Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CHA2DS2-VASc Score Predicts In-Hospital and Long-Term Clinical Outcomes in Patients With ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction Who Were Undergoing Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention

CHA2DS2-VASc score includes similar risk factors for coronary artery disease. We hypothesized that admission CHA2DS2-VASc score might be predictive of adverse clinical outcomes for patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) who were undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention. A total of 647 patients with STEMI enrolled in this study. The study population was divided into 2 groups according to their admission CHA2DS2-VASc score. The low group (n = 521) was defined as CHA2DS2-VASc score ≤2, and the high group (n = 126) was defined as CHA2DS2-VASc score >2. Patients in the high group had significantly higher incidence of in-hospital cardiovascular mortality (8.7% vs 1.9%; P < .001). Long-term mortality was significantly frequent in the high group (13.4% vs 3.6%, P < .001). Hypertension, admission CHA2DS2-VASc score, and Killip class >1 were independent predictors of long-term mortality. Admission CHA2DS2-VASc score >2 was identified as an effective cutoff point for long-term mortality (area under curve = 0.821; 95% confidence interval: 0.76-0.89; P < .001). CHA2DS2-VASc score is a simple, very useful, easily remembered bedside score for predicting in-hospital and long-term adverse clinical outcomes in STEMI.
Reputation in peer-to-peer networks

At the core of any peer-to-peer network is the primitive of routing, whereby peers assist each other by forwarding transit traffic. However, some nodes may adopt selfish behavior and drop transit traffic due to reasons such as competing commercial interest or conservation of bandwidth. Thus nodes must be able to detect misbehavior as well as use this information to avoid misbehaving nodes. We propose two reputation schemes to address this problem, focusing on the Chord routing protocol. In the first scheme, nodes submit keyspace ranges that they suspect to contain a misbehaving node, and all the ranges are intersected to narrow the keyspace. The second scheme introduces a new routing reputation metric that is allocated to each finger of chord nodes' routing table. This allows nodes to route to fingers with better reputation in order to have a greater chance of successful delivery. We also present simulation results to evaluate the performances of the two schemes.
Enabling partial cache line prefetching through data compression

Hardware prefetching is a simple and effective technique for hiding cache miss latency and thus improving the overall performance. However, it comes with addition of prefetch buffers and causes significant memory traffic increase. We propose a new prefetching scheme which improves performance without increasing memory traffic or requiring prefetch buffers. We observe that a significant percentage of dynamically appearing values exhibit characteristics that enable their compression using a very simple compression scheme. The bandwidth freed by transferring values from lower levels in memory hierarchy to upper levels in compressed form is used to prefetch additional compressible values. These prefetched values are held in vacant space created in the data cache by storing values in compressed form. Thus, in comparison to other prefetching schemes, our scheme does not introduce prefetch buffers or increase the memory traffic. In comparison to a baseline cache that does not support prefetching, on average, our cache design reduces the memory traffic by 10%, reduces the data cache miss rate by 14%, and speeds up program execution by 7%
High-Early-Strength Engineered Cementitious Composites for Fast, Durable Concrete Repair—Material Properties

The lack of durability in concrete structures worldwide demands fast and durable repairs. To address this need, high-early-strength engineered cementitious composites (HES-ECC) were recently developed for concrete repair applications in which minimum operations disruption is desired. A detailed characterization of HES-ECC’s compressive, tensile, flexural, and shrinkage properties at different ages is reported in this paper. HES-ECC achieves a compressive strength of 23.59 ± 1.40 MPa (3422.16 ± 203.33 psi) in 4 hours and 55.59 ± 2.17 MPa (8062.90 ± 315.03 psi) in 28 days. Under uniaxial tension, HES-ECC exhibits tensile strain-hardening behavior with a strain capacity greater than 2.5%. Its flexural strength exceeds twice that of concrete with similar compressive strength. Under restrained shrinkage conditions, HES-ECC forms microcracks with a self-controlled crack width below 50 μm (0.002 in.). The combination of these properties suggests HES-ECC material is highly suitable for fast and durable concrete repairs with shortened downtime and improved longterm durability.
A Longitudinal Study of P2P Traffic Classification

This paper focuses on network traffic measurement of Peer-to- Peer (P2P) applications on the Internet. P2P applications supposedly constitute a substantial proportion of today's Internet traffic. However, current P2P applications use several obfuscation techniques, including dynamic port numbers, port hopping, HTTP masquerading, chunked file transfers, and encrypted payloads. As P2P applications continue to evolve, robust and effective methods are needed for P2P traffic identification. The paper compares three methods to classify P2P applications: port-based classification, application-layer signatures, and transport-layer analysis. The study uses empirical network traces collected from the University of Calgary Internet connection for the past 2 years. The results show that port-based analysis is ineffective, being unable to identify 30%-70% of today's Internet traffic. Application signatures are accurate, but may not be possible for legal or technical reasons. The transport-layer method seems promising, providing a robust means to assess aggregate P2P traffic. The latter method suggests that 30%-70% of the campus Internet traffic for the past year was P2P.
Hotspot Ranking Based Indoor Mapping and Mobility Analysis Using Crowdsourced Wi-Fi Signal

In this paper, we propose a new hotspot ranking-based indoor mapping and mobility analysis approach based on the sporadically collected crowdsourced Wi-Fi received signal strength (RSS) data. This approach aims to construct the indoor mapping, as well as achieve the mobility analysis of the users following their daily motion patterns in target environment. First, we perform the wavelet analysis with respect to each RSS sequence to mitigate the noise interference to some extent. Second, we develop a new multidimensional scaling approach to map each RSS data into a linear one in the 2-D signal space, which is followed by the density clustering approach to merge the linear ones into different clusters based on the spatial correlation property. Finally, we construct the indoor mapping from the signal into physical spaces by the concept of hotspot ranking order, as well as the transfer relations among different RSS clusters and different physical sub-areas. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve the superior performance in terms of indoor mapping and mobility analysis in an unknown indoor environment.
Subspace Predictive Repetitive Control for wind turbine load alleviation using trailing edge flaps

A novel Subspace Predictive Repetitive Control (SPRC) methodology is presented and used to control trailing edge flaps for wind turbines. First, the dynamics of the wind turbine are identified online. This is especially important for trailing edge flaps on a large wind turbine, where a local change in wind conditions can result in significantly altered aerodynamics. Next, a repetitive control (RC) law is formulated for the multivariable problem from the identified dynamics, that guarantees stability when the identification converges to the true system parameters. This is done in a lower-dimensional basis-function subspace, which reduces computations and gives high control over the shape of the actuator signal. The SPRC methodology is validated in a high-fidelity wind turbine simulation environment.
Prevalence, Predictive Factor, and Clinical Significance of White-Coat Hypertension and Masked Hypertension in Korean Hypertensive patients

Background The prevalence and clinical significance of white-coat hypertension (WCHT) and masked hypertension (MHT) are unknown in Koreans. Here we measure the frequency of WCHT and MHT in hypertensive subjects and identify the epidemiologic and/or clinical factors that predict it in Korean subjects. Methods This study is a retrospective analysis of a random sample from February 2004 to October 2005. All patients had measurements of blood pressure (BP) in the clinic and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM). Subjects were classified into four groups on the basis of daytime ambulatory BP and clinic BP level: 1) Normotension (NT), 2) MHT, 3) WCHT, and 4) sustained hypertension (SHT). Results For all 967 patients, the mean clinic BP was 157.7±22.0/ 95.3±13.1 mmHg, and the mean daytime ambulatory BP was 136.4±15.0/ 86.2±10.7 mmHg. The NT, MHT, WCHT, and SHT groups consisted of 51 (5.3%), 55 (5.7%), 273 (28.2%), and 588 (60.8%) subjects, respectively. The left ventricular mass index was significantly higher in SHT than in the other groups, and was positively correlated with BP, especially ABPM. Compared with NT, the factors associated with MHT were younger age, male gender, higher BMI, clinic BP ≥130 mmHg, and alcohol consumption. Compared with SHT, the factors associated with WCHT were female gender, lower BMI, and clinic BP < 150 mmHg. Conclusions WCHT and MHT were prevalent in the hypertensive population. ABPM was more predictive of target organ damage than clinic BP, and could be useful in identifying subjects at risk for WCHT and MHT.
Plasmonic Conducting Polymers for Heavy Metal Sensing

Conducting polymers are a sub-group of organic and inorganic electrical conductors which can be considered as interdisciplinary science and technology. They are in the intersection of three disciplines: physics, chemistry and engineering. These macromolecular materials are unique combination of electronic and optical properties of metals and semiconductors with the processing advantages and mechanical properties of polymers [1].
Cheek Augmentation With Bio-Alcamid in Facial Lipoatrophy in HIV Seropositive Patients

Lipoatrophy of the face in HIV seropositives are not susceptible to satisfactory correction by using single cosmetic surgery. The limitation of the available filler products to augment and to correct the facial defects in facial lipoatrophy is mainly inherent in the amount of substance that can be implanted for the correction of lipoatrophy. Using Bio-Alcamid, which is an injectable, biocompatible, nontoxic, nonallergenic soft tissue filler designed to correct tissue deficits of various volume by intratissue administration, 9 nonrelated HIV seropositive patients with facial lipoatrophy (7 males and 2 females, age 43 ± 6 years) underwent cheek augmentation. From 7 mL to 16 mL of substance was injected each on both cheeks per application up to a maximum total of 25 mL. with a mean amount of 12 mL ± 4 mL. The median follow up time was 2 years. The results revealed that the corrections have remained essentially unchanged throughout the period of follow up. Bio-Alcamid maintained the form and blend with the surrounding tissues. The surgical outcome was evaluated according to the analysis of photographs obtained before and after surgery, the analysis of pre- and postoperative measurements, and patients' self-judgment. The level of satisfaction was significantly high: in 63% of the cases, the result was judged to be excellent and in 32%, good. Only in 5% of the cases the result was considered poor. The present study strongly suggests that Bio-Alcamid is suitable for the correction of remarkable defects of facial atrophy, otherwise treatable only by surgery with myofascial free flaps. In addition, it permits a simplification of facial reconstruction and rejuvenation.
A background and target signal separation technique for exact RCS measurement

Background clutter is one of the major factors which degrade the accuracy in radar cross section (RCS) measurement. In this paper, an operationally and computationally simple technique is proposed for background and target signal separation, which is especially useful for low observable object tests at an outdoor test range where a metal pylon is used as the target support. Both numerical and experimental examples are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed technique.
Automatic Utterance Segmentation in Instant Messaging Dialogue

Instant Messaging (IM) chat sessions are real-time, text-based conversations which can be analyzed using dialogue-act models. Dialogue acts represent the semantic information of an utterance, however, messages must be segmented into utterances before classification can take place. We describe and compare two statistical methods for automatic utterance segmentation and dialogue-act classification in task-based IM dialogue. It is shown that IM messages can be automatically segmented and classified to a very high accuracy using statistical machine learning.
Uniform color space based facial complexion recognition for Traditional Chinese Medicine

Face diagnosis of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is carried out by observing the facial complexion to obtain the disease diagnostic results. Color space based on human visual system will be more conducive to facial complexion recognition, which is more suitable to measure and distinguish facial complexion. Uniform color space based facial complexion recognition for TCM is proposed in this paper, which include: (1) the skin blocks in the human facial region are extracted by locating the eye position and mouth corner accurately; (2) the statistical characteristic of color histogram and the characteristic of aberration chromatic in Lab color space are introduced to extract the facial complexion feature; (3) the support vector machine (SVM) is used to evaluate the performance of facial complexion recognition. The experimental results show the proposed complexion feature can achieve good performance, with the facial complexion recognition rate up to 81%.
Minimum probability of error demodulation for multipath OFDM-SDMA systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is attractive for wireless communication because it simplifies the problems posed by the frequency and time selective nature of a wireless channel. This simplification is achieved by converting a frequency selective channel into a frequency flat one. On the other hand, space division multiple access (SDMA) leads to spectral efficiency. These two techniques, when combined, can therefore achieve reliable wireless communication at high data rates. The resulting system however suffers from co-channel interference. In this paper we develop two linear demodulators that effectively combat this interference. The demodulators are based on the principle of minimizing the probability of error in linear demodulation of the received symbols. The first demodulator, minimum probability of error (MPOE), minimizes the probability of error of each transmitting source separately. The second demodulator, minimum joint probability of error (MJPOE), minimizes the joint error probability of the sources. The demodulators are computed iteratively by using the method of gradient descent. Both demodulators show considerable improvement in BER compared to the MMSE demodulator and enjoy fast convergence. At a BER of 10-3, the MJPOE shows a gain of over 7 dB SNR over the MMSE demodulator and 10 dB SNR over the training based adaptive RLS demodulator. For the MPOE demodulator, the corresponding gains are 5.5 and 8.5 dB SNR.
Benchmarking a Home-Delivered Meal Program's Annual Satisfaction Survey: A Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance (MANNA) Initiative in Philadelphia

The Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance (MANNA) is a community-based organization providing home-delivered meals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to individuals at acute nutritional risk and experiencing a life-threatening illness, independent of age or income. The challenge MANNA faces, like other community-based organizations, is to demonstrate effective services by benchmarking with other organizations. This article reports how MANNA benchmarked results of their annual satisfaction survey against the 2013 National Survey of Older Americans Act Program. Overall, MANNA recipients were more often satisfied with the taste and variety of food, and more MANNA recipients rated the program as excellent. However, more MANNA recipients reported not having enough money to buy food, skipping meals because of money, needing to choose between food and medications or food and utilities. MANNA is using these findings as an impetus to better understand the needs of their clients, especially as they transition off the meal program, and to identify additional resources to support transitional programming.
Esophageal Dilated Intercellular Spaces (DIS) and Nonerosive Reflux Disease

Esophageal mucosal dilated intercellular spaces (DIS) are frequently observed in patients with nonerosive reflux disease (NERD) and patients with esophagitis. The specificity of DIS is questionable, as it is present in up to 30% of asymptomatic healthy subjects and in patients with other esophageal disorders. DIS occurs in parallel with a drop in potential difference, diminished transepithelial resistance, and increased esophageal mucosal permeability. These alterations arise with exposure to acid and pepsin during gastroesophageal reflux, but the exact pathway of damage to the intercellular junctions remains unclear and seems to be multifactorial. Other noxious contents of the refluxate, such as bile acids, are harmful and DIS can also be induced by acute psychological stress. DIS can be assessed quantitatively with electron microscopy (EM), but it is also recognizable with light microscopy (LM). DIS can disappear after treatment with proton pump inhibitors (PPI); however, this is not the case in all NERD patients. A recent study showed that patients with NERD who are refractory to PPI might still have DIS; and animal experiments showed that persistence of DIS might be due to esophageal mucosal exposure to bile acids and/or psychological stress. In conclusion, DIS is a frequent but nonspecific histological feature of NERD. It can be caused by acid reflux, but bile acids in the refluxate and/or psychological stress can modulate the development or persistence of DIS. Although a causal relationship between DIS and heartburn has been proposed, it still needs to be proven and the underlying mechanisms investigated before considering DIS as a target for treatment of NERD.
Low-Iodine Diet Revisited: Importance in Nuclear Medicine Imaging and Management

Purpose: The need for a low-iodine diet (LID) to maximize the results of radioactive iodine uptake (RAIU), nuclear medicine thyroid scintigraphy, and ultimately treatment of thyroid cancer patients is widely accepted. Failure to follow the prescribed diet can alter RAIU results, thyroid scan findings, and poststudy management. Objective: Provided is a case presentation that illustrates the need for adequate patient understanding and compliance with the LID. Methods: We present the clinical history, laboratory values, and pertinent imaging of a 21-year-old woman with papillary thyroid cancer. The patient's post-thyroidectomy I-123 and 2 subsequent thyroid (I-123 and post-RAI ablation I-131) scintigraphy examinations are reviewed as well as the patient's urine iodine levels. Results: In this case of a woman with papillary thyroid cancer, the nuclear medicine whole body and neck pinhole images revealed that compliance to an LID positively impacts the overall management. After an LID was followed, the patient's urine iodine level appropriately declined from the previously elevated level. Initial negative results on thyroid scintigraphy caused by noncompliance with the LID became positive when the patient adhered to the prescribed dietary regimen. Conclusion: An LID is an integral element in the management of differentiated thyroid cancer. Proper guidance and emphasis on the implementation of the diet needs to be provided to patients. Noncompliance may lead to false negative imaging results, misleading the medical professionals and patient. Potentially inadequate management of the patient's thyroid cancer may follow.
Defining and Protecting Meta Privacy: A New Conceptual Framework Within Information Privacy

When considering information security and privacy issues most of the attention has previously focused on data protection and the privacy of personally identifiable information (PII). What is often overlooked is consideration for the operational and transactional data. Specifically, the security and privacy protection of metadata and metastructure information of computing environments has not been factored in to most methods. Metadata, or data about data, can contain many personal details about an entity. It is subject to the same risks and malicious actions personal data is exposed to. This paper presents a new perspective for information security and privacy. It is termed Meta Privacy and is concerned with the protection and privacy of information system metadata and metastructure details. We first present a formal definition for Meta Privacy, and then analyze the factors that encompass and influence Meta Privacy. In addition, we recommend some techniques for the protection of Meta Privacy within the information systems. Further, the paper highlights the importance of ensuring all informational elements of information systems are adequately protected from a privacy perspective.
Long term motor function after neonatal stroke: Lesion localization above all

Motor outcome is variable following neonatal arterial ischemic stroke (NAIS). We analyzed the relationship between lesion characteristics on brain MRI and motor function in children who had suffered from NAIS. Thirty eight full term born children with unilateral NAIS were investigated at the age of seven. 3D T1‐ and 3D FLAIR‐weighted MR images were acquired on a 3T MRI scanner. Lesion characteristics were compared between patients with and without cerebral palsy (CP) using the following approaches: lesion localization either using a category‐based analysis, lesion mapping as well as voxel‐based lesion‐symptom mapping (VLSM). Using diffusion‐weighted imaging the microstructure of the cortico‐spinal tract (CST) was related to the status of CP by measuring DTI parameters. Whereas children with lesions sparing the primary motor system did not develop CP, CP was always present when extensive lesions damaged at least two brain structures involving the motor system. The VLSM approach provided a statistical map that confirmed the cortical lesions in the primary motor system and revealed that CP was highly correlated with lesions in close proximity to the CST. In children with CP, diffusion parameters indicated microstructural changes in the CST at the level of internal capsule and the centrum semiovale. White matter damage of the CST in centrum semiovale was a highly reproducible marker of CP. This is the first description of the implication of this latter region in motor impairment after NAIS. In conclusion, CP in childhood was closely linked to the location of the infarct in the motor system. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4793–4807, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.