Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of standing on bone density and hip dislocation in children with severe cerebral palsy

Abstract The aim of the study was to evaluate whether standing time associates with bone density and/or hip dislocation in children with severe cerebral palsy. The study design was cross-sectional and descriptive. Eleven boys and seven girls, median age 10.5 years, with severe cerebral palsy participated. Spasticity was measured with modified Ashworth scale. Seven children had scores of 0–1, and 11 had scores of 2–4. Eight of 18 had insulin-like growth factor-I levels lower than −2 standard deviations below the age-matched mean. Time spent in the Standing shell was recorded. Bone mineral density levels determined using dual energy X-ray absorptiometry and hip X-ray were evaluated. Time spent in the Standing shell was 40 min/day (range=4–164). The lumbar spine bone mineral density was 73% of that of age-matched able-bodied controls. Standing time was not associated with bone mineral density, but in 11 children with modified Ashworth scale scores of 2–4, standing time was significantly and negatively associated with hip dislocation. We conclude that time spent in the Standing shell in these 18 children did not affect whole body bone mineral density. In children with spasticity, the association to hip dislocation was significantly negative.
Gekoppeltes Raytracing für Licht und Schallausbreitung

Diese Arbeit untersucht, ob eine effizientere Simulation, uber ein kombiniertes Verfahren fur Raumakustik und Grafik, moglich ist. Es werden die Grundbegriffe und die Renderinggleichungen der Schall- sowie Lichtausbreitung besprochen. Die Renderinggleichungen der beiden Varianten werden einem Vergleich unterzogen, sowie deren Losung mittels des auf Monte-Carlo-Integration basierenden Pathtracings aufgezeigt. Anschliesend wird der Implementierungsansatz des gekoppelten Raytracings wiedergegeben. Darauf aufbauend wird die Implementierung und das gekoppelte Verfahren analysiert. Abschliesend wird die Arbeit zusammengefasst und Schlussfolgerungen sowie Ausblicke bezuglich moglicher hierauf aufbauender Arbeiten gegeben.
Knowledge inference from smartphone GPS data

With the advent of the incorporation of GPS receivers and then GPS-enabled smartphones in transportation data collection, many studies have looked at how to infer meaningful information from this data. Research in this field has concentrated on the use of heuristics and supervised machine learning methods to detect trip ends, trip itineraries, travel mode and trip purpose. Until now approaches to inference have relied on the use of fully-validated data. However, respondent burden associated with validation lowers participation rates and reduces the amount of precisely validated data because some people do not validate their trips or misreport them. This thesis consists of two studies. In the first study I propose the application of a semi-supervised method to mode detection from smartphone travel survey data. Semi-supervised methods let researchers and planners use both validated and un-validated data. I compare the accuracy of three popular supervised methods (Decision Tree, Random Forest and Logistic Regression) with a simple semi-supervised method (Label Propagation with KNN kernel). Simple features such as speed, duration and length of trip and closeness of start and end points to transit network are used for model estimation. The results show that the semi-supervised method outperforms the supervised methods in the presence of high proportions of un-validated data and better predicts the observations in the test set. Furthermore, the run-time of the best model among the supervised methods was on average almost 16 times longer than the average run-times of the semi-supervised method. In the second study, I develop a method to infer transit itineraries from smartphone travel survey data. Since the application of semi-supervised algorithms in travel surveys and transit itinerary detection are both in the early stages of development, a supervised approach is taken to tackle the problem of transit itinerary detection. To this end, trip features were extracted from smartphone collected data and transit network information available in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format. Based on these features, a Random Forest model was trained. Using the model, transit routes for 62% of trip segments was correctly detected.
HISTOCHIMICAL AND IMMUNOHISTOCHIMICAL STUDY OF BARRET'S OESOPHAGUS SEQUENCE - DYSPLASIA - GASTRO- ESOPHAGEAL ADENCARCINOMA

Summary The etiology of gastro-esophageal adenocarcinomas is related to gastro-esophageal reflux disease and the development of Barrett ’ s esophagus or cardia intestinal metaplasia, a preneoplasic condition which is diagnosed endoscopically with an histological confirmation, an incomplete intestinal metaplasia. Adenocarcinomas of the gastric cardia and distal oesophagus are among the most deadly of all gastro -intestinal malignancies, with 5-year mortality rates exceeding 80% (Souza and Spechler, 2005). The medical societies have recommanded endoscopic cancer surveillance routinely for pacients with Barrett’s metaplasia or cardiac intestinal metaplasia. The ri sing incidence and poor prognosis of gastro-esophageal adenocarcinomas have intensified research into earlier methods of detection of this diseases and the relationship to Barrett’s esophagus. In the present study we investigates several histochemical and immunohistochemical features of gastroesophageal adenocarcinomas, 87 resection specimens of Barrett’s esophagus and adenocarcinoma junction were carefully selected. We chosed the histochemical examination of the intestinal metaplasia lesions of gastro-oesophageal junctions and the immunohistochemical study for COX - 2 for evidence the lesions of Barrett's oesophagus sequence ‐ dysplasia ‐ adenocarcinoma and the potential of utilization in the early
Studio teorico sperimentale del comportamento reologico dei terreni coinvolti nelle colate rapide

L’obiettivo della ricerca e la determinazione del comportamento reologico dei terreni piroclastici campani interessati da fenomeni di colata rapida di fango considerando il completo assortimento granulometrico dei materiali. Nello sviluppo dello studio, alcuni terreni piroclastici campani, campionati nelle zone di alimentazione di colate di fango occorse e rappresentativi dei differenti contesti nei quali si sono verificati gli eventi, sono stati sottoposti ad una fitta campagna di prove di laboratorio mediante sistemi di misura tradizionali e mediante un’apparecchiatura innovativa progettata e messa a punto nel Dipartimento di Ingegneria Idraulica, Geotecnica e Ambientale dell’Universita degli studi di Napoli “Federico II”.
Short-Term Outcomes after Median Nerve Release for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Aim:to study the short-term (considered as a 1-month period after surgery) outcomes experienced by patients following median nerve release due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Material and methods: A longitudinal cohort study was performed between September 2013 and October 2014. Inclusion criteria included suffering from CTS for at least six months confirmed by clinical and electromyographyc criteria and undergoing median nerve release. Exclusion criteria were pregnancy, patients with acute CTS and patients who were not able to read or non-Spanish speakers. All participants completed the questionnaires DASH, SF-36 and a Visual Analogue Scale for Pain, preoperatively and one month after surgery. Results: Thirty patients were included, 22 women and 8 men. DASH and VAS showed statistical significant differences before and after surgery (p<0.05) whereas SF-36 did not show significant differences. Conclusion: This study shows that median nerve surgical release for CTS has satisfying outcomes in only one month from surgery.
Thinking about Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Fatal Attraction and Scarface 2. Narrative Structure: Jurassic Park and Rashomon 3. Formal Analysis: Rules Of The Game and The Sixth Sense 4. Authorship: The Searchers and Jungle Fever 5. Genres: Murder, My Sweet and Gunfight at the OK Corral 6. Series, Sequels, and Remakes: Goldfinger and Psycho 1960 and 1998 7. Actors and Stars: Morocco and Dirty Harry 8. Audiences and Reception: A Woman Of Paris and The Crying Game 9. Film and the Other Arts: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Nosferatu 10. Film and its Relation to Radio and Television: Richard Diamond: Private Detective, Peter Gunn, and Victor/Victoria 11. Realism and Theories Of Film: Potemkin and Umberto D 12. Gender and Sexuality: The Silence of the Lambs and American Gigolo 13. Race: Out Of The Past, LA Confidential, and Boyz N The Hood) 14. Class: Pretty Woman and The People Under the Stairs 15. Citizen Kane: An Analysis: Citizen Kane 16. Digital Technology and Film: The Matrix and Timecode Glossary Index
Confirming Design Guidelines for Evolvable Business Processes Based on the Concept of Entropy

—Contemporary organizations need to be agile at both their IT systems and organizational structures (such as business processes). Normalized Systems theory has recently proposed an approach to build evolvable IT systems, based on the systems theoretic concept of stability. However, its applicability to the organizational level, including business processes, has proven to be relevant in the past and resulted among others in a set of 25 guidelines for designing business processes. In subsequent work, the Normalized Systems theory was conﬁrmed and extended based on the concept of entropy from thermodynamics. This perspective allows for the investigation of the observability of IT systems or —at the organizational level— business processes. Therefore, this paper explores whether the guidelines which have been proposed to design business processes from an evolvability point of view can be conﬁrmed or extended from the entropy reasoning as well. More speciﬁcally, the validity of 25 business process design guidelines is investigated for this purpose. While 9 of these guidelines were already analyzed in earlier work, this paper supplements the earlier analysis by including a discussion of the other 16 guidelines. Our results indicate that the investigated guidelines are rather consistent among both approaches: guidelines required to attain evolvability also enable low entropy (i.e., high observability) and vice versa. Part of one guideline was found to be not strictly necessary from the entropy viewpoint. Moreover, several guidelines were able to be reﬁned to some extent based on our entropy reasoning or were subject to some additional nuancing.
Isolated Sign Language Characters Recognition

People with normal senses use spoken language to communicate with others. This method cannot be used by those with hearing and speech impaired. These two groups of people will have difficulty when they try to communicate to each other using their own language. Sign language is not easy to learn, as there are various sign languages, and not many tutors are available. This study focuses on the character recognition based on manual alphabet. In general, the characters are divided into letters and numbers. Letters were divided into several groups according to their gestures. Characters recognition was done by comparing the photograph of a character with a gesture dictionary that has been previously developed. The gesture dictionary was created using the normalized Euclidian distance. Character recognition was performed by using the nearest neighbor method and sum of absolute error. Overall, the level of accuracy of the proposed method was 96.36%.
Monte Carlo cross‐validation for selecting a model and estimating the prediction error in multivariate calibration

A new simple and effective method named Monte Carlo cross validation (MCCV) has been introduced and evaluated for selecting a model and estimating the prediction ability of the model selected. Unlike the leave‐one‐out procedure widely used in chemometrics for cross‐validation (CV), the Monte Carlo cross‐validation developed in this paper is an asymptotically consistent method of model selection. It can avoid an unnecessarily large model and therefore decreases the risk of overfitting of the model. The results obtained from a simulation study showed that MCCV has an obviously larger probability than leave‐one‐out CV (LOO‐CV) of selecting the model with best prediction ability and that a corrected MCCV (CMCCV) could give a more accurate estimation of prediction ability than LOO‐CV or MCCV. The results obtained with real data sets demonstrated that MCCV could successfully select an appropriate model and that CMCCV could assess the prediction ability of the selected model with satisfactory accuracy. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Pretreatment Characteristics as Predictors of Retention in Cocaine-dependent Outpatients

ObjectiveOne of the principal problems traditionally found by clinicians in drug-dependence treatment programs has been the high rate of dropout. This study presents a mathematical model that predicts, through the assignment of probabilities, treatment retention in a sample of cocaine addicts. MethodsThe model was defined through a logistic regression analysis. Participants were 70 in number with a cocaine-dependence diagnosis, treated at a public outpatient unit in the city of Valencia (Spain). Patients were assessed at the beginning and end of the treatment period (6 mo). ResultsRetention rate was 50%. The results showed that the variables best predicting treatment retention were years of education and family and social situation (sociocultural context conditions). ConclusionsTherefore, we suggest the application of programs, which assess patient needs and include specific intervention strategies in the areas of education and family and vocational counseling.
Envelope: estimation of bottleneck and available bandwidth over multiple congested links

Envelope: Estimation of Bottleneck and Available Bandwidth over Multiple Congested Links. (December 2004) Amit Bhati, B.Tech., Kakatiya University, India Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Dmitri Loguinov Bandwidth estimation has been extensively researched in the past. The majority of existing methods assume either negligible or fluid cross-traffic in the network during the analysis. However, on the present-day Internet, these assumptions do not always hold right. Hence, over such paths the existing bandwidth estimation techniques become inaccurate. In this thesis, we explore the problem assuming arbitrary cross-traffic and develop a new probing method called Envelope, which can simultaneously estimate bottleneck and available bandwidth over an end-to-end path with multiple heavily congested links. Envelope is based on a recursive extension of the stochastic queuing model first proposed by Kang, Liu, Dai and Loguinov (2004), and a modified packet-train methodology. We use two small packets to surround the probing packet-trains and preserve the inter-packet spacing of probe traffic at each router in the path-suffix. The preserved spacings are then used by the receiver to estimate bandwidth. We first reproduce results for a single congested router case using the model proposed by Kang et al. Next, we extend it to the case of multiple congested routers with arbitrary cross-traffic and develop the methodology Envelope. We evaluate the performance of Envelope in various network path topologies and cross-traffic conditions through extensive NS-2 simulations. We also evaluate various probe-traffic parameters which affect the accuracy of this method and obtain the range of values for these parameters that provide good estimation results. Finally, we compare the bandwidth estimation results of our method with the results of other existing meth-
A New Method for Analyzing Patterns of Interaction

Abstract This case study examined a new method for analyzing patterns of interaction in face‐to‐face and asynchronous computer‐mediated classrooms. Using software and a coding system developed by the author, the text of all spoken and written discourse was analyzed from four face‐to‐face (FTF) courses and two courses taught via computer‐mediated communication (CMC). The results indicated that the interaction patterns in the computer‐mediated courses resembled discussion, whereas the patterns in the FTF courses resembled recitation. In addition, problems with comparing synchronous FTF courses and asynchronous CMC are examined.
Extracción de Candidatos a Término mediante la combinación de estrategias heterogéneas.

espanolSintesis de la tesis doctoral presentada en la Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya en junio de 2001, bajo la direccion de Horacio Rodriguez Hontoria y Maria Teresa Cabre Castellvi. EnglishSummary of the PhD thesis presented at the Technical University of Catalonia in June 2001, under the supervision of Horacio Rodriguez Hontoria and Maria Teresa Cabre Castellvi.
Novel electrocardiograph visualization techniques for multichannel data

Traditional ECG viewing techniques use a flat file structure and the relationship of the leads to physical structure is not clear. State space allows a 3D representation that is more representative of anatomical structure and electrical activity. This paper demonstrates how novel visualisation techniques allow easier identification of anomalies. The methods employed use Taken’s state-space theory to plot the amplitude of user selected leads on the relative axes in the state space domain. By plotting the combined values of separate leads, the direct relationship between the different viewing angles of the electrodes can be seen. A graphical user interface (GUI) was developed to view MIT-BIH database files, and files from a cardiology clinic, in various state-space formats. This software allows the user to rotate the 3D models and provides a cross-sectional view of the plots at user selected coordinates. The usefulness of these models were determined by combining the orthogonal views of leads I, aVF, and V2. This enabled the user to collaborate the vector values of the lead locations with the conventional ECG characteristics.
Cochlear implant electrode stimulation strategy based on a human auditory model

﻿Cochleaimplantate (CI), verbunden mit einer professionellen Rehabilitation, haben mehreren hunderttausenden Horgeschadigten die verbale Kommunikation wieder ermoglicht. Betrachtet man jedoch die Rehabilitationserfolge, so haben CI-Systeme inzwischen ihre Grenzen erreicht. Die Tatsache, dass die meisten CI-Trager nicht in der Lage sind, Musik zu geniesen oder einer Konversation in gerauschvoller Umgebung zu folgen, zeigt, dass es noch Raum fur Verbesserungen gibt.Diese Dissertation stellt die neue CI-Signalverarbeitungsstrategie Stimulation based on Auditory Modeling (SAM) vor, die vollstandig auf einem Computermodell des menschlichen peripheren Horsystems beruht.Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde die SAM Strategie dreifach evaluiert: mit vereinfachten Wahrnehmungsmodellen von CI-Nutzern, mit funf CI-Nutzern, und mit 27 Normalhorenden mittels eines akustischen Modells der CI-Wahrnehmung. Die Evaluationsergebnisse wurden stets mit Ergebnissen, die durch die Verwendung der Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE) Strategie ermittelt wurden, verglichen. ACE stellt die zurzeit verbreitetste Strategie dar. Erste Simulationen zeigten, dass die Sprachverstandlichkeit mit SAM genauso gut wie mit ACE ist. Weiterhin lieferte SAM genauere binaurale Merkmale, was potentiell zu einer Verbesserung der Schallquellenlokalisierungfahigkeit fuhren kann. Die Simulationen zeigten ebenfalls einen erhohten Anteil an zeitlichen Pitchinformationen, welche von SAM bereitgestellt wurden. Die Ergebnisse der nachfolgenden Pilotstudie mit funf CI-Nutzern zeigten mehrere Vorteile von SAM auf. Erstens war eine signifikante Verbesserung der Tonhohenunterscheidung bei Sinustonen und gesungenen Vokalen zu erkennen. Zweitens bestatigten CI-Nutzer, die kontralateral mit einem Horgerat versorgt waren, eine naturlicheren Klangeindruck. Als ein sehr bedeutender Vorteil stellte sich drittens heraus, dass sich alle Testpersonen in sehr kurzer Zeit (ca. 10 bis 30 Minuten) an SAM gewohnen konnten. Dies ist besonders wichtig, da typischerweise Wochen oder Monate notig sind. Tests mit Normalhorenden lieferten weitere Nachweise fur die verbesserte Tonhohenunterscheidung mit SAM.Obwohl SAM noch keine marktreife Alternative ist, versucht sie den Weg fur zukunftige Strategien, die auf Gehormodellen beruhen, zu ebnen und ist somit ein erfolgversprechender Kandidat fur weitere Forschungsarbeiten.
Semantic Spaces of Clinical Text : Leveraging Distributional Semantics for Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records

The large amounts of clinical data generated by electronic health record systems are an underutilized resource, which, if tapped, has enormous potential to improve health care. Since the majority of this data is in the form of unstructured text, which is challenging to analyze computationally, there is a need for sophisticated clinical language processing methods. Unsupervised methods that exploit statistical properties of the data are particularly valuable due to the limited availability of annotated corpora in the clinical domain.Information extraction and natural language processing systems need to incorporate some knowledge of semantics. One approach exploits the distributional properties of language – more specifically, term co-occurrence information – to model the relative meaning of terms in high-dimensional vector space. Such methods have been used with success in a number of general language processing tasks; however, their application in the clinical domain has previously only been explored to a limited extent. By applying models of distributional semantics to clinical text, semantic spaces can be constructed in a completely unsupervised fashion. Semantic spaces of clinical text can then be utilized in a number of medically relevant applications.The application of distributional semantics in the clinical domain is here demonstrated in three use cases: (1) synonym extraction of medical terms, (2) assignment of diagnosis codes and (3) identification of adverse drug reactions. To apply distributional semantics effectively to a wide range of both general and, in particular, clinical language processing tasks, certain limitations or challenges need to be addressed, such as how to model the meaning of multiword terms and account for the function of negation: a simple means of incorporating paraphrasing and negation in a distributional semantic framework is here proposed and evaluated. The notion of ensembles of semantic spaces is also introduced; these are shown to outperform the use of a single semantic space on the synonym extraction task. This idea allows different models of distributional semantics, with different parameter configurations and induced from different corpora, to be combined. This is not least important in the clinical domain, as it allows potentially limited amounts of clinical data to be supplemented with data from other, more readily available sources. The importance of configuring the dimensionality of semantic spaces, particularly when – as is typically the case in the clinical domain – the vocabulary grows large, is also demonstrated.