Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Brain Morphometry and the Neurobiology of Levodopa-Induced Dyskinesias: Current Knowledge and Future Potential for Translational Pre-Clinical Neuroimaging Studies

Dopamine replacement therapy in the form of levodopa results in a significant proportion of patients with Parkinson’s disease developing debilitating dyskinesia. This significantly complicates further treatment and negatively impacts patient quality of life. A greater understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID) is therefore crucial to develop new treatments to prevent or mitigate LID. Such investigations in humans are largely confined to assessment of neurochemical and cerebrovascular blood flow changes using positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, recent evidence suggests that LID is associated with specific morphological changes in the frontal cortex and midbrain, detectable by structural MRI and voxel-based morphometry. Current human neuroimaging methods however lack sufficient resolution to reveal the biological mechanism driving these morphological changes at the cellular level. In contrast, there is a wealth of literature from well-established rodent models of LID documenting detailed post-mortem cellular and molecular measurements. The combination therefore of advanced neuroimaging methods and rodent LID models offers an exciting opportunity to bridge these currently disparate areas of research. To highlight this opportunity, in this mini-review, we provide an overview of the current clinical evidence for morphological changes in the brain associated with LID and identify potential cellular mechanisms as suggested from human and animal studies. We then suggest a framework for combining small animal MRI imaging with rodent models of LID, which may provide important mechanistic insights into the neurobiology of LID.
Cost-Effectiveness of Treating Upper Limb Spasticity Due to Stroke with Botulinum Toxin Type A: Results from the Botulinum Toxin for the Upper Limb after Stroke (BoTULS) Trial

Stroke imposes significant burdens on health services and society, and as such there is a growing need to assess the cost-effectiveness of stroke treatment to ensure maximum benefit is derived from limited resources. This study compared the cost-effectiveness of treating post-stroke upper limb spasticity with botulinum toxin type A plus an upper limb therapy programme against the therapy programme alone. Data on resource use and health outcomes were prospectively collected for 333 patients with post-stroke upper limb spasticity taking part in a randomized trial and combined to estimate the incremental cost per quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained of botulinum toxin type A plus therapy relative to therapy alone. The base case incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of botulinum toxin type A plus therapy was £93,500 per QALY gained. The probability of botulinum toxin type A plus therapy being cost-effective at the England and Wales cost-effectiveness threshold value of £20,000 per QALY was 0.36. The point estimates of the ICER remained above £20,000 per QALY for a range of sensitivity analyses, and the probability of botulinum toxin type A plus therapy being cost-effective at the threshold value did not exceed 0.39, regardless of the assumptions made.
Estimation of the probability of karst cavities collapse under technogenic cyclic loads below the fatigue limit

The paper deals with the phenomenon of fatigue formation in soils over karst cavities under cyclic loading near the fatigue limit. A method is proposed for determining the stress state of the integumentary earth arising during the considered technogenic cyclic loads. Currently, the assessment of the possibility of karst cavities collapse is performed on the basis of static models, without taking into account the dynamic technogenic load. Especially in the case of slow cyclic loads of low intensity, which do not directly lead to collapse of the soil above the karst cavities. However, these actions change the bearing capacity of soils that are not taken into account at the exploration stage and are not laid in the project documentation for the construction of facilities in karst-dangerous areas. A technique for estimating pre-crisis states based on joint processing of active geoelectric and seismoacoustic geodynamic control signals is proposed.
Convexity Properties of Detection Probability Under Additive Gaussian Noise: Optimal Signaling and Jamming Strategies

In this correspondence, we study the convexity properties for the problem of detecting the presence of a signal emitted from a power constrained transmitter in the presence of additive Gaussian noise under the Neyman-Pearson (NP) framework. It is proved that the detection probability corresponding to the α-level likelihood ratio test (LRT) is either strictly concave or has two inflection points such that the function is strictly concave, strictly convex, and finally strictly concave with respect to increasing values of the signal power. In addition, the analysis is extended from scalar observations to multidimensional colored Gaussian noise corrupted signals. Based on the convexity results, optimal and near-optimal time sharing strategies are proposed for average/peak power constrained transmitters and jammers. Numerical methods with global convergence are also provided to obtain the parameters for the proposed strategies.
Efficient schemes for parallel communication

A fundamental problem in the theory of parallel computation is to find an efficient interconnection pattern between N processors that minimizes the number of lines entering or leaving each processor while enabling fast communication between the processors. A family of Balanced communication schemes for connecting N processors with only a constant number of lines entering or leaving each processor is defined. It is proved that this network topology enables a fully distributed algorithm to route in parallel N packets each located in distinct processors to their distinct destinations in O(log2N) steps. Thus we give an optimal solution to the above problem.
Utilizing Noise Addition for Data Privacy, an Overview

The internet is increasingly becoming a standard for both the production and consumption of data while at the same time cyber-crime involving the theft of private data is growing. Therefore in efforts to securely transact in data, privacy and security concerns must be taken into account to ensure that the confidentiality of individuals and entities involved is not compromised, and that the data published is compliant to privacy laws. In this paper, we take a look at noise addition as one of the data privacy providing techniques. Our endeavor in this overview is to give a foundational perspective on noise addition data privacy techniques, provide statistical consideration for noise addition techniques and look at the current state of the art in the field, while outlining future areas of research.
Clinical Features and Risk Factors of Oedematous Mycobacterium ulcerans Lesions in an Australian Population: Beware Cellulitis in an Endemic Area

Introduction Oedematous lesions are a less common but more severe form of Mycobacterium ulcerans disease. Misdiagnosis as bacterial cellulitis can lead to delays in treatment. We report the first comprehensive descriptions of the clinical features and risk factors of patients with oedematous disease from the Bellarine Peninsula of south-eastern Victoria, Australia. Methods Data on all confirmed Mycobacterium ulcerans cases managed at Barwon Health, Victoria, were collected from 1/1/1998–31/12/2012. A multivariate logistic regression model was used to assess associations with oedematous forms of Mycobacterium ulcerans disease. Results Seventeen of 238 (7%) patients had oedematous Mycobacterium ulcerans lesions. Their median age was 70 years (IQR 17–82 years) and 71% were male. Twenty-one percent of lesions were WHO category one, 35% category two and 41% category three. 16 (94%) patients were initially diagnosed with cellulitis and received a median 14 days (IQR 9–17 days) of antibiotics and 65% required hospitalization prior to Mycobacterium ulcerans diagnosis. Fever was present in 50% and pain in 87% of patients. The WCC, neutrophil count and CRP were elevated in 54%, 62% and 75% of cases respectively. The median duration of antibiotic treatment was 84 days (IQR 67–96) and 94% of cases required surgical intervention. On multivariable analysis, there was an increased likelihood of a lesion being oedematous if on the hand (OR 85.62, 95% CI 13.69–535.70; P<0.001), elbow (OR 7.83, 95% CI 1.39–43.96; p<0.001) or ankle (OR 7.92, 95% CI 1.28–49.16; p<0.001), or if the patient had diabetes mellitus (OR 9.42, 95% CI 1.62–54.74; p = 0.02). Conclusions In an Australian population, oedematous Mycobacterium ulcerans lesions present with similar symptoms, signs and investigation results to, and are commonly mistakenly diagnosed for, bacterial limb cellulitis. There is an increased likelihood of oedematous lesions affecting the hand, elbow or ankle, and in patients with diabetes.
Management-Employee Relations, Firm Size and Job Satisfaction

This paper investigates the job satisfaction in relation to managerial attitudes towards employees and firm size using the linked employer-employee survey results in Britain. We first investigate the management-employee relationships and the firm size using maximum likelihood probit estimation. Next various measures of job satisfaction are related to the management-employee relations via maximum likelihood ordered probit estimates. Four measures of job satisfaction that have not been used often are considered. They are satisfaction with influence over job; satisfaction with amount of pay; satisfaction with sense of achievement and satisfaction with respect from supervisors. Main findings indicate that management-employee relationships are less satisfactory in the large firms than in the small firms. Job satisfaction levels are lower in large firms. Less satisfactory management-employee relationships in the large firms may be a major source of the observed lower level of job satisfaction in them. These results have important policy implications from the point of view of the firm management while achieving the aims of their organizations in particular in the large firms in the area of management-employee relationships. Improving the management-employee relations in large firms will increase employee satisfaction in many respects as well as increase productivity and reduce turnover. The nature of the management-employee relations with firm size and job satisfaction has not been investigated before.
Nutritional education for management of osteodystrophy (NEMO) trial: Design and patient characteristics, Lebanon

This study aims to determine the effect of a trained dedicated dietitian on clinical outcomes among Lebanese hemodialysis (HD) patients: and thus demonstrate a viable developing country model. This paper describes the study protocol and baseline data. The study was a multicenter randomized controlled trial with parallel-group design involving 12 HD units: assigned to cluster A (n = 6) or B (n = 6). A total of 570 patients met the inclusion criteria. Patients in cluster A were randomly assigned as per dialysis shift to the following: Dedicated Dietitian (DD) (n = 133) and Existing Practice (EP) (n = 138) protocols. Cluster B patients (n = 299) received Trained Hospital Dietitian (THD) protocol. Dietitians of the DD and THD groups were trained by the research team on Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative nutrition guidelines. DD protocol included: individualized nutrition education for 2 hours/month/HD patient for 6 months focusing on renal osteodystrophy and using the Trans-theoretical theory for behavioral change. EP protocol included nutrition education given to patients by hospital dietitians who were blinded to the study. The THD protocol included nutrition education to patients given by hospital dietitian as per the training received but within hospital responsibilities, with no set educational protocol or tools. Baseline data revealed that 40% of patients were hyperphosphatemics (> 5.5 mg/dl) with low dietary adherence and knowledge of dietary P restriction in addition to inadequate daily protein intake (58.86%± 33.87% of needs) yet adequate dietary P intake (795.52 ± 366.94 mg/day). Quality of life (QOL) ranged from 48-75% of full health. Baseline differences between the 3 groups revealed significant differences in serum P, malnutrition status, adherence to diet and P chelators and in 2 factors of the QOL: physical and social functioning. The data show room for improvement in the nutritional status of the patients. The NEMO trial may be able to demonstrate a better nutritional management of HD patients.
Power Management Techniques For Control-flow Intensive Designs

This paper presents a low-overhead controller-based powermanagement technique that re-specifies control signals to reconfigureexisting multiplexer networks and functional units to minimizeunnecessary activity. We demonstrate that conventional powermanagement techniques may often not be suited to control-flowintensive designs, and provide a comprehensive analysis of thepotential negative effects of power management on circuit delay,glitching activity at control and data path signals, and formationof false combinational cycles. We present techniques to performpower management through controller re-specification while avoidingthe above negative effects, and demonstrate the efficiency ofthe techniques through experiments.
Spectral and photometric evolution of young stellar populations: The impact of gaseous emission at various metallicities

We include gaseous continuum and line emission into our galev models for the spectral and photometric evolution of Simple Stellar Populations (SSPs) for various metallicities in the range 0:02 Z=Z 2:5. This allows to extend them to significantly younger ages than before. They now cover the age range from 4 Myr all through 14 Gyr. We point out the very important contributions of gaseous emission to broad band fluxes and their strong metallicity dependence during very early evolutionary stages of star clusters, galaxies or subgalactic fragments with vigorous ongoing star formation. Emission- line contributions are commonly seen in these actively star-forming regions. Models without gaseous emission cannot explain their observed colors at all, or lead to wrong age estimates. We use up-to-date Lyman continuum (=Lyc) emission rates and decided to use recent empirical determinations of emission line ratios relative to H for subsolar metallicities. We justify this approach for all situations where no or not enough spectral information is available to determine all the parameters required by photoionization models. The eects of gaseous line and continuum emission on broad band fluxes are shown for dierent metallicities and as a function of age. In addition to the many filter systems already included in our earlier models, we here also include the HST NICMOS and Advanced Camera for Surveys (=ACS) filter systems.
The Novel Approach for Control of Induction Motors based on Zero-Crossing Times Signal of Stator Currents

The purpose of this study is to illustrate a new method for sensorless vector control of induction motors. This approach uses zero-crossing times (ZCT) signal of stator current to estimate rotor speed. ZCT signal contains useful information, which can be used for estimation of rotor speed and resistance. We have used this information for online estimation of rotor speed. To avoid time-consuming fast Fourier transformation (FFT) analysis of ZCT signal, we have used switchable high order Butterworth filters in order to extract rotor frequency. Simulation result has expressed good performance of this simple and inexpensive sensorless vector control of induction motors
Silicon photomultipliers for improved detection of low light levels in miniature near-infrared spectroscopy instruments

Silicon photomultipliers are novel solid state photodetectors that recently became commercially available. The goal of this paper was to investigate their suitability for low light level detection in miniaturized functional near-infrared spectroscopy instruments. Two measurement modules with a footprint of 26×26 mm2 were built, and the signal-to-noise ratio was assessed for variable source-detector separations between 25 and 65 mm on phantoms with similar optical properties to those of a human head. These measurements revealed that the signal-to-noise ratio of the raw signal was superior to an empirically derived design requirement for source-detector separations up to 50 mm. An arterial arm occlusion was also performed on one of the authors in vivo, to induce reproducible hemodynamic changes which confirmed the validity of the measured signals. The proposed use of silicon photomultipliers in functional near-infrared spectroscopy bears large potential for future development of precise, yet compact and modular instruments, and affords improvements of the source-detector separation by 67% compared to the commonly used 30 mm.
Pricing and Informational Efficiency of the Mib30 Index Options Market. An Analysis with High Frequency Data

We analyse the pricing and informational efficiency of the Italian market for options written on the most important stock index, the MIB30. We report that a striking percentage of the data consists of option prices violating basic no-arbitrage conditions. This percentage declines when we relax the no-arbitrage restrictions to accommodate the presence of bidsask spreads and other frictions but never becomes negligible. We also investigate the informational efficiency of the MIBO and conclude that option prices are poor predictors of the volatility of MIB30 returns. This conclusion is robust to a number of statistical and sampling methods. Copyright Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, 2004
Calculation of beams of positrons, neutrons, and protons associated with terrestrial gamma ray flashes

Positron beams have been observed by the Fermi satellite to be correlated with lightning leaders, and neutron emissions have been attributed to lightning and to laboratory sparks as well. Here we discuss the cross sections to be used for modeling these emissions, and we calculate the emissions of positrons, neutrons, and also protons from lightning leaders. Neutrons were first erroneously attributed to fusion reactions, but the photonuclear reaction responsible for neutrons should create protons as well. We predict them here; they have not been observed yet. In the paper, we first revisit the model for stepped lightning leaders of Xu, Celestin, and Pasko with updated cross sections, we analyze the spatial and energetic structure of the electron beam, and we calculate the spectrum of the generated gamma ray beam at 16 km altitude. Then we review the scattering processes of photons with emphasis on the processes above 5 MeV, in particular the photon energy losses in Compton scattering events and the generation of leptons and hadrons. We provide simple approximations for photon energy loss and lepton and hadron production for any photon with energy above 5 MeV passing through an arbitrary air layer. Finally, we launch a gamma ray beam with the earlier calculated spectrum of the negative stepped lightning leader from 16 km upward and calculate the production and energy of positrons, neutrons, and protons as well as the propagation of positrons.
The impact of applications' I/O strategies on the performance of the Lustre parallel file system

Parallel applications present multiple approaches regarding the management of data. Due to specific characteristics of parallel file systems, some approaches will provide better performance than others due to a better matching to the system's internals. One common situation is when each instance of an application accesses exclusive data stored in the file system. This paper studies some I/O techniques for this situation and evaluates them on the Lustre file system. We provide a guide to help developers tune their application to extract the best performance out of Lustre. Our results show expressive gains in performance related with the choice of access pattern of the application. We present considerations on operation granularity, intra-node concurrency and temporal behaviour of the application.
Multi-sensor detection schemes using spatio-temporal models

This thesis is focused on multi-sensor event detection schemes in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In the WSN, sensors individually take their observations, do some initial local processing and then send the result to the fusion center. Apart from this information, the fusion center may have prior information such as the known positions of sensors, the topology of the network or structures, features and patterns present in the received observations. In order to achieve better detection performance, the fusion center must exploit all this prior information in the best possible way. Keeping this in mind, in this thesis we focus on the exploitation of available a-priori information with the aim of developing enhanced and robust detection mechanisms. For instance, we exploit the fact that in most applications, the signal emitted from the event becomes a local physical phenomenon that only a"ects a small subset of sensors. Moreover, the a"ected sensors will be located close to the event as well as close to each other in the form of a spatial cluster. Hence, novel detection schemes are presented with a two-fold motivation: ! rst, the exploitation of the relevant set of sensors, which helps in rejecting the noise; second, to take advantage of the signal correlation by using a-priori information about the positions of sensors. Based on these results, we move one step further and concentrate on the exploitation of both spatial and temporal correlation in the received observations. In this case, we propose detection schemes that explore di"erent matrix structures embedded in the observed covariance matrix, which naturally arise due to the underlying topologies of the multiple sensors. Numerical results are presented for all of the proposed schemes that show important advantages compared to traditional schemes.
Addiction and Choice: Theory and New Data

Addiction’s biological basis has been the focus of much research. The findings have persuaded experts and the public that drug use in addicts is compulsive. But the word “compulsive” identifies patterns of behavior, and all behavior has a biological basis, including voluntary actions. Thus, the question is not whether addiction has a biology, which it must, but whether it is sensible to say that addicts use drugs compulsively. The relevant research shows most of those who meet the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for addiction quit using illegal drugs by about age 30, that they usually quit without professional help, and that the correlates of quitting include legal concerns, economic pressures, and the desire for respect, particularly from family members. That is, the correlates of quitting are the correlates of choice not compulsion. However, addiction is, by definition, a disorder, and thereby not beneficial in the long run. This is precisely the pattern of choices predicted by quantitative choice principles, such as the matching law, melioration, and hyperbolic discounting. Although the brain disease model of addiction is perceived by many as received knowledge it is not supported by research or logic. In contrast, well established, quantitative choice principles predict both the possibility and the details of addiction.