Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantification of Gastric Contractions Using MRI with a Natural Contrast Agent

Gastric motility has an essential role in mixing and the breakdown of ingested food. It can affect the digestion process and the efficacy of the orally administered drugs. There are several methods to image, measure, and quantify gastric motility. MRI has been shown to be a suitable non-invasive method for gastric motility imaging. However, in most studies, gadolinium-based agents have been used as an oral contrast agent, making it less desirable for general usage. In this study, MRI scans were performed on 4 healthy volunteers, where pineapple juice was used as a natural contrast agent for imaging gastric motility. A novel method was developed to automatically estimate a curved centerline of the stomach. The centerline was used as a reference to quantify contraction magnitudes. The results were visualized as contraction magnitude-maps. The mean speed of each contraction wave on the lesser and greater curvatures of the stomach was calculated, and the variation of the speeds in 4 regions of the stomach were quantified. There were 3-4 contraction waves simultaneously present in the stomach for all cases. The mean speed of all contractions was 2.4±0.9 mm/s, and was in agreement with previous gastric motility studies. The propagation speed of the contractions in the greater curvature was higher in comparison to the lesser curvature (2.9±0.8 vs 1.9±0.5 mm/s); however, the speeds were more similar near to the pylorus. This study shows the feasibility of using pineapple juice as a natural oral contrast agent for the MRI measurements of gastric motility. Also, it demonstrated the viability of the proposed method for automatic curved centerline estimation, which enables practical clinical translation.Clinical Relevance— MRI is able to non-invasively provide dynamic images of the contraction patterns of the stomach, providing a novel clinical tool for assessing functional motility disorders. The use of a natural oral contrast agent such as pineapple juice, as opposed to a gadolinium-based contrast agent, makes MRI more widely accessible. Our semi-automated methods for quantifying contraction magnitude and speed will streamline analysis and clinical diagnosis.
Small bowel to closest human body surface distance calculation through a custom-made software using CT-based datasets

Screening of the gastrointestinal tract is imperative for the detection and treatment of physiological and pathological disorders in humans. Ingestible devices (e.g., magnetic capsule endoscopes) represent an alternative to conventional flexible endoscopy for reducing the invasiveness of the procedure and the related patient’s discomforts. However, to properly design localization and navigation strategies for capsule endoscopes, the knowledge of anatomical features is paramount. Therefore, authors developed a semi-automatic software for measuring the distance between the small bowel and the closest human external body surface, using CT colonography images. In this study, volumetric datasets of 30 patients were processed by gastrointestinal endoscopists with the dedicated custom-made software and results showed an average distance of 79.29 ± 23.85 mm.
Large eddy simulation on the flow characteristics of an argon thermal plasma jet

Large eddy simulations based on the CFD software OpenFOAM have been used to study the effect of Reynolds number and turbulence intensity on the flow and mixing characteristics of an argon thermal plasma jet. Detailed analysis was carried out with respect to four aspects: the average flow field, the instantaneous flow field, turbulence statistical characteristics and the self-similarity. It was shown that for the argon thermal plasma jet with low Reynolds number, increasing the turbulence intensity will increase the turbulent transport mechanism in the mixing layer rather than in the jet axis, leading to the faster development of turbulence. The effect of the turbulent transport mechanism increases with increasing Reynolds number. However, the characteristics of flow and mixing are not affected by turbulence intensity for high Reynolds number situations. It was also found that the mean axial velocity and mean temperature in the axis of the turbulent thermal plasma jet satisfy the self-similarity aspects downstream. In addition, decay constant K is 1.25, which is much smaller than that (5.7–6.1) of the turbulent cold gas jet and has nothing to do with the Reynolds number or turbulence intensity in the jet inlet.
Characterization of the E3 Ubiquitin Ligase Pirh2

The p53 tumour suppressor gene is inactivated by mutation in over 50% of all human cancers. The p53 protein is activated and stabilized through several post-translational modifications in response to various stresses and promotes cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. Thus, regulation of p53 is critical for normal cellular function. Pirh2 is a p53-regulated gene recently identified in our laboratory which encodes an E3 RING-finger ubiquitin ligase that binds to p53 and negatively regulates p53 by targeting it for ubiquitinmediated proteolysis. Pirh2 is similar to another well-characterized E3 RING finger ubiquitin ligase, Mdm2, which also participates in a similar negative feedback loop with p53. At least seven E3 ubiquitin ligases are known to target p53 for degradation and the reason for this functional redundancy is unclear. The purpose of this study is to characterize Pirh2 activity. This study has two aims the first is to identify additional interacting proteins for Pirh2, and the second is to delineate Pirh2 regulation of p53. Using several tandem affinity purification strategies and a GST-pull down approach, we have identified PKC as a candidate interacting protein. The second aim is to further characterize Pirh2 regulation of p53. Splenocytes and thymocytes from Pirh2-/mice demonstrate a subtle increase in total p53 levels after irradiation when compared to wild-type controls. Phosphoserine 15 p53 levels are significantly higher in splenocytes and thymocytes from Pirh2 -/mice relative to wildtype counterparts. Cells stably transfected with Pirh2 have decreased levels of phosphoserine 15 p53 and decreased induction of p21 relative to vector control and Mdm2 expressing cells. The stability of the p53 protein is primarily regulated through ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, and there are multiple ubiquitin ligases targeting p53 for degradation. Here we are able to address the question of functional redundancy by indicating that Pirh2 can target serine 15 phosphorylated p53 which is reported to not be regulated by Mdm2.
Development of a Digital Signal Processing System for the X‐ray Microcalorimeter onboard ASTRO‐H

A digital signal processing system for the X‐ray microcalorimeter array (SXS) is being developed for the next Japanese X‐ray astronomy satellite, ASTRO‐H. The SXS digital signal processing system evaluates each pulse by an optimal filtering process. For the ASTRO‐H project, we decided to employ digital electronics hardware, which includes a digital I/O board based upon FPGAs, and a separate CPU board. It is crucially important for the FPGA to be able to detect the presence of an “secondary” pulses on the tail of an initial pulse. In order to detect the contaminating pulses, we have developed a new finite impulse response filter, to compensate for the undershoot in the derivative. By employing the filter it is possible for FPGA to detect the secondary pulse very close the first pulse, and to reduce the load of the CPU in the secondary pulse searching process.
Possibility of Using Cotton Knitted Fabric Waste in Concrete

The use of waste and recycled materials in the construction industry, especially in concrete production, is becoming increasingly popular. The production of cotton underwear generates a certain amount of knitted fabric waste. This study was conducted to investigate the possibility of using cotton knitted fabric waste (CKFW) in concrete and to explore its potential application in the construction industry. The aim of the study is not only to reduce the waste but also to add positive properties to the concrete. A total of 4 mixes were prepared for testing purposes. CKFW were cut into small pieces of size about 6-8 cm x 2 cm. The addition of CKFW was a substitute for aggregates and replaced 0, 2.5, 5 and 10% of the total volume of aggregates in the concrete mix to make the concrete lighter. All mixes have the same amount of cement, water and superplasticizer. The knitted waste was saturated in water before mixing with other concrete components. The properties of the fresh mix were determined by slump method. The dynamic modulus of elasticity, flexural strength and compressive strength were tested on 28 days old concrete specimens. The σ-δ diagram is also presented. It was found that specimens with CKFW have better flexural strength and higher ductility but lower compressive strength than the reference concrete mix. The mix with the highest percentage of CKFW reduced the compressive strength by 28%, while the specimens with lower percentage of CKFW increased the flexural strength by 20% compared to the reference mix. The capillary water absorption capacity of concrete is closely related to its durability. The water absorption by capillarity was measured after 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 45, 60 min, and 4 and 24 h. The increase in the amount of water absorbed was found to be higher than that of the reference mix. It was related to the percentage increase in the knitted waste and the values obtained ranged from 3.3 to 5.6% of the mass of the dry sample. The largest reduction in concrete density was 3.8% compared to the reference mix. Based on the obtained results, recommendations for further tests are given.
Computer Image Recognition and Recovery Method for Distorted Underwater Images by Structural Light

When imaging through water surface, the random fluctuation of sea surface will cause the distortion of the target scene image, so the distorted image needs to be corrected and reconstructed. At present, distortion compensation mainly adopts iterative registration strategy based on image sequences which is difficult to satisfy the real-time observation. This paper presents a correction method based on active imaging of structured light for underwater image. Experimental results show that compared with the traditional iterative algorithm, the proposed algorithm cannot only improve the restoration accuracy, but also greatly shorten the processing time. Experimental test results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good recovery results.
Pedestrian Paths as an Indicator of Legibility Aspects of Omani Traditional Settlements

The interest for studying the Omani built heritage is not recent. However, the published research about the subject since the early 1970s, is limited in number and sporadic in topics and territories investigated. Moreover, there was no or little interest in examining this built heritage from the point of view of its urban design typologies. This paper is examining the urban form of these settlements and linking it with legibility aspects. Legibility and its influence on users of urban spaces have been significant for many theorists in urban studies. In their point of view, behaviour patterns of pedestrians are strongly influenced by legibility perception of the spatial patterns in urban spaces. The current research aims at studying the legibility aspects of traditional Omani residential settlements in an objective evaluation represented by numerical approach. Through a descriptive and analytical method, the results will link the influence of urban forms with legibility and behaviour patterns of pedestrians, which are deeply affected by the perception of body and mind. The paper explored paths’ forms influence on legibility perception of pedestrian in some of traditional settlements in Oman that have a strong urban identification. Five case studies representing traditional Omani settlements were chosen and analysed with an innovative quantitative approach capable of discovering, evaluating deficiencies, and suggesting solutions to develop local concepts for paths in any of urban settlements. The findings disclose that the contest to adopt international approaches to solve local urban spaces has created pointless, despicable, and unused spaces, while adopting local patterns, features and solutions will enhance the legible image of local urban settlements.
In vitro culture of Dendrobium lineale Rolfe orchid for plant breeding and propagation

D.lineale is included in the CITES appendix II due to D. lineale has great potential as a cut flower and the parent of hybrid orchids. In vitro culture can be used for mass propagation of orchids for commercial breeding as well as conservation. Basic culture medium with the addition of organic substances can increase the growth of plantlets. The objective of this research was to determine the best condition for in vitro culture of D.lineale orchids for producing a mass number of plantlets. Methods used include planting orchid seedlings in various variations of culture media, plantlet subcultures, observation of the anatomy of leaves and roots, as well as the measurement of chlorophyll content. This research uses ‘pisang raja’ as organic material in the culture medium. The highest chlorophyll content in the leaves was 1.58 mg/g, while the highest chlorophyll content in the roots was 0.34 mg/g. Both were found in medium NP+100 g/L bananas in light conditions (1317 lux). The anatomical structure of the leaves shows that the mesophyll is thicker in plants placed under lighting 1317 lux because it shows good effectiveness in photosynthesis. The anatomy of the orchid roots showed differences in diameter in each treatment because the addition of bananas to the medium stimulated rapid and abundant root formation, but the size was smaller. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the addition of 100 gr/L bananas as organic substances in in vitro medium culture increases the growth rate of D. lineale orchids, which will be beneficial for conservation efforts.
Reduced finite-volume model for the fast numerical calculation of the fluid flow in the melt pool in laser beam welding

In this paper we propose a reduced two-dimensional finite-volume model for the fast calculation of the melt flow. This model was used to determine the influence of the welding speed, viscosity in the melt and vapour flow inside of the keyhole on the fluid flow field, the temperature distribution, and the resulting weld-pool geometry for laser beam welding of aluminium. The reduced computational time resulting from this approach allows the fast qualitative investigation of different aspects of the melt flow over a wide range of parameters. It was found that the effect of viscosity within the melt is more pronounced for lower welding speeds whereas the effect of friction at the keyhole walls is more pronounced for higher welding speeds. The weld-pool geometry mainly depends on the welding speed.
Implementing the basic CT backprojecting algorithm in android mobile application

We have implemented the basic steps for the FDK backprojecting algorithm in computed tomography. Application works from the set of preloaded projections and uses OpenCV libraries for FFT, convolution, frequency space image filtering, image’s brightness, contrast and quality manipulation. Compared to the desktop implementation, the calculation-intensive part of the application was moved to the asynchronous background task hosted by an android fragment. This allows the task to survive the application’s configuration changes and to run in the background even if the main activity was destroyed. The minimalistic interface with the access to all main backprojecting parameters was implemented. The result of backprojection is saved as an image in the download folder of the phone. The user also has the control over the reconstructed slice location along the Z axis.
Research of Metric Learning-Based Method for Person Re-Identification by Intelligent Computer Vision Technology

Person re-identification technology aims to establish an efficient metric model for similarity distance measurement of pedestrian images. Candidate images captured by different camera views are ranked according to their similarities to the target individual. However, the metric learning-based method, which is commonly used in similarity measurement, often failed in person re-identification tasks due to the drastic variations in appearance. The main reason for its low identification accuracy is that the metric learning method is over-fitting to the training data. Several types of metric learning methods which differ from each other by the distribution of sample pairs were summarized in this article for analysing and easing the metric learning methods’ over-fitting problem. Three different metric learning methods were tested on the VIPeR dataset. The distributions of the distance of the positive/negative training/test pairs are displayed to demonstrate the over-fitting problem. Then, a new metric model was proposed by combining the thoughts of binary classification and multi-class classification. Related verification experiments were conducted on VIPeR dataset. Besides, the semi-supervised metric learning approach was introduced to alleviate the over-fitting problem. The experimental results reflect gap between training pairs and test pairs in the metric subspace. Therefore, reducing the difference between training data and test data is a promising way to improve the identification accuracy of metric learning method.
Critical Success Factors for Implementation of Green Building in India

For the sustainable built environment, Green Building technology is the most widely adopted trend worldwide, however, it is in a nascent stage in India. Even though the use of green building technology is advantageous over the lifecycle of the project, people are hesitant to adopt. Therefore, this study aims at identifying the critical factors affecting the implementation of green buildings in India. For this purpose, an extensive literature review was done to identify factors affecting the implementation of green buildings. In total 27 factors were identified which may be critical for the adoption of green building technology widely in an Indian context. The questionnaire was prepared using the five-point Likert scale. The questionnaire was sent through emails to 150 consultants in India and 52 valid responses received in return. The primary data is analyzed using factor analysis. The critical factors found are time and knowledge constraints; technical constraints; authenticity of research and awareness about Green Building. Though the findings of this study are based on the small sample size, it will be beneficial to the policymakers
A 350-GHz SIS antipodal finline mixer

In this paper, we describe the design and operation of a 350-GHz finline superconductor-insulator-superconductor mixer. The mixer is fed by a horn-reflector antenna, and the superconducting circuit is fabricated using planar-circuit technology and fully integrated tuning. An important feature of the mixer is that it employs an antipodal finline section, deposited on one side of a quartz substrate, which transforms the high impedance of the waveguide (/spl ap/300 /spl Omega/) to the low impedance of the microstrip (/spl ap/20 /spl Omega/). The Nb/Al-oxide/Nb tunnel junction is fabricated at the same time as the finline circuit. In this paper, we describe the design procedure in some detail. We pay particular attention to the synthesis of the finline taper and the electromagnetic design of the horn-reflector antenna. We have tested a finline mixer over the frequency range of 330-370 GHz and measured a receiver noise temperature of 90 K, which remained unchanged over the whole frequency range. Our investigation has demonstrated that it is possible to make superconducting finline mixers for frequencies as high as 350 GHz.
Measurement of macroalgae total carbohydrate content found in Lendang Luar coast, Lombok, Indonesia for potential sources of bioethanol

Bioethanol is a renewable alternative energy through the process of fermenting sugar from carbohydrate sources by adding microorganisms such as yeast or bacteria. Macroalgae or known as seaweed is one of the producers in the marine environment which has a high carbohydrate content so that it can be used as raw material for bioethanol. Macroalgae contains specific carbohydrates including laminarin, mannitol, alginate, agar and polysaccharides. The high carbohydrate content indicates the ethanol content produced. The aim of the study was to initial screen total carbohydrates in red algae (G. latifolium and G rugosa) and brown algae (M rosea, S. crassifolium, S. cristaefolium, S. polycystum, P.australis and T. muray ana). Carbohydrate total analysis was performed by colorimetric assay using the BioVision kit. The overall carbohydrate content found in macroalgae samples in this study was 28.23 fig (DW)1. The highest carbohydrate content was obtained by G. latifolium (37.50 fig (DW)1), followed by G rugosa (34.27 fig (DW)1) and S. cristaefolium (33.33 fig (DW)1). Current results show that macroalgae exhibits sufficient amounts of carbohydrate which could potentially be further developed as source for biotehanol.
Study of a Privacy Preserving Logistic Regression Algorithm (PPLRA) For Data Privacy in the Context of Big Data

Regression algorithms are commonly used in machine learning. Based on encryption and privacy protection methods, the current key hot technology regression algorithm and the same encryption technology are studied. This paper proposes a PPLAR based algorithm. The correlation between data items is obtained by logistic regression formula. The algorithm is distributed and parallelized on Hadoop platform to improve the computing speed of the cluster while ensuring the average absolute error of the algorithm.
The Behaviour of Fibre-Metal Laminates under High Velocity Impact Loading with Different Stacking Sequences of Al Alloy

The high velocity impact response of composite laminated plates has been experimentally investigated using a nitrogen gas gun. Tests were undertaken on fibre-metal laminate (FML) structures based on Kevlar-29 fiber/epoxy-Alumina resin with different stacking sequences of 6061-T6 Al plates. Impact testing was conducted using a cylindrical shape of 7.62 mm diameter steel projectile at 400m/s velocity, which was investigated to achieve complete perforation of the target. The numerical parametric study of ballistic impacts caused by similar conditions in experimental work is undertaken to predict the ballistic limit velocity, energy absorbed by the target, and comparisons between simulations by using ANSYS AUTODYN 3D v.12. 1 software and experimental work to study the effects of the shape of the projectile with different (4, 8, 12, 16 and 20mm) thicknesses on the ballistic limit velocity. While only one thickness was used with 24mm of back stacking sequence, it was not penetrated. The sequence of the Al plate position (front, middle and back) inside laminate plates of the composite specimen was also studied. The Al back stacking sequence plate for the overall results obtained was the optimum structure to resist the impact loading. The simulation results obtained of the residual velocity hereby are in good agreement with the experimental results with an average error of 1.8%. The energy absorption was obtained with 7.3% and 2.7% of the back to front and back to middle of the Al stacking sequence respectively. Hence, the back Al stacking sequence is considered the optimum position for resisting the impact loading. The data showed that these novel sandwich structures exhibit excellent energy-absorbing characteristics under high-velocity impact loading conditions. Hence, it is considered suitable for aerospace applications.