Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive bit-reduced mean absolute difference criterion for block-matching algorithm and its VLSI design

An adaptive bit-reduced mean absolute difference (ABRMAD) is presented as a criterion for the block-matching algorithm (BMA) to reduce the complexity of the very large scale integration (VLSI) imple- mentation and to improve the processing time. The ABRMAD uses the lower pixel resolution of the significant bits instead of full-resolution pixel values to estimate the motion vector (MV) by examining the pixels in a block. Simulation results show that the 4-bit ABRMAD has competitive mean square error (MSE) results and a half less hardware complexity than the mean absolute difference (MAD) criterion. It has also better characteristics in terms of both MSE performance and hardware com- plexity than the MiniMax criterion and has better MSE performance than difference pixel counting (DPC), binary block matching with edge map (BBME), and bit-plane matching (BPM) with the same number of bits.
Hierarchical B-spline refinement

Refinement is usually advocated as a means of gaining finer control over a spline curve or surface during editing. For curves, refinement is a local process. It permits the change of control vertices and subsequent editing of the detail in one region of the curve while leaving control vertices in other regions unaffected. For tensor-product surfaces, however, refinement is not local in the sense that it causes control vertices far from a region of interest to change as well as changing the control vertices that influence the region. However, with some care and understanding it is possible to restrict the influence of refinement to the locality at which an editing effect is desired. We present a method of localizing the effect of refinement through the use of overlays, which are hierarchically controlled subdivisions. We also introduce two editing techniques that are effective when using overlays: one is direct surface manipulation through the use of edit points and the other is offset referencing of control vertices.
Training Synaesthesia

Synaesthetic inducers such as graphemes are typically cultural artifacts. Thus, a learning component seems evident in synaesthesia (Simner et al, 2009 Brain 132 57 – 64). Normally, synaesthetes report to have their experiences since they can remember. Nevertheless, a recent training study suggests that synaesthesia can be mimicked in non-synaesthetes. To date, the role of learning during the development of synaesthesia is still debated. It is not clear whether synaesthesia can be learned or trained at all. To address this question, we compared a non-adaptive and an adaptive training for their effectiveness. We assessed their impact on two types of priming tasks, before and after the training. We found stronger priming in the adaptive training group suggesting that adaptive training is more efficient to mimic synaesthesia.
Effects of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Objective Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a programme developed to prevent depression relapse, but has been applied for other disorders. Our objective was to systematically review and meta-analyse the evidence on the effectiveness and safety of MBCT for the treatment of mental disorders. Methods Searches were completed in CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, LILACS, PsychINFO, and PsycEXTRA in March 2011 using a search strategy with the terms ‘mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’, ‘mindfulness’, and ‘randomised controlled trials’ without time restrictions. Selection criteria of having a randomised controlled trial design, including patients diagnosed with mental disorders, using MBCT according to the authors who developed MBCT and providing outcomes that included changes in mental health were used to assess 608 reports. Two reviewers applied the pre-determined selection criteria and extracted the data into structured tables. Meta-analyses and sensitivity analyses were completed. Results Eleven studies were included. Most of them evaluated depression and compared additive MBCT against usual treatment. After 1 year of follow-up MBCT reduced the rate of relapse in patients with three or more previous episodes of depression by 40% (5 studies, relative risk [95% confidence interval]: 0.61 [0.48, 0.79]). Other meta-analysed outcomes were depression and anxiety, both with significant results but unstable in sensitivity analyses. Methodological quality of the reports was moderate. Conclusion Based on this review and meta-analyses, MBCT is an effective intervention for patients with three or more previous episodes of major depression.
Estimation of the warfarin dose with clinical and pharmacogenetic data.

BACKGROUND Genetic variability among patients plays an important role in determining the dose of warfarin that should be used when oral anticoagulation is initiated, but practical methods of using genetic information have not been evaluated in a diverse and large population. We developed and used an algorithm for estimating the appropriate warfarin dose that is based on both clinical and genetic data from a broad population base. METHODS Clinical and genetic data from 4043 patients were used to create a dose algorithm that was based on clinical variables only and an algorithm in which genetic information was added to the clinical variables. In a validation cohort of 1009 subjects, we evaluated the potential clinical value of each algorithm by calculating the percentage of patients whose predicted dose of warfarin was within 20% of the actual stable therapeutic dose; we also evaluated other clinically relevant indicators. RESULTS In the validation cohort, the pharmacogenetic algorithm accurately identified larger proportions of patients who required 21 mg of warfarin or less per week and of those who required 49 mg or more per week to achieve the target international normalized ratio than did the clinical algorithm (49.4% vs. 33.3%, P<0.001, among patients requiring < or = 21 mg per week; and 24.8% vs. 7.2%, P<0.001, among those requiring > or = 49 mg per week). CONCLUSIONS The use of a pharmacogenetic algorithm for estimating the appropriate initial dose of warfarin produces recommendations that are significantly closer to the required stable therapeutic dose than those derived from a clinical algorithm or a fixed-dose approach. The greatest benefits were observed in the 46.2% of the population that required 21 mg or less of warfarin per week or 49 mg or more per week for therapeutic anticoagulation.
The susceptibility to Fas-induced apoptosis in normal enterocytes is regulated on the level of cIAP1 and 2.

Various members of the tumor necrosis factor receptor superfamily are implicated in the regulation of enterocyte apoptosis. Previously, we observed that human intestinal epithelial cells are rather unsusceptible to Fas-induced apoptosis. In the present study we analyzed these protective mechanisms in the human intestinal epithelial cell line HIEC, focusing on antiapoptotic molecules of the IAP family which block apoptosis at the level of the caspase cascade. HIEC expressed all key molecules required to trigger Fas-induced apoptosis. However, no apoptosis occurred after activation of Fas, whereas an upregulation of antiapoptotic cIAP1 and 2 was observed. Suppression of this upregulation with the proteasome inhibitor MG132 or the protein synthesis inhibitor cycloheximide highly sensitized HIEC toward Fas-induced apoptosis. Western blot analyses revealed that both inhibitors potently suppressed endogenously produced cIAP1 and 2. No effect was observed on XIAP expression. These data indicate that enterocytes are particularly protected against Fas-induced apoptosis on the level of executionary caspases.
Open label randomized comparison of dihydroartemisinin–piperaquine and artesunate–amodiaquine for the treatment of uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria in central Vietnam

Objective Artesunate–amodiaquine (AAQ) is efficacious for the treatment of uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria in Africa, but little is known about its efficacy in Southeast Asia. We compared the efficacy of dihydroartemisinin–piperaquine (DHP) and AAQ against falciparum malaria in central Vietnam.
Achieving QoS Through Network Coding

Network coding is a novel technique that includes many applications in realistic networking era. Through network coding, intermediary nodes might send out packets that are combinations of incoming information. The basic theme behind network coding is the summation of incoming information traffic through simple XOR. There are many profits of network coding: improved throughput, less number of transmissions, better network management, less BER, minimum delay, less resource consumptions. In this paper we will prove how network coding improves and achieves the Qos of any network. We also discuss the Implementation aspects of network coding like how it may implemented on current infrastructure networks, we also discuss the theoretical and practical results on network coding for improving quality of service parameters using four basic approaches of network coding, Optimal, Deterministic, Random and Heuristic approach.
Antioxidant, Chemo-Protective Role Of Buffalo Colostrum And Milk Whey Derived Peptide Against 2, 4-Dinitrophenol Induced-Oxidative Damage On Human Plasma, In Vitro.

This study investigates the role of buffalo colostrum and milk whey derived peptides in protection against oxidative damage induced by 2, 4Dinitrophenol (2, 4-DNP) in human blood serum samples in vitro. A biomarker enzymes for oxidative stress like Alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and acid phosphatase (ACP), oxidative damage markers indicating extent of host antioxidant reserve indicators like reduced glutathione (GSH) were measured by spectrophotometric techniques in four different groups namely (1) Human blood plasma only (control) , (2) Human blood plasma + 2,4-DNP, (3) Human blood plasma + colostrum whey derived peptides + 2,4-DNP ,(4) Human blood plasma + colostrum whey derived peptides , (5) Human blood plasma + milk whey derived peptides + 2,4-DNP and (6) Human blood plasma + milk whey derived peptides. Following exposure to 2, 4-DNP, levels of antioxidants like GSH was significantly decreased in comparison to control, e.g., GSH [0.568 ± 0.015 vs0.871 ± 0. 022μmol/0.1 mg proteins. In addition, the concentration of biomarker enzymes for 2,4-DNP induced membrane damage and oxidative stress like ALP and ACP were increased in serum by oxidant compared to control, e.g., ALP [5.497 ± 0.185 vs. 2.782 ± 0. 000μmol/mg protein], ACP [1.689 ± 0.047 vs. 0.629 ± 0.047μmol/mg protein]. Pretreatment with buffalo whey derived peptides significantly protects 2,4-DNP induced RBC membrane lyses and release of ALP and ACP into serum environment. e.g., ALP [3.444 ± 0.094 vs. 5.497 ± 0.185 μmol/mg protein], ACP [0.629 ± 0.047 vs. 1.689 ± 0.047μmol/mg protein]. Pretreatment with whey derived peptides give protection to oxidative damage and shifts the trend towards amelioration and replenishment of the antioxidant status.
Selecting between Competitors in Multiplication Tasks: An Explanation of the Errors Produced by Adolescents with Learning Difficulties

Two experiments were conducted in order to determine the nature of the difficulties encountered by learning disabled (LD) adolescents in the resolution of multiplication problems (a b, where a and b vary between 2 and 9). A response production task (Experiment 1) revealed that the incorrect responses generally belonged to the table of one of the two operands, and that the order of difficulty of the problems was the same for the LDs as for normal children, adolescents, and educated adults as reported in the literature. This result suggests that the difficulties are not solely due to memory problems. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that these difficulties were caused by a problem in inhibiting the incorrect responses from a set of possible responses. Subjects completed a multiple response task in which the correct response was presented along with three distractors. The level of interference between the correct response and the distractors was varied by manipulating the nature of the distractors (Null Interference, NI: numbers that did not belong to the multiplication table; Weak Interference, WI: numbers belonging to other tables than those of a and b; Strong Interference, SI: numbers belonging to the tables of either a or b). The SI condition resulted in a higher level of errors than the NI and WI conditions and there was no difference between these latter two conditions. This result suggests that the main difficulty encountered by LD subjects is associated with inefficient inhibition of incorrect responses. Thus, the mobilisation of inhibitory processes seems to be an important stage in the development of multiplication skills.
Treatment of patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma: disappointment or challenge?

Purpose of review We give an overview on the emerging compounds for patients with soft tissue sarcoma. Included are recent developments in targeted therapy, focusing on the following: antiangiogenic and immunomodulatory drugs (e.g. anti-cytotoxic T lymphocyte associated antigen-4 monoclonal antibody), Bcl-2 antisense therapy, raf kinase and mammalian target of rapamycin inhibition, heat shock protein modulators, minor groove binders and other agents being developed. Recent findings Soft tissue sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of tumours that arise predominantly from the embryonic mesoderm. They account for fewer than 1% of all adult malignancies. The prognosis of patients with advanced metastatic soft tissue sarcoma remains poor, with disease-free survival at 5 years below 10%. Complete resection remains the only potentially curative treatment option. Only few chemotherapeutic agents have been identified to be active, with reported response rates for doxorubicin and ifosfamide of around 20%. New strategies are urgently needed to improve outcomes. Summary Understanding of the molecular biology and pathogenesis of soft tissue sarcomas has been enhanced, and in the near future this should translate into molecular tumour characterization and development of new therapeutic strategies.
GCSTLPP: Face Recognition using Gabor Center-Symmetric Tensor Locality Preservative Projection Approach in Video

Face Recognition has become the challenging and interesting research topic in the last few years. The aim is to design a robust Face Recognition System under different environmental conditions like illumination, pose and occlusion. These are the three major challenges in Face Recognition which may hinder the Face Recognition system. By combining the three successful representations such as Gabor filters, CS-LBP and TLPP better performance can be achieved as compared to just considering them individually. CS-LBP is used for describing interest regions which have good tolerance to illumination and computational efficiency and TLPP is used to take the data directly in the form of tensors as input. Since the number of the combined feature sets are more only a few feature sets is selected to be trained by the Support Vector Machine classifier. A number of experiments are conducted using YouTube celebrity, McGill Face dataset and as well as the own collected sequence under different conditions such as illumination variations, different poses, occlusion including indoor and outdoor scenes. This approach provides better results compared to traditional approaches.
Ocular optics, electroretinography and primary open angle glaucoma

Abstract Advancing the knowledge of ocular image quality is important in the development of new tests for the earlier detection of primary open angle glaucoma (POAG). Loss of blue sensitivity is an important feature of POAG; however, it is difficult to separate this loss from the effects of wavelength related intraocular light scatter and media absorption. A technique for recording the S‐cone electroretinogram is described which may solve these problems. The effect of scattered light is avoided by a Ganzfeld stimulus and the absorption of short wavelength light is compensated by a photometric balancing of blue and green stimuli using the M‐cone response. The modulation transfer function of the eye has enabled the true spatial tuning function of the retina to be determined by pattern electroretinography (PERG). This has demonstrated the role of retinal ganglion cells in the generation of the PERG. These techniques are shown to be highly sensitive tests in the early stages of POAG.
Monadic encapsulation of effects: a revised approach (extended version)

Launchbury and Peyton Jones came up with an ingenious idea for embedding regions of imperative programming in a pure functional language like Haskell. The key idea was based on a simple modification of Hindley-Milner's type system. Our first contribution is to propose a more natural encapsulation construct exploiting higher-order kinds, which achieves the same encapsulation effect, but avoids the ad hoc type parameter of the original proposal. The second contribution is a type safety result for encapsulation of strict state using both the original encapsulation construct and the newly introduced one. We establish this result in a more expressive context than the original proposal, namely in the context of the higher-order lambda-calculus. The third contribution is a type safety result for encapsulation of lazy state in the higher-order lambda-calculus. This result resolves an outstanding open problem on which previous proof attempts failed. In all cases, we formalize the intended implementations as simple big-step operational semantics on untyped terms, which capture interesting implementation details not captured by the reduction semantics proposed previously.
Model based 3D point cloud segmentation for automated selective broccoli harvesting*

The 3D point cloud data was captured in outdoor fields under different weather conditions in 4 locations: 2 in the UK, 1 in Spain, and 1 more in USA using the Kinect 2 sensor. Histograms of the reference models used in our algorithm. A FPFH descriptor [1], based on a set of angular features, is computed for each data point. The descriptor is then matched to both reference models and the difference provides the final classification score. Reference models
IACR: an interference-aware channel reservation for wireless sensor networks

In battery-based wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient operation is one of the most important factors. Especially, in order to improve energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks, various studies on low power operation have been actively conducted in the MAC layer. In recent years, mutual interference among various radio technologies using the same radio frequency band has become a serious problem. Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth use the same frequency band of 2.4GHz at the same time, which causes various signal interference problems. In this paper, we propose a novel channel reservation scheme, called IACR, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks in an environment where interference occurs between various wireless technologies. The proposed scheme inserts a PN code into a long preamble for exchanging transmission status information between a transmitting node and a receiving node, thereby improving the transmission success probability while receiving less influence on transmission of other radio technologies. We performed an event-driven simulation and an experiment to measure the signal detection rate. As a result, it can be seen that the proposed technique reduces the packet drop rate by 15% and increases the discoverable distance of the control packet for channel reservation.
Circulation and long-term fate of functionalized, biocompatible single-walled carbon nanotubes in mice probed by Raman spectroscopy

Carbon nanotubes are promising new materials for molecular delivery in biological systems. The long-term fate of nanotubes intravenously injected into animals in vivo is currently unknown, an issue critical to potential clinical applications of these materials. Here, using the intrinsic Raman spectroscopic signatures of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), we measured the blood circulation of intravenously injected SWNTs and detect SWNTs in various organs and tissues of mice ex vivo over a period of three months. Functionalization of SWNTs by branched polyethylene-glycol (PEG) chains was developed, enabling thus far the longest SWNT blood circulation up to 1 day, relatively low uptake in the reticuloendothelial system (RES), and near-complete clearance from the main organs in ≈2 months. Raman spectroscopy detected SWNT in the intestine, feces, kidney, and bladder of mice, suggesting excretion and clearance of SWNTs from mice via the biliary and renal pathways. No toxic side effect of SWNTs to mice was observed in necropsy, histology, and blood chemistry measurements. These findings pave the way to future biomedical applications of carbon nanotubes.
STUDY OF URINARY NEUTROPHIL GELATINASE-ASSOCIATED LIPOCALIN (NGAL) IN PATIENTS WITH LIVER CIRRHOSIS AND ITS RELATION TO HEPATORENAL SYNDROME

Background: Hepatorenal syndrome (HRS) is a unique form of kidney injury resulting from renal vasoconstriction in the setting of systemic and splanchnic arterial vasodilatation in patients with advanced cirrhosis. Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) is a proved biomarker of acute and chronic renal injury. Aim of the work was to study urinary NGAL level in patients with liver cirrhosis and its relation to HRS. Subjects and methods: The study included 5 groups; group I (15 patients with cirrhosis, no ascites and normal renal function), group II (15 patients with cirrhosis, ascites and normal renal function), group III (15 patients with cirrhosis, ascites and HRS), group IV (15 patients with cirrhosis, ascites and chronic kidney disease; CKD) and group V (15 healthy subjects) as control group. The diagnosis of HRS was based on the International Ascites Club criteria. The glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was calculated using 2 formulas: The Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) and the Extended Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (Ext-MDRD) formula. Urinary level of neutrophil gelatinase lipocalin (NGAL) was done using ELISA, and neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin/ urinary creatinine concentration (NGAL/UCC) ratio was calculated. Results: Both NGAL level and NGAL/UCC ratio increased significantly in cirrhotic patient with HRS, while only NGAL/UCC ratio significantly increased in cirrhotics with CKD compared to normal controls and to cirrhotics with normal serum creatinine. NGAL level and NGAL/UCC ratio were higher in HRS compared to CKD cirrhotics, they could successfully identify HRS at cut-off values of 100 ng/ml and 0.9, respectively. Both markers correlated with each other and with blood urea, serum creatinine, estimated GFR, and Child-Pugh score of patients. Conclusion: Urinary NGAL level and NGAL/UCC ratio can be used as markers for early detection of HRS among patients with cirrhosis. However, the elevation of NGAL in the setting of HRS confirms the speculation that HRS entails a degree of structural kidney injury rather than being purely functional. Larger studies with higher number of patients are needed to investigate the value of urinary NGAL in type I and type II HRS separately, and to examine the role of other markers for early detection of HRS to improve its prognosis. Key Words: Hepatorenal syndrome: HRS, Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin: NGAL, chronic kidney disease: CKD, the Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration: CKD-EPI, the Extended Modification of Diet in Renal Disease: Ext-MDRD, neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin/ urinary creatinine concentration: NGAL/UCC .