Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combined Lifestyle and Herbal Medicine in Overweight Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS): A Randomized Controlled Trial

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common, complex reproductive endocrinopathy characterized by menstrual irregularities, hyperandrogenism and polycystic ovaries. Lifestyle modification is a first‐line intervention; however, there are barriers to success for this form of self‐care, and women often seek adjunct therapies including herbal medicines. This pragmatic, randomized controlled trial, delivered in communities of Australia in overweight women with PCOS, compared the effectiveness and safety of a lifestyle intervention plus herbal medicine against lifestyle alone. All participants were helped to construct a personalized lifestyle plan. The herbal intervention consisted of two tablets. Tablet 1 contained Cinnamomum verum, Glycyrrhiza glabra, Hypericum perforatum and Paeonia lactiflora. Tablet 2 contained Tribulus terrestris. The primary outcome was oligomenorrhoea/amenorrhoea. Secondary outcomes were hormones; anthropometry; quality of life; depression, anxiety and stress; pregnancy; birth outcomes; and safety. One hundred and twenty‐two women gave their consent. At 3 months, women in the combination group recorded a reduction in oligomenorrhoea of 32.9% (95% confidence interval 23.3–42.6, p < 0.01) compared with controls, estimated as a large effect (ηp2 = 0.11). Other significant improvements were found for body mass index (p < 0.01); insulin (p = 0.02) and luteinizing hormone (p = 0.04); blood pressure (p = 0.01); quality of life (p < 0.01); depression, anxiety and stress (p < 0.01); and pregnancy rates (p = 0.01). This trial provides evidence of improved effectiveness and safety for lifestyle intervention when combined with herbal medicines in women with PCOS. © 2017 The Authors. Phytotherapy Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Model compensation for noises in training and test data

It is well known that the performance of speech recognition systems degrade rapidly as the mismatch between the training and test conditions increases. Approaches to compensate for this mismatch generally assume that the training data is noise-free, and the test data is noisy. In practice, this assumption is seldom correct. We propose an iterative technique to compensate for noise in both the training and test data. The adopted approach compensates the speech model parameters using the noise present in the test data, and compensates the test data frames using the noise present in the training data. The training and test data are assumed to come from different and unknown microphones and acoustic environments. The interest of such a compensation scheme has been assessed on the MASK task using a continuous density HMM-based speech recognizer. Experimental results show the advantage of compensating for both test and training noise.
PSCloud: a durable context-aware personal storage cloud

Personal content from mobile devices is often irreplaceable, yet current solutions for managing and synchronizing this data across multiple devices to ensure durability are often limited. A common approach is to synchronize data through a cloud storage service such as Dropbox. We argue that this model is excessively rigid because it forces users to use more expensive cloud storage than is needed. This paper proposes an alternative approach that uses storage on all of a user's mobile devices, home servers, and cloud storage accounts to create a single unified personal storage system called PSCloud in which data is automatically cached, replicated, and placed to enable reliable access across all devices while minimizing network access and storage costs. This approach is based on a per-device network context-graph that tracks connectivity relationships between a user's devices and storage options over time. Preliminary experiments show that combining such context with techniques that exploit content similarity across devices to make placement decisions can lead to substantial reductions in cloud storage and network usage.
Cardiovascular magnetic resonance evaluation of the patient with known or suspected coronary artery disease

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is finding an increasing role in the diagnosis of cardiac disease. In many instances, CMR provides valuable information and for some aspects, such as left ventricular function, is considered to be the diagnostic ‘gold standard’. 1 Among the most important advances is the implementation of balanced steady state free precession (SSFP) sequences that provide higher signal-to-noise ratio than can be obtained by conventional gradient echo techniques, along with excellent delineation of the blood–myocardium interface. The SSFP technique has become the preferred cardiac CMR pulse sequence for acquisition of volumetric datasets of the left and right ventricle. Parallel acquisition techniques allow image acquisition times to be substantially shortened. Next to imaging of cardiac morphology CMR has several distinct applications that are of use in assessing patients with chest pain. First of all, CMR is currently considered the gold standard for quantification of ventricular volumes, biventricular global and regional function, and mass.1 Even small motion abnormalities can be reliably detected due to free choice of tomographic plane, high spatial resolution, as well as excellent delineation of endo- and epicardial borders (figure 1). Compared to echocardiography, CMR provides more precise data and is associated with lower interobserver and interstudy variability. For stress testing, this can be of particular advantage and improved accuracy of stress CMR over echocardiography has been demonstrated in patients with poor echocardiographic windows2 (figure 2). Of major interest is the ability of CMR to visualise myocardial scar directly by using a segmented inversion recovery gradient echo sequence at least 10 min after the intravenous injection of gadolinium contrast (figure 1). This method, termed ‘delayed gadolinium enhancement-CMR’ (DGE-CMR), unmasks non-viable, irreversibly damaged myocardium as a hyperenhanced or ‘bright’ area in a manner that closely correlates to histopathology findings.3 Compared to nuclear imaging, CMR …
Multi-object tracking using the particle filter algorithm on the top-view plan

In this paper we address the problem of multi-object tracking in video sequences, with application to pedestrian tracking in a crowd. In this context, particle filters provide a robust tracking framework under ambiguity conditions. The particle filter technique is used in this work, but in order to reduce its computational complexity and increase its robustness, we propose to track the moving objects by generating hypotheses not in the image plan but on the top-view reconstruction of the scene. Comparative results on real video sequences show the advantage of our method for multi-object tracking.
Pharmacological and Biochemical Properties of Nicotinic Receptors from Chick Retina

Previous work has established that functional nicotinic receptors in the chick retina are blocked by neuronal bungarotoxin (NBT), and that the binding of radio‐iodinated NBT to retinal homogenates is displaced by nicotinic ligands. In the present study, we examined the desensitizing effects of agonists on nicotinically‐mediated depolarizations recorded from chick retina. The concentrations of five agonists necessary to reduce the amplitude of these depolarizations by 50% were found to correlate closely with the concentrations of these same agonists previously found necessary to displace 50% of NBT binding. In addition, bromoacetylcholine (BAC), a selective affinity alkylating agent for the agonist binding site, irreversibly inactivated the functional responses of intact chick retina with an inhibiting concentration for 50% block (IC50) near 10‐6 M, the same concentration of BAC that displaced 50% of labelled NBT binding from alkylated retinal homogenates. These data suggest that NBT acts at the receptor agonist binding site. Furthermore, this binding site has a relatively low affinity for agonists, in the micromolar range, even in the desensitized state. Multiple subtypes of nicotinic receptors are known to exist in neuronal tissue, and receptors that bind agonists in the nanomolar range have been detergent‐solubilized and purified using monoclonal antibodies. Under similar conditions, detergent‐solubilization of chick retinal homogenates interfere with the interaction between NBT and the low‐affinity neuronal nicotinic receptors. These data suggest that the conditions used to purify high‐affinity neuronal nicotinic receptors may denature the subtype(s) of neuronal receptors recognized by NBT.
Assessment of Simplified Methods to Measure 18F-FLT Uptake Changes in EGFR-Mutated Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients Undergoing EGFR Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Treatment

3′-deoxy-3′-18F-fluorothymidine (18F-FLT) PET/CT provides a noninvasive assessment of proliferation and, as such, could be a valuable imaging biomarker in oncology. The aim of the present study was to assess the validity of simplified quantitative parameters of 18F-FLT uptake in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients before and after the start of treatment with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). Methods: Ten patients with metastatic NSCLC harboring an activating epidermal growth factor receptor mutation were included in this prospective observational study. Patients underwent 15O-H2O and 18F-FLT PET/CT scanning on 3 separate occasions: within 7 d before treatment, and 7 and 28 d after the first therapeutic dose of a TKI (gefitinib or erlotinib). Dynamic scans were acquired and venous blood samples were collected during the 18F-FLT scan to measure parent fraction and plasma and whole-blood radioactivity concentrations. Simplified measures (standardized uptake value [SUV] and tumor-to-blood ratio [TBR]) were correlated with fully quantitative measures derived from kinetic modeling. Results: Twenty-nine of thirty 18F-FLT PET/CT scans were evaluable. According to the Akaike criterion, a reversible 2-tissue model with 4 rate constants and blood volume parameter was preferred in 84% of cases. Relative therapy-induced changes in SUV and TBR correlated with those derived from kinetic analyses (r2 = 0.83–0.97, P < 0.001, slope = 0.72–1.12). 18F-FLT uptake significantly decreased at 7 and 28 d after the start of treatment compared with baseline (P < 0.01). Changes in 18F-FLT uptake were not correlated with changes in perfusion, as measured using 15O-H2O. Conclusion: SUV and TBR could both be used as surrogate simplified measures to assess changes in 18F-FLT uptake in NSCLC patients treated with a TKI, at the cost of a small underestimation in uptake changes or the need for a blood sample and metabolite measurement, respectively.
A reconfigurable quasi-Yagi folded dipole antenna

A design for a reconfigurable planar quasi-Yagi antenna with a folded dipole driver element is presented. Reconfigurability of the operating frequency of the antenna is achieved by changing the effective electrical length of the folded dipole, which is controlled by a varactor diode. The predicted operating frequency of the quasi-Yagi antenna can be continuously tuned from 5.6 to 7.6GHz using a typical equivalent circuit model of a varactor diode. Preliminary theoretical results on tuning range and radiation patterns for the reconfigurable antenna are described.
Deterministic pivoting algorithms for constrained ranking and clustering problems

We introduce new problems of finding minimum-cost rankings and clusterings which must be consistent with certain constraints (e.g. an input partial order in the case of ranking problems); we give deterministic approximation algorithms for these problems. Randomized approximation algorithms for unconstrained versions of these problems were given by Ailon, Charikar, and Newman [2] and by Ailon and Charikar [1]. Finding deterministic approximation algorithms for these problems answers an open question of Ailon et al. [2]. In particular, we give deterministic algorithms for constrained weighted feedback arc set in tournaments, constrained correlation clustering, and constrained hierarchical clustering related to finding good ultrametrics. Our algorithms follow the paradigm of Ailon et al. [2] of choosing a particular vertex as a pivot and partitioning the graph according to the pivot; unlike their algorithms, we do not choose the pivot randomly but rather use an LP relaxation to choose a good pivot deterministically. Additionally, the use of the LP relaxation allows us to impose constraints easily and analyze the results. In several cases we are able to find approximation factors for the constrained problems that improve on the factors they obtained for the unconstrained cases. We also give a combinatorial algorithm for constrained weighted feedback arc set in tournaments with weights satisfying probability constraints. This algorithm improves on the best known factor given by deterministic combinatorial algorithms for the unconstrained case.
Inflation and Financial Market Performance: What Have We Learned in the Last Ten Years?

The last decade has witnessed a great deal of theoretical and empirical research on the relationships between inflation, financial market performance, and economic growth. This paper provides a survey of that literature and presents new cross-country empirical results on this topic. We find that inflation is negatively associated with banking industry size, real returns on financial assets, and bank profitability. We also discover a positive relationship between asset return volatility and inflation.
Improvement and Fabrication of Anode Pixel for FED Panel with Cold Cathode Emitters

With high effective screen-printing process, the diode field emission display (FED) panel was fabricated. The soda-lime flat glass was used as panel anode plate, and the indium tin oxide film covered on the anode plate surface was etched, which was used to form the anode electrodes. With simple screen printing method, the phosphor paste was prepared on the exposed anode electrode surface, so the phosphor dots were fabricated. Using insulation slurry as material, the insulation layer was also fabricated on the anode plate. The fabricated FED panel with carbon nanotube field emitters possessed good field emission characteristics and image displaying performance.
Opinion-Based Entity Ranking ( Author ’ s Draft )

The deployment of Web 2.0 technologies has led to rapid growth of various opinions and reviews on the web, such as reviews on products and opinions about people. Such content can be very useful to help people find interesting entities like products, businesses and people based on their individual preferences or tradeoffs. Most existing work on leveraging opinionated content has focused on integrating and summarizing opinions on entities to help users better digest all the opinions. In this paper, we propose a different way of leveraging opinionated content, by directly ranking entities based on a user’s preferences. Our idea is to represent each entity with the text of all the reviews of that entity. Given a user’s keyword query that expresses the desired features of an entity, we can then rank all the candidate entities based on how well opinions on these entities match the user’s preferences. We study several methods for solving this problem, including both standard text retrieval models and some extensions of these models. Experiment results on ranking entities based on opinions in two different domains (hotels and cars) show that the proposed extensions are effective and lead to improvement of ranking accuracy over the standard text retrieval models for this task.
Nanolithography and patterning techniques in microelectronics

Copolymer ordering Templated synthesis for controlled 3D structural control Surface-induced structure formation of polymer blends Rapid prototyping of functional microfabricated devices by soft lithography Control of polymer topography AFM based patterning Patterning of confined polymer thin films Ion beam patterning Nanoprinting techniques Photolithography beyond the diffraction limit Standard printing techniques for unconventional methods Microfluidics Manipulation of biomolecules and reactions Fabrication of organic display devices Printing techniques for plastic electronics.
Hot DB'02 course project reports : hot topics in database systems, fall 2002

This technical report contains eight final project reports contributed by ten participants in "Hot Topics in Database Systems," a CMU advanced graduate course offered by Professor Anastassia Ailamaki in Fall 2002. The course covers advanced research issues in modern database system design through paper presentations and discussion. In Fall 2002, topics included query optimization, data stream and adaptive query processing, continuous queries, self-tuning database systems, interaction between the database software and the underlying hardware, distributed and peer-to-peer DBMS, and XML applications. The participating students studied and evaluated the cutting-edge research papers from each topic, and addressed the related issues in in-class discussions. Inspired by the course material, the students proposed and carried out a total of eight projects. The projects included innovative research and implementation and the students worked in teams of two or by themselves. The project reports were carefully evaluated by the students using a conference program committee-style blind-review process. The resulting camera-ready papers are available in this technical report. Several of these reports (as noted in their first page) have resulted in conference submissions. The projects were presented using posters and demos during a half-day HotDB workshop that was held at Carnegie Mellon on December 10, 2002.
Analytic Performance Evaluation of the RED Algorithm for QoS in TCP/IP Networks

The Random Early Detection algorithm is considered as a promising algorithm for Differentiated Services to cope with feedback oriented traffic like TCP. In this paper, we model the salient features of TCP and RED ad evaluate the model with a discrete-time analysis. The novelty of our investigation is the analytic approach to the composed model, i.e., TCP feedback traffic over a RED queue. Deriving not only mean values but also distributions for the performance measures, we obtain insights of the behaviour of TCP under RED.
MCRB for Timing and Phase Offset for Low-Rate Optical Communication with Self-Phase Modulation

We derive the modified Cramer-Rao bound (MCRB) for symbol timing and phase offset estimation in the presence of nonlinear self-phase modulation (SPM) in a dispersion compensated long-haul optical fiber link with coherent detection at data rates below 10 Gigabaud. In the presence of a low-pass filter at the receiver front-end, we find that SPM degrades the MCRB. Moreover, depending on the pulse shape, SPM induces underdamped oscillation on the bounds.
CRSearcher: Searching Code Database for Repairing Bugs

With the exponentially rising of software development in the past decades, millions of software products have been created. Existing empirical studies show that many code snippets are similar. Although there exist many difficulties in maintaining these similar code snippets, we believe that it is feasible to leverage the similarity to enhance program repairs, as bugs may have already been repaired in many other similar code snippets. In this paper, we propose CRSearcher, an approach, that searches open-sourced codebases and uses similar code to repair bugs. It is designed with insights from three observations: small patch, code redundancy, and the availability of open-sourced software repositories. With these insights, CRSearcher provides the engineers with an interactive strategy for program repair which automatically locates bug location, searches for similar code, and recommends code snippets as an aid, but allows developers to make a final decision. We have implemented CRSearcher on the basis of the state-of-the-art techniques such as Findbugs and a token-based similar code snippets search engine. In our evaluation, we have built a code database that consists of several open-source projects. Our evaluation results show that CRSearcher does help generating high quality program patches, and reduce more than 50% time on repairing six buggy programs.
A logical characterisation of qualitative coalitional games

Qualitative coalitional games (QCGs) were introduced as abstract formal models of goal-oriented cooperative systems. A QCG is a game in which each agent is assumed to have some goal to achieve, and in which agents must typically cooperate with others in order to satisfy their goals. In this paper, we show how it is possible to reason about QCGs using Coalition Logic (CL), a formalism intended to facilitate reasoning about coalitional powers in game-like multiagent systems. We introduce a correspondence relation between QCGs and interpretations for CL, which defines the circumstances under which a CL interpretation correctly characterises a QCG. The complexity of deciding correspondence between QCGs and interpretations for CL is shown to vary from being tractable up to Πp 2-complete, depending on the representation chosen for the QCG and interpretation. We then show how various properties and solution concepts of QCGs can be characterised as CL formula schemes. The ideas are illustrated via a detailed worked example, in which we demonstrate how a model checker can be deployed to investigate whether a particular system has the properties in question.
Monocyte/Macrophage Suppression in CD11b Diphtheria Toxin Receptor Transgenic Mice Differentially Affects Atherogenesis and Established Plaques

Although monocytes/macrophages are considered important in atherogenesis, their role in established plaques is unclear. For example, macrophage content is associated with plaque instability, but their loss through cell death is observed at sites of plaque rupture. To examine the role of monocytes/macrophages in atherosclerosis, we developed CD11b–diphtheria toxin (DT) receptor (DTR) transgenic mice, whereby administration of DT selectively kills monocytes/macrophages. DT treatment reduced peripheral blood monocytes and tissue macrophages and inhibited macrophage function in CD11b-DTR mice and apolipoprotein E–null (apoE−/−) mice transplanted with CD11b-DTR bone marrow. In atherogenesis experiments, DT markedly reduced plaque development and altered plaque composition, reducing collagen content and necrotic core formation. In mice with established plaques, acute DT treatment induced macrophage apoptosis and reduced macrophage content but did not induce plaque inflammation, thrombosis, or rupture. Furthermore, despite a 50% reduction in monocytes, chronic DT treatment of these mice did not alter plaque extent or composition, most likely because of ongoing recruitment/proliferation of monocytes with recovery of macrophage content. We conclude that monocytes/macrophages are critical to atherogenesis, but established plaques are more resistant to reductions in monocytes.