Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of oesophageal motor function using combined perfusion manometry and multi‐channel intra‐luminal impedance measurement in normal subjects

Abstract Multichannel intraluminal impedance (MII) is being used increasingly to assess oesophageal bolus clearance. However, there is no good standardization of the impedance parameters that define ‘effective bolus clearance’. The aim of this study was to define these important impedance parameters and to determine their normal values. Concurrent perfusion manometry and MII were performed in 42 healthy volunteers. Ten, 5‐mL liquid (saline) boluses and then, 10 × 5‐mL low impedance viscous boluses were tested in each subject in the right‐lateral position. Normal values for bolus presence time (BPT) at each site and total bolus transit time (TBTT) were determined from either ‘normal’ peristaltic responses (amplitude ≥30 mmHg in distal oesophagus) or ‘super‐normal’ peristaltic responses (amplitudes ≥50 mmHg at all sites). The relationship between BPT and TBTT within a response and per‐individual performance was determined. A total of 840 swallows of liquids and viscous responses were analysed. BPT and TBTT of viscous swallows were longer than those for liquids. Non‐peristaltic responses were significantly more likely not to clear a viscous than a liquid bolus. Within a response, the number of sites with prolonged BPT strongly predicted the incidence of prolonged TBTT. Using impedance criteria, normal oesophageal bolus clearance is defined when an individual completely clears at least 70% of liquid responses and at least 60% of viscous responses. This study provides normal values for impedance measurement of bolus clearance when combined with perfusion manometry. These values will allow standardization of impedance application in oesophageal function testing, in both research and clinical setting.
Author ' s response to reviews Title : Moxibustion in the management of irritable bowel syndrome : systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common functional gastrointestinal disor der. Many patients suffer from IBS that can be difficult to treat, thus complementary t he apies which may be effective and have a lower likelihood of adverse effects are being soug ht. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed at critically eva luating the current evidence on moxibustion for improving global symptoms of IBS. Methods We searched Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Tr ials, AMED, CINAHL, and CNKI databases for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of moxi bustion comparing with sham moxibustion, pharmacological medications, and other active trea tments in patients with IBS. Trials should report global symptom improvement as an outcome measure. Risk of bias for each RCT was assessed according to criteria b y the Cochrane Collaboration, and the dichotomous data were pooled according to the control intervention to obtain a risk ratio (RR) of global symptom improvement after moxibustion, with 95 % confidence intervals (CI). Results A total of 20 RCTs were eligible for inclusion (n = 1625). The risk of bias was gener ally high. Compared with pharmacological medications, moxibustion significantly allevia ted overall IBS symptoms but there was a moderate inconsistency among studies (7 RCTs, RR 1.33, 95 % CI [1.15, 1.55] , I 2 = 46 %). When mMoxibustion was given alongside combined with acupuncture , moxibustion was more effective than pharmacological therapy but a moderate inconsistency among studies was found (4 RCTs, RR 1.24, 95 % CI [1.09, 1.41] , I 2 = 36 %). When moxibustion was added to pharmacological medications or herbal medicine, no additive benefit of moxibustion was shown compared with pharmacological medications or 2 herbal medicine alone. Moxibustion as an adjunct to other active treatment, was sig nificantly better than active treatment alone in improving IBS symptoms (8 RCTs, RR 1.17, 95 % CI [1.06, 1.30]). One small sham-controlled trial found no difference between moxibustion and sham control in symptom severity (mean difference 0.35, 95 % CI [-0.77, 1.47]). Moxibustion appears to be associated with few adverse events but the evidence is l imit d due to poor reporting. Conclusions This systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that moxibustion may pr ovide benefit to IBS patients although the risk of bias in the included studies is relatively high. Fut ure studies are necessary to confirm whether this finding is reproducible in carefully-de signed and conducted trials and to firmly establish the place of moxibustion in current practic e.
ENSO Model Validation Using Wavelet Probability Analysis

A new method to quantify changes in El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability is presented, using the overlap between probability distributions of the wavelet spectrum as measured by the wavelet probability index (WPI). Examples are provided using long integrations of three coupled climate models. When subsets of Nino-3.4 time series are compared, the width of the confidence interval on WPI has an exponential de- pendence on the length of the subset used, with a statistically identical slope for all three models. This ex- ponential relationship describes the rate at which the system converges toward equilibrium and may be used to determine the necessary simulation length for robust statistics. For the three models tested, a minimum of 250 model years is required to obtain 90% convergence for Nino-3.4, longer than typical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) simulations. Applying the same decay relationship to observational data indicates that measuring ENSO variability with 90% confidence requires approximately 240 years of ob- servations, which is substantially longer than the modern SST record. Applying hypothesis testing techniques to the WPI distributions from model subsetsand from comparisons of model subsetsto the historicalNino-3.4 index then allows statistically robust comparisons of relative model agreement with appropriate confidence levels given the length of the data record and model simulation.
An Intuitive Synthesizer of Continuous-Interaction Sounds: Rubbing, Scratching, and Rolling

In this article, we propose a control strategy for synthesized continuous-interaction sounds. The framework of our research is based on the action–object paradigm that describes the sound as the result of an action on an object and that presumes the existence of sound invariants (i.e., perceptually relevant signal morphologies that carry information about the action's or the object's attributes). Auditory cues are investigated here for the evocations of rubbing, scratching, and rolling interactions. A generic sound-synthesis model that simulates these interactions is detailed. We then suggest an intuitive control strategy that enables users to navigate continuously from one interaction to another in an “action space,” thereby offering the possibility to simulate morphed interactions—for instance, ones that morph between rubbing and rolling.
Personality disorders and depression: Comorbidity

Depression and comorbid personality disorders relate to one another in three distinct ways: 1) personality disorders may precede the development of depression and render an individual vulnerable to depression; 2) depression may precede the personality disorder and foster the development of the personality disorder; 3) there may be an interface between personality disorders and depression, which has been deemed depressive personality disorder. This article reviews data on the comorbidity of depression, particularly chronic depression, and personality disorders. This article also reviews data on the effect of comorbid personality disorders on treatment for depression, and the effect that treatment for depression has on personality disorders. Comorbid personality disorders generally do not impede treatment for depression. Successful treatment for depression is associated with improvement in personality disorders. Depression and Anxiety 10:142–146, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Implementing Refactorings in the Spoofax Language Workbench

Spoofax is a language workbench for efficient development of textual domain-specific languages together with state-of-the-art IDE support. Spoofax integrates language and IDE development into a single environment, using concise, declarative specifications for languages and IDE services. We are extending Spoofax with a framework for the implementation of refactorings. The current paper gives an overview of the framework and demonstrates the implementation of refactorings for languages developed using Spoofax.
Human Metabolism and Metabolic Interactions of Deployment-Related Chemicals

It has been suggested that chemicals and, more specifically, chemical interactions, are involved as causative agents in deployment-related illnesses. Unfortunately, this hypothesis has proven difficult to test, because toxicological investigations of deployment-related chemicals are usually carried out on surrogate animals and are difficult to extrapolate to humans. Other parts of the problem, such as the definition of variation within human populations and the development of methods for designating groups or individuals at significantly greater risk, cannot be carried out on surrogate animals, and the data must be derived from humans. The relatively recent availability of human cell fractions, such as microsomes, cytosol, etc., human cells such as primary hepatocytes, recombinant human enzymes, and their isoforms and polymorphic variants has enabled a significant start to be made in developing the human data needed. These initial studies have examined the human metabolism by cytochrome P450, other phase I enzymes, and their isoforms and, in some cases, their polymorphic variants of compounds such as chlorpyrifos, carbaryl, DEET, permethrin, and pyridostigmine bromide, and, to a lesser extent, other chemicals from the same chemical and use classes, including solvents, jet fuel components, and sulfur mustard metabolites. A number of interactions at the metabolic level have been described both with respect to other xenobiotics and to endogenous metabolites. Probably the most dramatic have been seen in the ability of chlorpyrifos to inhibit not only the metabolism of other xenobiotics such as carbaryl and DEET but also to inhibit the metabolism of steroid hormones.
Corpora for sentiment analysis of Arabic text in social media

Different Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as text categorization, machine translation, etc., need annotated corpora to check quality and performance. Similarly, sentiment analysis requires annotated corpora to test the performance of classifiers. Manual annotation performed by native speakers is used as a benchmark test to measure how accurate a classifier is. In this paper we summarise currently available Arabic corpora and describe work in progress to build, annotate, and use Arabic corpora consisting of Facebook (FB) posts. The distinctive nature of these corpora is that they are based on posts written in Dialectal Arabic (DA) not following specific grammatical or spelling standards. The corpora are annotated with five labels (positive, negative, dual, neutral, and spam). In addition to building the corpora, the paper illustrates how manual tagging can be used to extract opinionated words and phrases to be used in a lexicon-based classifier.
PennCOSYVIO: A challenging Visual Inertial Odometry benchmark

We present PennCOSYVIO, a new challenging Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) benchmark with synchronized data from a VI-sensor (stereo camera and IMU), two Project Tango hand-held devices, and three GoPro Hero 4 cameras. Recorded at UPenn's Singh center, the 150m long path of the hand-held rig crosses from outdoors to indoors and includes rapid rotations, thereby testing the abilities of VIO and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms to handle changes in lighting, different textures, repetitive structures, and large glass surfaces. All sensors are synchronized and intrinsically and extrinsically calibrated. We demonstrate the accuracy with which ground-truth poses can be obtained via optic localization off of fiducial markers. The data set can be found at https://daniilidis-group.github. io/penncosyvio/.
Developing Bengali WordNet Affect for Analyzing Emotion

This paper reports the process of developing WordNet Affect lists in Bengali from the affect wordlists already available in English. It is organized in six basic emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. Emotion or affect words of the six lists are updated using equivalent synsets of the SentiWordNet by keeping their parts-of-speech information unchanged. Another updating process employed especially for the verb entries is carried out on six affect lists with the help of VerbNet. The updated lists are converted into Bengali using the synset based English to Bengali bilingual dictionary. The sense disambiguation task is conducted based on the hints of sense wise separated word groups present in Bengali to English bilingual dictionary. Human translator translates the non-translated emotion word entries into Bengali. The statistical inter-translator agreement between two translators is measured using kappa coefficient (k) that shows a moderate agreement varying from 0.44 to 0.56 for six emotion classes. KeywordsWordNet Affect; SentiWordNet; VerbNet; Bilingual Dictionary; Translation; Sense Disambiguation; Kappa
Attitude synchronization of spacecraft formation with adaptation of consensus penalty terms

The main thrust of this work is on the time variation of the consensus weights used to enforce agreement (synchronization) amongst a network of spacecraft. The main idea is to allow a flexibility in the consensus gains to adapt in proportion to the Euclidean distance of the spacecraft states. A prelude to the time adaptation of the consensus controllers is also provided and takes the form of considering different gains in the synchronization signal thereby arriving in two cases: node-dependent and edge-dependent synchronization gains. A way to choose these fixed gains is in terms of the initial mismatch between the pairwise difference of the spacecraft states. Further, an adaptation of the synchronizing controllers is proposed and compared to the fixed gains. Extensive numerical studies are provided to further support the theoretical predictions and provide insights on the choice of consensus gains in synchronization control used for spacecraft formation.
Monte Carlo modelling of the treatment line of the Proton Therapy Center in Orsay

This paper presents the main results of a Monte Carlo simulation describing the Orsay Proton Therapy Center (CPO) beam line. The project aimed to obtain a prediction of the dose distribution in a water phantom within 2% accuracy in the dose value and a 2 mm of range. The simulation tool used was MCNPX, version 2.5. 0, and included all the elements of the CPO beam line. A new algorithm of multiple Coulomb scattering has been incorporated in MCNPX, resulting in a better prediction of the spatial dose distribution and absolute values of the deposited energy. The simulations of 3D dose profiles in water show a very good agreement with measured data to within 2%. We first performed a comparative analysis of the dosimetry in heterogeneous phantoms between the pencil beam algorithm and MCNPX. The simulations give a better agreement with experimental data compared to the pencil beam approach. In a second phase, we simulated the patient-dependent fields along with the spatial dose distributions in a water phantom. The simulated response of a Pixel chamber located 2 m upstream of the water phantom revealed a good agreement with the measured data to within 1%. The results presented herein support the applicability of Monte Carlo models for absolute dosimetry and for design purposes regarding existing and new beam lines at CPO. This work completes a series of publications reporting the progress in the development of a Monte Carlo simulation tool for the CPO beam line dedicated for the treatment of head and neck tumours.
Heterogeneous Multitask Metric Learning Across Multiple Domains

Distance metric learning plays a crucial role in diverse machine learning algorithms and applications. When the labeled information in a target domain is limited, transfer metric learning (TML) helps to learn the metric by leveraging the sufficient information from other related domains. Multitask metric learning (MTML), which can be regarded as a special case of TML, performs transfer across all related domains. Current TML tools usually assume that the same feature representation is exploited for different domains. However, in real-world applications, data may be drawn from heterogeneous domains. Heterogeneous transfer learning approaches can be adopted to remedy this drawback by deriving a metric from the learned transformation across different domains. However, they are often limited in that only two domains can be handled. To appropriately handle multiple domains, we develop a novel heterogeneous MTML (HMTML) framework. In HMTML, the metrics of all different domains are learned together. The transformations derived from the metrics are utilized to induce a common subspace, and the high-order covariance among the predictive structures of these domains is maximized in this subspace. There do exist a few heterogeneous transfer learning approaches that deal with multiple domains, but the high-order statistics (correlation information), which can only be exploited by simultaneously examining all domains, is ignored in these approaches. Compared with them, the proposed HMTML can effectively explore such high-order information, thus obtaining more reliable feature transformations and metrics. Effectiveness of our method is validated by the extensive and intensive experiments on text categorization, scene classification, and social image annotation.
Furthering Distributed Participative Design Unlocking the walled gardens

Participatory design (PD) and its derivative distributed participatory design (DPD) are examples of collaborative research methods that have been successfully applied to in - formation systems problems. Yet, there are other collaborative research methods such as action research and design science that have also been used in the same context. This paper argues that this trifurcation in collaborative methods is unhelpful and that the 'walled gar - dens' in which these methods exist inhibit learning and the methods' development. As PD moves to tackle the problems that arise in distributed projects, it becomes more necessary to look outside its own domain for solutions. This paper investigates whether collaborative research projects that are categorized under one method also match the characteristics of the other methods. It finds that research projects using different methods demonstrate re - markable similarities concerning research contributions, roots, and methodological guide - lines, but use different terminologies, and also maintain method-specific publication out - lets and communities. Thus, insight into some of the issues raised by participatory design in distributed contexts may arise if PD looks outside its walled garden.
Accurate Digitization of the Chlorophyll Distribution of Individual Rice Leaves Using Hyperspectral Imaging and an Integrated Image Analysis Pipeline

Pigments absorb light, transform it into energy, and provide reaction sites for photosynthesis; thus, the quantification of pigment distribution is vital to plant research. Traditional methods for the quantification of pigments are time-consuming and not suitable for the high-throughput digitization of rice pigment distribution. In this study, using a hyperspectral imaging system, we developed an integrated image analysis pipeline for automatically processing enormous amounts of hyperspectral data. We also built models for accurately quantifying 4 pigments (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, total chlorophyll and carotenoid) from rice leaves and determined the important bands (700-760 nm) associated with these pigments. At the tillering stage, the R2 values and mean absolute percentage errors of the models were 0.827–0.928 and 6.94–12.84%, respectively. The hyperspectral data and these models can be combined for digitizing the distribution of the chlorophyll with high resolution (0.11 mm/pixel). In summary, the integrated hyperspectral image analysis pipeline and selected models can be used to quantify the chlorophyll distribution in rice leaves. The use of this technique will benefit rice functional genomics and rice breeding.
A 13.8-MHz RC oscillator with self-calibration for ±0.4% temperature stability from −55 to 125°C

This paper articulates a novel oscillator design that can provide stable frequency operation over a wide temperature range using self-calibration technique. A simple ring oscillator is implemented to sense its temperature variation, and digital circuits to tune the output frequency according to the sensing outcomes has also been incorporated to the design. Simulation results show that the circuit can generate a stable frequency of 13.8 MHz. The power consumption of the whole system is only 52. 8μW. The temperature coefficient is less than ±0.4% across -55 to 125°C in the worst process corner, operating at an ultra-low supply voltage of 0.6 V.
Extension of Recombinant Human RANTES by the Retention of the Initiating Methionine Produces a Potent Antagonist (*)

Extension of recombinant human RANTES by a single residue at the amino terminus is sufficient to produce a potent and selective antagonist. RANTES is a proinflammatory cytokine that promotes cell accumulation and activation in chronic inflammatory diseases. When mature RANTES was expressed heterologously in Escherichia coli, the amino-terminal initiating methionine was not removed by the endogenous amino peptidases. This methionylated protein was fully folded but completely inactive in RANTES bioassays of calcium mobilization and chemotaxis of the promonocytic cell line THP-1. However, when assayed as an antagonist of both RANTES and macrophage inflammatory polypeptide-1α (MIP-1α) in these assays, the methionylated RANTES (Met-RANTES) inhibited the actions of both chemokines. T cell chemotaxis was similarly inhibited. The antagonistic effect was selective since Met-RANTES had no effect on interleukin-8- or monocyte chemotractant protein-1-induced responses in these cells. Met-RANTES can compete with both [I]RANTES and [I]MIP-1α binding to THP-1 cells or to stably transfected HEK cells recombinantly expressing their common receptor, CC-CKR-1. These data show that the integrity of the amino terminus of RANTES is crucial to receptor binding and cellular activation.
Genetic and molecular analysis of nematode–microbe interactions

Symbiosis, the living together of unlike organisms, such as between microbes and their multicellular eukaryotic hosts, can be categorized as parasitic, commensal or mutualistic. The establishment of symbiosis and the outcome of microbe–host interactions are dictated largely by both microbe‐ and host‐derived factors. Over the last decade, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has provided a facile experimental system to study such interactions, with parasitic interactions being the primary focus. The myriad of genetic and molecular tools available has made C. elegans a powerful model system to interrogate the interactions between a host and its pathogens, and has provided a greater understanding of the molecular underpinnings of these interactions, many of which were found to be conserved across other taxa. Commensal and mutualistic interactions between worms and their microbes, although less studied, have the potential to enhance our understanding of genetic and molecular features underlying host–microbe interactions. Here, we highlight new insights obtained in delineating the signalling pathways that function within and between host cells in combating assaults from extracellular and intracellular pathogens. We also discuss potential new insights that could be gained from further studies into commensal and mutualistic relationships between nematodes and microbes.