Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of optical coherence tomography speckle patterns in low-scatterer-concentration regions: simulations for lymphatic vessels mapping

In recent pre-clinical studies, we have demonstrated that analysis of speckle statistics in low-scattering, low SNR regions may have applications for accurate lymphatic vessels (and nerves) mapping in optical coherence tomography (OCT) of biotissues. Specifically, we utilized a Rayleigh fitting goodness-of-fit threshold parameter to isolate low scattering biological structures, in particular to distinguish them from noise. The threshold as well as the size of region of interest (ROI) for such speckle statistics evaluation were both chosen empirically. Here we present a model simulation study aimed at optimizing and automatically determining these empirically chosen important parameters. We explore the Rayleigh fit and speckle contrast metrics parameter space to enable accurate label-free OCT mapping of weakly scattering structures such as lymphatic vessels.
Comment: Variational Autoencoders as Empirical Bayes

We thank Professor Efron for his informative and unifying review of empirical Bayes. In this comment, we discuss the connection between empirical Bayes and the variational autoencoder (VAE), a popular statistical inference framework in the machine learning community. We hope this connection motivates new algorithmic approaches for empirical Bayesians and gives new perspectives on VAEs for machine learners.
A Complete Exercise Program for Adults: Content and Commitment

A: Physical activity provides so many health and fitness benefits (1). Linking the knowledge of WHAT to do (the first part of the question) with DOING the activity (the second part of the question) is a dual challenge. The first section of this article will address the “what” to include in a complete exercise program for an apparently healthy adult, and the second section will briefly provide insights on the “how” to promote adherence to exercise for the long term, along with additional resources to consult regarding adherence to lifelong exercise.
Searching for Dark Matter decay signals in the Galactic halo with the MAGIC telescopes

MAGIC is a system of two Cherenkov telescopes located in the Canary island of La Palma. A key part of MAGIC Fundamental Physics program is the search for indirect signals of Dark Matter (DM) from different sources. In the Milky Way, DM forms an almost spherically symmetric halo, with a density peaked towards the center of the Galaxy and decreasing toward the outer region. We search for DM decay signals from the Galactic Halo, with a special methodology developed for this work. Our strategy is to compare pairs of observations performed at different angular distances from the Galactic Center, selected in such a way that all the diffuse components cancel out, except for those coming from the DM. In order to keep the systematic uncertainty of this novel background estimation method down to a minimum, the observation pairs have been acquired during the same nights and follow exactly the same azimuth and zenith paths. We collected 20 hours of data during 2018. Using half of them to determine the systematic uncertainty in the background estimation of our analysis, we obtain a value of 4.8% with no dependence on energy. Accounting for this systematic uncertainty in the likelihood analysis based on the 10 remaining hours of data collected so far, we present the limit to TeV DM particle with a lifetime of 10^26 s in the bb decay channel.
Evaluation of the fine motor skills of children with DCD using the digitalised visual-motor tracking system

The study on the coordination between vision and motion of children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) can help understand the mechanism of DCD for timely and appropriate intervention. Whereas the existing visual-motor integrated systems rely on markers attached to the subject to track the eye gaze and body movements, which is too expensive and not suitable for DCD assessment. In this study, a markerless visual-motor tracking system which consists of an eye-tracker used to track the eye gaze and a Kinect used to capture the body movements is designed to monitor the behaviour of children in the fine motor tasks. Then the eye gaze position of the subject is matched into the motion image captured by Kinect. The current data of children placing pegs captured by the proposed system are analyzed quantitatively. We find that the visual movement speed of the children with DCD or at risk of DCD is slower than that of the typical developing children to focus on the target while their hand movement speed is almost the same. In addition to DCD analysis, the proposed system is meaningful to the monitoring of other diseases related to visual-motor coordination.
The Issue with Diffusive Shock Acceleration

We discuss the recent developments in the theory of diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) by using both first-principle kinetic plasma simulations and analytical theory based on the solution of the convection/diffusion equation. In particular, we show how simulations reveal that the spectra of accelerated particles are significantly steeper than the $E^{-2}$ predicted by the standard theory of DSA for strong shocks, in agreement with several observational pieces of evidence. We single out which standard assumptions of test-particle and non-linear DSA are violated in the presence of strong (self-generated) magnetic turbulence and put forward a novel theory in better agreement with the particle spectra inferred with multi-wavelength observations of young SN remnants, radio-SNe, and Galactic cosmic rays.
Printed Leaky-Wave Antenna With Aperture Control Using Width-Modulated Microstrip Lines and TM Surface-Wave Feeding by SIW Technology

This letter presents a width-modulated microstrip line leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with substrate-integrated waveguide and microstrip feeding. In particular, the planar antenna system consists of an integrated surface-wave launcher and three identical rows of quasi-periodic width-modulated microstrip lines for TM leaky-wave excitation, which produces a tailored binomial-like aperture distribution on the guiding surface. The behavior of the antenna when changing the width-modulated lines for different aperture distributions is also analyzed and presented. The measured LWA demonstrates a fan beam pattern in the far field with realized gain values greater than 10 dBi and with a beam direction of about <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math></inline-formula>20<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> from broadside at 23 GHz. Also, far-field measurements and near-field data indicate that the half-power beamwidth is below 10<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula>, and the position of the main beam maximum is relatively stable, i.e., ranging from about <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math></inline-formula>23<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math></inline-formula>15<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> between 23 and 24 GHz. The measured prototype is also well matched over these frequencies and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$|S_{11}| < $</tex-math></inline-formula> <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math></inline-formula>20 dB at 23.5 GHz.
The Hellerman-Rarick algorithm

We describe an algorithm for achieving a bordered block triangular form, including the case where the diagonal blocks are themselves in this form. The original algorithm was created by Hellerman and Rarick (1971, 1972) for solving linear programming problems. We include an extension of this algorithm for overcoming the problem of structural singularity in intermediate steps introduced by Erisman, Grimes, Lewis and Poole (1985). Two areas requiring further work include: dealing with safeguards against numerical instability when factorizing the diagonal blocks of the form, and dealing with parallelization, cache management, and memory management for large problems. Only after doing these things would it be appropriate to explore what niche, if any, these algorithms might address when implemented in a modern computer architecture for the solution of very large problems.
A Study on Sensitive Bands of EEG Data under Different Mental Workloads

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals contain a lot of human body performance information. With the development of the brain–computer interface (BCI) technology, many researchers have used the feature extraction and classification algorithms in various fields to study the feature extraction and classification of EEG signals. In this paper, the sensitive bands of EEG data under different mental workloads are studied. By selecting the characteristics of EEG signals, the bands with the highest sensitivity to mental loads are selected. In this paper, EEG signals are measured in different load flight experiments. First, the EEG signals are preprocessed by independent component analysis (ICA) to remove the interference of electrooculogram (EOG) signals, and then the power spectral density and energy are calculated for feature extraction. Finally, the feature importance is selected based on Gini impurity. The classification accuracy of the support vector machines (SVM) classifier is verified by comparing the characteristics of the full band with the characteristics of the β band. The results show that the characteristics of the β band are the most sensitive in EEG data under different mental workloads.
Multipole Fluctuations in Filled Skutterudites

In order to clarify exotic multipole properties of filled skutterudites, we evaluate multipole susceptibility for n =1–5, where n is the local f -electron number, on the basis of a multiorbital Anderson model constructed using the j – j coupling scheme. For n =1, magnetic fluctuations dominate over low-temperature electronic properties, while for n =2 and 4, electronic states are dominated by both magnetic and quadrupole fluctuations. For n =3 and 5, octupole fluctuations are found to be significant, depending on the crystalline electric field potential. We discuss the possible relevance of the results to actual materials.
Optical properties and photonic density of states in one-dimensional and three-dimensional liquid-crystalline photonic crystals

ABSTRACT Complex optical investigations were performed in one-dimensional (cholesteric) and three-dimensional (Blue Phase II) liquid-crystalline photonic crystals. Spectra of optical transmission and luminescence in the range of the photonic stop band contain information about the local anisotropy, characteristics of the photonic stop band, photonic density of states. We determine the photonic density of states in one-dimensional and three-dimensional liquid-crystalline photonic crystals employing measurements of polarised luminescence. The width of the photonic band gap, density of states and the optical characteristics related to the density of states essentially change with temperature in one-dimensional cholesteric photonic crystal. Drastic transformation of the density of states was found at the transition from one-dimensional to three-dimensional (Blue Phase II) photonic crystal. The results of our investigations demonstrate the possibility to employ the applied method for various types of photonic structures. Graphical abstract
SuperTIGER Abundances of Galactic Cosmic-Rays for the Charge Interval Z=41-56

On December 8, 2012 the SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument was launched from Williams Field, Antarctica on a long-duration balloon flight that lasted 55 days and maintained a mean altitude of 125,000 feet. SuperTIGER measured the relative abundances of Galactic cosmic-ray nuclei with high statistical precision and well resolved individual element peaks from Neon to Zirconium (charges Z=10-40). SuperTIGER also made exploratory measurements of the relative abundances up to Barium (Z=56). Although the statistics are low for elements heavier than Zirconium, we will show how the relative abundances of charges Z=41-56 compare to those reported by HEAO3-HNE during 1979-81. The relative abundances of elements Zirconium through Neodymium (Z=60) are of particular interest because they are likely formed both by supernova explosions and by binary neutron star mergers. A well resolved measurement of this range of elements can constrain the contributions to the Galactic cosmic-ray composition from both of these possible sources.
Fractional iterative variational mode decomposition and its application in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Variational mode decomposition (VMD), a recently developed adaptive mode decomposition technique, has attracted much attention in various fields. However, due to the assumption that the obtained intrinsic mode functions should be band-limited and separable in the Fourier domain, VMD has experienced many obstacles when processing wideband nonstationary signals. In this paper, a new method named fractional iterative variational mode decomposition (FrIVMD) is proposed for the decomposition of a multicomponent linear frequency modulation signal. By accurately estimating the chirp rate of the linear frequency modulation (LFM) component, the original signal is mapped to the fractional Fourier domain by the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT), where the corresponding LFM component is narrowly banded. Then, the conventional VMD is applied to separate the components. Finally, the signal mode in the time domain is obtained by the inverse FRFT. Numerical and real-world vibration signals are employed to validate the effectiveness of the FrIVMD technique. The results prove that the proposed method performs well for noisy signals and even signals containing weak components.
Boundary Control Design for Linear 1-D Balance Laws in the Presence of in-domain Disturbances

Boundary feedback control design for linear scalar conservation laws in the presence of exogenous disturbances is studied. The closed-loop system is rewritten as an abstract dynamical system. Sufficient conditions in the form of dissipation functional inequalities are given to establish the existence of a bound on the $\mathcal{L}^{2}$ norm of the state with respect to energy bounded in-domain disturbances. A systematic design algorithm based on semidefinite programming is provided to design a stabilizing control gain minimizing the effect of the exogenous input on the closed-loop response. The effectiveness of the approach is shown in a numerical example.
Simulation of revised nanofluid model in the stagnation region of cross fluid by expanding-contracting cylinder

Purpose This paper aims to address stagnation point flow of cross nanofluid in frames of hydromagnetics. Flow analysis subjected to expanding-contracting cylinder is studied. Design/methodology/approach Nonlinear problems are computed by using bvp4c procedure. Findings Radius of curvature and temperature-dependent heat sink-source significantly affects heat-mass transport mechanisms for cylindrical surface. Originality/value No such analysis has yet been reported.
Three-layer control strategy for LLC converters : large-signal, small-signal, and steady-state operation

Resonant converters, particularly LLC converters, feature low switching losses and electromagnetic interference (EMI), and high power density and efficiency. As a result, they have been widely used in DC/DC applications. Although LLC converters naturally provide soft switching conditions and therefore, produce relatively less switching losses, conduction losses in their rectifier have remained a barrier to achieving higher efficiencies. Moreover, the analysis of LLC converters is complicated since they process the electrical energy through a high-frequency resonant tank that causes excessive nonlinearity. The issue of this complexity becomes even worse since, in reality, the resonant frequency of such converters deviates due to variations in the temperature, operating frequency, load, and manufacturing tolerances. This complexity has caused: a) limited research on large-signal modeling and control of LLC converters to be performed (this leads to uncertain large-signal transient behavior and sluggish dynamic/recovery response), b) limited insight into small-signal modeling of LLC converters (this often leads to low accuracy), c) unregulated LLC converters not to operate in their optimum operating point (this leads to degraded efficiency and gain), d) conduction losses in the LLC rectifier to remain the main challenge to achieve higher efficiency. To address the above concerns, in this dissertation, a three-layer control strategy is introduced. Based on the need, all the three layers or just one of them can be used when implementing the LLC converter. The three-layer control strategy produces accurate and fast dynamics during start-up, sudden load or reference changes with near zero voltage overshoot in the start-up, obtains a near zero steady-state error by employing a second-order average small-signal model valid below, at, and above resonance, improves efficiency by a new synchronous rectification technique, and also tracks the series resonant frequency in unregulated DC/DC applications.
Series-Fed Dual-Polarized Single-Layer Linear Patch Array With High Polarization Purity

In this letter, a novel dual-polarized 1 × 4 patch array using proximity feed technique is presented. The proposed single-layer antenna consists of four square patch elements, two short-terminated parallel coupled microstrip lines, and a rat-race incorporated in the feed network. The patches are placed at the inner space between the two parallel microstrip feedlines. Horizontal and vertical polarizations of the patch array are excited by the even and odd modes of the two microstrip lines, respectively. The rat-race structure is used to provide in-phase and 180° out-of-phase feeds for the two modes. A prototype operating at 3.5 GHz is fabricated and measured. The measured overlapping bandwidth of the two ports is 81 MHz, also with port isolation higher than 40 dB. Owing to the symmetry of the structure and balanced excitations, the measured cross polarizations are all below −29 dB in E- and H-planes.
Segmenting and Detecting Carotid Plaque Components in MRI

Cardiovascular diseases and stroke are currently the leading causes of death worldwide. Atherosclerotic plaque is a mostly asymptotic vascular disease, but rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque in the carotid artery could lead to stroke. Automated segmentation of plaque components could help improve risk assessment by producing fast and reliable results while saving costs. In this thesis two extensive comparisons have been made. First supervised classifiers are compared in the pixel-wise segmentation task of plaque components. In this comparison five conventional machine learning techniques and one deep learning architecture have been evaluated: linear and quadratic Bayes normal classifiers, linear logistic classifier, random forest and a U-net architecture. In the second comparison classifiers are evaluated in a detection task for their ability to learn with weakly labelled data. This is done within the multiple instance learning (MIL) framework. In addition to conventional multiple instance learning algorithms, a new MIL adaptation of the deep learning architecture, MIL U-net, is proposed and evaluated. In the pixel-wise segmentation tasks the U-net architecture was the best overall classifier after the addition of 93 extra training patients to the original 20 training patients. A good inter-rater agreement was found for the haemorrhage class (ICC = 0.684) and the calcification class (ICC = 0.627). In the detection task the supervised methods, trained with one-sided noise, outperformed multiple instance classifiers such as MIL-Boost and the proposed MIL U-net. In this task both random forest and the linear logistic classifier obtained a fair Cohen's kappa (0.419 and 0.445 respectively) for detection of calcification per slice. The same classifiers obtained good correlation (Cohen's kappa 0.717 and 0.666 respectively) for haemorrhage detection per slice.
Exposure to low Earth orbit of an extreme-tolerant cyanobacterium as a contribution to lunar astrobiology activities

Abstract By investigating the survival and the biomarker detectability of a rock-inhabiting cyanobacterium, Chroococcidiopsis sp. CCMEE 029, the BIOMEX space experiment might contribute to a future exploitation of the Moon as a test-bed for key astrobiology tasks such as the testing of life-detection technologies and the study of life in space. Post-flight analyses demonstrated that the mixing of dried cells with sandstone and a lunar regolith simulant provided protection against space UV radiation. During the space exposure, dried cells not mixed with minerals were killed by 2.05 × 102 kJ m−2 of UV radiation, while cells mixed with sandstone or lunar regolith survived 1.59 × 102 and 1.79 × 102 kJ m−2, respectively. No differences in survival occurred among cells mixed and not mixed with minerals and exposed to space conditions in the dark; this finding suggests that space vacuum and 0.5 Gy of ionizing radiation did not impair the cells’ presence in space. The genomic DNA of dead cells was severely damaged but still detectable with PCR amplification of a short target, thus suggesting that short sequences should be targeted in a PCR-based approach when searching for traces of life. The enhanced stability of genomic DNA of dried cells mixed with minerals and exposed to space indicates that DNA might still be detectable after prolonged periods, possibly up to millions of years in microbes shielded by minerals. Overall, the BIOMEX results contribute to future experiments regarding the exposure of cells and their biomarkers to deep space conditions in order to further test the lithopanspermia hypothesis, the biomarker stability and the microbial endurance, with implications for planetary protection and to determine if the Moon has been contaminated during past human missions.
Global Synchronization of Fuzzy Memristive Neural Networks With Discrete and Distributed Delays

This paper investigates the synchronization problem of Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy memristive neural networks (FMNNs) with mixed delays, in which the bounded distributed and unbounded discrete time-varying delays are involved. Then, under the nonsmooth analysis and Lyapunov stability theory, several easily verified algebraic criteria are established to guarantee the global synchronization of FMNNs via a designed fuzzy feedback controller. Moreover, to show the superiority of the theoretical results, several discussions and comparisons with existing work are provided, indicating that derived results in this paper are general and include several existing ones as special cases. Finally, two numerical examples and two applications in psuedorandom number generation and image encryption are presented to show the validity and practicability of the theoretical results.
A review of optimal cloning of pure quantum states

In this project, quantum cloning machines are analyzed that take in N quantum systems in the same unknown pure state and output M quantum systems with M g N, such that the output best resembles the ideal, but impossible output of an M-fold tensor product of the pure input state. The proof of Keyl and Werner is reviewed in which a unique optimal solution is constructed, both in the case where the quality of the cloning is determined by the entire output, and in the case where the quality is determined by measurements on a single clone. Furthermore, it is shown that previous work on qubit cloning machines is a special case of the presented optimal solution.