Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Shape-Based Approach to the Registration of Medical Imagery Using Gaussian Mixture Models

The problems of segmentation and registration are traditionally approached separately; yet the accuracy of one is of great importance in influencing the accuracy of the other. We propose a new method, using shape information and a statistical model, to address the problem of multimodality medical image registration. Using the approach presented in this paper, we apply a Q-function to measure the statistical dependence or information redundancy between the probability distributions of corresponding voxels from the region of interest in both images. We define a new registration measure with a Q-function obtained by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based on an Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The Q-function is assumed to be maximal if the two images for the registration are geometrically aligned. Using the registration traces based on the Q-function, we evaluate the precision of the proposed approach between MR images and CT images. The experimental results show that our method can be very successful in registering various medical images that use different modalities.
Denial of Service Attacks in IP Networks

More and more people all over the world use the Internet. The World Wide Web encourages the possibility to exchange data and information. Applications for e-business and e-commerce are used by a variety of people. This ability to connect any computer to any other computer anywhere does not only constitute major progress, but also presents a threat to sensitive data.
Analysis of an intense bora event in the Adriatic area

Abstract. Numerical simulations of a bora event, recently occurred in the Adriatic area, are presented. Two reference runs at different horizontal resolution (about 20km and 8km) describe the case. Initial conditions for the atmospheric model integration are obtained from ECMWF analyses. Satellite data are used for comparisons. A further run at horizontal resolution of 8km, using initial satellite sea surface temperatures, is performed to evaluate their impact on the low level wind over the Adriatic Sea. All the simulations are carried out with 50 layers in the vertical. Numerous aspects of the simulations are found to be in agreement with the understanding as well as the observational knowledge of bora distinctive characteristics. Satellite data and model results indicate that a more realistic simulation of the bora wind over the sea is achieved using the model with 8km horizontal resolution and that the low level wind in this case is sensitive, though weakly, to the difference between the used sea surface temperature fields. Simulation results also show that both wind intensity and the area around wind peaks tend to increase when relatively higher sea surface temperatures are used.
Learning Probabilistic Description Logics Theories

Uncertain information is ubiquitous in real world domains and in the Semantic Web. Recently, the problem of representing this uncertainty in description logics has received an increasing attention. In probabilistic Description Logics, knowledge bases contain numeric parameters that are often difficult to specify for a human. Moreover, the information are incomplete and poorly structured. On the other hand, data is usually available about the domain that can be leveraged for tuning the parameters and learn the structure of the information. In this paper we consider the problem of learning both the structure and the parameters of Probabilistic Description Logics under the DISPONTE semantics. We overview two systems we hve implemented: EDGE, that returns the value of the probabilities associated with axioms tuned using an Expectation Maximization algorithm, and LEAP, that exploits EDGE and the system CELOE to learn both the structure and the parameters of DISPONTE knowledge bases.
Prognostic Role of Spiritual Intelligence Components in Pregnant Women’s Depression, Anxiety, and Stress

Batul Khodakarami, Faegheh Golalizadeh Bibalan, Farzaneh Soltani, Alireza Soltanian, Hussein Mohagheghi 1 Department of Midwifery, Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Hamedan University of Medical Sciences, Hamedan, Iran. 2 Modeling of Noncommunicable Diseases Research Center, School of Public Health, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Hamadan, Iran. 3 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Economics and social science, Bu-ali sina University, Hamadan, Iran.
Expression of Mutant Dynamin Inhibits Toxicity and Transport of Endocytosed Ricin to the Golgi Apparatus

Endocytosis and intracellular transport of ricin were studied in stable transfected HeLa cells where overexpression of wild-type (WT) or mutant dynamin is regulated by tetracycline. Overexpression of the temperature-sensitive mutant dynG273D at the nonpermissive temperature or the dynK44A mutant inhibits clathrin-dependent endocytosis (Damke, H., T. Baba, A.M. van der Blieck, and S.L. Schmid. 1995. J. Cell Biol. 131: 69–80; Damke, H., T. Baba, D.E. Warnock, and S.L. Schmid. 1994. J. Cell Biol. 127:915–934). Under these conditions, ricin was endocytosed at a normal level. Surprisingly, overexpression of both mutants made the cells less sensitive to ricin. Butyric acid and trichostatin A treatment enhanced dynamin overexpression and increased the difference in toxin sensitivity between cells with normal and mutant dynamin. Intoxication with ricin seems to require toxin transport to the Golgi apparatus (Sandirg, K., and B. van Deurs. 1996. Physiol. Rev. 76:949–966), and this process was monitored by measuring the incorporation of radioactive sulfate into a modified ricin molecule containing a tyrosine sulfation site. The sulfation of ricin was much greater in cells expressing dynWT than in cells expressing dynK44A. Ultrastructural analysis using a ricin-HRP conjugate confirmed that transport to the Golgi apparatus was severely inhibited in cells expressing dynK44A. In contrast, ricin transport to lysosomes as measured by degradation of 125I-ricin was essentially unchanged in cells expressing dynK44A. These data demonstrate that although ricin is internalized by clathrin-independent endocytosis in cells expressing mutant dynamin, there is a strong and apparently selective inhibition of ricin transport to the Golgi apparatus. Also, in cells with mutant dynamin, there is a redistribution of the mannose-6-phosphate receptor.
Spoofing and countermeasures for automatic speaker verification

It is widely acknowledged that most biometric systems are vulnerable to spoofing, also known as imposture. While vulnerabilities and countermeasures for other biometric modalities have been widely studied, e.g. face verification, speaker verification systems remain vulnerable. This paper describes some specific vulnerabilities studied in the literature and presents a brief survey of recent work to develop spoofing countermeasures. The paper concludes with a discussion on the need for standard datasets, metrics and formal evaluations which are needed to assess vulnerabilities to spoofing in realistic scenarios without prior knowledge. Index Terms: spoofing, imposture, automatic speaker verification
Detection of differentially expressed genes using feature selection approach from RNA-seq

With the advance of next generation sequencing technology, RNA-seq is widely being used for transcriptomics as an alternative for microarray. RNA-seq has a dynamic range of applications such as gene expression quantification, alternative splicing identification, and novel transcript discovery. Generally, the primary aim of RNA-seq analysis is to detect differentially expressed genes in different biological conditions. From the data mining point of view, discovering differentially expressed genes can be seen as a feature selection problem that identifies most significant genes for discriminating different biological conditions. Feature selection methods for differential analysis in microarray data are well established in the literature but there are few studies on feature selection in RNA-seq experiments. In this paper, we propose to apply feature selection method in data mining for differential expression analysis. Symmetrical uncertainty is used to rank the genes and significant genes are selected based on a pre-defined relevance threshold. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted a simulation study to assess the performance in terms of the true and false positive rates. The experimental results demonstrated that feature selection strategy can be applied for differential analysis in RNA-seq and outperformed the existing statistical approaches.
Resources and Economic Growth

Editor’s Introduction Originally published in Volume 22, Number 2, Fall 1978, pages 5-11. Robert Solow (born 1924) is one of the most honored economists of all time. In 1961 he received the John Bates Clark medal given by the American Economic Association for significant contributions to the field by an American economist under the age of forty. Several Clark medal recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, including Professor Solow in 1987 for his work in economic growth. His work was again honored in 2014 when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award presented by the United States. The Solow Growth Model, originally developed in the 1950s, is one of the most widely applied theories in modern economics. In this paper, Professor Solow examines how future economic growth and development is constrained if the natural resource base narrows over time. Professor Solow then applies a variant of his eponymous growth model to analyze the relationship between the ratio of nonrenewable resource inputs to GNP in the United States over the middle half of the twentieth century.
Beneficial Mutation–Selection Balance and the Effect of Linkage on Positive Selection

When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population concurrently. In an asexual population, these different mutant lineages interfere and not all can fix simultaneously. In addition, further beneficial mutations can accumulate in mutant lineages while these are still a minority of the population. In this article, we analyze the dynamics of such multiple mutations and the interplay between multiple mutations and interference between clones. These result in substantial variation in fitness accumulating within a single asexual population. The amount of variation is determined by a balance between selection, which destroys variation, and beneficial mutations, which create more. The behavior depends in a subtle way on the population parameters: the population size, the beneficial mutation rate, and the distribution of the fitness increments of the potential beneficial mutations. The mutation–selection balance leads to a continually evolving population with a steady-state fitness variation. This variation increases logarithmically with both population size and mutation rate and sets the rate at which the population accumulates beneficial mutations, which thus also grows only logarithmically with population size and mutation rate. These results imply that mutator phenotypes are less effective in larger asexual populations. They also have consequences for the advantages (or disadvantages) of sex via the Fisher–Muller effect; these are discussed briefly.
MultiLing 2015: Multilingual Summarization of Single and Multi-Documents, On-line Fora, and Call-center Conversations

In this paper we present an overview of MultiLing 2015, a special session at SIGdial 2015. MultiLing is a communitydriven initiative that pushes the state-ofthe-art in Automatic Summarization by providing data sets and fostering further research and development of summarization systems. There were in total 23 participants this year submitting their system outputs to one or more of the four tasks of MultiLing: MSS, MMS, OnForumS and CCCS. We provide a brief overview of each task and its participation and evaluation.
Studies of nonlinear QED in collisions of 46.6 GeV electrons with intense laser pulses

We report on measurements of quantum electrodynamic processes in an intense electromagnetic wave, where nonlinear effects (both multiphoton and vacuum polarization) are prominent. Nonlinear Compton scattering and electron-positron pair production have been observed in collisions of 46.6 GeV and 49.1 GeV electrons of the Final Focus Test Beam at SLAC with terawatt pulses of 1053 nm and 527 nm wavelengths from a Nd:glass laser. Peak laser intensities of {approx}0.5{times}10{sup 18}hW/cm{sup 2} have been achieved, corresponding to a value of {approx}0.4 for the parameter {eta}=eE{sub rms}/m{omega}{sub 0}c and to a value of {approx}0.25 for the parameter {Upsilon}{sub e}=E{sub rms}{sup {star}}/E{sub crit}=eE{sub rms}{sup {star}}{h_bar}/m{sup 2}c{sup 3}, where E{sub rms}{sup {star}} is the rms electric field strength of the laser in the electron rest frame. We present data on the scattered electron spectra arising from nonlinear Compton scattering with up to four photons absorbed from the field. A convolved spectrum of the forward high energy photons is also given. The observed positron production rate depends on the fifth power of the laser intensity, as expected for a process where five photons are absorbed from the field. The positrons are interpreted as arising from the collision of a high-energy Compton scattered photon with themore » laser beam. The results are found to be in agreement with theoretical predictions. {copyright} {ital 1999} {ital The American Physical Society}« less
Intraoperative 3D visualization for surgical field deformation with geometric pattern projection

Recently there have been many efforts to investigate navigation technology and apply it in various clinical fields in which the target position in the surgical region is indicated during surgery. The objective is to facilitate an intuitive understanding of the surgical region by the surgeon, so that the accuracy of the surgery can be improved. Currently, the position of the surgical area is usually measured by a magnetic sensor or a marker-type optical 3D position sensor. In navigation of hard tissue such as bone, the target is rigid, and the position of the target can be measured from several discrete point markers. In navigation of soft tissue such as the body surface and the liver, where the shape and the position can change easily, a position sensor which can measure the state of modification in the form of time-series surface data is required. In the method proposed here in order to deal with this problem, a geometrical pattern is projected on the target by a PC projector and is captured in real time from various directions with using DV cameras. This biological deformation measurement system can be easily installed in an operating room and can simultaneously measure and visualize the 3D shape and the textural information of the target. An animal experiment was performed. Surface shape time-series data were used and were updated from time to time during the surgery, and registration of the target organ model was performed before the surgery. Data-fusion processing was performed, displaying the measured surface data of the surgical region together with an internal structure model of the organ. The results are reported. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(4): 45–54, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ scj.20449
Issues in Information Systems

Insiders are trusted individuals in an organization, such as current or former employees, contractors, consultants, or vendors (Keeney et al., 2005; Steele and Wargo, 2007). Insiders pose a threat to the security of information due to their intimate knowledge of an organization's internal operations, processes, data, systems, or other resources (Steele and Wargo, 2007). Because trusted individuals have the power to violate one or more rules in a security policy, an insider threat occurs either (1) through the violation of a security policy using legitimate access, and/or (2) through violation of an access control policy by obtaining unauthorized access (Bishop, 2005; Bishop and Gates, 2008).
A Deterministic Key Management Scheme for Securing Cluster-Based Sensors Networks

The main goal of Cluster-based sensor networks is to decrease system delay and reduce energy consumption. LEACH is a cluster-based protocol for micro sensor networks which achieves energy-efficient, scalable routing and fair media access for sensor nodes. However, the election of a malicious or compromised sensor node as the cluster head is one the most significant breaches in cluster-based wireless sensor networks. We propose a deterministic key management scheme, called DKS-LEACH, to secure LEACH protocol against malicious attacks. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we design and performed a theoretical evaluation of our security model which secures the setup and study phases of LEACH protocol. Secondly, using the TOSSIM simulator, we performed an evaluation of the power consumption of DKS-LEACH. The results indicate clear advantages of our approach in preventing the election of untrustworthy cluster head as well different kind of attacks from malicious sensor nodes.
Atorvastatin Attenuates Bleomycin-Induced Pulmonary Fibrosis via Suppressing iNOS Expression and the CTGF (CCN2)/ERK Signaling Pathway

Pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive and fatal lung disorder with high mortality rate. To date, despite the fact that extensive research trials are ongoing, pulmonary fibrosis continues to have a poor response to available medical therapy. Statins, 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors, known for its broad pharmacological activities, remains a remedy against multiple diseases. The present study investigated the antifibrotic potential of atorvastatin against bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis and to further explore the possible underlying mechanisms. Our results showed that atorvastatin administration significantly ameliorated the bleomycin mediated histological alterations and blocked collagen deposition with parallel reduction in the hydroxyproline level. Atorvastatin reduced malondialdehyde (MDA) level and lung indices. Atorvastatin also markedly decreased the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in lung tissues and, thus, prevented nitric oxide (NO) release in response to bleomycin challenge. Furthermore, atorvastatin exhibited target down-regulation of connective tissue growth factor (CTGF (CCN2)) and phosphorylation extracellular regulated protein kinases (p-ERK) expression. Taken together, atorvastatin significantly ameliorated bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis in rats, via the inhibition of iNOS expression and the CTGF (CCN2)/ERK signaling pathway. The present study provides evidence that atorvastatin may be a potential therapeutic reagent for the treatment of lung fibrosis.
Transformation-Based Error-Driven Parsing

In this paper we describe a new technique for parsing free text: a transformational grammar is automatically learned that is capable of accurately parsing text into binary-branching syntactic trees. The algorithm works by beginning in a very naive state of knowledge about phrase structure. By repeatedly comparing the results of bracketing in the current state to proper bracketing provided in the training corpus, the system learns a set of simple structural transformations that can be applied to reduce the number of errors. After describing the algorithm, we present results and compare these results to other recent results in automatic grammar induction.
Stages of concern and frequency of use of computer-based resources by middle school social studies teachers

The overall purpose of this study was to determine the Stages of Concern and Frequency of Use by social studies teachers in the application of a computer-based enhanced curriculum adoption by the R12 School District of Springfield, Missouri in the 1995–1996 school year. This adoption was a technology-based emphasis in social studies instruction, replacing a more traditional textbook driven curriculum. The study resulted in three findings: First, midway through the curriculum implementation of the district's technology initiative, the middle-school social studies faculty's level of concern about the use of technology in their classrooms classify them as “non-users,” suggesting potential resistance to the innovation. Second The Springfield R-12 middle-school social studies teachers are currently using 40 percent of available technology applications several times a month. Word processing is the most frequently used technology application and the only one being used on a weekly basis. Third, the Frequency of Use of technology is significantly impacted by attendance at Springfield R-12 workshops and by no other factor determined in this study. Three recommendations for practice are presented: First, taken from Concerns-Based Adoption Model research includes legitimize the existence and expression of personal concerns, open the lines of communication to provide encouragement and reinforce personal adequacy and connect individual teachers with others whose personal concerns have diminished and who will be supportive. Second, since inservice workshops have proven to be a positive significant factor in use of technology, continue this practice, with possible refinement and/or expansion. Third, the school district should use the data provided as a baseline to continue to track progress of the curriculum implementation. This study supports research that concludes that change is a process and that the degree of change is different for each teacher involved. The apparent lack of correlation in the data analysis seems to indicate that more emphasis should be expended on the part of designated change facilitators within the school district to guide and direct the integration and implementation of the technological-curricular change desired.
Visual enhancement of underwater images using Empirical Mode Decomposition and wavelet denoising

In recent years, most underwater vehicles are equipped with optical cameras to capture underwater images. But underwater images acquired using optic cameras have poor visual quality due to propagation of properties of light in water. So it is useful to apply image enhancement methods to increase visual quality of the images as well as enhance interpretability and visibility. In this paper, an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based underwater image enhancement algorithm is presented for this purpose. In the proposed approach, initially each color channel (R, G, B) of an underwater image is decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using EMD. The first IMF of each component is applied to wavelet denoising. Because this IMF includes all local high spatial frequency components. Then the enhanced image is constructed by combining the IMFs of spectral channels with different weights in order to obtain an enhanced image with increased visual quality. The weight estimation process is carried out automatically using a genetic algorithm that computes the weights of IMFs so as to optimize the sum of the entropy and average gradient of the reconstructed image.
Clinical data based optimal STI strategies for HIV: a reinforcement learning approach

This paper addresses the problem of computing optimal structured treatment interruption strategies for HIV infected patients. We show that reinforcement learning may be useful to extract such strategies directly from clinical data, without the need of an accurate mathematical model of HIV infection dynamics. To support our claims, we report simulation results obtained by running a recently proposed batch-mode reinforcement learning algorithm, known as fitted Q iteration, on numerically generated data