among this collection. In doing so, we validate Akaike's criterion if the partitions that we consider are regular and we modify it if the partitions are irregular. We deduce the rate of convergence of the squared Hellinger risk of our estimator in the regular case when the logarithm of the density belongs to some Besov space.
Secure Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Randomized Dispersive Routes

Compromised node and denial of service are two key attacks in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we study data delivery mechanisms that can with high probability circumvent black holes formed by these attacks. We argue that classic multipath routing approaches are vulnerable to such attacks, mainly due to their deterministic nature. So once the adversary acquires the routing algorithm, it can compute the same routes known to the source, hence, making all information sent over these routes vulnerable to its attacks. In this paper, we develop mechanisms that generate randomized multipath routes. Under our designs, the routes taken by the ¿ shares¿ of different packets change over time. So even if the routing algorithm becomes known to the adversary, the adversary still cannot pinpoint the routes traversed by each packet. Besides randomness, the generated routes are also highly dispersive and energy efficient, making them quite capable of circumventing black holes. We analytically investigate the security and energy performance of the proposed schemes. We also formulate an optimization problem to minimize the end-to-end energy consumption under given security constraints. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the validity of our mechanisms.
Stochastic Estimation of Multi-Variable Human Ankle Mechanical Impedance

This article presents preliminary stochastic estimates of the multi-variable human ankle mechanical impedance. We employed Anklebot, a rehabilitation robot for the ankle, to provide torque perturbations. Time histories of the torques in Dorsi-Plantar flexion (DP) and Inversion-Eversion (IE) directions and the associated angles of the ankle were recorded. Linear time-invariant transfer functions between the measured torques and angles were estimated for the Anklebot and when the Anklebot was worn by a human subject. The difference between these impedance functions provided an estimate of the mechanical impedance of the ankle. High coherence was observed over a frequency range up to 30 Hz, indicating that this procedure yielded an accurate measure of ankle mechanical impedance in DP and IE directions.Copyright © 2009 by ASME
THE RENAL REGULATION OF ACID-BASE BALANCE IN MAN. I. THE NATURE OF THE MECHANISM FOR ACIDIFYING THE URINE.

Under normal conditions the urine is more acid in reaction than the plasma from which it is formed, and some 100 to 300 ml. of one-tenth normal alkali are required to titrate the 24-hour specimen to pH 7.4 (1). When the metabolic acid load on the body is increased in diabetic ketosis, as much as 1200 ml. of one-tenth normal titratable acid may be excreted per day (2). Since the excretion of acid in free titratable form makes available to the body an equivalent quantity of fixed base for conversion into bicarbonate, the renal mechanisms involved in acidifying the urine play a significant role in stabilizing the alkali reserve (3). There are obviously 2 ways in which acid might gain access to the urine. First, it might be present as free buffer acid in the glomerular filtrate. If during passage of the filtrate through the renal tubules, alkaline buffer components were preferentially reabsorbed, the reaction of the urine would shift toward the acid side. Second, the acid might be added to the filtrate by some active transport mechanism resident in the renal tubular cells. The 4 possible permutations of these 2 theories are presented in diagrammatic form in Figure 1. Only 2 acids exist in the plasma in significant quantities in freely filtrable form: monobasic phosphate and carbonic acid. Each, associated with its alkaline counterpart, dibasic phosphate and bicarbonate, passes into the glomerular filtrate. If dibasic phosphate were reabsorbed by the renal tubules, the excreted monobasic phosphate could be titrated as acid in the urine (1). On the other hand, if bicarbonate were reabsorbed from the filtrate, and if the renal tubules were relatively impermeable to carbonic acid (in reality dissolved
Chronic excitotoxin-induced axon degeneration in a compartmented neuronal culture model

Glutamate excitotoxicity is a major pathogenic process implicated in many neurodegenerative conditions, including AD (Alzheimer's disease) and following traumatic brain injury. Occurring predominantly from over-stimulation of ionotropic glutamate receptors located along dendrites, excitotoxic axonal degeneration may also occur in white matter tracts. Recent identification of axonal glutamate receptor subunits within axonal nanocomplexes raises the possibility of direct excitotoxic effects on axons. Individual neuronal responses to excitotoxicity are highly dependent on the complement of glutamate receptors expressed by the cell, and the localization of the functional receptors. To enable isolation of distal axons and targeted excitotoxicity, murine cortical neuron cultures were prepared in compartmented microfluidic devices, such that distal axons were isolated from neuronal cell bodies. Within the compartmented culture system, cortical neurons developed to relative maturity at 11 DIV (days in vitro) as demonstrated by the formation of dendritic spines and clustering of the presynaptic protein synaptophysin. The isolated distal axons retained growth cone structures in the absence of synaptic targets, and expressed glutamate receptor subunits. Glutamate treatment (100 μM) to the cell body chamber resulted in widespread degeneration within this chamber and degeneration of distal axons in the other chamber. Glutamate application to the distal axon chamber triggered a lesser degree of axonal degeneration without degenerative changes in the untreated somal chamber. These data indicate that in addition to current mechanisms of indirect axonal excitotoxicity, the distal axon may be a primary target for excitotoxicity in neurodegenerative conditions.
Tracking Pylorus in Ultrasonic Image Sequences With Edge-Based Optical Flow

Tracking pylorus in ultrasonic image sequences is an important step in the analysis of duodenogastric reflux (DGR). We propose a joint prediction and segmentation method (JPS) which combines optical flow with active contour to track pylorus. The goal of the proposed method is to improve the pyloric tracking accuracy by taking account of not only the connection information among edge points but also the spatio-temporal information among consecutive frames. The proposed method is compared with other four tracking methods by using both synthetic and real ultrasonic image sequences. Several numerical indexes: Hausdorff distance (HD), average distance (AD), mean edge distance (MED), and edge curvature (EC) have been calculated to evaluate the performance of each method. JPS achieves the minimum distance metrics (HD, AD, and MED) and a smaller EC. The experimental results indicate that JPS gives a better tracking performance than others by the best agreement with the gold curves while keeping the smoothness of the result.
Variation in response to a home intervention to support daily function by age, race, sex, and education.

BACKGROUND Functional difficulty is associated with increased frailty and poor life quality, with the oldest old, women, African Americans, and less educated persons at greatest risk of disablement. This study examines whether these at-risk groups benefit differentially from an in-home intervention previously found to effectively reduce functional difficulties. METHODS Three hundred nineteen community-living, functionally vulnerable adults 70 years old or older were randomized to usual care or an intervention involving occupational and physical therapy home instruction in problem solving, device use, energy conservation, safety, fall recovery, balance, and muscle strengthening. Outcome measures at 6 and 12 months included difficulty level in ambulation, instrumental (IADLs) and activities of daily living (ADLs), self-efficacy, and fear of falling. RESULTS At 6 months, for ADLs, individuals > or =80 years (p =.022), women (p =.036), and less educated persons (p =.028) improved compared to their control group counterparts. For mobility, women (p =.048) and the oldest participants (p =.001) improved relative to their counterparts. For self-efficacy, women (p =.036) benefited more than men. For fear of falling, less educated persons improved more than their counterparts (p =.001). A similar pattern was found at 12 months. For IADLs, whites improved more than non-whites at 12 months. CONCLUSIONS Treatment benefits varied by specific participant characteristics, with individuals at greatest disability risk being most responsive to the intervention. Both white and minority participants benefited similarly except in IADL functioning. Future research should control for participant characteristics, identify underlying mechanisms for variation in treatment effects, and tailor treatment to patient characteristics and desired outcomes.
A Steganographic Algorithm for JPEG2000 Image

A steganographic algorithm for JPEG2000 image is introduced which substitutes secret massages for the codes of high frequency subbands of wavelet fields based on the encoding character of JPEG2000. Because the secret messages are directly embedded into the packages which are the smallest cells of the compressed code streams, retrieval of messages need not partly decompress stego-image. Comparing to other steganographic algorithms, it has the characters of transparency, large capacity and low computation complexity.
Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics of Patients attending Psychotherapy in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Oman.

OBJECTIVES There is significant evidence that psychotherapy is a pivotal treatment for persons diagnosed with Axis I clinical psychiatric conditions; however, a psychotherapy service has only recently been established in the Omani health care system. This study aimed to investigate the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of attendees at a psychotherapy clinic at a tertiary care hospital. METHODS An analysis was carried out of 133 new referrals to the Psychotherapy Service at Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, a tertiary care hospital. RESULTS The majority of referrals were females (59%), aged 18-34 years, employed (38%), had ≤12 years of formal education (51%), and were single (54%). A total of 43% were treated for anxiety disorders (including obsessive compulsive disorder), while 22% were treated for depression. A total of 65% were prescribed psychotropic medications. The utilisation of the Psychotherapy Service and its user characteristics are discussed within the context of a culturally diverse Omani community which has unique personal belief systems such as in supernatural powers (Jinn), contemptuous envy (Hassad), evil eye (Ain) and sorcery (Sihr) which are often used to explain the aetiology of mental illness and influence personal decisions on utilising medical and psychological treatments. CONCLUSION Despite the low number of referrals to the Psychotherapy Service, there is reason to believe that psychotherapy would be an essential tool to come to grips with the increasing number of mental disorders in Oman.
Automatic Generation of Systolic Array Designs For Reconfigurable Computing

The problem of rapidly generating optimal parallel circuit implementations from high level, formal descriptions of affinely indexed algorithms is addressed here in the context of reconfigurable FPGA-based computing. A specialized software tool, SPADE, is described that will take a user's high level code description of his algorithms and automatically generate an abstract latency-optimal, locally-connected parallel array of elemental processing elements. A design example, the Faddeev algorithm, is used to illustrate the tool's capabilities and to show a potential algorithm basis for a reconfigurable array processor.
Chemotherapy for Advanced-Stage Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

AbstractUse of platinum-based chemotherapy doublets is the standard of care for patients with advanced-stage non–small cell lung cancer, being associated with improved survival compared with best supportive care in fit patients with good performance status. Randomized studies showed that the addition of monoclonal antibodies against vascular endothelial growth factor receptor or epidermal growth factor receptor may increase the survival compared to chemotherapy alone. Patients with either advanced age or poor performance status can also benefit from chemotherapy. Docetaxel with or without ramucirumab, pemetrexed, and erlotinib are approved for previously treated patients. New treatment approaches are needed to improve the outcomes in this patient population.
Stream-oriented Availability Services for Endpoint-to-endpoint Data Transmission

Continuous real-time data stream show its significance in many applications under Cloud computing. Traditional high availability mechanism for data stream processing systems is dedicated and tightly coupled, and brings difficulties on maintenance or extension if requirements change. In this paper, basic endpoint-to-endpoint transmission is separated as general services from particular systems to independently provide no-loss guarantee of upstream data, through which high level extended HA mechanism can be realized conveniently. Comprehensive experiments illustrate that the overhead of the services is quite small and the tradeoff between guarantee and overheads is acceptable.
Cache Attacks on Intel SGX

For the first time, we practically demonstrate that Intel SGX enclaves are vulnerable against cache-timing attacks. As a case study, we present an access-driven cache-timing attack on AES when running inside an Intel SGX enclave. Using Neve and Seifert's elimination method, as well as a cache probing mechanism relying on Intel PMC, we are able to extract the AES secret key in less than 10 seconds by investigating 480 encrypted blocks on average. The AES implementation we attack is based on a Gladman AES implementation taken from an older version of OpenSSL, which is known to be vulnerable to cache-timing attacks. In contrast to previous works on cache-timing attacks, our attack is executed with root privileges running on the same host as the vulnerable enclave. Intel SGX, however, was designed to precisely protect applications against such root-level attacks. As a consequence, we show that SGX cannot withstand its designated attacker model when it comes to side-channel vulnerabilities. To the contrary, the attack surface for side-channels increases dramatically in the scenario of SGX due to the power of root-level attackers, for example, by exploiting the accuracy of PMC, which is restricted to kernel code.
Computed Tomography in Acute Posterior Fossa Infarcts 149

Thirty-one cases of acute posterior fossa infarcts are reported . CT evidence of obliterated posterior fossa cisterns and hydrocephalus indicates a grave prognosis due to brainstem compression . Progressive obliteration of posterior fossa cisterns may be used as an indicator for surgical decompression. Patients with intact posterior fossa cisterns had good recoveries without surgical treatment. CT can be used to diagnose the very early phase of an acute posterior fossa infarct and has prognostic value in predicting the outcome.
Stroboscopic stereo rangefinder

The Michelangelo dynamic 3D scanner uses stereo rangefinding along with strobe illumination to capture 3D information at 25 frames per second. The configuration allows rapid motion within the capture volume to be frozen into a series of virtual sculptures. Textured strobe illumination is used for range data and plain strobe illumination for colour data. We present examples of data captured with the system along with measurements of the tolerances attained in the measurements.
Towards real-time parallel processing of spatial queries

Spatial databases are entering an era of mass deployment in various real-life applications, especially mobile and location-based services. The real-time processing of spatial queries to meet different performance goals poses new problems to the real-time and parallel processing communities. We investigate how multiple window queries can be parallelized, decomposed, scheduled and processed in real time workloads to optimize system performance, such as I/O cost, response time and miss rate. We devise in-memory R-trees to decompose queries into independent jobs. Jobs from different queries can be combined according to their spatial locality to eliminate redundant I/Os. Runtime job schedulers are elaborately devised to optimize response time or miss rate for various systems. Empirical results show a significant performance improvement over the sequential, unparalleled approach
Debris and smear layer removal efficacy and changes in morphology of dentinal tubules after using citric acid, tetracycline-hydrochloride and mixture of tetracycline and acid and detergent

Background: In periodontal diseases, contamination of roots with bacteria and their active biologic agents and smear layer formation following periodontal treatments, prevents reattachment of periodontal cells. As a matter of fact biomodification of root surface and removal of smear layer and debris is critical for regeneration of periodontal structures. The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of smear layer removal by citric acid, tetracycline-hydrochloride (TTC-HCL) and mixture of tetracycline and acid and detergent (MTAD). Materials and Methods: In this in vitro and experimental study, 12 impacted third molars were sectioned from cervical enamel junction (CEJ) to mid-root area into four dentinal specimens (n = 48). Three groups were conditioned by citric acid 3%, TTC-HCL 50 mg/mL and MTAD by means of cotton pellets, which were changed every 30 s for 3 min. The control group was conditioned by distilled water. Images from scanning electron microscope (SEM) were examined by two different analyzers. Data was analyzed by Kroskal Wallis and Mann–Whitney statistical analysis. Results: The mean of dentinal tubules diameter was the most in MTAD group and the least in TTC-HCL and this difference was statistically significant (P = 0.05). Conclusion: According to the present study, TTC-HCL could remove debris and smear layer but citric acid and MTAD had better debris and smear layer removal efficacy and demineralization effect in comparison with TTC-HCL.