Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic arbitrary shape boundary detection anc tracking using Hungarian Kalman filter

The paper explains about tracking a dynamically changing arbitrary shaped structure, important for determining their boundary and position estimation for advanced warning. The proposed algorithm uses active contour detection algorithm to construct the effective contour in each frame. Then Hungarian based Kalman filter is used to achieve best accuracy in estimation of future positions using multi-point tracking with cost minimization assignment problem. An arbitrary shape shadow is constructed on photo-voltaic cell as an experimental set up and dynamic arbitrary shaped shadow is generated. Results of the algorithm shows 98% area accuracy of estimated and original shadow positioning.
A design of multi-stage, multi-way microstrip power dividers with broadband properties

We investigate a design method of multi-stage, multi-way microstrip power dividers to construct a compact low-loss power divider with number of outputs. First, we describe an integration design technique of multi-way power dividers founded on the planar circuit approach in combination with segmentation method, and design broadband 3- and 4-way power dividers. Next, we successfully design a 9-way power divider consisting of 3-way dividers of two-stage structure using a similar technique. As a result, the fractional bandwidths of nearly 90%, 100%, and 85% are obtained, respectively. The validity of these design results is confirmed by HFSS and an experiment.
Recent advances and future developments in PGD

PGD has now been practised for a decade. The basic techniques currently used involve embryo biopsy, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). Recent advances in molecular diagnostic techniques have included the use of fluorescent PCR, multiplex PCR and whole genome amplification. For cytogenetic analysis, many centres are now using five or more chromosome probes to examine for chromosome abnormalities, sexing and aneuploidy. Future improvements in molecular diagnosis include the use of quantitative PCR, DNA fingerprinting and microarray technology. Developments in methods to analyse chromosomes from a single cell have included interphase chromosome conversion, which has already been clinically applied, and the use of comparative genomic hybridization, which is still being developed. These methods will hopefully enable more accurate and a greater number of diseases to be diagnosed at the single cell level. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rapid killing of actinomycin D-treated tumor cells by human mononuclear cells. I. Effectors belong to the monocyte-macrophage lineage.

Preincubation of tumor cells with actinomycin D (Act D) rendered various murine and human lines susceptible to killing by unstimulated human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBM) in a 6-hr 51Cr-release assay. The murine WEHI 164 sarcoma was selected for analysis of drug-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (DDCC) because high levels of killing were detected with this tumor, and it was considerably resistant to natural killer (NK) cell activity. Optimal conditions for induction of susceptibility to lysis included a 3-hr preincubation with 1 microgram/ml Act D. Effector cells of cytotoxicity against Act D-treated WEHI 164 cells were plastic adherent (greater than 85% monocytes). Cells nonadherent to plastic and nylon wool (less than or equal to 1% monocytes) had no appreciable DDCC activity. In contrast NK activity against K562 cells was mediated by nonadherent cells. When PBM were fractionated on a one step discontinuous gradient of Percoll designed to enrich for monocytes (greater than 90% pure), DDCC activity was found in the monocyte fraction, and the lymphoid cell-enriched fraction had no cytotoxicity against Act D-treated WEHI 164 cells. In contrast, NK activity against K562 was recovered with lymphoid cells, and monocytes had no NK cytotoxicity. Upon fractionation on a six step Percoll gradient designed to enrich for large granular lymphocytes (LGL), the denser lymphocytes (fraction 4-6) and the less dense LGL with NK activity (fraction 2-3) had no cytotoxicity against Act D-treated WEHI 164 sarcoma cells. DDCC activity sedimented in fraction 1 in association with monocytes. PBM were fractionated according to monoclonal antibody-defined surface markers by using a fluorescence-activated cell sorter. Effector cells of DDCC were positive for monocyte markers (Mo2, UCHM1) and were negative for NK cell (B73.1, HNK1), T cell (T11), and B cell (Leu-10) markers. Macrophages obtained by culturing blood monocytes in vitro for 5 to 10 days had DDCC activity. Similarly, peritoneal and bronchoalveolar macrophages had considerable cytotoxicity against Act D-treated target cells, whereas minimal or no NK activity was found at these anatomic sites. Cells of human or murine origin, preincubated with Act D for 3 hr, were heterogeneous in their susceptibility to monocyte killing in a 6-hr 51Cr-release assay. High levels of cytotoxicity were observed with the murine WEHI 164 sarcoma and 3T3 "fibroblast" line and with the human CEM leukemia. Monocytes were weakly (but significantly) cytotoxic against the ALAB breast carcinoma (human) and the 8387 sarcoma (human). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Error performance analysis of sequential distributed detection using level-triggered sampling

In applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sequential distributed detection using level-triggered sampling (LTS) is a powerful scheme, whose advantages include short average decision delay and enabling asynchronous low-rate communication in network. In existing works, asymptotic optimality properties are analyzed only in terms of average decision delay, while in this paper we consider the global error performance of detection under the assumption of symmetric hypotheses test and i.i. d. observations across time and sensors. The LLR information bits from all local sensors are first ranked according to their transmitting time and produce a new sequence at the fusion center (FC), then global error probability are analyzed by method of exhaustion based on the new sequence. With local error probability computed via simulations and some coefficients computed recursively beforehand, the global error probability can be calculated by derived close-form expressions. Numerical results of derived expressions are compared to MonteCarlo simulation results to validate our performance analysis, which shows that numerical results approximately coincide with Monte-Carlo experimental results.
In Vivo, Dendritic Cells Can Cross-Present Virus-Like Particles Using an Endosome-to-Cytosol Pathway 1

Recombinant parvovirus-like particles (PPV-VLPs) are particulate exogenous Ags that induce strong CTL response in the absence of adjuvant. In the present report to decipher the mechanisms responsible for CTL activation by such exogenous Ag, we analyzed ex vivo and in vitro the mechanisms of capture and processing of PPV-VLPs by dendritic cells (DCs). In vivo, PPV-VLPs are very efficiently captured by CD8α− and CD8α+ DCs and then localize in late endosomes of DCs. Macropinocytosis and lipid rafts participate in PPV-VLPs capture. Processing of PPV-VLPs does not depend upon recycling of MHC class I molecules, but requires vacuolar acidification as well as proteasome activity, TAP translocation, and neosynthesis of MHC class I molecules. This study therefore shows that in vivo DCs can cross-present PPV-VLPs using an endosome-to-cytosol processing pathway.
Landmine detection improvement using one-class SVM for unbalanced data

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has been a precious tool for humanitarian demining. The GPR scans the ground and delivers a three-dimensional matrix representing three types of data: Ascan, Bscan and Cscan. The Ascan data represents the response from a reflection signal of a pulse emitted by the GPR at a given position. In the proposed landmine detection method, the Ascan data is normalized and then classified using Kernel based One Class Support Vector Machine (OSVM). In fact, OSVM has the main advantage of handling unbalanced data, where is not the case for multiclass SVM. Our landmine detection method was tested and evaluated on the MACADAM database which is composed of 11 scenarios of landmines and 3 scenarios of inoffensive objects (wood stick, SodaCan, pine, stone). Experimental results have shown the superiority of the RBF kernel OSVM over others kernel functions based multiclass SVM in term of classification accuracy especially, as landmine data is unbalanced.
Mechanisms, Roles and Consequences of Governance: Emerging Issues

This volume addresses emerging issues in public and non-profit governance research. Established concepts and theoretical issues are presented by established scholars in the governance, management and administration fields. These are set alongside highlighted emerging themes, and they're practicality illustrated through specific case examples. All papers in this volume have been double blind peer reviewed. Topics addressed include: The concept of board in the public sector, how to foster knowledge-intensive collaboration in the public sector, the development of the governance of regulatory networks, empirical research on non-profit boards, the relationship between governance and strategy in foundations, volunteer management and measurement systems.
Nested clade analysis: an extensively validated method for strong phylogeographic inference

Petit (2007) speculates that three papers (Knowles, Maddison, 2002; Panchal, Beaumont, 2007; Petit, Grivet, 2002) have delivered the coup de grâce for nested clade phylogeographic analysis (NCPA). As Petit (2007) notes, NCPA is one of the most frequently used analytical tools in the area of phylogeography, so this speculation must be evaluated carefully.
Unexpected Nucleophilic Participation and Rearrangement of DBU in Reactions with Saccharin Derivatives

Abstract DBU attacks saccharin derivatives with subsequent rearrangement to give rise to 3-[3′-(1′′-azepin-2′′-onyl)propylamino]-1,2-benzisothiazole-1,1-dioxide 2 after work-up.
Cholesterol Interferes with the MTT Assay in Human Epithelial-Like (A549) and Endothelial (HLMVE and HCAE) Cells

Metabolically active cells are able to convert the MTT [3-(4,5-dimethythiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide] dye to blue formazan. This is the basis of the MTT assay, which is among the most widely used screening methods to evaluate cell viability and proliferation. When testing the effects of cholesterol products on the viability of human pulmonary epithelial-like A549 cells using trypan blue staining (cell numbers) and the MTT assay, results were inconsistent. The MTT assay indicated greater than 50% loss of viability with exposure of cells to cholesterol, whereas there was no decrease in viability indicated by trypan blue exclusion and propidium iodide uptake. A similar decrease in MTT reduction was obtained upon cholesterol treatment in human lung microvascular endothelial cells (HLMVECs) and human coronary artery endothelial cells (HCAECs) without loss of viability. This suggested a direct interference of cholesterol with the assay. However, using a cell-free system, there was no decrease in the reduction of MTT by ascorbic acid during incubation with a similar concentration of cholesterol. Light microscopy revealed enhanced exocytosis of formazan granules in presence of cholesterol. Incubation with apolipoprotein A-1 decreased cholesterol-mediated inhibition of MTT assay. These studies indicate decreased MTT reduction as a result of enhanced exocytosis of formazan due to cholesterol. A careful validation of viability assay procedures is therefore suggested in experiments where cholesterol is a constituent, to avoid a potential bias in concluding results of cytotoxicity studies.
Prospects and progress of oncolytic viruses for treating peripheral nerve sheath tumors

ABSTRACT Introduction: Peripheral nerve sheath tumors (PNSTs) are an assorted group of neoplasms originating from the neuroectoderm and growing in peripheral nerves. Malignant transformation leads to a poor prognosis and is often lethal. The current treatment of PNSTs is predominantly surgical, which is often incomplete or accompanied by significant loss of function, in conjunction with radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, for which the benefits are inconclusive. Oncolytic viruses (OVs) efficiently kill tumor cells while remaining safe for normal tissues, and are a novel antitumor therapy for patients with PNSTs. Areas covered: Because of the low efficacy of current treatments, new therapies for PNSTs are needed. Preclinically, OVs have demonstrated efficacy in treating PNSTs and perineural tumor invasion, as well as safety. We will discuss the various PNSTs and their preclinical models, and the OVs being tested for their treatment, including oncolytic herpes simplex virus (HSV), adenovirus (Ad), and measles virus (MV). OVs can be ‘armed’ to express therapeutic transgenes or combined with other therapeutics to enhance their activity. Expert opinion: Preclinical testing of OVs in PNST models has demonstrated their therapeutic potential and provided support for clinical translation. Clinical studies with other solid tumors have provided evidence that OVs are safe in patients and efficacious. The recent successful completion of a phase III clinical trial of oncolytic HSV paves the way for oncolytic virotherapy to enter clinical practice.
Beyond Subjective Self-Rating: EEG Signal Classification of Cognitive Workload

Cognitive workload is an important indicator of mental activity that has implications for human-computer interaction, biomedical and task analysis applications. Previously, subjective rating (self-assessment) has often been a preferred measure, due to its ease of use and relative sensitivity to the cognitive load variations. However, it can only be feasibly measured in a post-hoc manner with the user's cooperation, and is not available as an online, continuous measurement during the progress of the cognitive task. In this paper, we used a cognitive task inducing seven different levels of workload to investigate workload discrimination using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The entropy, energy, and standard deviation of the wavelet coefficients extracted from the segmented EEGs were found to change very consistently in accordance with the induced load, yielding strong significance in statistical tests of ranking accuracy. High accuracy for subject-independent multichannel classification among seven load levels was achieved, across the twelve subjects studied. We compare these results with alternative measures such as performance, subjective ratings, and reaction time (response time) of the subjects and compare their reliability with the EEG-based method introduced. We also investigate test/re-test reliability of the recorded EEG signals to evaluate their stability over time. These findings bring the use of passive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for continuous memory load measurement closer to reality, and suggest EEG as the preferred measure of working memory load.
DIVEIN: a web server to analyze phylogenies, sequence divergence, diversity, and informative sites.

DIVEIN is a web interface that performs automated phylogenetic and other analyses of nucleotide and amino acid sequences. Starting with a set of aligned sequences, DIVEIN estimates evolutionary parameters and phylogenetic trees while allowing the user to choose from a variety of evolutionary models; it then reconstructs the consensus (CON), most recent common ancestor (MRCA), and center of tree (COT) sequences. DIVEIN also provides tools for further analyses, including condensing sequence alignments to show only informative sites or private mutations; computing phylogenetic or pairwise divergence from any user-specified sequence (CON, MRCA, COT, or existing sequence from the alignment); computing and outputting all genetic distances in column format; calculating summary statistics of diversity and divergence from pairwise distances; and graphically representing the inferred tree and plots of divergence, diversity, and distance distribution histograms. DIVEIN is available at http://indra.mullins. microbiol.washington. edu/DIVEIN.
The application of transient earth voltage in the partial discharge of power transformers

Partial discharge characteristics are extracted to analyze the potential shortcomings of transformers. And in order to better study the partial discharge characteristics of transformers, the detection performance of the two methods has been compared and analyzed. Using the method of transient earth voltage and pulse current to cooperate is very helpful to improve the accuracy of pattern recognition. In this paper, the method of transient earth voltage to detect the partial discharge of transformers is proposed. Then the parameters measured by this method are extracted and briefly analyzed. Four artificial partial discharge models of transformers have been set up, including needle-plate defect in oil, air gap defect in oil, surface defect in oil and sphere-plate defect in oil. The experiment uses the constant-voltage testing method to extract the characteristic parameters from phase spectrogram of maximum discharge capacity and discharge frequency by the method of transient earth voltage and pulse current based on phase analyze. Partial discharge characteristic parameters have been extracted by the method of phase-resolved partial discharge. The differences between each type of discharge characteristics and the relationship between the two methods are comparatively analyzed. And the method of pattern recognition has been used which based on support vector machines. The data have been analyzed for recognition which are obtained by the method of transient earth voltage, pulse current and the combination. According to the analysis of the two groups of data comprehensively, the accuracy of pattern recognition has been greatly improved.
The Semantic Web and Language Technology, Its Potential and Practicalities: EUROLAN-2003

EUROLAN, which has been held biennially since 1993, is one of the most significant European summer schools in the area of natural language processing. Each of the EUROLAN sessions has focused on an area of timely interest to researchers in the field; this year's EUROLAN involved students in tutorials and hands-on sessions concerned with semantic web technologies as applied to language processing, ontology creation and use, and consideration of the semantic web's potential and limitations.
Arenavirus Coinfections Are Common in Snakes with Boid Inclusion Body Disease

ABSTRACT Recently, novel arenaviruses were found in snakes with boid inclusion body disease (BIBD); these form the new genus Reptarenavirus within the family Arenaviridae. We used next-generation sequencing and de novo sequence assembly to investigate reptarenavirus isolates from our previous study. Four of the six isolates and all of the samples from snakes with BIBD contained at least two reptarenavirus species. The viruses sequenced comprise four novel reptarenavirus species and a representative of a new arenavirus genus.
A New Approach for Dynamic Gesture Recognition Using Skeleton Trajectory Representation and Histograms of Cumulative Magnitudes

In this paper, we present a new approach for dynamic hand gesture recognition that uses intensity, depth, and skeleton joint data captured by Kinect sensor. This method integrates global and local information of a dynamic gesture. First, we represent the skeleton 3D trajectory in spherical coordinates. Then, we select the most relevant points in the hand trajectory with our proposed method for keyframe detection. After, we represent the joint movements by spatial, temporal and hand position changes information. Next, we use the direction cosines definition to describe the body positions by generating histograms of cumulative magnitudes from the depth data which were converted in a point-cloud. We evaluate our approach with different public gesture datasets and a sign language dataset created by us. Our results outperformed state-of-the-art methods and highlight the smooth and fast processing for feature extraction being able to be implemented in real time.
Antagonism of the Chemokine Receptors CXCR3 and CXCR4 Reduces the Pathology of Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis

Chemokines regulate lymphocyte trafficking under physiologic and pathologic conditions. In this study, we have investigated the role of CXCR3 and CXCR4 in the activation of T lymphocytes and their migration to the central nervous system (CNS) using novel mutant chemokines to antagonize CXCR3 and CXCR4 specifically. A series of truncation mutants of CXCL11, which has the highest affinity for CXCR3, were synthesized, and an antagonist, CXCL11(4–79), was obtained. CXCL11(4–79) strongly inhibited the migration of activated mouse T cells in response to all three high‐affinity CXCR3 ligands, CXCL9, 10 and 11. CXCL12(P2G2), while exhibiting minimal agonistic activity, potently inhibited the migration of activated mouse T cells in response to CXCL12. Interfering with the action of CXCR3 and CXCR4 with these synthetic receptor antagonists inhibited experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a mouse model of multiple sclerosis and reduced the accumulation of CD4+ T cells in the CNS. Further investigation demonstrated that CXCL12(P2G2) inhibited the sensitization phase, whereas CXCL11(4–79) inhibited the effector phase of the immune response. Our data suggest that simultaneous targeting of CXCR4 and CXCR3 may be of benefit in the treatment of the CNS autoimmune disease.
ATWIG, An Automatic Test Pattern Generator with Inherent Guidance

ATWIG is a heuristic automatic test pattern generator (ATG) which employs various types of guidance based on controllability and observability (C/O) measures and various heuristics fault' path and fault selection. Guided inconsistent path sensitization, a new method for low cost ATG, is discussed. A concurrent fault simulator is used to verify the generated test patterns. Experimental results show that ATWIG is very efficient in generating test patterns for combinational and low sequential circuits. Further improvements and heuristics are necessary for automatic test generation of highly sequential circuits. The relationship between C/O cost measures and A TWIG cost is discussed.