Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overview on Osteoporosis Management

Osteoporosis is one of the most common disorders around the world. Osteoporotic fracture especially hip fracture are associated with an increased mortality rate in elders. However, elders with osteoporosis or at high risk of fractures remain largely underdiagnosed and undertreated. The screening, diagnosis, and treatment of osteoporosis must be improved to maintain pace with its fast-growing prevalence. This review will cover risk factors of osteoporosis, screening and diagnosis tools, newfound advancements, current medical treatments including options for special populations of concern, and future research directions.
Comparison of Seismocardiography Based Heart Rate Measurement Method

The article describes a new alternative method of detecting the Aorta Open fiducial point based on digital signal processing formulated from the average seismocardiogram cycle obtained from the 6-degree-of-freedom Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems Inertial Measurement Unit, enabling estimation of heartbeat during heart muscle contraction without reference to electrocardiogram time period. Using the seismocardiography data obtained from the Inertial Measurement Unit, the authors then process the data using two methods: 1) Empirical Mode Decomposition and 2) Jerk signal, which is extracted as a first derivative of the Inertial Measurement Unit signal. As an example, we compare the two proposed methods to the existing method. Our Method 2 allows us to detect Aorta Open-Aorta Open value between 400ms and 450ms using Berkeley Packet Filter 5-15 Hz with dynamic peak threshold from the Hilbert envelope. Thus, the evaluation of the new method’s effectiveness is confirmed by the estimation of the Aorta Open-Aorta Open fiducial point as closer to the reference. Therefore, the result of our research, especially using jerk signal, can be considered a more accurate alternative for estimating heart rate or heartbeat based on seismocardiogram.
Comparison of the newly developed Fournier’s gangrene mortality prediction model with existing models

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: Many predictive factors and scoring systems associated with Fournier’s gangrene have been proposed, including comorbidities, vital signs, biochemical and hematological parameters, and demographic characteristics of the patient. The aim of this study was to determine the strengths of the scoring systems that have been formed by revealing these factors from a wider perspective and in a larger patient population. METHODS: The patient population included 144 patients, 21 of whom died. Age, biochemical and hematological parameters, Uludag Fournier’s Gangrene Severity Index (UFGSI), Fournier’s Gangrene Severity Index (FGSI), and Age-Adjusted Charlson Comorbidity Index (ACCI) scores were analyzed using the Mann Whitney U-test due to their non-parametric distribution. Categorical data such as comorbidities, gender, need for positive inotropes, diversion ostomy status, and UFGSI grading status was analyzed with the Chi-square test, and independent risk factors were determined from the significant data emerging from univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis. Their strengths were compared using the logistic regression model (Fournier’s Gangrene Mortality Prediction Model: FGMPM) created through ROC analysis of the FGSI, UFGSI, and ACCI scores. RESULTS: The results of the statistical analyses showed that albumin (p<0.001) and need for positive inotropic support (p<0.001) were independent risk factors for mortality and ROC analysis revealed that the created FGMPM regression model (AUC: 0.995) was a stronger model than the FGSI (AUC: 0.874), UFGSI (0.893), and ACCI (0.788) scoring systems. CONCLUSION: The results of this study revealed that albumin and the need for positive inotropic support are independent risk factors for mortality. It is thought that the determination of these two parameters can be used to predict mortality more practically than the parameters used in the UFGSI and FGSI.
Improvement of the simulation of the water and energy cycle using Multiscale Parameter Regionalization (MPR)

The representation of the water and energy cycle in environmental models is closely linked to the parameter values used in the process parametrizations. The dimension of the parameter space in spatially distributed environmental models corresponds to the number of grid cells multiplied by the number of parameters per grid cell. For large-scale simulations on national and continental scales, the dimensionality of the parameter space is too high for efficient parameter estimation using inverse estimation methods. A regularization of the parameter space is necessary to reduce its dimensionality. The Multiscale Parameter Regionalization (MPR) is one approach to achieve this.
SCOPE OF VARIOUS SOLVENTS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON SOLVOTHERMAL SYNTHESIS OF Ni-BTC

Ni-BTC (BTC = 1,3,5-benzene tricarboxylate) metal organic framework (MOF) was synthesized using different solvent conditions. Solvent mixtures of water/N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), water/ethanol, and water/ethanol/DMF were used for the reactions with or without a variety of bases at 160 oC for 48 hours. Even with same green crystals, prepared MOFs show all different BET surface areas and different XRD patterns. The highest BET surface area of the crystals was 850 m2/g obtained from water/DMF solvent with NH4OH as a base. The measured surface areas of the crystals follows the order of Ni-BTC(water/DMF-NH4OH) > Ni-BTC(water/DMF-TMA) > Ni-BTC(water/DMF) > Ni-BTC(water/DMF-Pyridine)> Ni-BTC(water/ethanol)> Ni-BTC(water/DMF-aniline)> Ni-BTC(water/DMF-NaOH).
Direct Measurement of Attractive van der Waals Forces and Repulsive Electrostatic Forces between Regenerated Cellulose Surfaces in an Aqueous Environment

Using the colloidal probe technique, the interaction between carboxymethylated cellulose films and a cellulose sphere was studied. At low pH (pH 3.5), the interaction was dominated by dispersion forces. This was due to the low dissociation of carboxyl groups within the film at pH 3.5. However, at pH greater than 5, the interaction was dominated by an electrostatic repulsion. The increase in pH had the two-fold effect of completely dissociating the charged groups as well as causing appreciable swelling of the film leading to a decrease in the van der Waals component of the interaction. From these results it can be concluded that these cellulose films are suitable for a range of surface forces measurements including electrostatic, van der Waals’, steric and adhesion forces. Furthermore, the measurement of forces using the colloidal probe technique can be extended to inorganic particles as well as for interactions between surfaces in the presence of for example wet and dry strength agents and other materials relevant to the paper-making industry.
Comparative Genomic Analysis of Clinical Streptococcus Pneumoniae Isolates Reveal 31 New Unique Drug Resistant SNPs Using Whole Genome Sequencing

Comparative genomic analysis of ten clinical Streptococcus pneumoniae collected from a Malaysian hospital reveal 31 new unique drug-resistant SNPs using whole genome sequencing. Abstract Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of respiratory infections worldwide, specifically community-acquired pneumonia. Due to the overuse of antibiotics, S. pneumoniae has developed a high degree of resistance to a wide range of antibacterial drugs. In this study, we performed whole genome sequencing (WGS) for ten pneumococcal clinical isolates with different levels of antibiotic resistance. The key objective is to investigate genetic changes associated with antibiotic resistance in S. pneumoniae . Our results showed that resistant isolates contain higher non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within genes coding for virulence factors as compared to susceptible isolates, suggesting that drug resistance is essentially determined by the occurrence of SNPs rather than the presence or absence of virulent genes. In addition, 90 SNPs were identified that were unique to resistant isolates. Out of these 90 SNPs, 31 were unique and have not been reported previously. Detection of SNPs associated with antibiotic resistance is crucial for the future use of genome sequencing to predict antibiotic susceptibility in clinical microbiology and for developing new anti-pneumococcal drugs.
Multilevel Attention Based U-Shape Graph Neural Network for Point Clouds Learning

With the popularity of 3-D sensors in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), point clouds learning is increasingly important. In this article, we propose a novel multilevel attention based U-shape graph neural network (MAUGNN) for point clouds learning, which can effectively learn the features from low-level to high-level and fuse multiple-level features based on the graph neural networks and attention mechanism. There are three parts in MAUGNN: encoder, decoder, and connections. In the encoder and decoder, we design an attention-based graph convolution to explore the structural information for point clouds. During the encoder, a structure-aware attention pooling is proposed to support down-sampling on point cloud data. To adaptively fuse coarse-grained features from the encoder and fine-grained features from the decoder together, we also propose a structure-aware attention skip connection mechanism. Extensive experiments on popular point cloud datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our MAUGNN over state-of-the-art baselines.
Violence Detection in Images Using Deep Neural Networks

Software and technology has evolved and expanded so much over the last decades, that is present in everybody’s life in every little aspect, and more and more significantly at children’s disposal. Starting from this reality, it is necessary the identification of the images that contain scenes of violence or emotionally disturbing scenes, images that contain blood or depict human bodies with open wounds, violent fires, or presence of guns and weapons. Machine learning (ML) is capable of extracting features from images and learn to identify the images that depict inappropriate scenes for children, using different techniques. With the recent advances in deep learning, traditional ML methods, such as Support Vector Machines, have been surpassed by deep neural networks that are also employed by our solution for violence detection.
Adaptive virtual impedance design for three-phase inverter under unbalanced grid connection

As a critical part of energy conversion, the parallel inverters play an important role in the stability of distributed generation (DG) system. Although the conventional control, such as the virtual impedance-based droop control, can achieve the autonomous decoupling between active and reactive power irrespective of the condition of line impedance. However, under the unbalanced conditions, which has high occurrence due to the rural location of DG, the active and reactive power sharing are inevitably coupled so that the grid support capability is degraded, causing the stability issue to the whole system. In order to overcome this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive virtual impedance-based control strategy by purely decoupling the active and reactive power. The line impedance, i.e., the main origin of unbalances, is identified by establishing the unbalanced impedance modeling in full- dq transformation, which is further adopted as the adaptive virtual impedance generating the compensation of unbalanced voltages. Experimental results verify that the proposed method is effective to identify any unbalanced components and achieve the cancellation of unbalanced grid voltage so that the system stability is maintained.
Responding to COVID-19: LUNEX University’s decisions and actions to continue physiotherapy education

In this report we reflect on the decision-making process and actions taken by a young higher education institution to the COVID-19 pandemic to continue teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate physiotherapy degree programmes. LUNEX University is unique in that it is the only higher education institute in Luxembourg to provide education in physiotherapy. The response to the global pandemic is further complicated as the majority of students commute across international borders to attend campus. We have focused on three distinct challenges LUNEX staff faced to ensure continued and quality teaching was provided: 1) Response to the country-wide and global shutdown; 2) Return to campus; and 3) Provision of clinical placements. We describe the decisions and actions to rapidly move to a blended learning format, and the strategic approach to incorporating simulated practice after restrictions were eased and a return to campus was possible. Initial observation suggests improvement in student competency in practical skills as a result of the blended learning approach. Recommendations are provided to encourage the integration of blended learning for practical and clinical degree programmes, like physiotherapy, where an emphasis is placed on simulated practice in classroom settings, underpinned by prior theoretical knowledge delivered online.
Addition of Taxanes to Platinum and Fluoropyrimidines in Adjuvant Setting Did Not Improve Survival in Patients with Gastric Cancer after Curative Gastrectomy

BackgroundTo evaluate whether the addition of taxane to platinum and fluoropyrimidines in adjuvant chemotherapy would result in longer survival than platinum plus fluoropyrimidines in patients who underwent curative gastrectomy.MethodsThis study retrospectively analyzed survival for patients with stage Ⅱ-Ⅲ gastric adenocarcinoma who received curative gastrectomy and adjuvant chemotherapy with platinum plus fluoropyrimidines (PF group) or taxanes and platinum plus fluoropyrimidines (TPF group). Survival curves were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method, and the differences were compared using the log-rank test.ResultsBaseline characteristics were balanced between the PF group and TPF group. The median disease-free survival (DFS) was 14.9 months (95% CI: 11.0-18.8) in the PF group and 13.8 months (95% CI: 9.3-18.3) in the TPF group (HR=0.90, 95% CI: 0.63-1.29, log-rank test, P=0.560). The median overall survival (OS) was 30.0 months for patients in the PF group (95% CI: 24.5-35.5) and 25.6 months (95% CI: 22.3-28.9) for those in the TPF group (HR=0.93, 95% CI: 0.64-1.35, log-rank test, P=0.705). ConclusionFor stage Ⅱ-Ⅲ gastric adenocarcinoma, the adjuvant triple combination of TPF regimen after curative gastrectomy did not demonstrate survival benefit compared to the PF regimen.
Photopolymerization of Reactive Amphiphiles: Automatic and Robust Vertical Alignment Layers of Liquid Crystals with a Strong Surface Anchoring Energy

A photopolymerizable itaconic acid-based amphiphile (abbreviated as Ita3C12) consisting of a hydrophilic carboxylic acid, three alkyl tails, and a reactive vinyl function was newly designed and synthesized for the formation of automatic and robust vertical alignment (VA) layer of nematic liquid crystals (NLC). Since a hydrophilic carboxylic acid was chemically attached to the end of Ita3C12, the Ita3C12 amphiphiles initially dissolved in the host NLC medium were migrated toward the substrates for the construction of VA layer of NLC. The alkyl tails of Ita3C12 in the VA layer directly interacted with host NLC molecules and made them to automatically align vertically. Because of the reactive vinyl functions of Ita3C12 amphiphiles, it was possible to stabilize the automatic VA layer by the photopolymerization with methacryl polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (MAPOSS) cross-linkers. The polymer-stabilized robust Ita3C12 VA layer exhibited a strong surface anchoring energy without generating any light scatte.
Low-Cost EVM Measurement of ZigBee Transmitters From 1-bit Undersampled Acquisition

Error vector magnitude (EVM) or alternately offset EVM (OEVM) is one of the most important performance to verify for RF circuits, such as ZigBee transmitters in order to ensure that the quality of the generated modulated signal complies with the requirements of the wireless communication standard. The conventional solution to measure this performance relies on the use of an automatic test equipment (ATE) equipped with expensive RF channels. This article presents a low-cost solution that permits to realize EVM measurement using only a standard digital ATE. The approach is based on 1-bit undersampled acquisition of the RF modulated signal by a digital tester channel associated with a specifically tailored processing algorithm. This algorithm involves many different steps that are detailed in this article, including phase and amplitude fluctuation extraction, RF signal reconstruction, symbol clock recovery, symbol bits detection, and synthesis of reference data for EVM calculation. The proposed digital test solution is first evaluated through lab hardware experiments and then validated with EVM measurements on an industrial ATE.
Possibilities and Limitations of Photoactivatable Cytochalasin D for the Spatiotemporal Regulation of Actin Dynamics

The study of the actin cytoskeleton and related cellular processes requires tools to specifically interfere with actin dynamics in living cell cultures, ideally with spatiotemporal control and compatible with real time imaging. A phototriggerable derivative of the actin disruptor Cytochalasin D (CytoD) is described and tested here. It includes a nitroveratryloxycarbonyl (Nvoc) photoremovable protecting group (PPG) at the hydroxyl group at C7 of CytoD. The attachment of the PPG renders Nvoc-CytoD temporarily inactive, and enables light-dosed delivery of the active drug CytoD to living cells. This article presents the full structural and physicochemical characterization, the toxicity analysis. It is complemented with biological tests to show the time scales (seconds) and spatial resolution (cellular level) achievable with a UV source in a regular microscopy setup
Thinking Too Much About the Novel Coronavirus. The Link Between Persistent Thinking About COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 Anxiety and Trauma Effects

Background. Earlier reports have shown that anxiety over the novel coronavirus may predict mental functioning during the pandemic. The objective of this study was to assess the links between persistent thinking about COVID-19, anxiety over SARS-CoV-2 and trauma effects. For the purpose of this study, the Polish adaptation of the Obsession with COVID-19 Scale (OCS) was implemented. Participants and procedure. The study involved 356 individuals aged 18–78 (58% females). In addition to OCS, the participants completed the following questionnaires: the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale and the Short Form of the Changes in Outlook Questionnaire. Results. OCS was characterized by satisfactory psychometric properties (α = .82). Regression analysis indicated that persistent thinking about COVID-19 was associated with increased coronavirus anxiety and negative trauma effects. In addition, anxiety served as a partial mediator in the link between persistent thinking about COVID-19 and negative trauma effects. Conclusions. The data obtained suggest that persistent thinking about the pandemic may be dysfunctional for mental health during the spread of the infectious disease.
Modeling the Solubility of SO2 + CO2 Mixtures in Brine at Elevated Pressures and Temperatures

The knowledge of solubility behavior of SO2 + CO2 mixtures in brines at elevated pressures and temperatures is important both in the viability investigations of geologic cosequestrations into deep saline aquifers and in the simulations for flue gas sequestration. We present a model describing SO2 and CO2 as species that do not self-associate but cross associate with water. Two equations of state, PCSAFT/PMSA and eCPA, are applied to work with the model at conditions relevant to geologic sequestration of flue gases: up to 393 K and 450 bar (equivalent to a depth of 4 km) and high salt molality of 6. PC-SAFT/PMSA, which performs better in the whole range of interest, shows that the presence of SO2 makes CO2 less soluble in low-salinity brines (molality <1) but more soluble in high-salinity brines in a temperature range between the critical temperatures of the gases (31.1–157.5 °C).
POLYMORPHISM OF GD5SI2GE2: THE EQUIVALENCE OF TEMPERATURE, MAGNETIC FIELD, AND CHEMICAL AND HYDROSTATIC PRESSURES

The atomic scale details of the pressure-induced polymorphism of Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 2}Ge{sub 2} have been established by in situ x-ray powder diffraction. At room temperature, the monoclinic Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 2}Ge{sub 2} phase ({beta}) is transformed to the orthorhombic {alpha}-Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 2}Ge{sub 2}, observed previously as the low temperature, high magnetic field, or high silicon content polymorph. The transition occurs between {approx}10 kbar and {approx}20 kbar. Diffraction data provide the missing link in order to achieve a more complete understanding of how a structural change in a material can be induced by a variety of thermodynamic variables.
A New Method to Better Measure and Interpret Non-Verbal Communication in Patient-Therapist Interactions

Objective(s): To develop a novel method of examining facial affects in psychotherapeutic settings and interpreting the subliminal microexpressions and emotions they represent.Results: Therapy sessions are videotaped, and verbal content is evaluated with computer assistance from ATLAS.ti. Visual content is screened for facial action units/micro-expressions using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and reevaluated using the Emotional Facial Action Coding System (EmFACS) in order to discern the underlying emotions. Working Alliance Inventory scores are compiled to assess their impact on the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Reliability of facial action unit coding is ensured by a training course and an independently evaluated standardized test at Innsbruck University. Interrater reliability was excellent (Cohen’s κ > 0.80). Application of this method on a small study population to measure non-verbal communication and affects demonstrated its feasibility and usability. We believe this methodology to be widely implementable. Its application in psychotherapy may provide greater insights in investigations into important aspects of therapeutic interaction (e.g. verbal/non-verbal communication between clinicians and patients in psychiatric contexts, quality of psychotherapeutic relationships, etc.), and may be exploitable in clinical psychotherapeutic settings to better understand mechanisms of change in therapy.