Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cerebral Perfusion Changes After Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment: A Randomized Manual Placebo-Controlled Trial

Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment (OMT) is a therapeutic approach aimed at enhancing the body’s self-regulation focusing on somatic dysfunctions correction. Despite evidence of OMT effectiveness, the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms, as well as blood perfusion effects, are still poorly understood. The study aim was to address OMT effects on cerebral blood flow (CBF) in asymptomatic young volunteers as measured by Magnetic Resonance Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) method. Thirty blinded participants were randomized to OMT or placebo, and evaluated with an MRI protocol before manual intervention (T0), immediately after (T1), and 3 days later (T2). After T0 MRI, participants received 45 min of OMT, focused on correcting whole body somatic dysfunctions, or placebo manual treatment, consisting of passive touches in a protocolled order. After treatment, participants completed a de-blinding questionnaire about treatment perception. Results show significant differences due to treatment only for the OMT group (OMTg): perfusion decreased (compared to T0) in a cluster comprising the left posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the superior parietal lobule, while increased at T2 in the contralateral PCC. Furthermore, more than 60% of participants believed they had undergone OMT. The CBF modifications at T2 suggest that OMT produced immediate but reversible effects on CBF.
Clinical Course in Chronic Subdural Hematoma Patients Aged 18–49 Compared to Patients 50 Years and Above: A Multicenter Study and Meta-Analysis

Objective: Chronic Subdural Hematoma (cSDH) is primarily a disease of elderly, and is rare in patients <50 years, and this may in part be related to the increased brain atrophy from 50 years of age. This fact may also influence clinical presentation and outcome. The aim of this study was to study the clinical course with emphasis on clinical presentation of cSDH patients in the young (<50 years). Methods: A retrospective review of a population-based cohort of 1,252 patients operated for cSDH from three Scandinavian neurosurgical centers was conducted. The primary end-point was difference in clinical presentation between the patients <50 y/o and the remaining patients (≥50 y/o group). The secondary end-points were differences in perioperative morbidity, recurrence and mortality between the two groups. In addition, a meta-analysis was performed comparing clinical patterns of cSDH in the two age groups. Results: Fifty-two patients (4.2%) were younger than 50 years. Younger patients were more likely to present with headache (86.5% vs. 37.9%, p < 0.001) and vomiting (25% vs. 5.2%, p < 0.001) than the patients ≥50 y/o, while the ≥50 y/o group more often presented with limb weakness (17.3% vs. 44.8%, p < 0.001), speech impairment (5.8% vs. 26.2%, p = 0.001) and gait disturbance or falls (23.1% vs. 50.7%, p < 0.001). There was no difference between the two groups in recurrence, overall complication rate and mortality within 90 days. Our meta-analysis confirmed that younger patients are more likely to present with headache (p = 0.015) while the hemispheric symptoms are more likely in patients ≥50 y/o (p < 0.001). Conclusion: Younger patients with cSDH present more often with signs of increased intracranial pressure, while those ≥50 y/o more often present with hemispheric symptoms. No difference exists between the two groups in terms of recurrence, morbidity, and short-term mortality. Knowledge of variations in clinical presentation is important for correct and timely diagnosis in younger cSDH patients.
The Chloroplast Envelope Protease FTSH11 – Interaction With CPN60 and Identification of Potential Substrates

FTSH proteases are membrane-bound, ATP-dependent metalloproteases found in bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. The product of one of the 12 genes encoding FTSH proteases in Arabidopsis, FTSH11, has been previously shown to be essential for acquired thermotolerance. However, the substrates of this protease, as well as the mechanism linking it to thermotolerance are largely unknown. To get insight into these, the FTSH11 knockout mutant was complemented with proteolytically active or inactive variants of this protease, tagged with HA-tag, under the control of the native promoter. Using these plants in thermotolerance assay demonstrated that the proteolytic activity, and not only the ATPase one, is essential for conferring thermotolerance. Immunoblot analyses of leaf extracts, isolated organelles and sub-fractionated chloroplast membranes localized FTSH11 mostly to chloroplast envelopes. Affinity purification followed by mass spectrometry analysis revealed interaction between FTSH11 and different components of the CPN60 chaperonin. In affinity enrichment assays, CPN60s as well as a number of envelope, stroma and thylakoid proteins were found associated with proteolytically inactive FTSH11. Comparative proteomic analysis of WT and knockout plants, grown at 20°C or exposed to 30°C for 6 h, revealed a plethora of upregulated chloroplast proteins in the knockout, some of them might be candidate substrates. Among these stood out TIC40, which was stabilized in the knockout line after recovery from heat stress, and three proteins that were found trapped in the affinity enrichment assay: the nucleotide antiporter PAPST2, the fatty acid binding protein FAP1 and the chaperone HSP70. The consistent behavior of these four proteins in different assays suggest that they are potential FTSH11 substrates.
Secretory activity of cattle mammary gland tissues during lactation and duration of the interlactation period

Changes in the secretory activity of mammary gland during the involution period are designed to create conditions for inexhaustible use of the mammary gland, ensure the normal course of structural and functional regression for the development for the next lactation. For animals in which the interlactation period lasted less than 45 days, the absorption of non-esterified fatty acids in the last week of the involution period was 2.8 times higher than in animals in which the interlactation period lasted at least 55 days, 1.48 times higher than the absorption of acetic acid, 1.24 times higher than βoxybutyric acid, 1.28 times higher than glucose, 2.82 times the total amount of phospholipids and triacylglycerols. For acetic acid, β-oxybutyric acid and glucose, not only higher absorption rates were observed, but also a tendency to increase the absorption level in the last weeks of lactation in animals with an interlactation period of less than 45 days, indicating metabolic changes in mammary gland tissue during the involution period. The duration of the dry period affects the secretory activity of breast tissue during lactation and the quality of milk produced during this period, which is expressed by lower fat content in the product while reducing the duration of the dry period to less than 45 days and reducing milk fat by 10.42% during the next calving. At the same time, the body weight of newborn calves in animals, whose interlactation period was less than 45 days by 19.3%, was lower than the animals of the control group, i.e. those who were in the interlactation period for at least 55 days, which indicates the negative impact of reducing the duration of the dry period on the body of animals.
Self-Assembled Networks of Short and Long Chitin Nanoparticles for Oil/Water Interfacial Superstabilization

Highly charged (zeta potential ζ = +105 mV, acetate counterions) chitin nanoparticles (NCh) of three different average aspect ratios (∼5, 25, and >60) were obtained by low-energy deconstruction of partially deacetylated chitin. The nanoparticles were effective in reducing the interfacial tension and stabilized the oil/water interface via network formation (interfacial dilatational rheology data) becoming effective in stabilizing Pickering systems, depending on NCh size, composition, and formulation variables. The improved interfacial wettability and electrosteric repulsion facilitated control over the nanoparticle’s surface coverage on the oil droplets, their aspect ratio and stability against coalescence during long-term storage. Emulsion superstabilization (oil fractions below 0.5) occurred by the microstructuring and thickening effect of NCh that formed networks at concentrations as low as 0.0005 wt %. The ultrasound energy used during emulsion preparation simultaneously reduced the longer nanoparticles, producing very stable, fine oil droplets (diameter ∼1 μm). Our findings indicate that NCh surpasses any reported biobased nanoparticle, including nanocelluloses, for its ability to stabilize interfaces at ultralow concentrations and represent a step-forward in efforts to fully replace surfactants in multiphase systems.
Association between the CD40 rs1883832 polymorphism and Graves' disease risk: a meta-analysis

This meta-analysis aims to evaluate whether the CD40 rs1883832 polymorphism is associated with Graves' disease (GD) risk in different populations. We performed a systematic literature search in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Web of Science, and Pubmed databases to identify case-control association studies on the association between rs1883832 and GD risk. For each study we calculated the odds ratios (OR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI) assuming dominant, recessive and homozygote models. We then calculated pooled ORs and 95 % CIs. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 17 studies involving 4707 cases and 4215 controls were included in the meta-analysis. The results showed that rs1883832 was associated with GD risk in Asians under dominant (CT + TT vs CC, OR=0.67, 95 % CI: 0.56-0.81, P<0.001), recessive (TT vs CT + CC, OR=0.58, 95 % CI: 0.47-0.72, P<0.001), and homozygote (TT vs CC, OR=0.49, 95 % CI: 0.37-0.64, P<0.001) models. In Caucasians, rs1883832 was associated with GD risk under the dominant model (CT + TT vs CC, OR=0.82, 95 % CI: 0.68-0.99, P=0.042). Besides GD, we evaluated the relation of rs1883832 with Graves' ophthalmopathy (GO), finding that rs1883832 was associated with GO under the dominant model (CT + TT vs CC, OR=0.82, 95 % CI: 0.69-0.98, P=0.031). The findings of our meta-analysis suggest that the CD40 rs1883832 polymorphism is protective against GD and GO in Asians and Caucasians.
Comparative analysis and characterization of the gut microbiota of four farmed snakes from southern China

Background The gut microbiota plays an important role in host immunity and metabolic homeostasis. Although analyses of gut microbiotas have been used to assess host health and foster disease prevention and treatment, no comparative comprehensive study, assessing gut microbiotas among several species of farmed snake, is yet available. In this study, we characterized and compared the gut microbiotas of four species of farmed snakes (Naja atra, Ptyas mucosa, Elaphe carinata, and Deinagkistrodon acutus) using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene in southern China and tested whether there was a relationship between gut microbiotal composition and host species. Results A total of 629 operational taxonomic units across 22 samples were detected. The five most abundant phyla were Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Fusobacteria, and Actinobacteria, while the five most abundant genera were Bacteroides, Cetobacterium, Clostridium, Plesiomonas, and Paeniclostridium. This was the first report of the dominance of Fusobacteria and Cetobacterium in the snake gut. Our phylogenetic analysis recovered a relatively close relationship between Fusobacteria and Bacteroidetes. Alpha diversity analysis indicated that species richness and diversity were highest in the gut microbiota of D. acutus and lowest in that of E. carinata. Significant differences in alpha diversity were detected among the four farmed snake species. The gut microbiotas of conspecifics were more similar to each other than to those of heterospecifics. Conclusion This study provides the first comparative study of gut microbiotas among several species of farmed snakes, and provides valuable data for the management of farmed snakes. In farmed snakes, host species affected the species composition and diversity of the gut microbiota.
It's not what you say, it's what you do: the motivation of the crowd to participate in a crowdsourcing project to support blind and partially sighted students

There is a growing interest in crowdsourcing projects for socially responsible issues. One area of socially responsible crowdsourcing is to support people with disabilities. However, there is little exploration of what motivates people to participate in such projects. This programme of research investigated the motivators for students to participate in a socially responsible crowdsourcing project to support blind and partially sighted students by describing images found in digital learning resources. For this purpose a crowdsourcing project, DescribeIT, was developed. The first study explored what students thought would motivate them to participate in the project to compare with students’ actual behaviour in the following studies. Altruism and monetary rewards were the leading self-reported motivational factors, other factors such as being interested in accessibility were reported. Studies 2 to 6 investigated the effects of different intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors on students’ participation in the DescribeIT project with students from the UK and Arab countries. Despite the promising results of the self-reports of motivations, UK students’ participation rates in Studies 2 to 4 was extremely low. However, paying UK students small amounts of money (Study 6) did motivate them to participate. Arab students (Study 5) were intrinsically motivated to participate in the DescribeIT project and showed a higher participation rate than UK students. Studies 7 and 9 investigated the quality of the image descriptions produced by crowd members of established crowdsourcing platforms in comparison to those produced by students. The results showed a comparable quality across descriptions produced by students and crowd members. Studies 8 and 9 investigated the effect of simplifying the image description task by changing it to an image tagging task and showed that making the task easier increased participation rate. Lastly, Study 10 investigated the effect of a face-to-face training session on image description quality. It also investigated the effect of quality control instructions on quality. The face-to-face training increased description quality, but different quality control instructions did not. The practical implications of this research for crowdsourcers in socially responsible crowdsourcing contexts, are that they need to consider the cultural backgrounds of their potential crowd, make the task easy to do, offer small payments if possible and train crowd members in order to produce good quality work. The theoretical implications are a greater understanding of the motivations of crowd members in socially responsible projects and the importance of measuring both self-reports of motivation and actual behaviour.
A Novel Passive Magnetic Localization Wearable System for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy

Magnetic localization provides a feasible way to estimate the position and orientation of the wireless capsule endoscopy embedded with a permanent magnet. However, the magnetic localization suffers from the drifting effect from magnetic noises and the uncertain initial guess during the optimization. In this paper, a localization system with noise cancellation is proposed to reduce the drifting effect of the geomagnetic noise and obtain the initial guess in a simple and effective way. Compared to the prior arts, the proposed system is able to achieve a lower positioning and orientation error under the same system configuration and makes it possible for the patient to move around while wearing the localization system. Besides, the proposed algorithm improves the consistency of positioning error within the localization region. Within a volume of 380 mm by 270 mm by 240 mm covered by 16 digital magnetic sensors, the average positioning error obtained from the proposed algorithm is around 10 mm and the average orientation error is around 12°.
Extraction of Intrinsic Parameters of Lead–Acid Batteries Using Energy Recycling Technique

This paper presents the use of an energy recycling technique to extract the intrinsic parameters of lead–acid batteries. The charging and discharging currents of the battery under test are programmed by controlling a bidirectional dc–dc converter to profile the power flow between the battery and a supercapacitor. The sampled battery voltage and current information over the charging and discharging periods are used to estimate the parameters of a high-order electrical battery model with a modified particle swarm optimization algorithm and compare with the battery voltage and current predicted with the extracted parameters. With the energy recycling mechanism, the proposed parameter extraction process is environment friendly and has low power dissipation, thus increasing the power handling density and allowing long testing duration. A prototype that can extract the intrinsic parameters of eight different types of 12 V, 130 A lead–acid batteries has been built. Its performance has been evaluated with different charging and discharging profiles. The estimated parameters are favorably verified with the theoretical predictions, results obtained by the extended Kalman filter method, and results obtained on a calibrated commercial battery testing system. Results reveal that testing batteries with both charging and discharging processes gives a more accurate prediction of battery performance.
Family of Multiport Switched-Capacitor Multilevel Inverters for High-Frequency AC Power Distribution

This paper proposes a family of multiport switched-capacitor multilevel inverter (SCMLI) topologies for high-frequency ac power distribution. It employs asymmetric dc voltage sources with a common ground that makes it ideal to be employed in renewable energy farms and modern electric vehicles. The proposed family of step-up SCMLI attains higher number of output voltage steps with optimum component count in comparison to several existing topologies. The problem of capacitor voltage balancing is solved as the capacitors are inherently charged to a finite voltage every half cycle. In-depth study on two staircase modulation strategies, namely, selective harmonic elimination and minimum total harmonic distortion (THD) scheme is presented with study on the variation of switching angles and THD with modulation indices under both schemes. Working principle and analysis are presented for the proposed family of topologies. Simulation outcomes are validated with experimental results under both the aforementioned modulation schemes with equal and unequal output voltage waveform steps.
One-Class Classification Using Generative Adversarial Networks

One-class classification (OCC) problem has drawn increasing attention in recent years. It expands the range of classification from pre-defined categories to undefined categories. Since the vast diversity of negative samples, it is hard to acquire complete knowledge of unknown classes and construct a negative set for training a one-class classifier, which remains a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a new OCC model by modifying the generative adversarial network model to address the OCC problem. Taking the generator’s outputs as outliers, the discriminator in our model is trained with these synthetic data and target training data, and it manages to distinguish them from each other. Moreover, a new evaluation protocol named classification recall index is put forward to indicate the classifier’s performances on both positive and negative sets. The extensive experiments on the MNIST dataset and the Street View House Numbers (SVHN) dataset demonstrate that the proposed model is competitive over a variety of OCC methods.
A Probabilistic Range Query of Moving Objects in Road Network

The range query of moving objects in a road network is widely used in battlefield environment, intelligent transportation systems, and mobile phone location. It has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of spatiotemporal data management. Most of the existing research on range query of moving objects in the road network is based on the premise of dense sampling of the device and complete storage of data. It ignores the uncertainty of discrete location data caused by a blind area of actual devices and limited memory, which cannot guarantee the accuracy of the range query. In this paper, the processing framework of probabilistic range query of moving objects in the road network is constructed. A spatiotemporal index structure is proposed based on the framework. This index can effectively represent time weights and the relationship between road sections. The probabilistic range query algorithm of moving objects in the road network with an uncertain trajectory caused by sampling frequency is designed and implemented. The experiments verify that the method proposed in this paper can improve query efficiency and ensure query accuracy.
Wavelet Analysis Based Classification of Emotion from EEG Signal

Emotions are the most fundamental feature for non-verbal communication between human and machine. To extract the original expectation of mind, emotion recognition and classification is essential. But due to some complexities, the proper recognition of human emotion from Electroencephalogram (EEG) has become too much challenging. In this paper, we propose a system of emotion recognition from EEG signal based on Discrete Wavelet Transform. The most significant features (i) Wavelet Energy and (ii) Wavelet Entropy are calculated for detecting four different emotions namely happy, angry, sad and relaxed. Firstly we rearranged the prepossessed data properly by selecting the proper channel and sub-band. The extracted features are then trained in the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm to classify emotion separately. Our proposed method showed 78.7±2.6% sensitivity, 82.8±6.3% specificity and 62.3±1.1% accuracy on the internationally authorized ‘DEAP’ database.
Double Square Waveguide Directional Coupler for Polarimeter Calibration

A novel full-band square waveguide coupler design based on directional couplers which couple the TE10 and TE01 orthogonal modes in a square waveguide is presented. This waveguide coupler is aimed at the calibration of polarization receivers. This is composed of a pair of rectangular waveguide directional couplers, which are rotated 90° between them and both are coupled to the main square waveguide through each one of the square section walls. The coupler covers the full frequency band from 10 to 18.9 GHz. It has inherent low cross-polarization, which allows obtaining any known elliptically polarized wave at a square waveguide when a signal is applied to the couplers. The fabricated prototype of this coupler exhibits 31 dB of coupling, with flatness of ±3.8 dB and excellent cross polarization better than 50 dB over the whole band.