Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Prospective, Randomized Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study of Safety and Efficacy of a High-Concentration Full-Spectrum Extract of Ashwagandha Root in Reducing Stress and Anxiety in Adults

Context: Stress is a state of mental or emotional strain or tension, which can lead to underperformance and adverse clinical conditions. Adaptogens are herbs that help in combating stress. Ayurvedic classical texts, animal studies and clinical studies describe Ashwagandha as a safe and effective adaptogen. Aims: The aim of the study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a high-concentration full-spectrum extract of Ashwagandha roots in reducing stress and anxiety and in improving the general well-being of adults who were under stress. Settings and Design: Single center, prospective, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Materials and Methods: A total of 64 subjects with a history of chronic stress were enrolled into the study after performing relevant clinical examinations and laboratory tests. These included a measurement of serum cortisol, and assessing their scores on standard stress-assessment questionnaires. They were randomized to either the placebo control group or the study drug treatment group, and were asked to take one capsule twice a day for a period of 60 days. In the study drug treatment group, each capsule contained 300 mg of high-concentration full-spectrum extract from the root of the Ashwagandha plant. During the treatment period (on Day 15, Day 30 and Day 45), a follow-up telephone call was made to all subjects to check for treatment compliance and to note any adverse reactions. Final safety and efficacy assessments were done on Day 60. Statistical Analysis: t-test, Mann-Whitney test. Results: The treatment group that was given the high-concentration full-spectrum Ashwagandha root extract exhibited a significant reduction (P<0.0001) in scores on all the stress-assessment scales on Day 60, relative to the placebo group. The serum cortisol levels were substantially reduced (P=0.0006) in the Ashwagandha group, relative to the placebo group. The adverse effects were mild in nature and were comparable in both the groups. No serious adverse events were reported. Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that a high-concentration full-spectrum Ashwagandha root extract safely and effectively improves an individual's resistance towards stress and thereby improves self-assessed quality of life.
Statistical Analysis of Solar and Stellar Properties

We review the results of Robles et al. [1] in which a simultaneous multi-parameter comparison of solar and stellar properties and environments is presented. This 11-parameter analysis quantifies the (a)typicality of the Sun: we obtain a reduced solar χ /11 = 0.76 ± 0.09 and a probability of 29% ± 11% that a star selected at random has a lower χ value than solar. These two values are consistent with the idea that the Sun is a star selected at random rather than a special star. We also discuss the dependence of the results on different parameter and dataset selection criteria.
Copeland Dueling Bandits

A version of the dueling bandit problem is addressed in which a Condorcet winner may not exist. Two algorithms are proposed that instead seek to minimize regret with respect to the Copeland winner, which, unlike the Condorcet winner, is guaranteed to exist. The first, Copeland Confidence Bound (CCB), is designed for small numbers of arms, while the second, Scalable Copeland Bandits (SCB), works better for large-scale problems. We provide theoretical results bounding the regret accumulated by CCB and SCB, both substantially improving existing results. Such existing results either offer bounds of the form O(K log T) but require restrictive assumptions, or offer bounds of the form O(K2 log T) without requiring such assumptions. Our results offer the best of both worlds: O (K log T) bounds without restrictive assumptions.
Thermal and material characterisation of coated lightweight disc brake rotor

Environmental concerns linked to CO2 emissions have placed the automotive industry under considerable pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of the vehicles that they produce. One way forward involves the use of alternative lightweight materials. The use of aluminium alloy in a brake rotor has the potential to save around 20kg in unsprung mass on a medium sized passenger car. A full scale prototype lightweight coated ventilated aluminium alloy (6082) brake rotor was manufactured to investigate the thermal performance under drag brake test conditions. The brake rotor’s rubbing surface was coated with alumina layer using a plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) process. The ventilated brake rotor geometry contributes to the ability of the structure to dissipate heat through the inclusion of an array of appropriately configured vents and so has further bearing on the ability of the rotor to run cool. It is also feasible to explore the impact of vane design on the cooling of the rotor since the vented section of the rotor can be easily reconfigured using the current prototype. Experiments were conducted using a brake dynamometer. Brake rotor rubbing surface temperature, hydraulic pressure, rotational speed and brake torque were monitored during the test. The coefficient of friction was found to be around 0.5. Abaqus software was used to generate a three dimensional finite element model of a section of the coated brake rotor. The simulation results were found to be in good agreement with the experimental results when a heat transfer coefficient of 30 W/m2K was specified on all free surfaces. It was shown that coating thickness has a minimum effect on the substrate temperature. In parallel, a wear analysis has also been carried out using a pin-on-disc experimental setup. The mass of the friction material and the small discs were measured before and after the test. The wear coefficient for both conventional grey cast iron (GCI) and coated aluminium alloy were also measured and compared. It was found that wear rate of the PEO coated disc is about 15 times lower than the GCI. The wear rate of the friction material when run against the PEO coating was about 5 times less than when the same material was run against cast iron, even though the friction coefficient was on average higher (0.6 of 0.5)
Effect of Donor Age on the Proportion of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Derived from Anterior Cruciate Ligaments

The characteristics of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), such as proportion and multilineage potential, can be affected by donor age. However, the qualitative and quantitative features of ACL MSCs isolated from younger and older individuals have not yet been compared directly. This study assessed the phenotypic and functional differences in ACL-MSCs isolated from younger and older donors and evaluated the correlation between ACL-MSC proportion and donor age. Torn ACL remnants were harvested from 36 patients undergoing ACL reconstruction (young: 29.67 ± 10.92 years) and 33 undergoing TKA (old: 67.96 ± 5.22 years) and the proportion of their MSCs were measured. The mean proportion of MSCs was slightly higher in older ACL samples of the TKA group than of the younger ACL reconstruction group (19.69 ± 8.57% vs. 15.33 ± 7.49%, p = 0.024), but the proportions of MSCs at passages 1 and 2 were similar. MSCs from both groups possessed comparable multilineage potentiality, as they could be differentiated into adipocytes, osteocytes, and chondrocytes at similar level. No significant correlations were observed between patient age and MSC proportions at passages 0–2 or between age and MSC proportion in both the ACL reconstruction and TKA groups. Multiple linear regression analysis found no significant predictor of MSC proportion including donor age for each passage. Microarray analysis identified several genes that were differentially regulated in ACL-MSCs from old TKA patients compared to young ACL reconstruction patients. Genes of interest encode components of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and may thus play a crucial role in modulating tissue homeostasis, remodeling, and repair in response to damage or disease. In conclusion, the proportion of freshly isolated ACL-MSC was higher in elderly TKA patients than in younger patients with ACL tears, but their phenotypic and multilineage potential were comparable.
Mutations at the Galactose-1-P-Uridyltransferase Gene in Infants with a Positive Galactosemia Newborn Screening Test

Newborn screening for galactosemia yields a high number of false-positive results. Confirmatory DNA testing for unknown galactosemia mutations on the initial positive sample using novel techniques of mutation detection tenders itself to reduce the recall rate. The potential benefits of confirmatory DNA testing, however, could be offset by the detection of a high percentage of galactosemia carriers, Duarte/galactosemia compound heterozygotes, and infants with benign sequence changes in the galactose-1-phosphate uridyltransferase (GALT) gene among infants with a positive biochemical screening test. Our aim was to determine the frequency and allelic distribution of all sequence changes in the GALT gene in 110 newborns with a positive total galactose screening test among 43,688 Austrian newborns screened consecutively. We found that only 20 of the 110 probands carried at least one known or novel candidate galactosemia mutation (one galactosemia homozygote, 7 Duarte/galactosemia compounds, 12 carriers) as judged by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and cleavage fragment length polymorphism analysis. Four novel galactosemia candidate mutations (Q9H, A46fsdelCAGCT, M129T, L342I) were identified. Sixty-seven probands had no detectable sequence changes and 23 carried only the benign Duarte or Los Angeles variant alleles or silent mutations. We conclude that a rapid and automatable confirmation test for unknown GALT mutations, e.g. on a high-density oligonucleotide array basis, has the potential to lower the recall rate of galactosemia screening in our population by about five-fold from 0.25 to 0.046%. Further research, however, will be required before the development of such a test can be advocated.
Multi-channel magnetic induction tomography measurement system

Magnetic induction tomography(MIT) is a noninvasive and contactless medical imaging technique. The 16 channels of MIT system is showed in the paper, which image for the low conductivity object with working at 1MHz. In the study, we use the water tanker filled with salt solution and the different conductivity agar blocks to simulate the human brain with edema or hematoma. The each sensor is composed of the excitation coil, the two detection coils, a preamplifier board and a power amplifier board, which were fixed by four plastic columns. This paper researches the sensitivity and stability of single sensor unit, and the phase sensitivity of the system is 0.29°/S·m−1 and the phase drift is in the range of −0.02° to +0.06° over 30 minutes. Finally, the 2-dimensional images of conductivity distribution are obtained using the inverse distance weighted spatial interpolation algorithm of and the direct projection way.
Drug transport to brain with targeted liposomes

SummaryAntibody-conjugated liposomes or immunoliposomes are particulate drug carriers that can be used to direct encapsulated drug molecules to diseased tissues or organs. The present review discusses examples of successful applications of this technology to achieve drug transport across the blood-brain barrier. In addition, information will be provided on practical aspects such as phospholipid compositions of liposomes, antibody coupling technologies, large-scale production of liposomes, and obstacles related to drug loading of the carrier. Prospects of future uses of immunoliposome-based drug delivery systems such as gene therapy of the brain and clinical trials are discussed.
Development and validation of Arabic version of the pain catastrophizing scale

Introduction: The pain catastrophizing scale (PCS) is the most widely used tool to assess pain catastrophizing. The aim of this study was to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the PCS questionnaire in Arabic. Methods: A systematic translation process was used to translate the original English PCS into Arabic. After the pilot study, we validated our version among patients with chronic pain at two tertiary care centers. We tested the reliability of our version using internal consistency and test-retest reliability. We examined the validity by assessing construct validity, concurrent validity (by investigating the associations with Brief Pain Inventory [BPI]), and face validity. Results: A total of 113 subjects (50 men, 63 women) were included in the study. Cronbach's α was 0.94 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.92–0.96), and interclass correlation coefficients was 0.83 (95% CI: 0.77–0.89) for the total scale. There was no statistically significant difference in the total PCS scores between patients who reported experiencing current pain and those who did not. Among patients who reported having current pain, pain severity was weakly associated with the total PCS scores (r = 0.22, P = 0.03). PCS and its subscales were not statistically significantly associated with any of the BPI items. Nonetheless, patients who were diagnosed with neuropathic pain had statistically significantly higher scores on the total PCS, rumination, and helplessness subscales. Most patients found the PCS questions to be clear and easy to understand, and thought the questionnaire items covered all their problem areas regarding their pain catastrophizing. Conclusion: Our translated version of PCS is reliable and valid for use among Arabic-speaking patients.
First Report of a Deletion Encompassing an Entire Exon in the Homogentisate 1,2-Dioxygenase Gene Causing Alkaptonuria

Alkaptonuria is often diagnosed clinically with episodes of dark urine, biochemically by the accumulation of peripheral homogentisic acid and molecularly by the presence of mutations in the homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase gene (HGD). Alkaptonuria is invariably associated with HGD mutations, which consist of single nucleotide variants and small insertions/deletions. Surprisingly, the presence of deletions beyond a few nucleotides among over 150 reported deleterious mutations has not been described, raising the suspicion that this gene might be protected against the detrimental mechanisms of gene rearrangements. The quest for an HGD mutation in a proband with AKU revealed with a SNP array five large regions of homozygosity (5–16 Mb), one of which includes the HGD gene. A homozygous deletion of 649 bp deletion that encompasses the 72 nucleotides of exon 2 and surrounding DNA sequences in flanking introns of the HGD gene was unveiled in a proband with AKU. The nature of this deletion suggests that this in-frame deletion could generate a protein without exon 2. Thus, we modeled the tertiary structure of the mutant protein structure to determine the effect of exon 2 deletion. While the two β-pleated sheets encoded by exon 2 were missing in the mutant structure, other β-pleated sheets are largely unaffected by the deletion. However, nine novel α-helical coils substituted the eight coils present in the native HGD crystal structure. Thus, this deletion results in a deleterious enzyme, which is consistent with the proband’s phenotype. Screening for mutations in the HGD gene, particularly in the Middle East, ought to include this exon 2 deletion in order to determine its frequency and uncover its origin.
Multi-Stage Frame Error Concealment Algorithm for H.264/AVC Based on Estimated MB Feature

This paper proposes a novel multi-stage frame error concealment (EC) algorithm for H.264/AVC based on estimated MB modes and MVs. The proposed method first divides the lost frame into three regions according to MB features in previous frame: which are regular motion region within the object and background, irregular motion region mainly including border areas between various parts of moving object and background, and intra-coded MB region. Then we recover the three regions sequentially by utilizing suitable schemes, motion vector copy method for regular motion region, improved optical flow based method for irregular motion region, and bilinear interpolation (BI) or directional interpolation (DI) method for intra-coded MB region. Experimental results show that our proposed adaptive algorithm can effectively utilize the advantages of classic methods and obtain better recovery performance both in subjective and objective video quality at low computational complexity, and our method effectively prevents the error propagation in the following frames and thus improves the reconstruction quality of the entire video sequence.
Estimation of recursive order number of a photocopied document through entropy from gray level co-occurrence matrix

Photocopy documents are very common in our normal life. In country like India, people are permitted to carry and present photocopied documents to avoid damages to the original documents. But this provision is misused for temporary benefits by fabricating fake photocopied documents. Fabrication of fake photocopied document is possible only in 2nd and higher recursive order of photocopies. Whenever a photocopied document is submitted in place of original document, it may be required to check its originality. When the document is 1st order photocopy, chances of fabrication can be ignored. On the other hand when the photocopy recursive order is 2 or above, probability of fabrication may be suspected. Hence when a photocopied document is presented instead of original document, the recursive order number of photocopy is to be estimated to ascertain the originality. This requirement demands to investigate a method to estimate order number of photocopy. It is noticed that the degradation in photocopy obtained increases as the recursive order of photocopy increases. Considering the degradation as a feature in this work, a method based on entropy from gray level co-occurrence matrix is proposed to estimate the recursive order number of the photocopied document through computing degradation rate. A detailed experimentation is performed on a generated data set and the method exhibits efficiency close to 95%.
The AMIDA 2009 meeting transcription system

We present the AMIDA 2009 system for participation in the NIST RT’2009 STT evaluations. Systems for close-talking, far field and speaker attributed STT conditions are described. Im- provements to our previous systems are: segmentation and diar- isation; stacked bottle-neck posterior feature extraction; fMPE training of acoustic models; adaptation on complete meetings; improvements to WFST decoding; automatic optimisation of decoders and system graphs. Overall these changes gave a 6- 13% relative reduction in word error rate while at the same time reducing the real-time factor by a factor of five and using con- siderably less data for acoustic model training.
Joint Memory-Based Learning of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies in Multiple Languages

In this paper we present a system submitted to the CoNLL Shared Task 2009 performing the identification and labeling of syntactic and semantic dependencies in multiple languages. Dependencies are truly jointly learned, i.e. as if they were a single task. The system works in two phases: a classification phase in which three classifiers predict different types of information, and a ranking phase in which the output of the classifiers is combined.
Towards Robust Semantic Segmentation using Deep Fusion

Robust semantic scene understanding of unstructured environments is critical for robots operating in the real world. Several inherent natural factors such as shadows, glare and snow make this problem highly challenging, especially using RGB images. In this paper, we propose the use of multispectral and multimodal images to increase robustness of segmentation in real-world outdoor environments. Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architectures define the state of the art in various segmentation tasks. However, architectures that incorporate fusion have not been sufficiently explored. We introduce early and late fusion architectures for dense pixel-wise segmentation from RGB, Near-InfraRed (NIR) channels, and depth data. We identify data augmentation strategies that enable training of very deep fusion models using small datasets. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate our approach and show it exceeds several other state-of-the-art architectures. In addition, we present experimental results for segmentation under challenging realworld conditions. The dataset and demos are publicly available at http://deepscene.cs. uni-freiburg.de.
Computer-Aided Cobb Measurement Based on Automatic Detection of Vertebral Slopes Using Deep Neural Network

Objective To develop a computer-aided method that reduces the variability of Cobb angle measurement for scoliosis assessment. Methods A deep neural network (DNN) was trained with vertebral patches extracted from spinal model radiographs. The Cobb angle of the spinal curve was calculated automatically from the vertebral slopes predicted by the DNN. Sixty-five in vivo radiographs and 40 model radiographs were analyzed. An experienced surgeon performed manual measurements on the aforementioned radiographs. Two examiners used both the proposed and the manual measurement methods to analyze the aforementioned radiographs. Results For model radiographs, the intraclass correlation coefficients were greater than 0.98, and the mean absolute differences were less than 3°. This indicates that the proposed system showed high repeatability for measurements of model radiographs. For the in vivo radiographs, the reliabilities were lower than those from the model radiographs, and the differences between the computer-aided measurement and the manual measurement by the surgeon were higher than 5°. Conclusion The variability of Cobb angle measurements can be reduced if the DNN system is trained with enough vertebral patches. Training data of in vivo radiographs must be included to improve the performance of DNN. Significance Vertebral slopes can be predicted by DNN. The computer-aided system can be used to perform automatic measurements of Cobb angle, which is used to make reliable and objective assessments of scoliosis.