Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
igh inter-rater reliability in analyzing results of decomposition-based uantitative electromyography in subjects with or without neuromuscular isorder

Decomposition-based quantitative electromyography (DQEMG) comprises a group of methods used to obtain information related to the health of the neuromuscular system. Although primarily objective, aspects of the data analysis protocol include operator decisions that may impact its reliability and reduce the applicability of the technique among multiple users. Thus, the objective of this study was to establish the inter-rater reliability of the protocol used for DQEMG analysis among five raters. Seventy data files previously obtained using DQEMG from healthy control subjects and patients with disorders of the neuromuscular system were analyzed by four novice and one experienced rater. Values obtained from this analysis were then evaluated for reliability within the novice raters and in contrast to the results of euromuscular disease europathy the experienced rater to examine the influence of the level of rater experience on the results obtained. The majority of the parameters associated with the number of motor unit potentials and their physiological characteristics were found to be reliable among all raters, with moderate-high ICC values observed for both the biceps brachii and first dorsal interosseous muscles. The data suggest that the level of rater experience does not greatly influence the results obtained and that the analysis can be reliably performed by a rater who is given suitable instruction. These findings are important particularly given the potential ome m use of DQEMG as an outc Please cite this article in press as: Boe SG, et al. High inter-rater reliability i graphy in subjects with or without neuromuscular disorder. J Neurosci Me Abbreviations: AAR, area-to-amplitude ratio; ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; B, biceps brachii; CMT-X, Charcot-Marie Tooth disease, Type X; COV, coefficient f variation; DQEMG, decomposition-based quantitative electromyography; EMG, lectromyographic; FDI, first dorsal interosseous; FR, firing rate; ICC, intra-class corelation coefficient; IDI, interdischarge interval; MU, motor unit; MUP, motor unit otential; NpAmp, negative-peak amplitude; S-MUP, surface-detected motor unit otential. ∗ Corresponding author at: School of Physiotherapy, Dalhousie University, Rm. 18, 4th Floor Forrest Building, 5869 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 3H 3J5. Tel. : +1 902 494 6360; fax: +1 902 494 1941. E-mail address: s.boe@dal.ca (S.G. Boe). 1 Address: School of Physical Therapy, The University of Western Ontario, Elborn ollege, Rm 1588, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H1. 2 Address: E.W. Bickle Centre for Complex Continuing Care, Toronto Rehabilitation nstitute, 130 Dunn Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 2R7. 3 Address: VHA Rehab Solutions, 633 Colborne St., 2nd Floor, London, Ontario,
Draft 1 Eicosapentaenoic acid ( EPA ) and docosahexaenoic acid ( DHA ) increase A β-degradation by affecting insulin-degrading enzyme ( IDE )

Complete List of Authors: Grimm, Marcus; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Mett, Janine; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Stahlmann, Christoph; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Haupenthal, Viola; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Blümel, Tamara; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Stötzel, Hannah; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Grimm, Heike; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology Hartmann, Tobias; Saarland University, Experimental Neurology
The Efficacy of Intranasal Administration of Dexmedetomidine and Ketamine to Yellow-Bellied Sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta)

Abstract The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of dexmedetomidine and ketamine and reversal with atipamezole administered intranasally to Trachemys scripta scripta. Eight healthy adult turtles received 0.2 and 10 mg/kg of dexmedetomidine and ketamine, respectively. Heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, and sedation (on a scale of 0–4) were measured. Blood was collected 45 min post induction for drug plasma levels from both the subcarapacial and tail veins, followed by intranasal atipamezole administration (0.5 mg/kg). The most frequent sedation scores (2 and 3) provided a level of sedation deep enough to perform a thorough physical exam and minor clinical procedures. All of the turtles became active in 18.9 ± 7 min after atipamezole administration. No adverse effects were observed and all measured cardiopulmonary parameters were within normal limits. Plasma levels of both dexmedetomidine and ketamine indicated adequate absorption and distribution with no difference in the levels obtained from either the subcarapacial or the tail venipuncture sites. A combination of dexmedetomidine–ketamine can be used intranasally to induce moderate to heavy sedation for physical examination, venipuncture, and other minor procedures in the yellow-bellied slider without adverse effects. In addition, the intranasal administration of atipamezole appears efficacious for reversal of dexmedetomidine. Intranasal administration of anesthetic agents holds promise for sedating and anesthetizing chelonians, which are often difficult to thoroughly examine and restrain for biological sample collection, both in the clinic and in the field.
Immune-neuroendocrine biology of invertebrates: a collection of methods

In the last decade there has been a considerable increase of interest towards the elucidation of several aspects of invertebrate biology, including immunity and neuroendocrinology. However, due to the difficulties connected to the great variety of morphology and adaptations displayed by invertebrates, and also in consideration of the number of techniques that are applied in the various laboratories, research on invertebrates still suffers from hampering that have been substantially overcome in vertebrate models, especially in mammals. The aim of this Technical Report is to provide the reader a useful list of well-established morphological and morpho-functional protocols in order to facilitate the design and make more homogeneous the realization of experiments in the field of invertebrate immune-neuroendocrinology.
CAVASS: a computer-assisted visualization and analysis software system - image processing aspects

The development of the concepts within 3DVIEWNIX and of the software system 3DVIEWNIX itself dates back to the 1970s. Since then, a series of software packages for Computer Assisted Visualization and Analysis (CAVA) of images came out from our group, 3DVIEWNIX released in 1993, being the most recent, and all were distributed with source code. CAVASS, an open source system, is the latest in this series, and represents the next major incarnation of 3DVIEWNIX. It incorporates four groups of operations: IMAGE PROCESSING (including ROI, interpolation, filtering, segmentation, registration, morphological, and algebraic operations), VISUALIZATION (including slice display, reslicing, MIP, surface rendering, and volume rendering), MANIPULATION (for modifying structures and surgery simulation), ANALYSIS (various ways of extracting quantitative information). CAVASS is designed to work on all platforms. Its key features are: (1) most major CAVA operations incorporated; (2) very efficient algorithms and their highly efficient implementations; (3) parallelized algorithms for computationally intensive operations; (4) parallel implementation via distributed computing on a cluster of PCs; (5) interface to other systems such as CAD/CAM software, ITK, and statistical packages; (6) easy to use GUI. In this paper, we focus on the image processing operations and compare the performance of CAVASS with that of ITK. Our conclusions based on assessing performance by utilizing a regular (6 MB), large (241 MB), and a super (873 MB) 3D image data set are as follows: CAVASS is considerably more efficient than ITK, especially in those operations which are computationally intensive. It can handle considerably larger data sets than ITK. It is easy and ready to use in applications since it provides an easy to use GUI. The users can easily build a cluster from ordinary inexpensive PCs and reap the full power of CAVASS inexpensively compared to expensive multiprocessing systems which are less efficient for CAVA operations.
Effect of Follow and Watch Relationships in Pull Requests

GitHub is both a code repository system and a social networking site. The social graph is built by “following a user” or“watching a project. ” Making contributions to other users’ projects involves sending a pull request by the person committing the code, and the consequent acceptance of the pull request (i.e. merging the committed code) by the project owner at some later time. The goal of our study is to investigate whether the relationships built by following users and watching projects influence the response time of pull requests. From the given data set of 90 projects from GitHub, we retrieve the response times of all the pull requests, and identify those pull requests made by followers and watchers. We perform the Kruskal Wallis test to compare each pair of these user groups in order to assess any significant differences between the mean response times of these groups. Our findings are twofold. First, we found that very few pull requests are made by the followers of the project owner or watchers of the project, that is, the social network does not reflect strongly the actual pull requests. Second, we did not find statistically significant differences on the difference of means among these different groups.
Title Towards A Unified Definition of Function

Both natural objects and artifacts have been studied from a variety of perspectives by the different sciences. One issue that has so far resisted philosophical and ontological investigations is the definition of a general notion of function capable of making sense of the functions attributed to natural objects, such as biological organisms, as well as of the functions attributed to artifacts, such as (designed) tools. The paper starts from the notions of role and context to study a definition already used to define artifact functions. The clarification of types of functional contexts and of the role of intentionality in defining function leads to a new proposal that applies to functions of natural objects as well as of artifacts. Finally, we evaluate our proposal against some desiderata discussed in the literature.
Total phenolic content, antioxidant and antibacterial activities of three Verbascum species from Iran.

The genus Verbascum L. belongs to the family Scrophulariaceae and includes plants that have been used widely in traditional medicine for a long time. Methanolic extracts of three Verbascum species from flora of Iran were in vitro screened for their possible antioxidant activities by three complementary test systems, namely DPPH free radicalscavenging, metal chelating activity and β-carotene/linoleic acid. The total phenol and flavonoid contents of the methanolic extracts from the aerial parts were measured by Folin Ciocalteu and AlCl3 assays, respectively. In addition, antibacterial activities of the methanolic extracts were studied by disc diffusion method against 3 Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria. Results showed that the methanolic extract of V. sinuatum contains the highest amount of phenolic compounds and of V. speciosum represents the highest flavonoid content. Results from antioxidant activity assays showed that the studied extracts are more active than ascorbic acid as a synthetic antioxidant in DPPH radical scavenging assay, but represent lower activity in metal-chelating assay. In βcarotene/linoleic acid system, oxidation of linoleic acid was effectively inhibited by V. speciosum extract (58.4±18.1mg/g), followed by V. sinuatum (51.41±2.28 mg/g). In addition, methanolic extracts of three Verbascum species showed strong antibacterial activity against all tested bacteria.
Postoperative Complications After Tension-Free Vaginal Tape Versus Transobturator Tape Procedure For Stress Urinary Incontinence

ObjectiveTo determine the frequency of post operative complications after tension-free vaginal tape (TVT) compared with the transobturator tape (TOT) procedure in women with stress urinary incontinence (SUI). Study designProspective study of all consecutive women with urodynamically confirmed SUI undergoing anti-incontinence surgery between January 2000 and January 2010. All procedures were performed by experienced urogynaecologists well trained in TVT and TOT surgery. Assessments were carried out at 1, 6, 12 and, 36 months after surgery.ResultsThe study population included 366 women (mean age 59.5 years), 243 in the TVT group and 123 in the TOT group. The groups were similar in terms of demographics, preoperative data, and cure rates. De novo urgency occurred in 13.4% of patients at 6 months after surgery, in 19.3% at 12 months, and in 22.1% at 36 months. De novo urgency was significantly more frequent in the TVT group than in the TOT group at 12 (22.2% vs 11.2%, P = 0.025), 24 (24.8% vs 12.3%, P = 0.033), and 36 (0% vs 24.7%, P = 0.034) months. Cure rates were similar in both groups. The final adjusted cure rate was 87.3% (319/366). ConclusionTreatment of SUI using the TOT procedure was associated with a lower rate of de novo urgency
Position States Learning t t-1 t-2 t-3 pull push Velocity States Obs

We propose position-velocity encoders (PVEs) which learn—without supervision—to encode images to positions and velocities of task-relevant objects. PVEs encode a single image into a low-dimensional position state and compute the velocity state from finite differences in position. In contrast to autoencoders, position-velocity encoders are not trained by image reconstruction, but by making the position-velocity representation consistent with priors about interacting with the physical world. We applied PVEs to several simulated control tasks from pixels and achieved promising preliminary results.
Antioxidant and Antibacterial Properties of Mesembryanthemum crystallinum and Carpobrotus edulis Extracts

The two halophyte plants Mesembryanthemum crystallinum and Carpobrotus edulis (Family: Aizoaceae, Order: Cary-ophyllales), widely used in the traditional medicine, were chosen for this study. There is no much information about the antioxidant and antibacterial activities of the two plants growing in the Tunisian coasts. The most of studies conducted confirmed the responses of these plants to the abiotic stresses. We demonstrate a high antioxidant activity in the two plant extracts by using the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) method. The two plant extract also exhibited antibacterial activity by using the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) against bacterial strains; Escherichia coli (ATCC 25922), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC 27853) and Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 25923). The different medicinal properties can be attributed in part to the presence of polyphenolics compounds in the two plant extracts.
Mobile Face Tracking: A Survey and Benchmark

With the rapid development of smartphones, facial analysis has been playing an increasingly important role in a multitude of mobile applications. In most scenarios, face tracking serves as a crucial first step because more often than not, a mobile application would only need to focus on analysing a specific face in a complex setting. Albeit inheriting many commons traits of the generic visual tracking problem, face tracking in mobile scenarios is characterised by a unique set of challenges, including rapid illumination change, significant scale variation, in-plane and out-of-plane rotation, cluttered background, occlusion, and temporary disappearance of the tracking target. Despite of its importance, mobile face tracking has received little attention in the past. This is largely due to the fact that there has been no suitable benchmark for the development and evaluation of mobile face trackers. In this work, we propose iBUG MobiFace benchmark, the first mobile face tracking benchmark consisting of 50 sequences captured by smartphone users in unconstrained environments. The sequences contain a total of 50,736 frames with 46 distinct identities to be tracked. The tracking target in each sequence is selected with varying difficulties in mobile scenarios. In addition to frame by frame bounding box, the annotations of 9 sequence attributes(e.g. multiple faces) are provided. We further provide a survey of 23 state-of-the-art visual tracker and a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of these methods on the proposed benchmark. In particular, trackers from two most popular frameworks, namely, correlation filter-based tracking and deep learning-based tracking, are studied. Our experiment shows that (a) the performance of all existing generic object trackers drops significantly on the mobile face trackYiming Lin E-mail: yiming.lin15@imperial.ac. uk Jie Shen E-mail: jie.shen07@imperial.ac. uk Shiyang Cheng E-mail: shiyang.cheng11@imperial.ac. uk Maja Pantic E-mail: maja.pantic@gmail.com Imperial College London, UK, SW7 2AZ ing scenario, suggesting the need of more research effort into mobile face tracking, and (b) the effective combination of deep learning tracking and face-related algorithms(e.g. face detection) provides the most promising basis for future developments in the field. The database, annotations and evaluation protocol / code will be made publicly available on the iBUG website1.
Enhanced patient research participation: a Photovoice study in Blantyre Malawi

Objectives Patient involvement in palliative care research is a desirable if challenging goal. Photovoice is an action research method in which affected communities gather photographs to document and discuss their communities’ strengths and concerns. Engagement with policymakers is a separately stated goal. Photovoice is increasingly used in health-related research but has not been widely described in the palliative care literature. We report on experiences and lessons learnt using Photovoice in Blantyre, Malawi to encourage its wider use in research and practice. Methods Thirteen co-researchers (six patients and seven household carers, mean age 47 years) receiving community-based palliative care, attended nine half-day group sessions over a 4-month period. Co-researchers produced, selected and analysed photographs. On completion of data collection, they conducted an advocacy event, including a photographic exhibition, to which media representatives and community leaders were invited. Results Procedures to ensure safety of co-researchers and to obtain consent of individuals identified in the photographs were developed during the planning phase. Co-researchers engaged with the Photovoice process with enthusiasm, although frailty and physical disability (poor sight) limited participation for some older adults. Inclusion of palliative care staff within the research team helped to facilitate open dialogue and clinical review where appropriate. Conclusions In this Photovoice study, patients and family members receiving palliative care engaged in an exploration of household well-being using photography, participatory analysis and an advocacy event. With appropriate planning, Photovoice can be adapted to a range of settings to enhance patient participation.
A Practical Guide for Using Propensity Score Weighting in R.

Propensity score weighting is one of the techniques used in controlling for selection biases in nonexperimental studies. Propensity scores can be used as weights to account for selection assignment differences between treatment and comparison groups. One of the advantages of this approach is that all the individuals in the study can be used for the outcomes evaluation. In this paper, we demonstrate how to conduct propensity score weighting using R. The purpose is to provide a stepby-step guide to propensity score weighting implementation for practitioners. In addition to strengths, some limitations of propensity score weighting are discussed.
Quitting smoking before surgical interventions and its relationship to health literacy

Objectives: The aim of our study was to evaluate the effect of health literacy (HL) level and smoking dependence of patients on their compliance with advice given by the physicians in anesthesia polyclinics on giving up smoking. Methods: This prospective study included 165 smokers. HL was evaluated by The European Health Literacy (HLS-EU). Nicotine dependence was measured by Fagerstrom test for nicotine dependence (FTND). Patients were advised not to smoke and their carbon monoxide levels in expired air were measured before on the operation day. Results: The number of patients smoking on the day of surgery was significantly higher among females ( p = 0.001). While the HL was lower, the FTND scores ( p = 0.006), daily cigarette consumption ( p < 0.001) and years of cigarette smoking ( p = 0.002) were found to be significantly higher. Fewer number of days between the polyclinic interview and the surgery date were positively correlated with compliance with the advice to give up smoking ( p = 0.011). Conclusions: Since the number of patients continuing to smoke cigarettes was high, it was concluded that verbal advice on giving up smoking is not enough and that other more effective measures are needed to ensure patient compliance. The reminder of 'quit smoking' on the day very close to the surgery may help more patients to stop smoking on that day.
Analyzing Families of Experiments in SE: A Systematic Mapping Study

<italic>Context:</italic> Families of experiments (i.e., groups of experiments with the same goal) are on the rise in Software Engineering (SE). Selecting unsuitable aggregation techniques to analyze families may undermine their potential to provide in-depth insights from experiments’ results. <italic>Objectives:</italic> Identifying the techniques used to aggregate experiments’ results within families in SE. Raising awareness of the importance of applying suitable aggregation techniques to reach reliable conclusions within families. <italic>Method:</italic> We conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) to identify the aggregation techniques used to analyze families of experiments in SE. We outline the advantages and disadvantages of each aggregation technique according to mature experimental disciplines such as medicine and pharmacology. We provide preliminary recommendations to analyze and report families of experiments in view of families’ common limitations with regard to joint data analysis. <italic>Results:</italic> Several aggregation techniques have been used to analyze SE families of experiments, including Narrative synthesis, Aggregated Data (AD), Individual Participant Data (IPD) mega-trial or stratified, and Aggregation of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>p</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="santos-ieq1-2864633.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-values. The rationale used to select aggregation techniques is rarely discussed within families. Families of experiments are commonly analyzed with unsuitable aggregation techniques according to the literature of mature experimental disciplines. <italic>Conclusion:</italic> Data analysis’ reporting practices should be improved to increase the reliability and transparency of joint results. AD and IPD stratified appear to be suitable to analyze SE families of experiments.