Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Singing for Breathing”: Participants' perceptions of a group singing programme for people with COPD

Background: Chronic obstructive airways disease (COPD) is a long term respiratory condition with a high prevalence rate and associated with considerable physical and psychological morbidity. This research aims to examine the perceptions of people with COPD taking part in regular group singing, in terms of feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness. Methods: The overall approach was a pre-test, post-test feasibility element and a nested qualitative component. Measures of respiratory function and self-reported quality of life were collected from participants engaged in a 36 week singing programme. Written comments from 97 individuals, reported here, were collected at baseline, mid-point and end-point. Data were analysed using content and thematic analysis. Results: Participants noted limitations due to their respiratory condition but a large number expressed beliefs that singing had led to improvement and this appeared to be incremental over the time of the project. Other comments related to positive effects on physical health more broadly, on psychological wellbeing and on the social support gained through meeting others with COPD. Comments relating to the overall programme and the research itself were overwhelmingly positive. Conclusions: Findings suggest that singing is perceived as both acceptable and beneficial to people with COPD. Evidence from participants served as a useful supplement to the quantitative findings.
Avaliação de resposta patológica em câncer de mama após quimioterapia neoadjuvante: padronização de protocolo adaptado

The concept of pathologic complete response (pCR) is controversial. Previous studies used different methods of pCR assessment, but there is no universal consensus about the best protocol for the study of surgical specimens from patients with breast carcinoma undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Symmans et al. developed a classification system of residual cancer burden (RCB) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer analyzing the extent of primary tumor bed, the percentage of residual viable tumor cells in the tumor bed and lymph node involvement. We present a proposal for the evaluation of pathological response in breast tumors after neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Based on Symmans et al. study, it consists in a protocol adapted to our routine pathological examination of surgical specimens.
Motion Recovery by Using Stereo Perspective Observation

The motion recovery for a class of movements in the space is considered in this note by using the stereo perspective observation of at least three points. The motion equation that is considered can cover a wide class of practical movements in the space. The asymptotic estimation of the motion parameters, which are all time-dependent variables, is developed based on the second method of Lyapunov. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be modified to deal with occlusion phenomenon. To illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm, it is compared with the extended Kalman filter (EKF) by computer simulations.
Cascade High Gain Predictors for a Class of Nonlinear Systems

This work presents a set of cascade high gain predictors to reconstruct the vector state of triangular nonlinear systems with delayed output. By using a Lyapunov-Krasvoskii approach, simple sufficient conditions ensuring the exponential convergence of the observation error towards zero are given. All predictors used in the cascade have the same structure. This feature will greatly improve the easiness of their implementation. This result is illustrated by some simulations.
Control Design for Quantized Linear Systems With Saturations

This paper deals with systems involving input saturation and quantized control laws, which can be of two types: input quantization case and state quantization case. In both cases, the state feedback control design problem is addressed. Therefore, based on some modified sector conditions and appropriate variable changes, regional (local) uniform ultimate boundedness stabilization problem is tackled. Computational oriented solutions are derived to solve suboptimal convex optimization problems able to give a constructive solution to the design problem of the state feedback gain.
Gypenosides inhibits migration and invasion of human oral cancer SAS cells through the inhibition of matrix metalloproteinase-2 -9 and urokinase-plasminogen by ERK1/2 and NF-kappa B signaling pathways

Gypenosides (Gyp), found in Gynostemma pentaphyllum Makino, has been used as a folk medicine in the Chinese population for centuries and is known to have diverse pharmacologic effects, including anti-proliferative and anti-cancer actions. However, the effects of Gyp on prevention from invasion and migration of oral cancer cells are still unsatisfactory. The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of Gyp treatment on migration and invasion of SAS human oral cancer cells. SAS cells were cultured in the presence of 90 and 180 μg/mL Gyp for 24 and 48 hours. Gyp induced cytotoxic effects and inhibited SAS cells migration and invasion in dose- and time-dependent response. Wound-healing assay and boyden chamber assay were carried out to investigate Gyp-inhibited migration and invasion of SAS cells. Gyp decreased the abundance of several proteins, including nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB), cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/ 2), matrix metalloproteinase-9, -2 (MMP-9, -2), sevenless homolog (SOS), Ras, urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA), focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and RAC-alpha serine/threonine-protein kinase (Akt), in a time-dependent manner. In addition, Gyp decreased mRNA levels of MMP-2, MMP-7, MMP-9 but did not affect FAK and Rho A mRNA levels in SAS cells. These results provide evidences for the role of Gyp as a potent anti-metastatic agent, which can markedly inhibit the metastatic and invasive capacity of oral cancer cells. The inhibition of NF-κB and MMP-2, -7 and -9 signaling may be one of the mechanisms that is present in Gyp-inhibited cancer cell invasion and migration.
Hamiltonian Identification Through Enhanced Observability Utilizing Quantum Control

This note considers Hamiltonian identification for a controllable quantum system with nondegenerate transitions and a known initial state. We assume to have at our disposal a single scalar control input and the population measure of only one state at an (arbitrarily large) final time T. We prove that the quantum dipole moment matrix is locally observable in the following sense: for any two close but distinct dipole moment matrices, we construct discriminating controls giving two different measurements. This result suggests that what may appear at first to be very restrictive measurements are actually rich for identification, when combined with well designed discriminating controls, to uniquely identify the complete dipole moment of such systems.
Heart Modeling of Congenital Heart Disease Based on Neonatal Echocardiographic Images

A heart model that can be expressed mathematically in a computer is desirable. Heart modeling applications can be classified into four areas : clinical, research, educational, and communications. A heart model for clinical application can be used as prior knowledge for segmentation and registration in medical image processing. A heart model for research application could be constructed each time using a combination of selected elements to reproduce the behavior of interest. However, a heart model for educational use does not necessarily have to follow actual data faithfully. A combination of visualization techniques, rich text information, and interaction is most important for effective teaching. Also, graphical information is used frequently by medical staff to explain the disease condition to patients and their families. It is important to understand what is to be communicated in such cases. For example, it is not necessarily important to represent precise shape information. In this review, we present several applications of heart models. We also introduce a novel application of a congenital heart disease model for communications uses. Finally, we discuss future perspectives in this field.
Cadmium directly induced mitochondrial dysfunction of human embryonic kidney cells

Cadmium (Cd) is the major component of polluted environment, which has numerous undesirable effects on health. Cd could induce apoptosis of HEK293 cells, and the mitochondria may play a key role. However, the mode of action is unclear. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the ability of the Cd to induce dysfunction of mitochondria. We examined the effect of cadmium chloride (1, 5 and 10 μM) on mitochondrial membrane permeability and potential as well as oxidative stress markers in mitochondria isolated from HEK293 cells. We found that Cd could directly increase in permeability and decrease in membrane potential of mitochondria, even resulted in mitochondrial swelling, and that Cd could inhibit the activities of ATPase, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px), enhanced the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and lipid peroxidation (LPO). On the whole, the results show that Cd can directly lead to mitochondrial dysfunction of HEK293 cells, including increased permeability, inhibiting respiration and evoking oxidative stress. Thus, for the first time, this paper makes an overall analysis of Cd-induced changes of structure and function of isolated mitochondria. Our findings may also have general implications in Cd-induced apoptosis by mitochondria pathway.
Effect of wheat bran and flaxseed on cadmium effects and retention in rats

Dietary fiber can affect cadmium (Cd) absorption and toxicity, but the effect appears to depend on the type of dietary fiber. The aim of the present study was to compare the effect of dietary sources containing distinct amounts of soluble and insoluble fiber on Cd absorption, accumulation and toxicity in growing rats. The absorption of essential macrominerals (Ca, P and Mg) was also evaluated. Animals received a nutritionally balanced diet with cellulose (cel — control), wheat bran or flaxseed as the fiber source with 0 or 50 mg Cd kg-1 diet, during 30 days. Cd exposure reduced body weight gain, feed efficiency ratio, epididymal fat relative weight and liver relative weight, and increased plasma alanine aminotransferase activity in all fiber groups. The apparent Cd absorption was similar among Cd-groups, but the flax-Cd group had a higher hepatic and renal Cd concentration. Cd decreased the absorption of Ca and P, and increased Mg absorption in the wheat bran and flaxseed groups, but not in the cel group. Although the different fiber sources investigated had no effect on Cd toxicity, the major soluble fiber source, flaxseed, increased Cd retention. Thus, caution should be taken in the intake of flaxseed by Cd-exposed populations.
ACID-FAST BACILLI IN THE STOMACH LAVAGE AND FECES OF TUBERCULOUS CHILDREN

Our purpose in this study was to determine the value of stomach lavage and of the examination of feces in finding tubercle bacilli in children suffering with tuberculosis. We also thought it interesting to correlate the results of this method with other more commonly used laboratory procedures which also serve for the demonstration of tubercle bacilli. We studied our cases from different clinical points of view, too, and tried to discover the forms of tuberculosis which, among children, are likely to produce positive stomach lavage results for tubercle bacilli. Finally, we tried to demonstrate the difference of results when obtained for research purposes as compared with the results of similar methods done as the daily routine of a large hospital. SELECTION OF CASES The 101 cases studied were all from the Sea View Hospital. Four of them occur twice in this study with more than one year's interval between the
Fastest Mixing Reversible Markov Chains on Graphs With Degree Proportional Stationary Distributions

In this technical note, we study two semi-definite programming (SDP) methods of assigning transition probabilities to a Markov chain in order to optimize its mixing rate. In the first SDP formulation, there is a single transition probability parameter to be optimized (the holding probability of vertices) which leads to easier and faster computation as opposed to the more general reversible Markov chain formulation corresponding to a stationary distribution that is proportional to the degree of vertices. By deriving exact analytical results, it is shown that both the single parameter and the degree proportional reversible FMMC formulations tend to yield better results than the symmetric SDP formulation for some well-known graphs.
Learning from massive noisy labeled data for image classification

Large-scale supervised datasets are crucial to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for various computer vision problems. However, obtaining a massive amount of well-labeled data is usually very expensive and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to train CNNs with only a limited number of clean labels and millions of easily obtained noisy labels. We model the relationships between images, class labels and label noises with a probabilistic graphical model and further integrate it into an end-to-end deep learning system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we collect a large-scale real-world clothing classification dataset with both noisy and clean labels. Experiments on this dataset indicate that our approach can better correct the noisy labels and improves the performance of trained CNNs.
Cadmium-induced genetic instability in mice testis

Cadmium is a well recognized carcinogenic, cytotoxic and mutagenic transition metal. Recent evidence suggests that the proteins participating in the DNA repair systems, especially in excision and mismatch repair (MMR), are sensitive targets of cadmium toxicity. Microsatellite instability (MSI) is regarded as one of the phenotypes of defective DNA MMR and, consequently, as a marker of high risk for cancer. The purpose of this work is to determine whether cadmium, in the form of cadmium chloride (CdCl2), may induce microsatellite mutations in murine testes. For this study, 2-month-old male ICR-CD1 mice were treated by a single subcutaneous injection of 1, 2 and 3 mg CdCl2/kg body weight and killed after 35 days. A panel of six microsatellite markers, previously reported as being the most sensitive in detecting MSI in murine tumours, was used in this study. The results show that CdCl2 in the doses of 2 and 3 mg/kg induced a decrease in the testis weight and severe histopathologic changes with complete disorganization of testicular structure and evidences of severe necrosis. In addition, the animals exposed to the lowest CdCl2 dose presented MSI in the testis. The results indicate the existence of MSI in at least two nuclear loci suggesting putative genotoxic effects induced by cadmium.
The nerve growth factor 35 years later.

"Embryogenesis is in some way a model system. It has always been distinguished by the exactitude even punctitio, of its anatomical descriptions. An experiment by one of the great masters of embryology could be made the text of a discourse on scientific method. But something is wrong, or has been wrong. There is no theory of development in the sense in which Mendelism is a theory that accounts for the results of breeding experiments. There has therefore been little sense of progression or timeliness about embryological research. Of many papers delivered at embryological meetings, however good they may be in themselves . one too often feels that they might have been delivered five years beforehand without making anyone much the wiser, or deferred for five years without making anyone conscious of a great loss" (1). This feeling of frustration so incisively conveyed by these considerations by P. Medawar, pervaded, in the forties, the field of experimental embryology which had been enthusiastically acclaimed in the mid-thirties, when the upper lip of the amphibian blastopore brought this area of research to the forefront of the biological stage. The side branch of experimental neuroembryology, which had stemmed out from the common tree and was entirely devoted to the study of the tropic interrelations between neuronal cell populations and between these and the innervated organs and tissues, was then in its initial vigorous growth phase. It in turn suffered from a sharp decrease in the enthusiasm that had inflamed the pioneers in this field, ever since R. G. Harrison delivered his celebrated lecture on this topic at the Royal Society in London in 1935 (2). Although the alternate "wax and wane" cycles are the rule rather than the exception in all fields of human endeavor, in that of biological sciences the "wane" is all too often indicative of a justified loss of faith in the rational and methodical approach that had at first raised so much hope. A brief account of the state-of-the-art of experimental neuroembryology in the
Consensus Under Saturation Constraints in Interconnection States

This technical note studies the consensus problems under saturation constraints in interconnection states, both the componentwise and the norm bounded constraints. By utilizing the edge Laplacian and the state saturation, the networked linear systems under interconnection constraints are described by the node and constrained edge dynamics. Sufficient conditions are identified under which the given constrained systems achieve the average consensus. Then, as an example of applications, we extend the analytical result to the synthesis problem with limited communication ranges. By utilizing the state saturation, we propose a nonlinear consensus algorithm that solves the consensus problem while preserving the connectedness and the input constraints.
Child Birth Education for Adolescents: Removing the Barriers That Prevent Attendance at Child Birth Classes

Abstract Nearly half the families in a rural county in Southwestern Pennsylvania have annual incomes less than $35,000. Poverty, a predictor of adolescent sexual activity American Academy of Pediatrics. Adolescent pregnancy-current trends and issues: 1998. Pediatrics 1999; 103(2):516; Retrieved 06 15, 2002 Health Reference Center—Academic Web Site at http://web1.infotrac. galegroup.com/itw/infomark/1/1/1/purl=rc6_HRCA), may contribute to the adolescent pregnancy rate in this county. Twelve percent of clientele from a low-income pre/postnatal clinic in this county are adolescent mothers. Many low-income adolescents refrain from attending childbirth classes because there are no perceived benefits from these classes. The Health Belief Model is used to assess the extraneous and intrinsic variables that prevent this clientele from attending childbirth class and proposes an intervention plan addressing these variables.
New Minmax Linear Quadratic Fault-Tolerant Tracking Control for Batch Processes

A new design of linear quadratic control (LQ) is proposed for batch processes with partial actuator faults and unknown disturbance. The autoregressive model built through input-output process data is transformed into a new non-minimal state space (NMSS) model in which the process state variables and tracking error are combined, then a new LQ control scheme is derived based on minimax optimization. Unlike LQ based on traditional NMSS model (TNMSSLQ), the process state variables and tracking error can both be regulated in the proposed method. Monotonic situations of optimal performance cost are further derived to yield sufficient conditions for both nominal and robust system stability. Finally, an injection velocity control example is illustrated to show the effectiveness.
First Person Action Recognition Using Deep Learned Descriptors

We focus on the problem of wearer's action recognition in first person a.k. a. egocentric videos. This problem is more challenging than third person activity recognition due to unavailability of wearer's pose and sharp movements in the videos caused by the natural head motion of the wearer. Carefully crafted features based on hands and objects cues for the problem have been shown to be successful for limited targeted datasets. We propose convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for end to end learning and classification of wearer's actions. The proposed network makes use of egocentric cues by capturing hand pose, head motion and saliency map. It is compact. It can also be trained from relatively small number of labeled egocentric videos that are available. We show that the proposed network can generalize and give state of the art performance on various disparate egocentric action datasets.
Almost Sure Stability of Switching Markov Jump Linear Systems

Recently a special hybrid system called Switching Markov Jump Linear System (SMJLS) is studied. A SMJLS is subject to a deterministic switching and a stochastic Markovain switching. To extend the results already obtained and to investigate some new aspects of such systems, our main contributions in this paper are: i) Transient analysis of Markov process, i.e., the expectations of the sojourn time, the activation number of any mode, and the number of switchings between any two modes and ii) two sufficient conditions of the exponential almost sure stability for a general SMJLS. Different from previous work, which is a special case of our study, the transition rate matrix for the random Markov process in our study is not fixed, but varies when a deterministic switching takes place.
Luenberger-Type Observers for a Class of Nonlinear Triangular Control Systems

For a wide class of triangular nonlinear control systems, sufficient conditions for the solvability of the observer design problem are established. The state estimation is exhibited by means of a Luenberger-type observer whose dynamics are in general time-varying and noncausal. The proof of our main result is based on a Lyapunov-like forwarding procedure which extends the methodology employed in previous works towards solvability of the same problem for a subclass of triangular systems with no inputs.
Computing a Guaranteed Approximation of the Zone Explored by a Robot

This technical note deals with the guaranteed characterization of the part of the space that has been explored by a robot. The main difficulty of the problem is to take into account the uncertainty associated with the trajectory and the fact that the dimension of the visible space at time t may be smaller than that of the workspace. An example involving an experiment made with an actual underwater robot is presented in order to illustrate the efficiency of the approach.
Regional Stability Analysis of Discrete-Time Dynamic Output Feedback Under Aperiodic Sampling and Input Saturation

This technical note addresses the problem of regional stability analysis of a continuous-time plant controlled by a discrete-time dynamic output feedback control law with saturation constraints under aperiodic sampling. To cope with the aperiodic sampling problem, the proposed approach is based on an impulsive system modeling and the use of looped functionals. A generalized sector-based relation is applied to tackle the control saturation effects. From these ingredients, conditions to ensure regional asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system under aperiodic sampling are derived. Based on these conditions, LMI-based optimization problems are proposed to compute estimates of the region of attraction of the closed-loop system or to maximize the bound on the maximal admissible interval between two successive sampling instants, for which the regional stability can be ensured with respect to a given set of admissible states. A numerical example illustrates the application of the results.