Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lymph nodes regression grade is a predictive marker for rectal cancer after neoadjuvant therapy and radical surgery

Neoadjuvant therapy (NT) for rectal cancer (RC) reduces primary tumors and involved lymph nodes. While a prognostic value of tumor regression grade (TRG) has been identified, involved lymph node regression grade (LRG) has not been systematically evaluated. Here, we evaluated the association of LRG with oncologic outcomes of RC patients after NT followed by radical surgery. 347 patients with locally advanced RC who received NT and then underwent radical surgery were retrospectively recruited between 2004 and 2011. Response to NT was evaluated by a 3-tier LRG and TRG based on the ratio of residual tumor to fibrosis. LRG was assessed in all patients (LRG 0, 170 patients [49.0%]; LRG 1, 100 patients [28.8%]; and LRG 2, 77 patients [22.2%]). LRG correlated with 5-year distant metastasis and 5-year disease free survival (p=0.029 and 0.023, respectively). LRG also correlated with TRG (p=0.017). We conclude that the LRG system may be an independent predictive factor of long-term oncologic outcomes of rectal cancer patients after NT and radical surgery.
Scheduling algorithms for tdma wireless multihop networks

Current and future wireless standards use TDMA to provide guaranteed Quality-of-Service (QoS) in the network. While these standards specify how transmissions should occur, they do not discuss scheduling algorithms to find when transmissions should occur (transmission schedules). Despite the technological advances, the question of finding transmission schedules has existed for the past twenty years without a satisfactory answer. This thesis presents a new class of scheduling algorithms for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) wireless multihop networks. These algorithms have three major advantages. First, they take into account overhead and delay. With reduced overhead, transmission schedules have much higher throughput than what is possible with previous approaches. The algorithms can also be customized to produce schedules with specific delay properties. Scheduling to achieve a specific delay opens up a new dimension in wireless scheduling that was previously not possible. Second, the algorithms provide a simple and computationally efficient way to specify exact constraints on end-to-end flows in the network. These constraints provide us with a way to solve two important cross-layer design problems in TDMA wireless multihop networks. Third, the algorithms can be distributed in a very natural way. The distributed versions of the algorithms achieve the same performance as the centralized algorithms. The practical value of the algorithms is shown by simulating their usage in two different types TDMA wireless multihop networks.
The health and psychosocial functioning of caregivers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders

Purpose. Children with neurodevelopmental disorders (Neuro) pose complex parenting challenges, particularly if the condition co-occurs with behaviour problems. Such challenges are likely to impact caregiver health and well-being. This study explores the extent to which caregivers of children with both ‘Neuro’ and behaviour problems differ in their physical and psychosocial outcomes from caregivers of children with either condition or neither condition. Method. The first wave of data collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth in Canada (1994) was used to identify four groups of caregivers of 4 to 11-year-old children: caregivers of children with a ‘Neuro’ disorder and externalising behaviour problems (Both; n = 414), caregivers of children with a ‘Neuro’ disorder only (Neuro Only; n = 750), caregivers of children with an externalising behaviour problem only (Ext Only; n = 1067), and caregivers of children with neither health condition (Neither; n = 7236). Results. Caregivers in the ‘Both’ group were least likely to report excellent or very good health, and more frequently reported chronic conditions such as asthma, arthritis, back problems, migraine headaches, and limitations in activities as compared to the ‘Neither’ group. This group also exhibited higher depression scores, experienced more problematic family functioning, and reported lower social support than the ‘Neither’ group. Scores for caregivers in the ‘Ext Only’ and ‘Neuro Only’ groups tended to lie between the ‘Both’ and ‘Neither’ group scores and often did not differ from one another. Conclusions. Caregivers of children with both neurodevelopmental disorders and behaviour problems exhibited a greater number of health and psychosocial problems. While addressing children's behaviour problems, health care professionals should also consider caregiver physical and psychosocial health as this may also have an impact on children's well-being.
Computerized system for fingerprint identification for biometric security

AFTS (automated fingerprint identification system) is used for identification of fingerprint images. AFIS is a type of biometric system which uses digital imaging methodology to capture, analyze and store fingerprint data. This fingerprint data can be compared with the database to determine the identity of individual. The fingerprint images of poor quality need to be enhanced before the feature extraction and feature matching. In this paper, we present a novel automated approach for fingerprint matching, which involve three steps. In the first step, we enhance image to remove noise. In the second step, we extract required feature that is necessary for matching and remove unwanted feature. In the third step, we do matching by using adjacent feature vector technique. The advantage of adjacent feature vector technique is that, it shows a good performance to differentiate matching and non- matching minutiae pairs. AFV (Adjacent Feature Vector) also reduce the computational cost and matching error. We have used standard fingerprint image database FVC2004 (Fingerprint Verification Competition). Experimental result shows that our approach is effective and gets high quality matching.
Distribution of the major γ‐aminobutyric acidA receptor subunits in the basal ganglia and associated limbic brain areas of the adult rat

Within the basal ganglia, γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) exerts a fundamental role as neurotransmitter of local circuit and projection neurons. Its fast hyperpolarizing action is mediated through GABAA receptors. These ligand‐gated chloride channels are assembled from five subunits, which derive from multiple genes. Using immunocytochemistry, we investigated the distribution of 12 major GABAA receptor subunits (α1–5, β1–3, γ1–3, and δ) in the basal ganglia and associated limbic brain areas of the rat. Immunoreactivity for an additional subunit (subunit α6) was not observed. The striatum, the nucleus accumbens, and the olfactory tubercle displayed strong, diffuse staining for the subunits α2, α4, β3, and δ presumably located on dendrites of the principal medium spiny neurons. Subunit α1‐, β2‐, and γ2‐immunoreactivities were apparently mostly restricted to interneurons of these areas. In contrast, the globus pallidus, the entopeduncular nucleus, the ventral pallidum, the subthalamic nucleus, and the substantia nigra pars reticulata revealed dense networks of presumable dendrites of resident projection neurons, which were darkly labeled for subunit α1‐, β2‐, and γ2‐immunoreactivities. The globus pallidus, ventral pallidum, entopeduncular nucleus, and substantia nigra pars reticulata, all areas receiving innervations from the striatum, displayed strong subunit γ1‐immunoreactivity compared to other brain areas. In the substantia nigra pars compacta and in the ventral tegmental area, numerous presumptive dopaminergic neurons were labeled for subunits α3, γ3, and/or δ. This highly heterogeneous distribution of individual GABAA receptor subunits suggests the existence of differently assembled, and presumably also functionally different, GABAA receptors within individual nuclei of the basal ganglia and associated limbic brain areas. J. Comp. Neurol. 433:526–549, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Wavelength assignment in design DWDM transport network using algorithm BCO-RWA

The main problem in designing DWDM transport networks is the wavelength assignment of light paths. One way of solving this problem is to use the algorithm BCO-RWA. However, BCO-RWA has the following disadvantages: algorithm not solved the problem of choosing the location of the optical convector in the network; base algorithm ignores placement optical convector during calculating route selecting probability; base algorithm do not take into account the nonlinear four-wave mixing phenomenon. In this paper we present an algorithm which takes into account a number of disadvantages due to modifications introduced in the algorithm.
An Optimization Coverage Mechanism in Sensor Networks based on ACO

In the paper, an energy-efficient Optimization Coverage Mechanism in sensor networks is proposed based on ACO. It can guarantee that each target should be covered by at least one active sensor at the minimum cost, meanwhile, meet the requirement of different coverage accuracy to different levels of targets. To achieve the above mechanism, the novel heuristic factor and global pheromone updating rule are designed, which endow the artificial ants with the ability of coverage-awareness towards the monitored field and energy-awareness towards the sensor area, and finally the optimal robust solution is obtained.
Distinguishing Knowledge vs Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context

Social media communities (e.g. Wikipedia, Flickr, Live Q&A) give rise to distinct types of content, foremost among which are relational content (discussion, chat) and factual content (answering questions, problem-solving). Both users and researchers are increasingly interested in developing strategies that can rapidly distinguish these types of content. While many text-based and structural strategies are possible, we extend two bodies of research that show how social context, and the social roles of answerers can predict content type. We test our framework on a dataset of manually labeled contributions to Microsoft's Live Q&A and find that it reliably extracts factual and relational messages from the data.
Long-term risk of incident vertebral fractures.

CONTEXT Vertebral fractures are the most common osteoporotic fracture. Women with low bone mineral density (BMD) and prevalent vertebral fractures have a greater risk of incident vertebral fractures over the short-term, but their absolute risk of vertebral fracture over the long-term is uncertain. OBJECTIVE To examine the absolute risk of incident vertebral fracture by BMD and prevalent vertebral fracture status over 15 years. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A total of 9704 white women were recruited at 4 US clinical centers and enrolled in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures, a longitudinal cohort study. Of these, 2680 attended a clinic visit an average of 14.9 years after baseline; mean age of 68.8 years at entry and 83.8 years at follow-up. Mean Outcome Measure Incident vertebral fractures identified from lateral spinal radiographs defined as a decrease of at least 20% and 4 mm at any vertebral level. Prevalent vertebral fractures were identified on the baseline radiographs using vertebral morphometry. Bone mineral density was measured at the total hip and lumbar spine using dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry. RESULTS Of the 2680 women, 487 (18.2%) had an incident vertebral fracture including 163 of the 394 (41.4%) with a prevalent vertebral fracture at baseline and 324 of the 2286 (14.2%) without a prevalent vertebral fracture at baseline (odds ratio, 4.21; 95% confidence interval, 3.33-5.34). Low BMD was associated with an increased risk of incident vertebral fracture (odds ratio per 1 SD decrease in total hip BMD, 1.78 [95% confidence interval, 1.58-2.00]). The absolute risk of vertebral fracture ranged from 56% among women with total hip BMD T score of -2.5 or less and a prevalent vertebral fracture to 9% in women with normal BMD and no prevalent vertebral fracture. CONCLUSIONS Low BMD and prevalent vertebral fractures are independently related to new vertebral fractures over 15 years of follow-up. Women with a prevalent vertebral fracture have a substantially increased absolute risk of an incident fracture, especially if they have osteoporosis diagnosed by BMD.
Better Verification Through Symmetry

We address the state explosion problem in automatic veriication of nite-state systems by exploiting symmetries in the system description. We make symmetries easy to detect by introducing a new data type scalarset, a nite and unordered set, to our description language. The set of operations on scalarsets are restricted so that states are guaranteed to have the same future behavior, up to permutation of the elements of the scalarsets. We have extended our Mur' veriier to generate a reduced state space on-they. The veriier has been applied to cache coherence protocols, reducing the states space searched in veriication by over 90%. In some cases, this method can collapse innnite state spaces into nite spaces. We call this property data saturation. Data saturation can be used to exploit data-independence of protocols automatically, without hand-modiication of the protocol descriptions.
Automatic deformation transfer for data-driven haptic rendering

This paper addresses a major challenge in data-driven haptic modeling of deformable objects. Data-driven modeling is done for specific objects and is difficult to generalize for nearly isometric objects that have similarities in semantics or topology. This limitation prevents the wide use of the data-driven modeling techniques when compared with parametric methods such as finite element methods. The proposed solution is to incorporate deformation transfer methods when processing similar instances. The contributions of this work are focused on the novel automatic shape correspondence method that overcomes the problems of symmetry and semantics presence requirement. The results shows that the proposed algorithm can efficiently calculate the correspondence and transfer deformations for a range of similar 3D objects.
A case for increased operating system support in chip multi-processors

We identify the operating system as one area where a novel architecture could significantly improve on current chip multi-processor designs, allowing increased performance and improved power efficiency. We first show that the operating system contributes a non-trivial overhead to even the most computationally intense workloads and that this OS contribution grows to a significant fraction of total instructions when executing interactive applications. We then show that architectural improvements have had little to no effect on the performance of the operating system over the last 15 years. Based on these observations we propose the need for increased operating system support in chip multiprocessors. Specifically we consider the potential of a separate Operating System Processor (OSP) operating concurrently with General Purpose Processors (GPP) in a Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) organization.
Identifying Temporal Relations by Sentence and Document Optimizations

This paper presents a temporal relation identification method optimizing relations at sentence and document levels. Temporal relation identification is to identify temporal orders between events and time expressions. Various approaches of this task have been studied through the shared tasks TempEval (Verhagen et al., 2007, 2010). Not only identifying each temporal relation independently, some works also try to find multiple temporal relations jointly by logical constraints in Integer Linear Programming (Chambers and Jurafsky, 2008; Do et al., 2012) or Markov Logic Networks (Yoshikawa et al., 2009; Ling and Weld, 2010; Ha et al., 2010). Though previous joint approaches optimize temporal relations in an entire document, we first optimize our model at sentence level and then extend it to document level. We consider that different types of temporal relations require different types of optimizations. By evaluating our sentence and document optimized model on the TempEval-2 data, we show that our approaches can achieve competitive performance in comparison to other state-of-the-art systems. We find that the sentence and document optimized model has strong tasks in TempEval-2, respectively.
Fabrication of endothelialized tube in collagen gel as starting point for self‐developing capillary‐like network to construct three‐dimensional organs in vitro

A possible strategy for creating three‐dimensional (3D) tissue‐engineered organs in vitro with similar volumes to the primary organs is to develop a capillary network throughout the constructs to provide sufficient oxygenation and nutrition to the cells composing them. Here, we propose a novel approach for the creation of a capillary‐like network in vitro, based on the spontaneous tube‐forming activity of vascular endothelial cells (ECs) in collagen gel. We fabricated a linear tube of 500 µm in diameter, the inner surface of which was filled with bovine carotid artery vascular endothelial cells (BECs), in type I collagen gel as a starting point for the formation of a capillary‐like network. The BECs exposed to a medium containing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) migrated into the ambient gel around the tube. After 2 weeks of VEGF exposure, the distance of the migration into the ambient gel in the radial direction of the tube reached approximately 800 µm. Cross‐sections of capillary‐like structures composed of the migrating BECs, with a lumen‐like interior space, were observed in slices of the gel around the tube stained with hematoxylin–eosin (H&E). These results demonstrate that this approach using a pre‐established tube, which is composed of ECs, as a starting point for a self‐developing capillary‐like network is potentially useful for constructing 3D organs in vitro. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Modeling and Analysis of Generalized Slotted-Aloha MAC Protocols in Cooperative, Competitive and Adversarial Environments

Aloha [1] and its slotted variant [2] are commonly deployed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in environments where multiple transmitting devices compete for a medium, yet may have difficulty sensing each other’s presence. This paper models and evaluates the throughput that can be achieved in a system where nodes compete for bandwidth using a generalized version of slotted- Aloha protocols. We evaluate the channel utilization and fairness of these types of protocols for a variety of node objectives, including maximizing aggregate throughput of the channel, each node greedily maximizing its own throughput, and attacker nodes that attempt to jam the channel. If all nodes are selfish and greedily attempt to maximize their own throughputs, a situation similar to the traditional Prisoner’s Dilemma[3] arises. Our results reveal that under heavy loads, greedy strategies reduce the utilization, and that attackers cannot do much better than attacking during randomly selected slots.
An adaptive multi-objective scheduling selection framework for continuous query processing

Adaptive operator scheduling algorithms for continuous query processing are usually designed to serve a single performance objective, such as minimizing memory usage or maximizing query throughput. We observe that different performance objectives may sometimes conflict with each other. Also due to the dynamic nature of streaming environments, the performance objective may need to change dynamically. Furthermore, the performance specification defined by users may itself be multi-dimensional. Therefore, utilizing a single scheduling algorithm optimized for a single objective is no longer sufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive scheduling algorithm selection framework named AMoS. It is able to leverage the strengths of existing scheduling algorithms to meet multiple performance objectives. AMoS employs a lightweight learning mechanism to assess the effectiveness of each algorithm. The learned knowledge can be used to select the algorithm that probabilistically has the best chance of improving the performance. In addition, AMoS has the flexibility to add and adapt to new scheduling algorithms, query plans and data sets during execution. Our experimental results show that AMoS significantly outperforms the existing scheduling algorithms with regard to satisfying both uni-objective and multi-objective performance requirements.
Temporal Envelope of Time-Compressed Speech Represented in the Human Auditory Cortex

Speech comprehension relies on temporal cues contained in the speech envelope, and the auditory cortex has been implicated as playing a critical role in encoding this temporal information. We investigated auditory cortical responses to speech stimuli in subjects undergoing invasive electrophysiological monitoring for pharmacologically refractory epilepsy. Recordings were made from multicontact electrodes implanted in Heschl's gyrus (HG). Speech sentences, time compressed from 0.75 to 0.20 of natural speaking rate, elicited average evoked potentials (AEPs) and increases in event-related band power (ERBP) of cortical high-frequency (70–250 Hz) activity. Cortex of posteromedial HG, the presumed core of human auditory cortex, represented the envelope of speech stimuli in the AEP and ERBP. Envelope following in ERBP, but not in AEP, was evident in both language-dominant and -nondominant hemispheres for relatively high degrees of compression where speech was not comprehensible. Compared to posteromedial HG, responses from anterolateral HG—an auditory belt field—exhibited longer latencies, lower amplitudes, and little or no time locking to the speech envelope. The ability of the core auditory cortex to follow the temporal speech envelope over a wide range of speaking rates leads us to conclude that such capacity in itself is not a limiting factor for speech comprehension.
Architecture Research and IC Design for Embedded Ultra-Micro Processor

In an embedded system design, the mere serial function of a processor is generally used to improve its correctness and decrease the design period without making use of the entire functions of the processor. To reduce the area and the loss of cost-effectiveness brought about by the general processor, a new embedded ultra-micro processor circuit is proposed. It lies between the simplex parallel logic and a general processor. The processor can be easily tailored or expanded according to the design goals and whereby the flexibility and cost performance of the entire system are achieved.