Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of botulinum toxin A for treatment of unilateral spasms of the eyelid and its prognosis.

BACKGROUND To this date, only a small number of studies have described the long-term use of BTX in Hemifacial spasm. AIM To assess the prognosis and long-term effectiveness of Botulinum toxin A (BTXA) in the treatment of unilateral spasms of the eyelid. PATIENTS AND METHODS From September 1998 to January 2006, 245 consecutive cases of unilateral spasms of the eyelid were included in this retrospective study. Among them, 143 patients (BTXA group) underwent BTXA injection treatment, and 102 patients did not receive any intervention (control group). BTXA injections were made subcutaneously around the eye with the dose of 2.5U other than the temporal canthus of 5U. Follow-up was performed for 1-7 years after the last injection. RESULTS In BTXA treatment group, the complete remission rate was 78.3% (112/143), recurrence rate was 21.7% (31/143) and the incidence of hemifacial spasm (HFS) was 18.9% (27/143); complete remission rate for patients with disease duration less than 3 months was 96.6% (86/89); for patients with a 3-6 months disease history, complete remission rate was 75.8% (25/33), and patients having the disease course exceeding 6 months had a complete remission rate of 4.8% (1/21). In the control group, the complete remission rate was 12.7% (13/102), and the prevalence of HFS was 71.6% (73/102); 16.7% (9/56) of patients with the disease duration less than 3 months were remitted, but the complete remission rate was 12.9% (4/31) for patients with a 3-6 months disease history. None was in remission when the disease history exceeded 6 months. CONCLUSIONS BTXA treatment can improve the complete remission rate and prevent further progression of unilateral spasms of the eyelid into HFS, especially in early stage.
The Steered Auxiliary Beam Canceller for Interference Cancellation in a Phased Array

A common problem encountered in phased array signal processing is how to remove sources of interference from a desired signal. Two existing methods to accomplish this are the Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (LCMV) beamformer and the Side-Lobe Canceller (SLC). LCMV provides better performance than SLC, but comes with much higher computational costs. The Steered Auxiliary Beam Canceller (SABC) presented in this thesis is a new algorithm developed to improve the performance of SLC without the computational costs of LCMV. SABC performs better than SLC because it uses high-gain auxiliary channels for cancellation. This new technique is now possible because digital arrays allow for direction finding algorithms such as Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) to estimate the directions of the interference sources. With this added knowledge, high gain beams similar to the main beam may be used as auxiliaries instead of low-gain antenna elements. Another contribution is a method introduced to calculate the computational complexity of LCMV, SLC, and SABC much more accurately than existing methods which only provide order-of-magnitude estimates. The final contribution is a derivation of the signal loss experienced by SLC and SABC and simulations that verify the performance of LCMV, SLC, and SABC. iv Acknowledgements
Targeted activation of primitive neural stem cells in the mouse brain

Primitive neural stem cells (pNSCs) are the earliest NSCs to appear in the developing forebrain. They persist into the adult forebrain where they can generate all cells in the neural lineage and therefore hold great potential for brain regeneration. Thus, pNSCs are an ideal population to target to promote endogenous NSC activation. pNSCs can be isolated from the periventricular region as leukaemia inhibitory factor‐responsive cells, and comprise a rare population in the adult mouse brain. We hypothesized that the pup periventricular region gives rise to more clonal pNSC‐derived neurospheres but that pup‐derived pNSCs are otherwise comparable to adult‐derived pNSCs, and can be used to identify selective markers and activators of endogenous pNSCs. We tested the self‐renewal ability, differentiation capacity and gene expression profile of pup‐derived pNSCs and found them each to be comparable to adult‐derived pNSCs, including being GFAP−, nestinmid, Oct4+. Next, we used pup pNSCs to test pharmacological compounds to activate pNSCs to promote endogenous brain repair. We hypothesized that pNSCs could be activated by targeting the cell surface proteins C‐Kit and ErbB2, which were enriched in pNSCs relative to definitive NSCs (dNSCs) in an in vitro screen. C‐Kit and ErbB2 signalling inhibition had distinct effects on pNSCs and dNSCs in vitro, and when infused directly into the adult brain in vivo. Targeted activation of pNSCs with C‐Kit and ErbB2 modulation is a valuable strategy to activate the earliest cell in the neural lineage to contribute to endogenous brain regeneration.
Key Roles of CD4+ T Cells and IFN-γ in the Development of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms in a Murine Model1

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is one of a number of diseases associated with a prominent inflammatory cell infiltrate and local destruction of structural matrix macromolecules. This inflammatory infiltrate is predominately composed of T lymphocytes and macrophages. Delineating specific contribution of these inflammatory cells and their cytokines in AAA formation is the key to understanding AAA and other chronic inflammatory disease processes. Our previous studies have demonstrated that macrophages are the major source of matrix metalloproteinase-9, which is required for aneurysmal degeneration in the murine AAA model. However, the role of CD4+ T cells, the most abundant infiltrates in aneurysmal aortic tissue, is uncertain. In the present study, we found that in the absence of CD4+ T cells, mice are resistant to aneurysm induction. Previous studies have shown that IFN-γ levels are increased in AAA. IFN-γ is a main product of T cells. Intraperitoneal IFN-γ was able to partially reconstitute aneurysms in CD4−/− mice. Furthermore, mice with a targeted deletion of IFN-γ have attenuation of MMP expression and inhibition of aneurysm development. Aneurysms in IFN-γ−/− mice can be reconstituted by reinfusion of competent splenocytes from the corresponding wild-type mice. This study demonstrates the pivotal role that T cells and the T cell cytokine, IFN-γ, play in orchestrating matrix remodeling in AAA. This study has important implications for other degenerative diseases associated with matrix destruction.
Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine scale do climate projections need to be?

Recent studies suggest that species distribution models (SDMs) based on fine‐scale climate data may provide markedly different estimates of climate‐change impacts than coarse‐scale models. However, these studies disagree in their conclusions of how scale influences projected species distributions. In rugged terrain, coarse‐scale climate grids may not capture topographically controlled climate variation at the scale that constitutes microhabitat or refugia for some species. Although finer scale data are therefore considered to better reflect climatic conditions experienced by species, there have been few formal analyses of how modeled distributions differ with scale. We modeled distributions for 52 plant species endemic to the California Floristic Province of different life forms and range sizes under recent and future climate across a 2000‐fold range of spatial scales (0.008–16 km2). We produced unique current and future climate datasets by separately downscaling 4 km climate models to three finer resolutions based on 800, 270, and 90 m digital elevation models and deriving bioclimatic predictors from them. As climate‐data resolution became coarser, SDMs predicted larger habitat area with diminishing spatial congruence between fine‐ and coarse‐scale predictions. These trends were most pronounced at the coarsest resolutions and depended on climate scenario and species' range size. On average, SDMs projected onto 4 km climate data predicted 42% more stable habitat (the amount of spatial overlap between predicted current and future climatically suitable habitat) compared with 800 m data. We found only modest agreement between areas predicted to be stable by 90 m models generalized to 4 km grids compared with areas classified as stable based on 4 km models, suggesting that some climate refugia captured at finer scales may be missed using coarser scale data. These differences in projected locations of habitat change may have more serious implications than net habitat area when predictive maps form the basis of conservation decision making.
Denoising of range images using a trilateral filter and belief propagation

Two denoising techniques using reflectivity for noisy range images are proposed: range image smoothing by trilateral filter and range image inpainting by belief propagation. The trilateral filter makes use of reflectivity as well as spatial and intensity information so that geometric features, such as jump and roof edges, are preserved while smoothing. The range image inpainting technique based on belief propagation recovers a deteriorated range image using not only the adjacent range values but also the continuity of the reflectance image. We conduct simulations and experiments using synthesized images and actual range images taken by a laser scanner and verify that the proposed techniques suppress noise while preserving jump and roof edges and repair deteriorated range images.
L’inhibition d’une réponse dominante chez l’enfant : développement et interaction avec les processus émotionnels

Les mecanismes d’inhibition d’une reponse dominante permettent un ajustement du comportement lorsque celui-ci n’est pas ou plus approprie. Ces processus interviennent egalement dans la regulation des reponses emotionnelles. Notre travail s’est donc interesse, dans une perspective developpementale, a comprendre d’une part le developpement des capacites d’inhibition d’une reponse dominante lorsque le developpement de capacites plus generales est pris en compte. Par ailleurs, nous avons voulu comprendre les strategies de reponse que le sujet peut mettre en place dans les tâches de laboratoire permettant de mesurer les capacites d’inhibition d’une reponse dominante. Finalement, nous nous sommes centres sur les liens entre les capacites d’inhibition d’une reponse dominante et les processus emotionnels. Ainsi, d’une part nous avons voulu comprendre l’influence d’un contexte emotionnel sur ces mecanismes d’inhibition et d’autre part l’implication des capacites d’inhibition d’une reponse dominante dans la regulation de la frustration.
Multi-word verbs in a flective language: the case of Estonian

This paper describes automatic treatment of multi-word expressions in a morphologically complex flective language – Estonian. It focuses on a special type of multi-word expressions – the verbal multi-word expressions that can function as predicates. Authors describe two language resources – a database of verbal multi-word expressions and a corpus where these items have been annotated manually. The analysis of the annotated corpus demonstrates that the Estonian verbal multi-word expressions alternate in several grammatical categories. Different types of the verbal multi-word expressions (opaque and transparent idioms, support verb constructions and collocations) behave differently in the corpus with regard to the freedom of alternation. The paper describes main types of these alternations and the methods for dealing with them automatically.
Longitudinal predictors of implicit phonological awareness skills.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal predictive relationships among variables that may contribute to poor phonological awareness skills in preschool-age children with speech-sound disorders. METHOD Forty-seven children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the spring of their prekindergarten year and again at the end of their kindergarten year. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to examine relationships among the children's prekindergarten and kindergarten performance on measures of speech perception, vocabulary, articulation, and phonological awareness skills in order to verify a proposed developmental ordering of these variables during this 1-year period. RESULTS Prekindergarten speech perception skills and receptive vocabulary size each explained unique variance in phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten. Prekindergarten articulation abilities did not predict unique variance in phonological awareness a year later. Prekindergarten speech perception skills also explained unique variance in articulation skills at the end of kindergarten. CONCLUSIONS Maximizing children's vocabulary and speech perception skills before they begin school may be an important strategy for ensuring that children with speech-sound disorders begin school with age-appropriate speech and phonological awareness abilities.
A log-linear weighting approach in the Word2vec space for spoken language understanding

This paper proposes an original method which integrates contextual information of words into Word2vec neural networks that learn from words and their respective context windows. In the classical word embedding approach, context windows are represented as bag-of-words, i.e. every word in the context is treated equally. A log-linear weighting approach modeling the continuous context is proposed in our model to take into account the relative position of words in the surrounding context of the word. Quality improvements implied by this method are shown on the the Semantic-Syntactic Word Relationship test and on a real application framework implying a theme identification task of human dialogues. The promising gains of our adapted Word2vec model of 7 and 5 points for Skip-gram and CBOW approaches respectively demonstrate that the proposed models are a step forward for word and document representation.
BER computation of 4/M-QAM hierarchical constellations

Hierarchical constellations offer a different degree of protection to the transmitted messages according to their relative importance. As such they find interesting application in digital video broadcasting systems as well as wireless multimedia services. Although a great deal of attention has been devoted in the recent literature to the study of the bit error rate (BER) performance of uniform quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations, very few results have been published on the BER performance of hierarchical QAM constellations. Indeed the only available expressions are "leading-term" approximate BER expressions for 4/16-QAM and 4/64-QAM. In this paper, we obtain exact and generic expressions in M for the BER of the 4/M-QAM (square and rectangular) constellations over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels. For the AWGN case, these expressions are in the form of a weighted sum of complementary error functions and are solely dependent on the constellation size M, the carrier-to-noise ratio, and a constellation parameter which controls the relative message importance. Because of their generic nature, these new expressions readily allow numerical evaluation for various cases of practical interest. In particular, numerical results show that the leading-term approximation gives significantly optimistic BER values at low carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) in particular over Rayleigh fading channels but is quite accurate in the high CNR region.
Making decision for the next step in dense crowd simulation using support vector machines

This paper presents a method to optimize the travel time of an intelligent agent finding its way through a simulated dense crowd by using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). While prior studies have used Social Force Model (SFM) for crowd simulation, a limitation of the model is that it does not allow the agent to make decision in getting to a specific point in a dense crowd in the shortest time possible. The next step refers to the temporary position before a final destination is reached and identifying a suitable next step in a dense crowd is challenging as there are many other moving agents that might block the path. Hence, to avoid formulating the decision of the agent's next step to proceed to a target point in an explicit manner, we therefore resort to SVMs whereby the position and velocity of the nearby agents are used as the feature vectors and the next step position as the class label. The training data is trained a priori with feature vectors and class labels supplied by human subjects. In order to produce a higher accuracy of training model, the training data is duplicated by permutation process. During the simulation, we used SFM and multiple SVM training models to control the motion of the intelligent agent. The results of the simulation indicated that the combination of SFM+SVMs enabled the intelligent agent to reach the final destination faster than using SFM on its own.
The Impact of Multichannel Customer Management on e-CRM

One of the integral necessities of an acknowledged e-CRM resolution is the challenge of consolidating all pertained client information into a single aspect. To achieve this, it is essential to generate a multichannel for transferring legitimate data that can take information from any of the identified customer sources and merge this into multiple strata and colonize the single prospect. CRM can interact within a company in various ways and the internet does have the ability to create a flow in interactions and transactions. Besides, today the experience element plays a significant function in boosting a company's prospects. Moreover, the internet provides connectedness among customers' touch points. So, it is best to integrate Customer relationship management with the internet first to identify various multi-channels. A multichannel strategy is one that provides abundant customer touch-points and makes the web site more friendly for employees and customers. Multichannel consolidation is deemed as one of the most versatile procedures in CRM strategy enhancement. In this paper we aim at drawing a conceptual framework to illustrate, how to plan for sale and after sale service, recognize the problems; catch customer touch points and deliver the best experience for the customers. Eventually, using multichannel customer management, the company can consolidate the data and assess it more efficiently. Using questionnaires and 5-point liket scale, we assess the data.
A Large Scale Interactive Holographic Display

Our work focuses on the development of interactive multi-user holographic displays that allow freely moving naked eye participants to share a three dimensional scene with fully continuous, observer independent, parallax. Our approach is based on a scalable design that exploits a specially arranged array of projectors and a holographic screen. The feasibility of such an approach has already been demonstrated with a working hardware and software 7.4M pixel prototype driven at 10-15Hz by two DVI streams. In this short contribution, we illustrate our progress, presenting a 50M pixel display prototype driven by a dedicated cluster hosting multiple consumer level graphic cards.
Human Skin Preserved Long-Term in Anhydric Pulverized Sodium Chloride Retains Cell Molecular Structure and Resumes Function After Transplantation

Background. Human skin is needed to cover large areas of the body lost through burns, trauma, and extensive maxillofacial surgery. Contemporary methods of skin storage are limited by the period of preservation to a few days. Our previous findings showed that fixation and storage of human skin in anhydric sodium chloride at room temperature for weeks or months preserves its morphological and molecular structure. In this study, we examined whether skin grafts preserved in sodium chloride may be successfully transplanted. Methods. Skin was harvested from lower limbs of patients during elective surgery, placed in containers with anhydric salt powder, and kept at 22°C for 3 to 12 weeks. Desalination and rehydration took place before transplantation. Desalinated fragments were transplanted onto the dorsum of scid mice. Results. All grafts were accepted by recipients. Three weeks after transplantation, keratinocytes synthesized keratins 10, 16, and 17 and expressed antigens specific for stem (p63) and transient (CD29) cells. Moreover, they proliferated vigorously, their basal layer cells incorporated bromdeoxyuridine and expressed proliferative cell nuclear antigen. Isolated from transplants and cultured in vitro, they remained viable and produced enzymes. Dermis retained its structure and expressed fibroblast-specific antigen. All graft cells remained human leukocyte antigen I+. Conclusion. Human skin preserved in anhydric sodium chloride at room temperature for months can be successfully transplanted to scid mice. We propose the concept of “spore-like” keratinocyte stem cells to explain the long-term ex vivo survival of keratinocytes. The mechanism of survival of fibroblasts remains to be determined.
Role of caffeine‐sensitive Ca2+ stores in Ca2+ signal termination in adult mouse DRG neurones

THE role of calcium stores in cytoplasmic calcium signal termination was studied in acutely isolated small and large DRG neurones from mice. Cytoplasmic calcium concentration ([Ca2+]in) was recorded using indo-1 microfluorometry and membrane potential was monitored by 'perforated' whole-cell patch-clamp. Depolarization-induced [Ca2+]in transients recovered significantly faster in large neurones than in small neurones. Caffeine was able to release Ca2+ from internal stores only in large neurones, while small neurones lacked caffeine-releasable calcium stores. Thapsigargin abolished caffeine-induced Ca2+ release and significantly slowed down recovery of depolarization-triggered [Ca2+]in transients in large neurones. We conclude that [Ca2+]in signals recover faster in large DRG neurones, at least in part due to the higher rate of Ca2+ sequestration by intracellular stores.