Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shadow extraction of buildings from high-resolution SAR data via the combination of amplitude reversal and total variation

For building shadow extraction from high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, traditional image processing methods cannot fundamentally overcome the high sidelobe interference of SAR images. In this paper, a novel technique is proposed via the combination of amplitude reversal and total variation (TV). Instead of SAR image processing, it uses SAR raw echo signal for sparse reconstruction. The technique mainly considers two scattering properties of building shadow: the zero scattering intensity and the extended block sparsity. Amplitude reversal is proposed to restrain the former, while TV is exploited to restrain the latter. Then the problem becomes a combined cost function minimization, and the gradient projection method is used for solution. Simulation results and comparison with traditional methods show the effectiveness and performance improvement of the proposed method, with fewer echo samples used.
Consensus Conference on Prevention of Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections: 2009

Health care-acquired infections are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in all patient care settings. In 2009, a consensus conference was held to evaluate practices and recommendations for the prevention and control of one specific type of health care-acquired infections, those associated with central catheter use. The conference had 2 purposes—-to provide a tool for quality changes within health care institutions regarding central catheter infections and to empower those who are responsible for implementing policies needed to reduce the risk of these infections. The findings of the expert panel assembled for the conference are presented in this article.
A randomized comparison of liposomal versus conventional amphotericin B for the treatment of pyrexia of unknown origin in neutropenic patients

One hundred and thirty‐four adults and 204 children were randomized in two prospective, parallel comparative multicentre trials to receive either conventional amphotericin B 1 mg/kg/d (c‐AMB), liposomal amphotericin B 1 mg/kg/d (L‐AMB1) or liposomal amphotericin B 3 mg/kg/d (L‐AMB3). Patients were entered if they had a pyrexia of unknown origin (PUO) defined as temperature of 38°C or more, not responding to 96 h of systemic broad‐spectrum antibiotic treatment, and neutropenia (< 0.5 × 109/l). The safety and toxicity of liposomal amphotericin B was compared with that of conventional amphotericin B. Efficacy of treatment was assessed, with success defined as resolution of fever for 3 consecutive days (< 38°C) without the development of any new fungal infection. Clinical and laboratory parameters were collected for safety analysis. In both the paediatric and adult populations, L‐AMB treated patients had a 2–6‐fold decrease in the incidence (P 0.01) of test‐drug‐related side‐effects, compared to c‐AMB. Severe trial‐drug‐related side‐effects were seen in 1% of L‐AMB treated patients, in contrast to 12% of patients on c‐AMB (P < 0.01). Nephrotoxicity, in the patient subset not receiving concomitant nephrotoxic agents, defined as a doubling from the patients baseline serum creatinine level, was not observed in the L‐AMB1 arm whereas the incidence was 3% in patients on L‐AMB3 and 23% in those on c‐AMB (P < 0.01). Moreover, time to develop nephrotoxicity was longer in both L‐AMB arms than c‐AMB (P < 0.01). Severe hypokalaemia was observed less frequently in both L‐AMB arms (P < 0.01).
Plasma Based Sterilization : Overview and the Stepwise Inactivation Process of Microbial by Non-thermal Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet

The microbial inactivation/sterilization is an important part of our daily healthy life. This paper presents the overview on the sterilization process. Comparing the effectiveness of the sterilization agents it has been found that the short High Electric Field [HEF] pulse is the most efficient inactivation agent. This HEF pulse creates pores on the cell surface and kills the cell. Electroporation plays an important role in the inactivation of the biological cell or killing of the cell and spore. The active chemical species produced in the propagation phase of the plasma jet are considered to be the basic inactivation agent for plasma based sterilization. Along with the emission intensity of the active chemical species in the plasma jet, maximum electric field of the plasma jet has been estimated in this paper and is around 84 kV/cm. A new inactivation agent, the electric field strength of the plasma jet is proposed for the first time in this paper. It has been shown that the electric field produced in the plasma bullet is sufficient enough to have an adverse effect on the cell exposed to plasma bullet and is the main inactivation agent of plasma based inactivation. Stepwise inactivation process is described. Index Term— Plasma medicine, Non-thermal plasma jet application, electroporation, electric field strength PACS: 52
Introduction of adhesive and costimulatory immune functions into tumor cells by infection with Newcastle Disease Virus.

We demonstrate in this study that infection of tumor cells by Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) leads to changes in tumor cell surface adhesiveness and tumor immune costimulatory function. While adsorbtion of virions to the cell surface occurs after short-term (10 min) incubation and leads to cells expressing viral antigens at low antigen density (LAD), viral replication in the cytoplasm occurs within 5-24 h leading to tumor cells expressing viral antigens at high antigen density (HAD) as shown by quantitative FACS flow cytometry. Virus infected tumor cells showed an increased adhesiveness for erythrocytes and lymphocytes. When IL-2 preactivated human lymphocytes with cytotoxic potential were coincubated with 51Cr-labeled NDV-infected or non-infected human colon carcinoma cells increased lysis of the virus infected targets was observed. The virus mediated cell adhesion could be inhibited by monoclonal antibody (mAb) against the hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) molecule but not by antibody against the fusion protein. HN cDNA transfectants also mediated increased lymphocyte adhesion in comparison to wild-type or neo-vector transfected control cells. Further experiments demonstrated that not only the adhesion domain of HN but also the neuraminidase plays a role in cell-cell interactions. A comparison of an NDV neuraminidase mutant of the strain Australian Victoria (AV-L1) with the parental AV strain revealed pronounced differences in their capacity to mediate lymphocyte binding and costimulatory activity. The mutant with highly decreased neuraminidase activity was very similar to NDV Ulster in adhesive and costimulatory activity while the parental line with high neuraminidase activity was negative for both functions. Costimulatory effects of NDV Ulster and AV-L1 were revealed when virions and suboptimal concentrations of anti-CD3 mAbs were coated to microtiter plates for induction of murine CD4 T cell proliferation. In human autologous mixed lymphocyte-tumor cell cultures up-regulation of T cell activation markers CD69 and CD25 was seen with NDV modified but not with non-modified tumor cells.
Datapath synthesis using a problem-space genetic algorithm

This paper presents a new approach to datapath synthesis based on a problem-space genetic algorithm (PSGA). The proposed technique performs concurrent scheduling and allocation of functional units, registers, and multiplexers with the objective of finding both a schedule and an allocation which minimizes the cost function of the hardware resources and the total time of execution. The problem-space genetic algorithm based datapath synthesis system (PSGA-Synth) combines a standard genetic algorithm with a known heuristic to search the large design space in an intelligent manner. PSGA-Synth handles multicycle functional units, structural pipelining, conditional code and loops, and provides a mechanism to specify lower and upper bounds on the number of control steps. The PSGA-Synth was tested on a set of problems selected from the literature, as well as larger problems created by us, with promising results. PSGA-Synth not only finds the best known results for all the test problems examined in a relatively small amount of CPU time, but also has the ability to efficiently handle large problems. >
Speaker identification using utterances correspond to speaker-specific-text

In speaker recognition tasks, the main reason for reduced accuracy is due to closely resembling speakers in the acoustic space. Conventional GMM-based modelling technique captures unique features along with common features among various classes. Further, it ignores knowledge of phonetic content of the speech. In order to increase the discriminative power of the classifier, the system must be able to use only the unique features of a given speaker with respect to his/her acoustically closely resembling speaker. This paper proposes a technique to reduce the confusion errors, by finding speaker-specific phonemes and formulate a text using the subset of phonemes that are unique, for speaker identification task. Experiments have been conducted on speaker identification task using speech data of 192 female speakers from TIMIT corpus.The performance of the proposed system is compared with that of a conventional GMM-based technique and a significant improvement is noted.
From benchmarking HITS-CLIP peak detection programs to a new method for identification of miRNA-binding sites from Ago2-CLIP data

Abstract Experimental evidence indicates that about 60% of miRNA-binding activity does not follow the canonical rule about the seed matching between miRNA and target mRNAs, but rather a non-canonical miRNA targeting activity outside the seed or with a seed-like motifs. Here, we propose a new unbiased method to identify canonical and non-canonical miRNA-binding sites from peaks identified by Ago2 Cross-Linked ImmunoPrecipitation associated to high-throughput sequencing (CLIP-seq). Since the quality of peaks is of pivotal importance for the final output of the proposed method, we provide a comprehensive benchmarking of four peak detection programs, namely CIMS, PIPE-CLIP, Piranha and Pyicoclip, on four publicly available Ago2-HITS-CLIP datasets and one unpublished in-house Ago2-dataset in stem cells. We measured the sensitivity, the specificity and the position accuracy toward miRNA binding sites identification, and the agreement with TargetScan. Secondly, we developed a new pipeline, called miRBShunter, to identify canonical and non-canonical miRNA-binding sites based on de novo motif identification from Ago2 peaks and prediction of miRNA::RNA heteroduplexes. miRBShunter was tested and experimentally validated on the in-house Ago2-dataset and on an Ago2-PAR-CLIP dataset in human stem cells. Overall, we provide guidelines to choose a suitable peak detection program and a new method for miRNA-target identification.
Explorer's guide to the semantic web

A complex set of extensions to the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web will make data and services more accessible to computers and useful to people. Some of these extensions are being deployed, and many are coming in the next years. This is the only book to explore the territory of the Semantic Web in a broad and conceptual manner. This Guide acquaints you with the basic ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web, their roles and inter-relationships. The key areas covered include knowledge modeling (RDF, Topic Maps), ontology (OWL), agents (intelligent and otherwise), distributed trust and belief, "semantically-focused" search, and much more. The book's basic, conceptual approach is accessible to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Important points are illustrated with diagrams and occasional markup fragments. As it explores the landscape it encounters an ever-surprising variety of novel ideas and unexpected links. The book is easy and fun to read - you may find it hard to put down. The Semantic Web is coming. This is a guide to the basic concepts and technologies that will come with it.
A New Computational Tool for Analyzing Translation Processes: The TransCorrect Project

The TransCorrect project is a first attempt to automate the correction of human translation within the context of higher education. It is based on a number of new techniques derived from computational corpus linguistics, but also on the author’s pedagogical experience. The program was specially created for the teaching of translation at university level. While offering the students an immediate feedback to their translation attempts, the TransCorrect project also enables the teacher to have an additional insight into the complex translation processes.
The added effectiveness of early geriatrician involvement on acute orthopaedic wards to orthogeriatric rehabilitation.

AIMS To evaluate the effect of regular input by a geriatrician to an orthopaedic ward. METHOD A geriatrician saw all patients aged over 65 years admitted to an acute orthopaedic ward-this was compared to an adjacent orthopaedic ward which had consultation only service, and also to both wards in the preceding year. All subjects over the age of 65 years with fractured neck of femur admitted over a 4 month period were enroled. Main outcome measures were length of stay, cost, discharge destination. RESULTS In the year prior to study, patients in both wards had a mean total stay of 28 days. On the intervention ward the mean stay was reduced to 20.7 days, and on the control ward to 27 days. The cost per case on the intervention ward was NZ$9400, and on the control ward was NZ$11 500. Eleven percent went to a higher care level on the intervention ward, compared with 23% on the control ward. CONCLUSION Geriatrician input on a twice weekly basis to all patients over 65 years of age on an orthopaedic ward, saves bed days, reduces costs and produces an improved outcome.
Personality variables that discriminate pseudoseizures patients and epileptic patients used in the 16 PF

This project was designed to study the effect of certain personality factors on pseudoseizure patients. It was hypothesized that Factors C and 0 in the 16 Personality Questionnaire could serve as predictor variables for the criterion variable, positive diagnosis of pseudoseizure versus true epileptic seizures. It was also hypothesized that these two groups, pseudoseizure versus epileptic seizure, would differ significantly on a test titled the Sickness Impact Profile. The two scales in this test, psychosocial and physical, were examined. Two discriminant analyses were performed with these two tests being the predictor variables and group membership being the criterion variable. Non-significant results indicated no support for these two hypotheses. Difficulties with rEliaoility of the 16 PF Questionnaire and the small sample size may have contributed to the non-significant results. Personality Variables That Discriminate Pseudoseizure Patients and Epileptic.Patients Used In The 16 PF Patricia Lane Marshall University of Richmond
Impacts of Ground Water Contamination on Property Values: Agricultural Run-off and Private Wells

Few studies have examined the impacts of ground water quality on residential property values. Using a unique data set of well tests, we link residential real estate transactions to home-specific contamination and conduct a hedonic analysis of sales in Lake County, Florida, where pollution concerns relate primarily to agricultural run-off. We find that recent testing and contamination of ground water there correspond to a 2–6 percent depreciation in home values, an effect that diminishes over time. Focusing on nitrogen-based contamination, we find that prices decline mainly when concentrations exceed the regulatory health standard, suggesting as much as a 15 percent depreciation at levels twice the standard.
Monolithic Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits for Compact 100 $^{+}$Gb/s Coherent Optical Receivers and Transmitters

We present silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs) based coherent optical transmitters and receivers for high-speed long-distance fiber optical transmission. High-degree photonic integration is achieved by monolithically integrating silicon electro-optic modulators, germanium photo detectors, silicon nitride-assisted on-chip polarization rotators, thermal phase shifters, and various passive silicon optical devices on a single wafer platform. We demonstrate the use of these PICs for modulating and detecting 112-Gb/s polarization-division-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK) and 224-Gb/s PDM 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16-QAM) signals. Transmission and coherent detection of a 112-Gb/s PDM-QPSK signal over 2560-km standard single-mode fiber is also demonstrated. The high-degree photonic integration for silicon PICs promises small-form-factor and low-power-consumption transceivers for future coherent systems that demand high cost efficiency and energy efficiency.
Improved cloning of antibody variable regions from hybridomas by an antisense-directed RNase H digestion of the P3-X63-Ag8.653 derived pseudogene mRNA.

When antibody variable regions (VL or VH) are cloned from hybridoma cell lines using standard methods (1), often sequences of non-functional rearranged variable regions are obtained by PCR of the hybridoma cDNA (2,3). The origin of these sequences (GenBank accession nos X58634 for VH and X05184, K00888 and M35669 for VL) can be traced to the myeloma cell lines originally utilized for the fusion ( 4,5). Often, the non-secretor cell line P3-X63-Ag8.653 (as well as other cell lines derived from MOPC 21) is used for the establishment of hybridoma cell lines by the standard fusion technique described by G. Kohler and C. Milstein (6). In many cases these hybridoma cells not only transcribe the desired monoclonal antibody DNA, but also bear high levels of non-functionally rearranged mRNAs. These mRNAs represent pseudogenes and can greatly exceed the level of normal antibody mRNA. Due to a reading frame shift in the V‐J recombination site, these pseudogene mRNAs cannot be translated into a functional protein ( 7). Development of PCR primers which can avoid amplification of these pseudogenes was hampered by the nearly identical sequences of the N- and C-termini of the variable regions. Up to now, the discrimination between ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ clones was often achieved by DNA sequence analysis or by checking the binding properties of the expressed antibody fragments ( 2). During the process of cloning a set of monoclonal antibodies directed against cytochrome c oxidase, we ran into the pseudogene problem many times. We developed two possible ways to solve the problem. First, if the variable region of interest does not belong to the subtype γ1 for VH or κ for VL, it is possible to suppress transcription of the pseudogene mRNA (which is subtype γ1 and κ) into cDNA by using a specific primer for the first strand synthesis. This strategy worked well with a subtype IgG2a clone where the cDNA synthesis could be made subtype-specific with an IgG2a-specific primer (Fig. 1). Therefore, the VH pseudogene (which belongs to subtype IgG1) could not be transcribed into cDNA. As a result, no pseudogene sequence could be detected using this procedure for cloning of the VH domain of this clone. Secondly, we developed another strategy which works independently from the antibody subtype. We used this strategy in the case of clone 11D3 (which is an IgG1/κ monoclonal antibody
Corpus profiling with Nootropia

The characteristics of different corpora influence the success of Information Retrieval and NLP methods. How to best characterise a corpus is still an unexplored research area. In this paper, we use a model that has so far been applied for user profiling in Information Filtering, to profile the corpora of the TIPSTER collection. Each corpus profile is a network of terms that allows the extraction of a series of statistical features. These features can be used to calculate the similarity between the corpora in TIPSTER. This is part of ongoing work that aims at providing a corpus profiling service that will map corpora to their features and to the corresponding experimental results of various models and techniques.
Developing Choropleth Maps of Parameter Results for Quantile Regression

Local regression methods can provide specific information about individual observations (places) in spatial analysis that is often useful in understanding non-stationary covariate relationships. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is one widely used local regression model whose parameter estimates are mapped as continuous or discrete surfaces. A less frequently used local regression method used in spatial analysis is quantile regression (QR). One drawback to the use of QR is its restricted visualization possibilities; currently, regression parameter summaries for QR are visualized only as line graphs that plot parameter estimates against quantile levels. This article presents a method that also permits the spatial display of these values in a choropleth map so that QR can be added to the cartographic repertoire of exploratory data models.
First integration of Cu TSV using die-to-wafer direct bonding and planarization

Copper-filled Through-Si Vias (TSV) with diameters from 2 µm to 5 µm have been integrated in a die-to-wafer stack combining direct bonding and a planarization technique. TSVs were processed on chip backside after oxide bonding and substrate thinning. The results were compared to the ones achieved with a wafer-to-wafer test vehicle. It was demonstrated that die-to-wafer process developed for this integration does not impact TSV electrical and morphological properties. Moreover, no damage was observed on the stack during TSV process performed at 400°C. This demonstration is the first step to validate the industrial compatibility between high density TSV process and die-to-wafer direct bonding and planarization techniques. With a resistance close to 150 mOhm and a capacitance of about 30 fF, 3 µm-diameter TSV provides excellent electrical performance to heterogeneous 3D ICs.
Estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptor expression in breast tumors of patients, and their usage of HER2-targeted therapy, in a tertiary care centre in India.

BACKGROUND This study was undertaken to document the pattern of expression of estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) and the usage of HER2-targeted therapy in a large tertiary care hospital in India in the year 2008. MATERIALS AND METHODS The histopathology reports of all breast cancer patients registered in the hospital in 2008 were extracted from the electronic medical record system. All the cases were immunohistochemically evaluated for estrogen and progesterone receptor status (ER and PR), and c-erbB-2 protein (HER2) expression using standard immunoperoxidase method. The use of HER2-targeted therapies was evaluated by extracting relevant information from the database of the hospital pharmacy and case charts of patients enrolled in ongoing approved trials. RESULTS A total of 2001 new patients of invasive breast cancers with available pathology reports were registered in the hospital in the year 2008. ER and/or PR expression was positive in tumors of 1025 (51.2%) patients. HER2 3+ expression by immunohistochemistry (IHC) was found in 335 (16.7%) and HER2 2+ in 163 (8.1%). The triple negative phenotype was found in 596 (29.8%) patients. An estimated 441 patients were eligible to receive HER2-targeted therapy based on their HER2 status. Of these 38 (8.6%) patients received some form of HER2-targeted therapy; 20 patients (4.5%) as part of ongoing clinical trials and 18 (4.1%) as part of routine care. CONCLUSIONS The overwhelming majority of patients eligible for HER2-targeted therapy in our institution are unable to receive it because of financial constraints and limited access to health insurance. There is a higher fraction of patients with the triple negative phenotype compared to the Western population.