Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neurocognitive functioning in bulimia nervosa: the role of neuroendocrine, personality and clinical aspects

Background Studies investigating neurocognitive impairment in subjects with eating disorders (EDs) have reported heterogeneous patterns of impairment and, in some instances, no dysfunction. The present study aimed to define the pattern of neurocognitive impairment in a large sample of bulimia nervosa (BN) patients and to demonstrate that neuroendocrine, personality and clinical characteristics influence neurocognitive performance in BN. Method Attention/immediate memory, set shifting, perseveration, conditional and implicit learning were evaluated in 83 untreated female patients with BN and 77 healthy controls (HC). Cortisol and 17β-estradiol plasma levels were assessed. Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory – Revised (TCI-R), the Bulimic Investigation Test Edinburgh (BITE) and the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) were administered. Results No impairment of cognitive performance was found in subjects with BN compared with HC. Cortisol and ‘Self-directedness’ were associated with better performance on conditional learning whereas 17β-estradiol had a negative influence on this domain; ‘Reward dependence’ was associated with worse performance on implicit learning; and depressive symptomatology influenced performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) negatively. Conclusions No cognitive impairment was found in untreated patients with BN. Neuroendocrine, personality and clinical variables do influence neurocognitive functioning and might explain discrepancies in literature findings.
Identifying depression in primary care: a comparison of different methods in a prospective cohort study

Depressive disorders are a major health problem in primary care, and at least half of these disorders remain undetected.1 There are two recommended approaches to diagnosing depression in primary care: one is to perform routine screening, and the other is to evaluate patients only when the clinical presentation triggers the suspicion of depression. Our aim was to compare these two approaches, and to compare three different screening tools in order to evaluate which would be most appropriate for use in primary care. From among the many available screening tools, we selected three brief, self rating instruments: one disorder-specific (the depression module of the brief patient health questionnaire (B-PHQ, 9 items)),2 one broad based (the general health questionnaire (GHQ-12, 12 items)),3 and one that is less restricted to both issues (WHO-5 wellbeing index (WHO-5, 5 items)). 4 Eighteen primary care facilities …
The use of mutual information and joint entropy for anatomical priors in emission tomography

This paper studies the use of mutual information and joint entropy to define anatomical priors for maximum-a- posteriori (MAP) reconstruction in emission tomography. Other groups have used mutual information for this purpose, and reported promising results. Simple simulation studies with the "isolated" prior distribution reveal that mutual information may introduce bias, because of a repelling effect between intensity clusters in the marginal histogram. Deleting the terms involving the marginal histograms leads to the joint entropy prior. A gradient ascent MAP-reconstruction algorithm with this prior is described. Its performance is studied with simulation experiments and illustrated on a two sets of patient data: a whole body PET/CT scan and a PET brain scan, combined with the corresponding MRI-scan using off-line registration. The joint entropy seems to be a useful function for defining anatomical priors that do not require explicit segmentation of the anatomical image.
A shape descriptor based on new projective invariants

Great attention has been devoted to the development of shape descriptors that is the key to object recognition. Previous works have great success on either relatively simple shapes or limited transformations, e.g., translation, rotation and scaling. We propose a new projective invariant, named characteristic number (CN) that includes more points for complex shapes with rich inner structures. Moreover, we build a novel shape descriptor with CN values calculated on triangles that cover the convex hull of a shape. The matching based on the descriptor also runs fast since only one initial point for the triangular coverage needs to align based on its CN value prior to the matching. The performance of the proposed descriptor is validated by the experiments compared with the classical shape context (SC) and recently developed cross ratio spectrum (CRS) on 32 logos of television networks with a wide range of transformations (512 images in total).
Anismus, Physiology, Radiology: Is It Time for Some Pragmatism? A Comparative Study of Radiological and Anorectal Physiology Findings in Patients With Anismus

Purpose Anismus is a functional disorder featuring obstructive symptoms and paradoxical contractions of the pelvic floor. This study aims to establish diagnosis agreement between physiology and radiology, associate anismus with morphological outlet obstruction, and explore the role of sphincteric pressure and rectal volumes in the radiological diagnosis of anismus. Methods Consecutive patients were evaluated by using magnetic resonance imaging proctography/fluoroscopic defecography and anorectal physiology. Morphological radiological features were associated with physiology tests. A categorical analysis was performed using the chi-square test, and agreement was assessed via the kappa coefficient. A Mann-Whitney test was used to assess rectal volumes and sphincterial pressure distributions between groups of patients. A P-value of <0.05 was significant. Results Forty-three patients (42 female patients) underwent anorectal physiology and radiology imaging. The median age was 54 years (interquartile range, 41.5–60 years). Anismus was seen radiologically and physiologically in 18 (41.8%) and 12 patients (27.9%), respectively. The agreement between modalities was 0.298 (P = 0.04). Using physiology as a reference, radiology had positive and negative predictive values of 44% and 84%, respectively. Rectoceles, cystoceles, enteroceles and pathological pelvic floor descent were not physiologically predictive of animus (P > 0.05). The sphincterial straining pressure was 71 mmHg in the anismus group versus 12 mmHg. Radiology was likely to identify anismus when the straining pressure exceeded 50% of the resting pressure (P = 0.08). Conclusion Radiological techniques detect pelvic morphological abnormalities, but lead to overdiagnoses of anismus. No proctographic pathological feature predicts anismus reliably. A stronger pelvic floor paradoxical contraction is associated with a greater likelihood of detection by proctography.
Sensitivity of N2O, CFCl3, and CF2Cl2 two‐dimensional distributions to O2 absorption cross sections

The distribution of the trace gases N2O, CFCl3, and CF2Cl2 is influenced by the O2 absorption cross sections. There has been a recent indication in the literature that the O2 cross sections used in past model studies may overestimate the true values. We have used a two-dimensional model to perform a sensitivity study on the effects of changes in the O2 cross sections on N2O, CFCl3, and CF2Cl2. Decreases in the O2 cross sections between 180 and 230 nm resulted in altitude-, latitude-, and season-dependent reductions in the computed species' concentrations. The altitude dependence of the reductions at mid-latitudes agrees qualitatively with similar one-dimensional model studies (Froidevaux and Yung, 1982; Brasseur et al., 1983). The vertical profiles of CFCl3 are most affected and the vertical profiles of N2O are least affected by the O2 cross-section changes. The greatest changes in the trace gases occur above 20 km, at high latitudes, and in the winter. In general, the reduced O2 cross sections led to better agreement between model calculations and experimental measurements for all three trace gases; however, there still remain some unexplained differences between observations and model predictions. This result implies that the reduced O2 cross sections may be the better set. The accuracy of the lifetime calculations for the trace gases is not sufficient to recommend either set of O2 cross sections. More precise measurements of O2 absorption cross sections are thus required to determine the true values.
Urokinase and Tissue-type Plasminogen Activator Are Required for the Mitogenic and Chemotactic Effects of Bovine Fibroblast Growth Factor and Platelet-derived Growth Factor-BB for Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells*

The present study was undertaken to evaluatein vitro the relative importance of tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA) and urokinase-type plasminogen activator (u-PA) in the mitogenic and chemotactic potential of bovine fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) and platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF)-BB for smooth muscle cells (SMC). Aortic SMC were isolated from transgenic mice showing single inactivations of the t-PA, u-PA, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1, or urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (u-PAR) genes. With regard to serum-induced proliferation, all cell types showed similar responses. However, SMC isolated from t-PA-deficient mice did not proliferate or migrate in response to PDGF, whereas SMC isolated from u-PA-deficient animals appeared to be much less sensitive to bFGF than the cells isolated from the other animals. Supplementation of cells from deficient animals with exogenous murine t-PA or u-PA restored the normal response of the growth factors with regard to both migration and proliferation. The mitogenic and chemotactic responses of bFGF were specifically inhibited in u-PAR-deficient cells or in wild-type SMC, cultured in the presence of antibodies to u-PAR. The role of u-PA and t-PA in bFGF and PDGF-induced growth and migration of SMC was not dependent on plasmin generation and activity as demonstrated by the inactivity of ε-aminocaproic acid and aprotinin. A 4–5-fold increase in the steady-state levels of u-PA and t-PA mRNA and proteins were observed after 24 h of incubation of the cell cultures with bFGF and PDGF-BB, respectively. These results therefore indicate that, at least in vitro, t-PA is an important element of the activity of PDGF-BB with regard to the proliferation and migration of SMC whereas u-PA is a key factor in the effect of bFGF on SMC.
Human behavior in contextual multi-armed bandit problems

In real-life decision environments people learn from their direct experience with alternative courses of action. Yet they can accelerate their learning by using functional knowledge about the features characterizing the alternatives. We designed a novel contextual multi-armed bandit task where decision makers chose repeatedly between multiple alternatives characterized by two informative features. We compared human behavior in this contextual task with a classic multi-armed bandit task without feature information. Behavioral analysis showed that participants in the contextual bandit task used the feature information to direct their exploration of promising alternatives. Ex post, we tested participants’ acquired functional knowledge in one-shot multi-feature choice trilemmas. We compared a novel function-learning-based reinforcement learning model to a classic reinforcement learning. Although reinforcement learning models predicted behavior better in the learning phase, the new models did better in predicting the trilemma choices.
Multi-Modal Transportation Advisor system

The current work deals with the problem of growing population in the cities and the associated mobility problems. For this problem it is proposed a Multi-Modal Transportation Advisor system, based on the integration from different data sources such as public transportation systems, car and bike sharing or car pooling. Taking into account real time traffic information the system shows best option for a user goes from point A to a point B and calculates the associated trip cost. This is part of the European Project START, where we show the contribution of a public transportation ontology for different DB integration and a best path advisor based on an appropriate Dijkstra's algorithm implementation.
SilentSense: silent user identification via touch and movement behavioral biometrics

In this work, we present SilentSense, a framework to authenticate users silently and transparently by exploiting the user touch behavior biometrics and leveraging the integrated sensors to capture the micro-movement of the device caused by user's screen-touch actions. By tracking the fine-detailed touch actions of the user, we build a "touch-based biometrics" model of the owner by extracting some principle features, and then verify whether the current user is the owner or guest/attacker. When using the smartphone, the unique operating pattern of the user is detected and learnt by collecting the sensor data and touch events silently. When users are mobile, the micro-movement of mobile devices caused by touch is suppressed by that due to the large scale user-movement which will render the touch-based biometrics ineffective. To address this, we integrate a movement-based biometrics for each user with previous touch-based biometrics. We conduct extensive evaluations of our approaches on the Android smartphone, we show that the user identification accuracy is over 99%.
Analysis of Partitioning Interwell Tracer Tests

Partitioning interwell tracer tests (PITTs) have emerged as a useful tool in characterizing the volume of nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in contaminated aquifers. More than 40 PITTs have been conducted in various NAPL-contaminated sites for both initial estimation of NAPL volume and postremediation performance assessment of various cleanup technologies. An effective interpretation of PITT results requires an accurate determination of the confidence limits of the volume of NAPL estimated from PITT data. This necessitates a description of the various errors, both systematic and random, associated with the measurement and analysis of PITT data. In this paper, an approach for performing this error analysis for both vadose-zone and saturated-zone PITTs is presented. This approach is based upon identifying the various sources of errors in both the measurement of PITT data and the errors from the data analysis using the method of temporal moments. Results are illustrated using our data from several soil column.
Factors affecting unplanned readmissions from community hospitals to acute hospitals: a prospective observational study.

INTRODUCTION While the readmission rate from community hospitals is known, the factors affecting it are not. Our aim was to determine the factors predicting unplanned readmissions from community hospitals (CHs) to acute hospitals (AHs). MATERIALS AND METHODS This was an observational prospective cohort study, involving 842 patients requiring post-acute rehabilitation in 2 CHs admitted from 3 AHs in Singapore. We studied the role of the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale (CIRS) organ impairment scores, the Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE) score, the Shah modified Barthel Index (BI) score, and the triceps skin fold thickness (TSFT) in predicting the rate of unplanned readmissions (UR), early unplanned readmissions (EUPR) and late unplanned readmissions (LUPR). We developed a clinical prediction rule to determine the risk of UR and EUPR. RESULTS The rates of EUPR and LUPR were 7.6% and 10.3% respectively. The factors that predicted UR were the CIRS-heart score, the CIRS-haemopoietic score, the CIRS-endocrine / metabolic score and the BI on admission. The MMSE was predictive of EUPR. The TSFT and CIRS-liver score were predictive of LUPR. Upon receiver operator characteristics analysis, the clinical prediction rules for the prediction of EUPR and UR had areas under the curve of 0.745 and 0.733 respectively. The likelihood ratios of the clinical prediction rules for EUPR and UR ranged from 0.42 to 5.69 and 0.34 to 3.16 respectively. CONCLUSIONS Patients who have UR can be identified by the admission BI, the MMSE, the TSFT and CIRS scores in the cardiac, haemopoietic, liver and endocrine/metabolic systems.
Approach towards the characteristic interpretation of Electromyography (EMG) signal with clinical study

This paper is based on the glimpse of the clinical studies and its applications for starting different characteristic interpretation of Electromyography (EMG) signal. The paper presents the biological and the clinical properties of different human muscles and their movements. Strong and precise information about both active and inactive conditions of the skeletal muscles i.e propius muscle, biceps muscle, triceps muscle, deltoid muscle, etc. are shown in a tabular format. In real world, the elimination of anomaly of noisy EMG signal and its proper implementation is very difficult work. An attempt is taken on accomplishing an efficient and discretized knowledge based database of EMG interpretation and by the help of this database we just took a footstep to generate an actuator for the EMG interpretation to facilitate the modeling of dexterous prosthetic arm.
Non-locality of scale interactions in turbulent shear flows

The scale interactions in turbulent shear flow are evaluated using a channel flow DNS database at Reτ = 590. The velocity field is filtered using a sharp cut-off filter in the Fourier space, and the relative magnitudes of the advective terms in the small scale equations, derived from Navier-Stokes equations, are computed as a function of wavenumber. We show that the interactions at small scales are non-local in the direction of the mean flow, dominated by the advection of small scales by large scale vortices. This non-locality of interactions suggests that the subgrid-scale model of Dubrulle and Nazarenko (1997) for 2D turbulence is likely to be applicable to turbulent shear flows as well.
Intrasource Chemical Differentiation of Obsidian in the Jemez Mountains and Taos Plateau, New Mexico

Obsidian specimens from the Jemez Mountains and Taos Plateau source regions of north central New Mexico were characterized by instrumental neutron activation analysis and X-ray fluorescence analysis to establish the number of geochemical groups present. In addition, 37 obsidian artefacts from sites in New Mexico were similarly analysed. The results of this research have determined that at least eight geochemical varieties of obsidian exist within the two source regions. The results also indicate that an abbreviated-INAA procedure previously found to be successful in assigning obsidian artefacts from Mesoamerica is also capable of sourcing artefacts from the northern New Mexico sources.
Quartz: a tool for tuning parallel program performance

Initial implementations of parallel programs typically yield disappointing performance. Tuning to improve performance is thus a significant part of the parallel programming process. The effort required to tune a parallel program, and the level of performance that eventually is achieved, both depend heavily on the quality of the instrumentation that is available to the programmer. This paper describes Quartz, a new tool for tuning parallel program performance on shared memory multiprocessors. The philosophy underlying Quartz was inspired by that of the sequential UNIX tool gprof: to appropriately direct the attention of the programmer by efficiently measuring just those factors that are most responsible for performance and by relating these metrics to one another and to the structure of the program. This philosophy is even more important in the parallel domain than in the sequential domain, because of the dramatically greater number of possible metrics and the dramatically increased complexity of program structures. The principal metric of Quartz is normalized processor time: the total processor time spent in each section of code divided by the number of other processors that are concurrently busy when that section of code is being executed. Tied to the logical structure of the program, this metric provides a “smoking gun” pointing towards those areas of the program most responsible for poor performance. This information can be acquired efficiently by checkpointing to memory the number of busy processors and the state of each processor, and then statistically sampling these using a dedicated processor. In addition to describing the design rationale, functionality, and implementation of Quartz, the paper examines how Quartz would be used to solve a number of performance problems that have been reported as being frequently encountered, and describes a case study in which Quartz was used to significantly improve the performance of a CAD circuit verifier.
Cognitive Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks Over Nakagami- $m$ Fading

In this correspondence, the outage probability (OP) of dual-hop cognitive amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks subject to independent non-identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Nakagami-m fading is examined. We assume a spectrum-sharing environment, where two different strategies are proposed to determine the transmit powers of the secondary network. Specifically, the transmit power conditions of the proposed spectrum-sharing network are governed by either the combined power constraint of the interference on the primary network and the maximum transmission power at the secondary network or the single power constraint of the interference on the primary network. Closed-form lower bounds and asymptotic expressions for the OP are derived. Regardless of the transmit power constraint, we reveal that the diversity order is strictly defined by the minimum fading severity between the two hops of the secondary network. This aligns with the well-known result for conventional dual-hop AF relaying without spectrum sharing. Furthermore, the impact of the primary network on the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff is investigated. We confirm that the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff is independent of the primary network.
Opportunistic computing experience with the SAM platform

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) technology allows one to build applications exhibiting opportunistic, non deterministic and dynamic behavior. Unfortunately in SOC technologies these features are uncontrolled and software application is not an explicit concept. The challenge therefore is to provide a well defined application definition (an application model) in which the opportunistic behavior is used only when convenient, and to provide an extended SOC platform which enforces compliant application execution. This paper discuses the issues and shows the solution proposed by the SAM platform.
Aftershock distribution of the 1983 Japan Sea earthquake revealed by ocean-bottom and land-based stations

A detailed aftershock distribution study is made for the 1983 Japan Sea Earthquake of MJMA 7.7. A five-OBS (ocean bottom seismograph) array in the aftershock region near the northeastern edge of the Japan Sea provided a dataset for a time period of 12 days to give strong controls on locations. This dataset and the land network data for the corresponding events were used to obtain accurate hypocenter solutions employing an inversion technique for a two-dimensional structure. The focal depths of thus determined aftershocks increase a little eastward. These events, however, do not seem to delineate the main shock fault plane, since its dip angle has been inferred to be much larger by a number of source mechanism studies. The lateral extent of aftershocks agrees with the inferred fault-plane dimension. We also found that the central part of the crescent-shaped aftershock area is especially complex in seismicity, which includes both eastern shallow and western deep events. This complexity seems to be related to a change in the spatial pattern of other geological and geophysical parameters.