Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prescribed Exercise With Compression vs Compression Alone in Treating Patients With Venous Leg Ulcers: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Importance Exercise is recommended as an adjuvant treatment for venous leg ulceration (VLU) to improve calf muscle pump function. However, the association of exercise with VLU healing has not been properly aggregated, and the effectiveness of different exercise interventions has not been characterized. Objective To summarize the association of different exercise interventions with VLU healing when used as an adjuvant to any form of compression. Data Sources The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycInfo, and SCOPUS databases were searched through October 9, 2017. Study Selection Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of any exercise compared with no exercise in participants with VLU were included, where compression was used as standard therapy and a healing outcome was reported. Independent title screening and full text review by 2 authors (A.J., J.S.) with appeal to a third author (J.P.) if disagreement was unresolved. Of the 519 articles screened, a total of 6 (1.2%) studies met the inclusion criteria for systematic review, including 5 for meta-analysis. Data Extraction and Synthesis Independent quality assessment for Cochrane risk of bias and data extraction by 2 authors with appeal to third author if disagreement unresolved (PRISMA). Data pooled using fixed effects model. Main Outcomes and Measures The a priori primary outcome was any healing outcome (proportion healed, time to healing, or change in ulcer area). Secondary outcomes (adverse events, costs, and health-related quality of life) were only collected if a primary outcome was reported. Results Six RCTs were identified and 5 (190 participants) met inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. The exercise interventions were progressive resistance exercise alone (2 RCTs, 53 participants) or combined with prescribed physical activity (2 RCTs, 102 participants), walking only (1 RCT, 35 participants), or ankle exercises (1 RCT, 40 participants). Overall, exercise was associated with increased VLU healing at 12 weeks although the effect was imprecise (additional 14 cases healed per 100 patients; 95% CI, 1-27 cases per 100; P = .04). The combination of progressive resistance exercise plus prescribed physical activity appeared to be most effective, again with imprecision (additional 27 cases healed per 100 patients; 95% CI, 9-45 cases per 100; P = .004). Conclusions and Relevance The evidence base may now be sufficiently suggestive for clinicians to consider recommending simple progressive resistance and aerobic activity to suitable patients with VLU while further research is produced.
Primitive Fitting Using Deep Boundary Aware Geometric Segmentation

To identify and fit geometric primitives (e.g., planes, spheres, cylinders, cones) in a noisy point cloud is a challenging yet beneficial task for fields such as robotics and reverse engineering. As a multi-model multi-instance fitting problem, it has been tackled with different approaches including RANSAC, which however often fit inferior models in practice with noisy inputs of cluttered scenes. Inspired by the corresponding human recognition process, and benefiting from the recent advancements in image semantic segmentation using deep neural networks, we propose BAGSFit as a new framework addressing this problem. Firstly, through a fully convolutional neural network, the input point cloud is point-wisely segmented into multiple classes divided by jointly detected instance boundaries without any geometric fitting. Thus, segments can serve as primitive hypotheses with a probability estimation of associating primitive classes. Finally, all hypotheses are sent through a geometric verification to correct any misclassification by fitting primitives respectively. We performed training using simulated range images and tested it with both simulated and real-world point clouds. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrated the superiority of BAGSFit.
GI-OHMS: Graphical Inference to Detect Overlapping Communities

Discovery of communities in complex networks is a topic of considerable recent interest within the complex systems community. Due to the dynamic and rapidly evolving nature of large-scale networks, like online social networks, the notion of stronger local and global interactions among the nodes in communities has become harder to capture. In this paper, we present a novel graphical inference method - GI-OHMS (Graphical Inference in Observed-Hidden variable Merged Seeded network) to solve the problem of overlapping community detection. The novelty of our approach is in transforming the complex and dense network of interest into an observed-hidden merged seeded(OHMS) network, which preserves the important community properties of the network. We further utilize a graphical inference method (Bayesian Markov Random Field) to extract communities. The superiority of our approach lies in two main observations: 1) The extracted OHMS network excludes many weaker connections, thus leading to a higher accuracy of inference 2) The graphical inference step operates on a smaller network, thus having much lower execution time. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the accuracy of other baseline algorithms like OSLOM, DEMON, and LEMON. To further improve execution time, we have a multi-threaded implementation and demonstrate significant speed-up compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
A Review on Fusion Strategy based on Underwater Image Enhancement

Image enhancement is one of the pre-processing steps in various computer vision applications. It is a procedure of improving the quality of the image without any information loss. Usually, the images are affected by various facts. Particularly in the underwater image, haze and hue variations significantly affected. Practically, our fusion-based method plans to yield a final image that overcomes the deficiencies existing in the degraded input images by employing several weight maps that discriminate the regions characterized by poor visibility. In this paper, a literature survey is done by study various techniques of an image enhancement and fusion for underwater images.
Hypoxia Delays Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell Migration and Myelin Formation by Suppressing Bmp2b Signaling in Larval Zebrafish

Hypoxia in newborns tends to result in developmental deficiencies in the white matter of the brain. As previous studies of the effects of hypoxia on neuronal development in rodents and human infants have been unable to use in vivo imaging, insight into the dynamic development of oligodendrocytes (OLs) in the central nervous system under hypoxia is limited. Here, we developed a visual model to study OL development using sublethal postnatal hypoxia in zebrafish larvae. We observed that hypoxia significantly suppressed OL progenitor cell migration toward the dorsum using in vivo imaging. Further, we found that hypoxia affected myelination, as indicated by thinner myelin sheaths and by a downregulation of myelin basic protein expression. Bmp2b protein expression was also significantly downregulated following hypoxia onset. Using gain of function and loss of function experiments, we demonstrated that the Bmp2b protein was associated with the regulation of OL development. Thus, our work provides a visual hypoxia model within which to observe OL development in vivo, and reveals the underlying mechanisms involved in these processes.
Genetic diversity of Leishmania tropica in Morocco: does the dominance of one haplotype signify its fitness in both predominantly anthropophilic Phlebotomus sergenti and human beings?

In Morocco, cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) caused by Leishmania tropica is endemic to locations where the predominantly anthropophilic blood-feeding Phlebotomus sergenti and humans co-perpetuate. The objective of this study was to explore whether the range of epidemiological features of CLcould be linked to the range of L. tropica genetic heterogeneity and to further explore the relationships between the genetic diversity of L. tropica in both P. sergenti and humans. L. tropica DNAwas extracted from dermal scarping smears of 125 CLpatients. Genetic polymorphisms were analyzed by sequencing the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) 1 and 5.8S rDNAgene. Nucleotide diversity (π), haplotype diversity (Hd) and Tajima's D test for neutrality, as well as overall and pairwise FSTvalues, were calculated using Arlequin ver 3.5 software. Out of the 125 amplified DNAsequences, 93 were completely sequenced and 13 L. tropica haplotypes were identified, which confirmed the significant genetic heterogeneity of L. tropica in Morocco. The most common haplotype included 74 out of 93 sequences; this haplotype is not only widely represented but was also detected in P. sergenti, which is known to be the most abundant species in the studied foci. Considering the negative value calculated using Tajima's D index, we briefly discussed the hypothesis that the L. tropica common haplotype propagation could be a sign of its fitness in P. sergenti and human hosts. Furthermore, analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) shows significant correlations between intraspecific variants of L. tropica and patients' geographic origins. The long-term goals of the present pilot study are to further explore the relationships between the genetic diversity of L. tropica in human and P. sergenti populations.
How Much Privilege Does an App Need? Investigating Resource Usage of Android Apps (Short Paper)

Arguably, one of the default solutions to many of today's everyday errands is to install an app. In order to deliver a variety of convenient and user-centric services, apps need to access different types of information stored in mobile devices, much of which is personal information. In principle, access to such privacy sensitive data should be kept to a minimum. In this study, we focus on privilege utilization patterns by apps installed on Android devices. Though explicit consent is required prior to first time access to the resource, the unavailability of usage information makes it unclear when trying to reassess the users initial decision. On the other hand, if granted privilege with little or no usage, it would suggest the likely violation of the principle of least privilege. Our findings illustrate a plausible requirement for visualising resource usage to aid the user in their decisionmaking and finer access control mechanisms.
A geospatial hybrid cloud platform based on multi-sourced computing and model resources for geosciences

ABSTRACT Cloud computing has been considered as the next-generation computing platform with the potential to address the data and computing challenges in geosciences. However, only a limited number of geoscientists have been adapting this platform for their scientific research mainly due to two barriers: 1) selecting an appropriate cloud platform for a specific application could be challenging, as various cloud services are available and 2) existing general cloud platforms are not designed to support geoscience applications, algorithms and models. To tackle such barriers, this research aims to design a hybrid cloud computing (HCC) platform that can utilize and integrate the computing resources across different organizations to build a unified geospatial cloud computing platform. This platform can manage different types of underlying cloud infrastructure (e.g., private or public clouds), and enables geoscientists to test and leverage the cloud capabilities through a web interface. Additionally, the platform also provides different geospatial cloud services, such as workflow as a service, on the top of common cloud services (e.g., infrastructure as a service) provided by general cloud platforms. Therefore, geoscientists can easily create a model workflow by recruiting the needed models for a geospatial application or task on the fly. A HCC prototype is developed and dust storm simulation is used to demonstrate the capability and feasibility of such platform in facilitating geosciences by leveraging across-organization computing and model resources.
Efficacy and safety of 5 alpha-reductase inhibitor monotherapy in patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia: A meta-analysis

Background Although combination therapy with 5 alpha-reductase inhibitor (5ARI) and alpha-blocker is one of the standard interventions in symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), 5ARI monotherapy is seldom the focus of attention. Adverse events associated with 5ARI include depression and suicidal attempts in addition to persistent erectile dysfunction. The aim of this study is to update our knowledge of clinical efficacy and incidence of adverse events associated with 5ARI treatment in symptomatic BPH. Methods and findings A meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) from 1966 until March, 2017 was performed using database from PubMed, Cochrane Collaboration and Embase. A total of 23395 patients were included in this study and the inclusion criteria were: RCTs with 5ARI and placebo in symptomatic BPH patients. Parameters included prostate specific antigen (PSA), prostate volume (PV), International Prostate Symptom Score (IPPS), post-void residual urine (PVR), voiding symptoms of IPSS (voiding IPSS), maximum urinary flow rate (Qmax), and adverse events (AEs). A meta-analysis with meta-regression was performed for each effect size and adverse events, sensitivity analysis, cumulative analysis along with the analysis of ratio of means (ROM) in the placebo group. A total of 42 studies were included in this study for review, and a total of 37 studies were included in the meta-analysis, including a total of 23395 patients (treatment group: 11392, placebo group: 12003). The effect size of all variables except PVR showed a significant improvement following 5ARI treatment compared with placebo. However, the effect size of differences showed declining trend in PV, IPSS and Qmax according to recent years of publication. In ROM analysis, PV showed no significant increase in the placebo group, with a ROM of 1.00 (95% CI, 0.88, 1.14). The 5ARI treatment resulted in a significantly higher incidence of decreased libido (OR = 1.7; 95% CI, 1.36, 2.13), ejaculatory disorder (OR = 2.94; 95% CI, 2.15, 4.03), gynecomastia (OR = 2.32; 95% CI, 1.41, 3.83), and impotence (OR = 1.74; 95% CI, 1.32, 2.29). Our study has the following limitations: included studies were heterogeneous and direct comparison of efficacy between alpha blocker and 5ARI was not performed. Adverse events including depression or suicidal attempt could not be analyzed in this meta-analysis setting. Conclusions Although there was a significant clinical benefit of 5ARI monotherapy compared with placebo, the effective size was small. Moreover, the risk of adverse events including sexually related complications were high. Additional head-to-head studies are needed to re-evaluate the clinical efficacy of 5ARI compared with alpha-adrenergic receptor blockers.
Violence detection in surveillance video using low-level features

It is very important to automatically detect violent behaviors in video surveillance scenarios, for instance, railway stations, gymnasiums and psychiatric centers. However, the previous detection methods usually extract descriptors around the spatiotemporal interesting points or extract statistic features in the motion regions, leading to limited abilities to effectively detect video-based violence activities. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to detect violence sequences. Firstly, the motion regions are segmented according to the distribution of optical flow fields. Secondly, in the motion regions, we propose to extract two kinds of low-level features to represent the appearance and dynamics for violent behaviors. The proposed low-level features are the Local Histogram of Oriented Gradient (LHOG) descriptor extracted from RGB images and the Local Histogram of Optical Flow (LHOF) descriptor extracted from optical flow images. Thirdly, the extracted features are coded using Bag of Words (BoW) model to eliminate redundant information and a specific-length vector is obtained for each video clip. At last, the video-level vectors are classified by Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed detection approach is superior to the previous methods.
Integrating the Extreme Programing Model with Secure Process for Requirement Selection

In this paper we basically compare the various agile project management development models. And also try to recognize the element that can make the project to vulnerabilities during the project development. The agile development methodologies can be done by following the main principle of that the software requirements always change with the change of time. We will also try to learn the frameworks on which the methodologies of agile software development were based like Scrum, XP & DSDM. In this paper we will try to improve the XP framework by adding the security processes and will also compare with the previous model.
Physiological-based cord clamping in preterm infants using a new purpose-built resuscitation table: a feasibility study

Objective Physiological-based cord clamping (PBCC) led to a more stable cardiovascular adaptation and better oxygenation in preterm lambs, but in preterm infants, this approach has been challenging. Our aim was to assess the feasibility of PBCC, including patterns of oxygen saturation (SpO2) and heart rate (HR) during stabilisation in preterm infants using a new purpose-built resuscitation table. Design Observational study. Setting Tertiary referral centre, Leiden University Medical Centre, The Netherlands. Patients Infants born below 35 weeks’ gestational age. Interventions Infants were stabilised on a new purpose-built resuscitation table (Concord), provided with standard equipment needed for stabilisation. Cord clamping was performed when the infant was stable (HR >100 bpm, spontaneous breathing on continuous positive airway pressure with tidal volumes >4 mL/kg, SpO2 ≥25th percentile and fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) <0.4). Results Thirty-seven preterm infants were included; mean (SD) gestational age of 30.9 (2.4) weeks, birth weight 1580 (519) g. PBCC was successful in 33 infants (89.2%) and resulted in median (IQR) cord clamping time of 4:23 (3:00–5:11) min after birth. There were no maternal or neonatal adverse events. In 26/37 infants, measurements were adequate for analysis. HR was 113 (81–143) and 144 (129–155) bpm at 1 min and 5 min after birth. SpO2 levels were 58%(49%–60%) and 91%(80%–96%)%), while median FiO2 given was 0.30 (0.30–0.31) and 0.31 (0.25–0.97), respectively. Conclusion PBCC in preterm infants using the Concord is feasible. HR remained stable, and SpO2 quickly increased with low levels of oxygen supply. Trial registration number NTR6095, results.
Effect of Zingiber officinale Roscoe essential oil in fungus control and deoxynivalenol production of Fusarium graminearum Schwabe in vitro

ABSTRACT Members of the Fusarium genus are capable of contaminating agricultural commodities, compromising the quality of maize and other grains, which leads to severe quality and yield losses. Contamination with mycotoxins is also a concern. Essential oils are possible alternatives to the use of synthetic pesticides for control of fungal contamination, as many have antifungal and anti-mycotoxigenic properties and are innocuous to human health. They also do not cause any sort of microbial resistance and do not promote environmental pollution. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antifungal and anti-mycotoxigenic effects of Zingiber officinale Roscoe essential oil (GEO) upon Fusarium graminearum Schwabe in vitro. The essential oil was extracted by hydrodistillation and analysed by GC/MS. Antifungal and anti-mycotoxigenic activities were assessed by HPLC/UV by quantifying ergosterol and deoxynivalenol (DON), respectively. Results indicated that GEO inhibited ergosterol production at a concentration of 1000 µg/mL and DON production at a concentration of 500 µg/mL, evidencing that the anti-mycotoxigenic effect is independent of the antifungal effect due to its probable direct action upon toxin biosynthesis.
Calcium‐regulated mitochondrial ATP‐Mg/Pi carriers evolved from a fusion of an EF‐hand regulatory domain with a mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier‐like domain

The mitochondrial ATP‐Mg/Pi carrier is responsible for the calcium‐dependent regulation of adenosine nucleotide concentrations in the mitochondrial matrix, which allows mitochondria to respond to changing energy requirements of the cell. The carrier is expressed in mitochondria of fungi, plants and animals and belongs to the family of mitochondrial carriers. The carrier is unusual as it consists of three separate domains: (i) an N‐terminal regulatory domain with four calcium‐binding EF‐hands similar to calmodulin, (ii) a loop domain containing an amphipathic α‐helix and (iii) a mitochondrial carrier domain related to the mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier. This striking example of three domains coming together from different origins to provide new functions represents an interesting quirk of evolution. In this review, we outline how the carrier was identified and how its physiological role was established with a focus on human isoforms. We exploit the sequence and structural information of the domains to explore the similarities and differences to their closest counterparts; mitochondrial ADP/ATP carriers and proteins with four EF‐hands. We discuss how their combined function has led to a mechanism for calcium‐regulated transport of adenosine nucleotides. Finally, we compare the ATP‐Mg/Pi carrier with the mitochondrial aspartate/glutamate carrier, the only other mitochondrial carrier regulated by calcium, and we will argue that they have arisen by convergent rather than divergent evolution. © 2018 The Authors. IUBMB Life published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 70(12):1222–1232, 2018
Self-Stabilizing High-Speed Communication in Multi-Synchronous GALS Architectures

We describe a simple self-stabilizing point-to-point communication protocol for multi-synchronous GALS (globally asynchronous locally synchronous) systems. Its implementation is based on a ring buffer, which compensates for the clock deviations of sender and receiver. Read and write pointers separated by a suitable offset facilitate metastability-free operation without the need for synchronizers. We conduct a detailed analysis of the required buffer size and offset, which allows to tailor the protocol to given clock parameters like frequency bounds and synchronization precision. Simulation results obtained by means of a VHDL implementation of our approach prove its practical feasibility.