Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The European eHealth Initiative - Objectives and Solutions

eHealth applications are a key factor of success for national health systems. Background, objectives, definitions and an application taxonomy are presented. After this the paper gives a review about background, objectives and actions of the European Commission eHealth-strategy. Examples for card-based solutions in some of the member states are presented and in conclusion the main issues are discussed. 1 eHealth – Background, Objectives and Application Taxonomy Daily work and leisure of citizens in all industrial countries worldwide are increasing affected by telematic applications. Hotel, ticket and car reservation, shopping via Internet, the retrieval of information in the World Wide Web or in databases, the organisation of company-spanning business processes and many other applications are used more and more. Telematic applications in general are institution-spanning applications independent from time and place to support or automate every kind of business process between business partners. Normally the collaboration is realised by interoperability of the institutional enterprise information systems. Sometimes dedicated functionality of these information systems – for example user-functions for reservations or purchasing or information retrieval like the Medline-Web-functions – are available via Internet for external partners, customers or citizens. Unfortunately in healthcare work is more often than not paper-based – although treatment and medical decision making is an extremely information processing task. Why this? The special context of healthcare with most confidential information about a person, complex multi-media documentation and multilayered distributed organisation implies theoretical, practical, social, legal, ethical and financial barriers, that retard ITinnovation. But a “condicio sine qua non” for effective eHealth-applications are powerful and interoperable enterprise information systems in the care organisations. The
The use of sensory electrical stimulation for pressure ulcer prevention

Pressure ulcer prevention is critically important for many people with reduced mobility. The authors investigated whether sensory (sub-motor-threshold) electrical stimulation (ES) may provide a convenient preventive intervention. A double-blinded, repeated measures study design was used to test the hypothesis that repeated use of sensory surface ES improves tissue health status in individuals with motor paralysis. Six adult males with complete spinal cord injury (SCI) were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. The treatment group received the ES intervention, whereas the control group received a control sham intervention. Repeated tissue health assessments included transcutaneous oxygen tension (TcPO2), interface pressure mapping, and gluteal computed tomography (CT) studies. An initial increase in TcPO2 following use of subthreshold ES was observed but was not sustained at follow-up. No statistically significant changes before and after treatment were found in regional TcPO2, gluteal muscle area or pressure distribution. Thus subthreshold ES does not appear to have any sustained effects on tissue health status indicative of reduced pressure ulcer risk for individuals with SCI. This implies that a contractile muscle response is critically important and further that subthreshold ES is unlikely to prevent pressure ulcers. Further studies are needed to find solutions for preventing pressure ulcers in high-risk populations.
Women, Physical Activity, and Quality of Life: Self-concept as a Mediator

Abstract The objectives of this research are: (a) analyze the incremental validity of physical activity’s (PA) influence on perceived quality of life (PQL); (b) determine if PA’s predictive power is mediated by self-concept; and (c) study if results vary according to a unidimensional or multidimensional approach to self-concept measurement. The sample comprised 160 women from Burgos, Spain aged 18 to 45 years old. Non-probability sampling was used. Two three-step hierarchical regression analyses were applied to forecast PQL. The hedonic quality-of-life indicators, self-concept, self-esteem, and PA were included as independent variables. The first regression analysis included global self-concept as predictor variable, while the second included its five dimensions. Two mediation analyses were conducted to see if PA’s ability to predict PQL was mediated by global and physical self-concept. Results from the first regression shows that self-concept, satisfaction with life, and PA were significant predictors. PA slightly but significantly increased explained variance in PQL (2.1%). In the second regression, substituting global self-concept with its five constituent factors, only the physical dimension and satisfaction with life predicted PQL, while PA ceased to be a significant predictor. Mediation analysis revealed that only physical self-concept mediates the relationship between PA and PQL (z = 1.97, p < .050), and not global self-concept. Physical self-concept was the strongest predictor and approximately 32.45 % of PA’s effect on PQL was mediated by it. This study’s findings support a multidimensional view of self-concept, and represent a more accurate image of the relationship between PQL, PA, and self-concept.
iSentenizer-μ: Multilingual Sentence Boundary Detection Model

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) system is normally quite sensitive to genres of data that the system is trained on. The genres of data are often referred to the shifts of text topics and new languages domains. Although new detection models can be retrained for different languages or new text genres, previous model has to be thrown away and the creation process has to be restarted from scratch. In this paper, we present a multilingual sentence boundary detection system (iSentenizer-μ) for Danish, German, English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, and Swedish languages. The proposed system is able to detect the sentence boundaries of a mixture of different text genres and languages with high accuracy. We employ i +Learning algorithm, an incremental tree learning architecture, for constructing the system. iSentenizer-μ, under the incremental learning framework, is adaptable to text of different topics and Roman-alphabet languages, by merging new data into existing model to learn the new knowledge incrementally by revision instead of retraining. The system has been extensively evaluated on different languages and text genres and has been compared against two state-of-the-art SBD systems, Punkt and MaxEnt. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms the other systems on all datasets.
Fully Automatic Dark-Spot Detection From SAR Imagery With the Combination of Nonadaptive Weibull Multiplicative Model and Pulse-Coupled Neural Networks

Dark-spot detection is a critical step in oil-spill detection. In this paper, a novel approach for automated dark-spot detection using synthetic aperture radar imagery is presented. A new approach from the combination of Weibull multiplicative model (WMM) and pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) techniques is proposed to differentiate between the dark spots and the background. First, the filter created based on WMM is applied to each subimage. Second, the subimage is segmented by PCNN techniques. As the last step, a very simple filtering process is used to eliminate the false targets. The proposed approach was tested on 60 Envisat and ERS2 images which contained dark spots. The same parameters were used in all tests. For the overall data set, an average accuracy of 93.66% was obtained. The average computational time for dark-spot detection with a 512 × 512 image is about 7 s using IDL software, which is the fastest one in this field at present. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is very fast, robust, and effective. The proposed approach can be applied on any kind of synthetic aperture radar imagery.
Mic1-3 Knockout Toxoplasma gondii is a good candidate for a vaccine against T. gondii-induced abortion in sheep

This study assessed the effectiveness of a mutant strain of Toxoplasma gondii (RH strain) lacking the mic1 and mic3 genes (Mic1-3KO) against Toxoplasma abortion in sheep. Ewes were inoculated subcutaneously with 105 Mic1-3KO tachyzoïtes in three independent experiments. Following vaccination, Mic1-3KO induced a mild febrile response and serum IgG antibodies, which persisted throughout the experiments. Tissue cysts formed in the sheep, but were not, under our experimental conditions, infectious when given orally. Ewes were mated two months after vaccination and were orally challenged with the PRU strain of T. gondii at mid-gestation (400 oocysts in Experiments 1 and 2; 100 oocysts in Experiment 3). Challenge of vaccinated pregnant ewes resulted in a slight febrile response, whereas unvaccinated ewes developed a more severe, characteristic febrile response of longer duration. After challenge, all unvaccinated ewes aborted whereas 62%, 91% and 64% (Experiments 1, 2 and 3 respectively) of the lambs from vaccinated ewes were viable, with no clinical signs of infection. Mic1-3KO was as effective as S48, the strain used as a live vaccine for sheep (Toxovax®). A dose of 105 Mic1-3KO tachyzoites was sufficient to induce protection (versus a dose of 2 × 106). Both subcutaneous and intraperitoneal injections were effective. Moreover, preliminary results showed the potential of Mic1-3KO to reduce the development of tissue cysts in lambs born to vaccinated ewes. This study demonstrates that Mic1-3KO is a potent vaccine candidate.
An Algorithm to Produce Temporally and Spatially Continuous MODIS-LAI Time Series

Ecological and climate models require high-quality consistent biophysical parameters as inputs and validation sources. NASA's moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) biophysical products provide such data and have been used to improve our understanding of climate and ecosystem changes. However, the MODIS time series contains occasional lower quality data, gaps from persistent clouds, cloud contamination, and other gaps. Many modeling efforts, such as those used in the North American Carbon Program, that use MODIS data as inputs require gap-free data. This letter presents the algorithm used within the MODIS production facility to produce temporally smoothed and spatially continuous biophysical data for such modeling applications. We demonstrate the algorithm with an example from the MODIS-leaf-area-index (LAI) product. Results show that the smoothed LAI agrees with high-quality MODIS LAI very well. Higher R-squares and better linear relationships have been observed when high-quality retrieval in each individual tile reaches 40% or more. These smoothed products show similar data quality to MODIS high-quality data and, therefore, can be substituted for low-quality retrievals or data gaps.
Frequency Domain Analysis as Risk Predictor of Sudden Cardiac Death from Long-time ECG Recordings

Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) is a disease that may not only affect patients with cardiovascular pathologies, but also to apparently healthy patients. Thereby, identification of patients with a high potential of suffering SCD is crucial for their treatment with adequate therapies. To this respect, in the present work, different signal processing tools were applied to surface electrocardiographic (ECG) recordings to develop markers which can clearly differentiate between subjects without cardiovascular pathologies and patients who died of SCD. Precisely, the proposed indexes were the Spectral Concentration (SC) around the main frequency peak, which reached a sensitivity of 100.00% and a specificity of 88.89%, and the Mean Frequency Distance (MFD) between the first spectral peaks, which provided a sensitivity of 95.00% and a specificity of 100.00%.
Plug & produce by modelling skills and service-oriented orchestration of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Abstract Shortening product lifecycles and small lot sizes require manufacturing systems to adapt increasingly fast. Many existing machine tools, handling and logistics systems provide a generic functionality that is not bound to a specific product. But this flexibility and reconfigurability on the level of individual resources is lost in automated systems that are limited to the production of a fixed set of product variants. We propose a unified abstraction for the skills provided by the available resources and the product-specific manufacturing requirements. From these high-level descriptions, executable manufacturing procedures are derived, exposed as services and dynamically orchestrated at runtime in order to achieve the manufacturing goals.
Discriminative cluster adaptive training

Multiple-cluster schemes, such as cluster adaptive training (CAT) or eigenvoice systems, are a popular approach for rapid speaker and environment adaptation. Interpolation weights are used to transform a multiple-cluster, canonical, model to a standard hidden Markov model (HMM) set representative of an individual speaker or acoustic environment. Maximum likelihood training for CAT has previously been investigated. However, in state-of-the-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, discriminative training is commonly employed. This paper investigates applying discriminative training to multiple-cluster systems. In particular, minimum phone error (MPE) update formulae for CAT systems are derived. In order to use MPE in this case, modifications to the standard MPE smoothing function and the prior distribution associated with MPE training are required. A more complex adaptive training scheme combining both interpolation weights and linear transforms, a structured transform (ST), is also discussed within the MPE training framework. Discriminatively trained CAT and ST systems were evaluated on a state-of-the-art conversational telephone speech task. These multiple-cluster systems were found to outperform both standard and adaptively trained systems
Text to speech for Bangla language using festival

In this paper, we present a Text to Speech (TTS) synthesis system for Bangla language using the open-source Festival TTS engine. Festival is a complete TTS synthesis system, with components supporting front-end processing of the input text, language modeling, and speech synthesis using its signal processing module. The Bangla TTS system proposed here, creates the voice data for festival, and additionally extends festival using its embedded scheme scripting interface to incorporate Bangla language support. Festival is a concatenative TTS system using diphone or other unit selection speech units. Our TTS implementation uses two different kinds of these concatenative methods supported in Festival: unit selection and multisyn unit selection. The function of a Text-to-Speech system is to convert some language text into its spoken equivalent by a series of modules. These modules, constituting the TTS system are described in detail which is very much helpful for future development. Finally, the quality of synthesized speech is assessed in terms of acceptability and intelligibility.
Ideas del profesorado de primaria acerca de la diversidad familiar

Resumen Este artículo intenta profundizar en las ideas que el profesorado de primaria tiene acerca de los modelos familiares que se salen del patrón más convencional. Para ello, 108 profesores y profesoras de Primaria de la provincia de Sevilla respondieron a un cuestionario elaborado por el propio equipo de investigación acerca de la diversidad de modelos familiares. Los datos obtenidos evidencian que el profesorado no mantiene una visión homogénea de los distintos tipos de hogares. Las familias adoptivas, las biparentales en que padre y madre trabajan o las monoparentales bajo responsabilidad de madres tuvieron mejor aceptación entre el profesorado que las homoparentales, las de progenitores divorciados, o las encabezadas en solitario por un padre. Los ítems relativos a familias homoparentales fueron respondidos significativamente por menos personas. El profesorado de mayor edad presentó ideas más tradicionales con respecto a la diversidad familiar. Se discuten estos resultados a la luz de sus implicaciones de cara a las necesarias adaptaciones de la escuela con respecto a la diversidad de familias que a ella acuden.
The Role of Platelet-Endothelial Cell Adhesion Molecule-1 in Atheroma Formation Varies Depending on the Site-Specific Hemodynamic Environment

Objective—Polymorphisms in the platelet-endothelial cell adhesion molecule (PECAM-1)-1 gene are linked to increased risk of coronary artery disease. Because PECAM-1 has been demonstrated to form a mechanosensory complex that can modulate inflammatory responses in murine arterial endothelial cells, we hypothesized that PECAM-1 contributes to atherogenesis in a shear-dependent and site-specific manner. Approach and Results—ApoE–/– mice that were wild-type, heterozygous, or deficient in PECAM-1 were placed on a high-fat diet. Detailed analysis of the aorta at sites with differing hemodynamics revealed that PECAM-1–deficient mice had reduced disease in areas of disturbed flow, whereas plaque burden was increased in areas of steady, laminar flow. In concordance with these observations, bone marrow chimera experiments revealed that hematopoietic PECAM-1 resulted in accelerated atheroma formation in areas of laminar and disturbed flow, however endothelial PECAM-1 moderated disease progression in areas of high sheer stress. Moreover, using shear stress–modifying carotid cuffs, PECAM-1 was shown to promote macrophage recruitment into lesions developing in areas of low shear stress. Conclusions—PECAM-1 on bone marrow cells is proatherogenic irrespective of the hemodynamic environment, however endothelial cell PECAM-1 is antiatherogenic in high shear environments. Thus, targeting this pathway therapeutically would require a cell-type and context-specific strategy.
Different Foci for the Regulation of the Activity of the KefB and KefC Glutathione-gated K+ Efflux Systems*

KefB and KefC are glutathione-gated K+ efflux systems in Escherichia coli, and the proteins exhibit strong similarity at the level of both primary sequence and domain organization. The proteins are maintained closed by glutathione and are activated by binding of adducts formed between glutathione and electrophiles. By construction of equivalent mutations in each protein, this study has analyzed the control over inactive state of the proteins. A UV-induced mutation in KefB, L75S, causes rapid spontaneous K+ efflux but has only a minor effect on K+ efflux via KefC. Similarly amino acid substitutions that cause increased spontaneous activity in KefC have only small effects in KefB. Exchange of an eight amino acid region from KefC (HALESDIE) with the equivalent sequence from KefB (HELETAID) has identified a role for a group of acidic residues in controlling KefC activity. The mutations HELETAID and L74S in KefC act synergistically, and the activity of the resultant protein resembles that of KefB. We conclude that, despite the high degree of sequence similarity, KefB and KefC exhibit different sensitivities to the same site-specific mutations.
A phase 1 study of everolimus and sorafenib for metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma

The current study was conducted to assess the maximum tolerated dose (MTD), safety, pharmacokinetics, and preliminary antitumor effect of everolimus, a mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor, in combination with sorafenib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, in patients with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma.
The role of endogenous molecules in modulating pain through transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1)

• TRPV1 (transient receptor potential vanilloid 1) channels are found throughout the body in epithelial cells and in peripheral and central terminals in neurons. They exert a variety of functions ranging from inflammation, to nociception and pain. • TRPV1 is a molecular integrator in that it can be activated by different endogenous stimuli. These interact to alter the channels’ properties, thereby changing the threshold to a given stimulus and resulting in sensitization. • TRPV1 has numerous agonists and antagonists, including lipids and their metabolites, as well as gases and ions. Here, we detail what is known about the mechanisms used by endogenous molecules to modulate the activity of this important transducer for environmental and painful stimuli. • Understanding how these compounds modify TRPV1 activity will allow us to comprehend how some pathologies are associated with its deregulation.
Geometrical Algorithms of Ear Contour Shape Representation and Feature Extraction

In the article we present discrete geometrical algorithms of open contours representation, feature extraction and recognition. The proposed algorithms were developed for ear biometrics, but they can be also applied in other contour image processing applications. Firstly we present mathematical and algorithmic foundations of our geometrical feature extraction methods. We also discuss their application and the achieved results for ear contour image analysis and recognition
On-Board Evolution of a Model-Free Adaptive Controller for a Robotic Fish

Introduction Many physical systems experience fluctuating dynamics throughout their lifetime. Variations can be attributed in part to material degradation and decay of mechanical hardware. Designing control strategies that mitigate the negative effects of such variations can be difficult. One approach is to utilize model-free adaptive control (MFAC), which learns how to control a system by continually updating link weights of an artificial neural network (ANN) (Cheng, 2004). However, determining the optimal values of various control parameters, as well as the structure of the ANN, is challenging. In this study, we investigate how to enhance the on-board adaptability of MFAC-based systems through computational evolution.
Disturbance rejection in 2 x 2 linear hyperbolic systems

Many interesting problems in the oil and gas industry face the challenge of responding to disturbances from afar. Typically, the disturbance occurs at the inlet of a pipeline or the bottom of an oil well, while sensing and actuation equipment is installed at the outlet, only, kilometers away from the disturbance. The present paper develops an output feedback control law for such cases, based on modelling the transport phenomenon as a 2 $\times$ 2 linear partial differential equation (PDE) of hyperbolic type and the disturbance as a finite-dimensional linear system affecting the left boundary of the PDE. Sensing and actuation are co-located at the right boundary of the PDE. The design provides a separation principle, allowing a disturbance attenuating full-state feedback control law to be combined with an observer. The results are applied to a relevant problem from the oil and gas industry and demonstrated in simulations.