Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patient education on the internet: opportunities and pitfalls.

The Internet, an increasingly pervasive part of our culture, has vastly increased the rate at which information is disseminated. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of medical information on the Internet is false or misleading. Realizing this, many patients would like their physicians to help guide their online searches for medical information, but most physicians do not feel comfortable enough with the Internet to provide this service. A recent poll by Cyberdialogue (2000) found that 70% of all patients would like their physicians to recommend a health care web site for their condition, but that only 4% of patients receive such a recommendation. In recommending medical web sites, physicians need to consider the quality of the web site, the quality of the content, and especially the ethics of the site. The most important ethical standard a web site must meet is the clear separation of its editorial comment from promotional material. Patients do not have enough knowledge to distinguish unbiased information from information designed to push a product or service. There are organizations such as the Health on the Net Foundation and the E-Health Code of Ethics that have established clear quality and ethical criteria, but very few resources exist for these organizations to use in policing the sites that claim to adhere to their criteria. The National Institutes of Health recently started a consumer web site (www.medlineplus.gov) that takes web sites that adhere to their stringent criteria and places them on their web site, thus ensuring proper compliance. Patient education from sources other than face-to-face contact with a physician should be seen as an adjunct to the medical practice of physicians, and not as competition. Information is a form of therapy, and should lead to better referrals, more realistic outcome expectations, better treatment compliance, and better outcomes. As long as patients are referred to information that is unbiased, well-written, and not proprietary, their decision making should be enhanced, bringing them into the decision-making loop. This allows the patient to be much more involved with his or her care. As the medical profession changes from a "gatekeeper" model to a patient choice model, patient education will take on a much greater role.
Simple-phrase score for selective query expansion in health Information Retrieval

Query expansion technique is commonly used for the vocabulary mismatch problem in Information Retrieval. External sources can provide useful information and result in improving query expansion effectiveness. Since each source has different characteristics, selective query expansion aims to determine the most effectiveness expansion method for each query. In this paper, we propose the Simple-phrase score for selective query expansion in health-related information retrieval. Our method is more robust than the state-of-the-art Clarity score method and more effective than uniform expansion using separate source.
Generalized Liver- and Blood-Derived CD8+ T-Cell Impairment in Response to Cytokines in Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection

Generalized CD8+ T-cell impairment in chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and the contribution of liver-infiltrating CD8+ T-cells to the immunopathogenesis of this infection remain poorly understood. It is hypothesized that this impairment is partially due to reduced CD8+ T-cell activity in response to cytokines such as IL-7, particularly within the liver. To investigate this, the phenotype and cytokine responsiveness of blood- and liver-derived CD8+ T-cells from healthy controls and individuals with HCV infection were compared. In blood, IL-7 receptor α (CD127) expression on bulk CD8+ T-cells in HCV infection was no different than controls yet was lower on central memory T-cells, and there were fewer naïve cells. IL-7-induced signalling through phosphorylated STAT5 was lower in HCV infection than in controls, and differed between CD8+ T-cell subsets. Production of Bcl-2 following IL-7 stimulation was also lower in HCV infection and inversely related to the degree of liver fibrosis. In liver-derived CD8+ T-cells, STAT5 activation could not be increased with cytokine stimulation and basal Bcl-2 levels of liver-derived CD8+ T-cells were lower than blood-derived counterparts in HCV infection. Therefore, generalized CD8+ T-cell impairment in HCV infection is characterized, in part, by impaired IL-7-mediated signalling and survival, independent of CD127 expression. This impairment is more pronounced in the liver and may be associated with an increased potential for apoptosis. This generalized CD8+ T-cell impairment represents an important immune dysfunction in chronic HCV infection that may alter patient health.
Natural Language Access to Data Bases: Interpreting Update Requests

Abstract : For natural language database systems to operate effectively in practical domains, they must have the capabilities required by real applications. One such capability is understanding and performing update requests. The processing of natural language updates raises problems not encountered in the processing of queries. These difficulties stem from the fact that the user will naturally phrase requests with respect to his conception of the domain, which may be a considerable simplification of the actual underlying database structure. Updates which are meaningful and unambiguous from the user's standpoint may not translate into reasonable changes to the underlying database. Update requests may be impossible (cannot be performed in any way), ambiguous (can be performed in several ways), or pathological (can be performed only in ways which cause undesirable side effects). Drawing on work in Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, we have developed a domain-transparent approach to identifying and performing 'reasonable' changes in response to a user's update request, using only knowledge sources typically present in existing database systems. A simple notion of 'user model' and explanation with respect to the user's state of knowledge are central to the design. This paper describes a system PIQUE (Program for Interpreatation of Query/Update in English), which implements this approach. (Author)
Using Alternating Words to Describe Symbolic Pictures

In this paper we present the concepts of drawn symbolic picture and symbolic picture. Such notions have been conceived as an extension of the concept of drawn pictures which was introduced by Maurer, Rozenberg and Welzl [31]. We provide a string description of such pictures. It consists of alternating words, i.e. strings whose letters are in alternation from an alphabet of symbols and an alphabet of moves. We analyze the complexity of the description language of a (drawn) symbolic picture and show how these yield context-sensitive, contextfree and regular languages. Then, we characterize the grammars for alternating words and define the generative model for (drawn) symbolic pictures. Moreover, we investigate the different types of ambiguity that occur when dealing with symbolic grammars. Finally, we propose a classification for symbolic picture grammars and languages.
Temporal constraints on visual perception: A psychophysical investigation of the relation between attention capture and the attentional blink

When two targets (T1 & T2) are presented in rapid succession, observers often fail to report T2 if they attend to T1. The bottleneck theory proposes that this attentional blink (AB) is due to T1 occupying a slow processing stage when T2 is presented. Accordingly, if increasing T1 difficulty increases T1 processing time, this should cause a greater AB. The attention capture hypothesis suggests that T1 captures attention, which cannot be reallocated to T2 in time. Accordingly, if increasing T1 difficulty decreases T1 saliency, this should cause a smaller AB. In two experiments we find support for an attention capture hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that AB magnitude increases with T1 contrast – but only when T1 is unmasked. In Experiment 2 we add Gaussian noise to targets and vary T1 contrast but keep T1 ‘s SNR constant. Again we find that AB magnitude increases with T1 contrast.
Elevation of microtubule-associated protein tau in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer's disease

Article abstract-Currently, there is no biochemical marker clinically available to test for the presence of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent studies suggest that the core component of AD-associated neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), the microtubule-associated protein tau, might be present in CSF. This study focuses on establishing both the presence of tau in CSF and its potential utility in the diagnosis of AD. We obtained CSF from 181 individuals; 71 of these were diagnosed as having probable AD by NINCDS-ADRDA criteria. The remaining 110 individuals were divided into three groups: (1) age-matched demented non-AD patients (n = 25), (2) neurologic controls (n = 59), and (3) other controls (n = 26). We developed a sensitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent tau assay using monoclonal antibodies prepared against recombinant human tau. We confirmed specificity of the antibodies by a combination of immunoprecipitation and immunoblot results. By this assay we measured that the AD population has a mean level of tau 50% greater than the non-AD dementia patients. Comparing AD patients with all other groups, the difference in tau levels as analyzed by one-way ANOVA is highly statistically significant (p < 0.001). Postmortem analysis of two AD patients with high levels of CSF tau revealed a high density of NFTs in the hippocampus. There was no significant correlation between tau and age in the non-AD groups. This study suggests that CSF tau is elevated in AD and might be a useful aid in antemortem diagnosis. NEUROLOGY 1995;45: 788-793
Scalable Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization by Active Riemannian Subspace Search

The user ratings in recommendation systems are usually in the form of ordinal discrete values. To give more accurate prediction of such rating data, maximum margin matrix factorization (M3F) was proposed. Existing M3F algorithms, however, either have massive computational cost or require expensive model selection procedures to determine the number of latent factors (i.e. the rank of the matrix to be recovered), making them less practical for large scale data sets. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we formulate M3F with a known number of latent factors as the Riemannian optimization problem on a fixed-rank matrix manifold and present a block-wise nonlinear Riemannian conjugate gradient method to solve it efficiently. We then apply a simple and efficient active subspace search scheme to automatically detect the number of latent factors. Empirical studies on both synthetic data sets and large real-world data sets demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Randomized Study on Simple Versus Complex Stenting of Coronary Artery Bifurcation Lesions: The Nordic Bifurcation Study

Background— The optimal stenting strategy in coronary artery bifurcation lesions is unknown. In the present study, a strategy of stenting both the main vessel and the side branch (MV+SB) was compared with a strategy of stenting the main vessel only, with optional stenting of the side branch (MV), with sirolimus-eluting stents. Methods and Results— A total of 413 patients with a bifurcation lesion were randomized. The primary end point was a major adverse cardiac event: cardiac death, myocardial infarction, target-vessel revascularization, or stent thrombosis after 6 months. At 6 months, there were no significant differences in rates of major adverse cardiac events between the groups (MV+SB 3.4%, MV 2.9%; P=NS). In the MV+SB group, there were significantly longer procedure and fluoroscopy times, higher contrast volumes, and higher rates of procedure-related increases in biomarkers of myocardial injury. A total of 307 patients had a quantitative coronary assessment at the index procedure and after 8 months. The combined angiographic end point of diameter stenosis >50% of main vessel and occlusion of the side branch after 8 months was found in 5.3% in the MV group and 5.1% in the MV+SB group (P=NS). Conclusions— Independent of stenting strategy, excellent clinical and angiographic results were obtained with percutaneous treatment of de novo coronary artery bifurcation lesions with sirolimus-eluting stents. The simple stenting strategy used in the MV group was associated with reduced procedure and fluoroscopy times and lower rates of procedure-related biomarker elevation. Therefore, this strategy can be recommended as the routine bifurcation stenting technique.
The proline-rich P65 protein of Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a component of the Triton X-100-insoluble fraction and exhibits size polymorphism in the strains M129 and FH

Previously, we described the identification of a novel Mycoplasma pneumoniae M129 protein, named P65 because of its apparent molecular mass of 65 kDa estimated by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (T. Proft and R. Herrmann, Mol. Microbiol. 13:337-348, 1994). DNA sequence analysis of the P65 open reading frame (orfp65), however, revealed an ORF encoding a protein with a molecular weight of 47,034. This discrepancy can be explained by the unusual amino acid composition of this protein. According to the deduced amino acid sequence, the N-terminal half of P65 contains several penta- and hexapeptides (DPNAY and DPNQAY) forming a proline-rich acidic domain. Secondary-structure predictions indicated beta-sheets and turns within that region, suggesting an extended and rigid conformation. Near the C terminus of P65 the tripeptide Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) was found. This motif is known to play an important role in binding of extracellular matrix proteins to integrins. P65 could be located exclusively to the Triton X-100-insoluble cell fraction. The results of immunofluorescence microscopy and of immunoadsorption experiments indicated that P65 carries surface-exposed regions. Mild treatment of whole cells with proteases resulted in cleavage of a limited amount of P65 molecules, suggesting either that only a small percentage of P65 molecules are exposed on the surface or that protease cleavage is hampered by a compact protein conformation or by binding of an unknown component to P65. P65 exhibits size polymorphism in M. pneumoniae M129 and FH. This is caused by an intragenetic duplication of a 54-bp sequence within the FH orfp65. As a consequence, the number of DPNAY pentapeptides increased from 9 to 12 repeats in the FH strain.
Nonparametric discriminant analysis in relevance feedback for content-based image retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) has been widely used to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). How to select a subset of features from a large-scale feature pool and to construct a suitable dissimilarity measure are key steps in RF. Biased discriminant analysis (BDA) has been proposed to select features during relevance feedback iterations. However, BDA assumes all positive feedbacks form a single Gaussian distribution, which may not be the case for CBIR. Although kernel BDA can overcome the drawback to some extent, the kernel parameter tuning makes the online learning unfeasible. To avoid the parameter tuning problem and the single Gaussian distribution assumption in BDA, we construct a new nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA). To address the small sample size problem in NDA, we introduce the regularization method and the null-space method. Because the regularization method may meet the ill-posed problem and the null-space method will lose some discriminant information, we proposed here a full-space method. The proposed full-space NDA is demonstrated to outperform BDA based RF significantly based on a large number of experiments in Corel database with 17,800 images.
Energy efficient scheduling via partial shutdown

Motivated by issues of saving energy in data centers we define a collection of new problems referred to as "machine activation" problems. The central framework we introduce considers a collection of <i>m</i> machines (unrelated or related) with each machine <i>i</i> having an <i>activation cost</i> of <i>a</i><sub><i>i</i></sub>. There is also a collection of <i>n</i> jobs that need to be performed, and <i>p</i><sub><i>i, j</i></sub> is the processing time of job <i>j</i> on machine <i>i</i>. Standard scheduling models assume that the set of machines is fixed and all machines are available. However, in our setting, we assume that there is an activation cost budget of <i>A</i> - we would like to <i>select</i> a subset <i>S</i> of the machines to activate with total cost <i>a</i>(<i>S</i>) ≤ <i>A</i> and <i>find</i> a schedule for the <i>n</i> jobs on the machines in <i>S</i> minimizing the makespan (or any other metric). We consider both the unrelated machines setting, as well as the setting of scheduling uniformly related parallel machines, where machine <i>i</i> has activation cost <i>a</i><sub><i>i</i></sub> and speed <i>s</i><sub><i>i</i></sub>, and the processing time of job <i>j</i> on machine <i>i</i> is <i>p</i><sub><i>i, j</i></sub> = <i>p</i><sub><i>j</i></sub><i>s</i><sub><i>i</i></sub>, where <i>p</i><sub><i>j</i></sub> is the processing requirement of job <i>j</i>. For the general unrelated machine activation problem, our main results are that if there is a schedule with makespan <i>T</i> and activation cost <i>A</i> then we can obtain a schedule with makespan (2 + ε)T and activation cost 2(1 + 1/ε)(ln <i>n</i>/<i>OPT</i> + 1)<i>A</i>, for any ε > 0. We also consider assignment costs for jobs as in the generalized assignment problem, and using our framework, provide algorithms that minimize the machine activation and the assignment cost simultaneously. In addition, we present a greedy algorithm which only works for the basic version and yields a makespan of 2<i>T</i> and an activation cost <i>A</i>(1 + ln <i>n</i>). For the uniformly related parallel machine sceduling problem, we develop a polynomial time approximation scheme that outputs a schedule with the property that the activation cost of the subset of machines is at most <i>A</i> and the makespan is at most (1 + ε)<i>T</i> for any ε > 0. For the special case of <i>m</i> identical speed machines, the machine activation problem is trivial, since the cheapest subset of <i>k</i> machines is always the best choice if the optimal solution activates <i>k</i> machines. In addition, we consider the case whem some jobs can be dropped (and are treated as outliers).
The proposal of a new motor which has a high winding factor and a high slot fill factor

In this paper, we propose a new motor which has a high winding factor and a high slot fill factor. A motor with concentrated windings has a high slot fill factor, but a winding factor is low. On the other hand, a motor with distributed windings has a high winding factor, but a slot fill factor is low. To get both good features, the proposal motor has a new distributed winding stator that can be flat band-shaped without dividing windings and can be easy to wind.
Biomechanics of patellar tendon autograft for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament in the goat: Three‐year study

This study examined the biomechanics of anterior cruciate ligament‐patellar tendon autografts for as long as 3 years after surgery. Twenty‐seven adult female goats were tested; four served as controls and the others received an autograft to the right knee with each left knee serving as an additional control. The animals with grafts were tested at 0 week (n = 4), 6 weeks (n = 4), 12 weeks (n = 4), 24 weeks (n = 3), 1 year (n = 5), and 3 years (n = 3) after surgery. The anteroposterior laxity of the knee joint, load‐relaxation, and structural and material properties of the graft were tested. The anteroposterior laxity was significantly greater than that of the controls for all groups except at 3 years. Load‐relaxation was greater than that of the control anterior cruciate ligaments, but in the 1 and 3‐year grafts load‐relaxation was less than that of the patellar tendons with 5 minutes of sustained loading. Between 12 and 52 weeks, the stiffness and modulus of the grafts increased 3‐fold, but the improvement was slow afterward. At 3 years, the strength and stiffness of the grafts were 44 and 49% those of the control ligaments, respectively; the modulus was 37 and 46% that of the control anterior cruciate ligaments and patellar tendons, respectively. The persistent inferior mechanical performance at 3 years suggests that anterior cruciate ligament grafts may never attain normal strength.
Cochlear Nerve Fiber Discharge Patterns: Relationship to the Cochlear Microphonic

Fourier analysis of discharge patterns in response to sinusoidal acoustic stimulation provides a consistent and repeatable measure of response phase and amplitude. The variation of the fundamental and harmonic components of the patterns as stimulus parameters are changed is strikingly similar to that of cochlear microphonics. The results are significantly different for single fibers with different characteristic frequencies; the variations parallel those of microphonics recorded from different cochlear turns.
FINAL REPORT Tagging and Playback Studies to Toothed Whales

While atypical mass strandings of beaked whales have been linked to naval exercises using midfrequency sonar, the causal chain of events from sound exposure to stranding has not been elucidated. We now know that beaked whales react strongly to sonar, killer whale, and bandlimited noise by ceasing echolocation and completing an unusually slow, directional ascent, in many cases leaving area entirely (Pirotta et al., 2012; Tyack et al., 2011; DeRuiter et al. 2013). Less is known about potential risks to other species of odontocetes that are exposed to sonar during navy exercises. This project is part of a collaborative research program with the goals to:
${\ssr{PriWhisper}}$ : Enabling Keyless Secure Acoustic Communication for Smartphones

Short-range wireless communication technologies have been used in many security-sensitive smartphone applications and services such as contactless micro payment and device pairing. Typically, the data confidentiality of the existing short-range communication systems relies on so-called “key-exchange then encryption” mechanism, which is inefficient, especially for short communication sessions. In this work, we present PriWhisper-a keyless secure acoustic short-range communication system for smartphones. It is designed to provide a software-based solution to secure smartphone communication without the key agreement phase. PriWhisper adopts the emerging friendly jamming technique from radio communication for data confidentiality. The system prototype is implemented and evaluated on several Android smartphone platforms for efficiency and usability. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the security of our proposed acoustic communication system against eavesdropping. In particular, we study the (in)separability of the data signal and jamming signal against blind signal segmentation (BSS) attacks such as independent component analysis (ICA). The result shows that PriWhisper provides sufficient security guarantees for commercial smartphone applications and yet strong compatibilities with most legacy smartphone platforms. As an application, we also develop AcousAuth-a novel smart phone-empowered system for personal authentication.
Delayed Force Feedback1

In master-slave manipulators, forces encountered by the remote hand are transmitted back to the operator. At very great distances there will be a transmission delay between an operator's movement and a resulting force. Investigation was made of the effect of long delays and differences in strategy on positioning time with force feedback alone. Positioning could be accomplished, but delay coupled with high loop gain creates serious instability. Experimental results suggest that alternative displays of the feedback force can overcome the stability problem.