Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Author`s Reply

We thank the authors for their valuable evaluation of our article entitled “Assessment of left atrial volume and mechanical functions using real-time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT3DE) in patients with mitral annular calcification” published in Anatol J Cardiol 2016; 16: 42-7 (1). They showed that the diastolic functions of tissue Doppler imaging can be used in the evaluation of mitral annular calcification (2–3). No artifacts/noise was mentioned in that study, and in our patients, we did not experience any problems when evaluating the mitral annulus movements on tissue Doppler. As stated by the author, in the comparison of the two groups with respect to cigarette smoking, a difference was seen originating from the two groups. We also wish to state that 7 subjects in the control group were smokers (p=0.337). This mistake happened due to the spelling errors. In the evaluation of diastolic functions, mitral valve velocities are evaluated proportionally. Just as a difference was seen between the study groups in E/Em or E/A as a marker of impaired diastolic function, that no difference was seen of Am between the two groups was not considered significant (4) . The max Left atrial volume index (LAVI) in the MAC patient group was found to be 26.9±6.1 mL/m2, measured with RT3DE3. In the Guidelines for Left Ventricular Dysfunction (5), left atrial (LA) volumes are evaluated using different methods. In a study by Russo et al. (2), the LAVI max mL/m2 value measured with RT3DE was found to be 22.9±5.9 in normal individuals and 22.7±5.3 in those with Grade 1, 25.0±10.9 in those with Grade 2, and 35.3±11.5 in those with Grade 3 diastolic dysfunction. The LAVI max mL/m2 values of our study are compatible with these (3, 4). Patients with suspected or diagnosed coronary artery disease were not included in our study. No diagnostic method was applied toward non-obstructive coronary artery disease. The main and primary objective of the study was to evaluate the diastolic parameters that could explain the reason for impaired left atrial function.
The role of Ca2+ in volume regulation induced by Na+‐coupled alanine uptake in single proximal tubule cells isolated from frog kidney

1 It has been suggested that epithelial cells maintain cell volume and function, in the face of changes in the rate of transepithelial transport, by activation of volume‐regulatory pathways. 2 The aim of the following study was to examine directly the effect of an alteration in Na+‐coupled alanine transport on cell length in single proximal tubule cells isolated from frog kidney. 3 An optical technique was used to examine the change in cell length induced by 5 mM L‐alanine. 4 On addition of L‐alanine to the bath there was an initial increase in cell length to a peak value. This was followed by two types of response. In eighteen out of thirty‐one cells a typical volume‐regulatory response was observed. The remaining cells showed no volume regulation. 5 Volume regulation was not affected by the removal of extracellular Ca2+. The mean degrees of recovery were 159 ± 21 % (n= 18) and 144 ± 18 % (n= 8) in the presence and absence of Ca2+, respectively. 6 Volume regulation was inhibited by depletion of intracellular Ca2+ stores, or in the presence of either Gd3+ or DIDS. The mean degrees of regulation were 55.4 ± 9.2 % (n= 7), 68.2 ± 18.8 % (n= 7) and 69.1 ± 14.3 % (n= 7), respectively. 7 The alanine‐induced increases in cell length were both stereospecific and Na+ dependent. 8 The evidence suggests that volume regulation induced by Na+‐coupled alanine uptake may be dependent on the release of Ca2+ from intracellular stores. This is in contrast to volume regulation induced by hypotonic shock, which appears to require extracellular Ca2+. Results obtained using a hypotonic shock should, therefore, be viewed with caution.
Multi Target Tracking by Linking Tracklets with a Convolutional Neural Network

The computer vision community has developed many multi-object tracking methods in various fields. The focus is put on traffic scenes and video-surveillance applications where tracking object features are challenging. Indeed, in these particular applications, objects can be partially or totally occluded and can appear differently. Usual detection methods generally fail to leverage those limitations. To deal with this, a framework for multiobject tracking based on the linking of tracklets (mini-trajectories) is proposed. Despite the number of errors (false positives or missing detections) made by the Faster R-CNN detector, short-term Faster R-CNN detection similarities are tracked. The goal is to get tracklets in a given number of frames. We suggest to associate tracklets and apply an update function to correct the trajectories. The experiments show that on the one hand, our approach outperforms the detector to find the undetected objects. And on the other hand, the developed method eliminates the false positives and shows the effectiveness of tracking.
Verification and Validation for Turbulent Mixing Simulations

We present highlights from and supplementary material related to two recent studies giving verification and validation of a new approach to the simulation of turbulent mixing. The verification is based on (i) a mesh refinement study of a circular Richtmyer-Meshkov unstable flow, (ii) code comparison to a well documented code and (iii) comparison to a simple analytic model. The validation is based on simulation agreement with Rayleigh-Taylor unstable experiments of Smeeton-Youngs and of Mueschke-Andrews. The mesh refinement verification gives convergence for such molecular level variables as the probability density functions for the concentrations, temperatures and a chemical reaction rate. The validation study, beyond obtaining near perfect agreement with experiment, explores the various factors in the simulations that result in this agreement and in the differences between the two experiments. The significant variables are: fluid transport parameters, dimensionless groups (not widely recognized to be significant) to characterize the dominant short wavelength initial perturbations and experimentally measured (long wavelength) initial perturbations. PACS numbers: 47.27. wj, 47.27. th, 47.27-i Verification and Validation for Turbulent Mixing Simulations 2
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory correlates of lateralized cerebral lesions and aphasic deficits.

In the present study, we investigated the emotional adjustment of brain-damaged patients as a function of (a) the hemispheric location of the lesion and (b) the degree of aphasia as measured by the HalsteadWepman Aphasia Screening Test. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profiles of 35 patients with right-hemisphere lesions were compared with those of 25 patients with left-hemisphere lesions. Both samples produced similar composite profiles that indicated the presence of mild dysphoria, dissatisfaction, withdrawal, decreased initiative, and mild somatic preoccupations. Within the left-hemisphere-damaged group, significant correlations emerged between the degree of aphasic disability and MMPI F, Pa, Pi, and Sc. When the variance in MMPI scores due to premorbid status (education) was partialled out, however, these correlations dropped to nonsignifican t levels. These findings failed to provide support for the widely held association of speech-related deficits with psychopathology. A number of investigators (Flor-Henry, 1976; Gainotti, 1972) have reported a connection between lateralizcd brain lesions and specific emotional disturbances in brain-damaged patients. In general, symptoms of depression, withdrawal, and anxiety have been associated with impairment of the dominant hemisphere (Berent, 1981), whereas symptoms of denial, indifference, and euphoria have been linked with nondominant hemispheric pathology (Hecean, 1962). In the present study, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was used to assess the emotional status of patients with unilateral brain lesions. Previous MMPI studies of patients with lateralized lesions have yielded mixed results. Despite the clinical lore, several MMPI investigators have failed to find any differences in patients' emotional adjustment as a function of lesion laterality (Dikmen & Reitan, 1974a; Friedman, 1950; Meier & French, 1965; Vogel, 1962). Dikmen and Reitan (1974b), however, found evidence suggesting that the MMPI may be sensitive to specific verbal deficits associated with cerebral impairment. Dysphasic symptoms, for example, were associated with elevations on the MMPI F, Psychopathic Deviate (Pd), and Schizophrenia (Sc) scales. Slightly higher elevations on MMPI variables in brain-damaged individuals have also been associated with functional deficits of a verbal-intellectual nature (Dikmen & Reitan, 1977; Osmon & Golden, 1978). In the two most recently published MMPI studies of patients with lateralized lesions Black (1975) and Gasparrini, Satz, Heilman, and Coolidge (1978) found profile differences due to lesion laterality, and they attributed these differences to the structural loss of brain tissue rather than to any specific loss of abilities. In
Phytochemical Analysis and Free Radical Scavenging Potential of Herbal and Medicinal Plant Extracts

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the phytochemical constitution and antioxidant activity of methanolic extract of dried leaves of four medicinally important herbs Ocimum sanctum, Mentha spicata, Trigonella foenum-graecum, Spinacia oleracea utilized in our routine diet along with one medicinal important tree Gmelina arborea. Qualitative analysis of phytochemical constituents’ viz. tannins, phlobatannins, saponins, flavonoids, steroids, alkaloids, quinones, coumarin, terpenoids and cardiac glycosides and quantitative analysis of total phenolics, alkaloids, saponins and flavonoids was performed by the well-known tests protocol available in the literature. Antioxidant activity was studied through DPPH and reducing power assay. The phytochemical screening revealed the extract richness in Tannins, Phlobatannin, Saponins, Flavonoids, Steroids and Alkaloids. Quantitative analysis of phenolics, alkaloids, saponins and flavonoids had revealed that Mentha spicata possessed maximum phenolic (18.41 %), Gmelina arborea highest alkaloids (5.66 %) & flavonoids (22.80 %) and Trigonella foenum-graecum highest saponin (50.12 %) contents. Antioxidant activity was determined by DPPH radical scavenging and reducing power assays. IC50 values obtained by DPPH activity for Mentha spicata crude extract was found to be 170µg/ml and reducing power was found to be maximum (1.92) at 1mg/ml concentration. The results suggest that Mentha spicata has promising antioxidant activity and could serve as potential source of natural antioxidants.
DNN-Based Ultrasound-to-Speech Conversion for a Silent Speech Interface

In this paper we present our initial results in articulatory-to-acoustic conversion based on tongue movement recordings us-ing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the fact that deep learning has revolutionized several ﬁelds, so far only a few researchers have applied DNNs for this task. Here, we compare various possible feature representation approaches combined with DNN-based regression. As the input, we recorded synchronized 2D ultrasound images and speech signals. The task of the DNN was to estimate Mel-Generalized Cepstrum-based Line Spectral Pair (MGC-LSP) coefﬁcients, which then served as input to a standard pulse-noise vocoder for speech synthesis. As the raw ultrasound images have a relatively high resolution, we experimented with various feature selection and transformation approaches to reduce the size of the feature vectors. The synthetic speech signals resulting from the various DNN con-ﬁgurations were evaluated both using objective measures and a subjective listening test. We found that the representation that used several neighboring image frames in combination with a feature selection method was preferred both by the subjects taking part in the listening experiments, and in terms of the Normalized Mean Squared Error. Our results may be useful for creating Silent Speech Interface applications in the future
[Measured weight, self-perceived weight, and associated factors in adolescents].

OBJECTIVE To compare weight self-perception and nutritional status based on objective measurements of weight, height, and skin folds in adolescents, and to evaluate factors associated with disagreement between these measures. METHODS The sample included the 1993 birth cohort from the city of Pelotas, Brazil, who were interviewed at home in 2004 and 2005. The study outcome resulted from the comparison between nutritional status and the weight self-perception of adolescents, and was divided into three categories: underestimation, agreement, and overestimation. The explanatory variables were sex, skin color, accumulated goods index, physical activity, eating habits, discrimination, dieting, feeling of well-being, and opinion of the adolescent concerning the perception of his/her parents regarding the adolescent's weight. Multivariate logistic regression was used for statistical analysis. RESULTS A total of 4 452 interviews were conducted (87.5% of original cohort). Mean age was 11 years. The analysis of nutritional status revealed that 7.1% were underweight, 69.8% normal weight, 11.6% overweight, and 11.6% obese. The analysis of self-perceived weight revealed that 19% saw themselves as thin or very thin, 56% believed their weight was normal, and 25% saw themselves as fat or very fat. Global agreement between weight self-perception and nutritional status was 65% (kappa = 0.36). Weight underestimation occurred in 24.9% of boys vs. 20.3% of girls. Overestimation occurred in 15.8% of girls vs. 8.5% of boys. CONCLUSIONS Girls tended to overestimate their weight, and boys, to underestimate it. There was a strong association between the opinion of adolescents concerning their parents' view of the adolescent's body and self-perceived weight.
Folding of a large protein at high structural resolution

Significance This study characterizes the initially collapsed but not yet folded denatured state ensemble of the large two-domain maltose binding protein (MBP), its contribution to the folding process, and an obligatory on-pathway native-like folding intermediate and probable further intermediates. The results add MBP to the growing list of proteins that fold through a distinct pathway with obligatory intermediates. Kinetic folding of the large two-domain maltose binding protein (MBP; 370 residues) was studied at high structural resolution by an advanced hydrogen-exchange pulse-labeling mass-spectrometry method (HX MS). Dilution into folding conditions initiates a fast molecular collapse into a polyglobular conformation (<20 ms), determined by various methods including small angle X-ray scattering. The compaction produces a structurally heterogeneous state with widespread low-level HX protection and spectroscopic signals that match the equilibrium melting posttransition-state baseline. In a much slower step (7-s time constant), all of the MBP molecules, although initially heterogeneously structured, form the same distinct helix plus sheet folding intermediate with the same time constant. The intermediate is composed of segments that are distant in the MBP sequence but adjacent in the native protein where they close the longest residue-to-residue contact. Segments that are most HX protected in the early molecular collapse do not contribute to the initial intermediate, whereas the segments that do participate are among the less protected. The 7-s intermediate persists through the rest of the folding process. It contains the sites of three previously reported destabilizing mutations that greatly slow folding. These results indicate that the intermediate is an obligatory step on the MBP folding pathway. MBP then folds to the native state on a longer time scale (∼100 s), suggestively in more than one step, the first of which forms structure adjacent to the 7-s intermediate. These results add a large protein to the list of proteins known to fold through distinct native-like intermediates in distinct pathways.
Assessment of vision-related quality of life measures in ophthalmic conditions

In this researching this report, a literature search of Entrez PubMed revealed 178 suitable articles, published between January 2000 and April 2006, concerning vision-related quality of life and progressive sight loss. Of these, 147 concerned previously developed instruments and mainly focused on two areas: descriptions of health-related quality of life in certain diseases or treatments (n = 99) and descriptions of psychometric properties of an instrument (n = 48). A total of 17 new instruments were described in 31 articles. The large number of articles reflects the growing awareness of the need for patients’ self-assessment of visual function; it may also reflect the difficulty of developing psychometrically robust instruments.
Vision with Equiluminant Colour Contrast: 2. A Large-Scale Technique and Observations

A simple technique is described for producing large-scale, tritanopic displays. The technique reproduces the various phenomena of vision with equiluminous-colour contrast that have previously been reported with red/green stimuli. It is, however, much less demanding technically, robust against artifacts, and can be used on large-scale scenes. One advantage of the technique is that a piece of blue filter can be used individually by each observer to compare quickly tritanopic and luminance conditions.
Women's experience of SLE-related fatigue: a focus group interview study.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to describe women's experience of SLE-related fatigue, how they express the feeling of fatigue, impact on life and strategies developed to manage fatigue in daily living. METHOD Seven, semi-structured focus group discussions with 33 women were audio-taped, transcribed verbatim and analysed according to qualitative content analysis. RESULTS Perceptions of SLE-related fatigue were sorted into four themes. Nature of Fatigue, involved the sensation, occurrence and character. Aspects Affected by Fatigue described emotions that arose together with fatigue as well as aspects of work, family life, social contacts and leisure activities that were affected by fatigue. Striving Towards Power and Control concluded the array of ways used to manage daily life and were categorized into the mental struggle, structure, restrict and provide. Factors Influencing the Perception of Fatigue described understanding from their surroundings and pain as strongly influencing the experience and perception of fatigue. CONCLUSION SLE-related fatigue was portrayed as an overwhelming phenomenon with an unpredictable character, resulting in the feeling that fatigue dominates and controls most situations in life. The choice of strategies was described as a balance with implications for how fatigue limited a person's life. Health care professionals are advised to take a more active role to empower people with SLE to find their own balance as a way to achieve a feeling of being in control.
High order neural networks with reduced numbers of interconnection weights

A multilayered network with the first layer consisting of parabolic neurons (constrained second-order neurons) is proposed. Each parabolic neuron requires only N+2 interconnections (where N is the number of inputs), which is virtually the same as a linear neuron. Such a network needs fewer neurons or layers than standard backpropagation (BP) to solve the same problem, and it converges much faster. The training is achieved through the backpropagation learning law. It is concluded that incorporating parabolic neurons onto the BP network can significantly improve the network's performance without resulting in an explosive number of interconnection weights
Induced signals in X-ray detectors with steering grid geometry

Oncoming pixelated X-ray detectors with semiconductor sensor layers made of CdTe or GaAs can be operated in single photon counting mode. Each charge cloud generated by an interacting photon induces a signal in the electronics which is amplified, shaped and compared to a threshold. This process needs to be very fast for high flux applications, which leads to the necessity of understanding the signal induction process. The adjoint simulation of the shape and timing of the signals can be done with the finite element software COMSOL using the convection and diffusion package. For a given sensor material, the signals depend on the geometry of the electrodes and this offers ways to optimise the size and shape of the electrodes. Even additional steering electrodes can be implemented which will be the main part of this contribution. Fully 3D simulations have been carried out to study the possible effects of steering electrodes on the signal shape.
Waveguide Probes for Complex Permittivity Measurement

Paper deals with the complex permittivity measurement of biological tissues. Application of a waveguide probe for this measurement is shown. A non-destructive and non-invasive method based on reflection coefficient measurement attaching the material under test is used. New types of the probes are under investigation - the section of waveguide with H cross-section, the section of waveguide with the rectangular cross-section and with shorted walls, the section of waveguide with inserted dielectric wedge and finally the section of waveguide filled by the liquid dielectric. Properties of these prototypes are studied in the frequency range from 300 kHz to 3 GHz. The method of finite difference in time domain is utilized for the numerical modeling and simulation of the reflection coefficient. The condition for the input reflection coefficient of the waveguide probe is the range from (0.7 - 0.3) in the broad frequency band. Although the waveguide is a narrowband microwave component, its modifications could have broadband frequency behavior of the reflection coefficient. Results indicate that the most interesting and suitable is the solution with removable dielectric. This liquid dielectric with the low value of permittivity has significant influence on the cut-off frequency of waveguide with dominant mode propagation.
Phase-Change Memory With Multifin Thin-Film-Transistor Driver Technology

In this letter, we have demonstrated the integration of phase-change memory (PCM) with thin-film-transistor (TFT) drivers for system-on-panel applications. To overcome the low-current drive and coarse design rule in TFT technology, thermal engineering to concentrate the thermal energy is used to achieve PCM cell programming at a low programming current. In addition, TFTs with multifin structure are implemented as PCM drivers to improve the current drive. The RESET/SET resistance read window of a fabricated test array can be maintained at 60 after programming cycles and with a ten-year retention time at 390 K.