Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of Outcome in Patients With Suspected Myocarditis

Background— The objective of this study was to identify the prognostic indicators in patients with suspected myocarditis who underwent endomyocardial biopsy. Methods and Results— Between 1994 and 2007, 181 consecutive patients (age, 42±15 years) with clinically suspected viral myocarditis were enrolled and followed up for a mean of 59±42 months. Endomyocardial biopsies were studied for inflammation with histological (Dallas) and immunohistological criteria. Virus genome was detected by polymerase chain reaction. The primary end point was time to cardiac death or heart transplantation. In 38% of the patients (n=69), the Dallas criteria were positive. Immunohistological signs of inflammation were shown in 50% (n=91). Genomes of cardiotropic virus species were detected in 79 patients (44%). During follow-up, 22% of the patients (n=40) reached the primary end point. Three independent predictors were identified for the primary end point, namely New York Heart Association class III or IV at entry (hazard ratio, 3.20; 95% confidence interval, 1.36 to 7.57; P=0.008), immunohistological evidence of inflammatory infiltrates in the myocardium (hazard ratio, 3.46; 95% confidence interval, 1.39 to 8.62; P=0.008), and β-blocker therapy (hazard ratio, 0.43; 95% confidence interval, 0.21 to 0.91; P=0.027). Ejection fraction, left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, and left ventricular end-diastolic dimension index were predictive only in univariate, not in multivariate, analysis. Neither the Dallas criteria nor the detection of viral genome was a predictor of outcome. Conclusions— For patients with suspected myocarditis, advanced New York Heart Association functional class, immunohistological signs of inflammation, and lack of β-blocker therapy, but not histology (positive Dallas criteria) or viral genome detection, are related to poor outcome.
Result List Actions in Fiction Search

It is studied how users browse search results to find interesting novels for four search scenarios. It is evaluated in particular whether there are differences in search result page (SERP) browsing patterns and effectiveness between an enriched catalog for finding fiction compared to a traditional public library catalog. The data was collected from 30 participants by eye-tracking and questionnaires. The results indicate that the enriched catalog supported users to identify sooner and more effectively potentially clickable items on the results list compared to a traditional public library catalog. This is likely due to the more informative metadata in the enriched catalog like snippets of content description on the result list items. The discussion includes a theoretical and empirical comparison of findings in studies on fiction and non-fiction searching.
Disruption of attention to novel events after frontal lobe injury in humans

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether frontal lobe damage in humans disrupts the natural tendency to preferentially attend to novel visual events in the environment. METHODS Nine patients with chronic infarctions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and 23 matched normal controls participated in a study in which subjects viewed repetitive background stimuli, infrequent target stimuli, and novel visual stimuli (for example, fragmented or “impossible” objects). Subjects controlled viewing duration by a button press that led to the onset of the next stimulus. They also responded to targets by pressing a foot pedal. The amount of time spent looking at the different kinds of stimuli, and the target detection accuracy and speed served as dependent variables. RESULTS Overall, normal controls spent significantly more time than frontal lobe patients looking at novel stimuli. Analysis of responses across blocks showed that initially frontal lobe patients behaved like normal controls by directing more attention to novel than background stimuli. However, they quickly began to distribute their viewing time evenly between novel and background stimuli, a pattern that was strikingly different from normal controls. By contrast, there were no differences between frontal lobe patients and normal controls for viewing duration devoted to background and target stimuli, target detection accuracy, or reaction time to targets. Frontal lobe patients did not differ from normal controls in terms of age, education, estimated IQ, or mood, but were more apathetic as measured by self report and informants' judgments. Attenuated responses to novel stimuli significantly correlated with degree of apathy. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that DLPFC injury selectively impairs the natural tendency to seek stimulation from novel and unusual stimuli. These data provide the first quantitative behavioural demonstration that the human frontal lobes play a critical part in directing and sustaining attention to novel events. The impairment of novelty seeking behaviour may contribute to the characteristic apathy found in patients with frontal lobe injury.
Exploring the relationship between national economic indicators and relative fitness and frailty in middle-aged and older Europeans.

BACKGROUND on an individual level, lower-income has been associated with disability, morbidity and death. On a population level, the relationship of economic indicators with health is unclear. OBJECTIVE the purpose of this study was to evaluate relative fitness and frailty in relation to national income and healthcare spending, and their relationship with mortality. DESIGN AND SETTING secondary analysis of data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE); a longitudinal population-based survey which began in 2004. SUBJECTS a total of 36,306 community-dwelling people aged 50 and older (16,467 men; 19,839 women) from the 15 countries which participated in the SHARE comprised the study sample. A frailty index was constructed as the proportion of deficits present in relation to the 70 deficits available in SHARE. The characteristics of the frailty index examined were mean, prevalence of frailty and proportion of the fittest group. RESULTS the mean value of the frailty index was lower in higher-income countries (0.16 ± 0.12) than in lower-income countries (0.20 ± 0.14); the overall mean frailty index was negatively correlated with both gross domestic product (r = -0.79; P < 0.01) and health expenditure (r = -0.63; P < 0.05). Survival in non-frail participants at 24 months was not associated with national income (P = 0.19), whereas survival in frail people was greater in higher-income countries (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS a country's level of frailty and fitness in adults aged 50+ years is strongly correlated with national economic indicators. In higher-income countries, not only is the prevalence of frailty lower, but frail people also live longer.
Mining for High Dimensional Clusters using Projections and Visualizations

Many applications require the clustering of large amounts of high dimensional data. Most automated clustering techniques, however, do not work eﬀectively and/or eﬃciently on high dimensional (numerical) data, i.e. they are likely to miss clusters with certain unexpected characteristics. There are various reasons for this. First, it is diﬃcult to ﬁnd the necessary parameters for tuning the clustering algorithms to the speciﬁc applications characteristics. Second, it is hard to verify and interpret the resulting high dimensional clusters and third, often the concept of clusters inspired from low dimensional cases cannot be extended to high dimensional cases. A desired clustering method should be able to deal with the inherent sparsity of high dimensional spaces, which is due to the so-called “curse of dimension-ality”.
Robust Algorithm for Face Detection in Color Images

Robust Algorithm is presented for frontal face detection in color images. Face detection is an important task in facial analysis systems in order to have a priori localized faces in a given image. Applications such as face tracking, facial expression recognition, gesture recognition, etc., for example, have a pre-requisite that a face is already located in the given image or the image sequence. Facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth are automatically detected based on properties of the associated image regions. On detecting a mouth, a nose and two eyes, a face verification step based on Eigen face theory is applied to a normalized search space in the image relative to the distance between the eye feature points. The experiments were carried out on test images taken from the internet and various other randomly selected sources. The algorithm has also been tested in practice with a webcam, giving (near) real-time performance and good extraction results.
The 3-D ionization structure of NGC 6818: A Planetary Nebula threatened by recombination

Long-slit NTT+EMMI echellograms of NGC 6818 (the Little Gem) at nine equally spaced position angles, reduced according to the 3-D methodology introduced by Sabbadin et al. (2000a,b), allowed us to derive: the expansion law, the di- agnostics and ionic radial profiles, the distance and the central star parameters, the nebular photo-ionization model, the 3-D reconstruction in He II, (O III) and (N II), the multicolor projection and a series of movies. The Little Gem results to be a young (3500 years), optically thin (quasi-thin in some directions) double shell (Mion � 0.13 M� ) at a distance of 1.7 kpc, seen almost equatorial on: a tenuous and patchy spherical envelope (r � 0.090 pc) encircles a dense and inhomogeneous tri-axial ellipsoid (a/2 � 0.077 pc, a/b � 1.25, b/c � 1.15) characterized by a hole along the major axis and a pair of equatorial, thick moustaches. NGC 6818 is at the start of the recombination phase following the luminosity decline of the 0.625 Mcentral star, which has recently exhausted the hydrogen shell nuclear burning and is rapidly moving toward the white dwarf domain (log T∗ � 5.22 K; logL∗/L� � 3.1). The nebula is destined to become thicker and thicker, with an increasing fraction of neutral, dusty gas in the outermost layers. Only over some hundreds of years the plasma rarefaction due to the expansion will prevail against the slower and slower stellar decline, leading to a gradual re-growing of the ionization front. The exciting star of NGC 6818 (mV � 17.06) is a visual binary: a faint, red companion (mV � 17.73) appears at 0.09 arcsec in PA = 190 ◦ , corresponding to a separation ≥150 AU and to an orbital period ≥1500 years.
Effects of Fasting on Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune demyelinating disease mediated by myelin activated T-cell crossing the blood-brain barrier. This disease starts by an autoimmune attack on the myelin sheath. The characteristic feature of MS is relapsing-remitting neurological signs affecting various parts of the nervous sytem at different times. During the Ramadan month, fasting permission is a common question. According to some evidence, fasting not only has no adverse effect on stable MS disability indicated by expanded status disability scale (EDSS) of E� 3, but also has regenerative neuroimmunological benefits. Although some MS symptoms, such as blurred vision, spasticity, gait ataxia, fatigue, weakness, and cognitive problems, could exacerbate during fasting, they remit immediately after fasting. Nevertheless, the patients with active MS or history of new attack during or after Ramadan, those on treatment with antispasmodic, anticonvulsive, corticosteroid, and immunosuppressive drugs, and patients with EDSS of > 7 are supposed to abstain from Ramadan fasting, specially in hot summer months.
Histogram methods in query optimization: the relation between accuracy and optimality

We have solved the following problem using pattern classification techniques (PCT): given two histogram methods, M/sub 1/ and M/sub 2/, used in query optimization, if the estimation accuracy of M/sub 1/ is greater than that of M/sub 2/, then M/sub 1/ has a higher probability of leading to the optimal query evaluation plan (QEP) than M/sub 2/. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has been open for at least two decades, the difficulty of the problem partially being due to the hurdles involved in the formulation itself. By formulating the problem from a pattern recognition perspective, we use PCT to present a rigorous mathematical proof of this fact, and show some uniqueness results. We also report empirical results demonstrating the power of these theoretical results on well-known histogram estimation methods.
Non-Conscious Processing of Motion Coherence Can Boost Conscious Access

Research on the scope and limits of non-conscious vision can advance our understanding of the functional and neural underpinnings of visual awareness. Here we investigated whether distributed local features can be bound, outside of awareness, into coherent patterns. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to create interocular suppression, and thus lack of awareness, for a moving dot stimulus that varied in terms of coherence with an overall pattern (radial flow). Our results demonstrate that for radial motion, coherence favors the detection of patterns of moving dots even under interocular suppression. Coherence caused dots to break through the masks more often: this indicates that the visual system was able to integrate low-level motion signals into a coherent pattern outside of visual awareness. In contrast, in an experiment using meaningful or scrambled biological motion we did not observe any increase in the sensitivity of detection for meaningful patterns. Overall, our results are in agreement with previous studies on face processing and with the hypothesis that certain features are spatiotemporally bound into coherent patterns even outside of attention or awareness.
A Survey on Association Rule Mining

Task of extracting useful and interesting knowledge from large data is called data mining. It has many aspects like clustering, classification, association mining, outlier detection, regression etc. Among them association rule mining is one of the important aspect for data mining. Best example of association rule mining is market-basket analysis. Applications of association rule mining are stock analysis, web log mining, medical diagnosis, customer market analysis bioinformatics etc. In past, many algorithms were developed by researchers for Boolean and Fuzzy association rule mining such as Apriori, FP-tree, Fuzzy FP-tree etc. We are discussing them in detail in later section of this paper.
Optimal Design of Digital IIR and FIR Filters Using Complex Flatness Constraints: A Unified Approach

A procedure for the design of digital filters with either a finite or infinite impulse response (FIR or IIR) is presented. Complex flatness constraints, incorporating the desired passband group delay, are used to specify the properties of non-linear-phase filters. Solutions are found using a linear combination of basis functions with zero or non-zero poles, for FIR or IIR filters, respectively. The procedure is used to design multidimensional filters for Lucas-Kanade optical flow.
Characterization of a maternal type VI collagen in Xenopus embryos suggests a role for collagen in gastrulation

We characterized a novel extracellular matrix element that is present in the earliest developmental stages of Xenopus laevis, and is recognized by an mAb 3D7. Based on amino acid composition, breakdown patterns by bacterial collagenases, and the molecular weights of the components of the antigen (240, 200, and 140 kD), we found it very similar to mammalian collagen type VI. The antigen is evenly distributed in unfertilized eggs. Shortly after fertilization, it becomes localized intracellularly in the periphery of the cleaving embryo as well as in the extracellular spaces. During gastrulation, the antigen was localized in the cells lining the blastopore and in the extracellular space between the two cell layers, in the presumptive archenteron. When Fab elements of the 3D7 antibody were added to the culture medium, gastrulation was blocked, suggesting a role for the antigen in gastrulation movements.
Healthcare system for elders with automatic drug label detection

Nowadays, since the medical technologies have been rapidly improved, the population of elderly persons has been rapidly increasing. Unfortunately, due to new born baby crisis problem, working age's population has been continuing decreasing. In this era, the elderly have to deal with a new problem which is a lack of caregivers. Consequently, with minor health issue, the elders must stay at a hospital or a charter house since hiring personal curator to take care of at home cost lots of money. The proposed model has been developed in order to give the elders better quality of life by solving major problems which are medicine taking and monitoring issue. The system focuses on medicine taking system and it can be operated with a standard device that anybody can afford, an Android smartphone with the Internet connection. To investigate an efficiency of the pilot system, 20 families that live with the elders was asked to try using the proposed application for one month. The result shows that with this system, the elders with minor health issue can live their life in their own house comfortably.
The G Protein-coupled Receptor Gpr30 Mediates the Proliferative Effects Induced by 17␤-estradiol and Hydroxytamoxifen in Endometrial Cancer Cells

The growth of both normal and transformed epi-thelial cells of the female reproductive system is stimulated by estrogens, mainly through the activation of estrogen receptor ␣ (ER␣), which is a ligand-regulated transcription factor. The selective ER modulator tamoxifen (TAM) has been widely used as an ER antagonist in breast tumor; however , long-term treatment is associated with an increased risk of endometrial cancer. To provide new insights into the potential mechanisms involved in the agonistic activity exerted by TAM in the uterus, we evaluated the potential of 4-hy-droxytamoxifen (OHT), the active metabolite of TAM, to transactivate wild-type ER␣ and its splice variant expressed in Ishikawa and HEC1A endome-trial tumor cells, respectively. OHT was able to antagonize only the activation of ER␣ by 17␤-es-tradiol (E2) in Ishikawa cells, whereas it up-regulated c-fos expression in a rapid manner similar to E2 and independently of ER␣ in both cell lines. This stimulation occurred through the G protein-coupled receptor named GPR30 and required Src-related and epidermal growth factor receptor ty-rosine kinase activities, along with the activation of both ERK1/2 and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/ AKT pathways. Most importantly, OHT, like E2, stimulated the proliferation of Ishikawa as well as HEC1A cells. Transfecting a GPR30 antisense expression vector in both endometrial cancer cell lines, OHT was no longer able to induce growth effects, whereas the proliferative response to E2 was completely abrogated only in HEC1A cells. Furthermore, in the presence of the inhibitors of MAPK and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase pathways , PD 98059 and wortmannin, respectively, E2 and OHT did not elicit growth stimulation. Our data demonstrate a new mode of action of E2 and OHT in endometrial cancer cells, contributing to a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in their uterine agonistic activity. E STROGENS ARE PLEIOTROPIC hormones that regulate the growth and differentiation of many tissues. Acting as mitogens, they also promote the development of breast and endometrial tumors, which cumulatively account for about 40% of cancer incidence among women (1). The classical mechanism of action of 17␤-estradiol (E2) (1) involves binding to es-trogen receptors (ER) ␣ and ␤, which interact with the estrogen response elements (EREs) located in the regulatory region of target genes (2, 3). It is well known that the ERs contain two main transcription activation functions (AF): the N-terminal AF1 and the C-terminal AF2, which is associated with the ligand-binding domain responsible for hormone-dependent transactiva-tion (4, 5). The involvement of both …
Hashish Body Packing: A Case Report

A 42-year-old African male was brought by the police to the emergency department under suspicion of drug smuggling by body-packing. Plain abdominal radiograph showed multiple foreign bodies within the gastrointestinal tract. Contrast-enhanced abdominal CT confirmed the findings, and the patient admitted to have swallowed “balls” of hashish. Body-packing is a recognized method of smuggling drugs across international borders. Body packers may present to the emergency department because of drug toxicity, intestinal obstruction, or more commonly, requested by law-enforcement officers for medical confirmation or exclusion of suspected body packing.
Towards a General Model of Variability in Product Families

The increasing amount of variability in software systems meanwhile leads to a situation where the complexity of variability management becomes a primary concern during software development. Whereas sound methodic support to analyze and specify variability on an abstract level is already available, the corresponding support on realization level is still lacking. The goal of this paper is to pave the way towards more systematic and consequently more efficient approaches to manage variability. To this end, it discusses the different motivations for variability in product families and the interrelationships between the specification and realization of variability. The paper further identifies appropriate concepts and interrelates them in form of a general model of variability in product families. In addition to this meta-model, the paper outlines an instantiation of the model: our language to specify variability in product family assets.
Retrieval approach to extract opinions about people from resource scarce language news articles

We wish to address the challenging task of opinion mining about organizations, people and places from different languages. It is known that resources and tools for mining opinions are scarce. In our study, we leverage comparable news articles collection to retrieve opinions about people (opinion targets) in resource scarce language like Hindi. Opinions expressed about opinion targets (Named Entities)given by adjectives and verbs known as opinion words are extracted from English collection of comparable corpora to get transliterated and translated to resource scare languages. Transformed opinion words are then used to create subjective language model (SLM) and structured opinion queries (OQs) using inference network (IN) for retrieval to confirm the opinion about opinion targets in documents. Experiments have shown that OQs and SLM with IN framework are effective for opinion mining tasks in minimal resource languages when compared to other retrieval approaches.
Proportional Disk I/O Bandwidth Management for Server Virtualization Environment

Many virtual machines are operated concurrently on a same physical machine. And service running on each virtual machine has different I/O requirement and priority. But, we can't guarantee that it has proper I/O bandwidth, because the I/O of virtual machine is treated as that of a process in normal system and there is no means to manage the I/O bandwidth for virtual machine. Therefore, we are hard to allocate I/O bandwidth to several virtual machines equally or discriminately. To solve the upper described problems, we propose a virtual machine-aware proportional share queuing scheduler, VM-PSQ, in server virtualization environment. To do that, we designed virtual machine unit scheduler and adopted the concept of time slice and schedule token to support the proportional share of I/O bandwidth. It recognizes each virtual machine I/O as independent system I/O. It enables us to allocate I/O bandwidth among many virtual machines equally or discriminately according to service priority or I/O requirement. This can make a good use of limited I/O bandwidth and guarantee the performance of specific virtual machine.