Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Image-Guided Percutaneous Aspiration and Gelfoam Treatment of Petrous Apex Cholesterol Granuloma: A New Theory and Method for Diagnosis and Treatment

Abstract Although diagnosis of cholesterol granulomas of the skull base can be straightforward with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) appearance, treatment is controversial with various skull base approaches described in the literature. This report describes a 35-year-old man who presented with a symptomatic, enlarging cystic lesion in the left petrous apex and clivus that had imaging features of a cholesterol granuloma (cholesterol cyst). Due to a prior history of treated mediastinal germ cell tumor, pathologic confirmation of the lesion was requested. A CT-guided percutaneous aspiration revealed dark used motor oil–like fluid. Continued aspiration yielded a change in the character of the fluid to marrow red. Injection of contrast revealed no communication with cerebrospinal fluid. Gelfoam (Pfizer, New York, New York, USA) was subsequently injected percutaneously into the residual cavity. Histopathology showed no evidence of malignancy and follow-up MRI at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year demonstrated continued decrease in size and signal of the lesion.
Study of the Lateral Force Behavior in a Field Cooled Superconducting Linear Bearing

The main characteristic of a linear superconducting magnetic bearing (SMB) is the stable levitation between the superconductor and the magnetic source, which is, in most cases, a permanent magnetic (PM) rail. A stable and passive levitation can be reached when the superconducting transition occurs in the presence of magnetic field (field cooling-FC). The cooling process is performed with the superconductor near to the PM rail in a certain cooling height (CH). This work aims to develop a technique, based on the critical state model, which calculates the magnetic forces of a SMB in the FC case when the superconductor bulk is displaced laterally in relation to the PM rail. This method consists in determining a macroscopic screening current density that the superconductor is supposed to carry. This algorithm has already shown satisfactory results when the vertical levitation force in zero field cooling and FC procedures were simulated. Here a study of the lateral force for different values of CH was performed considering the FC case. An experimental rig with a 6-axis transducer was used to measure the magnetic force. The simulated and measured force results presented the same behavior, showing a promising potential of this model for design of MagLev guideways.
Nonlinear Trend Analysis of Longitudinal Pointwise Visual Field Sensitivity in Suspected and Early Glaucoma.

PURPOSE We have shown previously that a nonlinear exponential model fits longitudinal series of mean deviation (MD) better than a linear model. This study extends that work to investigate the mode (linear versus nonlinear) of change for pointwise sensitivities. METHODS Data from 475 eyes of 244 clinically managed participants were analyzed. Sensitivity estimates at each test location were fitted using two-level linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. Sensitivity on the last test date was forecast using a model fit from the earlier test dates in the series. The means of the absolute prediction errors were compared to assess accuracy, and the root means square (RMS) of the prediction errors were compared to assess precision. RESULTS Overall, the exponential model provided a significantly better fit (P < 0.05) to the data at the majority of test locations (69%). The exponential model fitted the data significantly better at 85% of locations in the upper hemifield and 58% of locations in the lower hemifield. The rate of visual field (VF) deterioration in the upper hemifield was more rapid (mean, -0.21 dB/y; range, -0.28 to -0.13) than in the lower hemifield (mean, -0.14 dB/y; range, -0.2 to -0.09). CONCLUSIONS An exponential model may more accurately track pointwise VF change, at locations damaged by glaucoma. This was more noticeable in the upper hemifield where the VF changed more rapidly. However, linear and exponential models were similar in their ability to forecast future VF status. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE The VF progression appears to accelerate in early glaucoma patients.
Hierarchical SVM classifier for road intersection detection and recognition

This paper describes a hierarchical multi-classification approach for road intersection detection and classification using Support Vector Machines. Our approach has been organized in two main parts. The first involves the road detection in the bird's eye view image using an edge-based approach. In this step, we have exploited the concept of vertical spoke for road boundary extraction. The second step deals with the problem of road intersection detection and classification by hierarchical classification of the extracted road forms using the Unbalanced Decision Tree architecture. Many measures are incorporated for good evaluation of the proposed solution.
Identification and control of subglacial water networks under Dome A, Antarctica

Subglacial water in continental Antarctica forms by melting of basal ice due to geothermal or frictional heating. Subglacial networks transport the water from melting areas and can facilitate sliding by the ice sheet over its bed. Subglacial water flow is driven mainly by gradients in overburden pressure and bed elevation. We identify small (median 850 m) water bodies within the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains in East Antarctica organized into long (20–103 km) coherent drainage networks using a dense (5 km) grid of airborne radar data. The individual water bodies are smaller on average than the water bodies contained in existing inventories of Antarctic subglacial water and most are smaller than the mean ice thickness of 2.5 km, reflecting a focusing of basal water by rugged topography. The water system in the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains reoccupies a system of alpine overdeepenings created by valley glaciers in the early growth phase of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The networks follow valley floors either uphill or downhill depending on the gradient of the ice sheet surface. In cases where the networks follow valley floors uphill they terminate in or near plumes of freeze‐on ice, indicating source to sink transport within the basal hydrologic system. Because the ice surface determines drainage direction within the bed‐constrained network, the system is bed‐routed but surface‐directed. Along‐flow variability in the structure of the freeze‐on plumes suggests variability in the networks on long (10s of ka) timescales, possibly indicating changes in the basal thermal state.
Optimally Joint Subcarrier Matching and Power Allocation in OFDM Multihop System

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multihop system is a promising way to increase capacity and coverage. In this paper, we propose an optimally joint subcarrier matching and power allocation scheme to further maximize the total channel capacity with the constrained total system power. First, the problem is formulated as a mixed binary integer programming problem, which is prohibitive to find the global optimum in terms of complexity. Second, by making use of the equivalent channel power gain for any matched subcarrier pair, a low-complexity scheme is proposed. The optimal subcarrier matching is to match subcarriers by the order of the channel power gains. The optimal power allocation among the matched subcarrier pairs is water-filling. An analytical argument is given to prove that the two steps achieve the optimally joint subcarrier matching and power allocation. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves the largest total channel capacity as compared to the other schemes, where there is no subcarrier matching or power allocation.
Energy-aware analysis for supplying partner selection in mobile P2P 3D streaming

Due to the rapid improvements of wireless technologies and mobile devices'capabilities, we are witnessing an important growth in applications using thin mobile devices. Augmented reality took advantage of the enhancement of thin mobile devices, which led to the emergence of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR). Given that thin mobile devices can not have the entire virtual environment (VE) stored locally, multimedia streaming has been designed and is widely used nowadays in MAR. Most of the MAR systems apply the conventional client-server approach, that may suffer from delay and congestion, which affects the system performance. P2P-based multimedia streaming is considered, therefore, an alternative approach. Although mobile P2P based video streaming received a great deal of attention, mobile P2P based 3D streaming was not the choice of designed systems, mainly due to the limited mobile device's capabilities. Moreover, the main challenge that needs to be taken care of when designing mobile P2P based 3D streaming systems, is the selection of a supplying partner. A few studies have proposed supplying partner protocols for mobile P2P-based 3D streaming. However, they did not take into account the device's energy that is considered an important constraint when dealing with 3D streaming. In this paper, we propose an efficient energy-aware supplying partner protocol for mobile P2P networks based 3D streaming. A new load estimator is defined that takes into consideration two factors: the node's remaining energy and its number of served requests. We therefore propose the integration of an energy-aware criterion into the supplying partner selection in order to reduce the generation of overloaded nodes, and their energy dissipation. We then report on the performance evaluation we have obtained to evaluate our protocol using an extensive set of simulation experiments.
Global Structure-from-Motion and Its Application

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision, with the aim of recovering camera poses and 3D scene structure simultaneously given a set of 2D images. SfM methods can be broadly divided into incremental and global methods according to their ways to register cameras. Incremental methods register cameras one by one, while global SfM methods solve all cameras simultaneously from all available relative motions. As a result, global SfM has better potential in both reconstruction accuracy and computation efficiency than incremental SfM. In this thesis, we address two challenges of global SfM. Our goal is to propose a robust and efficient global SfM system which is applicable to all kinds of motions and datasets. The first challenge is that translation averaging in global SfM is difficult, since the input relative motion between two cameras doesn’t encode the scale information. Therefore, many existing global SfM methods don’t work for the data whose measurement graph is not parallel rigid, e.g. all cameras on the same line. To tackle this challenge, we propose a global SfM method based on a novel linear relationship within camera triplets. Our formulation encodes the scale information by the baseline length ratios within the camera triplet, which helps deal with the collinear camera motion. We further extend the linear relationship within camera triplets to linear constraints for cameras seeing a common scene point, which can improve the global translation estimation for the data with weak image association. The second challenge is that global SfM methods are fragile on noisy data, and one incorrect pairwise relationship may distort the result greatly as global SfM considers all relative relationships together. To deal with this challenge, we propose a novel global SfM pipeline where camera registration is formulated as a well-posed similarity averaging problem solved robustly with L1 optimization. What’s more, the novel pipeline makes the filtering of noisy relative poses simple and effective, which can further improve the robustness of global SfM. We show the effectiveness of our global SfM system by applying it into the video alignment problem which aims to find per-pixel correspondences between two video sequences in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Guided by the 3D information from global SfM, the proposed video registration method can align videos taken at different times with substantially different appearances, in the presence of moving objects and moving cameras with slightly different trajectories.
Hurdle models for multilevel zero‐inflated data via h‐likelihood

Count data often exhibit overdispersion. One type of overdispersion arises when there is an excess of zeros in comparison with the standard Poisson distribution. Zero‐inflated Poisson and hurdle models have been proposed to perform a valid likelihood‐based analysis to account for the surplus of zeros. Further, data often arise in clustered, longitudinal or multiple‐membership settings. The proper analysis needs to reflect the design of a study. Typically random effects are used to account for dependencies in the data. We examine the h‐likelihood estimation and inference framework for hurdle models with random effects for complex designs. We extend the h‐likelihood procedures to fit hurdle models, thereby extending h‐likelihood to truncated distributions. Two applications of the methodology are presented. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Design and Implementation of an Optimal Fuzzy Logic Controller Using Genetic Algorithm

All control systems suffer from problems related to undesirable overshoot, longer settling times and vibrations while going form one state to another state. Most of relevant techniques had been in the form of suggesting modification and improvement in the instrumentation or interfacing part of the control system and the results reported, remain suffering from shortcomings related to hardware parameter dependence and maintenance and operational complexities. Present study was based on a software approach which was focusing on an algorithmic approach for programming a PIC16F877A microcontroller, for eliminating altogether the parametric dependence issues while adding the benefits of easier modification to suit a given control system to changing operational conditions. Said approach was first simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK using the techniques of Proportional Derivative Fuzzy Logic Controller (PD-FLC) whose membership function, fuzzy logic rules and scaling gains were optimized by the genetic algorithm technique. Simulated results were verified by programming the PIC16F877A microcontroller with the algorithm and using it on a temperature control system where a fan was regulated in response to variations in the ambient system temperature. Resulting tabulated performance indices showed a considerable improvement in rising and settling time besides reducing overshoot and steady state error.
Entropy-based Word Sense Disambiguation for Semantic Annotation system

To make the text retrieval and index more accurate, several systems were proposed to annotate the semantic of key words using Wikipedia as a catalog. In this paper, we discuss a model by using human senses to express information, and use it to annotate most name entities. For this purpose, an Entropy-based Semantic Annotation (ESA) system is implemented to recognize and annotate name entities in text. A novel Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) algorithm is designed to disambiguate the ambiguous name entities, and to improve the performance when the relatedness between name entity and context is weak. Moreover, an advanced Viterbi algorithm is employed to optimize the overall entity assignment. In our experiments, two manually-annotated datasets are used to evaluate the ESA system, which is better than Tagme approaches in performance with 79.61% of Fmeasure. The time complexity of ESA system is O(n), which ensure the ESA system’s quickly response.
Children's enjoyment of play during school lunchtime breaks: an examination of intraday and interday reliability.

BACKGROUND Enjoyment and play during school lunchtime are correlated with children's physical activity. Despite this, there is an absence of studies reporting children's enjoyment of play during school lunchtime breaks. The purpose of this study was to examine the intraday and interday reliability of children's enjoyment of school lunchtime play. METHODS Surveys used to assess children's enjoyment of lunchtime play were distributed to and completed by 197 children (112 males, 85 females), aged 8-12 years attending an elementary school in Victoria, Australia. Children completed the surveys during class before lunch (expected enjoyment) and after lunch (actual enjoyment) for 5 days. The intra- and interday enjoyment of school lunchtime play reliability were determined using a weighted kappa. RESULTS Intraday kappa values ranged from fair (0.31) to substantial (0.75) within each of the 5 days (median kappa = 0.41). In comparison, "expected" (0.09-0.40; median 0.30) and "actual" (0.05-0.46; median 0.28) interday enjoyment of lunchtime play displayed low reliability. CONCLUSIONS Children's enjoyment of lunchtime play appears to be more consistent within days than across days. The findings suggest that assessment of children's enjoyment of lunchtime play once on a single day would be representative of a particular day but not necessarily that particular school week.
Capillary Limitation of Oxygen Distribution in the Isolated Rete Mirabile of the Eel (Anguilla anguilla)

The presence of a significant barrier at the level of the capillary to the diffusion of oxygen into tissue would have major significance in biology. The rete mirabile of the eel, an organ made up of alternately disposed arterial and venous capillaries, was used to study this question. The two capillary beds were perfused with albumin-containing Krebs-Ringer bicarbonate buffer in an uncoupled countercurrent fashion with equal flows, and the preparation was shielded from atmospheric oxygen with a polyvinylidene chloride fibs A constant arterial infusion containing labeled albumin, inulin, and water, and an increased oxygen content, and a venous infusion containing a greatly reduced oxygen content were begun, and from the steady state response to these, capillary permeability-surface products were calculated. Approximately half the labeled water and one-third of the arterial minus venous oxygen increment emerged in the arterial outflow, whereas in the flow-limited case none would be expected. We calculated permeability values for the labeled tracers (albumin, inulin, and water), assuming a surface area of 1 cm'/mg, and found these not to be significantly different from those previously reported (Circ Res 41: 791-798, 1977). The permeability value for oxygen at 25°C was 11.8 ± 1.9 (SD) ∼ 10~5 cm/sec. The data indicate that the limiting effect of the capillary wall on oxygen transfer is of a magnitude that must be taken into account in describing the factors affecting the distribution of oxygen to tissues. Circ Res 44: 498-503, 1979
Sensing Performance Study of SiC, a Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Material Platform for Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor

The sensing properties of a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based waveguide sensor on a wide bandgap semiconductor, silicon carbide (SiC), were studied. Compared to other waveguide sensors, the large bandgap energy of SiC material allows the sensor to operate in the visible and near infrared wavelength range, while the SPR effect by a thin gold film is expected to improve the sensitivity. The confinement factor of the sensor at various wavelengths of the incident light and refractive index of the analyte were investigated using an effective index method. Since the change of analyte type and concentration is reflected by the change of refractive index, the sensing performance can be evaluated by the shift of resonant wavelength from the confinement factor spectrum at different refractive index. The results show that the shift of resonant wavelength demonstrates linear characteristics. A sensitivity of 1928 nm/RIU (refractive index unit) shift could be obtained from the refractive index of 1.338~1.348 which attracts research interests because most biological analytes are in this range.
Molecular Method for Bartonella Species Identification in Clinical and Environmental Samples

ABSTRACT A new, efficient molecular method for detection of Bartonella, based on the 16S-23S rRNA intergenic spacer and 16S rRNA amplification by multiplex PCR combined with reverse line blotting, was designed. This assay could simultaneously detect 20 different known species and other Bartonella species not described previously.
Podocalyxin‐like protein 1 is a relevant marker for human c‐kitpos cardiac stem cells

Cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) from adult myocardium offer an alternative cell therapy approach for ischaemic heart disease. Improved clinical performance of CPCs in clinical trials requires a comprehensive definition of their biology and specific interactions with the environment. In this work we characterize specific human CPC surface markers and study some of their related functions. c‐kitpos human CPCs (hCPCs) were characterized for cell surface marker expression, pluripotency, early and late cardiac differentiation markers and therapeutic activity in a rat model of acute myocardial infarction. The results indicate that hCPCs are a mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)‐like population, with a similar immunoregulatory capacity. A partial hCPC membrane proteome was analysed by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry and 36 proteins were identified. Several, including CD26, myoferlin and podocalyxin‐like protein 1 (PODXL), have been previously described in other stem‐cell systems. Suppression and overexpression analysis demonstrated that PODXL regulates hCPC activation, migration and differentiation; it also modulates their local immunoregulatory capacity. Therefore, hCPCs are a resident cardiac population that shares many features with hMSCs, including their capacity for local immunoregulation. Expression of PODXL appears to favour the immature state of hCPCs, while its downregulation facilitates their differentiation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
¿Discapacidad?

Según registros del DANE1 en su última actualización de datos sobre discapacidad, en el 2012 el Valle del Cauca contaba con 30,617 personas con discapacidad (PcD), y en edad productiva, entre los 15 y los 59 años de edad. En la ciudad de Cali, capital del departamento del Valle del Cauca, se encontró el 64.0 % de la población con discapacidad del departamento. De esta población, el 32.0 % trabaja en la actividad económica de prestación de servicios, aproximadamente 1,482 personas, siendo este el sector que más apoyo brinda a las PcD en la ciudad.
High-Throughput Screening of a Diversity Collection Using Biodefense Category A and B Priority Pathogens

One of the objectives of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Biodefense Program is to identify or develop broad-spectrum antimicrobials for use against bioterrorism pathogens and emerging infectious agents. As a part of that program, our institution has screened the 10 000-compound MyriaScreen Diversity Collection of high-purity druglike compounds against three NIAID category A and one category B priority pathogens in an effort to identify potential compound classes for further drug development. The effective use of a Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute–based high-throughput screening (HTS) 96-well–based format allowed for the identification of 49 compounds that had in vitro activity against all four pathogens with minimum inhibitory concentration values of ≤16 µg/mL. Adaptation of the HTS process was necessary to conduct the work in higher-level containment, in this case, biosafety level 3. Examination of chemical scaffolds shared by some of the 49 compounds and assessment of available chemical databases indicates that several may represent broad-spectrum antimicrobials whose activity is based on novel mechanisms of action.