Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EKF-SLAM and Machine Learning Techniques for Visual Robot Navigation

In this work we propose the use of machine lear\-ning techniques to improve Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and visual information for robot navigation. We are using the Viola and Jones approach for looking specific visual landmarks in environment. The landmarks are used to improve the robot localization in the EKF-SLAM system. Our experiments validate the efficiency of our algorithm.
Analysis and design for sliding mode controlled buck inverter based on reference sliding surface and state variables surface

This paper presents a detailed and systematic analysis on the design of sliding mode control for the buck DC-AC inverter. The new inverter is composed of two symmetrical current bi-directional buck converters controlled by two independent controllers. The sliding mode motion and domain is researched by dividing the sliding surface into reference sliding surface and state variables surface. A proposed range for sliding surface coefficients is obtained conveniently. The hysteresis band method is used in the system to limit the switching frequency, and a more precise mode is established to evaluate it. The steady-state error in output voltage and the influence of ESR are analyzed by applying the new sliding surface. Finally, the simulation and experimental results validate the analysis in this paper.
Identification of the Multifaceted Chemopreventive Activity of Curcumin Against the Carcinogenic Potential of the Food Additive, KBrO3

Background: Potassium bromate (KBrO3), a food additive, has been used in many bakery products as an oxidizing agent. It has been shown to induce renal cancer in many in-vitro and in-vivo experimental models Objectives: This study evaluated the carcinogenic potential of potassium bromate (KBrO3) and the chemopreventive mechanisms of the anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory phytochemical, curcumin against KBrO3-induced carcinogenicity. Method: Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) cytotoxicity assay and morphological characteristics were used to assess curcumin's cytoprotective potential against KBrO3 toxicity. To assess the chemopreventive potential of curcumin against KBrO3-induced oxidative insult, intracellular H2O2 and the nuclear concen-tration of the DNA adduct 8-OHdG were measured. PCR array, qRT-PCR, and western blot analysis were used to identify dysregulated genes by KBrO3 exposure. Furthermore, immunofluorescence was used to evaluate the ciliary loss and the disturbance of cellular tight junction induced by KBrO3. Results: Oxidative stress assays showed that KBrO3 increased the levels of intracellular H2O2 and the DNA adduct 8-OHdG. Combination of curcumin with KBrO3 efficiently reduced the level of H2O2 and 8-OHdG while up-regulating the expression of catalase. PCR array, qRT-PCR, and western blot analysis revealed that KBrO3 dysregulated multiple genes involved in inflammation, proliferation, and apoptosis, namely CTGF, IL-1, and TRAF3. Moreover, qRT-PCR and immunofluorescence studies showed that KBrO3 negatively affected the tight junctional protein (ZO-1) and induced a degeneration of primary ciliary proteins. The negative impact of KBrO3 on cilia was markedly repressed by curcumin. Conclusion: Curcumin could potentially be used as a protective agent against carcinogenicity of KBrO3.
A 1 . 1Gb / s 115-pJ / bit Configurable MIMO Detector Using 0 . 13-μ m CMOS Technology

This brief presents an efficient and configurable multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) signal detector design solution and its high-speed IC implementation. This detector can support 2 × 2/3 × 3/4 × 4 MIMO and quadratic phase-shift keying/16-state quadratic amplitude modulation (QAM)/64-state QAM modulation configurations. The detection algorithm employs an early-pruned technique that can reduce up to 46% node extensions in the K-Best sphere decoder while maintaining an almost maximum-likelihood performance. A parallel multistage folded very large scale integration architecture is accordingly developed that can achieve high detection throughput and configurability. To further improve the IC implementation efficiency, this detector also uses a candidate-sharing structure for partial Euclidean distance calculation and a two-stage sorter for survivor node selection. A test chip has been fabricated using 0.13-μm single-polyand eight-metal (1P8M) CMOS technology with a core area of 3.9 mm. Operating at 1.2-V supply with 137.5-MHz clock, the chip achieves 1.1-Gb/s throughput and consumes 115 pJ per bit, representing 40% more energy efficient than state of the art in the open literature.
Computational Characterization of Mental States: A Natural Language Processing Approach

Psychiatry is an area of medicine that strongly bases its diagnoses on the psychiatrists subjective appreciation. The task of diagnosis loosely resembles the common pipelines used in supervised learning schema. Therefore, we propose to augment the psychiatrists diagnosis toolbox with an artiﬁcial intelligence system based on natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. This approach has been validated in many works in which the performance of the diagnosis has been increased with the use of automatic classi-ﬁcation.
Interactive search for action and motion planning with dynamics

This paper proposes an interactive search approach, termed INTERACT, which couples sampling-based motion planning with action planning in order to effectively solve the combined task and motion planning problem. INTERACT is geared towards scenarios involving a mobile robot operating in a fully known environment consisting of static and movable objects. INTERACT makes it possible to specify a task in the planning domain definition language (PDDL) and automatically computes a collision-free and dynamically feasible trajectory that enables the robot to accomplish the task. The coupling of sampling-based motion planning with action planning is made possible by expanding a tree of feasible motions and partitioning it into equivalence classes based on the task predicates. Action plans provide guidance as to which a equivalence class should be further expanded. Information gathered during the motion tree expansion is used to adjust the action costs in order to effectively guide the expansion towards the goal. This interactive process of selecting an equivalence class, expanding the motion tree to implement its action plan and updating the action costs and plans to reflect the progress made is repeated until a solution is found. Experimental validation is provided in simulation using a robotic vehicle to accomplish sophisticated pick-and-place tasks. Comparisons to previous work show significant improvements.
Macroevolutionary consequences of profound climate change on niche evolution in marine molluscs over the past three million years

In order to predict the fate of biodiversity in a rapidly changing world, we must first understand how species adapt to new environmental conditions. The long-term evolutionary dynamics of species' physiological tolerances to differing climatic regimes remain obscure. Here, we unite palaeontological and neontological data to analyse whether species' environmental tolerances remain stable across 3 Myr of profound climatic changes using 10 phylogenetically, ecologically and developmentally diverse mollusc species from the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains, USA. We additionally investigate whether these species' upper and lower thermal tolerances are constrained across this interval. We find that these species' environmental preferences are stable across the duration of their lifetimes, even when faced with significant environmental perturbations. The results suggest that species will respond to current and future warming either by altering distributions to track suitable habitat or, if the pace of change is too rapid, by going extinct. Our findings also support methods that project species' present-day environmental requirements to future climatic landscapes to assess conservation risks.
(Benzophenone imine-κN)chlorido(hydridotripyrazolylborato)(triphenylphosphine)ruthenium(II) diethyl ether solvate

The reaction of RuCl(Tp)(Ph3P)2, where Tp is [(CH)3N2]3BH, with benzophenone imine leads to the formation of the title compound, [Ru(C9H10BN6)Cl(C13H11N)(C18H15P)]·C4H10O. The environment about the Ru atom corresponds to a slightly distorted octahedron and the bite angle of the Tp ligand produces an average N—Ru—N angle of 86.3 (9)°. The three Ru—N(Tp) bond lengths [2.117 (2), 2.079 (2) and 2.084 (2) Å] are slightly longer than the average distance (2.038 Å) in other ruthenium–Tp complexes.
Analysis of carrier signal injection based sensorless control of PMSM drives under limited inverter switching frequency condition

This paper presents the carrier signal injection based sensorless control of permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) drives with limited inverter switching frequency. Accounting for the influence of stator resistances, the amplitude of carrier current utilised for position tracking can be maximized under an optimized injection frequency, with which signal to noise (S/N) ratio of carrier signal can be significantly boosted and consequently the steady-state performance during sensorless operation can be guaranteed. Further, it is deduced that this optimized injection frequency is mainly related to the ratio of stator resistance to incremental inductance. In addition, the carrier current responses with reduced switching frequency are also examined experimentally. These analyses can provide guidelines to select appropriate carrier injection signal under limited inverter switching frequency conditions. All the theoretical analyses are validated by experiments on a laboratory interior PM (IPM) machine.
Real-time rendering of complex, heterogeneous mesostructure on deformable surfaces

In this thesis, we present a new approach to rendering deforming textured surfaces that takes into account variations in elasticity of the materials represented in the texture. Our approach is based on dynamically warping the parameterisation so that parameterisation distortion in a deformed pose is locally similar to the rest pose; this similarity results in apparent rigidity of the mapped texture material. The warps are also weighted, so that users have control over what appears rigid and what not. Our algorithms achieve real-time generation of warps, including their application in rendering the textured surfaces. A key factor to the achieved performance is the exploitation of the parallel nature of local optimisations by implementing the algorithms on the GPU. We demonstrate our approach with several example applications. We show warps on models using standard texture mapping as well as Ptex. We also show warps using static or dynamic/procedural texture detail, while the surface that it is mapped on deforms. A variety of use-cases is also provided: generating warps for looping animations, generating out-of-core warps of film-quality assets, approximating high-resolution warps with lower-resolution texture-space Linear Blend Skinning and dynamically preserving texture features of a model being interactively edited by an artist.
Hemimegalencephaly: Prenatal Diagnosis and Outcome

Hemimegalencephaly (HME) is a developmental abnormality of the central nervous system (CNS) which may present as either a syndromic or isolated case. Here, we present two cases of early prenatal diagnosis of HME. Prenatal CNS ultrasound and MRI in the first case revealed ventricular asymmetry, midline shift with displacement of the occipital lobe across the midline, large dilatation mainly at the posterior horn of the left lateral ventricle, and a head circumference in the 90th percentile without involvement of the brain stem and cerebellum, as well as abdominal lymphangioma. Right hemispherectomy was performed at 3 months of age due to intractable seizures. The pathological specimen showed findings characteristic of HME, including a disorganized cytoarchitecture with lack of neuronal lamination, focal areas of polymicrogyria, and neuronal heterotopias with dysplastic cells. In the second case, 2D and 3D neurosonography demonstrated similar findings (asymmetry of cerebral hemispheres, midline shift, and dilation of the posterior horn of the left lateral cerebral ventricle). Posterior fossa structures were unremarkable. HME was diagnosed and the pregnancy was terminated. Autopsy findings confirmed the diagnosis of HME.
Biodistribution and Radiation Dosimetry of LMI1195: First-in-Human Study of a Novel 18F-Labeled Tracer for Imaging Myocardial Innervation

A novel 18F-labeled ligand for the norepinephrine transporter (N-[3-bromo-4-(3-18F-fluoro-propoxy)-benzyl]-guanidine [LMI1195]) is in clinical development for mapping cardiac nerve terminals in vivo using PET. Human safety, whole-organ biodistribution, and radiation dosimetry of LMI1195 were evaluated in a phase 1 clinical trial. Methods: Twelve healthy subjects at 3 clinical sites were injected intravenously with 150–250 MBq of LMI1195. Dynamic PET images were obtained over the heart for 10 min, followed by sequential whole-body images for approximately 5 h. Blood samples were obtained, and heart rate, electrocardiogram, and blood pressure were monitored before and during imaging. Residence times were determined from multiexponential regression of organ region-of-interest data normalized by administered activity (AA). Radiation dose estimates were calculated using OLINDA/EXM. Myocardial, lung, liver, and blood-pool standardized uptake values were determined at different time intervals. Results: No adverse events due to LMI1195 were seen. Blood radioactivity cleared quickly, whereas myocardial uptake remained stable and uniform throughout the heart over 4 h. Liver and lung activity cleared relatively rapidly, providing favorable target-to-background ratios for cardiac imaging. The urinary bladder demonstrated the largest peak uptake (18.3% AA), followed by the liver (15.5% AA). The mean effective dose was 0.026 ± 0.0012 mSv/MBq. Approximately 1.6% AA was seen in the myocardium initially, remaining above 1.5% AA (decay-corrected) through 4 h after injection. The myocardium-to-liver ratio was approximately unity initially, increasing to more than 2 at 4 h. Conclusion: These preliminary data suggest that LMI1195 is well tolerated and yields a radiation dose comparable to that of other commonly used PET radiopharmaceuticals. The kinetics of myocardial and adjacent organ activity suggest that cardiac imaging should be possible with acceptable patient radiation dose.
Three‐dimensional functional MRI with parallel acceleration: Balanced SSFP versus PRESTO

To compare the sensitivity and specificity of three‐dimensional (3D) principles of echo shifting using a train of observations (PRESTO) and passband balanced steady‐state free precession (SSFP) functional MRI (fMRI) sequences combined with integrated parallel acquisition techniques (iPAT) at 3 Tesla (T).
Epidemiology and clinical presentation of canine distemper disease in dogs and ferrets in Australia, 2006-2014.

OBJECTIVE To determine the status and distribution of distemper in Australian dogs and ferrets. DESIGN Retrospective case series. METHODS Cases were identified via a national voluntary disease reporting system, veterinarian groups and a national laboratory database. The geographic distribution, seasonal distribution, signalment and clinical presentation of cases were described using maps and frequency distributions. RESULTS A total of 48 individually affected dogs and ferrets in 27 case groups were identified, including eight confirmed case groups (> one individual). Confirmed cases were more common in summer and on the central coast of New South Wales and southern Victoria, and occurred exclusively in young, unvaccinated dogs. For dogs there was no obvious sex predilection. A mortality rate of 100% in ferrets and up to 77% in dogs was estimated. Neurological, gastrointestinal and respiratory were the most commonly reported systems affected in dogs and ferrets. There was no evidence that any large, unreported outbreaks occurred during the study period. CONCLUSIONS Continuation of vaccination against canine distemper virus is justified within Australia, particularly for younger dogs. Veterinarians should continue to consider distemper in their differential diagnosis of cases with neurological, gastrointestinal and respiratory presentation.
Embryo transfer in sheep under practice conditions

Embryo transfer was carried out on nine Texel donor ewes, one of them on two occasions, over two breeding seasons (1980 and 1981). The donors were prepared for superovulation on the farm by two different regimens and the recipients were also synchronised on the farm of origin. Surgery was carried out on donors and recipients at a veterinary practice and the techniques of anaesthesia, surgery and embryo transfer are described. Superovulation was variable and more than two ovulations were seen in only four of the 10 ewes. Forty-one corpora lutea were produced by the 10 ewes and 27 embryos were recovered. Twenty-one embryos were transferred to recipients and 14 lambs were produced. All the 10 donors except one produced lambs themselves. The value, economics and welfare aspects of the technique of embryo transfer under practice conditions are discussed and it is concluded that the procedure should not be carried out routinely but reserved for special circumstances.
Is diffusion‐weighted MRI superior to FDG‐PET or FDG‐PET/CT in evaluating and predicting pathological response to preoperative neoadjuvant therapy in patients with rectal cancer?

This meta‐analysis aimed to compare the diagnostic accuracy of diffusion‐weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW‐MRI) and fluorodeoxyglucose‐positron emission tomography (FDG‐PET) or FDG‐PET/computed tomography (CT) in evaluating and predicting pathological response to preoperative neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (NCRT) in patients with rectal cancer.
Breast health and disease over a lifetime.

The societal burden of breast disease in the United States is immense and affects women of all ages. In addition, failure to diagnose breast cancer is the most common cause of malpractice claims made against physicians. Obstetrician-gynecologists are often surprised to learn that this statement is also true for their specialty. Legal implications aside, a missed diagnosis of breast cancer is an emotionally difficult experience for physicians as well as their patients. Women with concerns about their breast health will often turn first to their obstetrician-gynecologist for knowledgeable advice and direction. This chapter is intended to provide practical information to guide the competent care of the patient presenting with a breast concern.
Pathology of the thymus, spleen and bursa of Fabricius in zinc-deficient ducklings

The weight and growth index of bursa of Fabricius, thymus and spleen were significantly reduced (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01) in zinc (Zn)-deficient ducks (Zn 22.9 mglkg diet) when compared with normal ducks. The G0/Gl phase of the cell cycle of the bursa of Fabricius, thymus and spleen was much higher, and the S and G2+M phases lower in Zn-deficient ducks than in the controls. Histopathologically, there was lymphocyte degeneration and depletion of lymphoid organs, and the reticular cells of thymus were also degenerate or necrotic in the Zndeficient group. The results demonstrated that Zn deficiency seriously inhibited the growth of lymphoid organs and caused marked pathology in the lymphoid organs. The results also showed that the effect of Zn deficiency on the primary lymphoid organs occurred earlier than on the secondary lymphoid organs. The effect of Zn deficiency was greatest on the bursa of Fabricius, followed by the thymus, and then the spleen.
MEASUREMENTS OF ANISOTROPIC ION TEMPERATURES, NON-THERMAL VELOCITIES, AND DOPPLER SHIFTS IN A CORONAL HOLE

We present a new diagnostic allowing one to measure the anisotropy of ion temperatures and non-thermal velocities, as well as Doppler shifts with respect to the ambient magnetic field. This method provides new results, as well as an independent test for previous measurements obtained with other techniques. Our spectral data come from observations of a low-latitude, on-disk coronal hole. A potential field source surface model was used to calculate the angle between the magnetic field lines and the line of sight for each spatial bin of the observation. A fit was performed to determine the line widths and Doppler shifts parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field. For each line width component we derived ion temperatures Ti, ⊥ and Ti, ∥ and non-thermal velocities vnt, ⊥ and vnt, ∥. Ti, ⊥ was cooler than off-limb polar coronal hole measurements, suggesting increasing collisional cooling with decreasing height. Ti, ∥ is consistent with a uniform temperature of (1.8 ± 0.2) × 106 K for each ion. Since parallel ion heating is expected to be weak, this ion temperature should reflect the proton temperature. A comparison between our results and others implies a large proton temperature gradient around 1.02 R☉. The non-thermal velocities are thought to be proportional to the amplitudes of various waves. Our results for vnt, ⊥ agree with Alfvén wave amplitudes inferred from off-limb polar coronal hole line width measurements. Our vnt, ∥ results are consistent with slow magnetosonic wave amplitudes inferred from Fourier analysis of time-varying intensity fluctuations. Doppler shift measurements yield outflows of ≈5 km s−1 for ions formed over a broad temperature range. This differs from other studies that found a strong Doppler shift dependence on formation temperature.
Development of a web-based, work-related asthma educational tool for patients with asthma.

BACKGROUND Asthma is a common chronic condition. Work-related asthma (WRA) has a large socioeconomic impact and is increasing in prevalence but remains under-recognized. Although international guidelines recommend patient education, no widely available educational tool exists. OBJECTIVE To develop a WRA educational website for adults with asthma. METHODS An evidence-based database for website content was developed, which applied evidence-based website design principles to create a website prototype. This was subsequently tested and serially revised according to patient feedback in three moderated phases (one focus group and two interview phases), followed by face validation by asthma educators. RESULTS Patients (n=10) were 20 to 28 years of age; seven (70%) were female, three (30%) were in university, two (20%) were in college and five (50%) were currently employed. Key format preferences included: well-spaced, bulleted text; movies (as opposed to animations); photos (as opposed to cartoons); an explicit listing of website aims on the home page; and an exploding tab structure. Participants disliked integrated games and knowledge quizzes. Desired informational content included a list of triggers, prevention⁄control methods, currently available tools and resources, a self-test for WRA, real-life scenario presentations, compensation information, information for colleagues on how to react during an asthma attack and a WRA discussion forum. CONCLUSIONS The website met the perceived needs of young asthmatic patients. This resource could be disseminated widely and should be tested for its effects on patient behaviour, including job choice, workplace irritant⁄allergen avoidance and⁄or protective equipment, asthma medication use and physician prompting for management of WRA symptoms.