Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Renal sympathetic denervation for hypertension, sleep apnea, and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation

Objective: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is independently associated with atrial fibrillation (AF). We hypothesized that renal sympathetic denervation (RSD) could decrease the occurrence of AF and apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) in patients with controlled hypertension and OSA. We aimed to compare the impact of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and CPAP+RSD in such patients. Methods: This prospective, longitudinal study included 36 patients recruited between January 2013 and January 2015 at the Arrhythmias and Artificial Cardiac Pacing Service at Hospital e Clínica São Gonçalo. Subjects were divided into two groups: a control group (n=22) receiving CPAP and RSD group (n=14) receiving CPAP+RSD. All patients underwent 6-month follow-up. Primary and secondary endpoints were decreased in AHI (by polysomnography) and the 30-s occurrence of AF (24-hour Holter monitoring). Results: From baseline to the 6-month follow-up, AHI decreased from 40.3 ± 10.9 to 12.5 ± 6.2 events/hour, and from 39.8 ± 12.1 to 3.6 ± 7.4 events/hour in the control (P<0.0001) and RSD groups (P<0.0001), respectively. After 6 months, AF occurrence was significantly higher in the control group (72.73%) than in the RSD group (21.43%) (odds ratio: 9.778, 95% confidence interval: 1.904-38.780, P=0.0054). Six-month post-RSD, left atrial volume (P=0.0001), and left ventricular mass indexed by body surface area (P=0.0064) significantly decreased. No patients presented RSD-related complications. Conclusions: The results of this preliminary study indicate that in patients with controlled hypertension, OSA, and paroxysmal AF, RSD significantly and safely decreased AF occurrence, AHI, left atrial volume, and left ventricular mass indexed by body surface area. Correspondence to: Márcio Galindo Kiuchi, Division of Cardiac Surgery and Artificial Cardiac Stimulation, Department of Medicine, Hospital e Clínica São Gonçalo, Rua Cel. Moreira César, 138 Centro, São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro 24440-400, Brazil; Tel: +55 (21) 26047744; Fax: +55 (21) 26047744; E-mail: marciokiuchi@gmail.com
A Comparison of Ultra-Endurance Cyclists in a Qualifying Ultra-Cycling Race for Paris-Brest-Paris and Race across America—Swiss Cycling Marathon

Ultra-endurance events test the adaptation of human physiology to extreme physical and mental demands, high levels of training, motivation, and physical conditioning among participants. To understand basic differences among participants according to the severity of the race, participants in qualifying events for two ultra-endurance cycling races, differing in length and intensity, were compared on measures of anthropometry, training, and support. One race was four times longer, required supporting teams, and racers typically had little sleep, which should lead to the qualifiers being substantially more highly trained than those from the shorter race. The qualifiers in the longer race had greater intensity in training while the qualifiers in the shorter race relied more on training volume. Different strategies and types of training reflected the different demands of the races. Future studies should evaluate personality and motivational differences in ultra-endurance events and between these athletes and athletes in other sports.
The Risk Assessment Score in Acute Whiplash Injury Predicts Outcome and Reflects Biopsychosocial Factors

Study Design. One-year prospective study of 141 acute whiplash patients (WLP) and 40 acute ankle-injured controls. Objective. This study investigates a priori determined potential risk factors to develop a risk assessment tool, for which the expediency was examined. Summary of Background Data. The whiplash-associated disorders (WAD) grading system that emerged from The Quebec Task-Force-on-Whiplash has been of limited value for predicting work-related recovery and for explaining biopsychosocial disability after whiplash and new predictive factors, for example, risk criteria that comprehensively differentiate acute WLP in a biopsychosocial manner are needed. Methods. Consecutively, 141 acute WLP and 40 ankle-injured recruited from emergency units were examined after 1 week, 1, 3, 6, and 12 months obtaining neck/head visual analog scale score, number of nonpainful complaints, epidemiological, social, psychological data and neurological examination, active neck mobility, and furthermore muscle tenderness and pain response, and strength and duration of neck muscles. Risk factors derived (reduced cervical range of motion, intense neck pain/headache, multiple nonpain complaints) were applied in a risk assessment score and divided into seven risk strata. Results. A receiver operating characteristics curve for the Risk Assessment Score and 1-year work disability showed an area of 0.90. Risk strata and number of sick days showed a log-linear relationship. In stratum 1 full recovery was encountered, but for high-risk patients in stratum 6 only 50% and 7 only 20% had returned to work after 1 year (P < 5.4 × 10−5). Strength measures, psychophysical pain measurements, and psychological and social data (reported elsewhere) showed significant relation to risk strata. Conclusion. The Risk Assessment score is suggested as a valuable tool for grading WLP early after injury. It has reasonable screening power for encountering work disability and reflects the biopsychosocial nature of whiplash injuries.
Comparison of Antibody Responses to a Potential Combination of Specific Glycolipids and Proteins for Test Sensitivity Improvement in Tuberculosis Serodiagnosis

ABSTRACT The humoral response to different proteinaceous antigens of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is heterogeneous among patients with active disease, and this has originated in the proposal to use a combination of several specific antigens to find an efficient serodiagnostic test for tuberculosis (TB). However, to date, comparisons of antibody responses to several antigens in the same population have been carried out without consideration of antigenic cell wall glycolipids. In the present study the presence of immunoglobulin G (IgG), IgM, and IgA antibodies to M. tuberculosis glycolipids (sulfolipid I, diacyltrehaloses, triacyltrehaloses, and cord factor) was compared with the response to four commercially available tests based on the 38-kDa protein mixed with the 16-kDa protein or lipoarabinomannan. Fifty-two serum samples from TB patients and 83 serum samples from control individuals (48 healthy individuals and 35 non-TB pneumonia patients) were studied. Three relevant results were obtained. (i) Smear-negative TB patients presented low humoral responses, but the sera which did react principally showed IgA antibodies to some glycolipidic antigens. (ii) TB patients exhibit heterogeneous humoral responses against glycolipidic antigens. (iii) Finally, test sensitivity is improved (from 23 to 62%) when IgG and IgA antibodies are detected together in tests based on different antigens (proteins and glycolipids). We conclude that it is possible to include glycolipidic antigens in a cocktail of specific antigens from M. tuberculosis to develop a serodiagnostic test.
An Iterated Estimation of the Motion Parameters of a Rigid Body from Noisy Displacement Vectors

Concerns the estimation of the motion parameters of a rigid body from noisy point matches made on perspective views. A minimization problem which permits relatively robust parameter estimation and helps overcome poor zoom estimation when the field-of-view is small is formulated. It is assumed that the motion has a small rotary component, interframe differences are small, and the errors in the system are due to independently distributed errors in the components of the displacement vectors. A fast procedure for minimization is exposited, in which the parameter set is partitioned and conditional generalized least-squares formulas identified. Recursive application of these provides the search space for the minimization problem. Comparative results are presented using simulated data and displacement vectors obtained from an intensity-based matching algorithm. >
Designing the behaviors of mobile robots for museum exhibits

Lion Shoes is an art installation, which was created for the 21 21 DESIGN SIGHT Exhibition “COLOR-HUNTING” directed by Dai Fujiwara. This exhibition promoted a method to bring the power of color into the design process. Lion Shoes was designed by Fujiwara and the shoe manufacturer Camper based on the colors of lions, which were collected in Africa. Our team developed a system of mobile robots that moved the Lion Shoes on a table. We made the robots react to visitors and we observed how visitors viewed the exhibit. Although the results indicated that the reactive behaviors should have been obvious, we found that some visitors made emotional responses to the shoe robots.
3D Garment Segmentation Based on Semi-supervised Learning Method ⋆

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning method to simultaneous segmentation and labeling of parts in 3D garments. The key idea in this work is to analyze 3D garments using semi-supervised learning method which can label parts in various 3D garments. We ﬁrst develop an objective function based on Conditional Random Field (CRF) model to learn the prior knowledge of garment components from a set of training examples. Then, we exploit an eﬀective training method that utilizes JointBoost classiﬁers based on the co-analysis for garments. And we modify the JointBoost to automatically cluster the segmented components without requiring manual parameter tuning. The purpose of our method is to relieve the manual segmentation and labeling of components in 3D garment collections. Finally, the experimental results show the performance of our proposed method is eﬀective
Extracting Patient Demographics and Personal Medical Information from Online Health Forums

Natural language processing has been successfully leveraged to extract patient information from unstructured clinical text. However the majority of the existing work targets at obtaining a specific category of clinical information through individual efforts. In the midst of the Health 2.0 wave, online health forums increasingly host abundant and diverse health-related information regarding the demographics and medical information of patients who are either actively participating in or passively reported at these forums. The potential categories of such information span a wide spectrum, whose extraction requires a systematic and comprehensive approach beyond the traditional isolated efforts that specialize in harvesting information of single categories. In this paper, we develop a new integrated biomedical NLP pipeline that automatically extracts a comprehensive set of patient demographics and medical information from online health forums. The pipeline can be adopted to construct structured personal health profiles from unstructured user-contributed content on eHealth social media sites. This paper describes key aspects of the pipeline as well as reports experimental results that show the system's satisfactory performance in accomplishing a series of NLP tasks of extracting patient information from online health forums.
Cellular receptors for sex steroids in human pituitary adenomas.

Cellular receptors for sex steroids (SSRs) were studied in an unselected series of 55 human pituitary tumors. Cytosolic receptors for estrogen (ERcs) and progesterone (PgRcs) were determined in all cases and cytosolic androgen receptors (ARcs) in 47 cases. Nuclear receptors (ERns, PgRns, ARns) were also studied in 33 cases. ERs and PgRs were determined by an ELISA and ARs by [3H]methyltrienolone binding. Where both cytosolic and nuclear receptors were studied (n = 33), ERs, PgRs and ARs were found in at least one subcellular fraction in 66.7, 60.6 and 81.8% of cases respectively, ERs and ARs being mainly recovered from the cytosol and PgRs from the nucleus. No linear correlation was found between pre-operative plasma steroid hormones and their specific cellular receptors. Nonetheless, the differential expression of SSRs according to sex and gonadal status at the time of surgery strongly supports their regulation by the steroid environment in vivo: PgRcs were more frequent in tumors found in women (41.4 vs 15.4%, P < 0.05), whereas a high expression of ERcs and ARcs (> 15 fmol/mg protein) was more common in tumors found in men (34.5 vs 10.3%, P < 0.05 and 54.5 vs 24.0% respectively). PgRs were positively correlated with ERns, indicating the possibility of estrogen priming of their expression, and negatively correlated with ARs in nuclear fractions. SSRs appeared to be widely distributed among pituitary tumors, although, compared with other hormone-secreting groups, prolactinomas displayed a higher ERc expression (34.8 +/- 11.3 vs 4.8 +/- 5.1 fmol/mg protein, P = 0.007) and gonadotroph cell adenomas lower ARc values (1.3 +/- 0.8 vs 38.2 +/- 10.6 fmol/mg protein, P = 0.048). Microadenomas were characterized by a higher PgR expression than macroadenomas, whereas hemorrhagic (macro)adenomas were characterized by a high ER expression (> 90%). The present results indicate that most pituitary tumors are targets for sex steroids, SSR expression being partially triggered by the steroid environment itself. Possible physiopathological and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.
Stress Discourse and Western Biomedical Ideology: Rewriting Stress

Popular psychosocial theories of stress and coping are based on an empiricist paradigm and a Western biomedical framework that reflect Western ideologies and values about health and illness. Problems associated with this discourse lie mainly in the ideologies that emphasize naturalism, individualism, rationalism, and objectivity. We suggest that stress and coping theory should be concerned with the ways in which power relations and social institutions produce the meaning of stress. The inclusion of alternative discourses that attend to the micro and macro social and historical factors is necessary for the further development of stress and coping theory and practice.
Distributed formation control of robots with directive visual measurement

In this paper, a formation control algorithm for holonomic mobile robots is developed based on a relative motion vision sensory system using the three-point perspective pose estimation algorithm, without the need for global sensing and communication between robots. This is achieved by employing the velocity variations, instead of actual velocities, as the control inputs. Simulation and experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed control method.
Hybrid position/force sliding mode control of a class of robotic manipulators

This paper deals with the hybrid position/force control of a class of robotic manipulators. To perform the control scheme design, it is necessary to characterize the dynamical model of the force sensor which is mounted at the end-effector of the robot. The objective is to perform reliable contact force measurements by estimating all the forces which are generated at the level of the tip which is directly connected to the sensor. A dynamical model of the sensor motion is formulated and identified, by considering also the kinematics of the robot. The proposed hybrid control scheme includes position and force controllers based on first and second order sliding modes. These kind of controllers guarantee suitable robustness properties to perform a satisfactory trajectory tracking, also allowing one to make the robot move in an environment with unknown obstacles by using the possibility of touching the obstacles as a way to pass them by. Experimental tests are performed on a COMAU SMART3-S2 anthropomorphic rigid robot manipulator with an ATI Gamma force sensor by comparing four different position/force control schemes.
Stimulation of estrogen receptor-mediated transcription and alteration in the phosphorylation state of the rat uterine estrogen receptor by estrogen, cyclic adenosine monophosphate, and insulin-like growth factor-I.

We have shown previously that exposure of rat uterine cells in primary culture to estradiol (E2), insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), or agents which alter intracellular cAMP levels, such as cholera toxin plus isobutylmethylxanthine (CT + IBMX) and 8-Br-cAMP, results in the up-regulation of cellular levels of the progesterone receptor, an effect believed to be mediated through the activation of estrogen receptor (ER) and phosphorylation pathways. We have therefore undertaken studies using transient transfection of these uterine cell cultures with a simple estrogen-responsive reporter gene in order to determine the ability of these agents to stimulate ER-mediated gene transcription directly. We also compared the ability of these same agents to alter the phosphorylation state of the endogenous uterine ER protein. Plasmid DNA containing two tandem estrogen responsive elements and a TATA box linked to the chloramphenicol acetyl transferase (CAT) gene was introduced into immature rat uterine cells grown in primary culture. Treatment of transfected cells with 10(-9) M E2, CT (1 micrograms/ml) + IBMX (10(-4) M), 8-Br-cAMP (10(-4) M), or IGF-I (20 ng/ml) resulted in an 8- to 10-fold induction of CAT activity. CAT activity stimulated by all agents was nearly completely suppressed by coincubation with the antiestrogen ICI 164,384 (ICI) or the protein kinase (PK) inhibitor H8. CAT activity induced by 8-Br-cAMP was more readily suppressed by ICI than that induced by E2, indicating that ER in cells exposed to 8-Br-cAMP is either unoccupied or minimally occupied by ligand. The level of ER phosphorylation in uterine cells was increased 3- to 5-fold upon exposure to E2, CT + IBMX, 8-Br-cAMP, or IGF-I. Of interest, the antiestrogen ICI also elicited a similar increase in overall ER phosphorylation. The PK inhibitors H8 and PKI suppressed the increase in overall ER phosphorylation stimulated by these agents by 50-75%. The results of our study indicate that E2, IGF-I, and agents which raise intracellular cAMP are able to stimulate ER-mediated trans-activation and ER phosphorylation. The fact that antiestrogen (ICI) evokes a similar increase in ER phosphorylation without a similar increase in transcription activation indicates that an increase in overall ER phosphorylation does not necessarily result in increased transcriptional activity. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Neural mapping and space-variant image processing

Network equations for the cortical area network (CAN) are presented. The nodes are formed by cortical areas with their intrinsic connectivity and the according computational capabilities. Intrinsic processing is modeled by convolutions. The edges are formed by the mappings between the various cortex areas. With respect to the spatial organization, one can distinguish topographic maps (coordinate transforms), patchy maps that occur when multiple input converges to a common target area, and parametric maps (2-D histograms that encode stimulus into a spatial position). Applications include space-variant image processing and visual receptive field organization
Joint Bayesian predictive classification and parallel model combination with prior scaling for robust ASR

This paper presents a model compensation approach based on Bayesian predictive classiﬁcation (BPC). In order to obtain effective prior distributions for BPC, our approach uses parallel model combination (PMC) to set the prior mean, and a likelihood ratio to set a scaled frame-speciﬁc prior variance. Experiments on the Aurora 2 database show that the proposed approach results in improved average performance compared to PMC.
Empowering people to change occupational behaviours to address critical global issues

Background. The greatest threat to human well-being in this century is climate change and related global issues. Purpose. We examined the effectiveness of the Modified Instrumentalism in Occupational Therapy model as a framework for facilitating occupational behaviour change to address climate change and related issues. Method. Eleven individuals participated in this mixed-methods single-subject-design study. Data were gathered using the Modified Assessment and Intervention Instrument for Instrumentalism in Occupational Therapy and Daily Occupational Inventories. Quantitative data were analyzed using two– and three–standard deviation band methods. Qualitative data were analyzed using heuristic phenomenological procedures. Findings. Occupational performance changed for five participants. Participants’ feelings shifted from frustration and helplessness to empowerment and a desire for action. They felt empowered to find occupation-based solutions to the global issues. Implications. Occupation-based interventions that increase personal awareness of the connection between occupational performance and global issues could empower people to be agents for action to ameliorate the issues.
Guest Editors' Introduction: Studying Professional Software Design

This special issue sets an agenda for research into early software design, and this introduction outlines drivers and issues for that agenda. It argues that looking at software from a design perspective, understanding software as a designed artifact, and considering how design reaches into the whole software life cycle can bring significant benefits both to our understanding of what works in software design and to our approach to tools and practices. The special issue presents outputs from an NSF-funded workshop on 'Studying Professional Software Design' held in 2010 at UC Irvine in which participants analyzed the same professional design sessions from different analytic perspectives. The workshop dialogues provide an example of what's critically needed to drive this research agenda: empirically grounded dialogues between research and practitioners.
Flower Categorization using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We have developed a deep learning network for classification of different flowers. For this, we have used Visual Geometry Group's 102 category flower dataset having 8189 images of 102 different flowers from University of Oxford. The method is basically divided into two parts; Image segmentation and classification. We have compared the performance of two different Convolutional Neural Network architectures GoogLeNet and AlexNet for classification purpose. By keeping the hyper parameters same for both architectures, we have found that the top 1 and top 5 accuracies of GoogLeNet are 47.15% and 69.17% respectively whereas the top 1 and top 5 accuracies of AlexNet are 43.39% and 68.68% respectively. These results are extremely good when compared to random classification accuracy of 0.98%. This method for classification of flowers can be implemented in real time applications and can be used to help botanists for their research as well as camping enthusiasts.
Associational fluency as a function of stimulus abstractness.

IN A RECENT paper, Cofer and Shevitz (1) analysed the relationship between fluency of verbal associations and the commonness or rarity of stimulus words. Reliable differences were found between the numbers of associations elicited by stimulus words which varied in commonness as determined by word-frequenc y counts. The importance of the Cofer and Shevitz study, like that of Haagen (2), lies in the fact that it gives clearer definition to properties of verbal stimuli. The present study considers an additional dimension of stimulus variability. Here the commonness-rarity difference is held constant and stimuli are chosen which vary along an abstract-conc rete dimension. Both Jung (3) and Woodworth (10) have noted that association time (delay between presentation of the stimulus word and the subject's response) is usually shorter for "concrete" nouns than for either "abstract" nouns or adjectives, although their definitions of abstract and concrete are not made explicit. Accordingly, the hypothesis to be examined here is that concrete nouns will be more provocative as stimulus words, i.e. will elicit more associational responses, than abstract nouns or adjectives. METHOD