Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Age, Sex, and Blood Pressure-Related Influences on Reference Values of Left Atrial Deformation and Mechanics From a Large-Scale Asian Population

Background— Left atrial (LA) function is tightly linked to several cardiovascular diseases and confers key prognostic information. Speckle tracking-based deformation as a feasible and sensitive LA mechanical assessment has proven its clinical significance beyond volume measures; however, the reference values remain largely unknown. Methods and Results— We studied 4042 participants undergoing annual cardiovascular survey. Among them, 2812 healthy participants (65% men; mean age, 47.4±9.9 years) were eligible for speckle tracking analysis. Peak atrial longitudinal systolic strain and strain rate (SR) at systolic (SRs), early diastolic (SRe), and late diastolic atrial contraction phases (SRa) were analyzed by dedicated software (EchoPAC, GE) and compared in terms of age, sex, and blood pressure. Overall, women demonstrated higher peak atrial longitudinal systolic strain (39.34±7.99% versus 37.95±7.96%; P<0.001) and showed age-dependent more pronounced peak atrial longitudinal systolic strain functional decay than those of men (P value for interaction, <0.05), with men showing higher SRs and SRa, although lower SRe (all P<0.001). Both increasing age and higher blood pressure were independently associated with deteriorated peak atrial longitudinal systolic strain, SRs, and SRe, although augmented LA SRa, even after accounting for baseline clinical covariates in multivariable models that incorporated LA volume, NT-proBNP (N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide), or left ventricular E/e′ (all P<0.001). Conclusions— Our findings suggest LA mechanical functional decays in association with increasing age and higher blood pressure, which seem to be compensated for by augmentation of atrial pump function. We have also provided age- and sex-stratified reference values for strain and SR based on a large-scale Asian population.
Identification of T- and B-cell epitopes of the S2 and S3 subunits of pertussis toxin by use of synthetic peptides

To design an optimized synthetic vaccine against whooping cough, we have studied the biological and immunological properties of three peptides of the S2 subunit and nine overlapping synthetic peptides covering the entire sequence of the S3 subunit of pertussis toxin (PT). Synthetic peptides corresponding to sequences 18 to 41, 78 to 108, 134 to 154, and 149 to 176 of S3 were found to be consistently capable of stimulating the proliferation of PT-specific T-cell lines primed with pertussis toxoid in both BALB/c and A/J strains of mice. All synthetic peptides were recognized by rabbit antisera raised against PT or pertussis toxoid. Both S2 and S3 peptide-keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) conjugates in the presence of complete Freund's adjuvant induced peptide-specific antibody responses in rabbits, and the antisera raised against S2(1-23), S3(18-41), S3(37-64), and S3(149-176) peptide-KLH conjugates cross-reacted with both subunits in the immunoblots. All antisera except those against S2(123-154) and S3(103-127) reacted with native PT in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with PT directly coated onto microtiter wells. In contrast, antisera raised against S2(123-154), S3(1-23), S3(18-41), S3(37-64), S3(60-87), and S3(103-127) peptide-KLH conjugates recognized native PT in a fetuin-PT capture ELISA. S2(78-98), S3(1-23), and S3(149-176) peptide-KLH conjugates elicited good PT-neutralizing antibody responses as judged by the antitoxin CHO cell assay. Identification of these B-cell neutralization epitopes and T-cell immunodominant determinants represents a first step towards the rational design of a synthetic vaccine against whooping cough.
Multilevel Coded Cooperation for Wireless Vehicular Networks

At the physical layer of wireless vehicular networks, coded cooperation is a possible way of realizing uplink transmit diversity at the mobile vehicles equipped with single antenna. In this work, in order to increase the power and bandwidth efficiency, a multilevel coded cooperative system using orthogonal signalling is proposed. Orthogonal signalling not only enables transmission of both users data in single channel symbol but also provides independent detection at the receiver. We investigate the performance of the system by derivation of pairwise and bit error probabilities together with Monte-Carlo simulations.
An emerging ground-based aerosol climatology: Aerosol optical depth from AERONET

Long-term measurements by the AERONET program of spectral aerosol optical depth, precipitable water, and derived Angstrom exponent were analyzed and compiled into an aerosol optical properties climatology. Quality assured monthly means are presented and described for 9 primary sites and 21 additional multiyear sites with distinct aerosol regimes representing tropical biomass burning, boreal forests, midlatitude humid climates, midlatitude dry climates, oceanic sites, desert sites, and background sites. Seasonal trends for each of these nine sites are discussed and climatic averages presented.
Color-based skin detection: survey and evaluation

This paper presents a comprehensive review and evaluation for color-based skin detection. The literature is reviewed in four categories: 1) colorspace selection, 2) skin color modeling, 3) dynamic modeling and 4) illumination invariance and adaptation. Using a large data set of 1894 images, we examine whether the colorspace transformation can increase the compactness of skin class and the discriminability between skin and nonskin classes in fourteen 3D colorspaces and fourteen 2D chrominance planes. Classification performance of SPM, GMM, SOM and SVM is also evaluated. The results reveal that 1) colorspace transformation cannot improve performance in general, 2) the absence of the luminance component decreases performance significantly, 3) the performance variance in 2D chrominance plane is more greater than in 3D colorspace, 4) except for 3D Bayes SPM, the color "preference" of detector is intrinsic and quite similar, and 5) the performance of SPM is superior to that of others
4kV 4H-SiC Epitaxial Emitter Bipolar Junction Transistors

In this paper we present 4H-SiC BJTs with open-base blocking voltage (BVCEO) of 4000V (the upper limit for 4H-SiC BJT operation), specific on-resistance (Ron,sp)of 56 mOmega-cm 2, and common-emitter current gain beta ~ 9. These devices are designed with interdigitated base and emitter fingers with multiple emitter stripes. We assess the impact of design (emitter stripe width and contact spacing) on device performance and also examine the effect of emitter contact resistance on the device forward conduction characteristics
Biodiversity, biogeography and potential trophic impact of Protoperidinium spp. (Dinophyceae) off the southwestern coast of Ireland

This study is the first detailed investigation of the diversity, distribution and potential grazing impacts of Protoperidinium spp. in relation to the hydrography and phytoplankton distributions off the southwestern coast of Ireland. In late July 2003, the area was well stratified, and the Irish Shelf Front was apparent as a strong salinity front offshore. Thirty-two species of Protoperidinium were identified and classified as nearshore, offshore and widespread, based on distribution. In the Celtic Sea, phototrophic dinoflagellates dominated the plankton community nearshore, whereas diatoms dominated offshore of the Irish Shelf Front. Protoperidinium species, including P steinii, P depressum and the putative azaspiracid-toxin producer, P crassipes, were most abundant nearshore in the Celtic Sea. The Bantry Bay section had the highest concentration and diversity of plankton in the study area. Most Protoperidinium species had the highest abundance nearshore along the Bantry Bay section, but the highest concentration of P crassipes was offshore. Given the plankton concentrations and estimated grazing rates of Protoperidinium species, Protoperidinium had the potential to consume 30-80% of the dinoflagellate or diatom standing stock at the time of the study.
Hedgehog Signaling in Pancreas Epithelium Regulates Embryonic Organ Formation and Adult β-Cell Function

OBJECTIVE Current studies indicate that Hedgehog (Hh) signaling must be excluded during early stages of pancreas formation. However, conflicting evidence suggests that Hh signaling may be active later during pancreas formation and that it is required for insulin production and secretion in cultured β-cell lines. The objective of this study was to address these discrepancies by assessing the in vivo role of epithelial Hh signaling in the pancreas. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS To identify Hh-active cells in the developing and adult pancreas epithelium, we characterized transgenic reporter Patched1-LacZ mice. To determine the requirement for epithelial Hh signaling in the pancreas, we eliminated an essential Hh signaling component, Smoothened (Smo), in the pancreatic epithelium, and assessed pancreatic development and adult β-cell physiology phenotypes. RESULTS Characterization of Patched1-LacZ reporter mice revealed low-level LacZ expression in pancreatic epithelial cells throughout development until birth, when LacZ activity increases in intensity specifically in endocrine and ductal cells. In the absence of Hh signaling, Smo-deficient mice have delayed pancreas formation leading to a temporary reduction in pancreatic epithelium and β-cell numbers. Although β-cell numbers recover by birth, adult Smo-deficient mice display glucose intolerance, increased insulin sensitivity, and reduced total insulin production. CONCLUSIONS These data show that Hh signaling functions early during pancreas morphogenesis to regulate epithelial and β-cell expansion and to modulate glucose metabolism by regulating insulin production in adult mice.
Tropospheric rivers? – A pilot study

Carbon monoxide has been measured from space as part of the NASA Measurement of Air Pollution by Satellites (MAPS) program. One of the puzzling findings was the presence of high values well removed from potential sources and in regions where neither vertical transport into the free troposphere from the boundary layer or horizontal transport by the prevailing wind provided a straightforward explanation. Water vapor also has a surface source that has large spatial variations and the authors therefore decided to examine daily values of water vapor transport in the troposphere to see if the results would shed some light on the carbon monoxide transport problem. Computations of daily global tropospheric water vapor flux values show the presence of a filamentary structure. The filaments, here called rivers, have lengths many times their widths and persist for many days while being translated through the atmosphere. They are present in data analyzed for both 1984 and 1991. The water vapor flux maxima coincide quite closely to reflectivity features (averaged from wavelengths of 380 and 360 nm) as revealed by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS). It is suggested that the filamentary structure may also be present in other trace constituents. 16 refs., 2more » figs.« less
Monitoring bioremediation in oil contaminated soils using toxicity analysis

To track oil degradation at the oil lakes in Kuwait, a tiered toxicity approach was used. Three soils from different locations with a history of hydrocarbon contamination were treated in bench-scale microcosms using conditions (nutrient amendment, moisture content and temperature) which had promoted mineralization of total hydrocarbon in a preliminary study. Bioremediation was monitored using the solid-phase Microtox test and earthworm survival assays. Total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) concentrations in soil A did not change after 150 days. Although 85 % of the total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs) in soil B were reduced after 120 days following treatment, results of the earthworm and Microtox tests suggested an initial increase in toxicity indicating that toxic intermediary metabolites may have formed during biodegradation. In addition, the significant decrease of TPH and corresponding high toxicity levels were also noted in soil A after 150 days of the bioremediation process. However, during the last 50 days of treatment, a considerable decrease in toxicity levels occurred in soil B and C. Whereas, TPH and PAH concentration did not change between 150 days and 200 days.
Transcriptional synergy between Tat and PCAF is dependent on the binding of acetylated Tat to the PCAF bromodomain

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) Tat protein plays an essential role in promoting efficient transcriptional elongation of viral transcripts. We report that the transcriptional co‐activator PCAF and Tat interact and synergize to activate the HIV promoter. The binding of Tat and PCAF in vitro and in vivo is dependent on the acetylated state of Lys50 of Tat and on the PCAF bromodomain. Structural analysis of the acetylated Tat peptide bound to the PCAF bromodomain defined amino acids Y47 and R53 in Tat and V763, Y802, and Y809 in PCAF as critical interaction points between the two proteins. Mutation of each of these residues in either Tat or PCAF inhibited in a cumulative manner the Tat–PCAF interaction in vitro and in vivo, and abrogated the synergistic activation of the HIV promoter by both proteins. These observations demonstrate that acetylation of Tat establishes a novel protein–protein interaction domain at the surface of Tat that is necessary for the transcriptional activation of the HIV promoter.
Single image dehazing with optimal transmission map

The challenge of single image dehazing mainly comes from the double uncertainty of scene depth and scene radiance. Approximation of the transmission, which encodes the scene depth information, is the most significant step to solve the dehazing problem. In this paper, we propose to derive an optimal transmission map under a heuristic assumption in the dehazing model. The proposed objective function guarantees to have a global optimal solution, and the obtained transmission map accurately preserves the depth-consistency of the same object. Using the optimal transmission map, our method recovers haze-free images with excellent performance.
Hardware Trojan horse detection using gate-level characterization

Hardware Trojan horses (HTHs) are the malicious altering of hardware specification or implementation in such a way that its functionality is altered under a set of conditions defined by the attacker. There are numerous HTHs sources including untrusted foundries, synthesis tools and libraries, testing and verification tools, and configuration scripts. HTH attacks can greatly comprise security and privacy of hardware users either directly or through interaction with pertinent systems and application software or with data. However, while there has been a huge research and development effort for detecting software Trojan horses, surprisingly, HTHs are rarely addressed. HTH detection is a particularly difficult task in modern and pending deep submicron technologies due to intrinsic manufacturing variability. Our goal is to provide an impetus for HTH research by creating a generic and easily applicable set of techniques and tools for HTH detection. We start by introducing a technique for recovery of characteristics of gates in terms of leakage current, switching power, and delay, which utilizes linear programming to solve a system of equations created using nondestructive measurements of power or delays. This technique is combined with constraint manipulation techniques to detect embedded HTHs. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on a number of standard benchmarks.
Protein-protein Interaction Prediction using Arabic semantic analysis

Scientists are still far from unraveling the molecular mechanisms of most relevant diseases such as cancer and diabetes. A better understanding of protein interactions could provide a clue about the molecular mechanism of the processes leading to such diseases. Novel methodologies to understand diseases through their primary protein interactions are highly desired. In this paper we propose a simple method to predict protein-protein interaction based on Arabic semantic analysis model. The Arabic semantic model is an effective feature extraction method based on natural language processing. Two protein sequences may interact if they contain similar or related Arabic words. The semantic meaning will most likely provide us with a clue on how or why two proteins interact. To evaluate the ability of the proposed method to distinguish between “interacted” and “non-interacted” proteins pairs, we applied it on a dataset of 200 protein pairs from the available yeast saccharomyces cerevisiae protein interaction. The proposed method managed to get 100% sensitivity, 0.84% sensitivity and 92% overall accuracy. The method also showed moderate improvement over the existing well-known methods for PPI prediction such as PPI-PS and PIPE.
Self-organizing and self-reconfigurable event routing in ad hoc networks with causal dependency awareness

Publish/Subscribe (P/S) is a communication paradigm of growing popularity for information dissemination in large-scale distributed systems. The weak coupling between information producers and consumers in P/S systems is attractive for loosely coupled and dynamic network infrastructures such as ad hoc networks. However, achieving end-to-end timeliness and reliability properties when P/S events are causally dependent is an open problem in ad hoc networks. In this article, we present, evaluate benefits of, and compare with past work an architecture design that can effectively support timely and reliable delivery of events and causally related events in ad hoc environments, and especially in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). With observations from both realistic application model and simulation experiments, we reveal causal dependencies among events and their significance in a typical use notional system. We also examine and propose engineering methodologies to further tailor an event-based system to facilitate its self-reorganizing capability and self-reconfiguration. Our design features a two-layer structure, including novel distributed algorithms and mechanisms for P/S tree construction and maintenance. The trace-based experimental simulation studies illustrate our design's effectiveness in both cases with and without causal dependencies.
Longer Paced QRS Duration is Associated With Increased Prevalence of Right Ventricular Pacing‐Induced Cardiomyopathy

Pacing‐induced cardiomyopathy (PICM) is an important cause of heart failure in patients exposed to frequent right ventricular (RV) pacing. While echocardiography is diagnostic, the optimal surveillance strategy remains unknown. We sought to identify clinical and electrocardiographic factors associated with the presence of PICM to guide further testing.
Answer Update for Rule-Based Stream Reasoning

Stream reasoning is the task of continuously deriving conclusions on streaming data. To get results instantly one evaluates a query repeatedly on recent data chunks selected by window operators. However, simply recomputing results from scratch is impractical for rule-based reasoning with semantics similar to Answer Set Programming, due to the trade-off between complexity and data throughput. To address this problem, we present a method to efficiently update models of a rule set. In particular, we show how an answer stream (model) of a LARS program can be incrementally adjusted to new or outdated input by extending truth maintenance techniques. We obtain in this way a means towards practical rule-based stream reasoning with nonmonotonic negation, various window operators and different forms of temporal reference.
3-Cell Network MIMO Architectures with Sectorization and Fractional Frequency Reuse

In this paper, we present a 3-cell network multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture with fractional frequency frequency (FFR) and a novel tri-sector frequency partition scheme. One fundamental question to apply the network MIMO technique in such a high interference environment is: how many base stations should be coordinated together to provide sufficient performance? We will demonstrate that the FFR-based 3-cell network MIMO architecture with the proposed tri-sector frequency partition can not only effectively overcome the inter-group interference, but can avoid executing the complex multi-base-station joint processing for a huge number of cluster of cells at all locations. It will be shown that the proposed 3-cell network MIMO with the rearranged tri-sector frequency partition strategy can outperform the 7-cell network MIMO with omni-directional antennas. Various sector antenna architectures and the method for determining the inner region of the FFR cell planning are also discussed and analyzed on top of the network MIMO system. We hope that this study can provide important insights into the design of the network MIMO systems from the perspectives of architecture and deployment.
Guided Superpixel Method for Topographic Map Processing

Superpixels have been widely used in lots of computer vision and image processing tasks but rarely used in topographic map processing due to the complex distribution of geographic elements in this kind of images. We propose a novel superpixel-generating method based on guided watershed transform (GWT). Before GWT, the cues of geographic element distribution and boundaries between different elements need to be obtained. A linear feature extraction method based on a compound opposite Gaussian filter and a shear transform is presented to acquire the distribution information. Meanwhile, a boundary detection method, which based on the color-opponent mechanisms of the visual system, is employed to get the boundary information. Then, both linear features and boundaries are input to the final partition procedure to obtain superpixels. The experiments show that our method has the best performance in shape control, size control, and boundary adherence, among all the comparison methods, which are classic and state of the art. Furthermore, we verify the low complexity and low cost of memory in our method through experiments, which makes it possible to deal with large-scale topographic maps.
Liouvillian Solutions of Linear Differential Equations of Order Three and Higher

Singer and Ulmer (1997) gave an algorithm to compute Liouvillian (“closed-form") solutions of homogeneous linear differential equations. However, there were several efficiency problems that made computations often not practical. In this paper we address these problems. We extend the algorithm in van Hoeij and Weil (1997) to compute semi-invariants and a theorem in Singer and Ulmer (1997)in such a way that, by computing one semi-invariant that factors into linear forms, one gets all coefficients of the minimal polynomial of an algebraic solution of the Riccati equation, instead of only one coefficient. These coefficients come “for free" as a byproduct of our algorithm for computing semi-invariants. We specifically detail the algorithm in the cases of equations of order three (order two equations are handled by the algorithm of Kovacic, 1986,see also Ulmer and Weil, 1996 or Fakler, 1997. In the Appendix, we present several methods to decide when a multivariate polynomial depending on parameters can admit linear factors, which is a necessary ingredient in the algorithm.