Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A randomized clinical trial of cisplatin/paclitaxel versus carboplatin/paclitaxel as first-line treatment of ovarian cancer.

BACKGROUND Despite considerable improvement in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer, the optimization of efficacy and tolerability remains an important issue. Therefore, we performed a randomized, phase III non-inferiority trial comparing paclitaxel plus cisplatin (PT) with paclitaxel plus carboplatin (TC) in patients with advanced ovarian cancer. METHODS A total of 798 patients with International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stage IIB-IV were randomly assigned to receive six courses of either PT or TC at 3-week intervals. The primary endpoint was the proportion of patients without progression at 2 years. Secondary endpoints included toxicity, response to treatment, quality of life, and overall and progression-free survival time. Quality of life was evaluated using the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer quality-of-life questionnaire (QLQ)-C30, version 2.0. Survival curves were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method, and hazard ratios were estimated using the Cox proportional hazards model. RESULTS The proportion of patients without progression at 2 years was not statistically significantly different between the two treatment arms (40.0% for PT versus 37.5% for TC, difference = 2.5%, one-sided 95% confidence interval [CI] = - infinity to 8.2%). Median progression-free survival time in the TC arm (17.2 months, 95% CI = 15.2 to 19.3 months) and the PT arm (19.1 months, 95% CI = 16.7 to 21.5 months) were also not statistically significantly different; the same was true of median overall survival time (43.3 months, 95% CI = 37.2 to 47.8 months versus 44.1 months, 95% CI = 40.2 to 49.4 months, for the TC and PT arms, respectively). The TC regimen was associated with a higher frequency of hematologic toxicity, but a lower frequency of gastrointestinal and neurologic toxicity, than the PT regimen. Mean global quality-of-life scores at the end of treatment were statistically significantly better in the TC arm than in the PT arm (65.25 versus 51.97, respectively; difference = -13.28, 95% CI = -18.88 to -7.68). CONCLUSION The TC regimen achieved comparable efficacy to the PT regimen but was associated with better tolerability and quality of life, and should, therefore, be considered as an important alternative for standard first-line chemotherapy in patients with advanced ovarian cancer.
Cognitive Interface System Design usability testing

Lack of human cognitive criteria incorporated in Interface System Design (ISD) may affect user's performance in system control. Perhaps, user's level of awareness is needed in dealing with constant system control in the production industries. By analyzing design principles, cognitive theories, models and understand user's cognitive limitations, helps the researcher to identify Cognitive ISD criteria which will be embedded in the development of system design. To date, in order to enhance human performance in using the system it is hope that by filling the gaps with the Cognitive ISD criteria in the system design will help users to increase the ease of use of the system. Seventeen participants involved in this study and they are required to complete the task scenarios by using the system which has been developed for the purpose of this study. Usability questionnaires will be given to the participants and will be further analyzed based on Situational Awareness categories.
How to diagnose and how to interpret microalbuminuria in the diabetic patient.

The definition of microalbuminuria was introduced 10 years ago [ 1 ] and since then it has been widely accepted. In recently published guidelines for the prevention of diabetic renal failure [2] it was stressed that the term microalbuminuria refers to a persistent increase in the albumin excretion rate to values between 20 and 200 ug/min (30 and 300 mg/day). A persistent increase is documented when these values are transgressed in at least two of three consecutive sterile timed urine specimens performed within 6-12 weeks. The presence of microalbuminuria permits the diagnosis of incipient (early) nephropathy [3], since microalbuminuria is not a marker but the first sign of diabetic nephropathy.
Behavioral transformation for algorithmic level IC design

An attempt was made to define the algorithmic level of design (also known as the behavioral level) and to provide the designer with the means to explore various design issues. Within the framework of the System Architect's Workbench, a new set of behavioral and structural transformations was developed to allow the interactive exploration of algorithmic-level design alternatives. A description is given of these transformations, and a set of examples is presented both to demonstrate the application of the transformations and to further illustrate their effects. >
Nonstaphylococcal Infections of Cardiac Implantable Electronic Devices

Background— Along with the rising use of cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs), there has been a disproportional increase in the number of infections of such devices. Little is known about nonstaphylococcal CIED-related infections, which make up ≈10% to 30% of all CIED infections. Methods and Results— A retrospective review of hospital records of patients admitted with a CIED-related infection was conducted in 4 academic hospitals in Houston, Tex, between 2002 and 2009. Of the 504 identified patients with CIED-related infection, 80 (16%) had a nonstaphylococcal infection and were the focus of this study. The mean duration of CIED placement before infection was 109±27 weeks, whereas 44% had their device previously manipulated within a mean of 29.5±6 weeks. The mean duration of clinical symptoms before admission was 48±12.8 days. Furthermore, 13 patients (16%) presented with CIED-related endocarditis. Although not described in prior reports, we identified 3 definite and 2 suspected cases of secondary Gram-negative bacteria seeding of the CIED. Inappropriate antimicrobial coverage was provided in ≈50% of the cases with a mean period of 2.1 days. The overall mortality rate was 4%. Conclusions— Nonstaphylococcal CIED-related infections are prevalent and diverse with a relatively low virulence and mortality rate. Because nonstaphylococcal organisms are capable of secondarily seeding the CIED, a high suspicion for CIED-related infection is warranted in patients with bloodstream infection. In patients with suspected CIED infection, adequate Gram-positive and Gram-negative antibacterial coverage should be administered until microbiological data become available.
Dynamic priority-based resource allocation policy for mixed traffic in long term evolution network

Drastic increase in mobile traffic due to smart phone applications require improved performance in terms of data rate and latency. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a potential component to address the increased mobile traffic, which is designed to be a high data rate with reduced latency to support better Quality-of-Service (QoS). Radio resource management of LTE system performs functions such as link adaptation, hybrid automatic repeat request, resource scheduling, power control and channel quality indicator feedback to improve the resource utilization. No standards downlink scheduler with QoS support that effectively utilizes the resources is available to the date. The existing work has immense scope of improvement. In this paper, we propose the dynamic priority-based resource allocation policy to distribute the available resources among the active users of mixed traffic in LTE based wireless network. The aim is to maintain the required QoS in terms of throughput, packet delay, spectral efficiency, capacity and coverage for each type of traffic. Various priorities have assigned to the packets coming from user applications. The resource allocation is based on the dynamic priorities to achieve the real-time as well as non real-time transmission. The simulation results shows the improvement in terms of throughput of video traffic among the mixed traffic over the LTE network compared to professional fair scheduler developed in NS3 for LTE downlink scheduling.
Congestion avoidance: Network based schemes solution

Network congestion control is a critical issue, especially in the growing size, demand, and speed (bandwidth) of the increasingly integrated services networks. Designing effective congestion control strategies for these networks is a challenge because of the complexity of the structure of the networks, nature of the services supported, and the variety of the dynamic parameters involved. Congestion is not a resource shortage problem but a dynamic allocation problem. This paper present congestion avoidance using network based schemes solution.
Effects of the knockdown of hypoxia inducible factor-1α expression by adenovirus-mediated shRNA on angiogenesis and tumor growth in hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines

Background/Aims Hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) is a central transcriptional factor involved in the cellular responses related to various aspects of cancer biology, including proliferation, survival, and angiogenesis, and the metabolism of the extracellular matrix in hypoxia. This study evaluated whether adenovirus-mediated small hairpin RNA (shRNA) against HIF-1α (shHIF-1α) inhibits cell proliferation and angiogenesis in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell lines. Methods Knockdown of HIF-1α expression was constructed by adenovirus-mediated RNA interference tools, and HCC cell lines infected with shHIF-1α coding virus were cultured under a hypoxia condition (1% O2) for 24 hours. Following infection, the expression levels of HIF-1α, angiogenesis factors, and matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) were examined using Western blotting. Cell proliferation and angiogenesis were measured by a cell proliferation assay (MTT assay) and an angiogenesis-related assay (invasion and tube-formation assay), respectively. Results Adenovirus mediated inhibition of HIF-1α induced suppression of tumor growth in HCC cell lines. It also down-regulated the expression of angiogenesis factor and MMP proteins. Angiogenesis as well as mobility of vascular cells to tumor was suppressed by adenovirus-mediated shHIF-1α-infected groups in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Conclusions These data suggest that adenovirus-mediated inhibition of HIF-1α inhibits the invasion, tube formation, and cell growth in HUVECs and HCC cells.
Fear of crime, personality and trait emotions: An empirical study

In recent years, scientific research has neglected the importance of personality and trait emotions in explaining fear of crime. Through a survey administered to 205 individuals, this study explored the relationship between individual variables and abstract fear of crime, perception of victimization risk (cognitive dimension), and behavioral expressions. A positive correlation between neuroticism (a personality dimension) and the abstract fear of crime was observed but not with the cognitive and behavioral dimensions. It was also found that trait fear emotion correlated only with the abstract fear of crime. Contrary to what was hypothesized, social desirability was positively correlated with abstract fear of crime, cognitive dimensions and behavioral dimensions in both men and women. Lastly, regression models revealed that distinct variables explaining each of the fear of crime dimensions exist. The implications of the findings are discussed herein.
Hidden topics modeling approach for review quality prediction and classification

The automatic assessment of online review's quality is becoming important with the number of reviews increasing rapidly. In order to help determining review's quality, some online services provide a system where users can evaluate or feedback the helpfulness of review as crowdsourcing knowledge. This approach has shortcomings of sparse voted data and richer-get-richer problem in which favor reviews are voted frequently more than others. In this work, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method to exploit hidden topics distribution information of all reviews and propose supervisor prediction model based on probabilistic meaning of the review's quality. We also propose a deep neural network to classify the review in quality and validate our proposals within some real reviews datasets. We demonstrate that using hidden topics distribution information could be helpful to improve the accuracy of review quality prediction and classification.
CONTENT-BASED RETRIEVAL FROM UNSTRUCTURED AUDIO DATABASES USING AN ECOLOGICAL ACOUSTICS TAXONOMY

In this paper we describe a method to search for environmental sounds in unstructured databases with user-submitted material. The goal of the project is to facilitate the design of soundscapes in virtual environments. We analyze the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a learning algorithm to classify sounds according to a general sound events taxonomy based on ecological acoustics. In our experiments, we obtain accuracies above 80% using crossvalidation. Finally, we present a web prototype that integrates the classifier to rank sounds according to their relation to the taxonomy concepts.
Observability analysis for mobile robot localization

In this paper, the problem of localize two mobile robots is considered. The robots are equipped with proprioceptive sensors (like encoders) and exteroceptive sensors able to provide relative observations between them. In these observations, one robot detects and identifies the other one and measures some relative quantity. An observability analysis is performed by taking into account the system nonlinearities and for four different relative observations. The theoretical results are validated by simulations and experiments carried out on real platforms. In these experiments, an extended Kalman filter is adopted to fuse the information coming from the encoders and the sensors performing the observations.
Virtual dissection of subcortical non-image forming visual pathways in the human brain with DTI tractography

This thesis presents novel evidence in support of a functional role for the anatomy of subcortical non-image forming white matter connections in the human brain. Observations of preserved ability to process threat in the absence of visual awareness in cortically blind patients suggest the existence of an older, primitive and phylogenetically conserved visual circuit that processes orientation to threat. Three pathways including the retinotectal tract, the stria terminalis and a putative pathway for processing visual threat connecting the superior colliculus and the amygdala via the pulvinar were virtually dissected with DTI tractography in healthy participants in vivo. Additionally, connectivity strength of dissected pathways were tested as predictors of performance on behavioural eye-tracking paradigms designed to optimise reflexive orienting responses to salient peripheral visual stimuli including abrupt onsets and threat. Behavioural findings demonstrated a temporal hemifield advantage for short latency reflexive saccades performed within a ‘gap’ paradigm, supporting the prediction that the superior colliculus receives retinal afferents via the retinotectal pathway that summon reflexive saccades. Saccadic bias to orient to threatening stimuli on a temporal order saccade decision task also demonstrated an advantage in the temporal hemifield, consistent with predictions that retinal afferents to the superior colliculus contribute to a subcortical threat mediating circuit connecting the superior colliculus, pulvinar and amygdala. Connectivity strength of anatomical demonstrations of a putative threat mediating connection between the superior colliculus, pulvinar and amygdala predicted a bias to orient to visual threat, thereby validating anatomical dissections presented here with functional evidence. Topography of the SC-amygdala pathway demonstrated a trajectory from the pulvinar to the lateral amygdala. The anatomy of the outflow of the amygdala connecting to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis was also considered, demonstrating anatomically distinct trajectories of the two pathways despite occupying topographies in close proximity. Stria terminalis connectivity strength also predicted a bias to threat, providing novel evidence for a functional role in selective orienting to threat, potentially driven by superior-colliculus afferents to amygdala nuclei.
Application program for prediction of the type 2 diabetes in Thai people using artificial neural network

Among non-communicable diseases, diabetes kills the most people in Asia and is only becoming more prevalent in this region. Analyzing Type 2 diabetes risk factors utilizing prediction tools instead of blood testing is a challenge for accurate diabetes diagnosis. Recently, many researchers have studied the risk factors of diabetes by using Logistic Regression, Radial Basis and Back-propagation Neural Network (BNN) and applying them as a tool for diabetes prediction. This paper presents the new factors of smoking and alcohol consumption to improve performance in diabetes prediction. The predictive role of some traditional factors, i.e., body mass index, blood pressure and waist circumference and Family History (FMH) are also improved by adjusting the previously accepted ranges. The newly proposed diabetes prediction method is based on BNN. The sample data consists of 2,000 Thai people presenting at Bangkok hospital, Thailand from 2010 to 2012. From these experiments, it was found that an appropriate number of hidden nodes was equal to 50 nodes. Each proposed factor, i.e., FMH, alcohol consumption factor, smoking factor, and WC gave a better accuracy (correct in prediction) compared with a baseline model. Their accuracies were 83.35%, 83.50%, 83.60% and 83.65%, respectively. Subsequently, the new risk factor model performance was increased by tuning the neural network parameter learning rate. Our previously proposed factors for tuning BNN parameters introduced a high accuracy compared with the baseline model up to 1.2%. In this paper, the new proposed factors model introduces a better performance in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) than the baseline factors model up to 25.75%, which are trained by the same sample data (2000 cases). Finally, the new model is implemented to be the diabetes prediction tool based on PHP web application, which works in conjunction with Matlab for predicting calculation. The threshold value returned is used to make a decision of whether or not patients have diabetes.
The impact of minimum wage legislation in developing countries where coverage is incomplete.

This paper examines the impact of minimum wage legislation in developing countries where coverage is incomplete. Using a rich data set from Ghana, it estimates the extent to which a binding minimum wage alters employment in both the formal and informal sectors of the labor market. The data reveal that Ghana’s minimum wage policies during the 1970s and 1980s led to a reduction of formal sector jobs and an increase in informal sector jobs. In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that a large proportion of the displaced workers from the formal sector ended up working in the informal sector.
The Application and Design of Second Order EKF Based on GPS/DR Integration for Land Vehicle Navigation

This paper proposes a land vehicle navigation algorithm based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the dead reckoning (DR). To achieve high location and velocity accuracy, second order extended Kalman filter (SEKF) is introduced for GPS/DR integrated navigation system. And the algorithm of the first extended Kalman filter (FEKF) and the second EKF (SEKF) are given. Further, the state models and measurement models of GPS/DR are set up. For comparision purpose, the algorithm performance of FEKF and SEKF is contrasted. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SEKF algorithm gives much higher navigation accuracy than FEKF algorithm for land vehicle navigation. The algorithm has obvious advantages of high accuracy.
Determinism analysis in the Mercury compiler

Mercury is a new purely declarative logic programming language. The Mercury determin-ism system allows programmers to specify which predicates never fail and which predicates succeed at most once. This information allows the compiler to check the program for errors , pinpointing predicates that do not satisfy their declarations. This makes programmers signiicantly more productive and enhances the reliability of their programs. The Mercury compiler also uses determinism information to generate much faster code than any other logic programming system. This paper presents the algorithms used by the Mercury compiler to infer determinism information and to detect determinism errors.
Setting “Spanish legacies” into further context: some findings and thoughts from CILS4EU

ABSTRACT This contribution compares some major findings of “Spanish Legacies” to findings from the CILS4EU study that has been conducted in four other European countries. Despite the differences in the immigration history and the composition of the immigrant youth, basic results of psychosocial adaptation are surprisingly similar for England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This confirms the mostly optimistic picture of the future of the second generation in Europe as drawn for Spain. In a sense, the similarities suggest that the role of the receiving context might be less important than is expected in overarching theoretical frameworks such as “segmented assimilation”. Some aspects of integration that are not covered in “Spanish Legacies” could raise more doubts on the smoothness of the adaptation processes for some immigrants groups.
Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis

The face is one of the most powerful channels of nonverbal communication.Facial expression provides cues about emotion, intention, alertness, pain,personality, regulates interpersonal behavior, and communicates psychiatric and biomedical status among other functions.Within the past 15 years, there has been increasing interest in automated facial expression analysis within the computer vision and machine learning communities. This paper reviews fundamental approaches to facial measurement by behavioral scientists and current efforts in automated facial expression recognition.
THE CHOICE OF IT GOVERNANCE MODES MADE BY ORGANIZATIONS FROM THE INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE : A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK DEVELOPMENT

This study uses the institutional theory as a lens for explaining choice of IT governance modes in organizations. Reasons are given to show how an IT governance mode can in itself be considered a legitimized institution. A conceptual framework is then developed, and several hypotheses are presented. The framework considers the IT governance modes from a non-rational perspective. It posits that coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures have an influence on the choice of IT