Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasound in the Evaluation of the Infl ammatory Myopathies

The lack of precise measures of disease activity may complicate the care of patients with infl ammatory myopathies (IM). Techniques currently available to physicians in practice rely on measurement of function, strength, laboratory indices, muscle biopsy, and imaging techniques. Although MRI has become the method of choice to assess IM, it is expensive, diffi cult for some patients to tolerate, and contraindicated in those with pacemakers, aneurysm clips, and other ferromagnetic biomedical implants. Ultrasonography is an alternative approach to image the muscular system. Newer applications of ultrasound, such as power Doppler sonography (PDS), contrast-enhanced ultrasound, and sonoelastography, show some promising results in further characterizing normal and pathologic states. Technical improvements, including extended fi eldof-view, compound imaging, and harmonic imaging, further enhance one’s ability to display changes in muscle morphology. This article reviews the sonographic appearances of normal and pathologic muscle with respect to infl ammatory myopathies.
Broadband 300-GHz Power Amplifier MMICs in InGaAs mHEMT Technology

In this article, we report on compact solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) millimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) covering the 280–330-GHz frequency range. The technology used is a 35-nm gate-length InGaAs metamorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology. Two power amplifier MMICs are reported, based on a compact unit amplifier cell, which is parallelized two times using two different Wilkinson power combiners. The Wilkinson combiners are designed using elevated coplanar waveguide and air-bridge thin-film transmission lines in order to implement low-loss 70-Ω lines in the back-end-of-line of this InGaAs mHEMT technology. The five-stage SSPA MMICs achieve a measured small-signal gain around 20 dB over the 280–335-GHz frequency band. State-of-the-art output power performance is reported, achieving at least 13 dBm over the 286–310-GHz frequency band, with a peak output power of 13.7 dBm (23.4 mW) at 300 GHz. The PA MMICs are designed for a reduced chip width while maximizing the total gate width of 512 μm in the output stage, using a compact topology based on cascode and common-source devices, improving the output power per required chip width significantly.
Acceleration and Phase Space Manipulation of Relativistic Electron Beams in Nano- and Micrometer-Scale Dielectric Structures

This thesis is about simulations, proof-of-principle experimental setups and first test experiments for new ultra-compact particle accelerators based on dielectric structures. Due to the high damage threshold of nanoand micrometer-scale dielectrics in the optical regime, accelerating fields on the order of GV/m can be achieved. This is more than an order of magnitude higher than what is possible with conventional RF-based technology, overcoming size limitations in high energy accelerators. The Accelerator on a CHip International Program (ACHIP) aims to demonstrate a working prototype of an all-optical, ultra-compact particle accelerator, based on this technology. Being part of the ACHIP collaboration, DESY will conduct related test experiments at its ARES linac. The design of this experiment is a central topic of this thesis. At ARES, it is planned to inject ultrashort relativistic electron bunches into laser-illuminated dielectric grating structures (DLA). The goal of the experiment is to show for the first time net-acceleration with low energy spread growth. In addition to that, a scheme for phase-synchronous acceleration of microbunch trains is planned to be implemented, enabling the demonstration of stable shot-to-shot operation. To this end, the layout of the first experimental area at the ARES linac and several key components were designed. The whole experiment was simulated start-to-end both using well established codes, as well as the novel code DLATracker, which was programmed as part of this thesis. It enables orders of magnitude faster beam simulation in DLA structures compared to traditional particle-in-cell codes. Also, numerical simulation studies were performed to investigate solutions for transverse focusing in DLAs, as well as the challenge of sub-fs synchronization and timing. In addition to the ACHIP-related experiment, two other experiments based on micrometer-scale dielectric lined waveguides (DLW) are proposed in this work. These two experiments can show that dielectric structures are suitable to be used as efficient phase space manipulation and diagnostic devices in both novel and conventional accelerator contexts. In the first experiment, planned to be conducted at the REGAE accelerator at DESY, sub-fs bunch length measurement resolution is achieved in simulation using a sub-THz-driven DLW-based transverse deflecting structure (TDS). The second proposed experiment is centered around 3D-printed DLWs that can be used as passive longitudinal phase space synthesizers. This thesis thus explores the physics and the potential of nanoand micrometer-scale dielectric accelerators, describes the design of required proof-of-principle experiments and finally discusses the possible application reach.
Ensemble-Based Targeted Observation Method Applied to Radar Radial Velocity Observations on Idealized Supercell Low-Level Rotation Forecasts: A Proof of Concept

The potential future installation of a multifunction phased-array radar (MPAR) network will provide capabilities of case-specific adaptive scanning. Knowing the impacts adaptive scanning may have on short-term forecasts will influence scanning strategy decision-making in hopes to produce the most optimal ensemble forecast while also benefiting human severe weather warning decision-making. An ensemble-based targeted observation algorithm is applied to an observing system simulation experiment (OSSE) where the impacts of synthetic idealized supercell radial velocity observations are estimated before the observations are “collected” and assimilated. The forecast metric of interest is the low-level rotation forecast metric (0–1-km updraft helicity), a surrogate for tornado prediction. It is found that the ensemble-based targeted observation approach can reasonably estimate the true error variance reduction when an effective method that treats sampling error is applied, the period of model forecast is associated with less degrees of nonlinearity, and the observation information content relative to the background forecast is larger. In some scenarios, a subset of a full-volume scan assimilation produces better forecasts than all observations within the full volume. Assimilating the full-volume scan increases the number of potential spurious correlations arising between the forecast metric and radial velocity observation induced state perturbations, which may degrade the forecast metric accuracy.
Molecular Cloning and Functional Characterization of Bisabolene Synthetase (SaBS) Promoter from Santalum album

Bisabolene-type sesquiterpenoids, which have multiple bioactivities, including anticancer activity, are one of the main groups of compounds in the essential oil extracted from Santalum album L. and other Santalum species. Bisabolene synthetase (SaBS) is a key enzyme for the synthesis of bisabolene in S. album, but the regulation of the SaBS gene’s expression is poorly understood. In this study, a 1390-bp promoter sequence of the SaBS gene was isolated from the leaves of six-year-old S. album. A bioinformatics analysis showed that certain environment stresses and phytohormone-activated cis-acting elements were distributed in different regions of the SaBS promoter (PSaBS). Transgenic Arabidopsis carrying full-length PSaBS had significantly higher β-glucuronidase (GUS) activity than the untreated control after treatment with salicylic acid (SA), suggesting that PSaBS is a SA-inducible promoter. Histochemical GUS staining and GUS fluorometric assays of transgenic Arabidopsis showed that the GUS activity directed by PSaBS was mainly expressed in stem tissue, followed by leaves and flowers. Moreover, different regions of PSaBS showed significantly different GUS activity. A 171-bp fragment upstream of the transcriptional initiation codon (ATG) is the core promoter region of PSaBS. Our results provide insight into and a greater understanding of the transcriptional regulation mechanism of the SaBS gene, which could serve as an alternative inducible promoter for transgenic plant breeding.
Evaluating the Impact of Building Information Modeling (BIM) on Mass House Building Projects

This paper aims to identify and investigate the factors affecting the goals of mass-housing building projects due to the use of building information modeling (BIM). A descriptive-survey method was used to collect necessary data. Fifty respondents from the target sectors and experts in the field of modeling building information participated in self-selection survey. The tools of collecting data included three questionnaires regarding three phases of construction work: pre-construction, during construction and post-construction, which were developed based on the three indices of cost, time and quality. The face, content and construct validity of the questionnaires were confirmed after several rounds of testing. The reliability coefficient of the pre-construction, during the construction and post-construction questionnaires were 0.923, 0.917 and 0.876, respectively. The results show that the F-statistic is significant for the difference between the three groups (pre-construction, during construction and post-construction) at the 0.01 level. The results confirmed that BIM has a great influence on a project in terms of meeting time, cost and quality objectives through the whole life cycle of a construction project: during pre-construction, construction, and post-construction stages.
CD4 Count Progression of Adult HIV Patients Under Art Follow Up At Mekelle General Hospital, Tigray Region: A Longitudinal Data Analysis Approach

Background: The number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in low- and middle-income countries continues to show encouraging growth, indicating that the global effort to scale up HIV treatment has exceeded 15 million people by the end of 2015. Methods: A retrospective cohort study, comprising of the quantitative method of data collection was conducted among randomly selected 210 adult ART users enrolled in the first 6 months of 2011 and followed up to mid-2016 which is a five year follow up. Data were analyzed using a linear mixed model to identify the determinant factors, which importantly incorporates the effect of factors over time. Results: Ninety-five (45%) were males and 115 (55%) were females. Composition of patients’ WHO clinical stage were; stage I (25 (11.8%)), stage II (30 (14.2%)), stage III (102 (48.8%)), and stage IV (52 (24.6%)). The mean CD4+ count at baseline was 218 cells. The progression of CD4+ count for males is lower than that of female over time (coef. =-0.0779, p-value=0.0062). There was a direct relationship between time in month and CD4+ count progression i.e., the CD4+ count progression of the adult HIV patients was increasing during the subsequent number of times measured or followed up under the ART clinic (coef. = 0.0435, p-value=0.0000). Patients with WHO stage II (coef. = -0.0982, p-value=0.0109) , stage III (coef. = -0.0884, p-value = 0.0010) and stage IV (coef. = 0.0859, p-value = 0.0095) had lower CD4+ count than the reference category WHO clinical stage I over time. Conclusion: In conclusion, we found that the WHO clinical stage, Time, Weight, Gender and the Interaction effects of Weight with Time were significantly associated with the progression of CD4+ counts over time.
Distinguishing Firefighters With Subthreshold PTSD From Firefighters With Probable PTSD or Low Symptoms

Abstract A substantial proportion of professional firefighters experience PTSD symptoms at levels high enough to qualify for a probable diagnosis. However, firefighters with subthreshold levels for clinical diagnosis may also experience significant difficulties. For this study, 164 professional firefighters completed measures assessing PTSD symptoms, job-related outcomes, and problems with substance use. Results indicated that firefighters with subthreshold levels of PTSD symptoms reported higher levels of job burnout compared to peers with fewer symptoms. Overall, study results suggest the importance of addressing the needs of firefighters who experience PTSD symptoms at levels below that of clinical diagnosis.
Clinical effect of urokinase (60, 000units/day) on cerebral infarction-camparative study by means of multiple center double blind test

The clinical effect of thrombolytic therapy with urokinase (UK) at the daily dosis of 60, 000 units (high dosis group-H) on cerebral infarction was estimated by means of multiple center double blind tests in comparison with that of cases treated with its 6, 000 units (low dosis group-L). The patients involved in this study were limited to those of cerebral infarction who were not caused by embolism coming from other organs such as endocardium, lung and deep vein of lower extremities, and started their treatment within two weeks after the onset. The cases with severer disorder of consciousness than Grade II in the International Classification of Sanity Disorder, were excluded from this study.The general improvement after one week UK treatment was realized to be significantly more in H-group than in L-(38% to 24%), but that at three weeks after stopping this treatment turned to be not significant (58% to 40%) although H-group showed still some higher tendency of improvement than L-group.The utility of UK judged comprehensively from the improvement and side effect was also calculated to be significantly more with high dosis than low (36% to 22%) after one week treatment and three weeks after stopping the treatment as well.This difference between H- and L-group in utility was more obvious in cases with lower severity. The apparent side effect invited during this treatment with high or low dosis was almost none and no difference was observed between H- and L-groups.From these findings it was supposed that high dosis administration of UK than 60, 000 units/day might be more effective in severe cases of Grade II.
Product Quantized Collaborative Filtering

Because of strict response-time constraints, efficiency of top-k recommendation is crucial for real-world recommender systems. Locality sensitive hashing and index-based methods usually store both index data and item feature vectors in main memory, so they handle a limited number of items. Hashing-based recommendation methods enjoy low memory cost and fast retrieval of items, but suffer from large accuracy degradation. In this paper, we propose product Quantized Collaborative Filtering (pQCF) for better trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. pQCF decomposes a joint latent space of users and items into a Cartesian product of low-dimensional subspaces, and learns clustered representation within each subspace. A latent factor is then represented by a short code, which is composed of subspace cluster indexes. A user’s preference for an item can be efficiently calculated via table lookup. We then develop block coordinate descent for efficient optimization and reveal the learning of latent factors is seamlessly integrated with quantization. We further investigate an asymmetric pQCF, dubbed as QCF, where user latent factors are not quantized and shared across different subspaces. The extensive experiments with 6 real-world datasets show that pQCF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing-based CF and QCF increases recommendation accuracy compared to pQCF.
Towards Diffractive Ways of Knowing Women’s Moving Bodies: A Baradian Experiment With the Fitbit–Motherhood Entanglement

This article presents a diffractive experiment in thinking about mothers’ engagements with self-tracking technologies as materially and discursively produced phenomena. Inspired by St. Pierre’s claim that any empirical adventure with new materialisms must begin by living with theory, we share our feminist, collaborative journey with Fitbits and Karen Barad’s agential realism to consider what might emerge when we begin thinking and living with concepts such as diffraction, entanglement, and intra-action. Unfolding within the uncertain intersections of theory, method, and data, our diffractive methodology prompted understandings of maternal, moving bodies as entangled agencies in continuous states of becoming and fostered generative feminist relationships that allowed us to embrace new ways of thinking, knowing, and being.
Modular Change in Platform Ecosystems and Routine Mirroring in Organizations

Organizational routines involve modular digital technologies that are part of larger platform ecosystems that often transcend organizational boundaries. Change in organizational routines is thus interwoven with innovation and associated change in digital platforms. To get at this “embedded” routine change, we use the concept of modular operators to concep-tualize how changes to digital technologies in platform ecosystems are mirrored in changes in the organizational routines in which these technologies are implicated. We distinguish between enabling and constraining impacts and develop a set of propositions to move towards a theory of “routine mirroring. ” We use the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as a base example.
An End-to-End Named Entity Recognition Model for Chinese

Named entity recognition is an important basic task in natural language processing. This paper proposes a named entity recognition method for end-to-end and efficient deep-loop neural networks. Using BERT to train sub-vectors as raw input enables the model to obtain more comprehensive text information, and at the same time, the BiLSTM network is focused on the attention mechanism, so that the network pays more attention to the key information in the text and ignores the redundant information to improve the recognition efficiency of the model. Finally, the relationship between any two tags is captured by the CRF layer, and the entire sentence is decoded and predicted. Experiments show that the method performs well on MSRA corpus.
Bayesian copy number detection and association in large-scale studies

Germline copy number variants (CNVs) increase risk for many diseases, yet detection of CNVs and quantifying their contribution to disease risk in large-scale studies is challenging due to biological and technical sources of heterogeneity that vary across the genome within and between samples. We developed an approach called CNPBayes to identify latent batch effects in genome-wide association studies involving copy number, to provide probabilistic estimates of integer copy number across the estimated batches, and to fully integrate the copy number uncertainty in the association model for disease. Applying a hidden Markov model (HMM) to identify CNVs in a large multi-site Pancreatic Cancer Case Control study (PanC4) of 7598 participants, we found CNV inference was highly sensitive to technical noise that varied appreciably among participants. Applying CNPBayes to this dataset, we found that the major sources of technical variation were linked to sample processing by the centralized laboratory and not the individual study sites. Modeling the latent batch effects at each CNV region hierarchically, we developed probabilistic estimates of copy number that were directly incorporated in a Bayesian regression model for pancreatic cancer risk. Candidate associations aided by this approach include deletions of 8q24 near regulatory elements of the tumor oncogene MYC and of Tumor Suppressor Candidate 3 (TUSC3). Laboratory effects may not account for the major sources of technical variation in genome-wide association studies. This study provides a robust Bayesian inferential framework for identifying latent batch effects, estimating copy number, and evaluating the role of copy number in heritable diseases.
Can placebo administered in the guise of caffeine reduce the misinformation effect?

: Research suggests that placebo can reduce the misinformation effect. We aimed to examine for the first time whether placebo administered in the guise of caffeine can reduce the misinformation effect. One hundred and twenty--three healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to four groups in a 2 Placebo (Present, Not Present) × 2 Narrative (Misleading, Correct) study design. Participants from placebo groups drank 100 ml of placebo solution. They were told that it was water mixed with caffeine which could positively influence their memory. After three minutes, they watched a short movie clip as an original event and read a narrative with misleading details or correct details as a postevent information; they then completed a 22 -item, two -alternative forced -choice questionnaire. The results reveal that the misinformation effect occurred. Although participants in the placebo with misinformation group scored better than participants who did not drink placebo and read the narrative containing misleading details, the difference was not statistically significant. Thus, it is concluded that placebo might not be enough to reduce the misinformation effect when it is administered in the guise of caffeine.
Size miniaturization of chipless RFID tag using metamaterial structure

A Chipless RFID based Modified Complementary Split Ring Resonator (MCSRR) with Different Width (DW) which is metamaterial structure is designed using PET substrate ( =3, loss tangent = 0.025 at 2 GHz) to miniaturize effective length size of conventional split ring resonator. The MCSRR structure with DW provides less size about 17% compared with the conventional MCSRR structure. The single MCSRR resonator with different width only requires a frequency range of 12 % of Complementary Split Ring Resonator (CSRR) resonator. The slotted MCSRR resonator is located underneath substrate and within substrate is connected with transmission lines. The insertion loss value of MCSRR resonator is used to encode ID information of chipless RFID with maximizing ID information using Frequency Position technique. The best swapping parameter for encoding ID number information is split gap of both ring compare with other parameter such as spacing between ring and width of ring.
Review on the Epidemiology and Economic Impact of Foot and Mouth Disease in Ethiopia

Absract: Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) is the most contagious, acute and economically important transboundary animal disease affecting cloven hoofed wild and domestic animals. It is caused by a virus that belongs to the genus aphthovirus of the family picornaviridae. There are seven recognized serotypes of FMD (O, A, C, Asia1, SAT1, SAT2 and SAT3) which differ in distribution across the world. It becomes endemic in Ethiopia and leads a great economic loss in the livestock’s sector. Therefore, the objective of this study is to review the epidemiology and economic impact of FMD in Ethiopia. The seroprevalence, temporal, serotype and regional distribution, topotypes present, the direct and indirect economic impacts of FMD in Ethiopia are reviewed in this seminar paper. Foot and mouth disease outbreaks are occurred in Ethiopia every year and reported from all regions of the country. However, most of the outbreaks are reported from central, Southern and Southeastern part of Ethiopia associated with the movement of animals for trade, agro ecology, animal density and production system of the community. These outbreaks of FMD results in huge economic loss directly due to production losses and indirectly due to export restriction, control and prevention costs. Therefore, the epidemiology of the serotypes present should be studied in detail. This helps to develop a vaccine which is effective to all the serotypes present in Ethiopia. Control of animal’s movement should be strengthened to limit spreading of serotypes.