Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Etiological Diagnosis of Left Ventricular Dysfunction : Computed Tomography Compared With Coronary Angiography and Cardiac Magnetic Resonance

Introduction and objectives: To evaluate the capability of multidetector computed tomography to diagnose the coronary etiology of left ventricular dysfunction compared with using invasive coronary angiography and magnetic resonance. Methods: Forty consecutive patients with left ventricular dysfunction of uncertain etiology underwent invasive coronary angiography and contrast magnetic resonance. All patients were evaluated with multidetector computed tomography including coronary calcium presence and score, noninvasive coronary angiography, and myocardial tissue assessment. Results: The sensitivity and specificity of the presence of coronary calcium to identify left ventricular dysfunction was 100% and 31%, respectively. If an Agatston calcium score of >100 is taken, specificity increases to 58% with sensitivity still 100%. Sensitivity and specificity for coronary angiography by multidetector computed tomography was 100% and 96%, respectively; for identifying necrosis in contrast acquisition it was 57% and 100%, respectively; and in late acquisition, 84% and 96%, respectively. To identify coronary ventricular dysfunction with necrosis, the sensitivity and specificity was 92% and 100%, respectively. Conclusions: Of all the diagnostic tools available in multidetector computed tomography, coronary angiography is the most accurate in determining the coronary origin of left ventricular dysfunction. A combination of coronary angiography and myocardial tissue study after contrast allows a single test to obtain similar information compared with the combination of invasive coronary angiography and contrast magnetic resonance. 2011 Sociedad Española de Cardiologı́a. Published by Elsevier España, S.L. All rights reserved. Diagnóstico etiológico de la disfunción ventricular izquierda con tomografı́a computarizada: comparación con coronariografı́a y cardiorresonancia
Ambulatory assessment of clinical anxiety

(From the chapter) Outlined some principal methodological complications in ambulatory anxiety research and presented a recent study of flying phobics to highlight the advancements we have made: the recording of electrodermal activity and calibrated respiration, the development of computer programs to eliminate artifacts in these channels, the control for speech activation, the application of a new method to derive additional HR (heart rate) in the field, and the representation of event data in clock time. data were collected as part of a treatment study to investigate the effects of combining the administration of the benzodiazepine alprazolam with cognitive-behavioral therapy; 28 Subjects (with flying phobia) and 15 control Subjects were included in the analysis; (Subjects were adult females)
Asymptotically Efficient Algorithms for the Frobenius Form

A new randomized algorithm is presented for computation of the Frobenius form of an n×n matrix over a field. A version of the algorithm is presented that uses standard arithmetic whose asymptotic expected complexity matches the worst case complexity of the best known deterministic algorithm for this problem, recently given by Storjohann and Villard [25], and that seems to be superior when applied to sparse or structured matrices with a small number of invariant factors. A version that uses asymptotically fast matrix multiplication is also presented. This is the first known algorithm for this computation over small fields whose asymptotic complexity matches that of the best algorithm for computations over large fields and that also provides a Frobenius transition matrix over the ground field. As an application, it is shown that a “rational Jordan form” of an n×n matrix over a finite field can also be computed asymptotically efficiently.
Analysis of IL12B Gene Variants in Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background IL12B encodes the p40 subunit of IL-12, which is also part of IL-23. Recent genome-wide association studies identified IL12B and IL23R as susceptibility genes for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, the phenotypic effects and potential gene-gene interactions of IL12B variants are largely unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings We analyzed IL12B gene variants regarding association with Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Genomic DNA from 2196 individuals including 913 CD patients, 318 UC patients and 965 healthy, unrelated controls was analyzed for four SNPs in the IL12B gene region (rs3212227, rs17860508, rs10045431, rs6887695). Our analysis revealed an association of the IL12B SNP rs6887695 with susceptibility to IBD (p = 0.035; OR 1.15 [95% CI 1.01–1.31] including a trend for rs6887695 for association with CD (OR 1.41; [0.99–1.31], p = 0.066) and UC (OR 1.18 [0.97–1.43], p = 0.092). CD patients, who were homozygous C/C carriers of this SNP, had significantly more often non-stricturing, non-penetrating disease than carriers of the G allele (p = 6.8×10−5; OR = 2.84, 95% CI 1.66–4.84), while C/C homozygous UC patients had less often extensive colitis than G allele carriers (p = 0.029; OR = 0.36, 95% CI 0.14–0.92). In silico analysis predicted stronger binding of the minor C allele of rs6887695 to the transcription factor RORα which is involved in Th17 differentiation. Differences regarding the binding to the major and minor allele sequence of rs6887695 were also predicted for the transcription factors HSF1, HSF2, MZF1 and Oct-1. Epistasis analysis revealed weak epistasis of the IL12B SNP rs6887695 with several SNPs (rs11889341, rs7574865, rs7568275, rs8179673, rs10181656, rs7582694) in the STAT4 gene which encodes the major IL-12 downstream transcription factor STAT4 (p<0.05) but there was no epistasis between IL23R and IL12B variants. Conclusions/Significance The IL12B SNP rs6887695 modulates the susceptibility and the phenotype of IBD, although the effect on IBD susceptibilty is less pronounced than that of IL23R gene variants.
Impact of Oxidative Stress on Exercising Skeletal Muscle

It is well established that muscle contractions during exercise lead to elevated levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in skeletal muscle. These highly reactive molecules have many deleterious effects, such as a reduction of force generation and increased muscle atrophy. Since the discovery of exercise-induced oxidative stress several decades ago, evidence has accumulated that ROS produced during exercise also have positive effects by influencing cellular processes that lead to increased expression of antioxidants. These molecules are particularly elevated in regularly exercising muscle to prevent the negative effects of ROS by neutralizing the free radicals. In addition, ROS also seem to be involved in the exercise-induced adaptation of the muscle phenotype. This review provides an overview of the evidences to date on the effects of ROS in exercising muscle. These aspects include the sources of ROS, their positive and negative cellular effects, the role of antioxidants, and the present evidence on ROS-dependent adaptations of muscle cells in response to physical exercise.
Efficient Non-Consecutive Feature Tracking for Robust Structure-From-Motion

Structure-from-motion (SfM) largely relies on feature tracking. In image sequences, if disjointed tracks caused by objects moving in and out of the field of view, occasional occlusion, or image noise are not handled well, corresponding SfM could be affected. This problem becomes severer for large-scale scenes, which typically requires to capture multiple sequences to cover the whole scene. In this paper, we propose an efficient non-consecutive feature tracking framework to match interrupted tracks distributed in different subsequences or even in different videos. Our framework consists of steps of solving the feature “dropout” problem when indistinctive structures, noise or large image distortion exists, and of rapidly recognizing and joining common features located in different subsequences. In addition, we contribute an effective segment-based coarse-to-fine SfM algorithm for robustly handling large data sets. Experimental results on challenging video data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Revisiting Frank-Wolfe: Projection-Free Sparse Convex Optimization

We provide stronger and more general primal-dual convergence results for Frank-Wolfe-type algorithms (a.k.a. conditional gradient) for constrained convex optimization, enabled by a simple framework of duality gap certificates. Our analysis also holds if the linear subproblems are only solved approximately (as well as if the gradients are inexact), and is proven to be worst-case optimal in the sparsity of the obtained solutions. On the application side, this allows us to unify a large variety of existing sparse greedy methods, in particular for optimization over convex hulls of an atomic set, even if those sets can only be approximated, including sparse (or structured sparse) vectors or matrices, low-rank matrices, permutation matrices, or max-norm bounded matrices. We present a new general framework for convex optimization over matrix factorizations, where every Frank-Wolfe iteration will consist of a low-rank update, and discuss the broad application areas of this approach.
Education about Diverse Religions and Worldviews, Social Inclusion and Countering Extremism: Lessons for the Australian Curriculum

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the so-called ‘religion in schools debate’ has generated a significant amount of controversy in Australia and arguably impeded progress in both research and education about diverse religions and non-religious worldviews (ERW). This article focuses on the recently released Review of the Australian Curriculum – Final Report and examines why there has been such strong resistance to learning from international best practices in implementing ERW programmes in Australia. It presents an analysis of the Review’s findings, in light of these advances, notably the recently released Signposts: Policy and Practice for Teaching about Religions and Non-religious Worldviews in Intercultural Education document published by the Council of Europe. Finally, this article argues that for the Australian Curriculum to be genuinely ‘world class’, and for it to promote an appreciation of religious diversity, it needs to include ERW as a separate subject or across the national Curriculum, drawing on Australian and international research and policies in this field to develop curricula and resources that are appropriate for the Australian context.
Shaping perceptions of musical identity: an ethnography of non-music majors' experiences in an undergraduate music course focused on cultivating creativity

The purpose of this study was to investigate what "being a musician" means in an innovative, improvisation-based music course. Participants in this study were non-music majors enrolled in the course, MUS 2022: Cultivating Creativity through Music. Instructor and creator of the course, Dr. Liz Rose, Associate Professor of Music Education and Music Therapy at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, was also a study participant. By studying the classroom culture as it evolved throughout the semester, and by reflecting on the experiences of students enrolled in the course, I was able to gain an understanding of how students make meaning of their experiences with creativity and improvisation. By focusing on regularly recurring classroom practices, teacher and student behaviors, and socially constructed meanings of musicianship in the classroom, I present an idea of what `being a musician' means in this particular classroom of students who have varying degrees of formal training in music. Several forms of data were collected, including participant observation, analysis of video-recorded class sessions, individual interviews with student and teacher participants, focus group interviews with students, analysis of student assignments and reflections, and examination of course documents. To find emergent patterns and themes relating to participants' acquisition of meaning throughout course experiences, field notes, observations, and interview texts were reviewed multiple times. Students enrolled in MUS 2022 felt that being a musician in this particular classroom community meant expressing themselves, taking risks, and recognizing the musician within self and others, regardless of the extent of previous musical experiences or formal musical training.
MUSHROOM BODY INFLUENCE ON LOCOMOTOR ACTIVITY AND CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER

Whether or not mechanisms underlying circadian locomotor rhythms and learning are related anatomically through the mushroom bodies (MBs) was investigated by monitoring behavioral rhythmicity in flies with MB lesions induced by chemical ablation and by mutations in five different genes. All flies tested were later examined histologically to assess (1) MB neuroanatomy, and (2) the condition of the putative pacemaker cells -- the ventral Lateral Neurons (LN v s) and their terminals that project to the vicinity of the MB calyces. All groups of flies had normal rhythms except for mushroom body miniature ( mbm ; only in a wild-type Berlin genetic background) and mushroom body defect ( mud ). MB ablation had no effect on the gender-specific differences in the rhythmic activity profile that are typical of wild-type flies. However, ablated males had a slightly longer period than untreated males and were more active under constant dark conditions. LN v s and their arborization patterns appeared normal in MB-ablated and in most mutant flies. Activity defects of mbm flies were attributed to genetic background rather than to the mutation alone. Misrouted LN v projections and ∼14% arrhythmia of mud flies were uncorrelated and attributed to pleiotropy rather than to specific effects of MB lesions. Our results imply that MBs are not involved in circadian activity rhythms but that they do have an inhibitory effect on activity levels of male flies.
Insular Cortex Activity Is Associated with Effects of Negative Expectation on Nociceptive Long-Term Habituation

It is generally accepted that acute painful experience is influenced by context information shaping expectation and modulating attention, arousal, stress, and mood. However, little is known about the nature, duration, and extent of this effect, particularly regarding the negative expectation. We used a standardized longitudinal pain paradigm and painful heat test stimuli in healthy participants over a time course of 8 consecutive days, inducing nociceptive habituation over time. Thirty-eight healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to two different groups. One group received the information that the investigators expected the pain intensity to increase over time (context group). The other group was not given any information (control group). All participants rated the pain intensity of the daily standardized pain paradigm on a visual analog scale. In agreement with previous studies the pain ratings in the control group habituated over time. However, the context group reported no change of pain ratings over time. Functional imaging data showed a difference between the two groups in the right parietal operculum. These data suggest that a negative context not only has an effect on immediate pain but can modulate perception of pain in the future even without experience/conditioning. Neuronally, this process is mediated by the right opercular region.
Parallel Distributed Trajectory Pattern Mining Using Hierarchical Grid with MapReduce

This paper proposes a new approach to trajectory pattern mining, which attempts to discover frequent movement patterns from the trajectories of moving objects. For dealing with a large volume of trajectory data, traditional approaches quantize them by a grid with a fixed resolution. However, an appropriate resolution often varies across different areas of trajectories. Simply increasing the resolution cannot capture broad patterns and consumes unnecessarily large computational resources. To solve the problem, the authors propose a hierarchical grid-based approach with quadtree search. The approach initially searches for frequent patterns with a coarse grid and drills down into a finer grid level to discover more minute patterns. The algorithm is naturally parallelized and implemented in the MapReduce programming model to accelerate the computation. The authors' evaluative experiments on real-word data show the effectiveness of the authors' approach in mining complex patterns with lower computational cost than the previous work.
Sujeito nulo na aquisição do Português do Brasil: resultados quantitativos de um estudo de caso

Este trabalho tem como foco o uso de sujeitos nulos por uma crianca de dois anos de idade, monolingue, adquirindo o portugues do Brasil como lingua materna. Os dados foram obtidos em coleta longitudinal, atraves de gravacoes quinzenais feitas em audio na casa do informante, cobrindo a faixa dos 2;4 ate os 3;0 de idade. A partir da analise dos dados, procura-se corroborar a hipotese de que ja desde os 2;4 a producao da crianca exibe as mesmas restricoes do adulto ao uso de nulos na posicao sujeito. Sujeitos nulos sao encontrados em percentuais baixos, de, em media, 51,2%. Esse numero e comparavel a achados atestados na aquisicao de linguas nao pro-drop, como o ingles e o alemao, por criancas com contagens de MLU semelhantes. Simultaneamente, tais percentuais sao mais baixos do aqueles atestados em pesquisas acerca da aquisicao do portugues Europeu e do italiano, envolvendo a producao de criancas em fases comparaveis de desenvolvimento linguistico. Por fim, a analise qualitativa dos ambientes sintaticos em que sujeitos nulos sao usados nos enunciados da crianca evidencia que as restricoes esperadas estao presentes. Nomeadamente, sujeitos nulos sao altamente restritos nas frases em que posicoes em CP estao preenchidas.
Myocardial ultrastructural changes in alloxan-induced diabetes in rabbits.

The ultrastructural changes in the left ventricles of rabbits with alloxan (100 mg/kg i.v.)-induced diabetes were examined. Injection of alloxan resulted in a diabetic state characterized by increased hemoglobin glycosylation, blood and urine glucose and a significant depression of serum insulin levels. Electron microscopic examination of 10-week diabetic hearts revealed a spectrum of abnormalities ranging from mild to severe. Cardiac muscle cells in diabetic hearts showed some myofibrillar damage and varying degrees of contraction. The most prominent findings, however, were alterations in the mitochondria. Swollen and fragmented mitochondria containing amorphous dense bodies were evident upon electron microscopic examination. The cristae in the mitochondria appeared distorted and in some cases were completely lysed. A marked increase in lipid droplets and glycogen granules was also apparent. In addition, the sarcoplasmic reticulum was dilated and contained varying degrees of electron-dense material. These ultrastructural alterations suggest that the cardiomyopathy observed in alloxan-induced diabetic rabbits could be due to alterations in the vasculature or may be secondary to a number of metabolic alterations previously reported in this model.
Improvements in audio classification based on sinusoidal modeling

In this paper, a set of features is presented and evaluated based on sinusoidal modeling of audio signals. Amplitude, frequency, and phase parameters of the sinusoidal model are used and compared as input features into an audio classifier system. The performance of sinusoidal model features is evaluated for classification of audio into speech and music classes using both the Gaussian and the GMM (Gaussian mixture model) classifiers. Experimental results show superiority of the amplitude parameters of the sinusoidal model, which could be used for the first time for such an audio classification, as compared to the popular cepstral features. By using a set of 40 sinusoidal features, we achieved 95.06% accuracy in the audio classification at frame level, as compared to 92.26% accuracy obtained with the MFCC coefficients, as tested over the same audio corpus.
Ovarian cancer vaccine trials and tribulations

Solid tumor vaccine therapy is coming of age. After years of failures, setbacks and negative trials, the first positive trials of antitumor vaccines in humans are being seen. Antitumor vaccine trials have reported an improvement in progression-free survival in breast cancer and an overall survival advantage in prostate cancer. Although, to date no positive Phase III antitumor vaccines trials in ovarian cancer have been reported, recent great strides have been made in improving tumor vaccine target antigens, improving antigen presentation and understanding the mechanisms of immunosuppression associated with tumors. In addition, biological therapies are now being identified that may enhance the efficacy of tumor vaccines. This review summarizes recent trials of ovarian cancer vaccines and addresses future directions to improve vaccine efficacy.
A methodology for precise comparisons of processor core architectures for homogeneous many-core DSP platforms

The power efficiency of an HMCP heavily depends on the architecture of its processor cores. It is thus very important to choose it carefully. When comparing processing architectures for their use in a many-core platform, one must evaluate its IPC, but also its power and area. Precise power and area evaluations can only be done with real implementations. However, comparing processor implementations is a difficult task since the implementation specifities introduce interferences on the performances. This paper proposes a methodology that allows to realize precise comparisons of performance for different processor architectures. Using this methodology, it is possible to choose the best architecture for an HMCP targeting DSP applications. The methodology is based on the use of a common architural template to build the cores, and on the application of specific optimizations when relevant. In order to validate the methodology, three RISC cores are implemented: a single-issue core, and two VLIW processors with respectively 3 and 5 issues. The implemented cores are precisely compared on a set of DSP kernels.