Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diagnosis and surgical management for retrosternal thyroid mass.

OBJECTIVE To understand the clinical manifestations, diagnostic methods, surgical management and prognosis of retrosternal thyroid masses in various pathological types. METHODS Sixty-four cases of retrosternal thyroid masses with surgical intervention were analyzed retrospectively. RESULTS Trachea-compressed symptoms (65%) and shadows beside the trachea at thoracic inlet (94%) were the most common clinical findings, chest X-ray (70%) and CT scan (96%) had higher diagnostic rate. No death occurred during operation or hospitalization among these patients. Total complications occurred in 15.7% cases (11/70) (including 3 preoperative cases with hoarseness) and postoperative pathological results were mainly multinodular goiter (54.7%), thyroid adenoma (21.9%) and thyroid carcinoma (15.6%) (including local carcinomatous change). CONCLUSIONS Diagnosis of retrosternal thyroid mass can be correctly made by chest X-ray and CT scan. Most operations on retrosternal thyroid masses can be performed safely through cervical incision with minimal morbidity and low recurrence rate. Retrosternal thyroid carcinoma was potentially invasive and could hardly be resected completely, hence with poor prognosis.
Per Flow Packet Scheduling Scheme to Improve the End-to-End Fairness in Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Network

— Various fairness models and criteria proposed by academia and industries for wired networks can be applied for ad hoc wireless network. The end-to-end fairness in an ad hoc wireless network is a challenging task compared to wired networks, which has not been addressed effectively. Most of the traffic in an ad hoc network are transport layer flows and thus the fairness of transport layer flows has attracted the interest of the researchers. The factors such as MAC protocol, routing protocol, the length of a route, buffer size, active queue management algorithm and the congestion control algorithms affects the fairness of transport layer flows. In this paper, we have considered the rate of data transmission, the queue management and packet scheduling technique. The ad hoc network is dynamic in nature due to various parameters such as transmission of control packets, multihop nature of forwarding packets, changes in source and destination nodes, changes in the routing path influences determining throughput and fairness among the concurrent flows. In addition, the effect of interaction between the protocol in the data link and transport layers has also plays a role in determining the rate of the data transmission. We maintain queue for each flow and the delay information of each flow is maintained accordingly. The pre-processing of flow is done up to the network layer only. The source and destination address information is used for separating the flow and the transport layer information is not used. This minimizes the delay in the network. Each flow is attached to a timer and is updated dynamically. Finite State Machine (FSM) is proposed for queue and transmission control mechanism. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in ns-2 simulation environment. The throughput and fairness based on mobility for different flows used as performance metrics. We have compared the performance of the proposed approach with ATP and the transport layer information is used. This minimizes the delay in the network. Each flow is attached to a timer and is updated dynamically. Finite State Machine (FSM) is proposed for queue and transmission control mechanism. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in ns-2 simulation environment. The throughput and fairness based on not mobility for different flows used as performance metrics. We have compared the performance of the proposed approach with ATP and MC-MLAS and the performance of the proposed approach is encouraging.
Effects of Isomalto-Oligosaccharides on Bowel Functions and Indicators of Nutritional Status in Constipated Elderly Men

Objectives: To evaluate effects of isomalto-oligosaccharides (IO) on the bowel function and nutritional status of elderly men. Methods: Seven older male subjects participated in this study that consisted of a 30-day control low fiber period followed by a 30-day IO-supplemented (10 g active components) experimental period. Bowel functions such as defecation, enema use and bloating were monitored daily. Fecal characteristics such as wet and dry stool weights, stool moisture, pH and short-chain fatty acid contents were determined on five-day fecal composites collected in each period. Feces were further fractionated into plant, bacterial and soluble fractions to determine the bases for the increase in stool weight. Nutritional status of subjects was assessed with anthropometric parameters, nutrient intake and biochemical measurements. Results: Incorporation of IO significantly increased the defecation frequency, wet stool output and dry stool weight by twofold, 70% and 55%, respectively. Fecal acetate and propionate concentrations significantly increased by nearly two and a half fold with IO supplement. The increase in stool bulk was mainly attributed by increased bacterial mass. Mean serum sodium concentration decreased in the experimental period while other blood characteristics did not change significantly. Anthropometric parameters and nutrient intake remained constant throughout the study. Conclusions: Consumption of IO effectively improved bowel movement, stool output and microbial fermentation in the colon without any adverse effect observed in this study. Therefore, supplementation of IO into ordinary low fiber diets may be practical in relieving constipation in the elderly population.
COGNITIVE THINKING FOR MOBILE ROBOT IN PATH PLANNING

Today’s mobile robots operate in natural industrial, commercial, or military environments and must interact with humans during the decision-making process. The natural environment is highly unstructured and often unknown, hence these robots must be able to process a large amount of information, and make planning and navigational decisions quickly. Autonomous mobile robot have additional processing requirements where they have to collect, plan, and execute their planned route as well as performing tasks relevant to their specific missions. The path planning task is usually one of many important tasks that these robots must accomplish. Autonomous mobile applications require efficient and adaptive path planning approaches. A number of heuristic algorithms exist for producing optimal traverses given changing arc costs. But, most of analytical algorithms are focused on the path finding procedure in a known environment and leave higher level functions, such as obstacle detection. The Cognitive Based Adaptive path planning (CBAPP) is an adaptive and cognitive based thinking system. And efficiency of the CBAPP was compared with analytical and a heuristic based algorithm results. Based on the simulation results, it was shown that CBAPP finds fast, efficient, and acceptable paths.
Generation Y Purchase Intention of Personal Care Products:The Influence of Attitude, Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioural Control / Noor’ain Mohamad Yunus, Rohana Mat Som, Afiza Abdul Majid,Ungku Munirah Ungku Abdul Aziz, Mohd Khalid Mohd Abas

Rising cost of living in Malaysia has negatively affected the demand for personal care products as consumers prefer to switch to cheaper alternatives. This has resulted in an increase in the number of registered and unregistered personal care products in the market. This situation has an impact on Malaysian consumption as some of the products contain hazardous and poisonous ingredients which may cause adverse effects on personal health. However, customers still consume the products although they are aware and conscious of the danger and the side effects of these products for self-satisfaction. Thus, using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), this study aims to shed further light on the factors that influence consumer decision making in the purchase of personal care products among Generation Y. The study was conducted using primary approach with the use of validated questionnaire from 390 university students. The findings revealed that subjective norm and perceived behavioural control influence consumer decision making. Findings provide evidence for businesses and policy makers to better understand the factors that influence consumer decision making. Further implications allow authorized body to identify the target group and conduct programs to educate consumers to engage in good judgement before making decisions to ensure healthy consumption choices aligned with the National Strategic Plan on promoting optimal healthy lifestyles.
A 16TX/16RX 60 GHz 802.11ad Chipset With Single Coaxial Interface and Polarization Diversity

The IEEE 802.11ad standard supports PHY rates up to 6.7 Gbps on four 2 GHz-wide channels from 57 to 64 GHz. A 60 GHz system offers higher throughput than existing 802.11ac solutions but has several challenges for high-volume production including: integration in the host platform, automated test, and high link loss due to blockage and polarization mismatch. This paper presents a 802.11ad radio chipset capable of SC and OFDM modulation using a 16TX-16RX beamforming RF front-end, complete with an antenna array that supports polarization diversity. To aid low-cost integration in PC platforms, a single coaxial cable interface is used between chips. The chipset is capable of maintaining a link of 4.6 Gbps (PHY rate) at 10 m.
Synthesis and Verification of Digital Circuits using Functional Simulation and Boolean Satisfiability

The semiconductor industry has long relied on the steady trend of transistor scaling, that is, the shrinking of the dimensions of silicon transistor devices, as a way to improve the cost and performance of electronic devices. However, several design challenges have emerged as transistors have become smaller. For instance, wires are not scaling as fast as transistors, and delay associated with wires is becoming more significant. Moreover, in the design flow for integrated circuits, accurate modeling of wire-related delay is available only toward the end of the design process, when the physical placement of logic units is known. Consequently, one can only know whether timing performance objectives are satisfied, i.e., if timing closure is achieved, after several design optimizations. Unless timing closure is achieved, expensive and time-consuming design-flow iterations are required. Given the challenges arising from increasingly complex designs, failing to quickly achieve timing closure threatens the ability of designers to produce high-performance chips that can match continually growing consumer demands. In this dissertation, we introduce powerful constraint-guided synthesis optimizations that take into account upcoming timing closure challenges and eliminate expensive design iterations. In particular, we use logic simulation to approximate the behavior of increasingly complex designs leveraging a recently proposed concept, called signatures, which allows us to represent a large fraction of a complex circuit's behavior in a compact data structure. By manipulating these signatures, we can efficiently discover a greater set of valid logic transformations than was previously possible and, as a result, enhance timing optimization. Based on the abstractions enabled through signatures, we propose a comprehensive suite of novel techniques: (1) a fast computation of circuit don't cares that increases restructuring opportunities, (2) a verification methodology to prove the correctness of speculative optimizations that efficiently utilizes the computational power of modern multi-core systems, and (3) a physical synthesis strategy using signatures that re-implements sections of a critical path while minimizing perturbations to the existing placement. Our results indicate that logic simulation is effective in approximating the behavior of complex designs and enables a broader family of optimizations than previous synthesis approaches.
E commerce Extended TAM Instrument Development

— E-commerce proved its importance as a reliable and viable channel of conducting business and consumer transactions. Researchers suggest the application and extension of the technology acceptance model (TAM) in different business and IS environements. In E-commerce, the TAM has been applied both in its original form and as an extended model in order to better understand online consumer behavior. However the instruments used did not include items that were balanced between the proess and the outcome of the onine shopping behavior. In this study, we develop and test instruments for an E-commerce specific extended TAM. These instrumets balance between items measuring procees satisfaction and outcome satisfaction, in addition to the original TAM constructs, namely perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. The study instruments proved to have reliability, convergent, discriminant and factorial validity.
Performance Analysis of MAC Protocols for Location-Independent End-to-End Delay in Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks

Backbone wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging alternatives to conventional wired backbones for metropolitan and have attracted much attention from both academic and industrial world as an infrastructure network for realizing the ubiquitous computing environment. WMN is a generalization of Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks that considers the use of heterogeneous nodes (e.g., clients and routers) and both wired and wireless connections to exchange data between these devices. The basic architecture of a WMN consists of a backbone of mesh routers (MR) and the clients that access communication services through the use of this backbone. Therefore, this backbone serves as a last mile solution that is interconnected to provide direct communication between clients (i.e., without routing the interclient traffic through any other intermediate network). This characteristic of a WMN enables it to function as an isolated autonomous network or as a last mile solution depending on the telecommunication facilities available at the place where the WMN is deployed. In a multi-hop WMN, communication between two nodes is basically carried out by forwarding packets through a number of intermediate nodes. In WMNs, nodes are comprised of mesh routers in fixed sites and mobile clients as shown in Fig.1. We call a mesh router (also called mesh node) with gateway functions a gateway node, which is equipped with wireline network interfaces to connect the internet backbone. In this chapter each mesh node operates not only as an access point (AP) for mobile clients in its own basic service set (BSS) but also as a router, forwarding packets on behalf of other nodes that may not be within direct wireless transmission range of their destinations (see Fig. 1). Mobile clients are attached to a node in their BSS. Data originating from mobile clients are relayed by intermediate relay nodes hop by hop and delivered to the gateway. One of the important problems to be solved in WMNs is the unfair bandwidth sharing problem depending on the nodes’ location. More specifically, the per node throughput may decrease and the end-to-end delay may dramatically increase with an increasing hop-count distance from the gateway. In particular, WMNs based on single radio, irrespective of its simplicity and high fault tolerance, face a significant limitation of limited network capacity. It has been shown (2) that the theoretical upper limit of the per node throughput 3
Monitoring gp43 Antigenemia in Paracoccidioidomycosis Patients during Therapy

ABSTRACT Paracoccidioidomycosis (PCM) is a systemic fungal disease that is particularly important among individuals living and working in rural areas of endemicity in Latin America. Detection of anti-Paracoccidioides brasiliensis antibodies is of limited value due to false-negative results. Detection of P. brasiliensis-gp43 circulating antigen is a practical approach for a specific diagnosis of the disease. In a previous study we described an inhibition enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay able to detect the 43-kDa P. brasiliensis antigen in sera of 100% of patients with the acute form of PCM and in 95.31 and 100% of patients with the chronic multifocal and unifocal forms of PCM. To investigate its potential application for the follow-up of PCM patients during treatment, antigen levels were monitored at regular intervals for up 8 to 12 months in serum samples from 23 patients. The results showed that treatment with itraconazole resulted in decreasing levels of circulating gp43 that were correlated with the reduction of anti-gp43 antibodies. It was also observed that by the end of 12 months of treatment gp43 levels were <5 μg/ml in all patients.
Short-term observations of the regenerative potential of injured proximal sensory nerves crossed with distal motor nerves

Motor nerves and sensory nerves conduct signals in different directions and function in different ways. In the surgical treatment of peripheral nerve injuries, the best prognosis is obtained by keeping the motor and sensory nerves separated and repairing the nerves using the suture method. However, the clinical consequences of connections between sensory and motor nerves currently remain unknown. In this study, we analyzed the anatomical structure of the rat femoral nerve, and observed the motor and sensory branches of the femoral nerve in the quadriceps femoris. After ligation of the nerves, the proximal end of the sensory nerve was connected with the distal end of the motor nerve, followed by observation of the changes in the newly-formed regenerated nerve fibers. Acetylcholinesterase staining was used to distinguish between the myelinated and unmyelinated motor and sensory nerves. Denervated muscle and newly formed nerves were compared in terms of morphology, electrophysiology and histochemistry. At 8 weeks after connection, no motor nerve fibers were observed on either side of the nerve conduit and the number of nerve fibers increased at the proximal end. The proportion of newly-formed motor and sensory fibers was different on both sides of the conduit. The area occupied by autonomic nerves in the proximal regenerative nerve was limited, but no distinct myelin sheath was visible in the distal nerve. These results confirm that sensory and motor nerves cannot be effectively connected. Moreover, the change of target organ at the distal end affects the type of nerves at the proximal end.
Optimisation de la production de l'électricité renouvelable pour un site isolé.

Le but de cette these est l'optimisation de la production de l'electricite renouvelable pour site isole de faible puissance. Un systeme, utilisant deux sources renouvelables : photovoltaique et eolienne, est etudie afin d'ameliorer le rendement energetique de l'energie produite. Pour la chaine de conversion photovoltaique, un controleur pour suivre le point de puissance maximale est concu en utilisant l'approche de recherche directe (methode Perturbe & Observe) combinee avec la logique floue, tout en prenant en compte le sens de variation des perturbations. Avec cette combinaison, on peut eviter des defauts de la methode Perturbe & Observe, s'affranchir des informations sur les caracteristiques du panneau photovoltaique et des conditions climatiques. Egalement, pour la chaine de conversion eolienne de petite puissance fonctionnant a vitesse variable couplee a un generateur synchrone a aimant permanent, un controleur pour suivre le point de puissance maximale est propose qui est base sur le meme principe par rapport a la chaine de conversion photovoltaique. Cette approche proposee a l'avantage de l'utilisation d'un capteur de tension au lieu d'un capteur de vitesse, ceci presente un interet certain notamment pour sites isoles par rapport aux autres solutions. Enfin, pour la realisation d'un systeme de production d'electricite hybride, un superviseur est concu pour obtenir un comportement optimal du systeme en fonction des variations de la charge et de la production en prenant en compte du systeme de stockage et de delestage. Pour chaque point aborde, des etudes en simulation sont fournies pour montrer l'efficacite des approches proposees.
The Influence Of Supply Chain Logistics On Food Wastage In Kenya: Perspectives of Selected Suppliers in Nairobi’s Western Precincts

iii COPYRIGHT . v LIST OF TABLES . viii LIST OF FIGURES . ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . x CHAPTER ONE . 1 1.0 INTRODUCTION.1 1.1 Background to the Study . 1 1.2 Problem Statement . 6 1.3 Purpose of the Study . 6 1.4 Research Questions . 6 1.5 Significance of the Study . 7 1.6 Scope of the Study . 8 1.7 Definition of Terms.8 1.8 Chapter Summary . 9 CHAPTER TWO . 10 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW . 10 2.
Seminoma Arising in Cryptorchid Testis 25 Years After Orchiopexy: Case Report

A 33-year-old man who underwent right orchiopexy at age 8 for undescended testis had a swelling develop at the same site 25 years later. He underwent right high orchiectomy. Histopathologic examination of the resected specimen suggested seminoma, and he was treated with chemotherapy (cisplatinum, etoposide, and bleomycin.) Even though the ideal age at orchiopexy is unknown, early intervention is advocated to preserve fertility and prevent malignant transformation. The management of cryptorchid testis is controversial. In view of the persistent malignant potential of this condition, early orchiopexy and lifelong follow-up are recommended.
Treatment of human tungiasis with niridazole (Ambilhar) a double-blind placebo-controlled trial.

Following the observation that children treated for urinary schistosomiasis also become free from ulcers caused by gravid human fleas, Tunga penetrans, a double-blind placebo-controlled trial was carried out against flea ulcers using a single or double dose of niridazole (Ambilhar) at 30 mg kg−1 body weight.Seventy-eight children treated with the single dose showed alleviation of local pruritus and total lysis of the embedded gravid flea within two weeks; healing of the ulcer crater averaged three weeks. Thirty-four children were given two doses of niridazole with an interval of one week. The results were similar to those with the single dose but healing occurred in only two weeks.Treatment was effective in all the children; side effects were limited to abdominal pain, vomiting and nausea (21 out of 135: 15·6°0). Twenty-three age and sex-matched control children received ascorbic acid as placebo.The addition of niridazole to pig feed is recommended, also that parents should encourage their children to wea.
Sample Size Calculation and Power Analysis of Changes in Mean Response Over Time

Despite tremendous effort on different designs with cross-sectional data, little research has been conducted for sample size calculation and power analyses under repeated measures design. In addition to time-averaged difference, changes in mean response over time (CIMROT) is the primary interest in repeated measures analysis. We generalized sample size calculation and power analysis equations for CIMROT to allow unequal sample size between groups for both continuous and binary measures, through simulation, evaluated the performance of proposed methods, and compared our approach to that of a two-stage model formulization. We also created a software procedure to implement the proposed methods.