Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comprehensive Study of Patients with Surgically Treated Lumbar Spinal Stenosis with Neurogenic Claudication

Background: The relationship between objective measurements and subjective symptoms of patients with spinal stenosis and the degree of narrowing of the spinal canal is not clear. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patients undergoing surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis and intermittent neurogenic claudication with functional testing, quantitative imaging, and patient self-assessment.Methods: Sixty-two patients with lumbar spinal stenosis and neurogenic claudication were prospectively enrolled in the study. All underwent preoperative magnetic resonance imaging and/or computed tomography myelography, and all were treated with decompressive surgery and were followed for a minimum of two years. The evaluation included treadmill and bicycle exercise tests as well as patient self-assessment with use of the Oswestry Disability Index and a visual analog pain scale preoperatively and postoperatively.Results: Preoperatively fifty-eight (94%) of the patients had a positive result (provocation of symptoms) on the treadmill test and twenty-seven (44%) had a positive result on the bicycle test, whereas postoperatively six and twelve, respectively, had positive results. The mean preoperative scores on the Oswestry Disability Index and visual analog pain scale were 58.4 and 7.1, respectively. Postoperatively, these scores decreased to 21.1 and 2.3, respectively, and both decreases were significant (p < 0.05). Forty-seven (76%) of the patients were seen to have central stenosis on the preoperative imaging studies; forty-one of them had a cross-sectional area of the dural tube of <100 mm 2 at at least one level and twelve had a cross-sectional area of <100 mm 2 at at least two levels.Conclusions: A positive treadmill test was consistent with a diagnosis of spinal stenosis and neurogenic claudication in >90% of the patients preoperatively. Following surgical decompression of the lumbar spinal stenosis, more functional improvement was demonstrated by the treadmill test than by the bicycle test. The scores on the Oswestry Disability Index and visual analog pain scale also improved postoperatively. The severity of central canal narrowing at a single level does not appear to limit the postoperative improvement in either functional ability or patient self-assessment. Patients with multilevel central stenosis were, on the average, older and walked a shorter distance preoperatively and postoperatively, although the improvement in their postoperative self-assessment scores was similar to that of patients with single-level stenosis.
Disease associated protein complex detection: A multi-objective evolutionary approach

Biological networks such as protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs) play a crucial role in cell biology of an organism and are widely studied in bioinformatics and biostatistics. Scores of high throughput techniques are used to identify PPIs which are then used to compile PPINs of an organism. Detection of protein complexes that are associated with diseases is another ongoing challenge. Consequently, methods have been developed that use PPINs in order to predict or identify disease associated protein complexes. Here we have modeled this task as a multi-objective optimization problem and developed a multi-objective evolutionary framework called MODAPROC to detect protein complexes associated with human diseases. MODAPROC considered three objective functions viz., density, number of outward interactions, and disease associations of a protein complex. Density and disease associations are to be maximized while outward interactions are minimized here. We have analyzed the resulting protein complexes and their association with different disorders. Moreover, we have detected some key properties of the disease associated protein complexes as well as classified them according to different disorders. MODAPROC is fast, robust, and provides a good analysis tool for finding and discovering obscure disease specific gene clusters and can be extended using other domain specific objective functions.
Automatic Detection of Facial Landmarks from AU-coded Expressive Facial Images

The present aim was to develop a fully automatic feature-based method for expression-invariant detection of facial landmarks from still facial images. It is a continuation of our earlier work where we found that some certain muscle contractions made a deteriorating effect on the feature-based landmark detection especially in the lower face. Taking into account this crucial facial behavior, we introduced improvements to the method that allowed facial landmarks to be fully automatically detected from expressive images of high complexity. In the method, information on local oriented edges was utilized to compose edge maps of the image at two levels of resolution. The landmark candidates resulted from this step were further verified by edge orientation matching. We used knowledge on face geometry to find the proper spatial arrangement of the candidates. The results obtained demonstrated a high overall performance of the method while testing a wide range official displays.
The Approach for Action Recognition Based on the Reconstructed Phase Spaces

This paper presents a novel method of human action recognition, which is based on the reconstructed phase space. Firstly, the human body is divided into 15 key points, whose trajectory represents the human body behavior, and the modified particle filter is used to track these key points for self-occlusion. Secondly, we reconstruct the phase spaces for extracting more useful information from human action trajectories. Finally, we apply the semisupervised probability model and Bayes classified method for classification. Experiments are performed on the Weizmann, KTH, UCF sports, and our action dataset to test and evaluate the proposed method. The compare experiment results showed that the proposed method can achieve was more effective than compare methods.
Real and Financial Development Traps

The direction of causality between financial intermediation and real economic progress has been a source of discussion over long periods of time. Instead of exogenously siding with one particular direction a priori, this paper provides a different treatment on this debate by considering the interaction between financial and real sectors to be not just a question of causality, but an issue of co-evolution. In order to pursue this, I integrate features of the intermediary sector, namely financial frictions among its participants, with the standard overlapping generations model of growth. I find that depending on technical conditions, the introduction of financial frictions can cause a delay in the actual formation of the financial sector, which in turn delays the development of the real sector. Moreover, it is also possible that under certain parametric configurations, the economy’s growth trajectory will never be able to support the endogenous emergence of the financial sector, and consequently, real economic activities are forever retarded. I am greatly indebted to my late dissertation supervisor, Bruce Smith, for inspiring me to study macroeconomics in general and encouraging me to pursue the study of financial intermediation. I started working on this project under his supervision, but I was deprived of the privilege of completing it with him. I will forever miss him, as a caring mentor and a loving friend. I am also very grateful for the gracious support from Scott Freeman, Joydeep Bhattacharya, and Peter Wilcoxen. I thank them deeply for helping me cope with my advisor’s passing. Finally, I need to thank Mike Sadler, Malathi Velamuri and Macroeconomics Seminar participants at the University of Texas at Austin for their comments. Any remaining errors are mine.
A Wideband Receiver with Adaptive Strong Interference Suppression

In this paper, a wideband receiver with high dynamic range is proposed. At the front end of the proposed receiver, a sensing waveform is used to sense the input signal. And by adjusting the sensing waveform so as to project the interference to zero, the receiver can eliminate the strong interference signal adaptively before sampling. Both the theoretic analysis and simulation show that this method can suppress the interference signal effectively and improve the sampling accuracy of the weak desired signal when the instantaneous dynamic range of the input signal is larger than the dynamic range of the ADC’s quantizer. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.
The Effect of a Moderately Low and High Carbohydrate Intake on Crossfit Performance

CrossFit is a metabolically demanding strength and conditioning method which performance may benefit from a carbohydrate (CHO)-rich diet. This study investigated the effect of three consecutive days of high CHO intake on CrossFit performance and corresponding metabolically -related variables in strength trained individuals. Eighteen subjects with a CHO intake of <6 g/kg/day were randomly assigned into a CHO (n = 9) or control (C) group (n =9) and underwent a 9-day training protocol. During days 1, 5, and 9, performance was measured as repetitions completed during a 12 minute CrossFit workout. Oxygen consumption (VO2), respiratory exchange ratio (RER), and blood lactate (BL) were also measured. Days 6–8, the CHO group increased CHO intake from <6 g/kg/day to 6–8 g/kg/day; the C group maintained their current intake of <6 g/kg/day. On days 6 and 7 both groups performed CrossFit workouts followed by a day of rest prior to day 9. There was a significant increase in repetitions completed in both groups in day 9 (vs. means score of day 1 + 5) (p = 0.002), but no differences between C and CHO groups (p = 0.111). However, the CHO group displayed a 15.2 repetition increase (+10.9%) in day 9, compared to 5.7 (+4.2%) by the C group. VO2, RER, and BL were not influenced by the experimental intervention. Our results suggest that the CrossFit-embraced practice of moderately-low CHO diets may be adequate in CHO during short periods of training, however, given the noted trend, extended training periods may be effected.
Interactive comment on “ The sensitivity of secondary organic aerosol component partitioning to the predictions of component properties – Part 1 : A systematic evaluation of some available estimation techniques ” by G .

We’d like to thank the referee for their useful comments and fully understand the hesitancy to recommend publication given the content of the review. We believe that the recommendations for major changes is entirely based on misunderstanding of the intentions of the paper and the methodology employed. It appears obvious that our explanation of both is inadequate and this has been fully revised in the updated manuscript.
Overcoming Informational Barriers to International Resource Allocation: Prices and Ties

Incomplete information in the international market creates difficulty in matching agents with productive opportunities and interferes with the ability of prices to allocate scarce resources across countries. Ties through international information-sharing networks or parent-subsidiary relationships overcome this matching friciton. When the difference between country factor-endowment ratios is small relative to the share of agents that is tied, efficient arbitrage and the standard properties of neoclassical trade models prevail. When the difference between factor-endowment ratios is sufficiently large, this equilibrium breaks down and countries become partially insulated from each other in the sense that the price (wage) of each country's immobile resource is more sensitive to changes in domestic than foreign supply and trade liberalization causes less convergence in relative resource prices. The model is applied to the debate over the impact of international trade on domestic wages, and extended to address whether ties can reduce world welfare through trade diversion and to compare the effect of ties on trade in differentiated versus homogenous products.
Research on a Software Fault Injection Model Based on Program Mutation

This paper researches the classification of fault injection technology, software fault injection and program-oriented mutation testing technology. On the basis of existing work, this paper puts forward a software fault injection model based on program mutation with the idea of fault injection, analyses the key technology of the model, and compares with other fault injection techniques. The model in this paper can be used to evaluate the adequacy of the test suite by using mutation testing, which provides a basis to improve the fault test suite. To some extent, applying this model can improve the ability of fault detection and provide some useful reference data for software reliability evaluation.
Adapting generic trackers for tracking faces

A novel system for adapting generic trackers for long-term face tracking in unconstrained videos is proposed. The system treats the tracker as a black box. The only requirement is that the tracker can be reinitialized when needed. The system consists of a generic face detector trained offline and a validator trained online which helps to distinguish the target face from other people's faces and the background. We demonstrate this method on three state-of-the-art generic trackers: OpenTLD, Struck and MIL. For the experiments we use public face videos as well as our own dataset. In all our experiments our face tracking adaptation method shows superior results in comparison with the original trackers.
An algorithm for the illegal copying detection of digital documents

Document copy detection has very important application in both intellectual property protection and information retrieval. In this paper, a novel reconstruction method and the corresponding overlap measuring algorithm based on the thought of mathematical expression is presented. Firstly, the documents are expressed in the aspect of component granularities; and then the text attribute vector space model was established according to the statistic of component frequencies; after that, the overlap value is obtained. Results of experiments showed that the algorithm is available.
Investigation of colour size effect for colour appearance assessment

Three psychophysical experiments were conducted to investigate the colour appearance changes between different sizes under various media or viewing conditions. The results are highly consistent that when increase stimulus size, the colour will appear to be lighter and more colourful with little change in hue. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 36, 201–209, 2011;
Modular Composition of Coordination Services

Coordination services like ZooKeeper, etcd, Doozer, and Consul are increasingly used by distributed applications for consistent, reliable, and high-speed coordination. When applications execute in multiple geographic regions, coordination service deployments trade-off between performance, (achieved by using independent services in separate regions), and consistency. We present a system design for modular composition of services that addresses this trade-off. We implement ZooNet, a prototype of this concept over ZooKeeper. ZooNet allows users to compose multiple instances of the service in a consistent fashion, facilitating applications that execute in multiple regions. In ZooNet, clients that access only local data suffer no performance penalty compared to working with a standard single ZooKeeper. Clients that use remote and local ZooKeepers show up to 7x performance improvement compared to consistent solutions available today.
Analysis of the Relationship Between ADIPOR1 Variants and the Susceptibility of Chronic Metabolic Diseases in a Northeast Han Chinese Population

Objective: Shared genetic variants in ADIPOR1 have been identified as closely related to coronary artery disease (CAD), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and T2D with CAD susceptibility, suggesting that these variants are strong candidates for the common soil hypothesis. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the relationship between ADIPOR1 variants and the susceptibility to CAD, T2D, and T2D with CAD in other populations. Materials and Methods: A case–control study was conducted which included three case cohorts [CAD (n = 316), T2D (n = 295), T2D with CAD (n = 302)], and a control cohort (n = 268) from a population in northeast China. Six ADIPOR1 single-nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped by high-resolution melting and polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism. Results: We confirmed that the shared variant, rs3737884*G, in ADIPOR1 is associated with CAD, T2D, and T2D with CAD (p-value range: 6.54E-6–1.82E-5, odds ratio [OR] range: 1.770–1.844) and that rs16850797*C is associated with T2D and T2D with CAD (p-value range: 0.001–0.001, OR range: 1.529–1.571). We also found that a novel shared variant, rs7514221*C, is associated with an increased susceptibility to CAD, T2D, and T2D with CAD (p-value range: 0.002–0.004, OR range: 1.194–2.382) in this population. Conclusions: ADPOR1 variants, rs3737884*G and rs7514221*C, may be shared risk factors associated with CAD, T2D, and T2D with CAD in a population of northeast China.
Overexpression of Cysteine-String Proteins inDrosophila Reveals Interactions with Syntaxin

Cysteine-string proteins (CSPs) are associated with secretory vesicles and critical for regulated neurotransmitter release and peptide exocytosis. At nerve terminals, CSPs have been implicated in the mediation of neurotransmitter exocytosis by modulating presynaptic calcium channels; however, studies of CSPs in peptidergic secretion suggest a direct role in exocytosis independent of calcium transmembrane fluxes. Here we show that the individual expression of various CSP isoforms in Drosophila similarly rescues the loss of evoked neurotransmitter release at csp null mutant motor nerve terminals, suggesting widely overlapping functions for each isoform. Thus, the structural difference of CSP variants may not explain the opposing putative functions of CSP in neurotransmitter and peptide exocytosis. Consistently, the individual overexpression of each CSP isoform in wild-type Drosophila shows similar effects such as impaired viability and interference with wing and eye development. The dominant effects caused by the overexpression of CSP are suppressed by the simultaneous overexpression of syntaxin-1A but not by the coexpression of SNAP-25. Although overexpression of CSP itself has no apparent effect on the synaptic physiology of larval motor nerve terminals, it fully suppresses the decrease of evoked release induced by the overexpression of syntaxin-1A. A direct protein–protein interaction of CSP with syntaxin is further supported by coimmunoprecipitations of syntaxin with CSP and by protein binding assays using recombinant fusion proteins. Together, the genetic and biochemical interactions of CSP and syntaxin-1A suggest that CSP may chaperone or modulate protein–protein interactions of syntaxin-1A with either calcium channels or other components of the regulatory machinery mediating depolarization-dependent neurotransmitter exocytosis.
Using Molecular Markers to Help Predict Who Will Fail after Radical Prostatectomy

Recent phase III trial data clearly demonstrate that adjuvant therapy can reduce recurrence and increase survival after prostatectomy for prostate cancer. There is great interest in being able to accurately predict who is at risk of failure to avoid treating those who may not benefit. The standard markers consisting of prostate specific antigen (PSA), Gleason score, and pathological stage are not very specific, so there is an unmet need for other markers to aid in prognostic stratification. Numerous studies have been conducted with various markers and more recently gene signatures, but it is unclear whether any of them are really useful. We conducted a comprehensive review of the literature to determine the current status of molecular markers in predicting outcome after radical prostatectomy.
Connectionism-inspired knowledge modeling for industrial systems

This paper introduces connectionistic concept grid (CCG), which is used for representation and reasoning of engineering knowledge applied for the industrial systems. The paper also presents the Crossword tool which was used for computer aided modelling and execution of CCG. CCG is able to provide semantic descriptions of objects and processes and was developed to overcome limitations of earlier knowledge approaches in expression of temporal relations between objects. The scope of this article includes an explanation of the principles for the proposed approach. The execution principles of the model, description of the tool and simple illustrative scenario of industrial equipment used in automated assembly line are discussed. It is assumed that the equipment interfaces are implemented as web services.
Older Patients Are Immunocompromised by Cytokine Depletion and Loss of Innate Immune Function After HIP Fracture Surgery

Purpose/Introduction: We have examined the immune status of elderly patients who underwent surgery for a hip fracture, an injury associated with poor postoperative outcomes, to identify specific immune defects. Methods: In a cohort observational study, 16 patients undergoing surgery for hip fractures had immune function evaluation prior to surgery, and then at 3 and 7 days postoperatively, using flow cytometry for phenotype and for monocyte and granulocyte phagocytic function and respiratory burst. Serum samples were stored and batch analyzed using a human cytokine 25-plex panel. Results: We report significant loss of innate immune function, related specifically to reduced granulocyte numbers by day 7 (P < .0001, flow cytometry; P < .05 white blood cells), and although granulocyte ability to take up opsonized Escherichia coli was increased (P < .05), the ability of those cells to generate a respiratory burst was reduced at days 3 and 7 (P < .05). Monocyte respiratory burst was also significantly reduced (P < .05). Serum cytokine levels indicated very poor T-cell function. Conclusion: We have demonstrated that the antimicrobial immune response is profoundly reduced after surgery in elderly patients with hip fractures. The effect was sustained up to 7 days postoperatively, identifying these patients as particularly vulnerable to bacterial infections.
Regulation of adult neurogenesis by excitatory input and NMDA receptor activation in the dentate gyrus

The effects of afferent input and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor activation on neurogenesis were examined in an intact system, the rat dentate gyrus, where neurons are naturally born in the adult. In the adult dentate gyrus, activation of NMDA receptors rapidly decreased the number of cells synthesizing DNA, whereas blockade of NMDA receptors rapidly increased the number of cells in the S phase identified with 3H- thymidine. Acute treatment with NMDA receptor antagonists increased the birth of neurons and increased the overall density of neurons in the granule cell layer. Lesion of the entorhinal cortex, the main excitatory afferent population to the granule neurons, also increased the birth of cells in the dentate gyrus. These results suggest that adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the rat is altered by afferent input, via NMDA receptors, and may be regulated naturally by endogenous excitatory amino acids.