Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Voxel-wise displacement as independent features in classification of multiple sclerosis

We present a method that utilizes registration displacement fields to perform accurate classification of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain acquired from healthy individuals and patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). Contrary to standard approaches, each voxel in the displacement field is treated as an independent feature that is classified individually. Results show that when used with a simple linear discriminant and majority voting, the approach is superior to using the displacement field with a single classifier, even when compared against more sophisticated classification methods such as adaptive boosting, random forests, and support vector machines. Leave-one-out cross-validation was used to evaluate this method for classifying images by disease, MS subtype (Acc: 77%-88%), and age (Acc: 96%-100%).
Modified Polar Format Algorithm for High-Resolution Wide-Swath DBF SAR

The digital beam forming (DBF) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system can operate with a pulse repetition frequency (PRF) dramatically lower than the Doppler bandwidth, thus can provide high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) SAR images. In traditional DBF SAR, a preprocessing to reconstruct the umambiguous signal spectrum is required before image formation processing. In this paper, the signal model for DBF SAR is presented and analyzed from the Fourier transform viewpoint. Then based on the multichannel Fourier model, a modified polar format algorithm is proposed to process the DBF SAR data. The new algorithm don't need any preprocessing operations, therefore possesses higher computational efficiency.
Dietary carnosic acid suppresses hepatic steatosis formation via regulation of hepatic fatty acid metabolism in high-fat diet-fed mice

In this study, we examined the hepatic anti-steatosis activity of carnosic acid (CA), a phenolic compound of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) leaves, as well as its possible mechanism of action, in a high-fat diet (HFD)-fed mice model. Mice were fed a HFD, or a HFD supplemented with 0.01% (w/w) CA or 0.02% (w/w) CA, for a period of 12 weeks, after which changes in body weight, blood lipid profiles, and fatty acid mechanism markers were evaluated. The 0.02% (w/w) CA diet resulted in a marked decline in steatosis grade, as well as in homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) index values, intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test (IGTT) results, body weight gain, liver weight, and blood lipid levels (P < 0.05). The expression level of hepatic lipogenic genes, such as sterol regulating element binding protein-1c (SREBP-1c), liver-fatty acid binding protein (L-FABP), stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 (SCD1), and fatty acid synthase (FAS), was significantly lower in mice fed 0.01% (w/w) CA and 0.02% (w/w) CA diets than that in the HFD group; on the other hand, the expression level of β-oxidation-related genes, such as peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPAR-α), carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1 (CPT-1), and acyl-CoA oxidase (ACO), was higher in mice fed a 0.02% (w/w) CA diet, than that in the HFD group (P < 0.05). In addition, the hepatic content of palmitic acid (C16:0), palmitoleic acid (C16:1), and oleic acid (C18:1) was significantly lower in mice fed the 0.02% (w/w) CA diet than that in the HFD group (P < 0.05). These results suggest that orally administered CA suppressed HFD-induced hepatic steatosis and fatty liver-related metabolic disorders through decrease of de novo lipogenesis and fatty acid elongation and increase of fatty acid β-oxidation in mice.
Towards creation of mobility society using solar energy

This paper presents current status and future direction of Photovoltaic (PV) electric power system installations in the world. This article also overviews PV R&D activities in Japan as the PV R&D Project Leader of NEDO and JST. Present status of various solar cells efficiencies under NEDO and JST PV R&D projects are presented: 44.4% for concentrator III-V compound 3-junction solar cell, 37.9% for 1-sun III-V compound 3-junctiion cell, 26.7% for single-crystal Si cell, 22.3% for CIGS cell, and 14.0% for a-Si based 3-junction cell. Efficiency potential of various solar cells is also discussed. Prospects of PV and our recent approaches towards the creation of “Mobility Society by using Solar Energy” are discussed.
The Complete Chloroplast Genome of Ginkgo biloba Reveals the Mechanism of Inverted Repeat Contraction

We determined the complete chloroplast genome (cpDNA) of Ginkgo biloba (common name: ginkgo), the only relict of ginkgophytes from the Triassic Period. The cpDNA molecule of ginkgo is quadripartite and circular, with a length of 156,945 bp, which is 6,458 bp shorter than that of Cycas taitungensis. In ginkgo cpDNA, rpl23 becomes pseudo, only one copy of ycf2 is retained, and there are at least five editing sites. We propose that the retained ycf2 is a duplicate of the ancestral ycf2, and the ancestral one has been lost from the inverted repeat A (IRA). This loss event should have occurred and led to the contraction of IRs after ginkgos diverged from other gymnosperms. A novel cluster of three transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, trnY-AUA, trnC-ACA, and trnSeC-UCA, was predicted to be located between trnC-GCA and rpoB of the large single-copy region. Our phylogenetic analysis strongly suggests that the three predicted tRNA genes are duplicates of trnC-GCA. Interestingly, in ginkgo cpDNA, the loss of one ycf2 copy does not significantly elevate the synonymous rate (Ks) of the retained copy, which disagrees with the view of Perry and Wolfe (2002) that one of the two-copy genes is subjected to elevated Ks when its counterpart has been lost. We hypothesize that the loss of one ycf2 is likely recent, and therefore, the acquired Ks of the retained copy is low. Our data reveal that ginkgo possesses several unique features that contribute to our understanding of the cpDNA evolution in seed plants.
Learning feedback terms for reactive planning and control

With the advancement of robotics, machine learning, and machine perception, increasingly more robots will enter human environments to assist with daily tasks. However, dynamically-changing human environments requires reactive motion plans. Reactivity can be accomplished through re-planning, e.g. model-predictive control, or through a reactive feedback policy that modifies on-going behavior in response to sensory events. In this paper, we investigate how to use machine learning to add reactivity to a previously learned nominal skilled behavior. We approach this by learning a reactive modification term for movement plans represented by nonlinear differential equations. In particular, we use dynamic movement primitives (DMPs) to represent a skill and a neural network to learn a reactive policy from human demonstrations. We use the well explored domain of obstacle avoidance for robot manipulation as a test bed. Our approach demonstrates how a neural network can be combined with physical insights to ensure robust behavior across different obstacle settings and movement durations. Evaluations on an anthropomorphic robotic system demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.
The efficacy and safety of riluzole for neurodegenerative movement disorders: a systematic review with meta-analysis

Abstract Neurodegenerative movement disorders mainly include Parkinson’s disease, atypical parkinsonisms, Huntington disease, and hereditary ataxia. Riluzole is the only drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The neuroprotective effects of riluzole have been observed in experimental models of neurodegenerative movement disorders. In this paper, we aimed to systematically analyze the efficacy and safety of riluzole for patients with neurodegenerative movement disorder. We searched the electronic databases such as PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, Cochrane Library and China National Knowledge Infrastructure until June 2017 for the eligible randomized controlled trials, as well as the unpublished and ongoing trials. For continuous data, we calculated standardized mean differences with 95% confidence intervals if studies did not use the same scales to measure outcomes. For dichotomous data, we calculated risk differences if a trial reported no adverse events or dropouts. We pooled the results using a random-effects model. We included nine studies with 1320 patients with neurodegenerative movement disorders, which compared riluzole with placebo. No significant difference was found in the number of participants with adverse events but with motor improvement in hereditary ataxia. There were only two studies focusing on neuroprotective effect. Riluzole is well-tolerated in the patients with neurodegenerative movement disorders. Riluzole seems to be promising for patients with hereditary ataxia in symptomatic effect, which needs to be further confirmed by well-designed studies in the future. Moreover, it makes sense to design long-term study focusing on neuroprotective effect of riluzole in disease-modifying.
Support vector machine multiuser receiver for DS-CDMA signals in multipath channels

The problem of constructing an adaptive multiuser detector (MUD) is considered for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) signals transmitted through multipath channels. The emerging learning technique, called support vector machines (SVM), is proposed as a method of obtaining a nonlinear MUD from a relatively small training data block. Computer simulation is used to study this SVM MUD, and the results show that it can closely match the performance of the optimal Bayesian one-shot detector. Comparisons with an adaptive radial basis function (RBF) MUD trained by an unsupervised clustering algorithm are discussed.
Characterization and modeling of Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ MIM capacitors: temperature and electrical field effects

This paper deals with the capacitance response of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structures with 15 nm thick Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ as dielectric. Electrical characterizations between 100 K and 450 K have been performed to study the temperature effect on the capacitance. An original model assuming that the permanent moment of the polar molecules in the Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ film grows linearly with temperature is exposed to explain the experimental results.
Illumination-invariant color object recognition via compressed chromaticity histograms of color-channel-normalized images

Several color object recognition methods that are based on image retrieval algorithms attempt to discount changes of illumination in order to increase performance when test image illumination conditions differ from those that obtained when the image database was created. Here we extend the seminal method of Swain and Ballard to discount changing illumination. The new method is based on the first stage of the simplest color indexing method, which uses angular invariants between color image and edge image channels. That method first normalizes image channels, and then effectively discards much of the remaining information. Here we adopt the color-normalization stage as an adequate color constancy step. Further, we replace 3D color histograms by 2D chromaticity histograms. Treating these as images, we implement the method in a compressed histogram-image domain using a combination of wavelet compression and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to fully exploit the technique of low-pass filtering for efficiency. Results are very encouraging, with substantially better performance than other methods tested. The method is also fast, in that the indexing process is entirely carried out in the compressed domain and uses a feature vector of only 36 or 72 values.
Consistent placement of macro-blocks using floorplanning and standard-cell placement

While a number of recent works address large-scale standard-cellplacement, they typically assume that all macros are fixed.Floorplanning techniques are very good at handling macros, but donot scale to hundreds of thousands of placeable objects. Thereforewe combine floorplanning techniques with placement techniques in adesign flow that solves the more general placement problem. Ourwork shows how to place macros consistently with large numbers ofsmall standard cells. Our techniques can also be used to guidecircuit designers who prefer to place macros by hand. The proposed flow relies on an arbitrary black-box standard-cellplacer to obtain an initial placement and then removes possibleoverlaps using a fixed-outline floorplanner. This results in validplacements for macros, which are considered fixed. Remainingstandard cells are then placed by another call to the standard-cellplacer. Empirical evaluation on ibm benchmarks shows, in mostcases, wirelength improvements of 10%-50% compared to CadenceQPlace, as well as runtime improvements.
Cocoa: Extending a Rule-based System to Tag Disease Attributes in Clinical Records

We extended Cocoa/Peaberry, our (RelAgent) existing rule based entity and event tagger, to tag attributes associated with diseases in clinical records. The boolean attributes of Negation, Uncertainty and Conditional were handled by an extension of the NegEx algorithm. The multi-valued Course and Severity attributes were detected either within the extended disease spans as output by the system, or by event-based annotation using a predicate-argument framework. The anatomical attribute Body Location was marked up by either finding embedded body parts in the extended disease spans or by being colocated close to the disease span. UMLS IDs for anatomical locations were derived by using a small number of morphological lemmas, and by a few rules derived by manual inspection in case of multiple hits. We used the most frequent value in the training data for Subject, Generic, and time-related attributes.
Energy-efficient and accurate fingerprinting-based localization system for smartphones

New location-aware smartphones applications making use of positioning information, are recently gaining an increasing diffusion although the same accuracy provided by those classical solutions, based on the well known GPS technology, is progressively reached by adopting new or revised less power-hungry communication technologies. Starting from this general framework and taking into account the novel green communication paradigm, the paper a cost-effective and energy-efficient localization architecture based on the improvement of classical cell-tower schemes coupled with a dynamic fingerprinting update phase in order to face the natural changes in the radio environments. The proposed system architecture has been implemented and tested in a real scenario to measure the performances in terms of accuracy and energy saving that will make it preferable to the traditional GPS-based systems in the next future. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the considered approach that makes possible to estimate the current position of a mobile user with a very small error (≈ 20m) also achieving an energy consumption reduction of about 38% respect to the classical GPS solutions.
A regularization-based approach for unsupervised image segmentation

We propose a novel unsupervised image segmentation algorithm, which aims to segment an image into several coherent parts. It requires no user input, no supervised learning phase and assumes an unknown number of segments. It achieves this by first over-segmenting the image into several hundred superpixels. These are iteratively joined on the basis of a discriminative classifier trained on color and texture information obtained from each superpixel. The output of the classifier is regularized by a Markov random field that lends more influence to neighbouring superpixels that are more similar. In each iteration, similar superpixels fall under the same label, until only a few coherent regions remain in the image. The algorithm was tested on a standard evaluation data set, where it performs on par with state-of-the-art algorithms in term of precision and greatly outperforms the state of the art by reducing the oversegmentation of the object of interest.
Association between vascular access type and patient mortality among elderly patients on hemodialysis in Canada

Optimal vascular access in elderly patients requires consideration of the benefits and risks in a population with increased comorbidity and mortality. Our objective was to examine the association between vascular access type and patient mortality by age category among incident adult hemodialysis patients registered in the Canadian Organ Replacement Register between 2001 and 2010. We also describe the secular trend in incident and prevalent vascular access use. We used a Cox proportional hazards model to evaluate the overall mortality in patients aged less than 65, 65–74, 75–85, and greater than 85 years who initiated hemodialysis using a central venous catheter (catheter) or arteriovenous (AV)‐access (fistula or graft) using an intention‐to‐treat approach. The cohort of 39,721 patients consisted of 42%, 27%, 26%, and 5% of patients aged <65, 65–74, 75–85, and >85, respectively. Patients who initiated hemodialysis using an AV‐access constituted 21%, 22%, 20%, and 15% of each age category. AV access use was associated with lower adjusted mortality compared with catheter use in each age category (Hazard Ratios [HR], 0.67; 95% Confidence Interval [0.62–0.72]; HR, 0.76 [0.63–0.91]; HR, 0.77 [0.64–0.93], HR, 0.73 [0.56–0.96], respectively). In Canada, use of an AV‐access is associated with lower mortality across all age categories, even in the very elderly. Further studies are required to understand the patient preference, complications, and resource use when selecting access type in the elderly.
Workshop on information heterogeneity and fusion in recommender systems (HetRec 2010)

1. MOTIVATION AND GOALS In recent years, increasing attention has been given to finding ways for combining, integrating and mediating heterogeneous sources of information for the purpose of providing better personalized services in many information seeking and ecommerce applications. Information heterogeneity can indeed be identified in any of the pillars of a recommender system: the modeling of user preferences, the description of resource contents, the modeling and exploitation of the context in which recommendations are made, and the characteristics of the suggested resource lists.
Torque angle control of the permanent magnet synchronous machine at the voltage margin

The efficiency of a motor drive combined with an inverter increases by exploiting the maximum voltage level that can be provided by the inverter. This paper presents a novel control strategy for permanent magnet synchronous machines in the field-weakening range. The inverter's voltage margin is utilised completely using only the variation of the torque angle and avoiding any zero voltage vectors in steady state operation.
A Character-Based Joint Model for CIPS-SIGHAN Word Segmentation Bakeoff 2010

This paper presents a Chinese Word Segmentation system for the closed track of CIPS-SIGHAN Word Segmentation Bakeoff 2010. This system adopts a character-based joint approach, which combines a character-based generative model and a character-based discriminative model. To further improve the crossdomain performance, we use an additional semi-supervised learning procedure to incorporate the unlabeled corpus. The final performance on the closed track for the simplified-character text shows that our system achieves comparable results with other state-of-the-art systems.
A Real-Time and Self-Calibrating Algorithm Based on Triaxial Accelerometer Signals for the Detection of Human Posture and Activity

Assessment of human activity and posture with triaxial accelerometers provides insightful information about the functional ability: classification of human activities in rehabilitation and elderly surveillance contexts has been already proposed in the literature. In the meanwhile, recent technological advances allow developing miniaturized wearable devices, integrated within garments, which may extend this assessment to novel tasks, such as real-time remote surveillance of workers and emergency operators intervening in harsh environments. We present an algorithm for human posture and activity-level detection, based on the real-time processing of the signals produced by one wearable triaxial accelerometer. The algorithm is independent of the sensor orientation with respect to the body. Furthermore, it associates to its outputs a “reliability” value, representing the classification quality, in order to launch reliable alarms only when effective dangerous conditions are detected. The system was tested on a customized device to estimate the computational resources needed for real-time functioning. Results exhibit an overall 96.2% accuracy when classifying both static and dynamic activities.
Frequency and Bandwidth Dependency of UWB Propagation Channels

In this paper, based on indoor ultra-wide band (UWB) propagation channel measurements for both LOS and NLOS scenarios, the frequency dependency of propagation in the 3-10 GHz UWB range is investigated by examining the power delay profile, rms delay spread, path loss and shadowing as functions of frequency. Moreover, the bandwidth dependency of channel parameters is also investigated for gaining more understanding of the general channel properties
The neural crest-enriched microRNA miR-452 regulates epithelial-mesenchymal signaling in the first pharyngeal arch

Neural crest cells (NCCs) are a subset of multipotent, migratory stem cells that populate a large number of tissues during development and are important for craniofacial and cardiac morphogenesis. Although microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as important regulators of development and disease, little is known about their role in NCC development. Here, we show that loss of miRNA biogenesis by NCC-specific disruption of murine Dicer results in embryos lacking craniofacial cartilaginous structures, cardiac outflow tract septation and thymic and dorsal root ganglia development. Dicer mutant embryos had reduced expression of Dlx2, a transcriptional regulator of pharyngeal arch development, in the first pharyngeal arch (PA1). miR-452 was enriched in NCCs, was sufficient to rescue Dlx2 expression in Dicer mutant pharyngeal arches, and regulated non-cell-autonomous signaling involving Wnt5a, Shh and Fgf8 that converged on Dlx2 regulation in PA1. Correspondingly, knockdown of miR-452 in vivo decreased Dlx2 expression in the mandibular component of PA1, leading to craniofacial defects. These results suggest that post-transcriptional regulation by miRNAs is required for differentiation of NCC-derived tissues and that miR-452 is involved in epithelial-mesenchymal signaling in the pharyngeal arch.
Efficient response-time analysis for tasks with offsets

We present a method that enables an efficient implementation of the approximative response-time analysis (RTA) for tasks with offsets presented by Tindell [(1992)] and Palencia Gutierrez et al. [(1998)]. The method allows for significantly faster implementations of schedulability tools using RTA. Furthermore, reducing computation time, from tens of milliseconds to just a fraction of a millisecond, as we show, is a step towards online RTA in for example admission control systems. We formally prove that our reformulation of earlier presented equations is correct and allow us to statically represent parts of the equation, reducing the calculations during fix-point iteration. We show by simulations that the speedup when using our method is substantial. When task sets grow beyond a trivial number of tasks and/or transactions a speed-up of more than 100 times (10 transactions and 10 tasks/transaction) compared to the original analysis can be obtained.