Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of endogenous annexin A1 on glucocorticoid control of inflammatory arthritis

Objectives To establish the role and effect of glucocorticoids and the endogenous annexin A1 (AnxA1) pathway in inflammatory arthritis. Methods Ankle joint mRNA and protein expression of AnxA1 and its receptors were analysed in naive and arthritic mice by real-time PCR and immunohistochemistry. Inflammatory arthritis was induced with the K/BxN arthritogenic serum in AnxA1+/+ and AnxA1−/− mice; in some experiments, animals were treated with dexamethasone (Dex) or with human recombinant AnxA1 or a protease-resistant mutant (termed SuperAnxA1). Readouts were arthritic score, disease incidence, paw oedema and histopathology, together with pro-inflammatory gene expression. Results All elements of the AnxA1 pathway could be detected in naive joints, with augmentation during ongoing disease, due to the infiltration of immune cells. No difference in arthritis intensity of profile could be observed between AnxA1+/+ and AnxA1−/− mice. Treatment of mice with Dex (10 µg intraperitoneally daily from day 2) afforded potent antiarthritic effects highly attenuated in the knockouts: macroscopic changes were mirrored by histopathological findings and pro-inflammatory gene (eg, Nos2) expression. Presence of proteinase 3 mRNA in the arthritic joints led the authors to test AnxA1 and the mutant SuperAnxA1 (1 µg intraperitoneally daily in both cases from day 2), with the latter one being able to accelerate the resolving phase of the disease. Conclusion AnxA1 is an endogenous determinant for the therapeutic efficacy of Dex in inflammatory arthritis. Such an effect can be partially mimicked by application of SuperAnxA1 which may represent the starting point for novel antiarthritic therapeutic strategies.
Association of a GermLine Copy Number Variation at 2 p 24 . 3 and Risk for Aggressive Prostate Cancer

We searched for deletions in the germ-line genome among 498 aggressive prostate cancer cases and 494 controls from a population-based study in Sweden [CAncer of the Prostate in Sweden (CAPS)] using Affymetrix SNP arrays. By comparing allele intensities off500,000 SNP probes across the genome, a germ-line deletion at 2p24.3 was observed to be significantly more common in cases (12.63%) than in controls (8.28%); P = 0.028. To confirm the association, we genotyped this germ-line copy number variation (CNV) in additional subjects from CAPS and from Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH). Overall, among 4,314 cases and 2,176 controls examined, the CNV was significantly associated with prostate cancer risk [odds ratio (OR), 1.25; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 1.06–1.48; P = 0.009]. More importantly, the association was stronger for aggressive prostate cancer (OR, 1.31; 95% CI, 1.08–1.58; P = 0.006) than for nonaggressive prostate cancer (OR, 1.19; 95% CI, 0.98–1.45; P = 0.08). The biological effect of this germ-line CNV is unknown because no known gene resides in the deletion. Results from this study represent the first novel germ-line CNV that was identified from a genome-wide search and was significantly, but moderately, associated with prostate cancer risk. Additional confirmation of this association and functional studies are warranted. [Cancer Res 2009;69(6):2176–9]
Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing and Prognosis in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Background—Exercise testing is performed in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to evaluate blood pressure response, a risk factor for sudden cardiac death. The prognostic role of exercise gas exchange variables is unknown. Methods and Results—Between 1998 and 2010, 1898 patients (age 47±15 years, range 16–86 years; 67% male) with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy underwent cardiopulmonary exercise testing. A total of 178 (9.4%) patients reached the primary end point of all-cause mortality or heart transplant (death/transplant) during a median follow-up of 5.6 years (interquartile range 2.6–8.9), giving an annual event rate of 1.6% per person year. Peak oxygen consumption (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 0.82, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.77–0.88, P<0.001), ventilatory efficiency (adjusted HR 1.10, 95% CI 1.00–1.22, P=0.049), and ventilatory anaerobic threshold (adjusted HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.70–0.96, P=0.016) were predictors of the primary outcome after correction for age, sex, left atrial size, nonsustained ventricular tachycardia, and ejection fraction. The overall adjusted death/transplant estimates for patients in the lowest quartile with peak oxygen consumption ⩽15.3 mL/kg/min were 14% at 5 years and 31% at 10 years. Peak oxygen consumption (HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.77–0.86, P<0.01) and ventilation to carbon dioxide production (HR 1.10, 95% CI 1.08–1.13, P<0.001) were predictors of death because of heart failure or transplantation but not sudden cardiac death or implantable cardioverter defibrillator shocks. Conclusions—Cardiopulmonary exercise testing provides prognostic information in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Submaximal exercise parameters, such as ventilatory efficiency and anaerobic threshold, measured alone or in combination with peak oxygen consumption, predict death from heart failure.
Color image contrast enhancement by co-occurrence histogram equalization and dark channel prior

A novel color image contrast enhancement approach is proposed that equalizes color components dependently using cooccurrence histogram. And then the enhanced color components are the trade-off between co-occurrence histogram equalization and dark channel prior. Histogram equalization (HE) and its derivatives are the most common used methods. They don't consider the spatial gray-level correlations so that the equalizations are applied for all gray-levels appeared in an image. However, in the fact, it will be more effective to equalize a gray-level with its spatial-adjacent gray-levels. Co-occurrence histogram equalization (COHE) for image contrast enhancement is proposed to overcome this problem. It is applied here to the RGB color space. But dependent COHE perhaps result in hue changes and artifacts. In this paper dark channel prior is used to solve this problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can enhance the RGB images effectively.
High Linearity and Efficien

An overview on linearity and efficiency performance optimisation in power amplifier (PA) is presented, stressing the required trade-off demanded to PA designers. For efficiency improvement, the harmonic tuning strategies are discussed, with their advantages and major drawbacks. For linearity improvement, the IMD sweet spot optimisation strategies is presented as a solution to obtain low intermodulation near PA saturated condition, resulting in efficiency enhancement with respect to back-off approaches.
Constraint-Based Scheduling : A Tutorial

Given a set of resources with given capacities, a set of activities with given processing times and resource requirements, and a set of temporal constraints between activities, a “pure” scheduling problem consists of deciding when to execute each activity, so that both temporal constraints and resource constraints are satisfied. Most scheduling problems can easily be represented as instances of the constraint satisfaction problem (Kumar, 1992): given a set of variables, a set of possible values (domain) for each variable, and a set of constraints between the variables, assign a value to each variable, so that all the constraints are satisfied.
Fast Bayesian Inference for Non-Conjugate Gaussian Process Regression

We present a new variational inference algorithm for Gaussian process regression with non-conjugate likelihood functions, with application to a wide array of problems including binary and multi-class classification, and ordinal regression. Our method constructs a concave lower bound that is optimized using an efficient fixed-point updating algorithm. We show that the new algorithm has highly competitive computational complexity, matching that of alternative approximate inference methods. We also prove that the use of concave variational bounds provides stable and guaranteed convergence - a property not available to other approaches. We show empirically for both binary and multi-class classification that our new algorithm converges much faster than existing variational methods, and without any degradation in performance.
Diabetic Foot Infection in the World

Impaired wound healing is one of the most important complications of diabetes mellitus. Though infection is not one of the pathogenic triad for development of diabetic foot ulcers, it is an extremely important cause of morbidity and hospitalization, amputation, and impaired healing based on clinical and other evidence from over the world. Approximately 3% to 4% of individuals with diabetes currently have foot ulcers or deep infections. A multicenter survey in China showed that in patients with diabetic foot disease, 67.9% develop foot infections. In the Middle East the prevalence of infection in diabetic patients was reported to be greater than 40%. There have been reports from India that are alarming. It is also thought that this problem is yet undefined in some well-populated parts of the world.
Metrifonate Increases Neuronal Excitability in CA1 Pyramidal Neurons from Both Young and Aging Rabbit Hippocampus

The effects of metrifonate, a second generation cholinesterase inhibitor, were examined on CA1 pyramidal neurons from hippocampal slices of young and aging rabbits using current-clamp, intracellular recording techniques. Bath perfusion of metrifonate (10–200 μm) dose-dependently decreased both postburst afterhyperpolarization (AHP) and spike frequency adaptation (accommodation) in neurons from young and aging rabbits (AHP:p < 0.002, young; p < 0.050, aging; accommodation: p < 0.024, young;p < 0.001, aging). These reductions were mediated by muscarinic cholinergic transmission, because they were blocked by addition of atropine (1 μm) to the perfusate. The effects of chronic metrifonate treatment (12 mg/kg for 3 weeks) on CA1 neurons of aging rabbits were also examined ex vivo. Neurons from aging rabbits chronically treated with metrifonate had significantly reduced spike frequency accommodation, compared with vehicle-treated rabbits. Chronic metrifonate treatment did not result in a desensitization to metrifonate ex vivo, because bath perfusion of metrifonate (50 μm) significantly decreased the AHP and accommodation in neurons from both chronically metrifonate- and vehicle-treated aging rabbits. We propose that the facilitating effect of chronic metrifonate treatment on acquisition of hippocampus-dependent tasks such as trace eyeblink conditioning by aging subjects may be caused by this increased excitability of CA1 pyramidal neurons.
Automatic detection of defective rail anchors

Rail line anchors/fasteners are the metallic components that attach each line with the sleepers. These are essential rail components as absence of these often result in derailments. Therefore in order to prevent dangerous situations and ensuring safety rail lines are periodically inspected. Rail inspection in many countries especially in third world countries, like Bangladesh, is performed manually by a trained human operator who periodically walks along the track searching for visual anomalies. This manual inspection is lengthy, laborious and subjective. This paper presents a machine vision-based technique to automatically detect the presence of rail line anchors/fasteners using Shi - Tomasi and Harris - Stephen feature detection algorithms. This approach has confirmed to successfully detect scenarios with both grounded and missing anchors invoked in the experiment, with an accuracy of 83.55%, thus proving its robustness.
Selection Criteria and Methods for Testing Different Surface Materials for Contact Frying Processes

The paper describes, characterises and validates the construction of an experimental rig for making contact frying experiments under controlled conditions. The construction enables a controlled fouling of different coatings on steel and aluminium plate under realistic frying conditions, in order to evaluate non-stick and cleaning properties of the coatings. In accordance with industry standards pancake was selected as the food model for the frying experiments. The non-stick properties of different frying surfaces (stainless steel, aluminium, PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) and three ceramic coatings with two different levels of smoothness) at different temperatures were rated by a standardized rating procedure. The subjective rating assessment was validated by measuring the force of adhesion. A distinct difference was observed in the non-stick properties of the surfaces when they were tested in an oven and on the frying rig. The performances of the surfaces were reproducible and significantly different to be used for screening of new surface coatings for contact frying. Type of coating, surface roughness and temperature each exerted a distinct effect and contributes to a more fundamental understanding of the adhesion mechanisms during contact frying.
Complementation of a temperature sensitive Escherichia coli rpoD mutation using Lactobacillus sigma factors

Housekeeping sigma factors in the σ70 family, as components of the RNA polymerase holoenzyme, are responsible for regulating transcription of genes related to vegetative growth. While these factors are well understood in model organisms such as Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, little experimental work has focused on the sigma factors in members of the Lactobacillus genus such as Lactobacillus brevis and Lactobacillus plantarum. This study evaluates the ability of putative σ70 proteins from L. brevis () and L. plantarum () to complement a temperature sensitive mutation in the E. coli 285c σ70 protein. This report is the first to show that these heterologous sigma factors were capable of restoring the viability of E. coli 285c for growth at 40-43.5 °C, indicating the and are capable of initiating transcription in a complex with the E. coli 285c RNA polymerase. These heterologous sigma factors may therefore be useful for improving biochemical knowledge of the sigma factor family or for use in the expression of hetereologous genomic libraries.
Structure and Expression of the FlaA Periplasmic Flagellar Protein of Borrelia burgdorferi

ABSTRACT The spirochete which causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, has many features common to other spirochete species. Outermost is a membrane sheath, and within this sheath are the cell cylinder and periplasmic flagella (PFs). The PFs are subterminally attached to the cell cylinder and overlap in the center of the cell. Most descriptions of the B. burgdorferi flagellar filaments indicate that these organelles consist of only one flagellin protein (FlaB). In contrast, the PFs from other spirochete species are comprised of an outer layer of FlaA and a core of FlaB. We recently found that a flaA homolog was expressed in B. burgdorferi and that it mapped in a fla/che operon. These results led us to analyze the PFs and FlaA of B. burgdorferi in detail. Using Triton X-100 to remove the outer membrane and isolate the PFs, we found that the 38.0-kDa FlaA protein purified with the PFs in association with the 41.0-kDa FlaB protein. On the other hand, purifying the PFs by using Sarkosyl resulted in no FlaA in the isolated PFs. Sarkosyl has been used by others to purifyB. burgdorferi PFs, and our results explain in part their failure to find FlaA. Unlike other spirochetes, B. burgdorferi FlaA was expressed at a lower level than FlaB. In characterizing FlaA, we found that it was posttranslationally modified by glycosylation, and thus it resembles its counterpart fromSerpulina hyodysenteriae. We also tested if FlaA was synthesized in a spontaneously occurring PF mutant of B. burgdorferi (HB19Fla−). Although this mutant still synthesizedflaA message in amounts similar to the wild-type amounts, it failed to synthesize FlaA protein. These results suggest that, in agreement with data found for FlaB and other spirochete flagellar proteins, FlaA is likely to be regulated on the translational level. Western blot analysis using Treponema pallidum anti-FlaA serum indicated that FlaA was antigenically well conserved in several spirochete species. Taken together, the results indicate that both FlaA and FlaB comprise the PFs of B. burgdorferi and that they are regulated differently from flagellin proteins of other bacteria.
On the user selection for MIMO broadcast channels

In this paper, we consider a downlink communication system, in which a base station (BS) equipped with M antennas communicates with N users each equipped with K receive antennas. We propose an efficient suboptimum algorithm for selecting a set of users in order to maximize the sum-rate throughput of the system. For the asymptotic case of N rarr infin, it is shown that by using a very simple preceding scheme of zero-forcing beam-forming, the optimum sum-rate which behaves like M log log N can be achieved. The complexity of our algorithm is investigated in terms of the required amount of feedback from the users to the base station, as well as the number of searches required for selecting the users. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of achieving a large portion of the sum-rate capacity, with a very low complexity
A Framework for Real-time Volume Visualization of Streaming Scattered Data

Scattered data reconstruction algorithms are often computationally expensive and difficult to implement. In order to visualize streaming scattered data, efficient approaches to scattered data reconstruction are required. We present a general framework for scattered data interpolation operating on discrete domains. The key idea for speeding up the reconstruction over an underlying grid is a refactorization of the algorithm. The re-factorized version is designed such that it easily maps to graphics hardware architectures exploiting their performance and parallelism. Moreover, it naturally extends to applications for streaming data. As a proof of concept, we have implemented inversedistance-weighted interpolation, natural neighbor interpolation, and radial Hermite interpolation using our general framework. We apply the framework to two kinds of streaming data: progressive scattered data and real-time sensor data with moving sensors delivering asynchronous measurements. To account for the scattered spatial and temporal distribution of streaming sensor data, we use a fourdimensional extension of our framework, which elegantly handles representation of time-varying data and leads to reconstructions that are smooth in both space and time.
Bitwise data parallelism in regular expression matching

A new parallel algorithm for regular expression matching is developed and applied to the classical grep (global regular expression print) problem. Building on the bitwise data parallelism previously applied to the manual implementation of token scanning in the Parabix XML parser, the new algorithm represents a general solution to the problem of regular expression matching using parallel bit streams. On widely-deployed commodity hardware using 128-bit SSE2 SIMD technology, our algorithm implementations can substantially outperform traditional grep implementations based on NFAs, DFAs or backtracking. 5× or better performance advantage against the best of available competitors is not atypical. The algorithms are also designed to scale with the availability of additional parallel resources such as the wider SIMD facilities (256-bit) of Intel AVX2 or future 512bit extensions. Our AVX2 implementation showed dramatic reduction in instruction count and significant improvement in speed. Our GPU implementations show further acceleration.
A Projective Framework for Polyhedral Mesh Modelling

We present a novel framework for polyhedral mesh editing with face‐based projective maps that preserves planarity by definition. Such meshes are essential in the field of architectural design and rationalization. By using homogeneous coordinates to describe vertices, we can parametrize the entire shape space of planar‐preserving deformations with bilinear equations. The generality of this space allows for polyhedral geometric processing methods to be conducted with ease. We demonstrate its usefulness in planar‐quadrilateral mesh subdivision, a resulting multi‐resolution editing algorithm, and novel shape‐space exploration with prescribed transformations. Furthermore, we show that our shape space is a discretization of a continuous space of conjugate‐preserving projective transformation fields on surfaces. Our shape space directly addresses planar‐quad meshes, on which we put a focus, and we further show that our framework naturally extends to meshes with faces of more than four vertices as well.
RARRES3 suppresses breast cancer lung metastasis by regulating adhesion and differentiation

In estrogen receptor‐negative breast cancer patients, metastatic relapse usually occurs in the lung and is responsible for the fatal outcome of the disease. Thus, a better understanding of the biology of metastasis is needed. In particular, biomarkers to identify patients that are at risk of lung metastasis could open the avenue for new therapeutic opportunities. Here we characterize the biological activity of RARRES3, a new metastasis suppressor gene whose reduced expression in the primary breast tumors identifies a subgroup of patients more likely to develop lung metastasis. We show that RARRES3 downregulation engages metastasis‐initiating capabilities by facilitating adhesion of the tumor cells to the lung parenchyma. In addition, impaired tumor cell differentiation due to the loss of RARRES3 phospholipase A1/A2 activity also contributes to lung metastasis. Our results establish RARRES3 downregulation as a potential biomarker to identify patients at high risk of lung metastasis who might benefit from a differentiation treatment in the adjuvant programme.
A New Optical Method For Determining The Stress Intensity Factor

This paper provides an optical method for determining the stress intensity factor. The optical properties of grating and wedge are used to form two images of a specime which stagger a small distance. The distance can be regulated stepless. Information of the partial derivative of the sum of principal stress around the crack tip is directly obtained by the shearing interference of two images and then the stress intensity factor is evaluated. This method is suited to both transparent and opaque material. Its sensitivity can be increased by multiplying technique.
TRECVID 2008 Participation by MCG-ICT-CAS

For TRECVID 2008 concept detection task, we principally focus on: (1) Early fusion of texture, edge and color features TECM, abbreviation of the combined TF*IDF weights based on SIFT features, Edge Histogram, and Color Moments. (2) To improve the training efficiency and explore the knowledge between concepts or hidden sub-domains more easily and efficiently, we propose a novel method based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA): LDA-based multiple-SVM (LDASVM). We first use LDA to cluster all the keyframes into topics according to the maximum element of the topic-simplex representation vector (TRV) of each keyframe. Then, we train the annotated data in each topic for each concept. During training, unlike multi-bag SVM, we only use positive samples in current topic for the sake of retaining sample’s separability, instead of all positive samples among the whole training set, and ignore the topics with too few positive samples. While testing a keyframe for a given concept, we adopt TRV as the weight vector, instead of equal weighting strategy, to combine the SVM outputs of topic-models. (3) Introduction of Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) into our concept detection system for the purpose of making re-trained models more adaptive to the test data: unlike existing PRF techniques in text and video retrieval, we propose a preliminary strategy to explore the visual features of positive training samples to improve the quality of pseudo positive samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LDASVM approach is both effective and efficient.