Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fluoroscopy Guided Percutaneous Transpedicular Biopsy of Vertebral Body Lesion.

BACKGROUND The common causes of vertebral body lesion are metastasis, infection, primary malignancies or osteoporotic fractures. Histopathological examination is necessary to confirm the diagnosis. There are different approaches to collect the biopsy samples and they have different adequacy and accuracy rates and also possible complications. This study aims to determine adequacy, accuracy and safety of the fluoroscopy guided percutaneous transpedicular biopsy of the vertebral body lesion. METHODS This is retrospective review of all the patients who underwent fluoroscopy guided percutaneous transpedicular biopsy from January 2013 to October 2016. We reviewed medical records and biopsy reports, plain radiographs, Computed Tomography Scan and Magnetic Resonance Imaging and additional necessary investigations required to confirm the diagnosis. RESULTS Fifty two patients underwent fluoroscopy guided percutaneous transpedicular biopsy of vertebral body lesion in 55 different levels. Thirty six patients were male and 16 were female with mean age of 54.17 years (range 2-87 years). This procedure was performed in 55 levels from D3 to S1. The adequate sample was retrieved from 50 samples in 47 cases (90.9%). The diagnosis was confirmed by histopathological examination from41 samples in 38 cases (82%). In three cases the histopathology was inconclusive but microbiological investigation of tissue sample confirmed the diagnosis. So in total 44 samples from 41 cases (80%), the diagnosis was confirmed by the procedure. We did not encounter any complications during the procedure. CONCLUSIONS Fluoroscopy guided percutaneous transpedicular biopsy is a safe minimally invasive procedure with high adequacy and accuracy rate.
Nursing students’ relationships among resilience, life satisfaction, psychological well-being, and attitude to death

Purpose This study attempted to examine the influence of resilience, life satisfaction, and psychological well-being on attitude to death. Methods A predictive correlational design was used. The participants were 184 nursing students from three universities of Korea. They responded to a self-report questionnaire, with items on demographics, resilience, life satisfaction, psychological well-being, and attitude to death. Results The mean score for attitude to death was 2.77±0.39 (range, 1–4), and a significant difference was observed depending on age, grade, and death-related education. Attitude to death was positively correlated with death-related education, resilience, life satisfaction, and psychological well-being. Results of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that death-related education and psychological well-being were significant predictors of attitude to death, explaining 26.6% of the latter. The most important factor was psychological well-being. Conclusion Although death-related education and psychological well-being are two of the most influential factors among nursing students, no more than 30.4% of this study’s participants received death-related education. Death-related education is necessary to help nursing students so that they can cope positively with stressful situations by finding positive meaning. It is necessary to develop a systematic curriculum so that these students can establish a positive attitude to death.
Computer program categorization with machine learning

Machine learning techniques have been applied to improve the learning process and to learn about the utilization of natural languages. Previous research has shown that similar techniques can be applied in the analysis of computer programming (artificial) languages. Several studies have demonstrated the influence of sociolinguistic characteristics such as age, gender, region, and social status in natural languages. This research focuses on determining the impact of sociolinguistic characteristics of the author, particularly gender and region on computer programs. We use machine learning and statistical techniques to find out the similarities and dissimilarities in the use of programming language based on the gender and region of the programmer. The results of various experiments are promising. We demonstrate that we can predict the gender of programmers with 83.1% accuracy and the region of the programmer with 92.5% accuracy.
Mathematical Modelling of RMSE Approach on Agricultural Financial Data Sets

In Statistics, Root Mean Square Error Approach (RMSE) plays an important role for Model fitting of agriculture data sets. The Present paper gives the whole information about the RMSE statistical analysis for different heterogeneous areas of data sets with standard parameters in agricultural applications. Initially, we fit a model for crops financial data sets and give complete statistical analysis through the RMSE approach. Finally, It attempts that it is the best measure to compare with the coefficient of determination.
Television : Advertising Value Perception among Students

The purpose of this paper is to examine perception of value of advertising on Facebook and television in both male and female students of University of Gujrat. Questionnaire was distributed among students of 6 major department of University of Gujrat. The final sample (n=300) was consists of both male and female students. Structural equation modeling was used in this study. The findings show that Ducoffe’s Ad Value was not fit for both Facebook and television. While irritation was also a factor that directly affect attitude toward advertisement. Entertainment and irritation have direct impact on attitude toward advertising. Future research must be included some other SNSs in comparison with radio or other medium. Revised Ad Value model will provide help for companies so they should remind entertainment and irritation factors while making Advertisements.
Extensions to behavioral genetic programming

In this work I introduce genetic programming [5] as a general technique to produce programs with arbitrary behavior. I discuss genetic programming and its application the task of symbolic regression. I introduce behavioral genetic programming [6] as an extension to genetic programming and explore various extensions to it. The codebase that I build is made sufficiently flexible to easily accommodate future adaptions to the behavioral genetic programming methodology. I test the performance of the implementation of behavioral genetic programming along with several extensions.
Chapter 3 Structure and Phase Behaviour of Binary Mixtures of Cholesterol with DPPC and DMPC 3 . 1

As discussed in chapter 1, phospholipids and cholesterol are important constituents of plasma membranes [1]. The distribution of cholesterol within the membranes is believed to be inhomogeneous and there is some evidence for the existence of cholesterol-rich lipid domains called rafts in these membranes, which are suspected to play a vital role in many cellular events [2, 3, 4, 5]. Although a wide variety of phospholipids are present in cell membranes, the major ones are phosphatidylcholines (PCs). Therefore, PC–cholesterol membranes are excellent model systems to study the effect of cholesterol on lipid membranes. This chapter deals with x-ray diffraction studies on the structure and phase behaviour of oriented multilayers of dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine (DPPC) and dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine (DMPC) at various cholesterol concentrations. Importance of lipid cholesterol interactions in bio-membranes has led to a large number of studies on these systems. These earlier studies are summarized in section 3.2. We describe our experimental results on DPPC-cholesterol and DMPC-cholesterol mixtures both at high (98 ± 2% ) and low (75 ± 2%) relative humidities (RH) in section 3.3. We have used oriented samples in our diffraction experiments which can provide more information about the in-plane ordering and chain tilt. The use of oriented samples has helped us to observe a new modulated phase induced
FSR Backpack: A Wearable Device to Improve Humanitarian Demining Operations

This paper presents the Field and Service Robotics (FSR) Backpack, a wearable kit that was designed to improve and speed up field demining operations. We describe the hardware and the integration of all sensors comprised in the kit, as well as the software developed, which enables real-time monitoring of humanitarian demining tasks. A preliminary field test was conducted to assess the localization system and overall potential of the FSR Backpack and we discuss the usability and advantages of using the device. The results show promising system capabilities and enable us to outline future directions of research work in the context of the EU FP7 TIRAMISU project.
Patch-based Denoising Algorithms for Single and Multi-view Images

In general, all single and multi-view digital images are captured using sensors, where they are often contaminated with noise, which is an undesired random signal. Such noise can also be produced during transmission or by lossy image compression. Reducing the noise and enhancing those images is among the fundamental digital image processing tasks. Improving the performance of image denoising methods, would greatly contribute to single or multi-view image processing techniques, e.g. segmentation, computing disparity maps, etc. Patch-based denoising methods have recently emerged as the state-of-the-art denoising approaches for various additive noise levels. This thesis proposes two patch-based denoising methods for single and multi-view images, respectively. A modification to the block matching 3D algorithm is proposed for single image denoising. An adaptive collaborative thresholding filter is proposed which consists of a classification map and a set of various thresholding levels and operators. These are exploited when the collaborative hardthresholding step is applied. Moreover, the collaborative Wiener filtering is improved by assigning greater weight when dealing with similar patches. For the denoising of multi-view images, this thesis proposes algorithms that takes a pair of noisy images captured from two different directions at the same time (stereoscopic images). The structural, maximum difference or the singular value decomposition-based similarity metrics is utilized for identifying locations of similar search windows in the input images. The non-local means algorithm is adapted for filtering these noisy multi-view images. The performance of both methods have been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively through a number of experiments using the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the mean structural similarity measure. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm for single image denoising outperforms the original block matching 3D algorithm at various noise levels. Moreover, the proposed algorithm for multi-view image denoising can effectively reduce noise and assist to estimate more accurate disparity maps at various noise levels.
De la reconnaissance automatique de la parole à l ’ analyse linguistique de corpus oraux

This contribution aims at giving an overview of present automatic speech recognition in French highlighting typical transcription problems for this language. Explanations for errors can be partially obtained by examining the acoustics of the speech data. Such investigations however do not only inform about system and/or speech modeling limitations, but they also contribute to discover, describe and quantify specificities of spoken language as opposed to written language and speakers’ speech performance. To automatically transcribe different speech genres (e.g. broadcast news vsconversations) specific acoustic corpora are used for training, suggesting that frequency of occurrence and acoustic realisations of phonemes vary significantly across genres. Some examples of corpus studies are presented describing phoneme frequencies and segment durations on different corpora. In the future largescale corpus studies may contribute to increase our knowledge of spoken language as well as the performance of automatic processing.
GEOMETRIZING RATES OF CONVERGENCE UNDER LOCAL DIFFERENTIAL

We study the problem of estimating a functional θ(P) of an unknown probability distribution P ∈ P in which the original iid sample X1, . , Xn is kept private even from the statistician via an α-local differential privacy constraint. Let ωTV denote the modulus of continuity of the functional θ over P, with respect to total variation distance. For a large class of loss functions l and a fixed privacy level α, we prove that the privatized minimax risk is equivalent to l(ωTV (n −1/2)) to within constants, under regularity conditions that are satisfied, in particular, if θ is linear and P is convex. Our results complement the theory developed by Donoho and Liu (1991) with the nowadays highly relevant case of privatized data. Somewhat surprisingly, the difficulty of the estimation problem in the private case is characterized by ωTV , whereas, it is characterized by the Hellinger modulus of continuity if the original data X1, . , Xn are available. We also find that for locally private estimation of linear functionals over a convex model a simple sample mean estimator, based on independently and binary privatized observations, always achieves the minimax rate. We further provide a general recipe for choosing the functional parameter in the optimal binary privatization mechanisms and illustrate the general theory in numerous examples. Our theory allows us to quantify the price to be paid for local differential privacy in a large class of estimation problems. This price appears to be highly problem specific.
MOTIVATIONS AND BENEFITS FOR IMPLEMENTING THE GREEN GLOBAL STANDARD

In recent years ISO 14001 certification has been experiencing major growth on the international stage. By the end of 2007 154,572 had been issued in 148 countries (ISO, 2008). In eight years the number of certificates issued worldwide had increased nearly eleven-fold. Attention should be drawn to the fact that around 40% of ISO 14001 certificates issued worldwide were issued within the EU. The weight of the USA, on the other hand, was confined to 3.5%, while China and Japan are the undeniable leaders in terms of the number of absolute certificates on a worldwide level, accounting for 20% and 18% of the total respectively. Spain ranks third in the number of certificates issued (ISO, 2008), and is the country in the world with greatest intensity of ISO 14001 certification (Marimón et al., 2006; Casadesús et al., 2008).
Reply to the comments of anonymous reviewer # 2 on manuscript entitled " Emission characteristic of refractory black carbon aerosols in the fresh Asian biomass burning : a perspective from laboratory experiment "

This manuscript reports results of rBC emissions and emission ratios from two different agricultural fuel types, which can be emitted during open agricultural burning and are relevant to both China and other regions where wheat and rapeseed are grown worldwide. The authors do a good job of citing previous work on ambient rBC emissions and the large uncertainties and variation in the data from different locations and sources. Unfortunately this work only focuses on rBC and does not measure non-rBC mass or aerosol optical properties. A large source of uncertainty in the aerosol optical properties from OBB is due to the presence of BrC as well as rBC, which the authors acknowledge in the introduction, but do not attempt to measure or quantify. For example, even with the assumption that the non-rBC aerosol is dominated by organics (and not direct measurement), this work could predict total aerosol optical properties and BrC absorption using the Saleh et al. 2015 (already cited) and Pokhrel et al. 2017 correlations of mass ratios with measured aerosol optical properties from different fuel types during a similar laboratory study on different biomass burning fuel emissions. A measurement of the total aerosol, Organic Aerosol and/or non-refractory aerosol mass to report rBC/OA or rBC/Total aerosol mass is used to bound BrC as referenced above as well as the total aerosol optical properties (single scatter albedo, SSA) that has been found to also be independent of fuel type and as a function of MCE. SSA is relevant to the total aerosol radiative impacts of OBB as reported Liu et al., 2014. For all of these reasons, the addition of non-rBC measurements if available for this data set would greatly enhance the impact of this work on the total aerosol optical and physical properties from near-field source emissions of two major crops from China, wheat and rapeseed, and any attempt to add this kind of total aerosol information if possible would be greatly supported.
Energy-Awareness in Network Dimensioning : a Fixed Charge Network Flow Formulation

Once a network has been designed (i.e., the resources that will compose it have been chosen), a periodical, on-line, process decides how the network resources will be used. This process is referred to as “network dimensioning”. One of the most common practices for acting in a green fashion in network dimensioning consists in resource consolidation. This technique aims at reducing the energy consumption due to devices underutilized at the considered interval of time. Given that the traffic level in standard networks approximately follows a well-known daily and weekly behavior [4], there is an opportunity to aggregate traffic flows over a subset of the network devices and links, allowing others to be switched off temporarily or be placed in sleep mode (if available). This solution shall preserve connectivity and Quality of Service (QoS), for instance by limiting the maximum utilization over any link. In other words, the required level of performance will still be guaranteed, but using an amount of resources that is dimensioned for the current network traffic demand rather than for the peak demand (or more). Flow aggregation may be achieved, for example, through a proper configuration of the routing weights.
AGENT-BASED SIMULATION APPLICATION IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

This work analyzes articles on the application of agent based simulation that have more recently arisen in the study of Operations Management. An exploratory study was conducted based on a literature review. In addition to this, this work ddelineates some theoretical gaps related to methodological aspects that should be worked out in order to facilitate the effective exploitation of the potential of agents in Operations Management. The cases were examined so as to develop a general understanding of the structure, elements and relations that comprise the operations system taken as subject model.
Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks: Single-Hop Broadcast is not enough

Safety Applications in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) pose tough requirements to the communication system: It has to strictly follow given quality-of-service constraints or to get along with very sparse or very dense networks. While the networking community works hard on these problems, their solutions are very often hard to integrate into well-known protocol or network-programming architectures. On the other hand, vehicular safety experts desire welldefined programming interfaces for the communication part of their applications. Very often, this is solved by using only the most simple network protocols such as single-hop broadcast or simplistic flooding, neglecting results of Ad-Hoc research. In this paper, we study the problems created by this dilemma and propose SLOPE (Self-Organizing Communication with Protocol Elements), an attempt to separate protocol functionality in application and communication domain leaving the common protocol practice with network layering and sockets. With this system and our current approach of implementation, creating VANET safety application protocols becomes as simple as extending a Java class and filling out some methods.
Standardization of Navaka Guggulu-An Ayurvedic polyherbal formulation

Standardization of the Ayurvedic medicine Navaka guggulu, known to be effective in medoroga – excess fat deposition in the body – has been achieved by following modern scientific quality control procedures, both for the raw material and the finished product. The obtained values of physical and chemical parameters for the finished product can be adopted to lay down new pharmacopoeial standards to be followed for traditional preparation of Navaka guggulu (synonym: Vyoshadi guggulu) with batch-to-batch consistency. The phytochemical constituents found to be present in the raw material used for the preparation of Navaka guggulu possibly facilitate the desirable therapeutic efficacy of the standardized medicinal formulation as a whole, and also could help in knowing the underlying mechanisms of pharmacological action.
On the computational complexity of some problems arising in partially-observed discrete-event systems

We study some problems arising in partially-observed discrete-event systems and examine the computational effort required for their solution. First, the problem of verifying the property of diagnosability is considered. In current works, the verification of diagnosability relies on the construction of the diagnoser, a step that requires exponential time in the worst case. We present a new polynomial time algorithm for deciding diagnosability. We also consider the problem of finding an observable event set with minimum cardinality with respect to three properties: diagnosability, normality, and observability. We prove that these search problems axe computationally hard by showing that the corresponding decision problems are NP-complete.
Aalborg Universitet Captive

Danish) Denne Ph.D.-afhandling inkluderer fire tidsskriftsa r ikler samt et bogkapitel. Disse publikationer undersøger hvordan nyetablerede forskningsog udvi klingsenheder (FoU enheder), etableret i udviklingslande, af internationale virksomheder fra andre lande, bliver i stand til at udføre deres mandat. I særdeleshed bliver det undersøgt hvordan de ansatte i disse enheder erhverver viden fra FoU hovedkvartererne i disse virksomheder, hvordan lokal talent bliver gjort brug af, og hvorledes lokale kilder til viden bliver engageret. Den teore tiske ramme er primært baseret på videndeling, men netværksteori er også gjort brug af. Undersøgel en bygger på casestudier fra fire multinationale selskaber, der stammer fra Skandinavien. Empiri er bl vet indsamlet fra Skandinavien, Kina og Indien. Afhandlingen stiller spørgmålstegn ved en a ntagelse i Uppsala-modellen, der forudsætter at forskellige typer af virksomhedsaktiviteter kan int ernationaliseres på samme måde. Resultaterne peger på vigtigheden af socialisering på tværs af F oU hovedkvarter og nyetablerede FoU-enheder, for at medarbejderne i sådanne enheder kan erhverve især tavs FoU viden. Dog kan dokumenteret FoU viden fra FoU hovedkvarteret også fremme disse nyetablerede FoU enheders evne til at udføre deres mandat. Resultaterne tyder på, at lokale tale nter i Kina og Indien er særligt egnet til at forbedre eksisterende produkter og processer. Men p å grund af manglende social-initiativ er det mindre relevant at bruge dette talent til at identi ficere og løse helt nye problemer. Afhandlingen undersøger også, hvordan lokale kilder til viden er engageret. Især samspil med lokale produktionsaktiviteter, og lokale universiteter undersøges.