Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiographic features of anatomic relationship between impacted third molar and inferior alveolar canal on coronal CBCT images: risk factors for nerve injury after tooth extraction

Introduction The present study was aimed to identify the radiographic signs between impacted third molar root and inferior alveolar canal (IAC) on cone-beam CT (CBCT) images as risk factors and prognostic predictors associated with inferior alveolar nerve (IAN) damage following tooth removal. Material and methods A retrospective clinical study was performed involving 136 patients with 257 impacted lower third molars from January 2013 to December 2014. The neurosensory function of the lower lip and chin was subjectively evaluated and assessed by neurosensory tests before and after surgery. The preoperative CBCT data were retrieved and analyzed to identify the radiographic signs associated with postoperative IAN injury. Results The overall incidence of IAN injury in our patient cohort was 13.2%. Multiple radiographic features on coronal CBCT images including contact between IAC and root, IAC position relative to root, IAC shape and cortication status were found to be significantly associated with IAN damage (p < 0.05, χ2 test). Furthermore, buccolingual position, teardrop/dumbbell shape and cortication status of IAC were identified as independent prognostic predictors for IAN damage. Conclusions Our findings indicate that radiographic signs including direct contact between IAC and root, buccal/lingual IAC position relative to root, teardrop/dumbbell shape and cortication absence of the IAC on presurgical CBCT images are associated with high risk of IAN injury and postoperative neurosensory disturbance.
Thermal Infrared Face Recognition: A Review

Visible light face recognition has been well researched but still its performance is limited by varying illumination conditions. Illumination conditions are major source of the uncertainty in face recognition systems performance when it is used in outdoor setting. In order to augment the performance of visible light face recognition system's performance, infrared facial images as a new modality has been used in the literature. The other intriguing factor in using the infrared, especially thermal infrared imaging for facial recognition is the night time surveillance with little or no light to illuminate the faces. Thermal facial recognition is used in several covert military applications. The covert data acquisition has its own environmental constraints. The choice of infrared makes the system less dependent on external light sources and more robust with respect to incident angle and light variations. In this paper we focus on reviewing recent developments in thermal IR face recognition and suggest the approaches that could be useful in matching visible and thermal IR images.
Antisense PMO cocktails effectively skip dystrophin exons 45-55 in myotubes transdifferentiated from DMD patient fibroblasts

Antisense-mediated exon skipping has made significant progress as a therapeutic platform in recent years, especially in the case of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Despite FDA approval of eteplirsen–the first-ever antisense drug clinically marketed for DMD–exon skipping therapy still faces the significant hurdles of limited applicability and unknown truncated protein function. In-frame exon skipping of dystrophin exons 45–55 represents a significant approach to treating DMD, as a large proportion of patients harbor mutations within this “hotspot” region. Additionally, patients harboring dystrophin exons 45–55 deletion mutations are reported to have exceptionally mild to asymptomatic phenotypes. Here, we demonstrate that a cocktail of phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers can effectively skip dystrophin exons 45–55 in vitro in myotubes transdifferentiated from DMD patient fibroblast cells. This is the first report of substantive exons 45–55 skipping in DMD patient cells. These findings help validate the use of transdifferentiated patient fibroblast cells as a suitable cell model for dystrophin exon skipping assays and further emphasize the feasibility of dystrophin exons 45–55 skipping in patients.
A reduced complexity decoding algorithm for NB-LDPC codes

Non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes perform much better than their binary counterparts, when codeword length is moderate or high-order modulation is used. However, the implementation of a NB-LDPC decoder usually suffers from excessive hardware complexity and large memory requirement. Many new algorithms and decoding schedules have been introduced in recent literatures to reduce the decoding complexity in further. However, the complexity of current decoding algorithms for NB-LDPC codes is still high. In this paper, a two-extra-column trellis min-sum algorithm (TEC-TMSA) is proposed. The TEC-TMSA combines the two-extra-column method and the trellis min-sum algorithm in an intelligent way. Since only the minimum value of a row needs to be sorted out for configuration constructions, the computational complexity of the proposed TEC-TMSA is much lower than that of the TMSA. Furthermore, we develop a novel location-fixed selection scheme, which significantly decreases the number of required comparison operations in the TEC-TMSA with negligible performance loss.
Recent strategies to design vascular theranostic nanoparticles

Vascular disease is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Current surgical intervention and treatment options for vascular diseases have exhibited limited long-term success, emphasizing the need to develop advanced treatment paradigms for early detection and more effective treatment of dysfunctional cells in a specific blood vessel lesion. Advances in targeted nanoparticles mediating cargo delivery enables more robust prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment of vascular disorders. In particular, nanotheranostics integrates diagnostic imaging and therapeutic function into a single agent, and is an emerging platform towards more effective and localized vascular treatment. This review article highlights recent advances and current challenges associated with the utilization of targeted nanoparticles for real-time diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases. Given recent developments, nanotheranostics offers great potential to serve as an effective platform for targeted, localized, and personalized vascular treatment.
Stochastic efficiency optimisation analysis of alternative agricultural water use strategies in Vaalharts over the long- and short-run

xiv interpreting the derived demand for irrigation water (elasticity) without knowing the conditions under which they were derived. Cognisance should also be taken of the fact that higher gross margins per unit of applied water would not necessarily result in greater willingness to pay for water when the alternatives were evaluated on a whole-farm level. The main conclusion from the short-run analyses was that although deficit irrigation was stochastically more efficient than full irrigation under limited water supply conditions, irrigation farmers would not willingly choose to conserve water through deficit irrigation and would be expected to be compensated to do so. Deficit irrigation would not save water if the water that was saved through deficit irrigation were used to plant larger areas to increase the overall profitability of the strategy. Standard risk aversion was used to explain the simultaneous increasing and decreasing relationship between the utility-weighted premiums and increasing levels of absolute risk aversion and was shown to be more consistent than when constant absolute risk aversion was assumed. The modelling framework and the models that were developed in this research provide powerful tools to evaluate water allocation problems that are identified while busy implementing the National Water Act. Only through the application of these type of models linked to hydrological models will a better understanding of the mutual interaction amongst water legislation, water policy administration, technology, hydrology, human value systems and the environment be gained to enhance water policy formulation and implementation.
KRAUTS: A German Temporally Annotated News Corpus

In recent years, temporal tagging, i.e., the extraction and normalization of temporal expressions, has become a vibrant research area. Several tools have been made available, and new strategies have been developed. Due to domain-speciﬁc challenges, evaluations of new methods should be performed on diverse text types. Despite signiﬁcant efforts towards multilinguality in the context of temporal tagging, for all languages except English, annotated corpora exist only for a single domain. In the case of German, for example, only a narrative-style corpus has been manually annotated so far, thus no evaluations of German temporal tagging performance on news articles can be made. In this paper, we present KRAUTS, a new German temporally annotated corpus containing two subsets of news documents: articles from the daily newspaper D OLOMITEN and from the weekly newspaper D IE Z EIT . Overall, the corpus contains 192 documents with 1,140 annotated temporal expressions, and has been made publicly available to further boost research in temporal tagging.
Discrete-Time Local Value Iteration Adaptive Dynamic Programming: Convergence Analysis

In this paper, convergence properties are established for the newly developed discrete-time local value iteration adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm. The present local iterative ADP algorithm permits an arbitrary positive semidefinite function to initialize the algorithm. Employing a state-dependent learning rate function, for the first time, the iterative value function and iterative control law can be updated in a subset of the state space instead of the whole state space, which effectively relaxes the computational burden. A new analysis method for the convergence property is developed to prove that the iterative value functions will converge to the optimum under some mild constraints. Monotonicity of the local value iteration ADP algorithm is presented, which shows that under some special conditions of the initial value function and the learning rate function, the iterative value function can monotonically converge to the optimum. Finally, three simulation examples and comparisons are given to illustrate the performance of the developed algorithm.
A feed-forward relay integrates the regulatory activities of Bicoid and Orthodenticle via sequential binding to suboptimal sites

Datta et al. define three major classes of enhancers that are differentially sensitive to binding and transcriptional activation by Bicoid (Bcd) and Orthodenticle (Otd). The specific activities of enhancers in each class are mediated by DNA motif variants preferentially bound by Bcd or Otd and the presence or absence of sites for cofactors that interact with these proteins.
Impacts of Jumps and Stochastic Interest Rates on the Fair Costs of Guaranteed Minimum Death Benefit Contracts

The authors offer a new perspective to the field of guaranteed minimum death benefit contracts, especially for simple return premium and rising floor guarantees. A particular feature of these contracts is a guaranteed capital upon the insured's death. A complete methodology based on the generalized Fourier transform is proposed to investigate the impacts of jumps and stochastic interest rates. This paper thus extends Milevsky and Posner (2001). If jumps alone are considered, similar results are obtained, but, when stochastic interest rates are introduced, the fair costs of the guarantee feature are found to be substantially higher in this more general economy.
Cellular microtissues spontaneously formed in a microfabricated device for angiongenesis

We report here on a microdevice for the spontaneous and simultaneous formation of microtissues-or microscale spheroids- in a fast, controlled and reproducible way. Spheroids are relevant constructs for tissue engineering applications, and notably for studying the process of angiogenesis which is of crucial importance for both tissue regeneration and understanding/manipulating tumor vascularization. Our microde-vices consist of PDMS microwell arrays whose surface properties are optimized (PDMS composition and applied coating agent) for both promoting cellular aggrega-tion into spheroids and facilitating spheroid removal out of the device.
Preconception Maternal Iodine Status Is Positively Associated with IQ but Not with Measures of Executive Function in Childhood

Abstract Background Adverse effects of severe maternal iodine deficiency in pregnancy on fetal brain development are well-established, but the effects of milder deficiency are uncertain. Most studies examine iodine status in pregnancy; less is known about iodine nutrition before conception. Objective We examined relations between maternal preconception iodine status and offspring cognitive function, within a prospective mother-offspring cohort. Methods Maternal iodine status was assessed through the use of the ratio of iodine:creatinine concentrations (I/Cr) in spot urine samples [median (IQR) period before conception 3.3 y (2.2–4.7 y)]. Childhood cognitive function was assessed at age 6–7 y. Full-scale IQ was assessed via the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, and executive function through the use of tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB). Analyses (n = 654 mother-child dyads) were adjusted for potential confounders including maternal intelligence, education, and breastfeeding duration. Results The median (IQR) urinary iodine concentration was 108.4 µg/L (62.2–167.8 µg/L) and the I/Cr ratio 114 µg/g (76–164 µg/g). The preconception I/Cr ratio was positively associated with child IQ, before and after adjustment for potential confounding influences [β = 0.13 (95% CI: 0.04, 0.21)/SD, P = 0.003]. 8.9% of women had a preconception urinary I/Cr ratio <50 µg/g; compared with those with an I/Cr ratio ≥150 µg/g, the IQ of their offspring was 0.49 (95% CI: 0.79, 0.18) SD lower. There were no associations with the executive function outcomes assessed via CANTAB, before or after adjustment for confounders. Conclusion The positive association between iodine status before conception and child IQ provides some support for demonstrated links between low maternal iodine status in pregnancy and poorer cognitive function reported in other studies. However, given the negative effects on school performance previously observed in children born to iodine-deficient mothers, the lack of associations with measures of executive function in the present study was unexpected. Further data are needed to establish the public health importance of low preconception iodine status.
The Reality of Business Reengineering: Pacific Bell's Centrex Provisioning Process

Business process reengineering (BPR), a recently popularized management change strategy, promises radical improvements in the business processes of an organization. This article describes and analyzes one of Pacific Bell's successful reengineering initiatives, the Centrex reengineering project. It suggests that successful reengineering implementation does not necessarily meet the popular assumptions underlying BPR. Reengineering designs tend to be radical and assume change to be clean slate, processbased, top-down directed, and information technology enabled. By contrast, reengineering implementation tends to involve improvements that are incremental, rather than radical. The key to implementation appears to be a continual involvement of front-line employees and managers.
Assessment of femoral bone quality using co-occurrence matrices and adaptive regions of interest

The surgical treatment of femur fractures, which often result from osteoporosis, is highly dependent on the quality of the femoral bone. Unsatisfying results of surgical interventions like early loosening of implants may be one result of altered bone quality. However, clinical diagnostic techniques to quantify local bone quality are limited and often highly observer dependent. Therefore, the development of tools, which automatically and reproducibly place regions of interest (ROI) and asses the local quality of the femoral bone in these ROIs would be of great help for clinicians. For this purpose, a method to position and deform ROIs automatically and reproducibly depending on the size and shape of the femur will be presented. Moreover, an approach to asses the femur quality, which is based on calculating texture features using co-occurrence matrices and these adaptive regions, will be proposed. For testing purposes, 15 CT-datasets of anatomical specimen of human femora are used. The correlation between the texture features and biomechanical properties of the proximal femoral bone is calculated. First results are very promising and show high correlation between the calculated features and biomechanical properties. Testing the method on a larger data pool and refining the algorithms to further increase its sensitivity for altered bone quality will be the next steps in this project.
An open-label non-randomized prospective pilot study of the efficacy of Q-switched Nd-YAG laser in management of facial lichen planus pigmentosus

ABSTRACT Lichen planus pigmentosus (LPP) is a cosmetically disfiguring condition. Many treatment options are available which are effective in halting the progression of the disease. The treatment of persistent pigmentation is still a challenge. We describe the use of Q-switched Nd-YAG laser in 13 patients with stable LPP using a standard protocol. Most of our patients showed complete to near-complete resolution of pigment without much complications.
The effect of leadership styles and organizational culture on organizational performance of the public sector in Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia, public organizations have been associated with poor management and performance. Little is understood about the reasons behind such poor performance. Therefore, this study examined the effect of organizational culture and leadership styles on the performance of Saudi Arabia’s public organizations, through the mediating factors of organizational commitment and job satisfaction. In this quantitative research, cross-sectional data of 400 employees working in 16 ministries of the Saudi Arabia government were obtained. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to test the hypotheses. The validity and reliability of the measurement and the structural models were confirmed. Findings showed a full mediation effect of organizational commitment on the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance, but organizational commitment was found to partially mediate the relationship between leadership styles and organizational performance. No mediation of job satisfaction was found on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational performance and on the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance. The findings add to the existing literature by integrating the factors that could enhance organizational performance. Based on the findings, the study recommends that public organizations in Saudi Arabia improve their organizational culture and appoint managers who have transactional and transformational qualities. By doing so, employee commitment is enhanced, which leads to a positive and significant impact on organizational performance. The implications for practice and for future research are also discussed.
A database of German definitory contexts from selected web sources

We introduce work on the detection of deﬁnitory contexts designed to speed up two lexicographical tasks: searching for the exact meaning(s) of terms and providing usable input for paraphrasing. Our database is built from a specialized web corpus using a robust pattern-based extraction method. The corresponding interface displays information for a large range of lexical units. The contributions of this article are threefold: we describe both acquisition and extraction, provide a qualitative assessment of the method, and present an interface to access the data.
Tumorigenesis and Neoplastic Progression Hyaluronan Oligosaccharides Inhibit Tumorigenicity of Osteosarcoma Cell Lines MG-63 and LM-8 in Vitro and in Vivo via Perturbation of Hyaluronan-Rich Pericellular Matrix of the Cells

Numerous studies have demonstrated a correlation between hyaluronan expression and the malignant properties of various kinds of cancer, and inhibition of hyaluronan production causes decreased tumor growth. Hyaluronan oligosaccharides have been shown to inhibit several tumor cell types via disruption of receptor-hyaluronan interaction. However, few studies have addressed hyaluronan with respect to osteosarcoma. In this study, we examined the effects of exogenously added hyaluronan oligosaccharides on tumorigenicity of murine osteosarcoma cells, LM-8, and human osteoblastic osteosarcoma cells, MG-63. Moreover, the critical size of oligomers needed to inhibit malignant properties was defined. Fluorescent hyaluronan oligosaccharides accumulated both on the surface of cells and in the cytoplasm, and this retention was blocked by pretreatment with an anti-CD44 monoclonal antibody. Hyaluronan octasaccharides significantly inhibited cell viability and induced apoptosis as defined by cell proliferation and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick-end labeling assays, respectively. Octasaccharides also abrogated functional cell-associated matrices and significantly reduced the retention of endogenous hyaluronan. Further, octasaccharide treatment affected an inhibition of cell motility as well as cell invasiveness. Pretreatment of the cells with anti-CD44 antibody reduced the antitumor effect of the octasaccharides. In vivo , intratumoral injection of hyaluronan octasaccharides reduced the hyaluronan accumulation in local tumors, resulting in significant suppression of the formation of distant lung metastasis. Together these data suggest that hyaluronan oligosaccharides have potent antitumor effects functioning in part by the abrogation of hyaluronan-rich cell-associated matrices. (Am J Pathol 2007, 171:274–286; DOI: 10.2353/ajpath.2007.060828)
Taishan Pinus massoniana Pollen Polysaccharides Enhance Immune Responses in Chickens Infected by Avian Leukosis Virus Subgroup B

ABSTRACT Immunosuppressive virus, which can cause suppressed immunity and vaccination failure, frequently occurs in chicken flocks and seriously destroys the poultry industry. Our previous studies have reported that Taishan Pinus massoniana pollen polysaccharide (TPPPS) possess immunomodulatory effects and improve the immune effects of vaccines. In this study, avian leukosis virus subgroup B (ALV-B) was chosen as immunosuppressive virus to artificially establish immunosuppressive models in chickens, and the immune modulatory ability of TPPPS on the immune response of chickens was evaluated. Four randomly assigned groups (Group I–IV) of these immunosuppressed chickens were administered with TPPPS at doses of 0, 100, 200, and 400 mg/kg (every kilogram chick), respectively. Group V was administered with saline as control. At seven day old, 10 chickens randomly selected from Group I–V were inoculated with the attenuated Newcastle disease (ND) vaccine. The results showed that during the monitoring period, TPPPS significantly enhanced weight of immune organs, peripheral lymphocyte proliferation, the percentage of CD4+ and the ratio of CD4+/CD8+, IL-2 and IFN-γ production, and ALV-B antibody positive rate of chickens in a dose-dependent manner, with 400 mg/kg TPPPS being the most effective. In addition, the antibody titer against Newcastle disease virus (NDV) in Group IV with 400 mg/kg was significantly higher than those in other groups. We observed the stronger immunity in the TPPPS group, which indicates that TPPPS could be used as an immunoenhancer to relieve immunosuppression caused by ALV-B in the poultry industry.