Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anatomical Variation of the Circle of Willis in Males and Females on 3D MR Angiograms

Higher prevalence of circle of Willis anomalies were detected in brains with signs of ischemic infarction, so the aim of this work is to study the anatomical variation of the circle of Willis in a trial to detect sex‐related differences as regard the component vessels and their average diameters. Sixty males and 60 females' healthy control adult subjects were observed. In addition, ten cadavers' brains were obtained from the Anatomy department Faculty of Medicine, ASU for examination of the circle of Willis. The results indicated that, the anterior part of the circle was completed in 70% males and 75% females of the study sample. The most common variant of the anterior part was the single anterior communicating artery followed by the hypoplastic or absent anterior communicating artery. The posterior part of the circle was % males and 58% females. The most common 48completed in anatomical variant was the bilateral posterior communicating arteries, followed by the unilateral posterior communicating artery. An entirely complete circle was found only in 45% of the entire population; and it was higher in females than in males. The vessels diameters were smaller in females than in males except for the posterior communicating artery. The present study shows the amazing great variability of the anatomy of the circle of Willis in the asymptomatic persons. This has to be considered during radiological interpretation and would be reported in the current anatomy text to be aware of all these normal variations.
Violence, Condom Breakage, and HIV Infection Among Female Sex Workers in Benin, West Africa

Objective To examine the relationship between violence, condom breakage, and HIV prevalence among female sex workers (FSWs). Methods Data were obtained from the 2012 cross-sectional integrated biological and behavioral survey conducted in Benin. Multivariable log-binomial regression was used to estimate the adjusted prevalence ratios of HIV infection and condom breakage in relation to violence toward FSWs. A score was created to examine the relationship between the number of violence types reported and HIV infection. Results Among the 981 women who provided a blood sample, HIV prevalence was 20.4%. During the last month, 17.2%, 13.5%, and 33.5% of them had experienced physical, sexual, and psychological violence, respectively. In addition, 15.9% reported at least 1 condom breakage during the previous week. There was a significant association between all types of violence and HIV prevalence. The adjusted prevalence ratios of HIV were 1.45 (95% confidence interval [95% CI], 1.05–2.00), 1.42 (95% CI, 1.02–1.98), and 1.41 (95% CI, 1.08–1.41) among those who had ever experienced physical, sexual, and psychological violence, respectively. HIV prevalence increased with the violence score (P = 0.002, test for trend), and physical and sexual violence were independently associated with condom breakage (P = 0.010 and P = 0.003, respectively). Conclusions The results show that violence is associated with a higher HIV prevalence among FSWs and that condom breakage is a potential mediator for this association. Longitudinal studies designed to analyze this relationship and specific interventions integrated to current HIV prevention strategies are needed to reduce the burden of violence among FSWs.
HIV treatment cascade in MSM, people who inject drugs, and sex workers

Purpose of reviewPeople who inject drugs (PWID), sex workers, and MSM simultaneously bear a high burden of HIV and stigma and discrimination. The purpose of this review was to summarize recent information about the understanding of the HIV care cascade among PWID, sex workers, and MSM populations around the globe. Recent findingsA review of the published literature relating to the care cascade in these three key populations was conducted. Data on the care cascade among key populations are sparse, particularly for PWID and sex workers. In the 12 countries in which a study or report of the care cascade was available stratified by these populations, all three populations have care cascade outcomes that are far below the 90–90–90 target set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) for 2020. Culturally tailored interventions, including colocation of services and peer navigators, can improve care cascade outcomes among key populations. SummaryKey populations’ care cascade outcomes must be included in international reporting metrics to expand cascade data for these groups. Improving care cascade outcomes in these key populations through culturally tailored interventions should be a priority in the coming years.
Effects of solid‐phase extraction of plasma in measuring gut metabolic hormones in fasted and fed blood of lean and diet‐induced obese rats

Glucagon‐like peptide‐1 (GLP‐1), peptide YY (3‐36) [PYY(3‐36)], amylin, ghrelin, insulin, and leptin are thought to act as hormonal signals from periphery to brain to control food intake. Here, we determined the effects of solid‐phase extraction of plasma in measuring these hormones in blood of lean and diet‐induced obese rats. Individual enzyme‐linked immunoassays and a multiplex assay were used to measure active GLP‐1, total PYY, active amylin, active ghrelin, insulin, leptin, and total GIP in response to (1) addition of known amounts of the peptides to lean and obese plasma, (2) a large meal in lean and obese rats, and (3) intravenous infusions of anorexigenic doses of GLP‐1, PYY(3‐36), amylin, and leptin in lean rats. Extraction of lean and obese plasma prior to assays produced consistent recoveries across assays for GLP‐1, PYY, amylin, ghrelin, and insulin, reflecting losses inherent to the extraction procedure. Plasma extraction prior to assays generally revealed larger meal‐induced changes in plasma GLP‐1, PYY, amylin, ghrelin, and insulin in lean and obese rats. Plasma extraction and the multiplex assay were used to compare plasma levels of GLP‐1, PYY, and amylin after a large meal with plasma levels produced by IV infusions of anorexigenic doses of GLP‐1, PYY(3‐36), and amylin. Infusions produced dose‐dependent increases in plasma peptide levels, which were well above their postprandial levels. These results do not support the hypothesis that postprandial plasma levels of GLP‐1, PYY(3‐36), and amylin are sufficient to decrease food intake by an endocrine mechanism.
Estimating House Vacancy Rate in Metropolitan Areas Using NPP-VIIRS Nighttime Light Composite Data

House vacancy rate (HVR) is an important index in assessing the healthiness of residential real estate market. Investigating HVR by field survey requires a lot of human and economic resources. The nighttime light (NTL) data, derived from Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, can detect the artificial light from the Earth surface, and have been used to study social-economic activities. This paper proposes a method for estimating the HVR in metropolitan areas using NPP-VIIRS NTL composite data. This method combines NTL composite data with land cover information to extract the light intensity in urbanized areas. Then, we estimate the light intensity values for nonvacancy areas, and use such values to calculate the HVR in corresponding regions. Fifteen metropolitan areas in the United States have been selected for this study, and the estimated HVR values are validated using corresponding statistical data. The experimental results show a strong correlation between our derived HVR values and the statistical data. We also visualize the estimated HVR on maps, and discover that the spatial distribution of HVR is influenced by natural situations as well as the degree of urban development.
Friction measurement apparatus for touch-feel perception studies

This paper describes an investigation into a new design of friction test apparatus with an artificial fingertip. In order to mimic a human finger stroking on surfaces, this special friction apparatus consists of an artificial fingertip, a linear flexure mechanism and a reciprocal stage. The contact force and friction force are measured simultaneously. The detailed design of major parts will be provided and the calibration of the apparatus will be discussed in the paper. Then experiments were carried out to measure surface frictions of aluminum, steel with different roughness, under different contact forces and different stroking speeds. The friction measurement results demonstrate that the designed artificial finger can be used to represent the real human fingertip for friction tests.
The risk of seizure recurrence after a first unprovoked afebrile seizure in childhood: an extended follow-up.

OBJECTIVE To assess the long-term recurrence risks after a first unprovoked seizure in childhood. METHODS In a prospective study, 407 children who presented with a first unprovoked seizure were then followed for a mean of 6.3 years from the time of first seizure. RESULTS One hundred seventy-one children (42%) experienced subsequent seizures. The cumulative risk of seizure recurrence was 29%, 37%, 42%, and 44% at 1, 2, 5, and 8 years, respectively. The median time to recurrence was 5.7 months, with 53% of recurrences occurring within 6 months, 69% within 1 year, and 88% within 2 years. Only 5 recurrences (3%) occurred after 5 years. On multivariable analysis, risk factors for seizure recurrence included a remote symptomatic etiology, an abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG), a seizure occurring while asleep, a history of prior febrile seizures, and Todd's paresis. In cryptogenic cases, the risk factors were an abnormal EEG and an initial seizure during sleep. In remote symptomatic cases, risk factors were a history of prior febrile seizures and age of onset younger than 3 years. Risk factors for late recurrences (after 2 years) were etiology, an abnormal EEG, and prior febrile seizures in the overall group and an abnormal EEG in the cryptogenic group. These are similar to the risk factors for early recurrence. CONCLUSIONS The majority of children with a first unprovoked seizure will not have recurrences. Children with cryptogenic first seizures and a normal EEG whose initial seizure occurs while awake have a particularly favorable prognosis, with a 5-year recurrence risk of only 21%. Late recurrences do occur but are uncommon.
A Specific Endoplasmic Reticulum Export Signal Drives Transport of Stem Cell Factor (Kitl) to the Cell Surface*

Stem cell factor, also known as Kit ligand (Kitl), belongs to the family of dimeric transmembrane growth factors. Efficient cell surface presentation of Kitl is essential for the migration, proliferation, and survival of melanocytes, germ cells, hemopoietic stem cells, and mastocytes. Here we demonstrate that intracellular transport of Kitl to the cell surface is driven by a motif in the cytoplasmic tail that acts independently of the previously described basolateral sorting signal. Transport of Kitl to the cell surface is controlled at the level of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and requires a C-terminal valine residue positioned at a distance of 19–36 amino acids from the border between the transmembrane and cytoplasmic domains. Deletion or substitution of the valine with other hydrophobic amino acids results in ER accumulation and reduced cell surface transport of Kitl at physiological expression levels. When these mutant proteins are overexpressed in the ER, they are transported by bulk flow to the cell surface albeit at lower efficiency. A fusion construct between Kitl and the green fluorescent protein-labeled extracellular domain of a temperature-sensitive mutant of vesicular stomatitis virus G protein revealed the valine-dependent recruitment into coat protein complex II-coated ER exit sites and vesicular ER to Golgi transport in living cells. Thus the C-terminal valine defines a specific ER export signal in Kitl. It is responsible for the capture of Kitl at coat protein complex II-coated ER exit sites, leading to subsequent cell surface transport under physiological conditions.
Deep Neural Networks for Appliance Transient Classification

Smart plugs are useful devices for measuring the appliance load, but intrusive. It has long been the goal of energy companies and researchers to monitor the load of all household appliances in a non-intrusive manner, using only a single smart meter. We show that deep neural networks can be extremely effective in this regard. Automatic feature learning can pick out distinctive load-dependent shapes in the time series power data, enabling identification of appliance signatures. We find that properly arranged deep neural networks are capable of multi-class appliance classification, outperforming a traditional multiclass classification algorithm. We evaluate on the public PLAID dataset, and compare results with features extracted from sampling frequencies in the 1Hz-1kHz range. We show that adding features extracted from high frequency sampling significantly improves classification performance over data obtained at typical smart meter frequencies.
Complete 1-loop test of AdS/CFT

We analyze nested Bethe ansatz (NBA) and the corresponding finite size corrections. We find an integral equation which describes these corrections in a closed form. As an application we considered the conjectured Beisert-Staudacher (BS) equations with the Hernandez-Lopez dressing factor where the finite size corrections should reproduce generic one (worldsheet) loop computations around any classical superstring motion in the AdS5 × S5 background with exponential precision in the large angular momentum of the string states. Indeed, we show that our integral equation can be interpreted as a sum over all physical fluctuations and thus prove the complete 1-loop consistency of the BS equations. In other words we demonstrate that any local conserved charge (including the AdS Energy) computed from the BS equations is indeed given at 1-loop by the sum of charges of fluctuations up to exponentially suppressed contributions in the large angular momentum os the string states. We also point out where precisely we loose the exponential terms in our ab initio analysis. Contrary to all previous studies of finite size corrections, which were limited to simple configurations inside rank 1 subsectors, our treatment is completely general.
Weighing the Economic Evidence: Guidelines for Critical Assessment of Cost-Effectiveness Analyses

Evidence-based medicine is concerned with the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. I Increasingly, health care providers are being asked to weigh economic evidence alongside clinical evidence when making decisions about the care of their patients. Although the idea that physicians should consider economics in their decision making is viewed as an anathema to many,2 this chapter takes the position that today's environment makes some consideration of economics inevitable. If one accepts the notion that economic considerations are unavoidable in clinical decision making, it seems reasonable then to take a position that only high-quality economic evidence should be used, in the spirit that evidence-based medicine is used to weigh clinical evidence. This article is devoted to giving clinicians the tools to evaluate economic evidence and determine whether that evidence is suitable for consideration in their clinical practice. This article is written for clinicians who are not well-versed in the purposes and methods cost-effectiveness analysis. It takes a position that costeffectiveness studies have much in common with the clinical literature that most physicians are comfortable reading and critically appraising. Thus, we will highlight important similarities and differences between sound economic and sound clinical evaluations. Some of the subtler aspects of cost-effectiveness analysis (eg, discounting of future costs and benefits, comparative measures of benefit) are not emphasized here. The interested reader can find greatly expanded discussions of these issues, along
Key Recycling in Authentication

In their seminal work on authentication, Wegman and Carter propose that to authenticate multiple messages, it is sufficient to reuse the same hash function as long as each tag is encrypted with a one-time pad. They argue that because the one-time pad is perfectly hiding, the hash function used remains completely unknown to the adversary. Since their proof is not composable, we revisit it using a composable security framework. It turns out that the above argument is insufficient: if the adversary learns whether a corrupted message was accepted or rejected, information about the hash function is leaked, and after a bounded finite amount of rounds it is completely known. We show however that this leak is very small: Wegman and Carter's protocol is still ε-secure, if ε-almost strongly universal2 hash functions are used. This implies that the secret key corresponding to the choice of hash function can be reused in the next round of authentication without any additional error than this ε. We also show that if the players have a mild form of synchronization, namely that the receiver knows when a message should be received, the key can be recycled for any arbitrary task, not only new rounds of authentication.
COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR IMAGE TEXTURE ANALYSIS IN PhD STUDENTS LABORATORY

bstract: The following paper reports results on building software for image texture nalysis. The main goal was to create an efficient tool for quantitative analysis of magnetic esonance images. The software was written to compute a variety of texture features parameters) based on image histogram, co-occurrence and run-length matrices, image radient, auto-regressive model and wavelet transform. Calculated features may be resented in a form of text list or in images (feature maps).
Solving Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations on Octree grids : towards Application to Wind Turbine Blade Modelling

The subject of the thesis is the development of a numerical tool that allows to model the flow around wind blades. We are interested in the solving of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on octree grids, where the smallest scales close to the wall have been modelled by the use of the so-called Wall Functions. An automatic Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) process has been developed in order to refine the mesh in the areas where the vorticity is higher. The structural model of a real wind blade has also been implemented and coupled with the fluid model. Indeed, an application of the numerical tool is the study of the effects of wind gusts on blades. An experimental work has been conducted with an in-service wind turbine with the measurement of wind speed upstream. This data will allow to calibrate and validate the numerical models developed in the thesis.
Numerical fits to important rates in high temperature astrophysical plasmas

We give simple but accurate numerical fits to various two-body rates in relativistic thermal plasmas, in the temperature range kTe ~ 50 keV–1MeV. The processes we discuss are bremsstrahlung, Coulomb heating and electron-positron pair production and annihilation. In particular we present a fit to the thermal electronelectron bremsstrahlung spectrum which is accurate to better than 5 per cent. We also include the results of some other workers, for completeness. Our results are suitable for semi-analytic or computer modelling of hot plasmas.
Neural Network, Component of Measuring Set for Error Reduction

The paper describes the use of neural network as a component of measuring set for error reduction (nonlinearity). The scope of interest is elastomagnetic sensor used for measuring of massive pressure force (of range about 200 kN). Nonlinearity and hysteresis errors are main limitations of elastomagnetic sensor use. The hysteresis causes ambiguity of transfer characteristic and with it related impossibility of exact conversion of output sensor voltage into measured force. The function of the neural network is to regulate the basic metrological characteristics of sensor in order to achieve the smallest deviation from an ideal transfer characteristic. The assumption of the use of neural network as data-conditioning block is non-linear dependency of sensor output from input quantity.
2 FRW equations in the background of TRNdS Black Holes

We consider the brane universe in the bulk background of the topological ReissnerNordström de Sitter black holes. We show that the thermodynamic quantities (including entropy) of the dual CFT take usual special forms expressed in terms of Hubble parameter and its time derivative at the moment , when the brane crosses the black hole horizon or the cosmological horizon. We obtain the generalized Cardy-Verlinde formula for the CFT with an charge and cosmological constant, for any values of the curvature parameter k in the Friedmann equations. E-mail: rezakord@yahoo.com E-mail:mansouri@sharif.edu
On the Connection Between Compression Learning and Scenario Based Single-Stage and Cascading Optimization Problems

We investigate the connections between compression learning and scenario based optimization. We first show how to strengthen, or relax the consistency assumption at the basis of compression learning and provide novel learnability conditions for the underlying algorithms. We then consider different constrained optimization problems affected by uncertainty represented by means of scenarios. We show that the compression learning perspective provides a unifying framework for scenario based optimization, since the issue of providing guarantees on the probability of constraint violation reduces to a learning problem for an appropriately chosen algorithm that satisfies some consistency assumption. To illustrate this, we revisit the scenario approach within the developed context. Moreover, using the compression learning machinery we provide novel results on the probability of constraint violation for the class of cascading optimization problems.
A novel self-healing composite made of thermally reversible polymer and shape memory alloy reinforcement

A novel self-healing polymer composite made of the thermally reversible polymer matrix and shape memory alloy reinforcement is introduced. The healing system is designed in such a way that by heating the structure, activation of shape recovery in shape memory alloy and chemical reversible reactions in polymer occur simultaneously. In the present healing method, the required crack closure force is provided by activating the embedded shape memory alloy wires in the polymer. Both superelastic and shape memory effects of shape memory alloy are considered on the fracture behavior of composites by investigating the passive and active reinforcement methods, respectively. Double cleavage drilled compression tests are utilized in order to study the fracture behavior and healing efficiency of composites. In the case of passive reinforcement, embedding 2% prestrained shape memory alloy wires caused 15% enhancement in the fracture toughness of composites. In this prestrain level, results of the micromechanical model are in good agreement with experiments. Promising results are also obtained for healing efficiency of composites in the case of active reinforcement. The average healing efficiency of 92% is achieved for shape memory alloy-reinforced thermally reversible epoxy composites. The excellent healing performance, without the necessity of external force and pressure, makes the present healing method as an ideal candidate for utilizing self-healing composite structures.