Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional endothelial progenitor cells selectively recruit neurovascular protective monocyte‐derived F4/80+/Ly6c+ macrophages in a mouse model of retinal degeneration

Retinitis pigmentosa is a group of inherited eye disorders that result in profound vision loss with characteristic retinal neuronal degeneration and vasculature attenuation. In a mouse model of retinitis pigmentosa, endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) from bone marrow rescued the vasculature and photoreceptors. However, the mechanisms and cell types underlying these protective effects were uncertain. We divided EPC, which contribute to angiogenesis, into two subpopulations based on their aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity and observed that EPC with low ALDH activity (Alde‐Low) had greater neuroprotection and vasoprotection capabilities after injection into the eyes of an rd1 mouse model of retinitis pigmentosa compared with EPC with high ALDH activity (Alde‐High). Of note, Alde‐Low EPC selectively recruited F4/80+/Ly6c+ monocyte‐derived macrophages from bone marrow into retina through CCL2 secretion. In addition, the mRNA levels of CCR2, the neurotrophic factors TGF‐β1 and IGF‐1, and the anti‐inflammatory mediator interleukin‐10 were higher in migrated F4/80+/Ly6c+ monocyte‐derived macrophages as compared with F4/80+/Ly6c− resident retinal microglial cells. These results suggest a novel therapeutic approach using EPC to recruit neuroprotective macrophages that delay the progression of neural degenerative disease. Stem Cells 2013;31:2149–2161
Joint user and transmit antenna selection for uplink multi-user MIMO systems

This paper investigates the joint user and transmit antenna selection for uplink multi-user MIMO systems. Our goal is to maximize the sum-rate capacity. The naive exhaustive search algorithm which can get the optimal sum rate performance is impractical in the large system. To tradeoff the complexity and performance, two suboptimal low-complexity joint user and transmit antenna selection algorithms (called CB-JUTAS and NB-JUTAS) are proposed. Numerical results show that the sum rate performance can be improved significantly by implementing joint user and transmit antenna selection. And the proposed CB-JUTAS may reach about 98% of the optimal sum rate performance with the complexity increasing linearly rather than exceptionally with the number of users and antennas. The NB-JUTAS with an extreme low-complexity has a reduced performance when SNR grows large, especially when the number of the transmit antennas increases.
p53 is a chromatin accessibility factor for nucleotide excision repair of DNA damage

One of the longest standing problems in DNA repair is how cells relax chromatin in order to make DNA lesions accessible for global nucleotide excision repair (NER). Since chromatin has to be relaxed for efficient lesion detection, the key question is whether chromatin relaxation precedes lesion detection or vice versa. Chromatin accessibility factors have been proposed but not yet identified. Here we show that p53 acts as a chromatin accessibility factor, mediating UV‐induced global chromatin relaxation. Using localized subnuclear UV irradiation, we demonstrate that chromatin relaxation is extended over the whole nucleus and that this process requires p53. We show that the sequence for initiation of global NER is as follows: transcription‐associated lesion detection; p53‐mediated global chromatin relaxation; and global lesion detection. The tumour suppressor p53 is crucial for genomic stability, a role partially explained by its pro‐apoptotic capacity. We demonstrate here that p53 is also a fundamental component of DNA repair, playing a direct role in rectifying DNA damage.
A robust H∞-tracking design for uncertain Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems with unknown premise variables using descriptor redundancy approach

This paper addresses a robust H∞ fuzzy observer-based tracking design problem for uncertain Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems with external disturbances. To have a practical observer-based controller, the premise variables of the system are assumed to be not measurable in general, which leads to a more complex design process. The tracker is synthesised based on a fuzzy Lyapunov function approach and non-parallel distributed compensation (non-PDC) scheme. Using the descriptor redundancy approach, the robust stability conditions are derived in the form of strict linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) even in the presence of uncertainties in the system, input, and output matrices simultaneously. Numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
The Method of Reduced Matrices for a General Transportation Problem

In the usual statement of the transportation problem [A], one has N items to send from shipping points A1,. ,Ap to receiving points B1,. ,Bq. The amounts available for shipment from A1,. ,Ap are a1,. ,ap, respectively, where (equation) Given the cost cij of shipping one item from Ai to Bj, the problem is to allocate the shipments so as to minimize the total cost. Formally, the problem is to find a set of integers xij such that (1) (equation) (equation) (equation) (equation)
A fully polynomial time approximation scheme for timing driven minimum cost buffer insertion

As VLSI technology enters the nanoscale regime, interconnect delay has become the bottleneck of the circuit timing. As one of the most powerful techniques for interconnect optimization, buffer insertion is indispensable in the physical synthesis flow. Buffering is known to be NP-complete and existing works either explore dynamic programming to compute optimal solution in the worst-case exponential time or design efficient heuristics without performance guarantee. Even if buffer insertion is one of the most studied problems in physical design, whether there is an efficient algorithm with provably good performance still remains unknown. This work settles this open problem. In the paper, the first fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the timing driven minimum cost buffer insertion problem is designed. The new algorithm can approximate the optimal buffering solution within a factor of 1 + ε running in O(m2n2b/ε3 + n3b2/ε) time for any 0 ≪ ε ≪ 1, where n is the number of candidate buffer locations, m is the number of sinks in the tree, and b is the number of buffers in the buffer library. In addition to its theoretical guarantee, our experiments on 1000 industrial nets demonstrate that compared to the commonly-used dynamic programming algorithm, the new algorithm well approximates the optimal solution, with only 0.57% additional buffers and 4.6× speedup. This clearly demonstrates the practical value of the new algorithm.
Common ophthalmic problems of urban and rural postmenopausal women in a population sample of Raciborz district, a RAC-OST-POL Study.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE We wished to establish the prevalence of eye diseases and eye disease risk factors at postmenopausal age and to compare ophthalmic problems in urban and rural areas of Raciborz. PATIENTS AND METHODS The study was performed in 2010. Out of the whole population of Raciborz, Poland, 10 percent (1750) of women were randomly selected for the reported study. Finally, ocular diseases, ophthalmic agents, health status (physical activity level, body mass index - BMI, reproductive history, the use of psychotropic drugs and hormone replacement therapy - HRT) were recorded in 623 women. The women underwent visual acuity test and anterior segment examination, applanation tonometry and indirect ophthalmoscopy. RESULTS The mean age of the selected patients was 66.01 ± 7.76 years, 275 (44%) of them originating from rural and 348 (56%) from urban regions. The average woman was obese (BMI=30.54 ± 5.38 kg/m(2)), with near normal agility and reproductive history of 2.59 ± 1.55 births, 147 (24%) subjects remained under regular HRT support. According to the WHO, the visual acuity was classified as normal or near normal in 87.5%, while no blindness was recorded at all. Visual acuity depended, first of all, on lens status and was better among subjects with good agility (R=-0.31, p=0.001). Dry eye prevalence increased significantly over age of 67 years (p=0.000) and HRT seemed to be a dry eye protective factor (p=0.010). Except age, No other risk factors of cataract, other than age, were identified. Normal agility (p=0.003) and HRT (p=0.032) were associated with lower AMD (age-related macular degeneration) prevalence rates. The differences between urban and rural participants were presented only in education, reproductive history, hypertension and frequency of ophthalmic examinations. CONCLUSIONS Older adult women living in neighboring urban and rural areas present no differential in ophthalmic health problems.
Methodological assessment of acid‐etching for visualizing the osteocyte lacunar‐canalicular networks using scanning electron microscopy

Osteocytes are the most abundant of the bone cells. Each osteocyte is contained within its own lacuna and connected to adjacent osteocytes via fillipodial processes, which form an intricate network of canaliculi within the matrix. Studying this intricate network of cells and their processes is difficult, because it exists embedded within a densely mineralized matrix. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been shown to be a useful tool for visualizing this cellular network, yet the techniques involved for preparing specimens has not been systematically explored. The goal of this study was to investigate how variations in acid‐etching, both etching media and etching duration, affect SEM‐based visualization of the osteocyte lacunar–canalicular network. Bone samples were embedded in plastic and then acid etched in either 9% (10, 20, 40, and 60 s durations) or 37% (5, 10, and 15 s) phosphoric acid. Specimens were imaged using SEM, and qualitative evaluation of the lacunar–canalicular network was undertaken. Our findings show acid etchingwith a 9% phosphoric acid solution for 20 s provided the most favorable visualization of the osteocyte lacunar–canalicular network. Microsc. Res. Tech., 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Efficient mining of local frequent periodic patterns in time series database

Recently, periodic pattern mining from time series data has been studied extensively. Existing studies on periodic patterns mining mainly consider discovering full periodic patterns from an entire time series. However, partial periodic patterns are more useful in practice since only some of the time episodes may exhibit periodic patterns. This paper aims to discover the partial periodic pattern in locality of the time series data. The notion of character locality is introduced to divide the time series into variable-length segments. We propose a novel algorithm, called LFPMiner, to find the local frequent periodic patterns in time series data. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient to reveal interesting local frequent periodic patterns.
Posterior Parietal Cortex Automatically Encodes the Location of Salient Stimuli

We examined the responses of neurons in posterior parietal area 7a to salient stimuli appearing alone or within multiple-stimulus displays in monkeys trained only to maintain fixation. Discharges in a population of parietal neurons encoded the location of the salient stimulus, although the latter had no task significance for the monkey. Neuronal selectivity for the location of the salient stimulus depended solely on its intrinsic difference from the background elements in the array and not on the color of the stimulus per se. These results were similar to those reported in monkeys trained to actively locate a salient stimulus in a multiple-stimulus display. A lower percentage of neurons with significant selectivity for the salient stimulus was observed in the fixation-only animals. These neurons took longer for the selective responses to emerge and showed a lower power of discrimination. The findings suggest that the posterior parietal cortex automatically detects and encodes the location of salient stimuli even when they are unrelated to the behavioral task.
Fall-related admissions after fast-track total hip and knee arthroplasty – cause of concern or consequence of success?

Background Total hip (THA) and knee arthroplasty (TKA) are common procedures in elderly persons, who are at potential increased risk of postoperative fall due to loss of muscle strength and impaired balance. Fast-track surgery with early mobilization and opioid-sparing analgesia have improved outcomes after these procedures, but early mobilization and short hospitalization length of stay (LOS) could potentially increase the risk of falls after discharge. We investigated injuries, circumstances, and the timing of fall-related hospital admissions 90 days after fasttrack THA and TKA. Methods This was a prospective, descriptive multicenter study on fall-related hospital admissions, in 5145 elective fast-track THA and TKA patients, with complete 90-day follow up through the Danish National Patient registry and medical charts. Results Of 83 (1.6%) fall-related hospital admissions, 43 (51.8%) were treated in the Emergency Room and 40 (48.2%) were admitted to a regular ward. The median LOS after surgery was 3 days (interquartile range [IQR]: 2–3) in fallers versus (vs) 2 days (IQR: 2–3) (P=0.022) in patients without falls. Injuries were classified as “none” or minor in 39.8%, moderate in 9.6%, and major in 50.6%. Most falls (54.8%) occurred within 1 month of discharge. Falls due to physical activity (12.0%) and extrinsic factors (14.5%) occurred later than did surgery-related falls (73.5%), contributing to 40% of all falls >30 days after discharge. In multivariate analysis, age (odds ratio [OR]: 1.05; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.0–1.08) (P=0.001), living alone (OR: 2.09; 95% CI: 1.20–3.62) (P=0.009), and psychiatric disease (OR: 2.80; 95% CI: 1.42–5.50) (P=0.001) were associated with surgery-related falls, whereas the use of a walking aid (OR: 1.20; 95% CI: 0.67–2.16) (P=0.544) and LOS ≤4 days (OR:1.19; 95% CI: 0.52–1.28) (P=0.680) was not. Conclusion Hospital admissions due to falls are most frequent within the first month after fast-track THA and TKA. The overall incidence of surgery-related falls amongst these patients is low, declines after the first month, and is related to patient characteristics rather than short LOS. The effect of interventions aimed at surgery-related falls should focus on the first 30 days after surgery and differentiate between the causes of falling.
Resolving Referential Ambiguity on the Web Using Higher Order Co-occurrences in Anchor-Texts

Retrieving information about famous personalities is a common task among internet users. Finding information from web search engines becomes difficult when those people are referred by other names on the web because information about people in the web pages exist using their alias names. So by just giving the real name in search won’t retrieve all the alias related information. This is the referential ambiguity problem. For this reason precise identification of aliases of a given person is important in many tasks such as information retrieval, identification of relations among entities, sentiment analysis, name disambiguation and semantic annotation related to web. The previous approaches extracted aliases for a given person which resulted in achieving a high mean reciprocal rank (MRR) and an improvement in recall. In order to achieve a good improvement in the MRR and recall compared to the previous approach we propose a system which extracts aliases by not only considering the first order co-occurrences but also the higher order co-occurrences among the anchor texts for a given name and alias which will help in the expansion of a query for retrieval of relevant results. This method will rank the aliases retrieved based on the different statistics scores calculated for a name and its corresponding alias in the anchor texts retrieved. The cooccurrences order will be known by constructing and mining an anchor text graph for a particular name and its associated aliases. We use two data sets person names and location names and for ranking the aliases we use a ranking support vector machine. Keywords—Information Retrieval, Referential Ambiguity, Anchor Text Co-occurrence Graph, Web crawler, Graph Mining
A Study on Train Travel Time Simulation Focused on Detailed Dwell Time Structure and On-site Inspections

To reduce passenger congestion during morning rush hour, railway companies in the Tokyo metropolitan area have increased the number of trains. On the other hand, once a train exceeds a dwell time due to sudden events such as passengers rushing onto a train, passengers agglomerating in specific cars and doors, objects getting caught in doors etc., delays propagate to subsequent trains quickly. To evaluate daily train transport stability and countermeasures against train delays, a train travel time simulation model is needed. However, it has been difficult so far to replicate the occurrence of sudden events and the fluctuations in passenger demand. In this paper, we use detailed data based on dwell time structure and on-site inspections to construct a train travel time simulator. In addition, we evaluate several case-studies of timetable adjustments and passenger demand variations.
Mechanism design on discrete lines and cycles

We study strategyproof (SP) mechanisms for the location of a facility on a discrete graph. We give a full characterization of SP mechanisms on lines and on sufficiently large cycles. Interestingly, the characterization deviates from the one given by Schummer and Vohra (2004) for the continuous case. In particular, it is shown that an SP mechanism on a cycle is close to dictatorial, but all agents can affect the outcome, in contrast to the continuous case. Our characterization is also used to derive a lower bound on the approximation ratio with respect to the social cost that can be achieved by an SP mechanism on certain graphs. Finally, we show how the representation of such graphs as subsets of the binary cube reveals common properties of SP mechanisms and enables one to extend the lower bound to related domains.
Stochastic image segmentation by typical cuts

We present a stochastic clustering algorithm which uses pairwise similarity of elements, based on a new graph theoretical algorithm for the sampling of cuts in graphs. The stochastic nature of our method makes it robust against noise, including accidental edges and small spurious clusters. We demonstrate the robustness and superiority of our method for image segmentation on a few synthetic examples where other recently proposed methods (such as normalized-cut) fail. In addition, the complexity of our method is lower. We describe experiments with real images showing good segmentation results.
External Validation of Survival-Predicting Models for Acute Myocardial Infarction with Extracorporeal Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in a Chinese Single-Center Cohort

Background This study was designed as an external evaluation of potentially relevant models for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) with extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (E-CPR). Material/Methods Twenty AMI adults that met criteria were retrospectively analyzed from January 2009 to January 2015. Six possible models – ENCOURAGE, SAVE, ECPR, GRACE, SHOCK, and a simplified risk chart – were identified by literature review and model scores calculated based on original data. Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment, commonly used in intensive care units, served as controls. A receiver operating characteristic curve was used to compare the models’ discriminative power for predicting survival to discharge. Results The ECPR model showed the best discriminative performance, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.893 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.733–1.530, p=0.006); the cutoff was 12.5 points, with 66.7% sensitivity and 100% specificity. The “clinical” SHOCK model (including infarct site) showed weaker but still good discriminative power, with an AUC of 0.804 (95% CI, 0.580–1.027, p=0.035); the cutoff was 45.5 points, with 83.3% sensitivity and 71.4% specificity. The remaining models did not show significant discriminative power for predicting survival to discharge. Risk stratifications indicated that a statistically significant difference was observed in the distribution of patients into the ECPR group with different prognoses when stratified by its cutoff (p=0.003), while a trend of significant difference was shown when applied to the SHOCK model (p=0.05). Conclusions The ECPR and SHOCK models possess important abilities to predict intrahospital outcomes of AMI patients treated with E-CPR.
Second order multiscale stochastic volatility asymptotics: stochastic terminal layer analysis and calibration

Multiscale stochastic volatility models have been developed as an efficient way to capture the principal effects on derivative pricing and portfolio optimization of randomly varying volatility. The recent book by Fouque et al. (Multiscale Stochastic Volatility for Equity, Interest-Rate and Credit Derivatives, 2011) analyzes models in which the volatility of the underlying is driven by two diffusions – one fast mean-reverting and one slowly varying – and provides a first order approximation for European option prices and for the implied volatility surface, which is calibrated to market data. Here, we present the full second order asymptotics, which are considerably more complicated due to a terminal layer near the option expiration time. We find that to second order, the implied volatility approximation depends quadratically on log-moneyness, capturing the convexity of the implied volatility curve seen in data. We introduce a new probabilistic approach to the terminal layer analysis needed for the derivation of the second order singular perturbation term, and calibrate to S&P 500 options data.
An over-12-Gbps on-chip transmission line interconnect with a pre-emphasis technique in 90 nm CMOS

This paper proposes an on-chip differential transmission line interconnect using a pre-emphasis technique for high-speed onchip signaling. The new transmitter with dynamic output-impedance control for pre-distortion of signals is presented. Simulation results showed that the proposed interconnect in 90 nm Si CMOS has possibilities of over-20-Gbps signaling and better energy-per-bit performances than conventional on-chip high-speed interconnects. Our 5-mm-long interconnect can achieve 12.5 Gbps signaling with power consumption of 6.9 mW in measurements.
Topological control for isotropic remeshing of non-manifold surfaces with varying resolution: application to 3D structural models

In this paper we propose a method to remesh non-manifold surfaces with triangles as equilateral as possible. We adapt an existing Voronoi based remeshing framework to recover the topology of non-manifold surfaces and their boundaries. The input of the procedure is a non-manifold triangulated surface constituted of several connected components representing geological interfaces (faults, horizons, detachments, etc). Positions of a given number of points are globally optimized to obtain an isotropic sampling of the surface. Then a topological control that enforces the topological ball property adds points to recover non-manifold edges and vertices. The method is demonstrated on a complex 3D fault model and clears the path for generating several models with varying resolution under topological control.