Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia use amongst medical students – New insights into the digital revolution

Web2.0 resources are internet-based tools, such as ‘wikis’ and social networking sites, allowing users to actively participate in the creation and editing of information. Wikipedia is increasingly being used by medical students and physicians when actively searching for health information (Judd & Kennedy 2010). While the paucity of formal editorial review of such resources warrants scepticism, there is increasing evidence about its reliability and potential use (Rajagopalan et al. 2011). We sought to determine the prevalence of Wikipedia use amongst medical students at one institution, through a selfadministered 12-item online questionnaire. A total of 361 students participated in the study across six years of the course. The mean participant age was 21 with a non-significant over-representation of females (57%). Wikipedia was used by 341 students (94%) while studying medicine. The most common reasons reported for using Wikipedia were ease of access (98%) and ease of understanding (95%). A lack of confidence in performing literature reviews was cited by 10% of the respondents. In those students who did not use Wikipedia, 85% reported it as an unreliable resource. There was no significant correlation between the year of medical school and the use of Wikipedia (R1⁄4 0.67, p1⁄4 0.12). However, there was a significant correlation between the year of medical school and the use of Wikipedia as the first resource (R1⁄4 0.81, p5 0.02), with older years less likely to use Wikipedia as the initial resource. Similarly, there was an inverse correlation between the year of medical school and the use of Wikipedia as the only resource (R1⁄4 0.70, p5 0.05), as the most common resource (R1⁄4 0.67, p5 0.05) and its perceived reliability (R1⁄4 0.73, p5 0.05). Multivariate regression analysis models found the year of medical school to be an independent predictor of the use of Wikipedia as the first resource (p5 0.05), only resource (p5 0.005) and most common resource (p5 0.05). The use of Wikipedia is almost ubiquitous throughout medical school for medical education. The ease of access and understanding, as well as readily usable and consumer-friendly interfaces, means students often turn to this, rather than traditional authoritative resources. While the reliance on Wikipedia reduces throughout medical school, this is likely due to confidence and ability to concurrently use other resources as well as perceived reduced reliability. Medical school administrators would benefit from embracing and developing web2.0 resources and include their use in ongoing dynamic medical education.
Minimum Variance Distortionless Response Estimators for Linear Discrete State-Space Models

For linear discrete state-space models, under certain conditions, the linear least-mean-squares filter estimate has a convenient recursive predictor/corrector format, aka the Kalman filter. The purpose of this paper is to show that the linear minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) filter shares exactly the same recursion, except for the initialization which is based on a weighted least-squares estimator. If the MVDR filter is suboptimal in mean-squared error sense, it is an infinite impulse response distortionless filter (a deconvolver) which does not depend on the prior knowledge (first- and second-order statistics) on the initial state. In other words, the MVDR filter can be pre-computed and its behaviour can be assessed in advance independently of the prior knowledge on the initial state.
Secondary prevention of stroke.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada has estimated that there are approximately 400,000 individuals living with the effects of stroke (Statistics Canada, 2011). While there is disagreement among studies assessing the relative cost associated with secondary compared to first-ever stroke, recurrent strokes appear to contribute a disproportionate share to the overall national burden of stroke, principally due to costs associated with long-term disability (e.g. nursing home care and re-hospitalization). The secondary prevention of stroke includes strategies used to reduce the risk of stroke recurrence among patients who had previously presented with a stroke or TIA. Management strategies, which should be specific to the underlying etiology, include risk factor modification, the use of antithrombotic or anticoagulant drugs, carotid surgery, endovascular treatments. The present review provides information on risk factor management programs, management of hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, the role of infection, lifestyle modification (diet, smoking, use of alcohol, physical activity) as well as treatment for atherosclerosis and cardiac abnormalities (e.g. atrial fibrillation) and reperfusion techniques. The review may be downloaded in a single document or in single sections corresponding to the topic areas listed above. 8 Secondary Prevention of Stroke Katherine Salter PhD (cand.), Robert Teasell MD, Norine Foley MSc, Adam Hopfgartner MSc (cand.), Jennifer Mandzia MD, Shannon Janzen MSc, Danielle Rice BA, Mark Speechley PhD
Novel method to improve vascularization of tissue engineered constructs with biodegradable fibers

Tissue engineered grafts lack adequate vascularization and suffer from poor perfusion in vivo curtailing clinical application. Improving vascularization in any tissue implants would hence increase their survivability and treatment efficacy. Many prevascularization strategies established to date involves the angiogenic induction of endothelial progenitor cells in thick tissue engineered scaffolds to obtain vascularization. These 3D scaffolds typically require a dynamic cell culturing system involving/needful of bioreactors to obtain vascularization in thick tissue engineered scaffolds. Herein, we developed a novel method to engineer a vessel network without bioreactor, where 3D blood vessels could be simply obtained in a 2D static cell culturing system. This network could be used to augment the prevascularization of tissue engineered grafts. Endothelial cells (HUVECs) were confluently cultured on resorbable electrospun poly (D, L-lactide-co-glycolide) microfibers of capillary dimensions. These cell encapsulated capillary fibers were further embedded in collagen with HUVECs and vascular endothelial growth factor. Green fluorescent protein and red fluorescent protein expressing HUVECs were used to label cells on fiber and in collagen respectively for visualization and monitoring of capillary network formation. Seeded HUVECs in the hybrid construct were subsequently cultured for 30 days before implantation. Vessel density was measured by the total tubule length per unit area at different time points. In vitro results indicated that the fibers provide contact guidance to form primary networks to direct more vessels branching of HUVECs in hybrid constructs and the vessel integrity of microvasculature was retained after fiber degradation. In addition, these preformed engineered capillaries could capably inosculate with de novo capillaries in collagen when combined, giving rise to a hybrid pre-vascularized scaffold of more extensive vessel network and interconnections, thereby markedly improved prevascularization. When implanted onto the dorsal skin of immune-deficient mice, vessels of hybrid pre-vascularized scaffold also rapidly anastomosed with mice vasculature within a day as confirmed with the immunostaining of endothelial cell markers CD31 and von Willebrand factor. This proof of concept study showed that artificial capillaries formed through contact guidance of endothelial cells on resorbable capillary sized microfibers can significantly enhance prevascularization in tissue engineered constructs intended for surgical implantation.
Whole-body diffusion-weighted imaging compared with FDG-PET/CT in staging of lymphoma patients

Background Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has become increasingly valuable in lymph node imaging, yet the clinical utility of this technique in the staging of lymphoma has not been established. Purpose To compare whole-body DWI with FDG-PET/CT in the staging of lymphoma patients. Material and Methods Thirty-one patients, eight with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and 23 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (18 aggressive and five indolent) underwent both whole-body DWI, whole-body MRI (T1W and T2W-STIR) and FDG-PET/CT. Lesions on whole-body DWI were only considered positive if they correlated with lesions on T1W and T2W-STIR images. The staging given by each technique was compared, according to the Ann Arbor staging system. Differences in staging were solved using biopsy results, and clinical and CT follow-ups as standard of reference. Results The staging was the same for DWI and FDG-PET/CT in 28 (90.3%) patients and different in three (9.7%). Of the 28 patients with the same staging, 11 had stage IV in both techniques and 17 had stages 0–III. No HL or aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients had different staging. Three indolent small lymphocytic lymphoma/chronic lymphocytic leukemia (SLL/CLL) lymphoma had higher staging with DWI when compared with FDG-PET/CT. One small subcutaneous breast lymphoma was not seen but all other extranodal sites were detected by both techniques. Conclusion Whole-body DWI is a promising technique for staging of both (aggressive and indolent) non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and HL.
POS Tagging without a Tagger: Using Aligned Corpora for Transferring Knowledge to Under-Resourced Languages

Almost all languages lack sufficient resources and tools for developing Human Language Technologies (HLT). These latters are mostly concerned by languages for which large resources and tools are available. In this paper, we will prove that under-resourced languages can benefit from these available resources and tools to develop their own HLT by taking as an example the which of the POS tagging Task that is among the most primordial Natural Language Processing tasks. Since, it assigns word tag to highlight its syntactic features by considering the corresponding contexts. The solution that we propose, in this research work, is based on the use of aligned parallel corpus as a bridge between a rich-resourced language and an under resourced language. This kind of corpus is usually available. The rich language side of this corpus is first annotated. These POS-annotations were then exploited to predict the annotation of under-resourced language side by using alignment training. After this training step, we obtain a matching table between the two languages which will be exploited to annotate an input text. The experimentation of the proposed approach is performed on a couple of languages: English as a rich language and Arabic as an under resourced language. We used the IWSLT10 training corpus, and English Treetagger. The approach was evaluated on the test corpus extracted from the IWSLT08 obtain a F-score of 89% and can be extrapolated to the other NLP tasks.
An efficient 3D DI-FDTD method for anisotropic magnetized plasma medium

An efficient three-dimensional (3D) direct integration (DI) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is introduced to solve electromagnetic wave propagation problems in anisotropic magnetized plasma medium using matrix method. Compared with previous 3D FDTD plasma method, our method is more flexible in adjusting medium parameters thus can deal with varied mediums. Through several simulations, the correctness of the method are proven and the advantages are clarified. Finally, potential applications of this method are discussed, such as the further study of the ionosphere.
A Low-Complexity Channel Estimator for MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this paper, a low complexity channel estimator for MIMO OFDM systems is proposed. A frequency domain filtering scheme based on the concept of temporal windowing for noise power reduction outside the window is developed to enhance the performance of the simple least square estimator. This approach can eliminate the extra FFT/IFFT operations required in the conventional time domain scheme. A temporal Hamming window is adopted to further reduce the computing complexity of the frequency domain filtering. Simulation results indicate the proposed scheme can significantly improve both the NMSE and BER performance of the LS channel estimator. Compared with the time domain most significant tap (MST) scheme, the proposed scheme has comparable performance but requires much less computing complexity. The proposed scheme also has the advantage in hardware implementation over the MST scheme
SURF-ing a Model of Spatiotemporal Saliency

Zhai and Shah (2006) proposed a model of spatiotemporal saliency using a combination of temporal and spatial attention models. The temporal model utilized Lowe’s SIFT (2004) to compute feature points and the correspondences between them in successive frames. Bay, Tuytelaars, & Van Gool introduced SURF (2006) as an alternative feature detector and descriptor. The authors of SURF show that it is faster than and superior to SIFT. This investigation replicated the model of Zhai and Shah evaluating performance with SURF used in place of SIFT. The performance of SIFT and SURF temporal model variants was tested on a variety of frame sets. In addition to qualitative comparisons, the SIFT and SURF model variants were quantitatively compared on the speed of both computing feature correspondences, and the resulting speed of homography computation. The robustness of the models to increased temporal spacing between frames was also tested at various step intervals. The SURF model was much faster as expected. Otherwise the models were generally indistinguishable. Both showed little change in performance due to an increase in the time between successive frames.
A study on face recognition in video surveillance system using multi-class Support Vector Machines

In this paper, we present an evaluation of face recognition algorithm in video surveillance system using multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM). We also show how the variation of sizes (due to distance) and intensity of training images (due to camera hardware) can improve the face recognition rate. The system starts by detecting the face regions using AdaBoost training algorithm. Holistic approach is chosen to extract features from the detected face regions as this approach is the simplest. After the feature vectors are generated, multi-class SVM is used for classification step. SVM is chosen as the classifier as it is a low samples, high dimensional classifier. As the training and test set, we use SCface database in which the images were taken in uncontrolled indoor environment using five video surveillance cameras of various qualities. Based on our study using only linear kernel multi-class SVM, it is shown that distance of approximately 2.6m gives the best results, and the training and test images have to be from similar intensity cameras although surveillance camera will have different quality of images.
Cost optimum embedded DRAM design by yield analysis

We study on cost optimum embedded DRAM interconnect technologies by using a simple VLSI particle-induced fault simulator modified for the embedded DRAM macro. The fault simulator is applied to an assumed 4-Mbit DRAM macro production process with DRAM interconnect technologies of DRAM 1/2 pitch 115 nm and ASIC 1/2 pitch of from 115 nm to 500 nm (peripheral circuits). The DRAM macro is included in a SoC chip that has area of 1 cm/sup 2/ and is manufactured on the wafer with size of 8 inches. Result shows that the wider pitch decreases the count of manufactured chips but increases the yield. ASIC 1/2 pitch of 0.4 /spl mu/m achieved maximum count of good chips per wafer under the assumed conditions. There exists the cost optimum embedded DRAM design.
Differential assembly of α-and γ-filagenins into thick filaments in Caenorhabditis elegans

The assembly of myosin into thick filaments in skeletal muscles has provided a model system for investigating the assembly of biological structures (Huxley, 1963; Epstein and Fischman, 1991; Liu et al., 1997). Thick filaments are highly organized structures with lengths, diameters, and flexural rigidities characteristic of their muscle of origin (Craig, 1977; Kensler et al., 1985; Stewart and Kensler, 1986; Schmid and Epstein, 1998). Myosin molecules in different regions of thick filaments show distinct biochemical characteristics, including interactions with different myosin binding proteins. Thick filaments, therefore, are highly differentiated structures. To date, such differentiated assembly has not been achieved with purified myosins. How cells assemble such filaments, therefore, remains an important question (Epstein and Fischman, 1991; Barral and Epstein, 1999). Accumulating evidence suggests that the assembly of myosin into thick filaments may require other proteins rather than being the result of simple self-assembly. The myosin binding protein C appears to be an integral part of thick filaments in vertebrate cardiac and skeletal muscles (Morimoto and Harrington, 1974), and its presence decreases the critical concentration for the assembly of purified myosin into synthetic filaments (Davis, 1988) and increases their rigidity (Schmid and Epstein, 1998). The giant protein titin may also contribute to the assembly of thick filaments in muscles (Labeit and Kolmerer, 1995). A major deletion within titin in the myofibroblast cell line BHK-21/C13 results in defective myofibril assembly and reduced thick filaments (van der Ven et al., 2000). In contrast, loss-of-function mutants in C. elegans twitchin and Drosophila D-titin, homologues of vertebrate titin, still assemble thick filaments (Waterston et al., 1980; Zhang et al., 2000). The existence of additional proteins in thick filaments is evident in invertebrates as paramyosin, a homologue of the myosin rod, is an integral part of thick filaments and forms their backbone (Cohen et al., 1971; SzentGyörgyi et al., 1971; Levine et al., 1983; Epstein et al., 1985). Other proteins that appear to be thick filament components include zeelins in Lethocerusmuscles (Ferguson et al., 1994) and flightin in Drosophila flight muscle (Vigoreaux et al., 1998). InDrosophila, multiple myosin isoforms are expressed in structurally distinct thick filaments of different muscles. These characteristic thick filaments are retained in a genetically engineered Drosophila strain that expresses only a single myosin isoform, suggesting that factors other than myosin itself determine the structure in each muscle type (Wells et al., 1996). 4001 Journal of Cell Science 113, 4001-4012 (2000) Printed in Great Britain © The Company of Biologists Limited 2000 JCS1869
HLA-DQ locus of the human leukocyte antigen complex and type 1 diabetes mellitus: a HuGE review.

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex is located on the short arm of chromosome 6 at p21.3 (1-4). It encompasses approximately 3,500 kilobases of DNA and contains at least 150 genes. It is the primary region of susceptibility for type 1 diabetes mellitus, as well as other autoimmune disorders. Recent genome screens have designated the class II subregion (i.e., the HLA-DR, HLA-DQ, and HLA-DP loci) IDDM1. The DQ locus, which is the focus of this review, consists of two tightly linked genes (DQA1 and DQB1) that encode a and fj glycoproteins, respectively. These molecules combine noncovalently to form functional a-(J heterodimers. The DQA1 and DQB1 genes are highly polymorphic. Allelic variation is observed primarily in the second exon, which corresponds to the peptide-binding cleft. HLA-DQ and other class II molecules present extracellular antigens to helper T cells and stimulate the body's immune response. They have a restricted tissue distribution and are located mainly on macrophages, B cells, and activated T cells. Transcription of DQA1 and DQB1 is complex and involves cisand frans-acting factors. Critical upstream regulatory sequences have been reported for DQA1 and DQB1. Variation in promoter sequences affects gene expression and may also be involved in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disorders. In addition, posttranscription activities appear to influence disease risk. For example, functional DQa$ heterodimers can be formed from the noncovalent association of products of DQA1 and DQB1 genes in cis (5). Alternatively, the combined a and (3 glycoproteins can represent molecules encoded by genes in trans. Hybrid DQ molecules with DR or DP glycoproteins have also been observed.
Selective detection of gold using genetically engineered bacterial reporters

Salmonella typhimurium harbours a Au‐resistance system whose expression is controlled by GolS, a transcriptional regulator of the MerR family that selectively detects Au with high sensitivity. We developed both Salmonella and genetically engineered Escherichia coli strains as Au‐selective whole‐cell biosensors by coupling the strictly regulated GolS‐dependent golB promoter to the gfp reporter gene. The bio‐reporters were evaluated under different laboratory conditions and calibrated for their use as selective Au detectors. Due to the intrinsic characteristics of the regulatory protein, the transgenic E. coli sensor exhibits low background, high signal‐to‐noise ratio, and improved sensitivity for detection of Au ions in a wide range of concentrations (up to 470 nM) with a calculated detection limit of ∼33 nM (6 µg L−1 or parts per billion) Au(I). The fluorescent Au‐sensing bacteria exhibit also minimal interference by chemically related metals such as Cu or Ag that are commonly found in Au deposits. These highly specific and sensitive Au detectors might allow the development of rapid and robust screening tools to improve discovery and extraction procedures. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2011;108: 2553–2560. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Disorder-based graphene spintronics

The use of the spin of the electron as the ultimate logic bit—in what has been dubbed spintronics—can lead to a novel way of thinking about information flow. At the same time single-layer graphene has been the subject of intense research due to its potential application in nanoscale electronics. While defects can significantly alter the electronic properties of nanoscopic systems, the lack of control can lead to seemingly deleterious effects arising from the random arrangement of such impurities. Here we demonstrate, using ab initio density functional theory and non-equilibrium Green’s functions calculations, that it is possible to obtain perfect spin selectivity in doped graphene nanoribbons to produce a perfect spin filter. We show that initially unpolarized electrons entering the system give rise to 100% polarization of the current due to random disorder. This effect is explained in terms of different localization lengths for each spin channel which leads to a new mechanism for the spin filtering effect that is disorder-driven.