Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Registry-based stroke research in Taiwan: past and future

Stroke registries are observational databases focusing on the clinical information and outcomes of stroke patients. They play an important role in the cycle of quality improvement. Registry data are collected from real-world experiences of stroke care and are suitable for measuring quality of care. By exposing inadequacies in performance measures of stroke care, research from stroke registries has changed how we manage stroke patients in Taiwan. With the success of various quality improvement campaigns, mortality from stroke and recurrence of stroke have decreased in the past decade. After the implementation of a nationwide stroke registry, researchers have been creatively expanding how they use and collect registry data for research. Through the use of the nationwide stroke registry as a common data model, researchers from many hospitals have built their own stroke registries with extended data elements to meet the needs of research. In collaboration with information technology professionals, stroke registry systems have changed from web-based, manual submission systems to automated fill-in systems in some hospitals. Furthermore, record linkage between stroke registries and administrative claims databases or other existing databases has widened the utility of registry data in research. Using stroke registry data as the reference standard, researchers have validated several algorithms for ascertaining the diagnosis of stroke and its risk factors from claims data, and have also developed a claims-based index to estimate stroke severity. By making better use of registry data, we believe that we will provide better care to patients with stroke.
You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information

Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly, metadata are often still categorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past, researchers and practitioners have mainly focused on the problem of the identification of a user from the content of a message. In this paper, we use Twitter as a case study to quantify the uniqueness of the association between metadata and user identity and to understand the effectiveness of potential obfuscation strategies. More specifically, we analyze atomic fields in the metadata and systematically combine them in an effort to classify new tweets as belonging to an account using different machine learning algorithms of increasing complexity. We demonstrate that, through the application of a supervised learning algorithm, we are able to identify any user in a group of 10,000 with approximately 96.7% accuracy. Moreover, if we broaden the scope of our search and consider the 10 most likely candidates we increase the accuracy of the model to 99.22%. We also found that data obfuscation is hard and ineffective for this type of data: even after perturbing 60% of the training data, it is still possible to classify users with an accuracy higher than 95%. These results have strong implications in terms of the design of metadata obfuscation strategies, for example for data set release, not only for Twitter, but, more generally, for most social media platforms.
Relating quality of life to outcomes and predictors in adult cochlear implant users: Are we measuring the right things?

Current clinical outcome measures for adults receiving cochlear implants (CIs) consist of word and sentence recognition, primarily under quiet conditions. However, these measures may not adequately reflect patients' CI‐specific quality of life (QOL). This study first examined traditional auditory‐only speech recognition measures and other potentially relevant auditory measures as correlates of QOL in CI users. Second, scores on nonauditory tasks of language and cognition were examined as potential predictors of QOL.
Comparison of dietary intakes of micro- and macronutrients in rural, suburban and urban populations in Costa Rica

Abstract Objective: To compare, along with behavioural habits, the potential atherogenicity of diets in rural and urban areas in Costa Rica. Design: Subjects (n = 503) were randomly selected from the general population in Costa Rica. A validated food-frequency questionnaire that inquired about dietary intake in the previous year was administered once to each subject. Each subject provided plasma and an adipose tissue biopsy, which were used as biomarkers for carotenoid, tocopherol and/or fatty acid intakes. Each subject also answered another questionnaire on personal profile and household characteristics. Setting: A dietitian visited all subjects and conducted the interviews at their homes. Subjects: Adult male and female free-living rural, suburban and urban Costa Ricans without a history of physical or mental disability. Results: Subjects in rural areas were significantly (P < 0.05) more active physically, earned less income and had a higher intake of dietary fibre than urban dwellers. Urban residents reported a significantly (P < 0.05) higher consumption of total fat, specifically unsaturated fat mostly from soyabean oil, and had higher plasma and adipose tissue tocopherol and lycopene concentrations. Interestingly, no differences in body mass index were observed. Conclusions: These data show differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors of rural and urban populations in Costa Rica. In rural areas, low socio-economic status and low intake of unsaturated fatty acids appear to be the prevalent CVD risk factors, while in urban areas they were low physical activity, high trans-fatty acids in the diet and adipose tissue, and low dietary fibre intake.
Object Tracking via Null-space Discriminative Projections and Sparse Representation

The traditional target tracking algorithm based on sparse representation only considers the whole information of the target template without considering the information of the background. Tracking drift is easily happened when the target is disturbed by cluttered background, occlusion and illumination. Aiming at the existing problems, this paper proposes a sparse representation target tracking method based on null-space discriminative projection. On the one hand, the model increases the reconstruction error of the target sample by introducing the null-space discriminative projection method, thus improving the discriminative ability of the algorithm to the target and the background; On the other hand, using the L1 norm as the loss function reduces the sensitivity of the template to the outlier data. In addition, the model designs an online learning algorithm using to update the target tracking template. The tracking algorithm performs the best in the scene with high similarity between target and background. It can also deal with occlusion, illumination changes and other issues. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more stable, reliable and robust than the popular tracking algorithms. The specific experimental results are demonstrated in this paper.
Eigenvalue based features for semantic sentence similarity

Due to its increasing importance, the semantic sentence similarity is getting more attention among natural language processing researchers during recent years. To the best of our knowledge, previous studies on the task have not exploited the eigenvalue analysis on their systems. In this paper we approach the sentence similarity task through eigenvalue analysis. We will propose a simple but efficient new aligner and introduce three new features for the task. Two of our proposed features are based on the eigenvalue analysis. Finally, we will show the significance of our proposed aligner and features through experiments. Specifically, we will show that our features outperform the STS2015 benchmarks for semantic sentence similarity.
A scalable approach to obtain mesenchymal stem cells with osteogenic potency on apatite microcarriers

Bone tissue engineering, which relies on the interactions between stem cells and suitable scaffold materials, represents a highly desirable alternative to currently used allograft or autograft strategies for the treatment of bone defects caused by injury or disease, with one of the major challenges being to generate sufficient quantities of stem cells to bring about the intended therapeutic effect. However, conventional cell culture to achieve sufficient cell numbers faces limitations of low efficiency and diminished efficacy of stem cells due to repeated passaging. Furthermore, current microcarriers available may not be suitable for therapeutic implantation. Here, the authors featured an apatite-based microcarrier intended for bone tissue engineering applications. These apatite microcarriers have a diameter of ∼230 µm, and exhibited porous and rough surface morphology. Peaks obtained from X-ray diffractometry (XRD) corresponded to hydroxyapatite (HA) with high crystallinity. Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometry (FTIR) showed that no residues of alginate remained, and all bands observed belong to phosphate and hydroxyl groups of HA. To evaluate the cytocompatibility of these microcarriers, in vitro proliferation studies were conducted and compared with conventional monolayer as well as Cytodex 3. The authors found that human foetal mesenchymal stem cells (hfMSCs) cultured on apatite microcarriers exhibited comparable growth characteristics, achieving 1.4-fold higher live cells than Cytodex 3 over a 9-day culture period. As these microcarriers were hypothesised to offer enhanced osteogenic potency over conventional monolayer culture, alkaline phosphatase (ALP), type I collagen and osteocalcin expression of hfMSCs cultured on the apatite microcarriers were evaluated over a 12-day period. ALP expression for hfMSCs seeded on apatite microcarriers was 2.7-fold higher than that of adherent monolayer culture (p < 0.001). Additionally, type I collagen and osteocalcin expression were 1.8- and 1.5-fold higher than that of adherent monolayer culture on day 12, respectively (p < 0.001).
A fast, affordable and extensible FPGA-based synthetic Ethernet traffic generator for network evaluation

Development of widespread high-speed networks accelerates the research of Ethernet test, for which testing new algorithm is important. As a result, generating traffic is indispensable to hardware test, which may contain some feature such as number of TCP or UDP flows, payload content of frames and packet sizes. When data rate of traffic aims to the level of Gb/s, this task cannot be finished only with PC, which work by Linux kernel. Even though there are some hardware achievement for this task, they are some expensive and not affordable for daily research of network evaluation. We propose a solution in this paper and describe an affordable implementation of Ethernet traffic generator for network evaluation which is FPGA-based and work in rate of 10 Gb/s with a operation interface designed in software to upper computer. The design is affordable because of it can work on a board including a 10GbE interface and an FPGA chip, which is very easy to get and can accurately configure by upper computer.
DEFECTS IN EXTRUSION PROCESS AND THEIR IMPACT ON PRODUCT QUALITY

In the 20th century, the number of manufacturers had established extrusion pipe manufacturing plants on the customer demand. To ensure quality extrusion pipe manufacturing, it is essential to identify, control, and monitor all quality parameters. Some of the important parameters are condition of equipments, operating conditions, temperatures, pressures, quality of dies, materials. Instead of the sincere efforts from the manufacturers, still there are number of obstacles in the process which lead to defects in the product. The purpose of this review paper is to focus on the various defects in the extrusion process, to identify its impact on the product quality and to suggest the remedies for the improvement of extrusion process.
Reverting doxorubicin resistance in colon cancer by targeting a key signaling protein, steroid receptor coactivator

Although there have been notable improvements in treatments against cancer, further research is required. In colon cancer, nearly all patients eventually experience drug resistance and stop responding to the approved drugs, making treatment difficult. Steroid receptor coactivator (SRC) is an oncogenic nuclear receptor coactivator that serves an important role in drug resistance. The present study generated a doxorubicin-resistant colon cancer cell line, in which the upregulation/activation of SRC was responsible for drug resistance, which in turn activated AKT. Overexpression of receptor tyrosine kinase-like epidermal growth factor receptor and insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor also induced SRC expression. It was observed that doxorubicin resistance in colon cancer also induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition, a decrease in expression of epithelial marker E-cadherin and an increase in the expression of mesenchymal markers, including N-cadherin and vimentin. Additionally, the present study indicated that SRC acts as a common signaling node, and inhibiting SRC in combination with doxorubicin treatment in doxorubicin-resistant cells aids in reversing the resistance. Thus, the present study suggests that activation of SRC is responsible for doxorubicin resistance in colon cancer. However, further research is required to understand the complete mechanism of how drug resistance occurs and how it may be tackled to treat patients.
Comparison Between Force-Controlled Skin Deformation Feedback and Hand-Grounded Kinesthetic Force Feedback for Sensory Substitution

Teleoperation and virtual reality systems benefit from force sensory substitution when kinesthetic force feedback devices are infeasible due to stability or workspace limitations. We compared the performance of sensory substitution when it is provided through a cutaneous method (skin deformation feedback) and a kinesthetic method (hand-grounded force feedback). For skin deformation feedback, we used a new force-controlled tactile sensory substitution device with the ability to provide tangential and normal force directly to the finger pad. Three-axis force control with 15 Hz bandwidth was achieved using a delta mechanism and three-axis force sensor. For hand-grounded force feedback, forces were grounded against the palm. As a control, world-grounded force feedback was provided using a three-degree-of-freedom kinesthetic force feedback device. Study participants were able to match a reference world-grounded force better with hand-grounded kinesthetic force feedback than with skin deformation feedback. Participants were also able to apply more accurate and precise forces with hand-grounded kinesthetic force feedback than with skin deformation feedback. Conversely, skin deformation feedback resulted in the lowest error during initial force adjustment. These experiments demonstrate relative advantages and disadvantages of skin deformation and hand-grounded kinesthetic force feedback for force sensory substitution.
Teleoperation of a concentric tube robot through hand gesture visual tracking

Concentric tube robots have been a popular study for minimially invasive surgical procedures because of their narrow diameters and curvature. To ensure safety and reliability, the surgeon is meant to control this robot through teleoperation. Current researchers use haptic devices; however, little research has been done at investigating alternative methods that could have more simplicity, controlability, portability or human-machine intiutiveness. Many gaming devices such as the Kinect or Leap Motion have become commercialised human-machine interfaces that are also gaining popularity in medical research for being touchless and intuitive. The work demonstrated in this paper investigates the implementation of a hand gesture visual tracking system, the hand to machine mapping algorithms and the practicality of this solution as being a teleoperation system for concentric tube robots.
Cross-lingual event-mining using wordnet as a shared knowledge interface

We describe a concept-based event-mining system that maximizes information extracted from text and is not restricted to predefined knowledge templates. Such a system needs to handle a wide range of expressions while being able to extract precise semantic relations. The system uses simple patterns of linguistic and ontological constraints that are applied to a uniform representation of the text. It uses a generic ontology based on DOLCE and wordnets in different languages to extract events from text in these languages in an interoperable way. The system performs unsupervised domain-independent event-mining with promising results. Error-analysis showed that the semantic model and the mapping of text to concepts through wordsense-disambiguation (WSD) are not the main cause of the errors but the complexity of the grammatical structures and the quality of parsing. Using the same semantic model and their cross-wordnet links, our English event-mining patterns were transferred to Dutch in less than a day’s work. The platform was tested on the environment domain but can be applied to any other domain.
Development of a fishhook-type robot hand: EEL-hand

In many of the grippers and robot hands developed so far, it is assumed that the target object is fixed firmly to the robot. However, when the object has a complicated shape, it is not easy to give a sufficient gripping force to the contact points. The hand proposed in this paper has a multi-joint 1-finger, which has an under-actuated mechanism driven by one actuator. By inserting the finger into the hole of the object and lifting it up, a highly reliable grasp is realized. Because the finger has compliance, according to its grasp condition, it is passively deformed and can reliably hook the object on the fingertip. In this paper, we introduce the basic concept and mechanism of the proposed robot hand. Next, we introduce the developed system and the results of the grasp experiment.
Person re-identification: Attribute-based feature evaluation

Matching people across various camera views at different times and locations is called person re-identification (re-id). Despite remarkable recent advances in the field, the problem is still particularly challenging due to significant viewpoint angle variations, illumination changes, background clutter, occlusions, motion blur and pose variations. Although these challenges are widely acknowledged within the re-id community, no previous work has attempted to analyze the extent to which they individually contribute to performance deterioration, and whether current feature representations have succeeded to mitigate their effect. To address this matter, 4 publically available single-shot datasets were fully and manually annotated for these attributes. Subsequently, 6 state-of-the-art feature representations were evaluated considering each attribute separately. Extensive experimentation using XQDA distance metric has clearly shown that illumination variation remains the major problem hindering accurate re-id. The results also provide insights towards the design of new feature representations to improve the performance.
Ratiometric Optical Thermometer Based on Dual Near-Infrared Emission in Cr3+-Doped Bismuth-Based Gallate Host

Detailed spectroscopic analysis of the electronic configuration of Cr3+ in Bi2Ga4O9 is reported. The material exhibits unique luminescent properties arising from the crystal field experienced by Cr3+, with simultaneous strong sharp and broadband near-infrared emissions from the 2E and 4T2 excited states, in a wide range of temperature. The system displays dual near-infrared emission characterized by a remarkable thermal sensitivity over the whole explored range of temperatures, reaching a value of 0.7%·K–1 in the physiological range. Moreover, the possibility to absorb and emit in the first biological window, allows one to consider the system as a new promising candidate for ratiometric fluorescent thermal sensing in biotechnological applications.
Towards a requirements traceability process centered on the traceability model

Requirements traceability (RT) has been acknowledged as a valuable activity in the software development process. Its importance is reflected in different quality standards, which dictates that requirements should be traceable through the software development life-cycle. However, there is not a consensus about the traceability process and, as a consequence, RT practices cannot be unified across different organizational settings. Identifying common aspects to the RT process has been recognized as one of the grand challenges of RT. Even though, researches regarding improvements in requirements engineering (RE) neglect the traceability research scope. Therefore, is this paper, we propose and detail a RT process, specifying its workflow, actors, responsibilities and inputs/outputs as well as establishing contracts that govern the proposed process phases. To evaluate the proposed process, we have conducted an empirical experiment in a real project under development for the federal police of Brazil. We observed time, precision, recall and efficiency metrics and concluded that the proposed process improves the performance of RT practices. As a final remark, the proposed process contributes towards the discussion of common aspects of the RT process.
Prevention and optimal management of sarcopenia: a review of combined exercise and nutrition interventions to improve muscle outcomes in older people

The growing recognition of sarcopenia, the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function, has highlighted the need to understand more about its etiology. Declines in muscle mass and strength are expected aspects of aging, but there is significant variability between individuals in rates of loss. Although some of these differences can be explained by fixed factors, such as sex, much of the remaining variation is unexplained. This has led to increasing interest in the influence of adult lifestyle, particularly in the effects of modifiable factors such as physical activity and diet, and in identifying intervention opportunities both to prevent and manage sarcopenia. A number of trials have examined the separate effects of increased exercise or dietary supplementation on muscle mass and physical performance of older adults, but less is known about the extent to which benefits of exercise training could be enhanced when these interventions are combined. In a comprehensive review of the literature, we consider 17 studies of older adults (≥65 years) in which combined nutrition and exercise interventions were used to increase muscle strength and/or mass, and achieve improvements in physical performance. The studies were diverse in terms of the participants included (nutritional status, degree of physical frailty), supplementation strategies (differences in nutrients, doses), exercise training (type, frequency), as well as design (duration, setting). The main message is that enhanced benefits of exercise training, when combined with dietary supplementation, have been shown in some trials – indicating potential for future interventions, but that existing evidence is inconsistent. Further studies are needed, particularly of exercise training combined with dietary strategies that increase intakes of a range of nutrients, as well as bioactive non-nutrients, to provide the evidence on which public health and clinical recommendations can be based.