Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microwave Radar-Based Breast Cancer Detection: Imaging in Inhomogeneous Breast Phantoms

This letter presents, for the first time, experimental work on microwave breast cancer imaging using inhomogeneous breast phantoms. A recently designed 31-antenna array is used in imaging experiments. The imaging system operates in the full ultrawideband frequency range, between 3 and 10 GHz. To verify imaging performance of our system, new breast phantoms with inhomogeneous interior were developed. For three different breast phantoms presented in this work, the contrast between spherical phantom tumors and surrounding materials ranges from 5:1 to 1.6:1. Our results show that the biggest challenge in radar microwave imaging is the inhomogeneity of the volume being sensed, and not the contrast itself. In addition to experimental results, we also present the new image formation algorithm, which is a modified version of the delay-and-sum (DAS) algorithm. The new algorithm makes use of a new weighting factor, the coherence factor. The new algorithm is effective in reducing clutter, providing better images. For the most demanding imaging example presented herein, the new algorithm improves the peak clutter-to-target energy ratio by 3.1 dB.
Named Entity Recognition on Code-Mixed Cross-Script Social Media Content

Focusing on the current multilingual scenario in social media, this paper reports automatic extraction of named entities (NE) from code-mixed cross-script social media data. Our prime target is to extract NE for question answering. This paper also introduces a Bengali-English (Bn-En) code-mixedcross-script dataset for NE research and proposes domain speciﬁc taxonomies for NE. We used formal as well as informal language-speciﬁc features to prepare the classiﬁcation models and employed four machine learning algorithms (Conditional Random Fields, Margin Infused Relaxed Algorithm, Support Vector Machine and Maximum Entropy Markov Model) for the NE recognition (NER) task. In this study, Bengali is considered as the native language while English is considered as the non-native language. However, the approach presented in this paper is generic in nature and could be used for any other code-mixed dataset. The classiﬁcation models based on CRF and SVM performed well among the classiﬁers.
N_LyST: a simple and rapid screening test for Lynch syndrome

Aims We sought to use PCR followed by high-resolution melting analysis to develop a single closed-tube screening panel to screen for Lynch syndrome. This comprises tests for microsatellite instability (MSI), MLH1 methylation promoter and BRAF mutation. Methods For MSI testing, five mononucleotide markers (BAT25, BAT26, BCAT25, MYB, EWSR1) were developed. In addition, primers were designed to interrogate Region C of the MLH1 promoter for methylation (using bisulphite-modified DNA) and to test for mutations in codon 600 of BRAF. Two separate cohorts from Nottingham (n=99, 46 with MSI, 53 being microsatellite stable (MSS)) and Edinburgh (n=88, 45 MSI, 43 MSS) were tested. Results All the cases (n=187) were blind tested for MSI and all were correctly characterised by our panel. The MLH1 promoter and BRAF were tested only in the Nottingham cohort. Successful blinded analysis was performed on the MLH1 promoter in 97 cases. All MSS cases showed a pattern of non-methylation while 41/44 cases with MSI showed full methylation. The three cases with MSI and a non-methylated pattern had aberrations in MSH2 and MSH6 expression. BRAF mutation was detected in 61% of MSI cases and 11% of MSS cases. Finally, 12 cases were blind screened by using the whole panel as a single test. Of these, five were identified as MSS, four as MSI/non-LS and three as MSI/possible LS. These results were concordant with the previous data. Conclusion We describe the Nottingham Lynch Syndrome Test (N_LyST). This is a quick, simple and cheap method for screening for Lynch syndrome.
Consumer Preferences for Animal Welfare Attributes: The Case of Gestation Crates

Animal welfare concerns are having dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets. Here we examine consumer preferences for pork products with a focus on use of gestation crates. We examine underlying consumer valuations of pork attributes while considering preference heterogeneity as well as voluntary and legislative alternatives in producing gestation crate-free pork. Our results suggest that prohibiting swine producers from using gestation crates fails to improve consumer welfare in the presence of a labeling scheme documenting voluntary disadoption of gestation crates. Consumers are found to implicitly associate animal welfare attributes with smaller farms. Preference heterogeneity drives notably diverse consumer welfare impacts when pork produced with use of gestation crates is no longer available for consumption.
Low T3 levels as a predictor marker predict the prognosis of patients with acute ischemic stroke

Background: Early and accurate prediction of outcome in acute stroke is important. The aim of this prospective study was to explore the correlation between serum triiodothyronine level and prognosis in acute ischemic stroke patients. Methods: A prospective observational study which included 359 consecutive patients with acute ischemic stroke from December 2014 to November 2015 was interrogated. Serum triiodothyronine (T3) concentrations were measured on admission to understand their value in predicting functional outcome within 90 d using multivariable models adjusted for confounding factors. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were calculated to define the best cut-off value of triiodothyronine to predict outcome. The accuracy of the test was assessed measuring the area under the ROC curve (AUROC). Results: Triiodothyronine was significantly decreased in patients with an unfavorable functional outcome as compared to patients with a favorable functional outcome within 90 d (p = 0.01). Binary logistic regression analyses revealed that lower triiodothyronine concentrations on admission were associated with a risk for poor outcomes (OR 0.05, 95% CI 0.01–0.25; p < 0.01). In addition, in ROC curve analysis, triiodothyronine may improve the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score in predicting functional outcome. The combined model AUROC was 0.84 for 30 d and 0.91 for 90 d, which were both significantly higher than the AUROCs of original NIHSS (0.83 and 0.87), triiodothyronine (0.64 and 0.69) and age (0.57 and 0.68) (all p < 0.05). Conclusions: Low serum triiodothyronine levels can be a predictive marker of short-term outcome after ischemic stroke. A combined model (triiodothyronine, age and NIHSS score) can add significant additional predictive information to the clinical score of the NIHSS.
Efficient minimization for dictionary based sparse representation and signal recovery

This paper provides an efficient minimization algorithm for dictionary based sparse representation and its application in some signal recovery problems. Dictionary has shown great potential in effectively representing various kinds of signals sparsely. However the computational cost associated with dictionary based sparse representation can be tremendous, especially when the representation problem is coupled with the complex encoding processes of the signals. The proposed algorithm tackles this problem by alternating direction minimizations with the use of Barzilai-Borwein's optimal step size selection technique to significantly improve the convergence speed. Numerical experiments demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm over traditional optimization methods.
Assessment of differentially expressed plasma microRNAs in nonsyndromic cleft palate and nonsyndromic cleft lip with cleft palate

Plasma microRNAs (miRNAs) have recently emerged as a new class of regulatory molecules that influence many biological functions. However, the expression profile of plasma microRNAs in nonsyndromic cleft palate (NSCP) or nonsyndromic cleft lip with cleft palate (NSCLP) remains poorly investigated. In this study, we used Agilent human miRNA microarray chips to monitor miRNA levels in three NSCP plasma samples (mixed as the CP group), three NSCLP plasma samples (mixed as the CLP group) and three normal plasma samples (mixed as the Control group). Six selected plasma miRNAs were validated in samples from an additional 16 CP, 33 CLP and 8 healthy children using qRT-PCR. Using Venn diagrams, distinct and overlapping dysregulated miRNAs were identified. Their respective target genes were further assessed using gene ontology and pathway analysis. The results show that distinct or overlapping biological processes and signalling pathways were involved in CP and CLP. Our study showed that the common key gene targets reflected functional relationships to the Notch, Wnt, phosphatidylinositol and Hedgehog signalling pathways. Further studies should examine the mechanism of the potential target genes, which may provide new avenues for future clinical prevention and therapy.
Effect of light-burend magnesia addition on the sinterability of light-weight magnesite-alumina spinel refractories

Industrial alumina and the dead-burned magnesia powder were used as the raw materials in the synthesis of light-weight magnesite-alumina spinel refractories and the effect of light-burned magnesia powder addition on the sinterability of magnesite-alumina spinel refrectories was studied by way of one step sintering. The research results showed that the sinterability of magnesite-alumina spinel could be improved by the addition of light-burned magnesia powder, and high temperature is favorable to the synthesis of the magnesite-alumina spinel.
Countervailing, time-dependent effects on host autophagy promote intracellular survival of Leishmania

Autophagy is essential for cell survival under stress and has also been implicated in host defense. Here, we investigated the interactions between Leishmania donovani, the main etiological agent of visceral leishmaniasis, and the autophagic machinery of human macrophages. Our results revealed that during early infection—and via activation of the Akt pathway—Leishmania actively inhibits the induction of autophagy. However, by 24 h, Leishmania switched from being an inhibitor to an overall inducer of autophagy. These findings of a dynamic, biphasic response were based on the accumulation of lipidated light chain 3 (LC3), an autophagosome marker, by Western blotting and confocal fluorescence microscopy. We also present evidence that Leishmania induces delayed host cell autophagy via a mechanism independent of reduced activity of the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). Notably, Leishmania actively inhibited mTOR-regulated autophagy even at later stages of infection, whereas there was a clear induction of autophagy via some other mechanism. In this context, we examined host inositol monophosphatase (IMPase), reduced levels of which have been implicated in mTOR-independent autophagy, and we found that IMPase activity is significantly decreased in infected cells. These findings indicate that Leishmania uses an alternative pathway to mTOR to induce autophagy in host macrophages. Finally, RNAi-mediated down-regulation of host autophagy protein 5 (ATG5) or autophagy protein 9A (ATG9A) decreased parasite loads, demonstrating that autophagy is essential for Leishmania survival. We conclude that Leishmania uses an alternative pathway to induce host autophagy while simultaneously inhibiting mTOR-regulated autophagy to fine-tune the timing and magnitude of this process and to optimize parasite survival.
Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition with Policy Learning

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is widely used for maximum likelihood learning in end-to-end speech recognition models. However, there is usually a disparity between the negative maximum likelihood and the performance metric used in speech recognition, e.g., word error rate (WER). This results in a mismatch between the objective function and metric during training. We show that the above problem can be mitigated by jointly training with maximum likelihood and policy gradient. In particular, with policy learning we are able to directly optimize on the (otherwise non-differentiable) performance metric. We show that joint training improves relative performance by 4% to 13% for our end-to-end model as compared to the same model learned through maximum likelihood. The model achieves 5.53% WER on Wall Street Journal dataset, and 5.42% and 14.70% on Librispeech test-clean and test-other set, respectively.
What may cause fetus loss from acute pancreatitis in pregnancy

Abstract Acute pancreatitis in pregnancy (APIP) poses a serious threat to the mother and her fetus, and might lead to fetal loss including miscarriage and stillbirth in certain patients. We sought to identify possible factors that affect fetal distress and evaluated outcomes of patients with APIP. We retrospectively reviewed clinical records of 54 pregnant women with APIP, who were treated at 2 tertiary clinical centers over a 6-year period. Clinical characteristics including etiology and severity of APIP, fetal monitoring data, and maternofetal outcomes were analyzed. Etiology of APIP included acute biliary pancreatitis (ABP, n = 14), hyperlipidemic pancreatitis (HLP, n = 22), and other etiologies (n = 18). Severity was classified as mild acute pancreatitis (MAP, n = 23), moderately severe acute pancreatitis (MSAP, n = 24), and severe acute pancreatitis (SAP, n = 7). The incidence of preterm delivery, fetal distress, and fetal loss increased with the progression of severity of APIP (P < .05). The severity of HLP was significantly higher than that of ABP and APIP of other etiology (P < .01). HLP was more likely to lead to fetal distress than other APs (P < .01). Only 12 (22.2%) patients had fetal monitoring including non-stress test (NST); 1 case of SAP (14.3%) and 15 cases of MSAP (62.5%) were not transferred to intensive care unit for intensive monitoring. The incidence of fetal distress and fetal loss increased with worsening of APIP severity. HLP tends to result in worse fetal outcomes. The deficiencies of fetal state monitoring, lack of assessment, and management of pregnant women might increase the fetal loss in APIP.
Birkhoff-von Neumann input-buffered crossbar switches for guaranteed-rate services

Based on a decomposition result by Birkhoff (1946) and von Neumann (1953) for a doubly sub-stochastic matrix, in this letter we propose a scheduling algorithm that is capable of providing guaranteed-rate services for input-buffered crossbar switches. Our guarantees are uniformly good for all nonuniform traffic. The computational complexity to identify the scheduling algorithm is O(N/sup 4.5/) for an N/spl times/N switch. Once the algorithm is identified, its on-line computational complexity is O(log N) and its on-line memory complexity is O(N/sup 3/ log N).
A Game Theoretic Optimization of RPL for Mobile Internet of Things Applications

The presence of mobile nodes in any wireless network can affect the performance of the network, leading to higher packet loss and increased energy consumption. However, many recent applications require the support of mobility and an efficient approach to handle mobile nodes is essential. In this paper, a game scenario is formulated, where nodes compete for network resources in a selfish manner, to send their data packets to the sink node. Each node counts as a player in the non-cooperative game. The optimal solution for the game is found using the unique Nash equilibrium (NE), where a node cannot improve its pay-off function while other players use their current strategy. The proposed solution aims to present a strategy to control different parameters of mobile nodes (or static nodes in a mobile environment) including transmission rate, timers, and operation mode, in order to optimize the performance of routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) under mobility in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput, energy consumption, and end-to-end-delay. The proposed solution monitors the mobility of nodes based on received signal strength indication readings, and it also takes into account the priorities of different nodes and the current level of noise in order to select the preferred transmission rate. An optimized protocol called game-theory based mobile RPL (GTM-RPL) is implemented and tested in multiple scenarios with different network requirements for Internet of Things applications. Simulation results show that in the presence of mobility, GTM-RPL provides a flexible and an adaptable solution that improves throughput whilst maintaining lower energy consumption showing more than 10% improvement compared to related work. For applications with high throughput requirements, GTM-RPL shows a significant advantage with more than 16% improvement in throughput and 20% improvement in energy consumption.
A Mismatch Between Athlete Practice and Current Sports Nutrition Guidelines Among Elite Female and Male Middle- and Long-Distance Athletes.

Contemporary nutrition guidelines promote a variety of periodized and time-sensitive recommendations, but current information regarding the knowledge and practice of these strategies among world-class athletes is limited. The aim of this study was to investigate this theme by implementing a questionnaire on dietary periodization practices in national/international level female (n = 27) and male (n = 21) middle- and long-distance runners/race-walkers. The questionnaire aimed to gain information on between and within-day dietary choices, as well as timing of pre- and posttraining meals and practices of training with low or high carbohydrate (CHO) availability. Data are shown as percentage (%) of all athletes, with differences in responses between subgroups (sex or event) shown as Chi-square x2 when p < . 05. Nearly two-thirds of all athletes reported that they aim to eat more food on, or after, hard training days. Most athletes said they focus on adequate fueling (96%) and adequate CHO and protein (PRO) recovery (87%) around key sessions. Twenty-six percent of athletes (11% of middle vs 42% of long-distance athletes [x2 (1, n = 46) = 4.308, p = . 038, phi = 0.3])) reported to undertake training in the fasted state, while 11% said they periodically restrict CHO intake, with 30% ingesting CHO during training sessions. Our findings show that elite endurance athletes appear to execute pre- and post-key session nutrition recovery recommendations. However, very few athletes deliberately undertake some contemporary dietary periodization approaches, such as training in the fasted state or periodically restricting CHO intake. This study suggests mismatches between athlete practice and current and developing sports nutrition guidelines.
Improvement of JPEG XT Floating-Point HDR Image Coding Using Region Adaptive Prediction

Displays capable of representing high-dynamic range (HDR) images were recently released in the digital consumer electronics market, and consumers have become increasingly interested in HDR images. However, the majority of today’s digital imaging devices are still low dynamic range (LDR) using an 8-bit representation for each RGB color components; hence, a backward-compatible HDR image format with an existing LDR-based imaging environment is required. Accordingly, JPEG XT, a new HDR image coding standard providing JPEG backward compatibility was established by the JPEG committee based on the market needs. JPEG XT consists of a base and a residual layer. Both layers are independently encoded by a legacy JPEG encoder. Most importantly, the base layer contains a tone-mapped LDR version of the HDR image for compliance with a legacy JPEG decoder. To date, three profiles have been defined for JPEG XT to encode HDR images, which are represented using floating-point values. This paper proposes a new image-coding scheme that uses a region adaptive prediction method with modified current specifications on JPEG XT Part 7. The proposed method adaptively predicts the HDR pixel value using different prediction information for each block based on the ratio between the LDR and HDR blocks, which is invariant to the tone-mapping operator, while the existing JPEG XT profiles globally predict the HDR values using an inverse transformation of the LDR values. Experimental results using various sample images show the superiority of the proposed method in terms of objective and visual evaluations.
PRIMA-1Met suppresses colorectal cancer independent of p53 by targeting MEK

PRIMA-1Met is the methylated PRIMA-1 (p53 reactivation and induction of massive apoptosis) and could restore tumor suppressor function of mutant p53 and induce p53 dependent apoptosis in cancer cells harboring mutant p53. However, p53 independent activity of PRIMA-1Met remains elusive. Here we reported that PRIMA-1Met attenuated colorectal cancer cell growth irrespective of p53 status. Kinase profiling revealed that mitogen-activated or extracellular signal-related protein kinase (MEK) might be a potential target of PRIMA-1Met. Pull-down binding and ATP competitive assay showed that PRIMA-1Met directly bound MEK in vitro and in cells. Furthermore, the direct binding sites of PRIMA-1Met were explored by using a computational docking model. Treatment of colorectal cancer cells with PRIMA-1Met inhibited p53-independent phosphorylation of MEK, which in turn impaired anchorage-independent cell growth in vitro. Moreover, PRIMA-1Met suppressed colorectal cancer growth in xenograft mouse model by inhibiting MEK1 activity. Taken together, our findings demonstrate a novel p53-independent activity of PRIMA-1Met to inhibit MEK and suppress colorectal cancer growth.
Study on performance of IP-SWAN based on distributed NS-RAID

Previous work on performance of network storage system has been mostly qualitative. This work proposes a quantitative analytical method based on closed queueing networks in order to analyze the performance bounds of IP-SWAN (storage wide area network) based on distributed network software RAID (NS-RAID). Experimental results show that testing results are within the bounds predicted by the performance analysis model and the bounds reflect the dynamic trend of the actual testing performance. Furthermore, the bottleneck and the potential bottleneck that affect the IP-SWAN performance can be derived from the performance analysis model. Meanwhile the model provides us with the criteria for distinguishing the key performance factors and non-key performance factors.