Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
User-adaptive fall detection for patients using wristband

Fall detection systems have been proposed to prevent additional injuries following fall accidents. This paper introduces an easily learnable fall detection system based on the data of an individual patient in a hospital room. The improvement of low performance using a single accelerometer at wrists and the inconvenience of sensor attached to a waist in the conventional approach was concentrated on by integrating heart rate signals to the conventional acceleration approach and changing the sensor location from a waist to wrists. As for the optimal heart rate feature selection, we proposed a four-feature vector combination (root mean square of successive differences, standard deviation of successive differences, normal to normal 50, normal to normal 20) with correlation and mutual information analysis in addition to mean absolute deviation selected as an accelerometer feature. To easily acquire and train the patients' fall data, our system was based on unsupervised learning approaches using Gaussian mixture models for optimal classifiers with the optimal cluster number decided by cluster validation index of square error sum. A 10-fold cross validation was applied for a final performance evaluation where each threshold for separating fall state from non-fall state was automatically decided in several comparison groups, which were created on the basis of fusion timing and used sensors. As a result, despite sensors attached to the wrist, the wearable inconvenience of the conventional is overcome using the feature-level fused approach between heart rates and accelerations with the accuracy up to 98.39 %, which is closest to 99.34 % of the case using a single accelerometer located at the waist.
A Service Design Thinking Approach for Stakeholder-Centred eHealth

Studies have described the opportunities and challenges of applying service design techniques to health services, but empirical evidence on how such techniques can be implemented in the context of eHealth services is still lacking. This paper presents how a service design thinking approach can be applied for specification of an existing and new eHealth service by supporting evaluation of the current service and facilitating suggestions for the future service. We propose Service Journey Modelling Language and Service Journey Cards to engage stakeholders in the design of eHealth services.
Approaches to Controlling Escherichia coli O157:H7, a Foodborne Pathogen and an Emerging Environmental Hazard

Escherichia coli is a ubiquitous bacterium that lives commensally in the guts of most mammals, including man; however, some types of E. coli are pathogenic to humans, including the enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), of which E. coli O157:H7 is the most well-known member. Escherichia coli O157:H7 is a natural member of the gastrointestinal microflora of domestic ruminants (e.g., cattle, goats, sheep) and has been isolated from several wildlife species (e.g., deer, rabbits), and transmission may occur from any of these reservoirs. Although E. coli O157:H7 is primarily thought of as a foodborne pathogen, recent outbreaks have demonstrated other important routes that lead to human exposure, such as contaminated water and dust. Because E. coli O157:H7 represents a significant and widespread environmental health hazard, much effort has been directed toward the development of intervention strategies. Because of the relationship between ruminant animals, wildlife, and E. coli O157:H7, many of the strategies have focused on reducing levels in live animals. In this review article, we examine this virulent pathogen and explore several of the recently developed pre-harvest intervention strategies (including pro-biotic and anti-pathogen strategies, as well as environmental/management changes) and their potential to reduce zoonotic transmission of E. coli O157:H7 and other EHEC to man.
Predicting pH buffering capacity of New Zealand soils from organic matter content and mineral characteristics

Information on the pH buffer capacity of soil is required to estimate changes in pH due to acidic or alkaline inputs, and to model pH-dependent processes within the soil nitrogen (N) cycle. The objective was to determine whether a model based on soil organic matter (SOM) and mineral characteristics (clay content, extractable iron (Fe) and aluminium (Al)) would be adequate to estimate the buffer capacities of New Zealand soils. We measured pH changes in 34 soils, representing a range of SOM and texture, after equilibration with several rates (range 0–15 cmol OH– kg–1 soil) of either KOH or Ca(OH)2. The Ca(OH)2 method often yielded higher buffer capacity values than the KOH method, possibly because of incomplete reaction of Ca(OH)2, especially at high addition rates. Buffer capacity (measured using KOH) of the soils was strongly correlated with soil carbon (C) (R2 = 0.76), and weakly (but significantly, P < 0.05) with clay content, and with dithionite extractable Fe and Al. A regression with soil C, clay, and P-retention (a surrogate for extractable Al and Fe) as independent variables explained 90% of the variability in pH buffering. The role of organic matter was further evaluated by measuring buffer capacity of soil from research plots at Lincoln, Canterbury, New Zealand, that differed in C (21–37 g C kg–1 in the top 7.5 cm; 19–26 g C kg–1 in the 7.5–15 cm) as a result of the treatments imposed during the 12-year trial period. A substantial decrease in pH buffering (by up to 24% in top 7.5 cm) was associated with a decline in SOM following the conversion of permanent pasture (pre-trial land use) to arable cropping. Across all treatments and sampling depths, buffer capacity was linearly related (R2 = 0.84, P < 0.001) to soil C; the estimated buffer capacity of SOM was 89 cmolc kg–1 C pH unit–1, similar to the value calculated from the previous study with different soil types. After 12 years, treatments with low soil C concentrations tended to be more acidic, possibly partly because of weaker pH buffering.
Matrix metalloproteinase expression increases after cerebral focal ischemia in rats: inhibition of matrix metalloproteinase-9 reduces infarct size.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a family of proteolytic enzymes that degrade the extracellular matrix and are implicated in numerous pathological conditions including atherosclerosis, inflammation, and tumor growth and metastasis. In the brain, the endothelial cell wall, strengthened by tight junctions, defines the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The extracellular matrix molecules constitute the basement membrane underlying the vasculature and play a critical role in maintaining the integrity of the BBB. After focal stroke, there is a breakdown of the BBB with an associated increase in vascular permeability, inflammatory cell influx, and neuronal cell death. The present study was designed to investigate the effects of MMP expression after stroke. METHODS Focal stroke was produced by permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in the rat, and MMP protein expression was measured by Western blot and zymogram analysis over a time course ranging from 6 hours to 30 days (n=32). Immunohistochemistry at 1 and 5 days (n=8 and 6, respectively) was also utilized to characterize the expression of several MMPs and related proteins after stroke, including their cellular source. To test the hypothesis that early increased MMP-9 expression is involved in ischemic brain injury, a neutralizing monoclonal antibody directed against MMP-9 was administered intravenously (n=7 per group) 1 hour before MCAO, and infarct size was measured 24 hours later. RESULTS MMP expression increased progressively over time after stroke. After 12 hours, significant (P<0.05) MMP-9 activity was observed that reached maximum levels by 24 hours (P<0.001), then persisted for 5 days at this level and returned to basal (zero) levels by 15 days. On the basis of morphological criteria, MMP-9 appeared to stain with endothelial cells and neutrophils identified both within and at the periphery of the infarct within 24 hours of focal ischemia. After 5 days, MMP-9 appeared to stain with macrophages present within the infarcted brain. MMP-2 activity was significantly (P<0.001) increased by 24 hours and was maximum after 5 days following MCAO. MMP-2 appeared to stain with macrophages present within the infarcted region. Unlike MMP-9 and MMP-2, tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 was identified at comparable levels in both control and ischemic tissue after MCAO. MMP-1 and MMP-3 could not be detected in the brain after focal stroke. When an MMP-9-neutralizing monoclonal antibody was administered systemically, animals exhibited significantly reduced infarct size (ie, a 30% reduction compared with non-immune antibody controls; P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate that early increased MMP-9 expression in endothelial cells and infiltrating neutrophils is a significant response to cerebral focal ischemia and that selective inhibition of MMP-9 activity can significantly reduce brain injury after stroke.
Cardiac endothelin release and infarct size, myocardial blood flow, and ventricular function in canine infarction and reperfusion.

BACKGROUND The potent vasoconstrictor endothelin-1 (ET) may play an important pathophysiologic role in acute myocardial infarction, but its precise effects are incompletely understood. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the interrelationships between cardiac ET-1 release and infarct size, myocardial blood flow, and ventricular function. METHODS Fifteen closed chest dogs underwent 3 hours of coronary artery occlusion followed by 3 hours of reperfusion. Coronary sinus and aortic ET-1 levels during occlusion and after reperfusion were determined by radioimmunoassay. Left ventricular function and regional myocardial blood flow were measured by echocardiography and colored microspheres, respectively. Myocardial infarct size was determined by postmortem staining with blue dye and triphenyl tetrazolium chloride. RESULTS Coronary occlusion and reperfusion produced significant elevations of coronary sinus ET-1 (p < 0.05) and cardiac ET-1 release (p < 0.05), and a trend toward an increase in aortic ET-1 (p = 0.08). A trend toward more ET-1 release was observed in dogs with larger infarcts (p = 0.06), and in dogs with substantial no-reflow in the reperfused territory (p = 0.05). Endothelin-1 release also was associated with increased contractility in nonischemic myocardial segments (p = 0.002), and ET-1 correlated with increased global left ventricular function (p < 0.02). CONCLUSIONS In this canine model of coronary occlusion and reperfusion, greater increases in cardiac ET-1 release were observed in dogs with larger infarcts, and increased ET-1 release was associated with the no-reflow phenomenon in the reperfused territory. These data suggest that ET-1 release may have adverse consequences in acute myocardial infarction, including a reduction of myocardial blood flow in the reperfused zone after reperfusion and increased contractility in nonischemic myocardium.
Text extraction algorithm under background image using wavelet transforms

With the growing number of digital multimedia libraries, the need to efficiently index multimedia information is increasing, detecting and extracting the text information from images plays an important part in images indexing based on content. In the paper, a new text extraction algorithm under background image based on two-dimensional wavelet transforms is proposed. For the algorithm, firstly the image is transformed into the wavelet domain and then a sliding window is set to scan high frequency sub-bands, through computing the wavelet texture features of the image in the sliding window, k-means clustering algorithm is used to classify the image into text area, simple background area and complex background area. Finally mathematical morphology operations are applied on the text area to locate the text positions exactly. The experimental result shows that the algorithm can extract text information with different languages, fonts, sizes and ways of arrangement from the background image exactly.
Collaborative Topic Ranking: Leveraging Item Meta-Data for Sparsity Reduction

Pair-wise ranking methods have been widely used in recommender systems to deal with implicit feedback. They attempt to discriminate between a handful of observed items and the large set of unobserved items. In these approaches, however, user preferences and item characteristics cannot be estimated reliably due to overfitting given highly sparse data. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian framework which incorporates ``bag-of-words'' type meta-data on items into pair-wise ranking models for one-class collaborative filtering. The main idea of our method lies in extending the pair-wise ranking with a probabilistic topic modeling. Instead of regularizing item factors through a zero-mean Gaussian prior, our method introduces item-specific topic proportions as priors for item factors. As a by-product, interpretable latent factors for users and items may help explain recommendations in some applications. We conduct an experimental study on a real and publicly available dataset, and the results show that our algorithm is effective in providing accurate recommendation and interpreting user factors and item factors.
Empirical Determination of Basic Heuristics for Narrative Content Planning

Stories are sequential in nature but they are used to package human experience that involves many things happening at the same time, to several people or in several locations. The mechanics of this packaging process constitute an instance of content planning that has not ben addressed in sufficient detail in existing NLG work. The present paper reviews a number of traditional stories in the light of the basic concepts of narratology that would be involved in the decisions involved in planning the content for tellings of these stories, proposes a number of basic principles to understand what is happening, and explores a possible way in which these principles may translate to basic heuristics for narrative content planning.
Frost risks in the Mantaro river basin

Abstract. As part of the study on the Mantaro river basin's (central Andes of Peru) current vulnerability to climate change, the temporal and spatial characteristics of frosts were analysed. These characteristics included intensity, frequency, duration, frost-free periods, area distribution and historical trends. Maps of frost risk were determined for the entire river basin, by means of mathematical algorithms and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools, using minimum temperature – 1960 to 2002 period, geomorphology, slope, land-use, types of soils, vegetation and life zones, emphasizing the rainy season (September to April), when the impacts of frost on agriculture are most severe. We recognized four categories of frost risks: low, moderate, high and critical. The critical risks (with a very high probability of occurrence) were related to high altitudes on the basin (altitudes higher than 3800 m a.s.l.), while the low (or null) probability of occurring risks were found in the lower zones (less than 2500 m a.s.l.). Because of the very intense agricultural activity and the high sensitivity of the main crops (Maize, potato, artichoke) in the Mantaro valley (altitudes between 3100 and 3300 m a.s.l.), moderate to high frost risks can be expected, with a low to moderate probability of occurrence. Another significant result was a positive trend of 8 days per decade in the number of frost days during the rainy season.
Kinship Care and Foster Care: A Comparison of Characteristics and Outcomes

The increase in children entering foster care, together with a range of other political, economic, and social factors, has helped fuel the newest phenomenon in the child welfare system–a substantial proportion of children in formal kinship care. Kinship care is defined as out-of-home placement with relatives of children who are in the custody of state and local child welfare agencies. The authors present a review of previous research and report on a study that examined differences and similarities between kinship and traditional foster care in Baltimore County, Maryland, a suburban county that surrounds the city of Baltimore. This study supports many earlier conclusions concerning kinship care, such as children remain in care longer, caregivers are primarily African American, and services provided by kin are less extensive than those provided by traditional foster parents.
Nanosecond pulsed electric fields adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer: An in vitro study

Breast cancer now has very high incidence and death rate among women. Chemotherapy plays a vital role in breast cancer treatment. However, problems brought by chemotherapy are not neglectable. One of the major problems in human cancer treatment is the chemotherapeutic resistance, which possibly leads to the failure of the treatment. Another is the adverse effects induced by chemotherapy, including suppression in immune system, nausea and vomiting, which may cause excessive pain to the patients. Lots of efforts have been put into discovering of better therapy for breast cancer.
Neural correlates of body and face perception following bilateral destruction of the primary visual cortices

Non-conscious visual processing of different object categories was investigated in a rare patient with bilateral destruction of the visual cortex (V1) and clinical blindness over the entire visual field. Images of biological and non-biological object categories were presented consisting of human bodies, faces, butterflies, cars, and scrambles. Behaviorally, only the body shape induced higher perceptual sensitivity, as revealed by signal detection analysis. Passive exposure to bodies and faces activated amygdala and superior temporal sulcus. In addition, bodies also activated the extrastriate body area, insula, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and cerebellum. The results show that following bilateral damage to the primary visual cortex and ensuing complete cortical blindness, the human visual system is able to process categorical properties of human body shapes. This residual vision may be based on V1-independent input to body-selective areas along the ventral stream, in concert with areas involved in the representation of bodily states, like insula, OFC, and cerebellum.
A Golgi study of the ventral tegmental area of Tsai and interfascicular nucleus in the rat

The ventral tegmental area of Tsai (VTA) and interfascicular nucleus of the adult rat brain has been studied with two variants of the Golgi method in three planes of section. Neurons were studied in relation to the cytoarchitectural groupings of the VTA. Dendritic organisation and dendritic fields were mapped out for each cytoarchitectural subgroup and cell types within each subgroup were classified on the basis of cell size and dendritic morphology.
Substrate-analogous inhibitors exert antimalarial action by targeting the Plasmodium lactate transporter PfFNT at nanomolar scale

Resistance against all available antimalarial drugs calls for novel compounds that hit unexploited targets in the parasite. Here, we show that the recently discovered Plasmodium falciparum lactate/proton symporter, PfFNT, is a valid druggable target, and describe a new class of fluoroalkyl vinylogous acids that potently block PfFNT and kill cultured parasites. The original compound, MMV007839, is derived from the malaria box collection of potent antimalarials with unknown targets and contains a unique internal prodrug principle that reversibly switches between a lipophilic transport form and a polar, substrate-analogous active form. Resistance selection of cultured P. falciparum parasites with sub-lethal concentrations of MMV007839 produced a single nucleotide exchange in the PfFNT gene; this, and functional characterization of the resulting PfFNT G107S validated PfFNT as a novel antimalarial target. From quantitative structure function relations we established the compound binding mode and the pharmacophore. The pharmacophore largely circumvents the resistance mutation and provides the basis for a medicinal chemistry program that targets lactate and proton transport as a new mode of antimalarial action.
Service Management - Academic Issues and Scholarly Reflections from Operations Management Researchers

Services are now a larger portion of the economy than manufacturing for every nation on Earth, and services are an overwhelming portion of Western economies. While decision-making research has begun responding to this change, much of the scholarly work still addresses manufacturing issues. Particularly revealing is the field of operations management (OM), in which the proportion of manuscripts dedicated to services has been estimated at 3%, 6%, and 7.5% by various authors. We investigate several possible reasons for the neglect of services in research, including the difficulty in defining services, viewing services as derivative activities, a lack of defined processes, a lack of scale in services, and the effect of variability on service performance. We argue that times have changed, and none of these reasons is valid anymore. We sound the warning that failure to emphasize services in our research and teaching may signal the decline of the discipline. We note the proportion of OM faculty in business schools has shrunk in the past 10 years. Finally, we examine a selection of service research agendas and note several directions for high-impact, innovative research to revitalize the decision sciences. With practitioners joining the call for more research in services, the academic community has an exciting opportunity to embrace services and reshape its future.
Fluid therapy in critical illness: a special focus on indication, the use of hydroxyethyl starch and its different raw materials.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Fluid therapy is a complex intervention with insufficient resuscitation, as well as overinfusion and fluid accumulation being associated with adverse outcomes. Early goal-directed therapy with later conservative fluid management (i.e. prevention of positive fluid balance and weight gain) appears to markedly improve the survival of patients with severe sepsis. The impact of colloids in resuscitation of patients with sepsis has been the topic of several recently published studies. The purpose of the present review is to outline the indication of fluid administration in critically ill patients, discuss the recent findings of trials involving hydroxyethyl starch (HES) solutions and highlight the impact of different raw materials for HES synthesis. RECENT FINDINGS Pragmatic trials of modern HES solutions versus crystalloids in critically ill patients show either no difference or adverse outcomes associated with HES infusion. However, fluid therapy was not protocolized in most of these studies and probably associated with overinfusion and hemodilution. Data on the use of waxy maize-derived 6% HES 130/0.4 during early goal-directed therapy show no evidence for harm and an improvement in microvascular blood flow. In addition, experimental data suggest that waxy maize-derived 6% HES 130/0.4 may have different biological effects compared to potato-derived 6% HES 130/0.42 with potentially reduced pulmonary inflammation. SUMMARY Adverse effects of fluid resuscitation in critically ill patients appear to be a consequence of dose and timing rather than the type of fluid itself. Modern waxy maize-derived 6% HES 130/0.4 may have advantages over crystalloids in the very early course of the disease. Clinical trials of early, goal-directed and protocolized therapy with innovative endpoints of resuscitation comparing balanced crystalloids and balanced, waxy maize-derived 6% HES 130/0.4 as the initial resuscitation fluid are warranted.