Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prospective study evaluating the incidence of bacteraemia and bacteruria in afebrile and febrile neutropaenic dogs undergoing chemotherapy

Abstract The purpose of this prospective study was to determine the incidence and character of bacteraemia and bacteruria in afebrile and febrile neutropaenic dogs undergoing cytotoxic chemotherapy. Fifty‐five neutropaenic dogs presenting to the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital were enrolled for a total of 57 neutropaenic episodes. The overall incidence of bacteraemia was 12.3% (n = 7/57). Three afebrile dogs and four febrile dogs were bacteraemic; this difference was not significant (P = 0.6968). The overall incidence of bacteruria was 7.5% (n = 4/53). Two afebrile dogs and two febrile dogs were bacteruric; this difference was not significant (P = 1.0). Of the positive blood cultures, the majority of organisms cultured (n = 6/7) were gram‐positive organisms with one gram‐negative organism. Three of the positive blood cultures showed in vitro resistance to more than one antimicrobial agent. Clinical parameters (age, body weight, heart rate, rectal temperature, neutrophil count, haematocrit and platelet count) were not predictive of bacteraemia. The results of this study were not sufficient to justify the use of blood cultures as a first‐line diagnostic test for neutropaenic patients. Blood cultures may have utility in individual case management for a minority of patients in guiding antibiotic choice in the case of resistant bacterial infections. Blood cultures may serve as a tool for antimicrobial de‐escalation, although further study is needed.
Internal charge‐phosphor field characteristics of alternating‐current thin‐film electroluminescent devices

The internal charge versus phosphor field (Q–Fp) technique is proposed as a method for characterization of the electrical properties of alternating‐current thin‐film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) devices. Q–Fp analysis provides direct information about the internal behavior of the ACTFEL device. The steady‐state field and internal conduction, polarization, leakage, and relaxation charges may be readily deduced from a Q–Fp plot.
Approachability in unknown games: Online learning meets multi-objective optimization

In the standard setting of approachability there are two players and a target set. The players play repeatedly a known vector-valued game where the first player wants to have the average vector-valued payoff converge to the target set which the other player tries to exclude it from this set. We revisit this setting in the spirit of online learning and do not assume that the first player knows the game structure: she receives an arbitrary vector-valued reward vector at every round. She wishes to approach the smallest ("best") possible set given the observed average payoffs in hindsight. This extension of the standard setting has implications even when the original target set is not approachable and when it is not obvious which expansion of it should be approached instead. We show that it is impossible, in general, to approach the best target set in hindsight and propose achievable though ambitious alternative goals. We further propose a concrete strategy to approach these goals. Our method does not require projection onto a target set and amounts to switching between scalar regret minimization algorithms that are performed in episodes. Applications to global cost minimization and to approachability under sample path constraints are considered.
Color Filtering Localization for Three-Dimensional Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Accurate localization of mobile nodes has been an important and fundamental problem in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). The detection information returned from a mobile node is meaningful only if its location is known. In this paper, we propose two localization algorithms based on color filtering technology called PCFL and ACFL. PCFL and ACFL aim at collaboratively accomplishing accurate localization of underwater mobile nodes with minimum energy expenditure. They both adopt the overlapping signal region of task anchors which can communicate with the mobile node directly as the current sampling area. PCFL employs the projected distances between each of the task projections and the mobile node, while ACFL adopts the direct distance between each of the task anchors and the mobile node. The proportion factor of distance is also proposed to weight the RGB values. By comparing the nearness degrees of the RGB sequences between the samples and the mobile node, samples can be filtered out. The normalized nearness degrees are considered as the weighted standards to calculate the coordinates of the mobile nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed methods have excellent localization performance and can localize the mobile node in a timely way. The average localization error of PCFL is decreased by about 30.4% compared to the AFLA method.
Facial Phenotype in Children and Young Adults with PHOX2B–Determined Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome: Quantitative Pattern of Dysmorphology

Congenital central hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS) is caused by mutations in PHOX2B, which is essential for maturation of the neural crest into the autonomic nervous system and is expressed in the dorsal rhombencephalon, a region that gives rise to facial structures. Digital photographs of 45 individuals with PHOX2B-confirmed CCHS, and 45 matched controls were analyzed for 17 linear and 6 angular measurements, and 9 derived indices. Paired t tests were used to compare group means, correlation was calculated between PHOX2B polyalanine expansion number and facial measures, and stepwise logistic regression was used to predict case-control and genotype status. CCHS cases differed significantly from controls on 13 variables (6 after p value correction: nasolabial angle, upper lip height, lateral lip height, facial index, upper facial index, and presence of inferior inflection of the lateral segment of the upper lip vermillion border). Five variables were able to predict correctly 85.7% of CCHS cases and 82.2% of controls: upper lip height, biocular width, upper facial height, nasal tip protrusion, and inferior inflection of the upper lip vermillion border. A negative relationship between number of repeats and four anthropometric measures was observed: mandible breadth, nasolabial angle, lateral lip height, and mandible-face width index. These results suggest a characteristic facial phenotype in children and young adults with CCHS, due to an expansion mutation in PHOX2B.
NoRM: No‐Reference Image Quality Metric for Realistic Image Synthesis

Synthetically generating images and video frames of complex 3D scenes using some photo‐realistic rendering software is often prone to artifacts and requires expert knowledge to tune the parameters. The manual work required for detecting and preventing artifacts can be automated through objective quality evaluation of synthetic images. Most practical objective quality assessment methods of natural images rely on a ground‐truth reference, which is often not available in rendering applications. While general purpose no‐reference image quality assessment is a difficult problem, we show in a subjective study that the performance of a dedicated no‐reference metric as presented in this paper can match the state‐of‐the‐art metrics that do require a reference. This level of predictive power is achieved exploiting information about the underlying synthetic scene (e.g., 3D surfaces, textures) instead of merely considering color, and training our learning framework with typical rendering artifacts. We show that our method successfully detects various non‐trivial types of artifacts such as noise and clamping bias due to insufficient virtual point light sources, and shadow map discretization artifacts. We also briefly discuss an inpainting method for automatic correction of detected artifacts.
Uptake and metabolism of exogenous glycosphingolipids by cultured cells.

Exogenous glycosphingolipids, especially gangliosides, are used to study transport and metabolism of their endogenous counterparts as well as their role in cell adhesion, cell recognition and signal transduction. Unlike monodispersed solutes, in aqueous media ganglioside molecules aggregate into micelles (or bilayer structures) with a very low critical micellar concentration. Upon addition to cells in culture, exogenous gangliosides bind to the cell surface in three operationally defined modes: loosely associated micelles removable by serum; tightly attached micelles removable by proteases such as trypsin; and ganglioside molecules inserted into the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane. As shown by a biotin-labeled derivative of the ganglioside GM1 these inserted molecules are endocytosed and transported to intralysosomal membranes for catabolism. The benefit from using (partially) nondegradable as well as semi-truncated glycosphingolipids in transport studies is discussed.
Shape initialization without ground truth for face alignment

The shape initialization is a crucial step for face alignment. In the literature, many approaches use the ground truth points to compute the bounding box. However, it is not always possible to detect an accurate bounding box in real applications due to various adverse factors. In this work, an effective initialization approach for face alignment is proposed. Firstly a modified Deformable Part Models (DPM) is used to estimate the face pose and the bounding box to obtain an initial shape. Then by detecting the two pupils, the roll rotation of the face is measured to correct the initial shape. To further increase the robustness and accuracy of face alignment, multiple initial shapes for each face are generated, then each one is refined by a cascade regression-based approach and we can get multiple shape estimations. Finally a better final shape is obtained by fusing the multiple estimations via the structured SVM learning. Experiments on challenging datasets and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods validate our proposed method in unconstrained environment.
The Risk for Myocardial Infarction With Cyclooxygenase-2 Inhibitors: A Population Study of Elderly Adults

BACKGROUND Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) selective inhibitors have been marketed since 1999 as safer alternatives to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Debate about their cardiac safety has culminated in the recent withdrawal of rofecoxib. Additional studies are needed to better understand this risk and to determine whether this safety concern represents a class effect. OBJECTIVE To assess the influence of various NSAIDs on the risk for a first myocardial infarction (MI). DESIGN Population-based, retrospective cohort study analyzed using a time-matched, nested case-control approach. SETTING Quebec, Canada. PARTICIPANTS 113,927 elderly persons without previous MI and newly treated with an NSAID between 1 January 1999 and 30 June 2002. MEASUREMENTS NSAID exposure and occurrence of MI assessed by using Quebec's administrative health databases. RESULTS Compared with no use of NSAIDs in the year preceding the event, current use of rofecoxib was associated with an increased risk for an acute MI (rate ratio [RR], 1.24 [95% CI, 1.05 to 1.46]) that was more pronounced at higher doses (RR, 1.73 [CI, 1.09 to 2.76]). The concomitant use of aspirin appears to decrease the risk associated with low-dose rofecoxib (RR, 1.00 [CI, 0.77 to 1.28]) but not with high-dose rofecoxib (RR, 2.36 [CI, 1.27 to 4.39]). No increased risks were observed with celecoxib (RR, 0.99 [CI, 0.85 to 1.16]) or the other NSAIDs. LIMITATIONS The study could not completely account for all potential confounders, including over-the-counter use of aspirin and ibuprofen. CONCLUSIONS These results provide evidence of an increased risk for acute MI in current users of rofecoxib among elderly persons with no history of MI. This risk appears greater at higher doses. Aspirin use mitigates the risk associated with low-dose but not high-dose rofecoxib. There was no evidence of an increased risk with the other NSAIDs.
A utility-approached radio resource allocation algorithm for downlink in OFDMA cellular systems

In this paper, we propose a utility-approached radio resource allocation (RRA) algorithm for downlink transmission in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular systems. The proposed utility-approached RRA algorithm is to efficiently allocate the radio resource to mobiles according to a utility function, which contains a rate-power function, a QoS function, and a priority function to ensure QoS requirements among heterogenous services and improve the system throughput. Also, a simulated-annealing (SA) method is applied to find out the solution within a reasonable time. Simulation result shows that the proposed utility-approached RRA algorithm can allocate the radio resource efficiently and guarantee the QoS requirements of each user under the power constraints of the OFDMA system.
Performance of different reflectance and diffuse optical imaging tomographic approaches in fluorescence molecular imaging of small animals

Optical imaging of fluorescent probes is an essential tool for investigation of molecular events in small animals for drug developments. In order to get localization and quantification information of fluorescent labels, CEA-LETI has developed efficient approaches in classical reflectance imaging as well as in diffuse optical tomographic imaging with continuous and temporal signals. This paper presents an overview of the different approaches investigated and their performances. High quality fluorescence reflectance imaging is obtained thanks to the development of an original "multiple wavelengths" system. The uniformity of the excitation light surface area is better than 15%. Combined with the use of adapted fluorescent probes, this system enables an accurate detection of pathological tissues, such as nodules, beneath the animal's observed area. Performances for the detection of ovarian nodules on a nude mouse are shown. In order to investigate deeper inside animals and get 3D localization, diffuse optical tomography systems are being developed for both slab and cylindrical geometries. For these two geometries, our reconstruction algorithms are based on analytical expression of light diffusion. Thanks to an accurate introduction of light/matter interaction process in the algorithms, high quality reconstructions of tumors in mice have been obtained. Reconstruction of lung tumors on mice are presented. By the use of temporal diffuse optical imaging, localization and quantification performances can be improved at the price of a more sophisticated acquisition system and more elaborate information processing methods. Such a system based on a pulsed laser diode and a time correlated single photon counting system has been set up. Performances of this system for localization and quantification of fluorescent probes are presented.
Fast construction of test-program generators for digital signal processors

Test-program generators play a key role in hardware functional verification of large scale processors. However, in the DSP domain, the usage of full-blown test-program generators is much less popular, mainly due to the limited resources (time and money) available when developing such systems. This paper describes a work-model for the fast, low cost construction of a test-program generator for DSPs. The core technology uses Genesys, a known test program generator that, until now, has been used for the verification of large scale processor families, such as PowerPC and x86. We developed the model while using Genesys for verification of the IBM C54XDSP, a fixed-point DSP. The case study shows that it is possible to build a full test-program generator in a very short time and thus achieve better verification coverage in spite of the shorter development time.
Badge size in collared flycatchers predicts outcome of male competition over territories

The evolution of conspicuous coloration is often hypothesized to be driven by sexual selection, where colour traits may function as honest signals of individual abilities in male contest competition and female choice. However, game theory models suggest that colourful badges (i.e. energetically cheap signals) may have no function in sexually selected contests, because the value of the contested resource is too high relative to the costs of fighting. We investigated this assertion by experimentally staging male contests over nest sites (a crucial resource for attracting females) in old (>/=2 years) male collared flycatchers, Ficedula albicollisMales with a relatively large white forehead patch (i.e. a condition-dependent plumage trait displayed in male contests) enjoyed a competitive advantage in disputes over experimentally vacated territories. No other measured morphological variable predicted the outcome of such a dispute. Furthermore, the winners of the disputes acquired a female more quickly than did the losers. Thus, our results suggest that the white forehead patch of male collared flycatchers may function as a badge of status that is also used in sexually selected contests over resources. We suggest that this is because the value of the contested territory may be relatively low compared with the cost of fighting when alternative vacant sites exist in the neighbourhood.Copyright 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour1997The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour
Trophic Mechanisms for Exercise-Induced Stress Resilience: Potential Role of Interactions between BDNF and Galanin

Current concepts of the neurobiology of stress-related disorders, such as anxiety and depression emphasize disruptions in neural plasticity and neurotrophins. The potent trophic actions of exercise, therefore, represent not only an effective means for prevention and treatment of these disorders, they also afford the opportunity to employ exercise paradigms as a basic research tool to uncover the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these disorders. Novel approaches to studying stress-related disorders focus increasingly on trophic factor signaling in corticolimbic circuits that both mediate and regulate cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses to deleterious stress. Recent evidence demonstrates that the neural plasticity supported by these trophic mechanisms is vital for establishing and maintaining resilience to stress. Therapeutic interventions that promote these mechanisms, be they pharmacological, behavioral, or environmental, may therefore prevent or reverse stress-related mental illness by enhancing resilience. The present paper will provide an overview of trophic mechanisms responsible for the enhancement of resilience by voluntary exercise with an emphasis on brain-derived neurotrophic factor, galanin, and interactions between these two trophic factors.
Use of single and combined antithrombotic therapy and risk of serious upper gastrointestinal bleeding: population based case-control study

Abstract Objectives To assess the risk of serious upper gastrointestinal bleeding associated with the newer antithrombotic agents used alone or in combination with other antithrombotic drugs; to describe the trends in use of antithrombotic drugs in the background population. Design Population based case-control study. Setting Funen County, Denmark (population 470 000). Subjects 1443 cases of serious upper gastrointestinal bleeding identified during 2000-4; 57 720 age and sex matched controls. Main outcome measure Exposure to low dose aspirin, clopidogrel, dipyridamole, vitamin K antagonists, and combined antithrombotic treatment. Results Adjusted odds ratios associating drug use with upper gastrointestinal bleeding were 1.8 (95% confidence interval 1.5 to 2.1) for low dose aspirin, 1.1 (0.6 to 2.1) for clopidogrel, 1.9 (1.3 to 2.8) for dipyridamole, and 1.8 (1.3 to 2.4) for vitamin K antagonists. Corresponding figures for combined use were 7.4 (3.5 to 15) for clopidogrel and aspirin, 5.3 (2.9 to 9.5) for vitamin K antagonists and aspirin, and 2.3 (1.7 to 3.3) for dipyridamole and aspirin. Other combinations were used too infrequently to allow estimation. The number of treatment years needed to produce one excess case varied from 124 for the clopidogrel-aspirin combination to 8800 for clopidogrel alone. During the study period, exposure to combined antithrombotic regimens increased by 425% in the background population. Conclusion Antithrombotic treatment is becoming increasingly aggressive. Combined antithrombotic treatment confers particular risk and is associated with high incidence of gastrointestinal bleeding.
Nigrostriatal dopaminergic depletion produces orofacial static mechanical allodynia

Dopamine is implicated in different orofacial pain‐related diseases. The mechanisms underlying this invalidating pain are not yet understood. Therefore, the present study investigated if unilateral or bilateral lesions of the medial forebrain bundle (MFB) could induce a trigeminal static mechanical allodynia (SMA) comparable to that obtained after chronic construction injury of the infraorbital nerve (CCI‐IoN) in rats.
Fabrication of functional colloidal photonic crystals based on well-designed latex particles

Colloidal photonic crystals (PCs) have attracted a wide research interest due to their special light manipulation properties, demonstrating wide applications in optical sensing materials and various optical devices. In this paper, we review recent research progress related to the fabrication of functional colloidal PCs with tough mechanical properties, controllable wettability and anisotropic structures based on well-designed latex particles. For example, tough colloidal PCs are assembled from latex particles with hard-core and soft-shell structures, or based on a crosslinked structure among latex particles; the wettability of colloidal PCs is controlled by modifying the assembly temperature, pH, electronic potential, etc, using latex particles with well-designed surface chemical composition; the anisotropic colloidal PCs are fabricated based on the particles' anisotropic chemical composition or their response to external fields. Otherwise, large-scale fabrication of colloidal PCs by coating or printing has also been demonstrated based on the use of the latex particles with additional assembly force. This fabrication of functional colloidal PCs will greatly extend their applications in various fields.
On combination of SMOTE and particle swarm optimization based radial basis function classifier for imbalanced problems

The combination of the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and the radial basis function (RBF) classifier is proposed to deal with classification for imbalanced two-class data. In order to enhance the significance of the small and specific region belonging to the positive class in the decision region, the SMOTE is applied to generate synthetic instances for the positive class to balance the training data set. Based on the over-sampled training data, the RBF classifier is constructed by applying the orthogonal forward selection procedure, in which the classifier structure and the parameters of RBF kernels are determined using a particle swarm optimization algorithm based on the criterion of minimizing the leave-one-out misclassification rate. The experimental results on both simulated and real imbalanced data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
Microstructure/Mechanical Property Correlations in a Medium Carbon Steel

The tensile and fracture strength of a medium carbon steel containing 0.2wt%C were determined after austenitisation at 1100oC for 1 h and subsequent isothermal transformation at 700oC for 0.5, 2, 6 and 8 h. Only the specimens transformed for 0.5 and 2 h contained martensite and these were l5.67 and 7.20%, respectively. The maximum measured tensile and fracture strength were 91l and 852 MPa, respectively and these were obtained in the specimens with the most martensite (0.5 h). Although after austenitisation and subsequent isothermal transformation there was a loss in ductility, this was accompanied by a very significant improvement in tensile and fracture strength.