Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symptom Control in Patients With Recurrent Ovarian Cancer: Measuring the Benefit of Palliative Chemotherapy in Women With Platinum Refractory/Resistant Ovarian Cancer

Most women with advanced ovarian cancer will relapse and subsequently develop platinum-resistant/refractory ovarian cancer. The benefit of treatment is currently based on objective response rates, which are a crude measure of benefit. It would be clinically meaningful if we were better able to measure the benefit of palliative therapy and, in particular, ascertain whether cancer-related symptoms improve with treatment and how this impacts on quality of life. This paper reviews the management of patients with platinum-resistant/refractory ovarian cancer and highlights the gaps in our knowledge and shortcomings with the current approaches to measure the benefit of treatment. The ultimate objective is to describe and encourage recruitment to the Gynecologic Cancer Intergroup study that has recently opened. This study will recruit a large number of patients from around the world in an effort to develop more robust instruments to measure the benefit of chemotherapy and to understand the impact of chemotherapy on symptom control and quality of life. In addition, this study will give us an insight into how all patients are managed rather than a select minority who are treated in clinical trials.
Exploiting semantic association to answer ’vague

Although today’s web search engines are very powerful, they still fail to provide intuitively relevant results for many types of queries, especially ones that are vaguely-formed in the user’s own mind. We argue that associations between terms in a search query can reveal the underlying information needs in the users’ mind and should be taken into account in search. We propose a multi-faceted approach to detect and exploit such associations. The CORDER method measures the association strength between query terms, and queries consisting of terms having low association strength with each other are seen as ‘vague queries’. For a vague query, we use WordNet to find related terms of the query terms to compose extended queries, relying especially on the role of least common subsumers (LCS). We use relation strength between terms calculated by the CORDER method to refine these extended queries. Finally, we use the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model and information flow (IF) method to expand these refined queries. Our initial experimental results on a corpus of 500 books from Amazon shows that our approach can find the right books for users given authentic vague queries, even in those cases where Google and Amazon’s own book search fail.
An Improved 2DLPP Method on Gabor Features for Palmprint Recognition

We propose an improved 2DLPP method on Gabor features (I2DLPPG) for palmprint recognition in this paper. 2DPCA is first utilized for dimensionality reduction of Gabor feature space maintaining most prominent 2D information. Thus similarity matrix corresponding to elements is easily constructed and the followed 2DLPP can be implemented directly in the reduced feature space. The proposed method preserving more intrinsic manifold structure of feature matrices yields higher recognition accuracy than the existing 2DLPP which treats the Gabor feature matrices as a whole. Meanwhile, fewer coefficients are extracted for image representation and recognition owing to 2DLPP and 2DPCA in the row and column directions simultaneously. Euclidean distance and the nearest classifier are finally used for classification. The recognition accuracy of the proposed I2DLPPG can reach 99.5% with 15 x 5 features. Experiments results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in both recognition accuracy and speed.
Extended Array Manifolds: Functions of Array Manifolds

The response of an array processing system has been widely modelled using the concept of the array manifold. The conventional array manifold is a function of the geometry of the array, the carrier frequency and the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the sources only. However, the emergence of more sophisticated array systems, for instance antenna array communication systems, dictates the extension of this array manifold into various new types of manifolds that incorporate additional system and channel parameters, such as the code-division multiple access (CDMA) (spreading and scrambling) codes, the lack of synchronization, Doppler effects, polarization parameters, subcarriers, etc. This paper is concerned with the definition and geometric investigation of a generic model for these new manifolds that can be expressed as functions of the conventional array manifolds and, hence, are defined herein as extended array manifolds. Thus, initially, the concept of the extended array manifold is introduced and is shown to accommodate both existing and newly defined extensions of the widely employed in the literature conventional (or spatial) array manifold. Next, the geometric properties and parameters of the extended array manifold are studied and linked with the properties of the associated spatial array manifold in an attempt to facilitate the geometric study of the former by taking advantage of the well understood study of the latter.
Study protocol for the Cities Changing Diabetes programme: a global mixed-methods approach

Introduction Urban living has been shown to affect health in various ways. As the world is becoming more urbanised and almost two-thirds of people with diabetes now live in cities, research into the relationship between urban living, health and diabetes is key to improving the lives of many. The majority of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, a subset linked to overweight and obesity, decreased physical activity and unhealthy diets. Diabetes has significant consequences for those living with the condition as well as their families, relationships and wider society. Although care and management are improving, complications remain common, and diabetes is among the leading causes of vision loss, amputation, neuropathy and renal and cardiovascular disease worldwide. We present a research protocol for exploring the drivers of type 2 diabetes and its complications in urban settings through the Cities Changing Diabetes (CCD) partnership programme. Methods and analysis A global study protocol is implemented in eight collaborating CCD partner cities. In each city, academic institutions, municipal representatives and local stakeholders collaborate to set research priorities and plan implementation of findings. Local academic teams execute the study following the global study protocol presented here. A quantitative Rule of Halves analysis obtains measures of the magnitude of the diabetes burden, the diagnosis rates in each city and the outcomes of care. A qualitative Diabetes Vulnerability Assessment explores the urban context in vulnerability to type 2 diabetes and identifies social factors and cultural determinants relevant to health, well-being and diabetes. Ethics and dissemination The protocol steers the collection of primary and secondary data across the study sites. Research ethics board approval has been sought and obtained in each site. Findings from each of the local studies as well as the result from combined multisite (global) analyses will be reported in a series of core scientific journal papers.
Improved techniques for automatic image segmentation

Mathematical morphology is very attractive for automatic image segmentation because it efficiently deals with geometrical descriptions such as size, area, shape, or connectivity that can be considered as segmentation-oriented features. This paper presents an image-segmentation system based on some well-known strategies. The segmentation process is divided into three basic steps, namely: simplification, marker extraction, and boundary decision. Simplification, which makes use of area morphology, removes unnecessary information from the image to make it easy to segment. Marker extraction identifies the presence of homogeneous regions. A new marker extraction design is proposed in this paper. It is based on both luminance and color information. The goal of boundary decision is to precisely locate the boundary of regions detected by the marker extraction. This decision is based on a region-growing algorithm which is a modified watershed algorithm. A new color distance is also defined for this algorithm. In both marker extraction and boundary decision, color measurement is used to replace grayscale measurement and L*a*b* color space is used to replace the more straightforward spaces such as the RGB color space and YUV color space.
Genome dynamics in a natural archaeal population

Evolutionary processes that give rise to, and limit, diversification within strain populations can be deduced from the form and distribution of genomic heterogeneity. The extent of genomic change that distinguishes the acidophilic archaeon Ferroplasma acidarmanus fer1 from an environmental population of the same species from the same site, fer1(env), was determined by comparing the 1.94-megabase (Mb) genome sequence of the isolate with that reconstructed from 8 Mb of environmental sequence data. The fer1(env) composite sequence sampled ≈92% of the isolate genome. Environmental sequence data were also analyzed to reveal genomic heterogeneity within the coexisting, coevolving fer1(env) population. Analyses revealed that transposase movement and the insertion and loss of blocks of novel genes of probable phage origin occur rapidly enough to give rise to heterogeneity in gene content within the local population. Because the environmental DNA was derived from many closely related individuals, it was possible to quantify gene sequence variability within the population. All but a few gene variants show evidence of strong purifying selection. Based on the small number of distinct sequence types and their distribution, we infer that the population is undergoing frequent genetic recombination, resulting in a mosaic genome pool that is shaped by selection. The larger genetic potential of the population relative to individuals within it and the combinatorial process that results in many closely related genome types may provide the basis for adaptation to environmental fluctuations.
Exhaled breath condensate: a space odessey, where no one has gone before…

To the Editor: We would like to congratulate the European Respiratory Society on the publication of the European Lung White Book . Here, on the western periphery of Europe, we have felt that our Irish Health Service is not fully aware of the importance of lung diseases and the resources necessary to deal with them. Accordingly, we have recently published a report entitled “Ireland needs healthier airways …
Exposure–Response Analysis of Necitumumab Efficacy in Squamous Non‐Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients

We sought to describe the exposure–response relationship of necitumumab efficacy in squamous non‐small cell lung cancer patients and evaluate intrinsic and extrinsic patient descriptors that may guide dosing. SQUIRE was a phase III study comparing necitumumab in combination with gemcitabine and cisplatin vs. gemcitabine and cisplatin alone in 1,014 patients. An integrated model for tumor size dynamics and overall survival was developed, where reduction in tumor size results in a decrease in survival hazard. The change in tumor size was characterized using linear growth and first‐order shrinkage. Overall survival was described using a combination of a Weibull function and Gompertz function for the hazard, with dynamic tumor size being a predictor for the hazard. Although body weight resulted in higher clearance and lower exposure, simulations showed that an 800 mg flat dose provided optimal response regardless of body weight.
Natural and Simulated (10.4) Pole Figures of Polycrystalline Hematite

Qualitative (10.4) pole figures of hematite have been generated by simulating the rotative arrangement of c axes on planes of preferred simple shear. The procedure of simulation is described which consists in geometric operations varying the degree of texture anisotropy and homogeneity. Comparisons are made between predicted orientation diagrams and natural textures of high-grade hematite ores from Precam-brian deposits of North and South America, Africa, and Australia. The mechanisms of preferred orientation of hematite in ores are explained in terms of changing metamorphic conditions and variations in amount of simple rotational shear.
The Study of Effect of Length in Morphological Segmentation of Agglutinative Languages

Morph length is one of the indicative feature that helps learning the morphology of languages, in particular agglutinative languages. In this paper, we introduce a simple unsupervised model for morphological segmentation and study how the knowledge of morph length affect the performance of the segmentation task under the Bayesian framework. The model is based on (Goldwater et al., 2006) unigram word segmentation model and assumes a simple prior distribution over morph length. We experiment this model on two highly related and agglutinative languages namely Tamil and Telugu, and compare our results with the state of the art Morfessor system. We show that, knowledge of morph length has a positive impact and provides competitive results in terms of overall performance.
T-ABAC: An attribute-based access control model for real-time availability in highly dynamic systems

In highly dynamic systems resources may have to be accessed in real-time, within the strict time limits of underlying physical processes, with availability becoming critical. Current access control models such as RBAC and ABAC do not address real-time availability in a scalable way for such scenarios. In this paper we propose a real-time attribute-based access control model that extends the functionality of ABAC by using real-time attributes that reflect the requirements of critical applications. We describe two applications of our model: (a) a substation automation system, and (b) a medical cyber-physical system.
The Parameters For Powerline Channel Modeling

This is a support document which describes the properties of the cable and parameters of the formulas for the statistical powerline channel modeling. The cable parameters help the reader build powerline channel according to the transmission line theory. The document also presents the parameters which describe the distribution of the number of path, path magnitude, path interval and the cable loss feature of the powerline channel. By using the parameters in this document, readers can model the powerline channel according to the statistical methodology proposed.
Coreference Resolution System using Maximum Entropy Classifier

In this paper, we present our supervised learning approach to coreference resolution in ConLL corpus. The system relies on a maximum entropy-based classifier for pairs of mentions, and adopts a rich linguisitically motivated feature set, which mostly has been introduced by Soon et al (2001), and experiment with alternaive resolution process, preprocessing tools, and classifiers. We optimize the system's performance for MUC (Vilain et al, 1995), BCUB (Bagga and Baldwin, 1998) and CEAF (Luo, 2005).
Neuroimaging Methods in Human Stress Science

Life stress can be a gateway to ill health among vulnerable individuals. This stress-related vulnerability is determined by genetic, biobehavioral, and environmental factors that interact over the lifespan to infl uence individual risk trajectories. Broadly stated, human neuroimaging technology makes available methodological approaches and conceptual frameworks that enable researchers to explicate the neurobiological pathways by which stressrelated processes aff ect health and well-being throughout life. This chapter highlights some of these approaches and frameworks for stress researchers with limited backgrounds in neuroscience, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging. It focuses specifi cally on functional and structural aspects of the human brain that relate to the regulation of behavioral and peripheral physiologic response systems that are infl uenced by short-term (acute) and long-term (chronic) stress processes. To acquaint the reader with basic concepts in the fi eld, we provide a general overview of the most common functional and structural neuroimaging modalities. We also consider how these modalities can be used to answer questions about stress-related neural processes, particularly within the context of their relevance to health. We then summarize experimental design and inferential issues relevant to executing and interpreting neuroimaging studies. A erward, we provide a concluding overview of neuroimaging studies of specifi c brain systems that play a dual role in processing stress-related information and regulating biobehavioral stress responses.
Unified RF-SVM model based digital radiography classification for Inferior Alveolar Nerve Injury (IANI) identification.

This paper proposes a feature selection based classification method that can be applied to better accuracy in the Digital Radiographs (DR) for the identification of Inferior Alveolar Nerve Injury (IANI). Different conventional features based on the shape and EZW (Embedded Zero tree Wavelet) based texture features are extracted using different feature extraction techniques. Then, aggregate voting of all the decision trees in the Random Forest (RF) method to get the reduced feature. Finally, Support vector machine (SVM) with RBF kernel is trained using reduced features to classify the IAN (Inferior Alveolar Nerve) injured on a healthy object. The proposed classification results are compared with PCA-DT, PCA-MLP and PSO-MLP classification algorithms. Both training and testing stages of proposed model get better classification accuracy of 96.4% and 83.58% respectively. This shows the highest classification accuracy performance among some other existing methods.
Increased Plasma Levels of 8-Hydroxydeoxyguanosine Are Associated with Development of Colorectal Tumors

Increased oxidative stress is generally thought to be associated with tumorigenesis. In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated plasma 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) levels in patients with colorectal adenoma and cancer, as a surrogate marker of oxidative damage to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). We collected blood samples from 58 patients with adenoma, 32 with early cancer, 25 with advanced cancer, and 36 without polyps or cancer (as controls), and measured plasma levels of 8-OHdG by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Univariate analysis by logistic regression showed that an increased level of 8-OHdG was a significant risk for adenoma [odds ratio (OR) 1.393, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.008–1.926, p = 0.045]. In patients with early cancer, univariate analysis revealed significant differences for age, body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure, and 8-OHdG level. Subsequent multivariate analysis revealed that 8-OHdG [OR 1.627, 95% CI 1.079–2.453, p = 0.020] and BMI [OR 1.283, 95% CI 1.038–1.585, p = 0.021] were significant risk factors for early cancer. However, 8-OHdG was not a significant risk factor for advanced cancer. Our results suggest that an increased plasma level of 8-OHdG is associated with development of colorectal adenoma and cancer.
Embedded metallic nanoparticles for on-chip infrared detection

Conventional silicide Schottky barrier photodetector suffers from low responsivity due to the low emission probability of photoexcited hot carriers from the silicide layer to the Si layer. The photoexcited carriers in metallic nanoparticle may have large emission probability because they meet the metal/Si interface at all directions. Moreover, the light absorption by the metallic nanoparticles may also be dramatically enhanced due to excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance. A proof-of-concept detector based on the embedded Ni silicide nanopaticles are fabricated using standard CMOS technology. It exhibits a peak responsivity of ~30 mA/W and a 3-dB bandwidth of ~6 GHz. The approaches to improve the performance are addressed.
The Relationship between Water Wetting and Ice Adhesion

Ice accretion on aircraft leads to difficulties in aircraft flight control due to weight increase and change in weight distribution. Conventionally these difficulties are overcome using anti-icing or de-icing products, such as freezing depressants and heating devices. A more cost effective way to solve these problems would be to use ice repellent surfaces (ice-phobic). As a first step in this direction the relationship between water wettability and ice adhesion was investigated. Using the appropriate chemistry and tailoring the surface roughness a variety of polycarbonate-coated surfaces were created: these included ultra-hydrophilic and ultra-hydrophobic surfaces and surfaces with surface properties in between the extreme ultra-surfaces. Ice adhesion tests and contact angle measurements indicated that the higher the contact angle the lower is the adhesion of ice. The best results were obtained in the case of ultra-hydrophobic surface treatment that led to an 18 fold decrease in ice adhesion compared to the untreated aluminum surface.
An Operator Approach to Popularity-Based Caching in DHTs

Caching is a long investigated topic in the context of P2P networks and distributed hash tables (DHTs). Most of the proposed caching algorithms are user-centric in the sense that they focus on minimizing the search size or latency as the target metrics. In contrast, we take the network operator-centric view in this paper. We set the total traffic generated by the DHT search as the metric of interest and provide a simple algorithm to achieve a maximum reduction of the traffic. The key of the algorithm is that every node maintains statistics about routed queries and replicates its cached objects only when the popularity of queries for those objects are above a certain threshold. Through extensive simulations, we determine the optimal value of the popularity threshold and show the traffic reduction in comparison with state of the art DHT caching solutions. Our algorithm achieves an average traffic reduction of around 30% as compared to caching along the entire search paths, while maintaining good performance in terms of user-oriented measures such as the number of search hops, or equivalently, the search latency.
Reasons for switching between antipsychotics in daily clinical practice.

BACKGROUND Previous research that atypical antipsychotics were switched less often compared to typical antipsychotics, suggesting overall better treatment satisfaction. The objective of this study was to investigate the reasons for switching antipsychotics after initiating oral treatment with either typical or atypical antipsychotics in a clinical setting. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 123 patients that switched antipsychotic therapy were recruited from 17 psychiatric hospitals, of which 46 % switched because of lack of effect and 45 % because of adverse effects. RESULTS No significant differences were found between users of atypical versus typical antipsychotics in reasons for switching, both for overall adverse events, and lack of effect. In users of atypical antipsychotics extrapyramidal effects were reported less often as reason for switching (adjusted OR = 0.18 (95 % CI = (0.07 - 0.51)). Patients on atypical antipsychotics switched more often because of weight gain (adjusted OR = 12.8 (95 % CI = (1.50 - 109)). CONCLUSION In conclusion, when switching occurred, no difference was found in the frequency of general tolerability or reported lack of effectiveness. However, the type of adverse event as a reason for switching differed between atypical and typical antipsychotics.