Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The diaphragm as an anatomic surrogate for lung tumor motion

Lung tumor motion due to respiration poses a challenge in the application of modern three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy. Direct tracking of the lung tumor during radiation therapy is very difficult without implanted fiducial markers. Indirect tracking relies on the correlation of the tumor's motion and the surrogate's motion. The present paper presents an analysis of the correlation between tumor motion and diaphragm motion in order to evaluate the potential use of diaphragm as a surrogate for tumor motion. We have analyzed the correlation between diaphragm motion and superior–inferior lung tumor motion in 32 fluoroscopic image sequences from ten lung cancer patients. A simple linear model and a more complex linear model that accounts for phase delays between the two motions have been used. Results show that the diaphragm is a good surrogate for tumor motion prediction for most patients, resulting in an average correlation factor of 0.94 and 0.98 with each model respectively. The model that accounts for delays leads to an average localization prediction error of 0.8 mm and an error at the 95% confidence level of 2.1 mm. However, for one patient studied, the correlation is much weaker compared to other patients. This indicates that, before using diaphragm for lung tumor prediction, the correlation should be examined on a patient-by-patient basis.
How big does the effect of an intervention have to be? Application of two novel methods to determine the smallest worthwhile effect of a fall prevention programme: a study protocol

Introduction This project concerns the identification of the smallest worthwhile effect (SWE) of exercise-based programmes to prevent falls in older people. The SWE is the smallest effect that justifies the costs, risks and inconveniences of an intervention and is used to inform the design and interpretation of systematic reviews and randomised clinical trials. Methods and analysis This study will comprise two different methodological approaches: the benefit-harm trade-off method and the discrete choice experiment to estimate the SWE of exercise interventions to prevent falls in older people. In the benefit-harm trade-off method, hypothetical scenarios with the benefits, costs, risks and inconveniences associated with the intervention will be presented to each participant. Then, assuming a treatment effect of certain magnitude, the participant will be asked if he or she would choose to have the intervention. The size of the hypothetical benefit will be varied up and down until it is possible to identify the SWE for which the participant would choose to have the intervention. In the discrete choice experiment, the same attributes (benefits, costs, risks and inconveniences) with varying levels will be presented as choice sets, and participants will be asked to choose between these choice sets. With this approach, we will determine the probability that a person will consider the effects of an intervention to be worthwhile, given the particular costs, risks and inconveniences. For each of the two approaches, participants will be interviewed in person and on different occasions. A subsample of the total cohort will participate in both interviews. Ethics and dissemination This project has received Ethics Approval from the University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee (Protocol number: 14404). Findings will be disseminated through conference presentations, seminars and peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Strategies for multi-modal scene exploration

We propose a method for multi-modal scene exploration where initial object hypothesis formed by active visual segmentation are confirmed and augmented through haptic exploration with a robotic arm. We update the current belief about the state of the map with the detection results and predict yet unknown parts of the map with a Gaussian Process. We show that through the integration of different sensor modalities, we achieve a more complete scene model. We also show that the prediction of the scene structure leads to a valid scene representation even if the map is not fully traversed. Furthermore, we propose different exploration strategies and evaluate them both in simulation and on our robotic platform.
Online The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Object analysis with visual sensors and RFID

Object analysis using visual sensors is one of the most important and challenging issues in computer vision research due principally to difficulties in object representation, segmentation, and recognition within a general framework. This has motivated researchers to investigate exploiting the potential identification capability of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology for object analysis. RFID however, has a number of fundamental limitations including a short sensing range, missing tag detection, not working for all objects, and some items being just too small to be tagged. This has meant applying RFID alone has not been entirely effective in computer vision applications. To address these restrictions, object analysis approaches based on a combination of visual sensors and RFID have recently been successfully introduced. This chapter presents a contemporary review on these object analysis techniques for localisation, tracking, and object and activity recognition, together with some future research directions in this burgeoning field. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1616-5.ch012
Finishing on-time: A qualitative examination of contributors to timely undergraduate degree completion

FINISHING ON-TIME: A QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF CONTRIBUTORS TO TIMELY UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE COMPLETION By Diane A. Vermaaten, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Administration, Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013 Director: Dr. William Bosher, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Education Executive Director, Commonwealth Education Policy Institute The purpose of this study was to determine the most significant factors that contributed to on-time undergraduate degree completion. On-time degree completion requires that a student complete all the requirements of their degree within 4.5 years or less. A grounded theory methodology was used to conduct the study. Narrative data was collected through semistructured interviews. Thirty former students who completed their undergraduate degree at Virginia Commonwealth University were recruited for this study. To be eligible for the study, participants had to have completed their undergraduate degree in 4.5 years or less and graduated between 2004 and 2011. The analysis of the narrative data determined that preparation for on-time completion begins in high school and continues throughout a student’s college career. First, high school students who develop ‘academic self-esteem’ by participating in an honors courses or an early college credit program in high school enter college with the belief, or personal vision, that they can complete their degree in 4 years. However, in cases where the student matriculates without ‘academic self-esteem’ directed and intensive institutional support is an effective proxy. Next, a student must be self-motivated or determined to complete on-time. They must have an inherent reason for wanting to reach that goal post. However, since the findings indicated that motivation can be internal, external, or both, institutional support can be used as effective tool to develop these qualities where needed. Third, if students are to complete their undergraduate degrees on-time, they must develop a personal plan for accomplishing that goal at the very beginning of their college careers. This plan should be incorporated into the student’s academic advising sessions and updated as they acquire the credits required for the completion of their degree. And finally, students should be strongly encouraged to engage in campus life by participating student clubs, organizations, and/or athletics. Participation in campus life encourages persistence and therefore supports on-time completion.
Parenteral anticoagulation in patients with cancer who have no therapeutic or prophylactic indication for anticoagulation.

BACKGROUND Anticoagulation may improve survival in patients with cancer through an antitumor effect in addition to the perceived antithrombotic effect. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the efficacy and safety of parenteral anticoagulants in patients with cancer with no therapeutic or prophylactic indication for anticoagulation. SEARCH STRATEGY A comprehensive search included (1) an electronic search (February 2010) of the following databases: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) Issue 1, 2010, MEDLINE, EMBASE and ISI the Web of Science; (2) handsearch of conference proceedings; (3) checking of references of included studies; and (4) use of the 'related citation' feature in PubMed. SELECTION CRITERIA Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the benefits and harms of parenteral anticoagulation in patients with cancer but no therapeutic or prophylactic indication for anticoagulation. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Using a standardized form we extracted in duplicate data on methodological quality, participants, interventions and outcomes of interest including all-cause mortality, symptomatic thromboembolism, major bleeding, minor bleeding and quality of life (QoL). MAIN RESULTS Of 8187 identified citations, nine RCTs enrolling 2857 patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In all included RCTs the intervention consisted of heparin (either unfractionated heparin or low molecular weight heparin). Overall, the effect of heparin therapy on mortality was not statistically significant at 12 months (risk ratio (RR) 0.93; 95% CI 0.85 to 1.02) but it was statistically significant at 24 months (RR 0.92; 95% CI 0.88 to 0.97). Heparin therapy was associated with a statistically and clinically important reduction in venous thromboembolism (RR 0.55; 95% CI 0.37 to 0.82). There were no statistically significant effects on major bleeding (RR 1.30; 95% CI 0.59 to 2.88), minor bleeding (RR 1.05; 95% 0.75 to 1.46) or QoL. The quality of evidence was high for symptomatic venous thromboembolism, moderate for mortality, major bleeding and minor bleeding, and low for QoL. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Heparin was associated with a significant reduction of death at 24 months but not 12 months. It was also associated with a reduction in venous thromboembolism but based on the RCTs in this review it had no significant effect on major bleeding, minor bleeding or QoL. Future research should further investigate the survival benefit of different types of anticoagulants in patients with different types and stages of cancer. The decision for a patient with cancer to start heparin therapy for survival benefit should balance the benefits and downsides and integrate the patient's values and preferences.
Turnover intention and preparedness for change: exploring leader-member exchange and occupational self-efficacy as antecedents of two employability predictors

Purpose – “Turnover intention” is defined as an employee's intention to voluntarily change jobs or companies. The purpose of this paper is to set “turnover intention” in relation to “preparedness for change”. The former relates to the change of jobs or companies, the latter to employees' willingness to change their current workplace. Both phenomena relate to employability, i.e. an employee's adaptability to changing internal (i.e. the current employer) and external labour market demands. The main aim of this paper is to compare both phenomena and identify antecedents of employability, namely, leader‐member exchange (LMX) and occupational self‐efficacy.Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire study was conducted in two samples of German and Dutch employees.Findings – Results indicate that the two concepts (turnover intention, preparedness for change) are, to some extent, related and show, to some extent, similar relationships to the antecedents.Research limitations/implications – In both samples, self.
1 WWW-SYSTEM USE AND BUSINESS VALUE IN PROJECT NETWORKS

This multiple case study describes the usage and potential business value of www-systems in distributed engineering project (DEP) networks. The study recognizes three different categories of www-system use: 1) “document sharing”, where the system is used in centralized document management 2) “collaboration”, where the www-system is used actively in stakeholder collaboration and 3) “project-management support”, where companies actively utilize the metadata generated by the system in supporting their internal and interfirm project-management processes. The factors identified as explaining the current systemuse category of a company are the company’s internal capability, external capability, collaboration capability, and system-use experience derived from projects. However, it is realized that the optimal system-use mode of a company is dependent on its position and respective co-ordination needs in the value network. Regarding the benefits, the results confirm that enhanced strategic benefits take effect after a time lag, during which companies learn to exploit the improved visibility the system provides.
Gadolinium chloride, a Kupffer cell inhibitor, attenuates hepatic injury in a rat model of chronic cholestasis

The aim of the current study was to elucidate the effect of Kupffer cells inhibition on hepatic injury induced by chronic cholestasis. Sprague-Dawley rats underwent bile duct ligation (BDL) or sham operation and were treated with either saline solution or gadolinium chloride (GdCl3, a specific Kupffer cell inhibitor, 20 mg/kg i.p. daily). Serum and liver samples were collected after 28 days. Direct and total bilirubin concentrations and serum enzyme activities of alkaline phosphatase (ALP), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) increased following BDL (p < 0.01). On the contrary to bilirubin concentrations and AST activity, GdCl3 partially prevented the elevation in ALP, ALT and GGT enzyme activities (p < 0.05). GdCl3 alleviated lipid peroxidation (reflected by malondialdehyde [MDA] concentration) and increased the activities of antioxidant enzymes (i.e. catalase and glutathione peroxidase) in liver samples after BDL (p < 0.05). Fibrosis, ductular proliferation and portal inflammation were also scored in liver samples. Among morphological changes appeared following BDL (i.e. marked fibrosis, portal inflammation and ductular proliferation); only ductular proliferation was not alleviated by GdCl3. Therefore, Kupffer cells inhibition has beneficial effects against the development of hepatic injury induced by chronic cholestasis.
People reidentification in surveillance and forensics

The field of surveillance and forensics research is currently shifting focus and is now showing an ever increasing interest in the task of people reidentification. This is the task of assigning the same identifier to all instances of a particular individual captured in a series of images or videos, even after the occurrence of significant gaps over time or space. People reidentification can be a useful tool for people analysis in security as a data association method for long-term tracking in surveillance. However, current identification techniques being utilized present many difficulties and shortcomings. For instance, they rely solely on the exploitation of visual cues such as color, texture, and the object’s shape. Despite the many advances in this field, reidentification is still an open problem. This survey aims to tackle all the issues and challenging aspects of people reidentification while simultaneously describing the previously proposed solutions for the encountered problems. This begins with the first attempts of holistic descriptors and progresses to the more recently adopted 2D and 3D model-based approaches. The survey also includes an exhaustive treatise of all the aspects of people reidentification, including available datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarking.
Probabilistic alg ' orithh 1 s in integer an 4 polynomial arithinetic *

We present a probabilistic algorithm for testing the result of the product of two n-bit integers (polynomials of degree n over any field) in 4n+o (n) bit (algebraic) operations with the error probability 0 (n-£j for any e < 0.5. The first version of this paper was written at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and presented at 1981 ACM Symposium on Algebraic and Symbolic Computation.
Maternal depression: relations with maternal caregiving representations and emotional availability during the preschool years

This longitudinal study aimed to determine whether maternal depression was related to caregiving behavior and further whether this relationship was mediated and/or moderated by maternal caregiving representations. Ninety-two mothers were assessed for symptoms of depression when their children were 4, 12, and 15 months, and later at 4 years of age. At 4 years of age, mothers' caregiving representations of their child and their relationship were examined using the Parent Development Interview (PDI), and aspects of maternal behaviors were rated during mother–child play interactions using the Emotional Availability Scales (EA). The experience of chronic maternal depression was related to lower levels of maternal sensitivity, and this association was mediated by mothers' impaired capacity to take their child's perspective. The link between depression and lower maternal sensitivity was also moderated by perspective taking, indicating that poor perspective taking had a negative impact on sensitivity only for chronically depressed mothers. In conclusion, the current study demonstrated that mothers' representational models are affected by cognitive distortions associated with depression, and these distortions interfere with a mother's capacity to interact sensitively with her child.
Convexity, complexity, and high dimensions

We discuss metric, algorithmic and geometric issues related to broadly understood complexity of high dimensional convex sets. The specific topics we bring up include metric entropy and its duality, derandomization of constructions of normed spaces or of convex bodies, and different fundamental questions related to geometric diversity of such bodies, as measured by various isomorphic (as opposed to isometric) invariants.
Low-Distortion Inference of Latent Similarities from a Multiplex Social Network

Much of social network analysis is --- implicitly or explicitly --- predicated on the assumption that individuals tend to be more similar to their friends than to strangers. Thus, an observed social network provides a noisy signal about the latent underlying "social space:" the way in which individuals are similar or dissimilar. Many research questions frequently addressed via social network analysis are in reality questions about this social space, raising the question of inverting the process: Given a social network, how accurately can we reconstruct the social structure of similarities and dissimilarities? We begin to address this problem formally. Observed social networks are usually multiplex, in the sense that they reflect (dis)similarities in several different "categories," such as geographical proximity, kinship, or similarity of professions/hobbies. We assume that each such category is characterized by a latent metric capturing (dis)similarities in this category. Each category gives rise to a separate social network: a random graph parameterized by this metric. For a concrete model, we consider Kleinberg's small world model and some variations thereof. The observed social network is the unlabeled union of these graphs, i.e., the presence or absence of edges can be observed, but not their origins. Our main result is a near-linear time algorithm which reconstructs each metric with provably low distortion.
Pregnancy outcome of Mexican-American women: the effect of generational residence in the United States.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether duration of generational residence in the United States is associated with the pregnancy outcome of Mexican Americans. DESIGN This is a population-based study. METHODS Stratified analyses were performed on a data set of 1989-1991 Illinois computerized vital records of Mexican-American infants. RESULTS First generation (N=2,203) and second or higher (N=4,192) US-born Mexican-American women had infant low birth-weight rates of 7.5% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to 5.1% for Mexican-born women (N=39,050); relative risk=1.4 (1.2-1.7) and 1.2 (1.1-1.4), respectively. Among women with one or more high-risk sociodemographic characteristics (age less than 20 years, educational attainment less than 12 years, unmarried, high parity, or inadequate prenatal care), first generation (N=1,624) and second or higher generation (N=2,874) US-born Mexican-American women had infant low birth-weight rates of 8.3% and 6.5%, respectively, vs 5.2% for Mexican-born women (N=33,625); relative risk = 1.6 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.3-1.9) and 1.2 (95% CI, 1.0-1.4), respectively. Among women with the lowest sociodemographic risk profile, infant low birthweight rates did not vary between the subgroups. CONCLUSIONS For second or higher generation US-born Mexican-American women, the rate of infant low birth weight does not exceed that of first generation US-born women; it actually approximates that of Mexican-born women across a broad range of sociodemographic characteristics.
Automatic Semantic Sequence Extraction from Unrestricted Non-Tagged Texts

Mophological processing, syntactic parsing and other useful tools have been proposed in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Many of those NLP tools take dictionary-based approaches. Thus these tools are often not very efficient with texts written in casual wordings or texts which contain many domain-specific terms, because of the lack of vocabulary.In this paper we propose a simple method to obtain domain-specific sequences from unrestricted texts using statistical information only. This method is language-independent.We had experiments on sequence extraction on email texts in Japanese, and succeeded in extracting significant semantic sequences in the test corpus. We tried morphological parsing on the test corpus with ChaSen, a Japanese dictionary-based morphological parser, and examined our system's efficiency in extraction of semantic sequences which were not recognized with ChaSen. Our system detected 69.06% of the unknown words correctly.
MOS charge pumps for low-voltage operation

New MOS charge pumps utilizing the charge transfer switches (CTSs) to direct charge flow and generate boosted output voltage are described. Using the internal boosted voltage to backward control the CTS of a previous stage yields charge pumps that are suitable for low-voltage operation. Applying dynamic control to the CTSs can eliminate the reverse charge sharing phenomenon and further improve the voltage pumping gain. The limitation imposed by the diode-configured output stage can be mitigated by pumping it with a clock of enhanced voltage amplitude. Using the new circuit techniques, a 1.2-V-to-3.5-V charge pump and a 2-V-to-16-V charge pump are demonstrated.