Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Has the Quality of Patient-Provider Communication About Survivorship Care Improved?

PURPOSE The aim of the current study was to assess whether the quality of patient-provider communication on key elements of cancer survivorship care changed between 2011 and 2016. METHODS Participating survivors completed the 2011 or 2016 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Experiences with Cancer Surveys (N = 2,266). Participants reported whether any clinician ever discussed different aspects of survivorship care. Responses ranged from "Did not discuss at all" to "Discussed it with me in detail". Distributions of responses were compared among all respondents and only among those who had received cancer-directed treatment within 3 years of the survey. RESULTS In 2011, the percentage of survivors who did not receive detailed instructions on follow-up care, late or long-term adverse effects, lifestyle recommendations, and emotional or social needs were 35.1% (95% CI, 31.9% to 38.4%), 54.2% (95% CI, 50.7% to 57.6%), 58.9% (95% CI, 55.3% to 62.5%), and 69.2% (95% CI, 65.9% to 72.3%), respectively, and the corresponding proportions for 2016 were 35.4% (95% CI, 31.9% to 37.8%), 55.5% (95% CI, 51.7% to 59.3%), 57.8% (95% CI, 54.2% to 61.2%), and 68.2% (95% CI, 64.3% to 71.8%), respectively. Findings were similar among recently treated respondents. Only 24% in 2011 and 22% in 2016 reported having detailed discussions about all four topics. In 2016, 47.6% of patients (95% CI, 43.8% to 51.4%) reported not having detailed discussions with their providers about a summary of their cancer treatments. CONCLUSION Clear gaps in the quality of communication between survivors of cancer and providers persist. Our results highlight the need for continued efforts to improve communication between survivors of cancer and providers, including targeted interventions in key survivorship care areas.
Securing the Payload, Finding the Cell, and Avoiding the Endosome: Peptide‐Targeted, Fusogenic Porous Silicon Nanoparticles for Delivery of siRNA

Despite the promise of ribonucleic acid interference therapeutics, the delivery of oligonucleotides selectively to diseased tissues in the body, and specifically to the cellular location in the tissues needed to provide optimal therapeutic outcome, remains a significant challenge. Here, key material properties and biological mechanisms for delivery of short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to effectively silence target‐specific cells in vivo are identified. Using porous silicon nanoparticles as the siRNA host, tumor‐targeting peptides for selective tissue homing, and fusogenic lipid coatings to induce fusion with the plasma membrane, it is shown that the uptake mechanism can be engineered to be independent of common receptor‐mediated endocytosis pathways. Two examples of the potential broad clinical applicability of this concept in a mouse xenograft model of ovarian cancer peritoneal carcinomatosis are provided: silencing the Rev3l subunit of polymerase Pol ζ to impair DNA repair in combination with cisplatin; and reprogramming tumor‐associated macrophages into a proinflammatory state.
The effects of adaptive directional microphone on auditory evoked cortical P300 response and speech performance in cochlear implant users

Abstract Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the possible benefits of an adaptive directional microphone in noise by using auditory P300 and speech recognition scores (SRSs) in cochlear implant subjects. Design: The P300 and speech recognition scores were obtained (a) in quiet with an omnidirectional microphone (Quiet OM), (b) in noise with an omnidirectional microphone (Noise OM) and (c) in noise with an adaptive directional microphone (Noise BEAM) to compare the microphone effects. Study sample: Thirty-five cochlear implant subjects (22.87 ± 1.30 years) Results: The latencies of the P2, N2 and P3 responses as the discrimination potentials were significantly prolonged in the Noise OM condition compared with those obtained in the Quiet OM and Noise BEAM conditions (p < 0.05). The latencies of all responses in the Quiet OM and Noise BEAM conditions were similarly obtained (p > 0.05). SRSs were significantly lower in the Noise OM condition than in the Quiet OM and Noise BEAM condition (p < 0.05). Conclusions: During noise, the adaptive directional microphone system provided a discrimination ability similar to that seen in quiet settings for cochlear implant users.
On the Importance of Epitaxial Strain at a Spin-Crossover Molecule-Metal Interface.

Spin-crossover molecules are very appealing for use in multifunctional spintronic devices because of their ability to switch between high-spin and low-spin states with external stimuli such as voltage and light. In actual devices, the molecules are deposited on a substrate, which can modify their properties. However, surprisingly little is known about such molecule-substrate effects. Here we show for the first time, by grazing incidence X-ray diffraction, that a Fe$^{\mathrm{II}}$ spin-crossover molecular layer displays a well-defined epitaxial relationship with a metal substrate. Then we show, by both density functional calculations and a mechanoelastic model, that the resulting epitaxial strain and the related internal pressure can induce a partial spin conversion at low temperatures, which has indeed been observed experimentally. Our results emphasize the importance of substrate-induced spin state transitions, and raise the possibility of exploiting them.
EEG Spectral Analysis of Workload for a Part-task UAV Simulation

Electroencephalography (EEG) has the prospect of providing a means to gauge operator workload in a manner that does not intrude on the task being performed. Specifically, it has been proposed that the technique could be used as a method to speed the learning of a task, by adjusting the task to suit the state of the learner. The present study recorded EEG while participants performed a simulated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance task. Analysis of power in three EEG frequency bands of interest found differences between the types of task being performed; however more complex analysis may be necessary to discern levels of difficulty within the task.
How Does Nonverbal Reasoning Affect Sentence Recognition in Adults with Cochlear Implants and Normal-Hearing Peers?

Background: Previous research has demonstrated an association of scores on a visual test of nonverbal reasoning, Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM), with scores on open-set sentence recognition in quiet for adult cochlear implant (CI) users as well as for adults with normal hearing (NH) listening to noise-vocoded sentence materials. Moreover, in that study, CI users demonstrated poorer nonverbal reasoning when compared with NH peers. However, it remains unclear what underlying neurocognitive processes contributed to the association of nonverbal reasoning scores with sentence recognition, and to the poorer scores demonstrated by CI users. Objectives: Three hypotheses were tested: (1) nonverbal reasoning abilities of adult CI users and normal-hearing (NH) age-matched peers would be predicted by performance on more basic neurocognitive measures of working memory capacity, information-processing speed, inhibitory control, and concentration; (2) nonverbal reasoning would mediate the effects of more basic neurocognitive functions on sentence recognition in both groups; and (3) group differences in more basic neurocognitive functions would explain the group differences previously demonstrated in nonverbal reasoning. Method: Eighty-three participants (40 CI and 43 NH) underwent testing of sentence recognition using two sets of sentence materials: sentences produced by a single male talker (Harvard sentences) and high-variability sentences produced by multiple talkers (Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set, PRESTO). Participants also completed testing of nonverbal reasoning using a visual computerized RPM test, and additional neurocognitive assessments were collected using a visual Digit Span test and a Stroop Color-Word task. Multivariate regression analyses were performed to test our hypotheses while treating age as a covariate. Results: In the CI group, information processing speed on the Stroop task predicted RPM performance, and RPM scores mediated the effects of information processing speed on sentence recognition abilities for both Harvard and PRESTO sentences. In contrast, for the NH group, Stroop inhibitory control predicted RPM performance, and a trend was seen towards RPM scores mediating the effects of inhibitory control on sentence recognition, but only for PRESTO sentences. Poorer RPM performance in CI users than NH controls could be partially attributed to slower information processing speed. Conclusions: Neurocognitive functions contributed differentially to nonverbal reasoning performance in CI users as compared with NH peers, and nonverbal reasoning appeared to partially mediate the effects of these different neurocognitive functions on sentence recognition in both groups, at least for PRESTO sentences. Slower information processing speed accounted for poorer nonverbal reasoning scores in CI users. Thus, it may be that prolonged auditory deprivation contributes to cognitive decline through slower information processing.
Dynamic modeling and control of a car transmission system

In the paper, the dynamic model of a car transmission system is taken into account and a simple control strategy for controlling the transmitted torque is presented. All the main components of the transmission system (the engine, the clutch, the gear-box, the differential, etc.) have been modeled in details by using the graphical modeling technique named power-oriented graph. A particular attention has been paid to the model of the clutch system because of its importance in the modulation of the transmitted torque. A simple control strategy for controlling the torque transmitted during the "start" of the car is also presented. Simulation results show the usefulness of the model and the effectiveness of the presented control strategy.
Chromatin texture characterization using multiscale fractal dimension

A new approach to chromatin texture characterization is proposed, based on the recently introduced concept of multiscale fractal dimension. Promising results for differentiating normal from abnormal blood cells have been obtained by considering the peaks of multiscale fractal dimension after Minkowski-Bouligand dilation of the nucleus gray tones. Results for a lymphocyte database exemplify the potential of the method with respect to nuclear texture discrimination. A brief review of related works is also included, focusing on statistical approaches.
Frequency hopping spread spectrum technique for wireless communication systems

The paper presents a wireless communication system that involved the frequency hopping spread spectrum technique M-ary frequency-shift keying (FH-MFSK) with M=2. The advantages of the FH are illustrated and compared with a direct sequence (DS) spread spectrum system from the point of view of interference suppression, multi-user interference suppression and implementation. An implementation with a low cost digital signal processor is presented. It is concluded that the FH spread spectrum technique is very attractive for wireless communication systems due its resistance to interference, multi-user access capability and simplicity of implementation with DSP microcontrollers.
Decentralized, modular real-time control for machining applications

Several different architectures for a control system for a reconfigurable machining system are considered, in terms of the inherent delays and their effects on the system performance. It is shown how time delays associated with distributed architectures impact the performance of the control algorithms, and how different types of communication protocols could be implemented to meet the required deadlines. A two-axis contouring system is considered in some detail, and the effects of various delays on the contour error are determined by simulation. These analytic and simulation results can be used to specify the maximum allowable communication delays in the system. Control requirements for a manufacturing control system can thus be mapped to temporal constraints on the data managed for the environment.
Intrinsic and Defect-Related Elastic Moduli of Boron Nitride Nanotubes as Revealed by in Situ Transmission Electron Microscopy.

Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) are promising for mechanical applications owing to the high modulus, high strength and inert chemical nature. However, up to now, precise evaluation of their elastic properties and their relation to defects have not been experimentally established. Herein, the intrinsic elastic modulus of BNNTs and its dependence on intrinsic and deliberately irradiation-induced extrinsic defects have been studied via an electric-field-induced high-order resonance technique inside a high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM). Resonances up to 4th order for normal modes and 3rd order for parametric modes have been initiated in the cantilevered tubes, and the recorded frequencies are well consistent with the theoretical calculations with a discrepancy of ~ 1 %. The elastic moduli of the BNNTs measured from high-order resonance is about 906.2 GPa on average, with a standard deviation of 9.3 %, which is found to be closely related to the intrinsic defect as cavities in the nanotube walls. Furthermore, electron irradiation in HRTEM has been used to study the effects of defects to elastic moduli, and to evaluate the radiation resistance of the BNNTs. Along with an increase in the irradiation dose, the outer diameter has linearly reduced due to the knock-on effects. A defective shell with nearly constant thickness has been formed on the outer surface, and, as a result, the elastic modulus decreases gradually to ~ 662.9 GPa, which is still 3 times that of steel. Excellent intrinsic elastic properties and decent radiation-resistance prove that BNNTs could be a material of choice for applications in extreme environments, such as those existing in space.
Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Ferroelectret Receiver With Additional Bias Voltage

High sensitivity is an important requirement for air-coupled ultrasonic sensors applied to materials testing. With a lower acoustic impedance than any piezoelectric material, charged cellular polypropylene (PP) offers better matching to air with a similar piezoelectric coefficient. The piezoelectric properties of charged cellular PP originate from their polarization, creating permanent internal voltage. The sensitivity of the sensor can be increased by applying additional dc bias voltage, as it has been done already for transmitters. This work presents the first ultrasonic sensor based on charged cellular PP including a high-voltage module providing dc bias voltage up to 2 kV. This bias voltage led to an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio of up to 15 ± 1 dB. The measurement of the received signal depending on the applied bias voltage is proposed as a new method of determining the internal voltage of ferroelectrets. The sensor combined with a cellular PP transmitter was applied to nondestructive testing of a rotor blade segment and glued-laminated timber, enabling imaging of the internal structure of these specimens with a thickness around 4 cm.
Biosynthetic Potential of a Novel Antarctic Actinobacterium Marisediminicola antarctica ZS314T Revealed by Genomic Data Mining and Pigment Characterization

Rare actinobacterial species are considered as potential resources of new natural products. Marisediminicola antarctica ZS314T is the only type strain of the novel actinobacterial genus Marisediminicola isolated from intertidal sediments in East Antarctica. The strain ZS314T was able to produce reddish orange pigments at low temperatures, showing characteristics of carotenoids. To understand the biosynthetic potential of this strain, the genome was completely sequenced for data mining. The complete genome had 3,352,609 base pairs (bp), much smaller than most genomes of actinomycetes. Five biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) were predicted in the genome, including a gene cluster responsible for the biosynthesis of C50 carotenoid, and four additional BGCs of unknown oligosaccharide, salinixanthin, alkylresorcinol derivatives, and NRPS (non-ribosomal peptide synthetase) or amino acid-derived compounds. Further experimental characterization indicated that the strain may produce C.p.450-like carotenoids, supporting the genomic data analysis. A new xanthorhodopsin gene was discovered along with the analysis of the salinixanthin biosynthetic gene cluster. Since little is known about this genus, this work improves our understanding of its biosynthetic potential and provides opportunities for further investigation of natural products and strategies for adaptation to the extreme Antarctic environment.
Redundancy and Attention in Convolutional LSTM for Gesture Recognition

Convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) networks have been widely used for action/gesture recognition, and different attention mechanisms have also been embedded into ConvLSTM networks. This paper explores the redundancy of spatial convolutions and the effects of the attention mechanism in ConvLSTM, based on our previous gesture recognition architectures that combine the 3-D convolutional neural network (CNN) and ConvLSTM. Depthwise separable, group, and shuffle convolutions are used to replace the convolutional structures in ConvLSTM for the redundancy analysis. In addition, four ConvLSTM variants are derived for attention analysis: 1) by removing the convolutional structures of the three gates in ConvLSTM; 2) by applying the attention mechanism on the ConvLSTM input; and 3) by reconstructing the input and 4) output gates with the modified channelwise attention mechanism. Evaluation results demonstrate that the spatial convolutions in the three gates scarcely contribute to the spatiotemporal feature fusion and that the attention mechanisms embedded into the input and output gates cannot improve the feature fusion. In other words, ConvLSTM mainly contributes to the temporal fusion along with the recurrent steps to learn long-term spatiotemporal features when taking spatial or spatiotemporal features as input. A new LSTM variant is derived on this basis in which the convolutional structures are embedded only into the input-to-state transition of LSTM. The code of the LSTM variants is publicly available.11https://github.com/GuangmingZhu/ConvLSTMForGR.
Region labeling of colonoscopic images using fuzzy logic

A fuzzy rule base approach to the labeling of colonoscopic images to render assistance to the clinician is presented. The color images are segmented using a scale-space filter. Several features are selected and fuzzified. The knowledge-based fuzzy rule base system performs the labeling of the segmented regions into background, lumen, and abnormalities (polyps, bleeding lesions). The system has been tested on several precaptured colonoscopic images. The results are encouraging. Modifications are in progress to prepare for real-time clinical testing.
Systems Analysis for Peptide Systems Chemistry

Living systems employ both covalent chemistry and physical assembly to achieve complex behaviors. The emerging field of systems chemistry, inspired by these biological systems, attempts to construct and analyze systems that are simpler than biology, while still embodying biological design principles. Due to the multiple phenomena at play, it can be difficult to predict which phenomena will dominate and when. Conversely, there may be no single rate-limiting step, but rather a reaction network that is difficult to intuit from a purely experimental approach. Mathematical modeling can help to sort out these issues, although it can be challenging to build such models, especially for assembly kinetics. Numerical and statistical methods can play an important role to facilitate the synergistic and iterative use of modeling and experiment, and should be part of a systems chemistry curriculum. Three case studies are presented here, from our work in peptide-based systems, to illustrate some of the tools available for model construction, model simulation, and experimental design. Examples are provided in which these tools help to evaluate hypotheses, uncover design principles, and design new experiments.
Using Processor Affinity in Loop Scheduling

Loops are the single largest source of parallelism in many applications. One way to exploit this parallelism is to execute loop iterations in parallel on different processors. Previous approaches to loop scheduling attempted to achieve the minimum completion time by distributing the workload as evenly as possible while minimizing the number of synchro- nization operations required. In this paper, we consider a third dimension to the problem of loop scheduling on shared-memory multiprocessors: communication overhead caused by accesses to nonlocal data. We show that traditional algorithms for loop scheduling, which ignore the location of data when assigning iter- ations to processors, incur a significant performance penalty on modern shared-memory multiprocessors. We propose a new loop scheduling algorithm that attempts to simultaneously balance the workload, minimize synchronization, and co-locate loop iterations with the necessary data. We compare the performance of this new algorithm to other known algorithms by using five representative kernel programs on a Silicon Graphics multiprocessor work- station, a BBN Butterfly, a Sequent Symmetry, and a KSR-1, and show that the new algorithm offers substantial performance improvements, up to a factor of 4 in some cases. We conclude that loop scheduling algorithms for shared-memory multiprocessors cannot afford to ignore the location of data, particularly in light of the increasing disparity between processor and memory speeds. Zndex Terms- Loop scheduling, synchronization, load imbal- ance, communication overhead, shared-memory multiprocessors
Human Mutation

Funding information NIH R13, Grant/Award Number: HG006650; NIH U41, Grant/Award Number: HG007346; NIH U01, Grant/Award Number: GM115486; NIH, Grant/Award Numbers: U01 GM115486, U41 HG007346, R13 HG006650 Abstract Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common hematological disorder. VTE affects millions of people around the world each year and can be fatal. Earlier studies have revealed the possible VTE genetic risk factors in Europeans. The 2018 Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI) challenge had asked participants to distinguish between 66 VTE and 37 non‐VTE African American (AA) individuals based on their exome sequencing data. We used variants from AA VTE association studies and VTE genes from DisGeNET database to evaluate VTE risk via four different approaches; two of these methods were most successful at the task. Our best performing method represented each exome as a vector of predicted functional effect scores of variants within the known genes. These exome vectors were then clustered with k‐means. This approach achieved 70.8% precision and 69.7% recall in identifying VTE patients. Our second‐best ranked method had collapsed the variant effect scores into gene‐level function changes, using the same vector clustering approach for patient/control identification. These results show predictability of VTE risk in AA population and highlight the importance of variant‐driven gene functional changes in judging disease status. Of course, more in‐depth understanding of AA VTE pathogenicity is still needed for more precise predictions.