Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IoT architecture and system design for healthcare systems

With the advent of high precision sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled medical devices, healthcare has seen a gradual decentralization from the traditional health center based approach. These smaller form factor IoT healthcare devices have reduced the cost of healthcare leading to affordability and wider adoption. This paper enunciates recent advances in the architecture as well as system design of IoT based healthcare systems. Healthcare systems like mHealth and 6LoWPAN based architectures are explored. Healthcare systems involving IEEE 11073 and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) are described. Multisensor based system designs that sense blood glucose, body temperature, heart rate and electrical activity (ECG) etc. are explored. The paper provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances in IoT based healthcare system and proposes Intel Curie based healthcare system design.
Evaluation of efficacy and safety of minimally invasive segmentectomy in the treatment of lung cancer

The aim of the study was to investigate the efficacy and safety of minimally invasive segmentectomy in the treatment of lung cancer. A total of 86 lung cancer patients in early stage were selected for the treatment between May, 2010 and December, 2010. The patients were randomly divided into the control (n=43) and observation (n=43) groups. Patients in the control group received conventional thoracotomy as treatment, while thoracoscopic segmentectomy was performed for patients in the observation group. Factors including intraoperative bleeding amount, number of dissected lymph nodes, surgery duration, postoperative intubation time and length of stay (LOS) were compared between the two groups. A visual analogue scale was used for comparison of the postoperative incisional pain experienced by patients in the two groups. The incidence rate of postoperative complications of patients in the two groups was observed. We also assayed variations in the levels of serum inflammatory factors C-reaction protein (CRP), interleukin (IL) −6 and −10 of patients prior to operation and on the 3rd, 5th and 7th days and after operation via ELISA, and on the 7th day after operation, we determined the pulmonary function of patients. During the 5-year follow-up, the recurrence and survival rate of patients in the two groups were observed. In the observation group, the intraoperative bleeding amount of patients was significantly lower than that in the control group, and the surgery duration, postoperative intubation time and LOS were all shorter than those in the control group (P<0.05). By contrast, no significant difference was detected in a comparison of the number of dissected lymph nodes of patients between the two groups (P>0.05). Additionally, in the observation group, patients suffered less pain after operation than those in the control group (P<0.05), and on the 3rd, 5th and 7th days after operation, the levels of CRP, IL-6 and −10 in the observation group were significantly lower than those in the control group (P<0.05). After operation, the incidence rate of complications in the observation group was significantly lower than that in the control group (P<0.05), and the recovery in pulmonary function after operation was superior to that in the control group (P<0.05). In addition, the 5-year survival rate of patients in the observation group was significantly higher than that in the control group, and the recurrence rate was significantly lower than that in the control group (P<0.05). Minimally invasive segmentectomy shows better efficacy in the treatment of lung cancer at early stage than the conventional thoracotomy. In addition to the high safety during surgery, this technique can lower the incidence rate of postoperative complications, protect the pulmonary function, increase the survival rate and decrease the recurrence rate, which shows great value in clinical practice.
Clinical and angiographic outcomes of rotational atherectomy for patients with calcified coronary lesions : a meta-analysis of randomized and observational studies

Rotational atherectomy (RA) before stenting is still controversial. We aim to evaluate the long-term clinical and angiographic outcomes of RA for patients with calcified coronary lesions after stent implantation. A systematic literature search of Medline, Embase, Cochrane and Ovid Databases were conducted. The clinical endpoints comprised major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs), target lesion revascularization (TLR), and myocardial infarction (MI). The angiographic outcomes include acute gain, late lumen loss, and restenosis rate. Five randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and thirteen observational studies comprising 5,340 patients were included. Pooled analysis indicated that RA followed by stent decreased the rate of TLR (odds ratio (OR), 0.69; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.48-0.99; P = 0.04), restenosis (OR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.40-0.75; P = 0.0002), and have a better acute gain (weighted mean difference (WMD), 0.28; 95% CI, 0.18-0.37; P<0.00001). However, the risk of MI was significantly higher in the RA followed by stent group than the stent-only group (OR, 1.63; 95% CI, 1.15-2.31; P = 0.006). There were no significant differences in the incidence of MACEs (OR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.46 to 1.32; P = 0.36) and late lumen loss (WMD, -0.03; 95% CI, -0.14 to 0.09; P = 0.65) between the two groups. This meta-analysis confirmed that RA followed by stent is superior to stent alone in terms of TLR, better acute gain, and restenosis during long-term periods. But a higher MI risk existed in patients treated by RA followed by stent technique.
A YY1-dependent increase in aerobic metabolism is indispensable for intestinal organogenesis

During late gestation, villi extend into the intestinal lumen to dramatically increase the surface area of the intestinal epithelium, preparing the gut for the neonatal diet. Incomplete development of the intestine is the most common gastrointestinal complication in neonates, but the causes are unclear. We provide evidence in mice that Yin Yang 1 (Yy1) is crucial for intestinal villus development. YY1 loss in the developing endoderm had no apparent consequences until late gestation, after which the intestine differentiated poorly and exhibited severely stunted villi. Transcriptome analysis revealed that YY1 is required for mitochondrial gene expression, and ultrastructural analysis confirmed compromised mitochondrial integrity in the mutant intestine. We found increased oxidative phosphorylation gene expression at the onset of villus elongation, suggesting that aerobic respiration might function as a regulator of villus growth. Mitochondrial inhibitors blocked villus growth in a fashion similar to Yy1 loss, thus further linking oxidative phosphorylation with late-gestation intestinal development. Interestingly, we find that necrotizing enterocolitis patients also exhibit decreased expression of oxidative phosphorylation genes. Our study highlights the still unappreciated role of metabolic regulation during organogenesis, and suggests that it might contribute to neonatal gastrointestinal disorders. Highlighted Article: The transcription factor YY1 plays a key role during intestinal morphogenesis in mice, affecting villi morphogenesis and the expression of mitochondrial genes.
Optimization of the upstream bandwidth allocation in passive optical networks using internet users' behavior forecast

The application of classification techniques based on machine learning approaches to analyze the behavior of network users has interested many researchers in the last years. In a recent work, we have proposed an architecture for optimizing the upstream bandwidth allocation in Passive Optical Network (PON) based on the traffic pattern of each user. Clustering analysis was used in association with an assignment index calculation in order to specify for PON users their upstream data transmission tendency. A dynamic adjustment of Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters is then performed to maximize the overall customers' satisfaction with the network. In this work, we extend the proposed architecture by adding a prediction module as a complementary to the first classification phase. Grey Model GM(1,1) is used in this context to learn more about the traffic trend of users and improve their assignment. An experimental study is conducted to show the impact of the forecaster and how it can overcome the limits of the initial model.
Short-Term Macroeconomic Effects of the Fiscal Stimulus Measures in Austria

Like most industrialized countries and many developing countries, Austria has taken measures to stabilise financial markets and to mitigate the sharp decrease in economic activity caused by the recent financial crisis. These measures amount to 4.2 per cent of 2008 GDP. Model simulations show that, together with fiscal measures adopted in the 10 major trading partner countries, the national stimulus packages may have slowed the decrease in Austrian real GDP by a cumulative 2.1 percentage points in 2010, preserving 41,500 jobs.
Speech understanding for spoken language systems: portability across domains and languages

This thesis investigates the problem of automatic natural language understanding for spoken language systems. The proposed parsing method is sufficiently general and flexible so as to be easily ported to different applications, domains and human languages. Spoken language systems support unconstrained human-machine communication. They combine primary component technologies (such as speech recognition, natural language understanding and dialog processing) to understand the meaning of an input utterance. Natural language generation and/or speech synthesis are required to build end-to-end systems which accomplish some given task. Today’s state-of-the-art rule-based methods to natural language understanding provide good performance in limited applications for specific languages. However, the manual development of an understanding component using specific rules is costly as each application and language requires its own adaptation or, in the worst case, a completely new implementation. In order to address this cost issue, statistical modeling techniques are used in this work to replace the commonly-used hand-generated rules to convert the speech recognizer output into a semantic representation. The statistical models are derived from the automatic analyses of large corpora of utterances with their corresponding semantic representations. To port the semantic analyzer to different applications and languages it is thus sufficient to train the component on the applicationand language-specific data sets as compared to translating and adapting the rule-based grammar by hand. A stochastic method for natural language understanding was developed and applied to the following tasks and languages: the American ATIS (Air Travel Information Services), the French MASK (Multimodal-Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk) applications and the English Spontaneous Speech Task (ESST). The ATIS and MASK tasks deal with information retrieval for air and train travel, a domain of human-machine interaction. ESST deals with human-to-human interaction in which two people negotiate to schedule a meeting. In ATIS, the corpora were semantically labeled by the rule-based component which was developed for the French language at the Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur (France). This same component was ported to English during the course of this thesis. For MASK, the semantic labels were obtained by integrating the stochastic component into the labeling process using bootstrapping and manual correction. For ESST, the model parameters were trained on a corpus of semantic tree-based represen-
A review and update on the current status of retinal prostheses (bionic eye).

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND The Argus® II is the first retinal prosthesis approved for the treatment of patients blind from retinitis pigmentosa (RP), receiving CE (Conformité Européenne) marking in March 2011 and FDA approval in February 2013. Alpha-IMS followed closely and obtained CE marking in July 2013. Other devices are being developed, some of which are currently in clinical trials. SOURCES OF DATA A systematic literature search was conducted on PubMED, Google Scholar and IEEExplore. AREAS OF AGREEMENT Retinal prostheses play a part in restoring vision in blind RP patients providing stable, safe and long-term retinal stimulation. AREAS OF CONTROVERSY Objective improvement in visual function does not always translate into consistent improvement in the patient's quality of life. Controversy exists over the use of an external image-capturing device versus internally placed photodiode devices. GROWING POINTS The alpha-IMS, a photovoltaic-based retinal prosthesis recently obtained its CE marking in July 2013. AREAS TIMELY FOR DEVELOPING RESEARCH Improvement in retinal prosthetic vision depends on: (i) improving visual resolution, (ii) improving the visual field, (iii) developing an accurate neural code for image processing and (iv) improving the biocompatibility of the device to ensure longevity.
SB431542 inhibited cigarette smoke extract induced invasiveness of A549 cells via the TGF-β1/Smad2/MMP3 pathway

Lung cancer has high morbidity and mortality rates. Smoking is involved in the pathogenesis of lung cancer, and tobacco smoke may increase tumor cell invasion and metastasis. The effects of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) on the carcinoma human alveolar basal epithelial A549 cell line were investigated. A549 cells were exposed to increasing concentrations of CSE for 12, 24 and 48 h, and the transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) signal pathway was inhibited by addition of SB431542, a TGF-β1 receptor antagonist. The proliferation of A549 cells was assayed by a Cell Counting kit-8, invasiveness was assayed using Transwell chambers, and TGF-β1, phosphorylated mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 2 (p-Smad2), and matrix metalloproteinase 3 (MMP3) levels was assessed by western blot analysis. The invasiveness of A549 cells and the expression of TGF-β1, pSmad2, and MMP-3 were significantly increased by CSE (P<0.05). The effects of CSE were abrogated by SB431542 (P<0.05). In conclusion, CSE increased the invasiveness of A549 cells and its effects were abrogated by SB431542 and the TGF-β1/Smad2/MMP-3 pathway may have been involved.
A Model of the Law Firm

While recently some significant theoretical contributions have been made in the economics of crime, punishment and courts by Gary Becker [3], Issac Ehrlich [9], William Landes [16] and Gordon Tullock [21], little theoretical analysis has been done on the legal service delivery system of the private sector.1 The present study hopes to fill part of this vacuum by formally presenting a model of the law firm and examining implications of its behavior. In this paper, a model of the law firm is examined which performs services for its clients under contractual arrangements much like sharecroppers in the share tenancy cases, and operates in such a way as to maximize the net income of its members like producers' cooperatives. The paper is divided into four sections. The first describes the nature of the law firm and legal services. The basic model of the law firm is constructed in the second section, and the third analyzes the extended model. Summary and conclusions are stated in the last section.
Intrinsic and extrinsic regulation of human skin melanogenesis and pigmentation

In human skin, melanogenesis is a tightly regulated process. Indeed, several extracellular signals are transduced via dedicated signalling pathways and mostly converge to MITF, a transcription factor integrating upstream signalling and regulating downstream genes involved in the various inherent mechanisms modulating melanogenesis. The synthesis of melanin pigments occurs in melanocytes inside melanosomes where melanogenic enzymes (tyrosinase and related proteins) are addressed with the help of specific protein complexes. The melanosomes loaded with melanin are then transferred to keratinocytes. A more elaborate level of melanogenesis regulation comes into play via the action of non‐coding RNAs (microRNAs, lncRNAs). Besides this canonical regulation, melanogenesis can also be modulated by other non‐specific intrinsic pathways (hormonal environment, inflammation) and by extrinsic factors (solar irradiation such as ultraviolet irradiation, environmental pollution). We developed a bioinformatic interaction network gathering the multiple aspects of melanogenesis and skin pigmentation as a resource to better understand and study skin pigmentation biology.
Efficient and retargetable SIMD translation in a dynamic binary translator

The single‐instruction multiple‐data (SIMD) computing capability of modern processors is continually improved to deliver ever better performance and power efficiency. For example, Intel has increased SIMD register lengths from 128 bits in streaming SIMD extension to 512 bits in AVX‐512. The ARM scalable vector extension supports SIMD register length up to 2048 bits and includes predicated instructions. However, SIMD instruction translation in dynamic binary translation has not received similar attention. For example, the widely used QEMU emulates guest SIMD instructions with a sequence of scalar instructions, even when the host machines have relevant SIMD instructions. This leaves significant potential for performance enhancement. We propose a newly designed SIMD translation framework for dynamic binary translation, which takes advantage of the host's SIMD capabilities. The proposed framework has been built in HQEMU, an enhanced QEMU with a separate thread for applying LLVM optimizations. The current prototype supports ARMv7, ARMv8, and IA32 guests on the X86‐64 AVX‐2 host. Compared with the scalar‐translation version HQEMU, our framework runs up to 1.84 times faster on Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation 2006 CFP benchmarks and up to 6.81 times faster on selected real applications.
Tail nerve electrical stimulation-induced walking training promotes restoration of locomotion and electrophysiology in rats with chronic spinal cord injury

Functional recovery is the final goal in the treatment of spinal cord injury. However, to date, few treatment strategies have demonstrated significant locomotor improvement in animal experiments. By using tail nerve electrical stimulation (TANES) as an open-field locomotor training method combined with glial scar ablation and cell transplantation, we have successfully promoted locomotor recovery in rats with chronic spinal cord contusion injury. The purpose of the present study is to further investigate the mechanism of TANES and its effect on electrophysiology. Spinal cord segment T10 of female, adult Long-Evans rats was contused using the NYU impactor device with 25 mm height setting. After injury, rats were randomly divided into three groups. Group I was used as a control without any treatment, group II and group III were subjected to basic treatment including glial scar ablation and transplantation of olfactory lamina propria 6 weeks after injury, and group III received TANES-induced open-field locomotor training weekly after basic treatment. All animals were allowed to survive 22 weeks, except some rats which were transected. Basso, Beattie, and Bresnahan (BBB) open-field locomotor rating scale, horizontal ladder rung walking test, and electrophysiological tests were used to assess the restoration of functional behavior and conduction. Results showed that TANES significantly improves locomotor recovery and spinal cord conduction, reflex, as well as significantly reduces the occurrence of autophagia. Additionally, after transection, trained rats still maintained higher BBB score than that of control rats. This may be related to the activity-dependent plasticity promoted by TANES-induced locomotor training.
Recovery of hormone sensitivity after salvage brachytherapy for hormone refractory localized prostate cancer.

PURPOSE Recent work has demonstrated the return of hormone sensitivity after palliative chemotherapy in androgen independent prostate cancer. We wished to establish whether a similar phenomenon existed in patients with no exposure to chemotherapy. MATERIALS AND METHODS A review of "hormone resistant" patients who had received salvage brachytherapy for localized prostate cancer after previous external beam radiotherapy was undertaken. Three patients with subsequent biochemical relapse responded to the rechallenge with hormonal treatment. RESULTS The series of patients presented here demonstrates this phenomenon occurs after salvage brachytherapy with no exposure to chemotherapy. Recovery of sensitivity is demonstrated both to androgen deprivation and to androgen receptor antagonism. The recovery of hormone sensitivity was surprisingly durable, ranging from eight months to over twenty-one months. CONCLUSIONS Hormone sensitivity may be recovered after salvage brachytherapy. Potential mechanisms underlying these observations are discussed and the likely central role of the activity of the androgen receptor highlighted. The relevance of these findings to the management of advanced prostate cancer is considered including thoughts on the practice of intermittent anti-androgen therapy.
Short Dental Implants (≤7mm) Versus Longer Implants in Augmented Bone Area: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Aim: The aim of this systematic review was to compare the survival rate and the marginal bone loss between short implants (≤7 mm) placed in the atrophic area and longer implants placed in the augmented bone area of posterior regions of maxillaries. Methods: Electronic search using three databases was performed up to May 2017 to identify Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) assessing short implants survival with a minimal follow-up of 12 months post-loading. For the meta-analysis, a Risk Difference (RD) with the 95% Confidence Interval (CI) was used to pool the results of implant failure rate for each treatment group. For the marginal bone changes, Mean Differences (MD) with 95% CI were calculated. Results: Seven randomized controlled trials met the inclusion criteria, being included in qualitative and quantitative analyses. The RD between the short implant group and the control group was -0.02 (95% CI: -0.04 to 0.00), I2=0 and Chi2=3.14, indicating a favorable survival rate for short implant, but with no statistical significance (p=0.09). Discussion: For marginal bone loss, the mean difference was -0,13 (95%CI: -0.22 to -0.05), favoring the test group with statistical significance (p=0.002). The studies showed more heterogeneity for bone loss compared to survival rate. Short and longer implants showed similar survival rates after one year of loading, however the marginal bone loss around short implants was lower than in longer implants sites. Conclusion: Placement of implants ≤7 mm of length was found to be a predictable alternative for the rehabilitation of atrophic posterior regions, avoiding all the disadvantages intrinsic to bone augmentation procedures.