Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Osteocytic network is more responsive in calcium signaling than osteoblastic network under fluid flow

Osteocytes, regarded as the mechanical sensor in bone, respond to mechanical stimulation by activating biochemical pathways and mediating the cellular activities of other bone cells. Little is known about how osteocytic networks respond to physiological mechanical stimuli. In this study, we compared the mechanical sensitivity of osteocytic and osteoblastic networks under physiological‐related fluid shear stress (0.5 to 4 Pa). The intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i) responses in micropatterned in vitro osteoblastic or osteocytic networks were recorded and analyzed. Osteocytes in the network showed highly repetitive spikelike [Ca2+]i peaks under fluid flow stimulation, which are dramatically different from those in the osteoblastic network. The number of responsive osteocytes in the network remained at a constant high percentage (>95%) regardless of the magnitude of shear stress, whereas the number of responsive osteoblasts in the network significantly depends on the strength of fluid flow. All spatiotemporal parameters of calcium signaling demonstrated that osteocytic networks are more sensitive and dynamic than osteoblastic networks, especially under low‐level mechanical stimulations. Furthermore, pathway studies were performed to identify the molecular mechanisms responsible for the differences in [Ca2+]i signaling between osteoblastic and osteocytic networks. The results suggested that the T‐type voltage‐gated calcium channels (VGCC) expressed on osteocytes may play an essential role in the unique kinetics of [Ca2+]i signaling in osteocytic networks, whereas the L‐type VGCC is critical for both types of cells to release multiple [Ca2+]i peaks. The extracellular calcium source and intracellular calcium store in ER‐, ATP‐, PGE2‐, NO‐, and caffeine‐related pathways are found to play similar roles in the [Ca2+]i signaling for both osteoblasts and osteocytes. The findings in this study proved that osteocytic networks possess unique characteristics in sensing and processing mechanical signals. © 2012 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research
Development of a Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase PCR Assay for Type A Influenza Virus and the Avian H5 and H7 Hemagglutinin Subtypes

ABSTRACT A real-time reverse transcriptase PCR (RRT-PCR) assay based on the avian influenza virus matrix gene was developed for the rapid detection of type A influenza virus. Additionally, H5 and H7 hemagglutinin subtype-specific probe sets were developed based on North American avian influenza virus sequences. The RRT-PCR assay utilizes a one-step RT-PCR protocol and fluorogenic hydrolysis type probes. The matrix gene RRT-PCR assay has a detection limit of 10 fg or approximately 1,000 copies of target RNA and can detect 0.1 50% egg infective dose of virus. The H5- and H7-specific probe sets each have a detection limit of 100 fg of target RNA or approximately 103 to 104 gene copies. The sensitivity and specificity of the real-time PCR assay were directly compared with those of the current standard for detection of influenza virus: virus isolation (VI) in embryonated chicken eggs and hemagglutinin subtyping by hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay. The comparison was performed with 1,550 tracheal and cloacal swabs from various avian species and environmental swabs obtained from live-bird markets in New York and New Jersey. Influenza virus-specific RRT-PCR results correlated with VI results for 89% of the samples. The remaining samples were positive with only one detection method. Overall the sensitivity and specificity of the H7- and H5-specific RRT-PCR were similar to those of VI and HI.
Camera sensor calibration approach for space control applications

Recent space science missions, including spacecraft navigation, orbit determination, and sensing systems that mimic the actual conditions in space have a considerable success depends on accurate trajectory tracking methods. Since ground-based calibration efforts can be corrupted during launch environments it is necessary to develop on-orbit calibration methods to maximize sensor performance. Future space systems will require more advanced navigation and control systems to avoid these potential problems. In this work, a camera sensor calibration approach is presented to conduct mission-oriented researches, and get hands on experience in conducting experiments for sensing, guidance, dynamics, and control of aerospace and space operations in a high-accurate environment.
The clinical implications of continuous central venous oxygen saturation during human CPR.

STUDY OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to observe, measure, and describe the changes in central venous oxygen saturation during CPR and immediately after return of spontaneous circulation. It also was to examine the clinical utility of continuous central venous oxygen saturation monitoring as a indicator of return of spontaneous circulation during CPR in human beings. DESIGN AND SETTING Eight-month, prospective, non-outcome, observational, nonrandomized case series in the ED of a large urban hospital. TYPES OF PATIENTS: Adult normothermic, nontraumatic, out-of-hospital cardiopulmonary arrests. INTERVENTIONS All patients were managed according to advanced cardiac life support guidelines. A proximal aortic and double-lumen central venous catheter was placed. Central venous oxygen saturation was measured continuously spectrophotometrically with a fiberoptic catheter in the central venous location. MEASUREMENTS Aortic blood pressure and central venous oxygen saturation were simultaneously measured throughout each resuscitation. Return of spontaneous circulation was defined as a systolic blood pressure of more than 60 mm Hg for more than five minutes. RESULTS One hundred patients who experienced 68 episodes of cardiac arrest were studied. Patients with return of spontaneous circulation had a higher initial and statistically higher mean and maximal central venous oxygen saturation than those without return of spontaneous circulation (P = .23, .0001, and .0001, respectively; P less than .05 is significant). No patient attained return of spontaneous circulation without reaching a central venous oxygen saturation of at least 30%. Only one of 68 episodes of return of spontaneous circulation was attained without reaching a central venous oxygen saturation of at least 40%. A central venous oxygen saturation of greater than 72% was 100% predictive of return of spontaneous circulation. CONCLUSION Continuous central venous oxygen saturation monitoring can serve as a reliable indicator of return of spontaneous circulation during CPR in human beings.
Regulation of TRPC6 Channel Activity by Tyrosine Phosphorylation*

Various hormonal stimuli and growth factors activate the mammalian canonical transient receptor potential (TRPC) channel through phospholipase C (PLC) activation. However, the precise mechanism of the regulation of TRPC channel activity remains unknown. Here, we provide the first evidence that direct tyrosine phosphorylation by Src family protein-tyrosine kinases (PTKs) is a novel mechanism for modulating TRPC6 channel activity. We found that TRPC6 is tyrosine-phosphorylated in COS-7 cells when coexpressed with Fyn, a member of the Src family PTKs. We also found that Fyn interacts with TRPC6 and that the interaction is mediated by the SH2 domain of Fyn and the N-terminal region of TRPC6 in a phosphorylation-independent manner. In addition, we demonstrated the physical association of TRPC6 with Fyn in the mammalian brain. Moreover, we showed that stimulation of the epidermal growth factor receptor induced rapid tyrosine phosphorylation of TRPC6 in COS-7 cells. This epidermal growth factor-induced tyrosine phosphorylation of TRPC6 was significantly blocked by PP2, a specific inhibitor of Src family PTKs, and by a dominant negative form of Fyn, suggesting that the direct phosphorylation of TRPC6 by Src family PTKs could be caused by physiological stimulation. Furthermore, using single channel recording, we showed that Fyn modulates TRPC6 channel activity via tyrosine phosphorylation. Thus, our findings demonstrated that tyrosine phosphorylation by Src family PTKs is a novel regulatory mechanism of TRPC6 channel activity.
Simulation of crystal growth and experiment analysis in excimer-laser crystallization of a-Si film with macro-micro model

In this work, the excimer-laser-induced crystallization of amorphous silicon (a-Si) films was investigated numerically and experimentally. This study had investigated the effects of irradiating energy density on the grain size and structure by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In the surface microstructure analysis of the laser-irradiated area, the critical fluences (full-melt threshold, FMT) between the partial melting and complete melting regimes can be found by applying scanning electron microscopy. An efficient two-dimensional numerical model is carried out to predict the critical fluences (FMT) and the transient temperature distribution during the laser processing by the finite element method. An macro-micro model has been developed for the melting and resolidification of thin Si films induced by excimer-laser annealing. Except temperature distributions, the macro-micro models can offer more information about solidification process, such as undercooling, grain size, grain density etc. The algorithm that allows for nucleation is based on classical nucleation theory. Accordingly, the model enables the prediction of grain size, as well as the calculation of other critical responses of the a-Si film. The average grain sizes, obtained from the simulation results of the proposed model, agree fairly well with those from the experimental data.
Improvements in SAT-based Reachability Analysis for Timed Automata

The paper deals with the problem of checking reachability for timed automata. In order to check reachability of a~state satisfying some property, first the transition relation of a timed automaton is unfolded iteratively to some depth and encoded as a propositional formula. Next, the property is translated to a propositional formula and satisfiability of the conjunction of the two defined above formulas is checked. The unfolding of the transition relation can be terminated when either a state satisfying the property has been found or all the states of the timed automaton have been searched. In this paper we propose some improvements of the encoding of the transition relation for timed automata. The improvements are partially based on a new discretization scheme. The efficiency of the improved encoding is strongly supported by the experimental results. We also introduce a method for checking unreachability.
Identity recognition based on generalised linear regression classification for multi-component images

In real-world recognition applications, several poor situations such as varying environment, limited image information, and irregular status would lead performance degradation in recognition. To overcome the unexpected effects, the authors propose a generalised linear regression classification (GLRC) to fully use all the information of multiple components of input images. The proposed GLRC achieves the global adaptive weighted optimisation for linear regression classification (LCR), which can automatically use the distinction components for recognition. For colour identify recognition, the authors also suggest several similarity measures for the proposed GLRC to be tested in different colour spaces. Experiments are conducted on two object datasets and two face databases including Columbia Object Image Library-100, SOIL-47, SDUMLA-HMT and FEI. For performance comparisons, the proposed GLRC approach is compared with the contemporary popular methods including colour principal component analysis, colour linear discriminant analysis, colour canonical correlation analysis, LRC, robust LRC (RLRC), sparse representation classification (SRC), colour LRC, colour RLRC, and colour SRC. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GLRC method achieves the best performance in multi-component identity recognition.
Simplify sentence structure for improving human post-editing efficiency on Chinese-to-English patent machine translation

In this paper, we propose a new approach to improve human post-editing efﬁciency by simplifying the sentence structure on Chinese-to-English patent machine translation (PMT). To simplify the structure of a patent sentence, we use a recognizer to recognize the max noun phrases (MNPs) 1 in a Chinese sentence before translating the sentence. The MNPs are replaced with their head words in the sentence, which makes the sentence structure simpler to be translated. Therefore, the task of translating a complicated sentence is transformed into two subtasks: one is the translation task of MNPs and the other is the translation task of the simpliﬁed sentence. And then, the translation results of two subtasks are combined to get the ﬁnal translation result of the input Chinese sentence. This method outperforms NTCIR-10 of-ﬁcial baseline by approximate 2 BLEU points. Moreover, the translation results are beneﬁcial for human post-editing, which can save human post-editing time and improve the quality of translation.
A high-performance integrated K-band diplexer

This paper describes the design and measurement of a planar diplexer integrated on a single silicon substrate. The diplexer channels are 5 and 6.5% relative bandwidth at 28 and 31 GHz, respectively. The diplexer is based on a micropackaged, membrane supported, capacitively coupled microstrip structure and is 1.5 cm/spl times/1.6 cm and only 1.4 mm thick. The measured insertion loss is 1.4 dB (5%) and 0.9 dB (6.5%) for the two channels with better than 35 dB isolation in the 28 GHz band and better than 50 dB isolation in the 31 GHz band. The measured results include all transition and packaging effects. The diplexer has CPW ports and can easily be integrated with other elements such as planar antennas, LNAs, and power amplifiers.
Developing an Open-domain English-Farsi Translation System Using AFEC: Amirkabir Bilingual Farsi-English Corpus

The translation quality of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) depends on the amount of input data especially for morphologically rich languages. Farsi (Persian) language is such a language which has few NLP resources. It also suffers from the non-standard written characters which causes a large variety in the written form of each character. Moreover, the structural difference between Farsi and English results in long range reorderings which cannot be modeled by common SMT reordering models. Here, we try to improve the existing English-Farsi SMT system focusing on these challenges first by expanding our bilingual limited-domain corpus to an open-domain one. Then, to alleviate the character variations, a new text normalization algorithm is offered. Finally, some hand-crafted rules are applied to reduce the structural differences. Using the new corpus, the experimental results showed 8.82% BLEU improvement by applying new normalization method and 9.1% BLEU when rules are used.
Evaluation of renal end points in nephrology trials

Chronische nierschade is een volksgezondheidsprobleem en wordt in verband gebracht met een hoog risico op dialyse, niertransplantatie en cardiovasculaire ziekten. Tot op heden zijn weinig interventies bewezen effectief gebleken in het vertragen van de progressie van de daling in de nierfunctie. Nieuwe therapeutische strategieen zijn dus gewenst om de hoge medische behoefte van chronische nierschade aan te pakken. Klinische uitkomststudies zijn nodig om de werkzaamheid en veiligheid van een geneesmiddel te bepalen. De huidige gebruikte eindpunten voor chronische nierschade zijn dialyse en niertranplantatie. Aangezien het lang duurt voordat de nierziekte zover gevorderd is dat men besluit om over te gaan op dialyse of niertransplantatie zijn er grote langdurige en complexe klinische studies nodig om de werkzaamheid van nieuwe interventies vast te stellen. In dit proefschrift zijn nieuwe definities voor eindpunten van klinische studies voor chronische nierschade onderzocht met als doel om een eindpunt te vinden die eerder in het beloop van de nierziekte plaats vindt zodat in de toekomst kleinere en minder complexe studies kunnen worden uitgevoerd. De bevindingen die in dit proefschrift zijn beschreven wijzen erop dat het optimale eindpunt in klinische studies naar de progressie van chronische nierschade, een samengesteld eindpunt moet zijn bestaande uit een daling van de nierfunctie en een klinisch zinvol eindpunt zoals dialyse of niertransplantatie. Met behulp van studies in dit proefschrift is een nieuw eindpunt gedefinieerd gebaseerd op daling van de nierfunctie, namelijk een 30% en 40% afname in de glomerulaire filtratie snelheid (eGFR). Dit eindpunt wordt momenteel gebruikt in nieuwe klinische studies naar de progressie van chronische nierschade.
Neural Blockade for Neuropathic Pain

Objective: This study reviews the available literature regarding the use of nerve bloks for the management of peripheral neuropathy. Design: A MEDLINE literature review was carried out, examining the existing literature about the use of nerve blocks for the treatment of mononeuropathies and radiculopathy. Interventions: The study encompassed the use of local anesthetic peripheral and sympathetic nerve blocks, perineural steroid injections, and neurolytic blocks. Results: Local anesthetic peripheral and sympathetic blocks provide useful diagnostic information but tend to afford only temporary therapeutic benefits in patients with peripheral neuropathy. Perineural steroids provide lasting relief for some patients with radiculopathy and peripheral neuropathy, but in most studies, it is a minority of patients who experience long‐term relief. Peripheral neurolytic blocks are helpful for some patients with peripheral mononeuropathy, particularly in the setting of cancer pain. Although there are the risks of exacerbating pain and serious complications, certain patients experience long‐term relief. Conclusions: Most discussions on the management of peripheral neuropathy do not include the use of nerve blocks. Nevertheless, the nerve block procedures discussed here can play an important role in the management of these conditions.
Polyphenols and disease risk in epidemiologic studies 1 – 4

Plant polyphenols, a large group of natural antioxidants, are serious candidates in explanations of the protective effects of vegetables and fruits against cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Epidemiologic studies are useful for evaluation of the human health effects of long-term exposure to physiologic concentrations of polyphenols, but reliable data on polyphenol contents of foods are still scarce. The aim of this review is to summarize available epidemiologic data on the health effects of polyphenols, focusing on the flavonoid subclasses of flavonols, flavones, and catechins and on lignans. Data obtained to date suggest beneficial effects of both flavonoids and lignans on cardiovascular diseases but not on cancer, with the possible exception of lung cancer. There is a need for more research on stroke and lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Most studies to date have included only flavonols and flavones. With data becoming available for other polyphenols, these compounds should be included in future studies. Careful design of prospective studies is important to offset some of the major drawbacks of epidemiologic studies, including residual confounding (by smoking and other dietary factors) and exposure assessment. Am J Clin Nutr 2005;81(suppl):317S–25S.
Development and Validation of a GEANT4 Radiation Transport Code for CT Dosimetry

AbstractThe authors have created a radiation transport code using the GEANT4 Monte Carlo toolkit to simulate pediatric patients undergoing CT examinations. The focus of this paper is to validate their simulation with real-world physical dosimetry measurements using two independent techniques. Exposure measurements were made with a standard 100‐mm CT pencil ionization chamber, and absorbed doses were also measured using optically stimulated luminescent (OSL) dosimeters. Measurements were made in air with a standard 16‐cm acrylic head phantom and with a standard 32‐cm acrylic body phantom. Physical dose measurements determined from the ionization chamber in air for 100 and 120 kVp beam energies were used to derive photon-fluence calibration factors. Both ion chamber and OSL measurement results provide useful comparisons in the validation of the Monte Carlo simulations. It was found that simulated and measured CTDI values were within an overall average of 6% of each other.
Implementation of real -time steam temperature control for high efficient induction- based extraction essential oil using hybrid fuzzy-PD plus PID controller

Steam temperature is well known as one significant parameter in process of extraction essential oil that can contribute to increase the output yield and quality of the product. In this study, induction heating system was adopted in steam distillation pot to replace the conventional heating element. Induction heating system was preferred is due to high efficient, clean and save energy. In term of temperature control, this study implemented hybrid fuzzy PD plus PID at steam distillation pot with induction heating system for essential oil extraction system. Initially, the system was modeled to represent the system using ARX structure with PRBS was triggered to the system as an input. The parameter estimation and tuning is derived by simulation for HFPP control scheme. The performance of HFPP with 25 and 49 rules is compared by step response test. From experiment of real time control, demonstrate the proposed HFPP using 49 rules giving a better performance based on settling time, rise time, percent overshoot and RMSE value.
7beta-hydroxycholesterol induces apoptosis and regulates cyclooxygenase 2 in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether treatment with 7beta-hydroxycholesterol (7beta-HC) would trigger cell death in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) cell lines in a dose-dependent fashion. DESIGN In vitro study. SUBJECTS The study included HNSCC cell lines SCC9, SCC25, CAL27, and FaDu. INTERVENTION We treated HNSCC cell lines with increasing doses of 7beta-HC. Proliferation assays were performed to assess cell viability after treatment. Western blots were carried out to evaluate cyclooxygenase (COX)-1 and -2 expression levels. RESULTS Using proliferation assays and immunocytochemical analysis, we detected significant growth inhibition via apoptosis in 4 different HNSCC cell lines after treatment with 7beta-HC (P < .001). The 50% inhibitory concentration levels were between 13.19 and 20.79 micromol/L after 72 hours. Western analysis indicated that COX-2, but not COX-1, levels were suppressed after treatment. CONCLUSIONS Treatment with 7beta-HC resulted in suppression of HNSCC growth in vitro. Our data warrant further investigations for the potential use of 7beta-HC as a cytotoxic agent in head and neck cancer.
Assessing vowel quality for singing evaluation

The proper pronunciation of lyrics is an important component of vocal music. While automatic vowel classification has been widely studied for speech, a separate investigation of the methods is needed for singing due to the differences in acoustic properties between sung and spoken vowels. Acoustic features combining spectrum envelope and pitch are used with classifiers trained on sung vowels for classification of test vowels segmented from the audio of solo singing. Two different classifiers are tested, viz., Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Linear Regression, and observed to perform well on both male and female sung vowels.