Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Primary ileo-anal pouch anastomosis in patients with acute ulcerative colitis

Introduction Proctocolectomy with ileal pouch-anal anastomosis (IPAA) was performed in ulcerative colitis (UC) for emergent or urgent indications in three stages. Since the three-step procedure imposes enormous demands on a patient, there was an attempt to introduce primary IPAA for urgent indications. The aim of this study was to compare early complications after Hartmann's colectomy (HC) and IPAA in a selected group of patients. Material and methods Medical records of 274 patients who underwent surgery for UC between 1996 and 2010 were retrospectively evaluated. Finally, a group of 77 patients with acute form of UC entered this study. Results All patients were divided into two groups. Group 1 consisted of 32 (42%) patients who underwent HC, whereas group 2 comprised 45 (58%) patients after IPAA. There was no postoperative mortality. Respiratory failure occurred in 8 (24%) patients after HC and in 6 (14%) patients who underwent IPAA. Intra-abdominal sepsis developed in 4 (12%) patients after HC and in 8 (17%) undergoing IPAA. Fascia dehiscence was present in 3 (8%) patients after HC and in 4 (9%) with IPAA. Bowel obstruction occurred in 1 (4%) patient after the former operation and in 3 (6%) patients after the latter one. Wound infection was diagnosed in 6 (20%) patients after HC and in 9 (20%) after IPAA. The differences between the investigated groups of patients were not statistically significant. Conclusions The IPAA could be performed for urgent indications only in the patients with no critical dilatation of the colon or with active UC but without signs of severe malnutrition.
Downregulation of transforming growth factor-β type II receptor prohibit epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in lens epithelium

Purpose Transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) is considered to be essential to induce epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) which plays central roles in wound healing in ocular fibrotic complication. The present study investigates whether small interference RNAs (siRNAs) targeting the type II receptor of TGF-β (TβRII) could be used to minimize the TGF-β action. Methods TGF-β receptor type II (TβRII) specific siRNAs designed from the Nakamura human gene sequence were used to transfect the cultured lens epithelial cells (LECs). The optimal transfection of scramble siRNA-Cy3 labeled duplexes in cultured LECs were examined by laser scanning confocal microscope and flow cytometry. TβRII protein expression and transcript levels were analyzed by immunofluorescence, western blotting, and real time PCR, respectively. Western blotting was performed to examine protein expression of fibronectin and alpha-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA). Scratch assay was used to determine cell migration. Cell morphology was observed after transfection by inverted microscope. Results The optimal transfection rate of scramble siRNA-Cy3 labeled duplexes was efficient in that nearly to 50% in cultured LECs. TβRII specific siRNAs significantly reduced the receptor transcript and protein expression in cultured LECs. The gene knockdown inhibited LECs transdifferentiation, as it abrogated the expression of fibronectin and α-SMA, and retarded cell migration on the scratch assay. In addition, after transfection with TβRII specific siRNA, the cultured LECs did not show fibroblast-like shape which was one of the feature signs of EMT. Wound scratch assays indicated that the number of cultured LECs migrated into the wounded area was significantly lower in TβRII specific siRNA treated group (12.8±3.27/7.85 mm2), compared with normal (57.8±3.06/7.85 mm2) and scrambled RNA transfected group (50.8±3.64/7.85 mm2; p<0.0001). Conclusions Our results provided additional evidence to support that TGF-β pathway was involved in the development of EMT of human posterior capsule opacification, while how TβRII was involved should be further investigated.
A network-flow based algorithm for power density mitigation at post-placement stage

In this paper, we propose a power density mitigation algorithm at post-placement stage. Our proposed framework first identifies cluster of bins with high temperature, then propagates power density away from high temperature region by balancing regional power density. The problem of balancing regional power density is modeled as a supply-demand problem and solution is obtained with minimal displacement of cells. An analytical temperature profiling algorithm is tightly integrated within the framework to constantly update the temperature profile in response to incremental perturbation to placement. Our proposed approach can effectively reduce maximum temperature compared to previous works on temperature mitigation.
User-centred design and pervasive health: A position statement from the User-Centred Healthcare Design project

The National Health Service in the UK, like many other public heath services worldwide, is facing a number of key challenges. Among them are an ageing population and a rising incidence of chronic health conditions. In this position paper we describe the User-Centred Healthcare Design (UCHD) project, a 5-year collaboration between universities and health Service Trusts in South Yorkshire, UK. We suggest that new models of healthcare that re-define the institutional and social context of care are required if we are to meet the challenge of chronic illness. We argue that user-centred design is a timely and necessary way of bringing about not only service improvement but also innovation and strategic change to healthcare provision in the UK. We describe our progress to date on the UCHD project, our commitment to placing patient experience at the centre of design, and our initial experiences of using an experience-based co-design method to improve outpatient services in a Sheffield hospital.
Internet-Based HIV Prevention With At-Home Sexually Transmitted Infection Testing for Young Men Having Sex With Men: Study Protocol of a Randomized Controlled Trial of Keep It Up! 2.0

Background Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections are increasing among young men who have sex with men (YMSM), yet few HIV prevention programs have studied this population. Keep It Up! (KIU! ), an online HIV prevention program tailored to diverse YMSM, was developed to fill this gap. The KIU! 2.0 randomized controlled trial (RCT) was launched to establish intervention efficacy. Objective The objective of the KIU! study is to advance scientific knowledge of technology-based behavioral HIV prevention, as well as improve public health by establishing the efficacy of an innovative electronic health (eHealth) prevention program for ethnically and racially diverse YMSM. The intervention is initiated upon receipt of a negative HIV test result, based on the theory that testing negative is a teachable moment for future prevention behaviors. Methods This is a two-group, active-control RCT of the online KIU! intervention. The intervention condition includes modules that use videos, animation, games, and interactive exercises to address HIV knowledge, motivation for safer behaviors, self-efficacy, and behavioral skills. The control condition reflects HIV information that is readily available on many websites, with the aim to understand how the KIU! intervention improves upon information that is currently available online. Follow-up assessments are administered at 3, 6, and 12 months for each arm. Testing for urethral and rectal sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is completed at baseline and at 12-month follow-up for all participants, and at 3- and 6-month follow-ups for participants who test positive at baseline. The primary behavioral outcome is unprotected anal sex at all follow-up points, and the primary biomedical outcome is incident STIs at 12-month follow-up. Results Consistent with study aims, the KIU! technology has been successfully integrated into a widely-used health technology platform. Baseline enrollment for the RCT was completed on December 30, 2015 (N=901), and assessment of intervention outcomes is ongoing at 3-, 6-, and 12-month time points. Upon collection of all data, and after the efficacy of the intervention has been evaluated, we will explore whether the KIU! intervention has differential efficacy across subgroups of YMSM based on ethnicity/race and relationship status. Conclusions Our approach is innovative in linking an eHealth solution to HIV and STI home testing, as well as serving as a model for integrating scalable behavioral prevention into other biomedical prevention strategies. Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01836445; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01836445 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6myMFlxnC)
THE LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER : TOUCHSTONE FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SCHOOLS

Echoing a goal that has long been held by the school library media field, these authors capture both the promise and the uncertainty that characterize any fond hope. In fact, many scholars and other leaders in the field have been vocal champions of a strong relationship linking the library media specialist, various learning technologies, and instructional design; however, the realities of life in the public schools have presented serious obstacles to the full flowering of this relationship. Today, as at other periods in the evolution of the library media field, internal and external changes affecting the school environment suggest that the library media specialist is poised to assume a much more active role as an instructional designer/instructional technologist than has been possible in the past. Understanding the nature and history of the field will enable school library media professionals and others to make a realistic assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead and to devise strategies to take advantage of them. This chapter discusses the history of the role of the library media specialist since the field began to emphasize a designand-technology focus in the 1960s; the various instructional design models created specifically for library media specialists to use in the schools; the nature of the library media specialist’s role today, particularly as it relates to instructional design and technology; the accumulated research on the impact of library media programs on student learning and achievement; and the issues related to instructional design and technology that are likely to engage school library media researchers in the near future. The chapter is intended to provide a wide-ranging context for a consideration of the issues the library media field faces in the early twenty-first century and to lay a realistic yet sanguine foundation for its future progress in the areas of instructional design and technology.
Virtual patient simulations for brief assessment of mental health disorders in integrated care settings

ABSTRACT This mixed-methods pilot investigation evaluated the use of virtual patient simulations for increasing self-efficacy and diagnostic accuracy for common behavioral health concerns within an integrated care setting. A two-by-three factorial design was employed to evaluate three different simulated training conditions with a sample of 22 Masters level behavioral health students. Results support engagement in virtual patient simulation training to increase students’ self-efficacy in brief clinical assessment, and support the use of virtual patient simulations to improve diagnostic accuracy. Results further indicate that virtual patient simulations have sufficient levels of usability and acceptability as a tool for developing brief clinical interviewing skills, and that participants found this method of instruction to be a valuable adjunct to traditional classroom or field based training. Future directions and next steps for the integration of technology enhanced simulations in clinical social services education are explored.
Acute treatment of moderate to severe depression with hypericum extract WS 5570 (St John's wort): randomised controlled double blind non-inferiority trial versus paroxetine

Abstract Objective To investigate the efficacy of hypericum extract WS 5570 (St John's wort) compared with paroxetine in patients with moderate to severe major depression. Design Randomised double blind, double dummy, reference controlled, multicentre non-inferiority trial. Setting 21 psychiatric primary care practices in Germany. Participants 251 adult outpatients with acute major depression with total score ≥ 22 on the 17 item Hamilton depression scale. Interventions 900 mg/day hypericum extract WS 5570 three times a day or 20 mg paroxetine once a day for six weeks. In initial non-responders doses were increased to 1800 mg/day hypericum or 40 mg/day paroxetine after two weeks. Main outcome measures Change in score on Hamilton depression scale from baseline to day 42 (primary outcome). Secondary measures were change in scores on Montgomery-Åsberg depression rating scale, clinical global impressions, and Beck depression inventory. Results The Hamilton depression total score decreased by mean 14.4 (SD 8.8) points, corresponding to 56.6% (SD 34.3%) of the baseline value, in the hypericum group and by 11.4 (SD 8.6) points (44.8% (SD 33.5%) of baseline value) in the paroxetine group (intention to treat analysis; similar results were observed in the per protocol analysis). The intention to treat analysis (lower one sided 97.5% confidence limit 1.5 points for the difference hypericum minus paroxetine) and the per protocol analysis (lower confidence limit 0.7 points) showed non-inferiority of hypericum and statistical superiority over paroxetine. The lower limits in both cases exceeded the pre-specified non-inferiority margin of −2.5 points and the superiority margin of 0. The incidence of adverse events was 0.035 and 0.060 events per day of exposure for hypericum and paroxetine, respectively. Conclusions In the treatment of moderate to severe major depression, hypericum extract WS 5570 is at least as effective as paroxetine and is better tolerated.
Motion Parallax without Motion Compensation in 3D Cluttered Scenes

When an observer moves through a rigid 3D scene, points that are near to the observer move with a different image velocity than points that are far away. The difference between image velocity vectors is the direction of motion parallax. This direction vector points towards the observer's translation direction. Hence estimates of the direction of motion parallax are useful for estimating the observer's translation direction. Standard ways to compute the direction of motion parallax either rely on precomputed optical flow, or rely on motion compensation to remove the local image shift caused by observer rotation. Here we present a simple Fourier-based method for estimating the direction of motion parallax directly, that does not require optical flow and motion compensation. The method is real-time and performs accurately for image regions in which multiple motions are present.
User-Centered Design and Evaluation of Virtual Environments

We present a structured, iterative methodology for user-centered design and evaluation of VE user interaction. We recommend performing (1) user task analysis followed by (2) expert guidelines-based evaluation, (3) formative user-centered evaluation, and finally (4) comparative evaluation. In this article we first give the motivation and background for our methodology, then we describe each technique in some detail. We applied these techniques to a real-world battlefield visualization VE. Finally, we evaluate why this approach provides a cost-effective strategy for assessing and iteratively improving user interaction in VEs.
An Assessment of the Spatial Performance of Virtual Home Theatre Algorithms by Subjective and Objective Methods

A controlled subjective test was carried out to assess selected spatial qualities of three virtual home theatre processors. The subjective results were used to evaluate a number of objective measurements based on the interaural cross-correlation coefficient (IACC). A novel implementation of the IACC was found which appears to correlate well with the subjective data.
2013 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare and Workshops a System for Remote Orthopedics Rehabilitation

In this paper we present a system prototype for supporting the orthopedics rehabilitation process at the hospital and at home. In the system, the patient gets immediate feedback on the executed exercises controlling a gaming interface, while the system collects data about the therapy progress. Physiotherapists are able to remotely monitor the patient activity, and to adjust therapy according to the data available and patient's capacity. During the conference, authors will demonstrate functions and the concept behind the system, and will exemplify the different scenarios of use of this innovative tool, allowing the conference participants to wear the sensors and experiment the system in first hand. The system is now at a prototype stage.
Clusterwise optimization of clicked web pages using Genetic algorithm for effective Personalized Web Search

The Information Retrieval on the web retrieves huge collection of documents set and are ranked based on their relevance for a given user search query. It is found in the research that pages which are representative of some aspect of retrieve set P but appear with low position in ordering has a negligible chance of being looked and hence is responsible for low precision of search results. In this paper the genetic algorithm is used to perform the clusterwise optimization of clicked pages in a given domain in order to identify web pages that are not only relevant but also have high internal dissimilarity in order to cover the wider representation of cluster domain. This clusterwise optimization of clicked pages identify those relevant documents up in ranking which otherwise has low ranking and could not be clicked. During online processing, the subset of webpages associated with the cluster is used for the recommendation for effective personalization of web search. This recommendation of web pages continues till search is personalized to the information need of the user. Experimental study was conducted on the data set of web query sessions captured in three domains Academics, Entertainment and Sports. The experimental results which were verified statistically shows the improvement in the average precision of search results and hence it confirms the effectiveness of clusterwise optimization of webpages for better personalizing the Web Search of the user.
Layered document model transformation and operation adaptation of two dimensional CAD environments

Transparent Adaptation (TA) technology is a strategy to transform single-user applications into groupware system without modifying the original source codes. There are two key issues of TA technology: data model transformation and operation adaptation. The paper introduces to map the two dimensional CAD document into layered document model, modifies AST consistency maintenance strategy to layer-AST to adapt to the new model; gives primitive operation definitions in CAD environments, and uses application APIs to capture the interface operations. Efficiency analysis of the layer-AST is also given, showing the improved performance of the algorithm.
Wiki communities in the context of work processes

In this article we examine the integration of communities of practice supported by a wiki into work processes. Linear structures are often inappropriate for the execution of knowledge-intensive tasks and work processes. The latter are characterized by non-linear sequences and dynamic social interaction. Communities of practice, however, often lack the "guiding light" needed to structure their work. We discuss the primary requirements for the integration of formally described knowledge-intensive processes into the dynamic social processes of knowledge generation in communities of practice and use the wiki approach for their support. We present our approach for an appropriate interface to integrate wiki communities into process structures and an information retrieval algorithm based on it to connect the process-oriented structures with community-oriented wiki structures. We show the prototypical realization of the concept by a brief example.
Document Analysis Algorithm Contributions in End-to-End Applications: Report on the ICDAR 2011 Contest

This contest aims to provide a metric giving indications on the influence of individual document analysis stages to overall end-to-end applications. Contestants are provided with a full, working pipeline which operates on a page image to extract useful information. The pipeline is built with clearly identified analysis stages (e.g. binarization, skew detection, layout analysis, OCR) that have a formalized input and output. Contestants are invited to contribute their own algorithms as an alternative to one or more of the initially provided stages. The evaluation measures the overall impact of the contributed algorithm on the final (end-of-pipeline) output.
TaxiSim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform for Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations

Taxi service is an important mode of public transportation in most metropolitan areas since it provides door-to-door convenience in the public domain. Unfortunately, despite all the convenience taxis bring, taxi fleets are also extremely inefficient to the point that over 50% of its operation time could be spent in idling state. Improving taxi fleet operation is an extremely challenging problem, not just because of its scale, but also due to fact that taxi drivers are self-interested agents that cannot be controlled centrally. To facilitate the study of such complex and decentralized system, we propose to construct a multiagent simulation platform that would allow researchers to investigate interactions among taxis and to evaluate the impact of implementing certain management policies. The major contribution of our work is the incorporation of our analysis on the real-world driver's behaviors. Despite the fact that taxi drivers are selfish and unpredictable, by analyzing a huge GPS dataset collected from a major taxi fleet operator, we are able to clearly demonstrate that driver's movements are closely related to the relative attractiveness of neighboring regions. By applying this insight, we are able to design a background agent movement strategy that generates aggregate performance patterns that are very similar to the real-world ones. Finally, we demonstrate the value of such system with a real-world case study.
SURVEY PAPER : MULTI SENSOR DATA FUSION FOR SENSOR VALIDATION

Multi-sensor fusion of data is based on the principle that integrate data from various sensors would allow a better understanding of the circumstances. Purpose of the paper is to review the various sensor fusion performances using different techniques. This paper has reviewed various applications, technologies, models and performance when adopted sensor fusion by taking into consideration the approaches namely wavelet based methods, fuzzy logic, artificial neural network, image fusion as well as combined approaches namely multi-sensor data fusion through systematic prior review of literature. In future, this study will develop a model and implement on any algorithm based on the fuzzy logic.
Scale-free and power law distributions via fixed points and convergence of (thinning and conditioning) transformations

In discrete contexts such as the degree distribution for a graph, scale-free has traditionally been defined to be power-law. We propose a reasonable interpretation of scale-free, namely, invariance under the transformation of $p$-thinning, followed by conditioning on being positive. For each $\beta \in (1,2)$, we show that there is a unique distribution which is a fixed point of this transformation; the distribution is power-law-$\beta$, and different from the usual Yule-Simon power law-$\beta$ that arises in preferential attachment models. In addition to characterizing these fixed points, we prove convergence results for iterates of the transformation.