Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Does Airway Resistance Tell Us About Lung Function?

Spirometry is considered the primary method to detect the air flow limitation associated with obstructive lung disease. However, air flow limitation is the end-result of many factors that contribute to obstructive lung disease. One of these factors is increased airway resistance. Airway resistance is traditionally measured by relating air flow and driving pressure using body plethysmography, thus deriving airway resistance (Raw), specific airway resistance (sRaw), and specific airway conductance (sGaw). Other methods to measure airway resistance include the forced oscillation technique (FOT), which allows calculation of respiratory system resistance (RRS) and reactance (XRS), and the interrupter technique, which allows calculation of interrupter resistance (Rint). An advantage of these other methods is that they may be easier to perform than spirometry, making them particularly suited to patients who cannot perform spirometry, such as young children, patients with neuromuscular disorders, or patients on mechanical ventilation. Since spirometry also requires a deep inhalation, which can alter airway resistance, these alternative methods may provide more sensitive measures of airway resistance. Furthermore, the FOT provides unique information about lung mechanics that is not available from analysis using spirometry, body plethysmography, or the interrupter technique. However, it is unclear whether any of these measures of airway resistance contribute clinically important information to the traditional measures derived from spirometry (FEV1, FVC, and FEV1/FVC). The purpose of this paper is to review the physiology and methodology of these measures of airway resistance, and then focus on their clinical utility in relation to each other and to spirometry.
Influence of Previous Experience on Resistance Training on Reliability of One-Repetition Maximum Test

Ritti-Dias, RM, Avelar, A, Salvador, EP, and Cyrino, ES. Influence of previous experience on resistance training on reliability of one repetition maximum test. J Strength Cond Res 25(5): 1418-1422, 2011-The 1-repetition maximum test (1RM) has been widely used to assess maximal strength. However, to improve accuracy in assessing maximal strength, several sessions of the 1RM test are recommended. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of previous resistance training experience on the reliability of 1RM test. Thirty men were assigned to the following 2 groups according to their previous resistance training experience: no previous resistance training experience (NOEXP) and more than 24 months of resistance training experience (EXP). All subjects performed the 1RM tests in bench press and squat in 4 sessions on distinct days. There was a significant session × group effect in bench press (F = 3.09; p < 0.03) and squat (F = 2.76; p < 0.05) showing that only the NOEXP increased maximal strength between the sessions. Significant increases (p < 0.05) in maximal strength occurred in the NOEXP between session 1 and the other sessions in bench press (session 1 vs. 2 = +3.8%; session 1 vs. 3 = +7.4%; session 1 vs. 4 = +10.1%), and squat (session 1 vs. 2 = +7.6%; session 1 vs. 3 = +10.1%; session 1 vs. 4 = +11.2%). Moreover, in bench press, maximal strength in sessions 3 and 4 were significantly higher than in session 2. The results of the present study suggest that the reliability of the 1RM test is influenced by the subject's previous experience in resistance training. Subjects without experience in resistance training require more practice and familiarization and show greater increases in maximal strength between sessions than subjects with previous experience in resistance training.
The Steric Gate of DNA Polymerase ι Regulates Ribonucleotide Incorporation and Deoxyribonucleotide Fidelity*

Background: Accurate bypass of DNA damage by translesion DNA polymerases is critical for cell survival. Results: Wild-type human DNA polymerase ι incorporates ribonucleotides, and a steric gate mutant increases both ribonucleotide incorporation and deoxyribonucleotide selectivity. Conclusion: A single amino acid residue in DNA polymerase ι limits incorporation of ribonucleotides into DNA. Significance: DNA polymerase ι may incorporate ribonucleotides during translesion DNA synthesis. Accurate DNA synthesis in vivo depends on the ability of DNA polymerases to select dNTPs from a nucleotide pool dominated by NTPs. High fidelity replicative polymerases have evolved to efficiently exclude NTPs while copying long stretches of undamaged DNA. However, to bypass DNA damage, cells utilize specialized low fidelity polymerases to perform translesion DNA synthesis (TLS). Of interest is human DNA polymerase ι (pol ι), which has been implicated in TLS of oxidative and UV-induced lesions. Here, we evaluate the ability of pol ι to incorporate NTPs during DNA synthesis. pol ι incorporates and extends NTPs opposite damaged and undamaged template bases in a template-specific manner. The Y39A “steric gate” pol ι mutant is considerably more active in the presence of Mn2+ compared with Mg2+ and exhibits a marked increase in NTP incorporation and extension, and surprisingly, it also exhibits increased dNTP base selectivity. Our results indicate that a single residue in pol ι is able to discriminate between NTPs and dNTPs during DNA synthesis. Because wild-type pol ι incorporates NTPs in a template-specific manner, certain DNA sequences may be “at risk” for elevated mutagenesis during pol ι-dependent TLS. Molecular modeling indicates that the constricted active site of wild-type pol ι becomes more spacious in the Y39A variant. Therefore, the Y39A substitution not only permits incorporation of ribonucleotides but also causes the enzyme to favor faithful Watson-Crick base pairing over mutagenic configurations.
Designing Interactions in Event-Based Unified Management of Personal Multimedia Information

Advancements in sensor technologies have made it easier and increasingly common to capture information using multiple media. This is especially true for personal multimedia information. Effective assimilation of such information requires recognizing the semantic correlations between media and the ability to model and interact with them in a unified manner. This paper presents our research in designing capabilities to support user-data interactions in context of the aforementioned issues. Central to our approach is characterization and modeling of media using the notion of an "event". Building on this idea, we propose the design of operations as well as visualizations that not only allow event generation and manipulation, but also the ability to interact with various semantically important characteristics of the underlying information. Experimental and comparative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy and promise of the approach
Gathering correlated data in sensor networks

In this paper, we consider energy-efficient gathering of correlated data in sensor networks. We focus on <i>single-input coding</i> strategies in order to aggregate correlated data. For <i>foreign coding</i> we propose the MEGA algorithm which yields a minimum-energy data gathering topology in O <i>(n</i><sup>3)</sup> time. We also consider <sup>self-coding</sup> for which the problem of finding an optimal data gathering tree was recently shown to be NP-complete; with LEGA, we present the first approximation algorithm for this problem with approximation ratio 2(1+ √2 ) and running time O <i>m</i> + <i>n</i> log <i>n</i>.
A Unified Notion of Outliers: Properties and Computation

As said in signal processing, "One person's noise is another person's signal. " For many applications, such as the exploration of satellite or medical images, and the monitoring of criminal activities in electronic commerce, identifying exceptions can often lead to the discovery of truly unexpected knowledge. In this paper, we study an intuitive notion of outliers. A key contribution of this paper is to show how the proposed notion of outliers unifies or generalizes many existing notions of outliers provided by discordancy tests for standard statistical distributions. Thus, a unified outlier detection system can replace a whole spectrum of statistical discordancy tests with a single module detecting only the kinds of outliers proposed. A second contribution of this paper is the development of an approach to find all outliers in a dataset. The structure underlying this approach resembles a data cube, which has the advantage of facilitating integration with the many OLAP and data mining systems using data cubes.
Shiga Toxins and the Pathophysiology of Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome in Humans and Animals

Food-borne diseases are estimated at 76 million illnesses and 5000 deaths every year in the United States with the greatest burden on young children, the elderly and immunocompromised populations. The impact of efficient food distribution systems and a truly global food supply ensures that outbreaks, previously sporadic and contained locally, are far more widespread and emerging pathogens have far more frequent infection opportunities. Enterohemorrhagic E. coli is an emerging food- and water-borne pathogen family whose Shiga-like toxins induce painful hemorrhagic colitis with potentially lethal complications of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). The clinical manifestations of Shiga toxin-induced HUS overlap with other related syndromes yet molecular mechanisms differ considerably. As discussed herein, understanding these differences and the novel properties of the toxins is imperative for clinical management decisions, design of appropriate animal models, and choices of adjunctive therapeutics. The emergence of new strains with rapidly aggressive virulence makes clinical and research initiatives in this field a high public health priority.
Reversible Watermarking Techniques: An Overview and a Classification

An overview of reversible watermarking techniques appeared in literature during the last five years approximately is presented in this paper. In addition to this a general classification of algorithms on the basis of their characteristics and of the embedding domain is given in order to provide a structured presentation simply accessible for an interested reader. Algorithms are set in a category and discussed trying to supply the main information regarding embedding and decoding procedures. Basic considerations on achieved results are made as well.
Atomic snapshots of shared memory

This paper introduces a general formulation of<? Pub Fmt italic>atomic snapshot memory<? Pub Fmt /italic>, a sharedmemory partitioned into words written(<? Pub Fmt italic>updated<? Pub Fmt /italic>) by individual processes, orinstantaneously read (<? Pub Fmt italic>scanned<? Pub Fmt /italic>) in itsentirety. This paper presents three wait-free implementations of atomicsnapshot memory. The first implementation in this paper uses unbounded(integer) fields in these registers, and is particularly easy tounderstand. The second implementation uses bounded registers. Itscorrectness proof follows the ideas of the unbounded implementation.Both constructions implement a single-writer snapshot memory, in whicheach word may be updated by only one process, from single-writer,<? Pub Fmt italic>n<? Pub Fmt /italic>-reader registers. The thirdalgorithm implements a multi-writer snapshot memory from atomic<? Pub Fmt italic>n<? Pub Fmt /italic>-writer,<? Pub Fmt italic>n<? Pub Fmt /italic>-reader registers, again echoing keyideas from the earlier constructions. All operations require&THgr;(<? Pub Fmt italic>n<? Pub Fmt /italic><supscrpt>2</supscrpt>) readsand writes to the component shared registers in the worst case. <abstrbyl>—<? Pub Fmt italic>Authors' Abstract<? Pub Fmt /italic></abstrbyl>
Context-Aided Sensor Fusion for Enhanced Urban Navigation

The deployment of Intelligent Vehicles in urban environments requires reliable estimation of positioning for urban navigation. The inherent complexity of this kind of environments fosters the development of novel systems which should provide reliable and precise solutions to the vehicle. This article details an advanced GNSS/IMU fusion system based on a context-aided Unscented Kalman filter for navigation in urban conditions. The constrained non-linear filter is here conditioned by a contextual knowledge module which reasons about sensor quality and driving context in order to adapt it to the situation, while at the same time it carries out a continuous estimation and correction of INS drift errors. An exhaustive analysis has been carried out with available data in order to characterize the behavior of available sensors and take it into account in the developed solution. The performance is then analyzed with an extensive dataset containing representative situations. The proposed solution suits the use of fusion algorithms for deploying Intelligent Transport Systems in urban environments.
Shared memory programming for large scale machines

This paper describes the design and implementation of a scalable run-time system and an optimizing compiler for Unified Parallel C (UPC). An experimental evaluation on BlueGene/L®, a distributed-memory machine, demonstrates that the combination of the compiler with the runtime system produces programs with performance comparable to that of efficient MPI programs and good performance scalability up to hundreds of thousands of processors.Our runtime system design solves the problem of maintaining shared object consistency efficiently in a distributed memory machine. Our compiler infrastructure simplifies the code generated for parallel loops in UPC through the elimination of affinity tests, eliminates several levels of indirection for accesses to segments of shared arrays that the compiler can prove to be local, and implements remote update operations through a lower-cost asynchronous message. The performance evaluation uses three well-known benchmarks --- HPC RandomAccess, HPC STREAM and NAS CG --- to obtain scaling and absolute performance numbers for these benchmarks on up to 131072 processors, the full BlueGene/L machine. These results were used to win the HPC Challenge Competition at SC05 in Seattle WA, demonstrating that PGAS languages support both productivity and performance.
A socio-relational framework of sex differences in the expression of emotion

Abstract Despite a staggering body of research demonstrating sex differences in expressed emotion, very few theoretical models (evolutionary or non-evolutionary) offer a critical examination of the adaptive nature of such differences. From the perspective of a socio-relational framework, emotive behaviors evolved to promote the attraction and aversion of different types of relationships by advertising the two most parsimonious properties of reciprocity potential, or perceived attractiveness as a prospective social partner. These are the individual's (a) perceived capacity or ability to provide expedient resources, or to inflict immediate harm onto others, and their (b) perceived trustworthiness or probability of actually reciprocating altruism (Vigil 2007). Depending on the unique social demands and relational constraints that each sex evolved, individuals should be sensitive to advertise “capacity” and “trustworthiness” cues through selective displays of dominant versus submissive and masculine versus feminine emotive behaviors, respectively. In this article, I introduce the basic theoretical assumptions and hypotheses of the framework, and show how the models provide a solid scaffold with which to begin to interpret common sex differences in the emotional development literature. I conclude by describing how the framework can be used to predict condition-based and situation-based variation in affect and other forms of expressive behaviors.
Automated Fiber Extraction From SEM Images With Application to Quality Control of Fiber-Reinforced Composites Manufacturing

The morphology of fibers (e.g., spatial uniformity and orientation) plays a decisive role in determining the material properties or fabrication quality of fiber-reinforced nanocomposites. The existing literature lacks a reliable and automatic fiber extraction method for morphology analysis based on the scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. This paper proposes four different methods, namely, the simple Hough Transform, opening method, partitioning Hough Transform and gradient based Hough Transform, to automatically identify the fibers from SEM images to expedite the morphology analysis. The performance of these methods are thoroughly evaluated and compared through simulation studies and real case studies.
Use of the Wearable External Cardiac Defibrillator in Children

Background: The wearable cardiac defibrillator (WCD) is an alternative to the implantation of cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) for patients at risk for sudden death who do not fulfill standard criteria for ICD implantation or in whom the risk:benefit ratio is equivocal. Published data pertaining to the WCD in children is sparse. We describe the utility of the WCD in children at a single tertiary care center.
The diagnostic potential of salivary protease activities in periodontal health and disease.

Periodontal disease is characterised by proteolytic processes involving enzymes that are released by host immune cells and periodontal bacteria. These enzymes, when detectable in whole saliva, may serve as valuable diagnostic markers for disease states and progression. Because the substrate specificities of salivary proteases in periodontal health and disease are poorly characterised, we probed these activities using several relevant substrates: (i) gelatin and collagen type IV; (ii) the Arg/Lys-rich human salivary substrate histatin-5; and (iii) a histatin-derived synthetic analog benzyloxycarbonyl-Arg-Gly-Tyr-Arg-methyl cumaryl amide (Z-RGYR-MCA). Substrate degradation was assessed in gel (zymography) and in solution. Whole saliva supernatant enzyme activities directed at gelatin, quantified from the 42 kDa, 92 kDa and 130 kDa bands in the zymograms, were 1.3, 1.4 and 2.0-fold higher, respectively, in the periodontal patient group (P < 0.01), consistent with enhanced activities observed towards collagen type IV. On the other hand, histatin 5 degraded equally fast in healthy and periodontal patients' whole saliva supernatant samples (P > 0.10). Likewise, the hydrolysis rates of the Z-RGYR-MCA substrate were the same in the healthy and periodontal patient groups (P > 0.10). In conclusion, gelatinolytic/collagenolytic activities but not trypsin-like activities in human saliva differentiate health from periodontal disease and may thus provide an adjuvant to diagnosis for monitoring disease activity.
The PerTOHS The PerTOHS The PerTOHS The PerTOHS Theory f Theory f Theory f Theory for On or On or On or On----Line Handwriting Segmentation Line Handwriting Segmentation Line Handwriting Segmentation Line Handwriting Segmentation

In this paper, we present PerTOHS theory for on-line handwriting segmentation, based on the fact that in order to identify patterns, our human perceptual system is based on basic features called perceptual codes. Analysing handwriting, we notice the existence of elementary and global ones. Perceptual organization of elementary perceptual codes in various constraints generates global ones, and to obtain different forms of handwriting, we proceed by combining them. We develop a new approach to improve handwriting segmentation via perceptual codes. The proposed architecture uses the Beta-elliptic model for the generation of on-line handwriting scripts, the fuzzy set theory to detect the elementary perceptual codes and the genetic algorithms for the global perceptual ones. This theory has been tested on the developed MAYASTROUN database, and IRONOFF database. The achieved results show successful representations of handwritten script via perceptual codes and good segmentation rate is obtained.
Efficient Reachability Query Evaluation in Large Spatiotemporal Contact Datasets

With the advent of reliable positioning technologies and prevalence of location-based services, it is now feasible to accurately study the propagation of items such as infectious viruses, sensitive information pieces, and malwares through a population of moving objects, e.g., individuals, mobile devices, and vehicles. In such application scenarios, an item passes between two objects when the objects are sufficiently close (i.e., when they are, so-called, in contact), and hence once an item is initiated, it can penetrate the object population through the evolving network of contacts among objects, termed contact network. In this paper, for the first time we define and study reachability queries in large (i.e., disk-resident) contact datasets which record the movement of a (potentially large) set of objects moving in a spatial environment over an extended time period. A reachability query verifies whether two objects are "reachable" through the evolving contact network represented by such contact datasets. We propose two contact-dataset indexes that enable efficient evaluation of such queries despite the potentially humongous size of the contact datasets. With the first index, termed ReachGrid, at the query time only a small necessary portion of the contact network which is required for reachability evaluation is constructed and traversed. With the second approach, termed ReachGraph, we precompute reachability at different scales and leverage these precalculations at the query time for efficient query processing. We optimize the placement of both indexes on disk to enable efficient index traversal during query processing. We study the pros and cons of our proposed approaches by performing extensive experiments with both real and synthetic data. Based on our experimental results, our proposed approaches outperform existing reachability query processing techniques in contact networks by 76% on average.
Thrombocytopenia in liver disease

Purpose of reviewTo evaluate recent findings in the multifaceted pathophysiological mechanisms underlying thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic liver disease and to assess its therapeutic management. Recent findingsAntiplatelet antibodies, despite being observed rather frequently in patients with chronic viral liver disease, have minimal relevance in the determinism of thrombocytopenia, and antiviral treatment of the underlying liver disease does not seem to significantly affect their prevalence. Translational application of the results of studies evaluating coagulation disorders associated with liver disease seems to suggest that these may be improved by treating thrombocytopenia. Both splenectomy and partial splenic embolization are still part of the therapeutic approach to thrombocytopenia. As far as this latter technique is concerned, patient selection is fundamental, and its success likely depends upon thrombopoietin-mediated mechanisms. Eltrombopag is a promising thrombopoietic drug that proved to be able to safely increase platelet counts in patients with viral liver disease and allows the initiation of antiviral treatment. SummaryNew insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of thrombocytopenia in patients with liver disease have provided interesting clinical reflex. In these patients, novel therapies for treating thrombocytopenia seem promising, although it remains to be established whether treating thrombocytopenia may help improve liver disease-associated coagulopathy.