Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular genetic alterations in hamartomatous polyps and carcinomas of patients with Peutz-Jeghers syndrome

Aim—To investigate whether mutations in the STK11/LKB1 gene and genes implicated in the colorectal adenoma–carcinoma sequence are involved in Peutz-Jeghers syndrome (PJS) related tumorigenesis. Methods—Thirty nine polyps and five carcinomas from 17 patients (from 13 families) with PJS were analysed for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at 19p13.3 (STK11/LKB1 gene locus), 5q21 (APC gene locus), 18q21–22 (Smad4 and Smad2 gene locus), and 17p13 (p53 gene locus), and evaluated for immunohistochemical staining of p53. In addition, mutational analysis of K-ras codon 12, APC, and p53 and immunohistochemistry for Smad4 expression were performed on all carcinomas. Results—LOH at 19p was seen in 15 of the 39 polyps and in all carcinomas (n = 5). Interestingly, six of the seven polyps from patients with cancer had LOH, compared with nine of the 31 polyps from the remaining patients (p = 0.01). In one polyp from a patient without a germline STK11/LKB1 mutation, no LOH at 19p or at three alternative PJS candidate loci (19q, 6p, and 6q) was found. No LOH at 5q was observed. However, mutational analysis revealed an APC mutation in four of the five carcinomas. LOH at 17p was not seen in polyps or carcinomas; immunohistochemistry showed expression of p53 in one carcinoma and focal expression in three polyps. At subsequent sequence analysis, no p53 mutation was found. One carcinoma had an activating K-ras codon 12 mutation and another carcinoma showed 18q LOH; however, no loss of Smad4 expression was seen. Conclusions—These results provide further evidence that STK11/LKB1 acts as a tumour suppressor gene, and may be involved in the early stages of PJS tumorigenesis. Further research is needed to see whether LOH in PJS polyps could be used as a biomarker to predict cancer. Differences in molecular genetic alterations noted between the adenoma–carcinoma sequence and PJS related tumours suggest the presence of a distinct pathway of carcinogenesis.
Performance of cement-stabilised crushed brick aggregates in asphalt pavement base and subbase applications

Demolished brick is one of the main components of construction waste, and its recycling for use in asphalt pavement base and subbase is a relatively new technique. This work studies the performance of cement-stabilised crushed brick aggregates (CSCBA) and proves the applicability of crushed brick aggregates (CBA) in asphalt pavement base. A scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD) and Fourier infrared spectrum (FIS) were used to investigate the micro performance of CBA. Six types of CSCBA were designed with the following CBA contents: 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100%. The properties of CSCBA were investigated, including compaction properties, compressive strength, split strength, compressive resilient modulus, shrinkage performance and fatigue performance. SEM was also used to analyse the strengthening mechanism of CSCBA. This study's results are useful for engineering practice, particularly for identifying (a) the properties of CSCBA and (b) the upper limits of CBA applicability for asphalt pavement base and subbase for low-grade highway.
Ieee Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 1 Exploring Permission-induced Risk in Android Applications for Malicious Application Detection

—Android has been a major target of malicious applications (malapps). How to detect and keep the malapps out of the app markets is an ongoing challenge. One of the central design points of Android security mechanism is permission control that restricts the access of apps to core facilities of devices. However, it imparts a significant responsibility to the app developers with regard to accurately specifying the requested permissions and to the users with regard to fully understanding the risk of granting certain combinations of permissions. Android permissions requested by an app depict the app's behavioral patterns. In order to help understanding Android permissions, in this work, we explore the permission-induced risk in Android apps on three levels in a systematic manner. First, we thoroughly analyze the risk of individual permission and the risk of a group of collaborative permissions. We employ three feature ranking methods, namely, mutual information, Correlation Coefficient (CorrCoef), and T-test to rank Android individual permissions w.r. t. their risk. We then use Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) as well as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify risky permission subsets. Second, we evaluate the usefulness of risky permissions for malapp detection with Support Vector Machine (SVM), decision trees as well as random forest. Third, we in depth analyze the detection results and discuss the feasibility as well as the limitations of malapp detection based on permission requests. We evaluate our methods on a very large official app set consisting of 310,926 benign apps and 4,868 real-world malapps and on a third-party app sets. The empirical results show that our malapp detectors built on risky permissions give satisfied performance (a detection rate as 94.62% with a false positive rate as 0.6%), catch the malapps' essential patterns on violating permission access regulations, and are universally applicable to unknown malapps (detection rate as 74.03%).
An Improved Chinese Chessman Recognition Method for Robot in Natural Environment

Computer vision is the prerequisite of chess playing robot in a natural environment. In this paper, a new method is presented for recognition of Chinese chessman with higher precision and less computing expense. Firstly, the noise is removed from the captured image by Gaussian filter. Secondly, the chess circles are detected by Hough circle transform, and the chess color is detected using the HSV color model, then the detected red and black character pixels are expanded by dilation. Thirdly, the positions of chessman are estimated based on detected circles and dilated regions, then chess positions are adjusted to their proper places. Finally, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and nearest neighbor matching are both employed, together with sorting matching numbers, to recognize the chess characters. We have tested 100 sets of chessman and each set contained 12 different Chinese characters with random rotation, then compare with the traditional approach. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method outperforms in both consuming time and recognition accuracy.
An Ensemble Approach to Knowledge-Based Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy Planning

Knowledge-based planning (KBP) utilizes experienced planners’ knowledge embedded in prior plans to estimate optimal achievable dose volume histogram (DVH) of new cases. In the regression-based KBP framework, previously planned patients’ anatomical features and DVHs are extracted, and prior knowledge is summarized as the regression coefficients that transform features to organ-at-risk DVH predictions. In our study, we find that in different settings, different regression methods work better. To improve the robustness of KBP models, we propose an ensemble method that combines the strengths of various linear regression models, including stepwise, lasso, elastic net, and ridge regression. In the ensemble approach, we first obtain individual model prediction metadata using in-training-set leave-one-out cross validation. A constrained optimization is subsequently performed to decide individual model weights. The metadata is also used to filter out impactful training set outliers. We evaluate our method on a fresh set of retrospectively retrieved anonymized prostate intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) cases and head and neck IMRT cases. The proposed approach is more robust against small training set size, wrongly labeled cases, and dosimetric inferior plans, compared with other individual models. In summary, we believe the improved robustness makes the proposed method more suitable for clinical settings than individual models.
Association Between Cesarean Birth and Risk of Obesity in Offspring in Childhood, Adolescence, and Early Adulthood.

Importance Cesarean birth has been associated with higher risk of obesity in offspring, but previous studies have focused primarily on childhood obesity and have been hampered by limited control for confounders. Objective To investigate the association between cesarean birth and risk of obesity in offspring. Design, Setting, and Participants A prospective cohort study was conducted from September 1, 1996, to December 31, 2012, among participants of the Growing Up Today Study, including 22 068 offspring born to 15 271 women, followed up via questionnaire from ages 9 to 14 through ages 20 to 28 years. Data analysis was conducted from October 10, 2015, to June 14, 2016. Exposure Birth by cesarean delivery. Main Outcomes and Measures Risk of obesity based on International Obesity Task Force or World Health Organization body mass index cutoffs, depending on age. Secondary outcomes included risks of obesity associated with changes in mode of delivery and differences in risk between siblings whose modes of birth were discordant. Results Of the 22 068 offspring (20 950 white; 9359 male and 12 709 female), 4921 individuals (22.3%) were born by cesarean delivery. The cumulative risk of obesity through the end of follow-up was 13% among all participants. The adjusted risk ratio for obesity among offspring delivered via cesarean birth vs those delivered via vaginal birth was 1.15 (95% CI, 1.06-1.26; P = .002). This association was stronger among women without known indications for cesarean delivery (adjusted risk ratio, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.09-1.54; P = .004). Offspring delivered via vaginal birth among women who had undergone a previous cesarean delivery had a 31% (95% CI, 17%-47%) lower risk of obesity compared with those born to women with repeated cesarean deliveries. In within-family analysis, individuals born by cesarean delivery had 64% (8%-148%) higher odds of obesity than did their siblings born via vaginal delivery. Conclusions and Relevance Cesarean birth was associated with offspring obesity after accounting for major confounding factors. Although additional research is needed to clarify the mechanisms underlying this association, clinicians and patients should weigh this risk when considering cesarean delivery in the absence of a clear indication.
Hypothalamic‐specific proopiomelanocortin deficiency reduces alcohol drinking in male and female mice

Opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone reduces alcohol consumption and relapse in both humans and rodents. This study investigated whether hypothalamic proopiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons (producing beta‐endorphin and melanocortins) play a role in alcohol drinking behaviors. Both male and female mice with targeted deletion of two neuronal Pomc enhancers nPE1 and nPE2 (nPE−/−), resulting in hypothalamic‐specific POMC deficiency, were studied in short‐access (4‐h/day) drinking‐in‐the‐dark (DID, alcohol in one bottle, intermittent access (IA, 24‐h cycles of alcohol access every other day, alcohol vs. water in a two‐bottle choice) and alcohol deprivation effect (ADE) models. Wild‐type nPE+/+ exposed to 1‐week DID rapidly established stable alcohol drinking behavior with more intake in females, whereas nPE−/− mice of both sexes had less intake and less preference. Although nPE−/− showed less saccharin intake and preference than nPE+/+, there was no genotype difference in sucrose intake or preference in the DID paradigm. After 3‐week IA, nPE+/+ gradually escalated to high alcohol intake and preference, with more intake in females, whereas nPE−/− showed less escalation. Pharmacological blockade of mu‐opioid receptors with naltrexone reduced intake in nPE+/+ in a dose‐dependent manner, but had blunted effects in nPE−/− of both sexes. When alcohol was presented again after 1‐week abstinence from IA, nPE+/+ of both sexes displayed significant increases in alcohol intake (ADE or relapse‐like drinking), with more pronounced ADE in females, whereas nPE−/− did not show ADE in either sex. Our results suggest that neuronal POMC is involved in modulation of alcohol ‘binge’ drinking, escalation and ‘relapse’, probably via hypothalamic‐mediated mechanisms, with sex differences.
Effects of Pressure Support Ventilation May Be Lost at High Exercise Intensities in People with COPD

ABSTRACT Pressure support ventilation (PSV) may be used for exercise training in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but its acute effect on maximum exercise capacity is not fully known. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of 10 cm H2O PSV and a fixed PSV level titrated to patient comfort at rest on maximum exercise workload (WLmax), breathing pattern and metabolic parameters during a symptom-limited incremental bicycle test in individuals with COPD. Eleven individuals with COPD (forced expiratory volume in one second: 49 ± 16%; age: 64 ± 7 years) performed three exercise tests: without a ventilator, with 10 cm H2O of PSV and with a fixed level titrated to comfort at rest, using a SERVO-i ventilator. Tests were performed in randomized order and at least 48 hours apart. The WLmax, breathing pattern, metabolic parameters, and mouth pressure (Pmo) were compared using repeated measures analysis of variance. Mean PSV during titration was 8.2 ± 4.5 cm H2O. There was no difference in the WLmax achieved during the three tests. At rest, PSV increased the tidal volume, minute ventilation, and mean inspiratory flow with a lower end-tidal CO2; this was not sustained at peak exercise. Pmo decreased progressively (decreased unloading) with PSV at workloads close to peak, suggesting the ventilator was unable to keep up with the increased ventilatory demand at high workloads. In conclusion, with a Servo-i ventilator, 10 cm H2O of PSV and a fixed level of PSV established by titration to comfort at rest, is ineffective for the purpose of achieving higher exercise workloads as the acute physiological effects may not be sustained at peak exercise.
Characterization of Silk/Poly 3-Hydroxybutyrate-chitosan-multi-walled Carbon Nanotube Micro-nano Scaffold: A New Hybrid Scaffold for Tissue Engineering Applications

Background: Long-term healing tissue engineering scaffolds must hold its full mechanical strength at least for 12 weeks. Nano-micro scaffolds consist of electrospinning nanofibers and textile microfibers to support cell behavior and mechanical strength, respectively. Methods: The new nano-micro hybrid scaffold was fabricated by electrospinning poly 3-hydroxybutyrate-chitosan-multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWNT functionalized by COOH) solution on knitted silk in a random manner with different amounts of MWNT. The physical, mechanical, and biodegradation properties were assessed through scanning electron microscopy, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, water contact angle test, tensile strength test, and weight loss test. The scaffold without MWNT was chosen as control sample. Results: An increase in the amount of MWNT up to 1 wt% leads to better fiber diameter distribution, more hydrophilicity, biodegradation rate, and higher tensile strength in comparison with other samples. The porosity percentage of all scaffolds is more than 80%. According to FTIR spectra, the nanofibrous coat on knitted silk did not have any effect on silk fibroin crystallinity structures, and according to tensile strength test, the coat had a significant effect on tensile strength in comparison with pure knitted silk (P ≤ 0.05). The average fiber diameter decreased due to an increase in electrical conductivity of the solution and fiber stretch in electrical field due to MWNTs. The scaffold containing 1 wt% MWNT was more hydrophilic due to the presence of many COOH groups of functionalized MWNT, thus an increase in the hydrolysis and degradation rate of this sample. Conclusions: High intrinsic tensile strength of MWNTs and improvement of nano-micro interface connection lead to an increase in tensile strength in scaffolds containing MWNT.
MoLoc: On Distinguishing Fingerprint Twins

Indoor localization has enabled a great number of mobile and pervasive applications, attracting attentions from researchers worldwide. Most of current solutions rely on Received Signal Strength (RSS) of wireless signals as location fingerprint, to discriminate locations of interest. Fingerprint uniqueness with respect to locations is a basic requirement in these fingerprinting-based solutions. However, due to insufficient number of signal sources, temporal variations of wireless signals, and rich multipath effects, such requirement is not always met in complex indoor environments, which we refer to as fingerprint ambiguity. In this work, we explore the potential of leveraging user motion against fingerprint ambiguity. Our basic idea is that user motion patterns collected by built-in sensors of mobile phones add to the diversity built by RSS fingerprints. On this basis, we propose MoLoc, a motion-assisted localization scheme implemented on mobile phones. MoLoc can easily be integrated in existing localization systems by simply adding a motion database that is constructed automatically by crowdsourcing. We conducted experiments in a large office hall. The experiment results show that MoLoc doubles the localization accuracy achieved by the fingerprinting method, and limits the mean localization error to less than 1m.
WNT9A Is a Conserved Regulator of Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cell Development

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) differentiate into all cell types of the blood and can be used therapeutically to treat hematopoietic cancers and disorders. Despite decades of research, it is not yet possible to derive therapy-grade HSCs from pluripotent precursors. Analysis of HSC development in model organisms has identified some of the molecular cues that are necessary to instruct hematopoiesis in vivo, including Wnt9A, which is required during an early time window in zebrafish development. Although bona fide HSCs cannot be derived in vitro, it is possible to model human hematopoietic progenitor development by differentiating human pluripotent stem cells to hematopoietic cells. Herein, we modulate WNT9A expression during the in vitro differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to hematopoietic progenitor cells and demonstrate that WNT9A also regulates human hematopoietic progenitor cell development in vitro. Overexpression of WNT9A only impacts differentiation to CD34+/CD45+ cells during early time windows and does so in a dose-dependent manner. The cells that receive the Wnt signal—not the cells that secrete WNT9A—differentiate most efficiently to hematopoietic progenitors; this mimics the paracrine action of Wnt9a during in vivo hematopoiesis. Taken together, these data indicate that WNT9A is a conserved regulator of zebrafish and human hematopoietic development.
Genetic Risk for Inflammatory Bowel Disease Is a Determinant of Crohn's Disease Development in Chronic Granulomatous Disease

Background:Approximately, one-third to one-half of children with chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) develop gastrointestinal inflammation characteristic of idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), usually Crohn's disease. We hypothesized that the overall IBD genetic risk, determined by IBD genetic risk score (GRS), might in part determine IBD development in CGD. Methods:We reviewed medical records to establish IBD diagnoses in CGD subjects seen at NIAID. IBD risk single nucleotide polymorphism genotypes were determined using the Immunochip, and GRS were estimated by Mangrove. Results:Among 157 white patients with CGD, 55 were confirmed, 78 excluded, and 24 were uncertain for IBD. Two hundred one established, independent European IBD risk single nucleotide polymorphisms passed quality control. After sample quality control and removing non-IBD CGD patients with perianal disease, mean GRS for 40 unrelated patients with CGD-IBD was higher than 53 CGD non-IBD patients (in log2-scale 0.08 ± 1.62 versus −0.67 ± 1.64, P = 0.026) but lower than 239 IBD Genetics Consortium (IBDGC) young-onset Crohn's disease cases (0.76 ± 1.60, P = 0.025). GRS for non-IBD CGD was similar to 609 IBDGC controls (−0.69 ± 1.60, P = 0.95). Seven established IBD single nucleotide polymorphisms were nominally significant among CGD-IBD versus CGD non-IBD, including those near LACC1 (P = 0.005), CXCL14 (P = 0.007), and TNFSF15 (P = 0.016). Conclusions:The weight of the common IBD risk alleles are significant determinants of IBD in CGD. However, IBD risk gene burden among CGD children with IBD is significantly lower than that in nonsyndromic pediatric Crohn's disease, congruent with the concept that defective superoxide production in CGD is also a major IBD risk factor. Individual IBD genes might interact with the CGD defect to cause IBD in CGD.
Combining Multiple Methods for the Automatic Construction of Multilingual WordNets

This paper explores the automatic construction of a multilingual Lexical Knowledge Base from preexisting lexical resources. First, a set of automatic and complementary techniques for linking Spanish words collected from monolingual and bilingual MRDs to English WordNet synsets are described. Second, we show how resulting data provided by each method is then combined to produce a preliminary version of a Spanish WordNet with an accuracy over 85%. The application of these combinations results on an increment of the extracted connexions of a 40% without losing accuracy. Both coarse-grained (class level) and fine-grained (synset assignment level) confidence ratios are used and evaluated. Finally, the results for the whole process are presented.
Dry Drawn Multiwall Carbon Nanotube Sheet as a Counter Electrode for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells: Multilayer Optimization

We demonstrate the fabrication of dye sensitized solar cells using multiwall carbon nanotube (MWNT) sheets as a counter electrode with catalytic activity optimized by layering as an alternative to platinum deposited on fluorinated tin oxide (FTO). The sheets are drawn directly from a highly aligned forest of MWNTs grown on silicon by chemical vapor deposition. We used different number of MWNT layers on the FTO and pure glass. Cell performance was found to vary with the number of MWNT sheets. When using of 10 or more layers we can substitute the FTO with platinum catalytic particles.
Chaotic Prediction for Traffic Flow of Improved BP Neural Network

A prediction algorithm for traffic flow prediction of BP neural based on Differential Evolution(DE) is proposed to overcome the problems such as long computing time and easy to fall into local minimum by combing DE and neural network . In the algorithm, DE is used to optimize the thresholds and weights of BP neural network, and the BP neural network is used to search for the optimal solution. The efficiency of the proposed prediction method is tested by the simulation of two typical chaotic time series and real traffic flow. The simulation results show that the proposed method has higher precision compared with the traditional BP neural network，so prove it is feasible and effective in the practical prediction of traffic flow. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i3. 2324 Full Text: PDF
GazeTry: Swipe Text Typing Using Gaze

Over the last decades, eye gaze has become an alternative form of text entry by some physically challenged people. Recently a dwell-free system has been proposed, which has been proven to be much faster compared to other existing dwell-free systems. However, it is vulnerable to some common text entry problems. In the paper, we propose GazeTry, a dwell-free gaze-based text entry system which allows people to type a word by gazing sequentially at the letters of the word. Simulation and experiments results show that our proposed new dwell-free system, GazeTry with the Moving Window String Matching (MoWing) algorithm has better accuracy and more resilience to text entry errors.