Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
QUANTIFICATION OF ULTRASOUND CONTRAST AGENTS USING HIGH FREQUENCY ULTRASOUND

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) are small microbubbles filled with gas. Because of their scattering properties, UCAs enhance the diagnostic capabilities of ultrasonic imaging. UCAs are associated with therapeutic or enhancing therapeutic applications of ultrasound and with possible adverse bioeffects. Quantification of the in vivo concentration of microbubbles is therefore essential to establishing a dose/effect response for therapeutics and for quantifying other bioeffects. The concentration of UCAs is hypothesized to be proportional to the magnitude of the ultrasonic backscattered power spectrum. To demonstrate the ability to quantify UCAs from ultrasonic backscatter, several experiments were conducted. All experiments were conducted with FDA approved Definity® contrast agents and were performed in vitro, i.e., within a beaker or within a perfusion phantom, or in vivo, i.e., within the auricular artery of a rabbit. Estimates of the UCA concentration were obtained by comparing estimates of the backscattered power spectrum corresponding to the scattering from UCAs. A Monte Carlo technique was used to estimate the UCA concentration in vitro by minimizing the mean square error between the estimated power spectrum and the theoretical power spectrum. Samples of the Definity mixture were also extracted and analyzed under a fluorescence microscope and hemacytometer to obtain the size distribution and concentration of microbubbles optically for comparison with the ultrasound estimates. In both the in vitro and in vivo experiments, the linear relationship between the UCA concentration and magnitude of the ultrasonic backscattered power spectrum was demonstrated. Additionally, with the Monte Carlo technique, the UCA concentration and mean microbubble radius was estimated to within 12.3% and 8.48% of the optically measured values, respectively.
The Tension between Heritage Claims and Cultural Governance: A Case Study from Taiwan

This study attempts to explore the issues on the involuntary tension between the heritage claims and cultural governance that follow from the devolution of heritage administration and the inherent contradiction between the universal heritage discourse and the local practical experiences in Taiwan. Through a review of the literature, the author shows the apparent existence of a dominant heritage discourse and the dramatic increase of alternative heritage recently. However, some controversial phenomena between the exclusive heritage legislation and the inclusive trend of heritage policy have been observed. With the help of historical research and Q methodology survey, this study goes on to explore the evolution of heritage concepts in Taiwan and various ways in which different people perceive heritage and the dilemma between the test of authenticity and necessary renovation, comparing the multi-lateral relations between various authorities and social actors in cultural governance. Finally, this study explores the gaps between the exclusiveness of heritage legislation and the inclusive nature of cultural governance. The exclusiveness derives from the orientation towards historical evidence of the dominant heritage discourse, which is instituted by heritage legislation, government agencies, professionals, international conservation organizations and conservation ethic, but which has no assent from ordinary people. However, this dominant discourse has recently been broadened by alternative heritage claims. After rethinking the meaning of heritage, the author submits that heritage is in fact the result of claim processes aimed at gaining official recognition to counter creative destruction in cultural governance. Furthermore, such processes involve complex, dynamic and multiple interactions which deeply influence the result of heritage claims.
Prevalence and Factors Associated With Resistant Hypertension in a Large Health Maintenance Organization in Israel

Previous assessments of the prevalence of resistant hypertension (RH) in uncontrolled blood pressure (BP) have ranged from 3% to 30%. Using real-world data, our aim was to estimate the prevalence of RH in patients belonging to the Maccabi Healthcare Services, a 2-million-member health organization in Israel. From 2010 to 2011, all hypertensive patients with ≥2 recorded BP measurements during a minimum period of 6 months were identified. Patients were considered uncontrolled if their most recent BP during the study period and their mean systolic BP or diastolic BP during a preceding period of ≥6months were systolic BP ≥140 mm Hg or diastolic BP ≥90 mm Hg, or systolic BP ≥130 mm Hg or diastolic BP ≥80 mm Hg in chronic kidney disease or diabetes mellitus. Uncontrolled patients taking diuretics and ≥2 antihypertensive therapy classes at their maximal recommended dose were regarded as resistant hypertensives. A total of 172 432 patients were eligible for the study. Uncontrolled BP was found in 35.9% (n=65 710). Overall, 2.2% of the uncontrolled patients (n=1487) were resistant hypertensives. Patients with RH were characterized by a significantly (P<0.01) older age, higher body mass index, and multicomorbidity (including dyslipidemia, diabetes mellitus, and impaired renal function) compared with patients with controlled hypertension receiving equivalent treatment. The results of this large population-based study indicate a substantially lower prevalence of RH than previously reported. Most patients with uncontrolled BP took less than the maximal recommended antihypertensive treatment.
Evaluation of 89Zr-Labeled Human Anti-CD147 Monoclonal Antibody as a Positron Emission Tomography Probe in a Mouse Model of Pancreatic Cancer

Introduction Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive cancer and its prognosis remains poor. Therefore, additional effective therapy is required to augment and/or complement current therapy. CD147, high expression in pancreatic cancer, is involved in the metastatic process and is considered a good candidate for targeted therapy. CD147-specfic imaging could be useful for selection of appropriate patients. Therefore, we evaluated the potential of a fully human anti-CD147 monoclonal antibody 059-053 as a new positron emission tomography (PET) probe for pancreatic cancer. Methods CD147 expression was evaluated in four pancreatic cancer cell lines (MIA Paca-2, PANC-1, BxPC-3, and AsPC-1) and a mouse cell line A4 as a negative control. Cell binding, competitive inhibition and internalization assays were conducted with 125I-, 67Ga-, or 89Zr-labeled 059-053. In vivo biodistribution of 125I- or 89Zr-labeled 059-053 was conducted in mice bearing MIA Paca-2 and A4 tumors. PET imaging with [89Zr]059-053 was conducted in subcutaneous and orthotopic tumor mouse models. Results Among four pancreatic cancer cell lines, MIA Paca-2 cells showed the highest expression of CD147, while A4 cells had no expression. Immunohistochemical staining showed that MIA Paca-2 xenografts also highly expressed CD147 in vivo. Radiolabeled 059-053 specifically bound to MIA Paca-2 cells with high affinity, but not to A4. [89Zr]059-053 uptake in MIA Paca-2 tumors increased with time from 11.0±1.3% injected dose per gram (ID/g) at day 1 to 16.9±3.2% ID/g at day 6, while [125I]059-053 uptake was relatively low and decreased with time, suggesting that 059-053 was internalized into tumor cells in vivo and 125I was released from the cells. PET with [89Zr]059-053 clearly visualized subcutaneous and orthotopic tumors. Conclusion [89Zr]059-053 is a promising PET probe for imaging CD147 expression in pancreatic cancer and has the potential to select appropriate patients with CD147-expressing tumors who could gain benefit from anti-CD147 therapy.
Class Selection Based Iterative Supervised Latent Semantic Indexing for Text Categorization

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an effective technique for feature extraction in text mining, and supervised LSI (SLSI) algorithms have been proposed to exploit the class labels of training data. In this paper, we propose an iterative SLSI framework based on class selection. We show that a previous iterative SLSI algorithm is an instance of the framework. We also propose a method under our framework, which selects a class at each iteration using a simple classifier and computes the main bias vector of one class only. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method both improves the classification accuracy and reduces the computation cost. Keywords-Supervised Latent Semantic Indexing; Text
Global patterns of 16S rRNA diversity at a depth of millions of sequences per sample

The ongoing revolution in high-throughput sequencing continues to democratize the ability of small groups of investigators to map the microbial component of the biosphere. In particular, the coevolution of new sequencing platforms and new software tools allows data acquisition and analysis on an unprecedented scale. Here we report the next stage in this coevolutionary arms race, using the Illumina GAIIx platform to sequence a diverse array of 25 environmental samples and three known “mock communities” at a depth averaging 3.1 million reads per sample. We demonstrate excellent consistency in taxonomic recovery and recapture diversity patterns that were previously reported on the basis of metaanalysis of many studies from the literature (notably, the saline/nonsaline split in environmental samples and the split between host-associated and free-living communities). We also demonstrate that 2,000 Illumina single-end reads are sufficient to recapture the same relationships among samples that we observe with the full dataset. The results thus open up the possibility of conducting large-scale studies analyzing thousands of samples simultaneously to survey microbial communities at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.
Web-based Question Answering: Revisiting AskMSR

Web-based QA, pioneered by Kwok et al. (2001), successfully demonstrated the power of Web redundancy. Early WebQA systems, such as AskMSR (Brill et al., 2001), rely on various kinds of rewriting and pattern-generation methods for identifying answer paragraphs and for extracting answers. In this paper, we conducted an experimental study to examine the impact of the advance of search engine technologies and the growth of the Web, to such Web-QA approaches. When applying AskMSR to a new question answering dataset created using historical TREC-QA questions, we find that the key step, query pattern generation is no longer required but instead, deeper NLP analysis on questions and snippets remains critical. Based on this observation, we propose a Web-QA system that removes the query pattern generation step and improves answer candidate generation and ranking steps, and outperforms AskMSR by 34 points of MRR. The revised dataset is made publicly available with this paper.
Study of masked face detection approach in video analytics

Security being of utmost importance, video surveillance has become an active research topic. Video analytics enhance video surveillance systems by performing tasks of real time event detection and post-event analysis. This can save human resources, cost and increase the effectiveness of the surveillance system operation. One of the common requirements of Video Analytics for security is to detect presence of a masked person automatically. In this paper, we propose a technique for masked face detection using four different steps of estimating distance from camera, eye line detection, facial part detection and eye detection. The paper outlines the principles used in each of these steps and the use of commonly available algorithms of people detection and face detection. This unique approach for the problem has created a method simpler in complexity thereby making real time implementation feasible. Analysis of the algorithm's performance on test video sequences gives useful insights to further improvements in the masked face detection performance.
Morbidity, Including Fatal Morbidity, throughout Life in Men Entering Adult Life as Obese

Background The association between obesity in adults and excess morbidity and mortality is well established, but the health impact throughout adult life of being obese in early adulthood needs elucidation. We investigated somatic morbidity, including fatal morbidity, throughout adulthood in men starting adult life as obese. Methods Among 362,200 Danish young men, examined for military service between 1943 and 1977, all obese (defined as BMI≥31.0 kg/m2), and, as controls, a random 1% sample of the others was identified. In the age range of 18–25 years, there were 1,862 obese, which encompass the men above the 99.5 percentile, and 3,476 controls. Information on morbidity was obtained via national registers. Cox regression models were used to estimate the relative morbidity assessed as first incidence of disease, occurrence of disease in the year preceding death and prevalent disease at time of death. Results From age 18 through 80 years the obese had an increased risk of becoming diseased by or die from a broad range of diseases. Generally, the incidence of first event, occurrence in the year prior to death, and prevalence at time of death showed the same pattern. As an example, the relative hazard of type 2 diabetes was constant throughout life at 4.9 (95% confidence intervals [CI]: 4.1–5.9), 5.2 (95% CI: 3.6–7.5), and 6.8 (95% CI: 4.6–10.1), respectively. Conclusions Our findings strongly support the continued need to avoid beginning adult life as obese, as obese young men experience an increased morbidity, including fatal morbidity, from many diseases throughout life.
Bi-objective release planning for evolving software systems

The release planning (RP) problem can be investigated from two dimensions -- what to release and when to release. We investigate the "what" to release decision in terms of which new features or change requests should be assigned and implemented in which releases of a software system. RP for evolving systems is challenging, because the new features might require changes to the existing system. A major drawback of existing RP methods is that, they do not consider the existing systems in making RP decisions. In this paper, we present a technique to detect coupling between features based on relatedness of the components that would implement the features. The components implementing the features are derived from change impact analysis. We integrate the results from feature coupling into a RP strategy that encourages the assignment of highly coupled features in the same release. This helps to avoid haphazard implementation of related features. We present a decision support approach that formulates the RP problem as a bi-objective optimization problem. Our Bi-Objective Release Planning for Evolving Systems (BORPES) is aimed at optimizing the value of release plans from both the business perspectives and the implementation perspectives. This paper presents BORPES in detail and reports on a proof-of-concept case study that investigates the applicability of the proposed approach. The bi-objective optimization offers a set of Pareto-optimal solutions.
Spatial Remapping in the Audio-tactile Ventriloquism Effect: A TMS Investigation on the Role of the Ventral Intraparietal Area

Previous studies have suggested that the putative human homologue of the ventral intraparietal area (hVIP) is crucially involved in the remapping of tactile information into external spatial coordinates and in the realignment of tactile and visual maps. It is unclear, however, whether hVIP is critical for the remapping process during audio-tactile cross-modal spatial interactions. The audio-tactile ventriloquism effect, where the perceived location of a sound is shifted toward the location of a synchronous but spatially disparate tactile stimulus, was used to probe spatial interactions in audio-tactile processing. Eighteen healthy volunteers were asked to report the perceived location of brief auditory stimuli presented from three different locations (left, center, and right). Auditory stimuli were presented either alone (unimodal stimuli) or concurrently to a spatially discrepant tactile stimulus applied to the left or right index finger (bimodal stimuli), with the hands adopting either an uncrossed or a crossed posture. Single pulses of TMS were delivered over the hVIP or a control site (primary somatosensory cortex, SI) 80 msec after trial onset. TMS to the hVIP, compared with the control SI-TMS, interfered with the remapping of touch into external space, suggesting that hVIP is crucially involved in transforming spatial reference frames across audition and touch.
Improved saliency detection based on superpixel clustering and saliency propagation

Saliency detection is useful for high level applications such as adaptive compression, image retargeting, object recognition, etc. In this paper, we introduce an effective region-based solution for saliency detection. We first use the adaptive mean shift algorithm to extract superpixels from the input image, then apply Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to cluster superpixels based on their color similarity, and finally calculate the saliency value for each cluster using compactness metric together with modified PageRank propagation. This solution is able to represent the image in a perceptually meaningful way and is robust to over-segmentation. It highlights salient regions with full resolution, well-defined boundary. Experimental results show that both the adaptive mean shift and the modified PageRank algorithm contribute substantially to the saliency detection result. In addition, the ROC analysis demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms five existing popular methods.
Predicting the Probability of Outbreeding Depression

Abstract: Fragmentation of animal and plant populations typically leads to genetic erosion and increased probability of extirpation. Although these effects can usually be reversed by re‐establishing gene flow between population fragments, managers sometimes fail to do so due to fears of outbreeding depression (OD). Rapid development of OD is due primarily to adaptive differentiation from selection or fixation of chromosomal variants. Fixed chromosomal variants can be detected empirically. We used an extended form of the breeders’ equation to predict the probability of OD due to adaptive differentiation between recently isolated population fragments as a function of intensity of selection, genetic diversity, effective population sizes, and generations of isolation. Empirical data indicated that populations in similar environments had not developed OD even after thousands of generations of isolation. To predict the probability of OD, we developed a decision tree that was based on the four variables from the breeders’ equation, taxonomic status, and gene flow within the last 500 years. The predicted probability of OD in crosses between two populations is elevated when the populations have at least one of the following characteristics: are distinct species, have fixed chromosomal differences, exchanged no genes in the last 500 years, or inhabit different environments. Conversely, the predicted probability of OD in crosses between two populations of the same species is low for populations with the same karyotype, isolated for <500 years, and that occupy similar environments. In the former case, we recommend crossing be avoided or tried on a limited, experimental basis. In the latter case, crossing can be carried out with low probability of OD. We used crosses with known results to test the decision tree and found that it correctly identified cases where OD occurred. Current concerns about OD in recently fragmented populations are almost certainly excessive.
Biologically-inspired reactive collision avoidance

Motivated by the design of a future autonomous, decentralized air traﬃc management system for runway-independent aircraft, a biologically-inspired reactive collision avoidance algorithm is developed for a simple model of managing multiple vehicle systems. Techniques using gyroscopic forces and scalar potentials result in all vehicles arriving at their destinations within a reasonable time, with no collisions. Demonstrations involving over 100 vehicles in a crowded cross-traﬃc setting with buildings have been simulate with no collisions observed. The control approach has two key features, both of which are desirable for on-board implementation: it uses only locally sensed information and is computationally cheap.
Physical Security for the μABYSS System

Open systems, now common in many small computers, have given the user logical access to all parts of his or her system. At the same time, the computing environment is moving out of the computing center and into the office and home, giving users physical access to their systems. This movement of the computing environment necessitates a mechanism to prevent the user from physically accessing certain parts of his or her system if logical security (of the type which limits the user's ability to make copies, change code, etc.) is to be reliable. This paper describes the development of a physical security system for protecting electronic circuits from unauthorized access. This system can be used to ensure that logical security mechanisms will remain uncompromised. The requirements, design criteria, and implementation of the system are discussed with an orientation towards practicality and manufacturing.
Using Situation Lattices to Model and Reason about Context

Much recent research has focused on using situations rather than individual pieces of context as a means to trigger adaptive system behaviour. While current research on situations emphasises their representation and composition, they do not provide an approach on how to organise and identify their occurrences efficiently. This paper describes how lattice theory can be utilised to organise situations, which reflects the internal structure of situations such as generalisation and dependence. We claim that situation lattices will prove beneficial in identifying situations, and maintaining the consistency and integrity of situations. They will also help in resolving the uncertainty issues inherent in context and situations by working with Bayesian Networks.
Macro-FF: Improving AI Planning with Automatically Learned Macro-Operators

Despite recent progress in AI planning, many benchmarks remain challenging for current planners. In many domains, the performance of a planner can greatly be improved by discovering and exploiting information about the domain structure that is not explicitly encoded in the initial PDDL formulation. In this paper we present and compare two automated methods that learn relevant information from previous experience in a domain and use it to solve new problem instances. Our methods share a common four-step strategy. First, a domain is analyzed and structural information is extracted, then macro-operators are generated based on the previously discovered structure. A filtering and ranking procedure selects the most useful macro-operators. Finally, the selected macros are used to speed up future searches. We have successfully used such an approach in the fourth international planning competition IPC-4. Our system, Macro-FF, extends Hoffmann's state-of-the-art planner FF 2.3 with support for two kinds of macro-operators, and with engineering enhancements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our ideas on benchmarks from international planning competitions. Our results indicate a large reduction in search effort in those complex domains where structural information can be inferred.