Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unintentional lumbar facet joint injection guided by fluoroscopy during interlaminar epidural steroid injection: a retrospective analysis

Background An epidural steroid injection (ESI) is a commonly administered procedure in pain clinics. An unintentional lumbar facet joint injection during interlaminar ESI was reported in a previous study, but there has not been much research on the characteristics of an unintentional lumbar facet joint injection. This study illustrated the imaging features of an unintentional lumbar facet joint injection during an interlaminar ESI and analyzed characteristics of patients who underwent this injection. Methods From December 2015 to May 2017, we performed 662 lumbar ESIs and we identified 24 cases (21 patients) that underwent a lumbar facet joint injection. We gathered data contrast pattern, needle approach levels and directions, injected facet joint levels and directions, presence of lumbar spine disease as seen on magnetic resonance images (MRI), and histories of lumbar spine surgeries. Results The contrast pattern in the facet joint has a sigmoid or ovoid contrast pattern confined to the vicinity of the facet joint. The incidence of unintentional lumbar facet joint injection was 3.6%. The mean age was 68.47 years. Among these 21 patients, 14 (66.7%) were injected in the facet joint ipsilaterally to the needle approach. Among the 20 patients who received MRI, all (100%) had central stenosis and 15 patients (75%) had severe stenosis. Conclusions When the operator performs an interlaminar ESI on patients with central spinal stenosis, the contrast pattern on the fluoroscopy during interlaminar ESI should be carefully examined to distinguish between the epidural space and facet joint.
PHP vulnerability detection based on taint analysis

To detect the vulnerabilities of Web applications which based on the PHP scripting language. This paper proposes a PHP vulnerability detection method based on fine-grained taint analysis algorithm. First of all, this article generates the Abstract Syntax Tree by lexical and grammatical analysis on the PHP, and then produces the corresponding Control Flow Graph. At last, performing taint analysis on the Control Flow Graph. By tracking the program parameters, variables and other external input, marking the input type, propagating to various types of vulnerability function via the taint, and finally according to the tainted types of variable which are outputted to identify the vulnerabilities. We tested 16 programs of Damm Vulnerable Web App and found nine known vulnerabilities.
Variants of the BMP15 gene in a cohort of patients with premature ovarian failure.

BACKGROUND Bone morphogenetic protein 15 (BMP15) is an oocyte-derived growth factor acting as a major player in follicle differentiation in mammals. Mutations in the BMP15 gene, some of which lead to defective secretion of bioactive dimers, have been associated with premature ovarian failure (POF) in humans. METHODS Fifty patients diagnosed with POF with a normal karyotype were included in the study. After DNA extraction and amplification by PCR, the entire coding sequence and intron-exon junctions of BMP15 gene were analysed in the cohort of POF patients and in a control group of 214 patients. RESULTS Nine variants of the BMP15 gene including six missense substitutions and one insertion of three nucleotides were identified in the POF group. Three of them were previously described as single nucleotide polymorphisms and were also found in the control group. Two variants (H81R and G199R) have not been previously described and were not identified among controls but were not predicted to be deleterious. One variant (A180T) was identified among two POF cases, and also in two controls. One variant (F194S), predicted as potentially deleterious, was identified for the first time in a POF patient but also identified in one control. One variant (L148P), potentially deleterious, previously reported in POF patients, was identified for the first time among controls. The variant 788insTCT, previously identified among POF patients, probably has a low biological impact as it was also found in control patients and is a common polymorphism in sub-Saharan African populations. CONCLUSIONS Various missense variants of the BMP15 gene were identified among patients with POF. For most variants, the impact of the amino-acid substitution on the protein structure and function was predicted to be low. The two variants predicted as potentially deleterious were also identified among controls and could be considered as rare polymorphisms. Although some of these variants could contribute to the development of POF in a complex manner, the demonstration of their role in the pathogenesis of POF requires additional functional studies.
Proposal of CQI table switching control method corresponding to 256-QAM for CRE in HetNet

Higher-order modulation such as 256-QAM is a key technology to increase data rates within a limited bandwidth. This paper proposes a channel quality indicator (CQI) table switching control method corresponding to 256-QAM that improves the 5-percentile user throughput in Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in which user equipments (UEs) connected to pico cell can use different CQI table depending on where UE is located within the original pico cell or the related CRE region. The features of the proposed CQI table switching control method are described in comparison with the conventional method. Computer simulation results such as average, 5-percentile and 95-percentile user throughput are provided as parameters of cell selection offset for two types of HetNets, i.e., co-channel deployment with time-domain enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC), and different frequency deployment between macro and pico cells. We confirmed that the proposed method can improve 5-percentile user throughput while maintain or improve the average and the 95-percentile user throughput for the co-channel HetNet with eICIC.
User specific xenogogy from social media

In this paper, we represent a user specific travel route recommendation by extracting and analysing data from social media. Our approach is not only specific to user's interests but also involves recommending POIs(Points of Interest) in travel as a sequence from source to destination with few waypoints according to user's interest and affordability. Similar users are mined using LCF (Location based collaborative filtering algorithm) based on their travel history, interests and affordability. The route is recommended based on similarity between user package and route package. Route optimisation is done by similar user's travel records. The hotels and restaurants along the recommended route are highlighted.
Uterine Micro-Environment and Estrogen-Dependent Regulation of Osteopontin Expression in Mouse Blastocyst

Embryo implantation is a highly synchronized bioprocess between an activated blastocyst and a receptive uterus. In mice, successful implantation relies on the dynamic interplay of estrogen and progesterone; however, the key mediators downstream of these hormones that act on blastocyst competency and endometrium receptivity acquisition are largely unknown. In this study, we showed that the expression of osteopontin (OPN) in mouse blastocysts is regulated by ovarian estrogen and uterine micro-environment. OPN mRNA is up-regulated in mouse blastocyst on day 4 of pregnancy, which is associated with ovarian estrogen secretion peak. Hormone treatment in vivo demonstrated that OPN expression in a blastocyst is regulated by estrogen through an estrogen receptor (ER). Our results of the delayed and activated implantation model showed that OPN expression is induced after estrogen injection. While estrogen treatment during embryo culture in vitro showed less effect on OPN expression, the tubal ligation model on day 3 of pregnancy confirmed that the regulation of estrogen on OPN expression in blastocyst might, through some specific cytokines, have existed in a uterine micro-environment. Collectively, our study presents that estrogen regulates OPN expression and it may play an important role during embryo implantation by activating blastocyst competence and facilitating the endometrium acceptable for active blastocyst.
What Moves Players?: Visual Data Exploration of Twitter and Gameplay Data

In recent years, microblogging platforms have not only become an important communication channel for the game industry to generate and uphold audience interest but also a rich resource for gauging player opinion. In this paper we use data gathered from Twitter to examine which topics matter to players and to identify influential members of a game's community. By triangulating in-game data with Twitter activity we explore how tweets can provide contextual information for understanding fluctuations in in-game activity. To facilitate analysis of the data we introduce a visual data exploration tool and use it to analyze tweets related to the game Destiny. In total, we collected over one million tweets from about 250,000 users over a 14-month period and gameplay data from roughly 3,500 players over a six-month period.
Capacity estimation and auditability of network covert channels

Classical covert channel analysis has focused on channels available on a single computer: timing channels and storage channels. We characterize network covert channels. Potential network covert channels are exploited by modulating transmission characteristics. We distinguish between spatial covert channels, caused by a variation in the relative volume of communication between nodes in the network, and temporal covert channels caused by a variation in transmission characteristics over time, extending the work of Girling (1987). A model for obtaining a spatially neutral transmission schedule was given by Newman-Wolfe and Venkatraman (1991, 1992). Temporally neutral transmissions are characterized and scheduling policies to generate temporally neutral transmission schedules were given by Venkatraman and Newman-Wolfe (1993). We estimate the covert channel capacity using an adaptive scheduling policy, modeling the system as a mode secure system. Based on our measurements on the University of Florida campus-wide backbone network (UFNET), we discuss the auditability of network covert channels and suggest some handling policies to reduce the capacity of these covert channels to TCSEC acceptable levels. <<ETX>>
Knowing What We See

Have you ever wondered how you know what you see? For example, when you see a round, red object at the grocery store, how do you know that it is called an apple and that it can be eaten? This type of knowledge is called semantic memory. Semantic memories are learned over a lifetime and can be accessed without remembering a specific experience. In other words, you do not need to remember details from the last time you ate an apple to identify one at the grocery store. Although knowledge about apples seems to come to mind rather easily when we see them, linking semantic memory to vision actually requires a lot of brain power! The purpose of this paper is to explain how the brain accomplishes this goal and to describe the functions of key brain regions. We also discuss the functional importance of linking semantic memory and vision.
Seperating Touching Particles: A Concavity-Based Method Using the Area Ratio of a Circular Mask

To address the difficulty of separating touching particles in an image, a method based on the area ratio of a circular mask is proposed in this article, and a framework consisting of image segmentation, concave point detection, point-pair matching, and the shape estimation of particles is implemented. A given color image is first preprocessed to obtain a binary image, then a corner detection algorithm is adopted to obtain a rough estimation of potential concave points, following which, the area ratio method is used to refine segmentation points qualified. The segmentation points obtained are matched to each pair by gray projection according to a certain evaluation criteria. Finally, each pair of points and one of their adjacent pixels on the border are used to estimate the status of each particle before adhesion, and the contour of each particle is generated using the curve fitting method. Experimental results show that the proposed method is consistent with human visual perception and can be used in the practice.
Relevance of irinotecan hydrochloride-induced diarrhea to the level of prostaglandin E2 and water absorption of large intestine in rats.

For characterization of the mechanism(s) of severe diarrhea due to the anticancer agent, irinotecan hydrochloride (CPT-11), examination was made of the relation of CPT-11-related diarrhea to colonic prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and water absorption in rats. Acute diarrheal symptoms were observed within 1 hr after the administration of CPT-11 to rats, with increased PGE2 and decreased water absorption in the colon. Treatment with atropine at 1 mg/kg, s.c. was noted to inhibit intestinal PGE2 and the CPT-11-related acute diarrheal symptoms, indicating that these diarrheal symptoms were mediated through the cholinergic nervous system accelerated functionally by CPT-11. On the other hand, daily treatment of CPT-11 at the same dose resulted in chronic diarrheal symptoms in all animals 3 days after CPT-11 treatment. Histopathological changes observed in the descending colon and ileum of the rats included degeneration and necrosis of villi and cryptal cells and a decrease in the number of the goblet cells. Significantly increased PGE2 and impaired water absorption of the descending colon were also observed during the chronic diarrheal stage. It can be considered that the chronic diarrheal symptoms appear as a consequence of the gastrointestinal injury characterized by significant increase in PGE2 accompanied by impaired water absorption.
Drug‐screening platform based on the contractility of tissue‐engineered muscle

A tissue‐based approach to in vitro drug screening allows for determination of the cumulative positive and negative effects of a drug at the tissue rather than the cellular or subcellular level. Skeletal muscle myoblasts were tissue‐engineered into three‐dimensional muscle with parallel myofibers generating directed forces. When grown attached to two flexible microposts (μposts) acting as artificial tendons in a 96‐well plate format, the miniature bioartificial muscles (mBAMs) generated tetanic (active) forces upon electrical stimulation measured with a novel image‐based motion detection system. mBAM myofiber hypertrophy and active force increased in response to insulin‐like growth factor 1. In contrast, mBAM deterioration and weakness was observed with a cholesterol‐lowering statin. The results described in this study demonstrate the integration of tissue engineering and biomechanical testing into a single platform for the screening of compounds affecting muscle strength. Muscle Nerve, 2007
Intelligent Scheduling in Health Care Domain

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high-quality services through effective process management at all levels-locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Patient scheduling becomes an integral part of daily work for healthcare professionals. The presented work is to build an agent based information services for mobile users. An agent is characterized by the concepts of situatedness, autonomy and flexibility. Multi-Agent systems (MAS) are appropriate in many medical domains, due to the characteristics of the problems in this area and are the basis of an emerging technology that promises to make it much easier to design and implement. The paper work integrates accessing distributed health care services in multi-agent environment to achieve better Quality of service by using java platform. This develops a framework to schedule the meeting between the patients and the relevant doctors meeting in an efficient way for routine and emergency services.
Noninvasive Ocular Drug Delivery: Potential Transcorneal and Other Alternative Delivery Routes for Therapeutic Molecules in Glaucoma

Drug delivery to the eye is made difficult by multiple barriers (such as the tear film, cornea, and vitreous) between the surface of the eye and the treatment site. These barriers are difficult to surmount for the purposes of drug delivery without causing toxicity. Using nanotechnology tools to control, manipulate, and study delivery systems, new approaches to delivering drugs, genes, and antigens that are effective and safe can be developed. Topical administration to the ocular surface would be the safest method for delivery, as it is noninvasive and painless compared with other delivery methods. However, there is only limited success using topical delivery methods, especially for gene therapy. Current thinking on treatments of the future enabled by nanodelivery systems and the identification of target specificity parameters that require deeper understanding to develop successful topical delivery systems for glaucoma is highlighted.
Screening Dyslexia for English Using HCI Measures and Machine Learning

More than 10% of the population has dyslexia, and most are diagnosed only after they fail in school. This work seeks to change this through early detection via machine learning models that predict dyslexia by observing how people interact with a linguistic computer-based game. We designed items of the game taking into account (i) the empirical linguistic analysis of the errors that people with dyslexia make, and (ii) specific cognitive skills related to dyslexia: Language Skills, Working Memory, Executive Functions, and Perceptual Processes. Using measures derived from the game, we conducted an experiment with 267 children and adults in order to train a statistical model that predicts readers with and without dyslexia using measures derived from the game. The model was trained and evaluated in a 10-fold cross experiment, reaching 84.62% accuracy using the most informative features.
An adaptive sparse deconvolution method for distinguishing the overlapping echoes of ultrasonic guided waves for pipeline crack inspection

In guided wave pipeline inspection, echoes reflected from closely spaced reflectors generally overlap, meaning useful information is lost. To solve the overlapping problem, sparse deconvolution methods have been developed in the past decade. However, conventional sparse deconvolution methods have limitations in handling guided wave signals, because the input signal is directly used as the prototype of the convolution matrix, without considering the waveform change caused by the dispersion properties of the guided wave. In this paper, an adaptive sparse deconvolution (ASD) method is proposed to overcome these limitations. First, the Gaussian echo model is employed to adaptively estimate the column prototype of the convolution matrix instead of directly using the input signal as the prototype. Then, the convolution matrix is constructed upon the estimated results. Third, the split augmented Lagrangian shrinkage (SALSA) algorithm is introduced to solve the deconvolution problem with high computational efficiency. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, guided wave signals obtained from pipeline inspection are investigated numerically and experimentally. Compared to conventional sparse deconvolution methods, e.g. the l1-norm deconvolution method, the proposed method shows better performance in handling the echo overlap problem in the guided wave signal.
Distributed routing algorithm for low-latency broadcasting in multi-rate wireless mesh network

Using the multi-rate feature of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in a wireless mesh network (WMN) increases efficiency in network-wide message broadcasting. A challenging problem is to achieve minimal latency for network-wide broadcasting in a multi-rate wireless mesh network (MrWMN). The three features, including the multi-rate characteristics, the source scheduling to obtain the routing decision, and the multi-radio solution to avoid the interference, add great complexities to this research issue. In this paper, we propose a distributed source routing algorithm that exploits the multi-rate feature to achieve low latency network-wide broadcasting in WMNs. Multi-radio is utilized to resolve the interferences among neighboring nodes. Simulation results show that, compared to the existing best known results under various network settings, our approach produces lower latency for network-wide broadcasting in the MrWMN.
Corneal Thickness Response after Anesthetic Eye Drops: Our Own Results and Meta-Analysis

We aimed to test if there are different patterns in the central corneal thickness (CCT) response after instilling oxybuprocaine anesthetic eye drops and also to determine whether there is a significant change in the CCT. CCT was measured in 60 eyes of 60 healthy subjects before and during the hour after oxybuprocaine 0.4% eye drops were instilled. In addition, a systematic review and meta-analysis were carried out in order to answer the following PICO (patient, intervention, comparison, and outcome) question: What effect do anesthetic eye drops have on CCT values? We found no significant changes in the mean CCT values during the hour's observation (ANOVA, p = 0.209), and the meta-analysis revealed no statistically significant changes in the CCT after anesthesia (Q-Value = 1.111; p value = 1.000; I2 = 0.000; Tau2 = 0.000; Stderr = 0.020). However, we found three CCT response patterns 5 minutes after anesthesia: Pattern 1, subjects with no significant changes in their CCT values (n = 14, 46.7%); Pattern 2, subjects with significant CCT increases (n = 11, 36.7%); and Pattern 3, subjects with significant CCT decreases (n = 5, 16.7%). In sum, there are no significant changes in the CCT after anesthesia, but there are three different CCT response patterns 5 minutes after anesthesia.
A Theoretical Analysis of Path Loss Based Activity Recognition

Body area networks are used extensively in the medical field and elderly care. These networks perform a collection of roles including monitoring an individual's activities, through a process known as activity recognition. Current approaches to activity recognition require specialized hardware for advanced sensors which puts stress on battery life. We show that it is theoretically possible to distinguish between different human activities/postures by using radio signal propagation only and provide strategies for doing this. This is immensely beneficial to the field of sensor networks for two reasons: 1) It removes the need for more energy intensive components thus reducing strain on limited power resources and thus 2) reduces form factor for sensor network nodes. We show that activity recognition can be done using only radio signals at low transmit power levels with good accuracy. Lower power consumption and reduced form factor are desirable features for body networks and have been identified as being essential for wide adoption of body networks.
Genetic exchange and reassignment in Porphyromonas gingivalis

ABSTRACT Porphyromonas gingivalis is considered a keystone pathogen in adult periodontitis but has also been associated with systemic diseases. It has a myriad of virulence factors that differ between strains. Genetic exchange and intracellular genome rearrangements may be responsible for the variability in the virulence of P. gingivalis. The present review discusses how the exchange of alleles can convert this bacterium from commensalistic to pathogenic and potentially shapes the host-microbe environment from homeostasis to dysbiosis. It is likely that genotypes of P. gingivalis with increased pathogenic adaptations may spread in the human population with features acquired from a common pool of alleles. The exact molecular mechanisms that trigger this exchange are so far unknown but they may be elicited by environmental pressure.