Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A multiphase variational level set approach for modelling human embryos

We propose to model the 3d shape and relative position of blastomeres confined inside the zona pellucida in human embryos with a multiphase variational level set approach. The blastomeres and the volume bounded by the interior surface of the zona pellucida are modelled as elastical objects with different surface tension. The object positions are constrained by measurements from light microscopy images and a non-overlapping criterium. Each object surface must contain a specified curve and the location of the entire object surface is restricted to the closure of the interior of a generalized cylinder given by the same curve. The general approach has been extended with a method representing these as soft constraints. There is no quantitative golden standard to measure the results against so the evaluation is based on judgement from human experts. The method results in models which corresponds well with human expert interpretation of the light microscopy images. This deformable model can capture the important deformations caused by mutual interaction between the blastomeres in contrast to previous models.
Tight Second Stage Formulations in Two-Stage Stochastic Mixed Integer Programs

We study two-stage stochastic mixed integer programs (TSS-MIPs) with integer variables in the second stage. We show that under suitable conditions, the second stage MIPs can be convexified by adding parametric cuts a priori. As special cases, we extend the results of Miller and Wolsey [Math. Program. , 98 (2003), pp. 73--88] to TSS-MIPs. Furthermore, we consider second stage programs that are generalizations of the well-known mixing (and continuous mixing) set, or certain piecewise-linear convex objective integer programs. These results allow us to relax the integrality restrictions on the second stage integer variables without effecting the integrality of the optimal solution of the TSS-MIP. We also use four variants of the two-stage stochastic capacitated lot-sizing problems as test problems for computational experiments and present tight second stage formulations for these problems. Our computational results show that adding parametric inequalities that a priori convexify the second stage formulation si.
Pre-2014 mudslides at Oso revealed by InSAR and multi-source DEM analysis

The March 22, 2014 Oso mudslide at Washington was an extreme event costing nearly 40 deaths and damaging civilian properties. Historic record indicates that there have been serial events in decades. In our study, the combination of multi-source digital elevation models (DEMs), interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), and time-series InSAR analysis allowed us to characterize the Oso mudslide. The difference of shuttle radar topography mission (SRTM) and 2003 light detection and ranging (LiDAR) DEM indicated the topographic changes before 2006 mudslide, and the combination of time-series InSAR analysis and old-dated DEM (2000 SRTM, 2003 LiDAR DEM) revealed topographic changes associated with the 2006 sliding event. InSAR results from advanced land observing satellite (ALOS) phased array type L-band synthetic aperture radar (PALSAR) and LiDAR DEMs show that there were no significant topographic changes between 2007 and 2013 before the 2014 mudslide. The lasting toe erosion and logging near the landslide site could affect the 2006 mudslide event. Elevated discharges during wet seasons after 2006 accelerated the erosion of slumps deposited after the 2006 mudslide, which lessened the beneficial buttressing effect of the landslide toe with increased pore pressure during relatively higher rainfall after 2006. The vicious toe erosion within a relatively short period of eight years might play a critical role on the run-away event at Oso in 2014.
MmWave Beam Prediction with Situational Awareness: A Machine Learning Approach

Millimeter-wave communication is a challenge in the highly mobile vehicular context. Traditional beam training is inadequate in satisfying low overheads and latency. In this paper, we propose to combine machine learning tools and situational awareness to learn the beam information (power, optimal beam index, etc) from past observations. We consider forms of situational awareness that are specific to the vehicular setting including the locations of the receiver and the surrounding vehicles. We leverage regression models to predict the received power with different beam power quantizations. The result shows that situational awareness can largely improve the prediction accuracy and the model can achieve throughput with little performance loss with almost zero overhead.
Asymptotic Performance Analysis of GSVD-NOMA Systems With a Large-Scale Antenna Array

This paper considers a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink communication scenario with one base station and two users, where each user is equipped with $m$ antennas and the base station is equipped with $n$ antennas. To efficiently exploit the spectrum resources, we propose a transmission protocol which combines generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The expected data rates achieved by the two users are adopted as performance metrics for the evaluation of the proposed GSVD-NOMA scheme. In particular, we first characterize the limiting distribution of the squared generalized singular values of the two users’ channel matrices for the asymptotic case, where the numbers of transmit and receive antennas approach infinity. Then, we calculate the expected normalized individual rates of the users in the considered asymptotic regime. Furthermore, we extend the proposed GSVD-NOMA scheme to the general MIMO downlink communication scenario with more than two users. To this end, we propose a hybrid multiple access approach, where the base station divides the users into different groups, the proposed GSVD-NOMA scheme is implemented within each group, and different groups are allocated orthogonal bandwidth resources. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed GSVD-NOMA protocol and the accuracy of the developed analytical results.
Large-Scale Neuromorphic Spiking Array Processors: A Quest to Mimic the Brain

Neuromorphic engineering (NE) encompasses a diverse range of approaches to information processing that are inspired by neurobiological systems, and this feature distinguishes neuromorphic systems from conventional computing systems. The brain has evolved over billions of years to solve difficult engineering problems by using efficient, parallel, low-power computation. The goal of NE is to design systems capable of brain-like computation. Numerous large-scale neuromorphic projects have emerged recently. This interdisciplinary field was listed among the top 10 technology breakthroughs of 2014 by the MIT Technology Review and among the top 10 emerging technologies of 2015 by the World Economic Forum. NE has two-way goals: one, a scientific goal to understand the computational properties of biological neural systems by using models implemented in integrated circuits (ICs); second, an engineering goal to exploit the known properties of biological systems to design and implement efficient devices for engineering applications. Building hardware neural emulators can be extremely useful for simulating large-scale neural models to explain how intelligent behavior arises in the brain. The principal advantages of neuromorphic emulators are that they are highly energy efficient, parallel and distributed, and require a small silicon area. Thus, compared to conventional CPUs, these neuromorphic emulators are beneficial in many engineering applications such as for the porting of deep learning algorithms for various recognitions tasks. In this review article, we describe some of the most significant neuromorphic spiking emulators, compare the different architectures and approaches used by them, illustrate their advantages and drawbacks, and highlight the capabilities that each can deliver to neural modelers. This article focuses on the discussion of large-scale emulators and is a continuation of a previous review of various neural and synapse circuits (Indiveri et al., 2011). We also explore applications where these emulators have been used and discuss some of their promising future applications.
EFFECTIVE ALGORITHM FOR SECURITY AND INTEGRITY IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Security is one of the major and key concerns in the network communications from long ago. A number of algorithms are developed so far by enormous researchers and practitioners, still this domain is having huge scope of research as the cracking and hacking attempts are increasing in assorted networks. In this manuscript, an effective and unique algorithm is proposed for the security and integrity in wireless sensor networks that makes use of dynamic hash key. This approach can be used in WSN as well as cloud environment. The proposed approach is making use of hybrid algorithm including IPSec protocol in which the hash techniques are used. The results in the proposed algorithm are giving effective and optimal results. International Journal of Enterprise Computing and Business Systems ISSN (Online) : 2230-8849 Volume 5 Issue 2 July December 2015 International Manuscript ID : 22308849072015-02
Role of Activated Protein C and Soyabean in Experimental Lung Toxicity in Adult Male Albino Rat : Histological and Immunohistochemical Studies

Background: Amiodarone (AM) is a potent antiarrhythmic drug that is limited in clinical use by its adverse effects, including potentially life-threatening AM-induced pneumotoxicity. The resemblance of the morphologic changes in amiodarone-treated rats lungs to pulmonary toxicity in humans suggest that this form of chemical injury may serve as useful model of this disease entity. Aim of the Work: Studying the effect of amiodarone on the lung of rat histologically and immunohistochemically as well as the role of concomitant use of soybean and activated protein C (APC) in ameliorating pulmonary toxicity (pneumotoxicity or parenchymal lung disease) induced by amiodarone. Material and Methods: Thirty adult male albino rats were used for the present study. The animals were divided into four groups: group I (control), group II (each rat was amiodarone orally treated for 6 weeks), group III (each animal was given soybean and amiodarone for 6 weeks) and group IV (each animal was given activated protein C and amiodarone for 6 weeks). The lung was then examined histologically and immunohistochemically. Results: Amiodarone caused increased interalveolar thickness with increased cellularity and mononuclear cellular infiltrations. Hypercellularity involved macrophages with large vacuolated cytoplasm and hyperplastic type II pneumocytes in group II. There was congested blood capillaries with some extravastion of red blood cells. By electron microscope, the hypertrophied type II pneumocytes showed multiple lamellar bodies and small inclusions with dilated rough endoplasmic reticulum. Macrophages with eccentric nuclei and prominent lamellar bodies with increased lysosomes were detected in group II. Also, increasing collagen fibers were detected. Rats treated with APC and soybean showed attenuation of these changes. There was a significant increase in plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) immunoreaction in group II with nonsignificant change in group III and group IV. [Maha Mohamed Abo Gazia and Eman Ali Mahmoud El-Kordy. Role of Activated Protein C and Soya-bean in Experimental Lung Toxicity in Adult Male Albino Rat: Histological and Immunohistochemical Studies. Life Science Journal 2012; 9(2):73-85]. (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite. com. 14
Individual Glucose Threshold and Maximal Lactate Steady State Coincidence Analysis

Editor-in-Chief Tommy Boone, PhD, MBA Review Board Todd Astorino, PhD Julien Baker, PhD Steve Brock, PhD Lance Dalleck, PhD Eric Goulet, PhD Robert Gotshall, PhD Alexander Hutchison, PhD M. Knight-Maloney, PhD Len Kravitz, PhD James Laskin, PhD Yit Aun Lim, PhD Lonnie Lowery, PhD Derek Marks, PhD Cristine Mermier, PhD Robert Robergs, PhD Chantal Vella, PhD Dale Wagner, PhD Frank Wyatt, PhD Ben Zhou, PhD
Visual-Inertial Target Tracking and Motion Planning for UAV-based Radiation Detection

This paper addresses the problem of detecting radioactive material in transit using an UAV of minimal sensing capability, where the objective is to classify the target's radioactivity as the vehicle plans its paths through the workspace while tracking the target for a short time interval. To this end, we propose a motion planning framework that integrates tightly-coupled visual-inertial localization and target tracking. In this framework,the 3D workspace is known, and this information together with the UAV dynamics, is used to construct a navigation function that generates dynamically feasible, safe paths which avoid obstacles and provably converge to the moving target. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through realistic simulations in Gazebo.
DRPose3D: Depth Ranking in 3D Human Pose Estimation

In this paper, we propose a two-stage depth ranking based method (DRPose3D) to tackle the problem of 3D human pose estimation. Instead of accurate 3D positions, the depth ranking can be identified by human intuitively and learned using the deep neural network more easily by solving classification problems. Moreover, depth ranking contains rich 3D information. It prevents the 2D-to-3D pose regression in two-stage methods from being ill-posed. In our method, firstly, we design a Pairwise Ranking Convolutional Neural Network (PRCNN) to extract depth rankings of human joints from images. Secondly, a coarse-to-fine 3D Pose Network(DPNet) is proposed to estimate 3D poses from both depth rankings and 2D human joint locations. Additionally, to improve the generality of our model, we introduce a statistical method to augment depth rankings. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the Human3.6M benchmark for all three testing protocols, indicating that depth ranking is an essential geometric feature which can be learned to improve the 3D pose estimation.
Recognition for Indian Scripts

Online Handwriting Recognition has been a rigorous research area for the last few decades. Substantial amount of work has been reported on the online handwriting recognition of Western, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic Scripts, but few related to Indian scripts. In this paper a review of online HCR work on almost all popular Indian scripts such as Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Kannada, Oriya, and Gujarati is presented. The review is organized into 7 sections. Section 1 covers introduction. Properties of Indian scripts and general architecture of online HCR is given in section 2 and 3. In section 4, research work done on online handwriting for Indian scripts is summarized. Challenges of online HCR are discussed in section 5. The scope of future work and further steps needed for Indian script based online HCR development are discussed in section 6. Conclusions are given in section 7.
Karyotype characterization of the endemic piscine leech from Lake Baikal with vindication of Baicalobdella cottidarum Dogiel, 1957 (Piscicolidae, Hirudinea)

In this paper, we present for the first time data on karyotype analysis of leeches of the genus Baicalobdella (Piscicolidae) parasitizing Lake Baikal endemic cottoid fishes. Both mitotic and meiotic chromosomes are described. Leech testisacs were processed by a “shaking-blotting” technique, and chromosomal preparations were stained with water-based fuchsine. Diploid and haploid chromosome sets demonstrated 2n=34 and n=17, respectively, with maximal chromosome length of 1.5-3.0 μm. Comparative karyotype analysis of two ecological forms of Baicalobdella leeches revealed differences in chromosome numbers and its morphology. Previously studied Baicalobdella torquata (Grube, 1871) parasitizing Baikal amphipods had smaller diploid and haploid sets (2n=32, n=16). In addition to numerical superiority, differing patterns of chromosome size gradation and presence of satellite elements were found in the karyotype of piscine Baicalobdella leeches. This confirms the systematic position of the Baikal cottoid leech parasite as a separate species, validating the original name Baicalobdella cottidarum sensu Dogiel, 1957.
A method for smoothing segmented lung boundary in chest CT images

To segment low density lung regions in chest CT images, most of methods use the difference in gray-level value of pixels. However, radiodense pulmonary vessels and pleural nodules that contact with the surrounding anatomy are often excluded from the segmentation result. To smooth lung boundary segmented by gray-level processing in chest CT images, we propose a new method using scan line search. Our method consists of three main steps. First, lung boundary is extracted by our automatic segmentation method. Second, segmented lung contour is smoothed in each axial CT slice. We propose a scan line search to track the points on lung contour and find rapidly changing curvature efficiently. Finally, to provide consistent appearance between lung contours in adjacent axial slices, 2D closing in coronal plane is applied within pre-defined subvolume. Our method has been applied for performance evaluation with the aspects of visual inspection, accuracy and processing time. The results of our method show that the smoothness of lung contour was considerably increased by compensating for pulmonary vessels and pleural nodules.
The Relationships among Perception of Stigma, Ethnic Identity, and Acculturation in People Living with HIV/AIDS

The HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to grow and minorities have been affected at a disproportionate rate. Two factors that are hypothesized to be associated with HIV/AIDS stigma include ethnic identity and acculturation. The current study uses a diverse, gender-balanced sample (n= 201, aged 23-68) of African-Americans (54.2%), European Americans (31.8%), and Latinos/Hispanics (10%) to evaluate the relationship among the proposed variables. The study found that higher levels of ethnic identity and other group orientation were associated with lower levels of perceived HIV/AIDS stigma. A stepwise linear regression analysis (adjusted R2 = .13, F(11, 189) = 3.74, p < . 001) revealed that as the level of inclusiveness of other ethnic groups (t = -4.263, p < .001) increases, the level of perceived HIV/AIDS stigma decreases. The results from this study suggest that the development of interventions that address stigma and inclusiveness of other ethnic groups may benefit people living with HIV/AIDS.
Conductive Metal–Organic Framework Nanowire Array Electrodes for High‐Performance Solid‐State Supercapacitors

The application of conventional metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) as electrode materials in supercapacitors is largely hindered by their conventionally poor electrical conductivity. This study reports the fabrication of conductive MOF nanowire arrays (NWAs) and the application of them as the sole electrode material for solid‐state supercapacitors. By taking advantage of the nanostructure and making full use of the high porosity and excellent conductivity, the MOF NWAs in solid‐state supercapacitor show the highest areal capacitance and best rate performance of all reported MOF materials for supercapacitors, which is even comparable to most carbon materials.
Socio-Ecological System within Governance of Marine Protected Area: Case from Cenderawasih Bay National Park, Indonesia

Overcoming the problem of resource management which relies only on social dimension without understanding the ecosystem dynamics will not be sufficient to create sustainable management. Therefore, socio-ecological system (SES) is needed to respond changes so that robust management could be created. Research on SES was focused more on capacity of governance in creating management of conservation area, particularly in the period where there were occurrence of resistance between social problem and ecosystem. Principal component analysis explained 76% of the total variability. Very high variable respond category occurred on first principal component (PC) with positive effect which was related directly to ecological condition, and negative effect toward catch yield and utilization of traditional zone. Condition of economy and fish resources contributed positively toward second PC, and can be expressed as factor which affected economic condition of fishermen household. Condition of fishermen, related with catching activity and income of fishermen household gave positive effect toward the third PC, and can be expressed as component which affected catching effort and explained exploitation level by fishermen toward resources. Interaction between factors which formed SES occurred due to economic activity of fishermen household, catching efforts, and ecological capacity. Design of governance could be conducted on increase of fishermen household economy through control of catching efforts and considering the carrying capacity and ecological capacity.
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Is Critical for Helping Others Who Are Suffering

Neurological patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are reported to display reduced empathy toward others in their daily lives in clinical case studies. However, the empathic behavior of patients with damage to the vmPFC has not been measured experimentally in response to an empathy-eliciting event. This is important because characterizing the degree to which patients with damage to the vmPFC have lower empathic behavior will allow for the development of targeted interventions to improve patients’ social skills and in turn will help family members to better understand their impairments so they can provide appropriate supports. For the first time, we induced empathy using an ecologically-valid empathy induction in neurological patients with damage to the vmPFC and measured their empathic emotional responses and behavior in real time. Eight neurological patients with focal damage to the vmPFC were compared to demographically-matched brain-damaged and healthy comparison participants. Patients with damage to the vmPFC gave less money in the empathy condition to a person who was suffering (a confederate) than comparison participants. This provides the first direct experimental evidence that the vmPFC is critical for empathic behavior toward individuals who are suffering.
Our Experience in Extra-Pelvic Causes of Sciatica and Review of Literature

The most common spinal etiology of sciatica, even in children, is lumbar inter-vertebral disk herniation. Several diseases related either to vertebras and inter-vertebral joints (such as infection, tumors, spondylolysthesis, and facet joints hypertrophy) or to spinal neurological structures (such as neural tumors or infection) can also produce sciatica symptoms. Rare extra-pelvic pathologies, which cause pressure or irritation of the sciatic nerve through its course in the gluteal area and/ or lower limb, should always be investigated in cases of sciatica, especially in patients without remarkable low back pain. These pathologies may be related either to diseases of the neural tissue (such as peripheral nerve tumor) or to other musculoskeletal disorders (such as muscular or soft tissues contractures, as well as bony diseases), able to cause dysfunction of the nerve. Diagnosis of sciatica may be limited, especially if the clinician, the physical examination and the routine radiological examination (X-ray or MRI scan) are exclusively focused to the lumbar spine only. In this paper, we present two cases of sciatica, with extra-pelvicetiology, where nerve dysfunction resulted to irritation because of nerve impingement on hip implants (acetabular metal cage in one case and reconstruction plate for fracture fixation in the other) and we review the analogue literature.