Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reference values for pulp oxygen saturation as a diagnostic tool in endodontics: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives This systematic review aimed to identify mean oxygen saturation values (SpO2) using pulse oximetry in permanent maxillary anterior teeth. Materials and Methods The MEDLINE, Scientific Electronic Library Online, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, EMBASE, and Literatura Latino Americana em Ciências da Saúde electronic databases were searched. Combinations and variations of “oximetry” AND “dental pulp test” were used as search terms. Studies reporting means and standard deviations of SpO2 values were included. Two reviewers independently extracted data following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses checklist. Heterogeneity was assessed using the I2 statistic, and all analyses were performed using R software. Study quality was assessed using the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 tool and the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Results Of the 251 studies identified, 19 met the eligibility criteria and were included (total sample, 4,541 teeth). In the meta-analysis, the mean SpO2 values were 84.94% (95% confidence interval [CI], 84.85%–85.04%) for the central incisors, 89.29% (95% CI, 89.22%–89.35%) for the lateral incisors, and 89.20% (95% CI, 89.05%–89.34%) for the canines. The studies were predominantly low-quality due to the high risk of bias associated with the index test, unclear risk regarding patient selection, and concerns about outcome assessment. Conclusions Although most studies were low-quality, the oxygen saturation levels in normal pulp could be established (minimum saturation, 77.52%). Despite the risk of bias of the included studies, the reference values reported herein are clinically relevant for assessments of changes in pulp status. Trial Registration International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews Identifier: CRD42018085598
Purification and Characterization of Hemolymph Lectin of Freshwater Crab, Lamella Lamellifrons (Alcock, 1909)

Lectins offer novel biomaterials useful in therapeutics and understanding animal lectins is of high value in the field of protein chemistry and designing new drugs on the principle of protein-carbohydrate or protein-protein interaction. The objective of this study was to isolate and characterise a brachyuran crab lectin. A 68 kDa O-acetyl sialic acid specific lectin, lamellin was purified from the hemolymph of the freshwater crab, Lamella lamellifrons using single step affinity chromatography. Lamellin strongly agglutinated rabbit and buffalo erythrocytes and was inhibited by BSM followed by bovine and porcine thyroglobulin. The optimum activity of the lectin was achieved between pH 7-7.5 and temperature 30-40 o C. The purified lectin was calcium dependent, sensitive to EDTA and had marked specificity to the O-acetyl group of sialic acid which was validated with a range of assays such as hemagglutination (HA), hemagglutination inhibition (HAI), de-O-acetylation and neuraminidase treatment of the glycoprotein inhibitors. Purification of a sialic acid-specific lectin with a strong affinity for O-acetyl group will find immense application in recognising pathogens and tumor cells.
Dynamic Correlation between Industry Greenization Development and Ecological Balance in China

By estimating the changing of industry greenization development and ecological balance in China from 2000 to 2017, this paper aims to study the dynamic correlation between industry and ecology in recent years. We focus on the conservation of resources in industry greenization development—if fewer resources are consumed under the same technical conditions as the base period, it means progress in green industrial development. The green proportion of industrial value-added is measured in a quantitative way to gauge the effect and level of industry greenization development in 2000–2017. Meanwhile, the changing impacts on China’s ecological balance imposed by ecological footprint and bearing capacity in 2000–2017 is calculated, and their relation is analyzed using the co-integration approach and PLS method. The results show that industry greenization development and ecological balance are in negative correlation in China, meaning our ecological balance is somewhat mitigated while we strongly practice and promote green industrial development.
Ultrabroadband All-Dielectric Transmitarray Designing Based on Genetic Algorithm Optimization and 3-D Print Technology

An ultra broadband all-dielectric transmitarray antenna (TA) is designed based on genetic algorithm optimization (GAO) and 3-D print fabrication technology. The array element is composed of all-dielectric pillars with different sizes distributed on the two sides of a substrate. The element is operating in the out-of-band resonance (OBR) zone, whose transmission amplitude is nearly one and the phase can be easily controlled. Afterward, the geometric parameters of the elements on different positions of the TA surface were optimized using generalized Snell’s Law-based GAO, which achieved broadband phase compensation and good transmission performance. As the structure is all- dielectric, it can be easily manufactured using 3-D printing technology. The TA was fed by a ridged horn, and the antenna gains are enhanced by 7–12 dB in the measuring band (9–20 GHz). Moreover, the 1 dB steady gain ranges from 14.5 to 20 GHz (up to 29%).
Bridgeless PFC Topology Simplification and Design for Performance Benchmarking

Compared with conventional power factor correction topologies, although dual-converter cell-based bridgeless topologies usually have higher efficiency, most of them suffer from high component counts. Thus, this article proposes general topology simplification methods for these topologies. Besides, several selected converter cells are exemplified to show the specific topology simplification processes, and the performance of the resultant simplified topologies is reviewed. Meanwhile, based on the same design specifications, in order to provide an unbiased quantitative topology comparison in terms of power loss, cost, and volume, this article introduces a consistent component database-based design procedure with electrical, thermal, and cost models. As case studies, the conventional and two selected bridgeless buck–boost-type topologies are compared by following the design procedure. The comparison results are analyzed to provide a reference for topology selection. Three prototypes are built and tested to verify the theoretical analysis.
A Class of Single-Phase Z-Source AC–AC Converters With Magnetic Coupling and Safe-Commutation Strategy

This article proposes a family of single-phase transformer based Z-source ac–ac converters (ZSACs). The proposed converters inherit all the benefits associated with the classical single-phase ZSAC, which are providing the buck–boost operation, maintaining or reversing the phase angle, and improving reliability. The proposed converters also have the improved input profile, continuous input current, and shared ground between input and output. Moreover, they use the turns ratio of transformers to produce the required voltage gain, which can be tuned by either increasing or decreasing the turns ratio of transformer depending on the configuration of Z-source structure. A safe-commutation strategy is also presented to achieve the soft commutation, which eliminates the voltage and current spikes without any additional snubber circuits. The features of proposed converters are comprehensively discussed with the detailed theoretical analysis. Thereafter, its performances are evaluated by both simulation and experimental tests.
Bacterial ghosts as carrier of active substances

Bakterielle Ghosts (BGs) stellen ein innovatives System zur Vakzinierung und zielgerichtetem Transport von Wirkstoffen dar. Naturliche immunstimulierende Oberflachenstrukturen bleiben auf den bakterielle Hullen erhalten und der intrazellulare Bereich kann mit jeglichen Substanzen befullt werden. Die zytotoxischen Effekte von BGs, welche mit den chemotherapeutischen Substanzen Resveratrol und seinen Analoga Digalloylresveratrol (DIG) und 3,3’,4,4’,5,5’-hexahydroxystilbene (M8) beladen wurden, wurden in der Kolonzelllinie HT29 untersucht. Durch das “BG-delivery“ wurde die Lebensfahigkeit der Zellen gemas des zytotoxischen Schemas der freien Substanzen (DIG> M8 > RV) signifikant reduziert. In HPLC Messungen konnte weiters die fortwahrende intrazellulare Freisetzung von RV aus BGs in HT29 Zellen gezeigt werden. Die Aufnahme verschiedener BGs wurde in unterschiedlichen humanen Bindehautszellen untersucht. Hohe Internalisierungsraten von BGs fuhrten zu einer erhohten Expression von ICAM-1, zeigten aber keine zyto- oder genotoxische Wirkung auf die Bindehautszellen. Jedoch demonstrierten Untersuchungen mit dem Konservierungsmittel Benzalkoniumchlorid (BAC), dass BGs, wahrscheinlich durch Detoxifizierung uber BG-Peroxidase Aktivitat, auserst protektiv gegenuber BAC induzierter toxischer Effekte in CCL 20.2. Zellen wirkten, Weiters wurde gezeigt, dass die bakteriozide Wirkung des Konservierungsmittels in Anwesenheit von BGs erhalten bleibt. Experimente mit primaren Keratinozyten veranschaulichten, dass BGs antimikrobiellen Peptide wie S100A7c (psoriasin) and humanes β defensin-2 (hBD-2) induzieren konnen Zudem konnte gezeigt werden, dass die Aufnahme der BGs in Keratinozyten wie auch die Freisetzung von proinflammatorischen Zytokinen, wie Interleukin (IL)-6 oder IL-8, auch vom Flagellingehalt auf der Oberflache der BGs abhangig ist. Durch Untersuchungen von RAW 264.7 Makrophagen wurde belegt, dass durch Phagozytose von BGs iNOS (induzierbare NO-Synthase) abhangige Stickstoffbildung ausgelost wird, welche durch Beladung von RV in BGs moduliert werden kann.
Performance Evaluation & Operation of DSP Control UPS System

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is a power conditioner that provides emergency power to a load when the supply power fails. In on-line UPS, the load is always connected to the inverter through the UPS static switch. Specialized expertise was required for collection, analysis, and dissemination of technical information relating to high quality uninterruptible power systems. Inherent in these responsibilities is the coordination of technical and contractual matters relating to the procurement and installation of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems which were required to support these facilities. The proposed circuit incorporates an AC/DC & DC & AC converter, which provided power factor correction and to assure feedback control. In our project when the AC main is available, the rectifier circuit will supply the power to the inverter as well as to the battery and battery will be charged. If the supply power fails suddenly, the battery will supply power to the inverter without any interruption and delay. In the constant current charging technique, a digital charger was designed and controlled through PIC12F675 microcontroller. In the realized system, The PIC16C73B was used as microcontroller. It was used to generate sinusoidal PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) signals that are connected to drive n-channel MOSFETs in inverter to assure feedback control and display units. The power circuit of the proposed UPS system was presented and analyzed. Circuit models were derived and a UPS digital control system using a digital signal processing (DSP) with microcontroller has been developed. The uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) are widely used by power supply during interruption of regular power supply due to load shedding, power failure, power fluctuations including telecommunication systems, medical systems, industrial control systems etc.
Navigating through Mutations in Acute Myeloid Leukemia. What Do We Know and What Do We Do with It?

A clonal hematopoietic disease, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is characterized by abnormal proliferation of early precursors of myeloid cells and blasts. It represents a heterogeneous disease group with a considerably complex biology and pathophysiology. Various translocations, chromosome copy number changes, and mutations have been described in AML, and a few of them help define the diagnosis, prognosis, and management. Cytarabine and anthracycline-based combination regimens followed by the allogeneic stem cell transplant remain the optimal treatment in most cases. However, older age and decreased tolerance to conventional therapies pose a major challenge for the conventional therapies, leading to the development of effective and less toxic therapy modalities as reviewed in this article.
Multiagent Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Virtual Resource Allocation Through Network Function Virtualization in Internet of Things

Resource allocation is a significant task in the emerging area of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are usually low-cost devices with limited computational power and capabilities for long term communication. In this article, the network function virtualization (NFV) technique is used to access resources of the network and a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is used to solve the problem of resource allocation in IoT networks. The traffic of the IoT network uses the substrate network which is available through NFV for its data transmission. The data transmission needs of the IoT network are translated to virtual requests and service function chain (SFC) are mapped to the substrate network to serve the requests. The problem of SFC placement while meeting the system constraints of the IoT network is a nonconvex problem. In the proposed deep RL (DRL)-based resource allocation, the virtual layer acts as a common repository of the network resources. The optimization problem of SFC placement under the system constraints of IoT networks can be formulated as a Markovian decision process (MDP). The MDP problem is solved through a multiagent DRL algorithm where each agent serves an SFC. Two <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-networks are considered, where one <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-network solves the SFC placement problem while the other updates weights of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-network through keeping track of long-term policy changes. The virtual agents serving SFCs interact with the environment, receive reward collectively and update the policy by using the learned experiences. We show that the proposed scheme can solve the optimization problem of SFC placement through adequate reward design, state, and action space formulation. Simulation results demonstrate that the multiagent DRL scheme outperforms the reference schemes in terms of utility gained as measured through different network parameters.
Isolation and Identification of Bacteria Associated with Pre and Post Processing of Groundnut Cake in Sokoto State, North-Western Nigeria

This study was conducted to assess the bacterial contamination between the groundnut cakes and paste obtained from Rural areas (Bodinga, kware) and that obtained within the metropolis at Urban areas (Arkilla and ‘Yargoriba) of Sokoto metropolis. A total of 8 samples of ready to eat groundnut cake and pastes were purchased, 4 of which were cake packaged in polythene and 4 paste packaged in plastic rubbers. The samples were analyzed microbiologically using standard procedures. Bacteria species associated with the samples collected from the rural areas were identified as Bacillus lentus, B. megaterium, B. licheniformis, Listeria monocytogene, Staphylococcus aureus while those associated with samples collected from the urban areas were identified as Bacillus lentus, B. megaterium, B. licheniformis, Listeria monocytogene, Staphylococcus aureus and S. hominis. There was higher bacteria count on samples from rural areas compared to those from urban areas. This might be as a result of unhygienic practices during the processing of the product which may range from methods of obtaining and quality of raw materials including sources of water, packaging, handling and distribution of the finished product to the final consumers. Based on these, it is recommended that Producers of groundnut cake should use good hygienic places, raw material and equipment to reduce the risk of microbial contamination. Keywords : Isolation, Identification, Bacteria, Processing, Groundnut DOI: 10.7176/JBAH/10-12-03 Publication date: June 30 th 2020
Compression Priors Assisted Convolutional Neural Network for Fractional Interpolation

Fractional interpolation has been extensively utilized in a series of video coding standards to generate fractional precision prediction to remove the temporal redundancy in consecutive frames. In the traditional interpolation filter based methods, the fractional samples are interpolated through a linear combination of the neighboring integer samples. This method is simple yet unable to accurately characterize the nonstationary video signals. Recently, convolutional neural network has been utilized in the fractional interpolation and shows superior performance compared with the traditional methods. However, only the reconstruction of the reference frame is used as the infer information source. All the other information contained in the bitstream or generated during the encoding/decoding procedure denoted as the compression prior is not utilized at all. In this paper, we give the first trial to involve some compression priors into the CNN to improve the performance of a in-loop coding tool. Specifically, we propose a Compression Priors assisted Convolutional Neural Network (CPCNN) to further improve the fractional interpolation efficiency. In addition to the reconstructed component, we additionally utilize two other compression priors – the corresponding residual component and col-located high quality component to boost the performance. Specifically, the residual component that indicates the prediction efficiency and contains effective texture information is utilized as a complementary input to the reconstructed one. While the col-located component provides more useful high quality information to help the reconstruction get rid of the quality fluctuation. Furthermore, a special network structure is designed to learn powerful representations of these triple input components. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CPCNN. The experimental results show that compared to HEVC, our proposed CPCNN achieves on average of 5.3%, 2.8% and 1.9% BD-Rate savings under LDP, LDB and RA configurations, respectively.
Efficacy of salivary versus subgingival bacterial sampling for the detection and quantification of periodontal pathogens

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy and validity of subgingival bacterial sampling using a retraction cord, and to evaluate how well this sampling method reflected changes in periodontal conditions after periodontal therapy. Methods Based on clinical examinations, 87 subjects were divided into a healthy group (n=40) and a periodontitis group (n=47). Clinical measurements were obtained from all subjects including periodontal probing depth (PD), bleeding on probing (BOP), clinical attachment loss (CAL), and the plaque index. Saliva and gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) as a subgingival bacterial sample were sampled before and 3 months after periodontal therapy. The salivary and subgingival bacterial samples were analyzed by reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction to quantify the following 11 periodontal pathogens: Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans (Aa), Porphyromonas gingivalis (Pg), Tannerella forsythus (Tf), Treponema denticola (Td), Prevotella intermedia (Pi), Fusobacterium nucleatum (Fn), Pavimonas micra (Pm), Campylobacter rectus (Cr), Prevotella nigrescens (Pn), Eikenella corrodens (Ec), and Eubacterium nodatum (En). Results Non-surgical periodontal therapy resulted in significant decreases in PD (P<0.01), CAL (P<0.01), and BOP (P<0.05) after 3 months. Four species (Pg, Tf, Pi, and Pm) were significantly more abundant in both types of samples in the periodontitis group than in the healthy group. After periodontal therapy, Cr was the only bacterium that showed a statistically significant decrease in saliva, whereas statistically significant decreases in Cr, Pg, and Pn were found in GCF. Conclusions Salivary and subgingival bacterial sampling with a gingival retraction cord were found to be equivalent in terms of their accuracy for differentiating periodontitis, but GCF reflected changes in bacterial abundance after periodontal therapy more sensitively than saliva.
Investigation of Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Austenite Stainless Steel 304 during Tempering and Cryogenic Heat Treatment

In the present study, the influence of heat treatment (tempering & cryogenic) on the grain orientation and few important mechanical properties of Austenite Stainless Steel 304 (ASS 304) are examined. The significant mechanical properties like ultimate strength, elongation percentage and surface hardness etc., of the experimented and untreated specimens are computed using pre standard methods and the micrographs of the specimens was conducted using metallurgical microscope. The effect of strain rate ranging from lower to higher strain rates 0.001s-1 to 0.1s-1, on true stress - true strain behaviour of tempered austenitic stainless steel 304 is investigated. Experimental results exhibited that the mechanical behaviour of ASS 304 can be reformed and improvised by several heat treatment procedures for a specific application. The results showed that the cryogenic treated specimens indicate lowest tensile strength, hardness and highest percent of elongation value compared with tempered specimen gave the maximum tensile strength, hardness and minimum percent of elongation in length value.
Design of mm-Wave Slow-Wave-Coupled Coplanar Waveguides

This article focuses on the design of high-performance coupled slow-wave coplanar waveguide (CS-CPW) in CMOS technologies for the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequency bands. First, the theory as well as the electrical model of the CS-CPW are presented. Next, the analytical approach for the calculation of the model parameters is discussed. Then, by using the developed model, two mm-wave backward directional 3-dB couplers are designed in a bipolar complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (BiCMOS) 55-nm technology for 120- and 185-GHz operation, respectively. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the use of the CS-CPW concept leads to state-of-the-art performance, with a good agreement between the analytical model, electromagnetic simulations, and measurement results.