Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arginine butyrate: a therapeutic candidate for Duchenne muscular dystrophy

As a strategy to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy, we used arginine butyrate, which combines two pharmacological activities: nitric oxide pathway activation, and histone deacetylase inhibition. Continuous intraperitoneal administration to dystrophin‐deficient mdx mice resulted in a near 2‐fold increase in utrophin (protein homologous to dystrophin) in skeletal muscle, heart, and brain, accompanied by an improvement of the dystrophic phenotype in both adult and newborn mice (45 and 70% decrease in creatine kinase level, respectively; 14% increase in tidal volume, 30% decrease in necrotic area in limb and 23% increase in isometric force). Intermittent administration, as performed in clinical trials, was then used to reduce the frequency of injections and to improve safety. This also enhanced utrophin level around 2‐fold (EC50=284 mg/ml) and alleviated the dystrophic phenotype (inverted grid and grip test performance near to wild‐type values, creatine kinase level decreased by 50%). Skin biopsies were used to monitor treatment efficacy, instead of invasive muscle biopsies, and this could be done a few days after the start of treatment. A 2‐fold increase in utrophin expression was also shown in cultured human myotubes. In vivo and in vitro experiments demonstrated that the drug combination acts synergistically. Together, these data constitute a proof of principle of the beneficial effects of arginine butyrate on muscular dystrophy. —Vianello, S. , Yu, H. , Voisin, V. , Haddad, H. , He, X. , Foutz, A. S. , Sebrié, C. , Gillet, B. , Roulot, M. , Fougerousse, F. , Perronnet, C. , Vaillend, C. , Matecki, S. , Escolar, D. , Bossi, L. , Israël, M. , de la Porte, S. Arginine butyrate: a therapeutic candidate for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. FASEB J. 27, 2256–2269 (2013). www.fasebj. org
FACIAL EXPRESSION RECOGNITION BASED ON CLOUD MODEL

Facial expression is one of the major features of facial recognition in recent years, and it has become a hotspot. In this paper, we present a novel method of facial recognition based on cloud model, in combination with the traditional Facial expression system. Firstly, we carry out the transformation from images into grids with M by N, where M and N denote the actual image positioning of the grid. Each grid is a gray value (0-255) and the grids stand for the data from data points to data sets based on cloud model. Secondly, we do data pre-processing for the original facial expressions of input images. Cloud droplets image can be obtained as the input of backward cloud generator in order to extract the three numerical characteristics, that is, Ex, En and He. With these three characteristics, facial expression can be realized. Finally, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented method, we conduct a case study of facial expression recognition based on cloud model. The results show that the method is feasible and effective in facial expression recognition. * Corresponding author. lianhua_chi@163.com.
Femtocells QoS management with user priority in mobile WiMAX

Femtocells are an inexpensive solution to address weak indoor cellular coverage. Femtocells increase network coverage, offloaded macro cell sites, and provide high data rate services in a cost-effective manner. However, several aspects of this new technology are ambiguous or not defined in standard, such as QoS architecture, bandwidth request management and subscribers flows priority. This paper provides a new QoS management scheme for WiMAX Femtocell Access Point (WFAP). Our proposal offers three key features: prioritize femtocell's owner traffics; guarantee's the QoS for the different connections of each user, better resources management. We validate our assumptions through simulations and numerical analysis. Results show the effectiveness of our solution in public and private access methods.
Student satisfaction and academic performance in a dual PharmD/MBA degree program.

OBJECTIVES Evaluate the academic experience and satisfaction of students enrolled in the dual PharmD/MBA degree program between the South Carolina College of Pharmacy and The Citadel's School of Business Administration. Compare grade point averages of students enrolled in the dual degree program with those of traditional student colleagues. METHODS A standardized satisfaction survey instrument was administered to 32 students currently enrolled in the dual PharmD/MBA degree program. Grade point averages (GPAs) in both pharmacy and business coursework were also collected for analysis. RESULTS There were slightly higher percentages of both female and minority students in the dual degree program compared to the pharmacy class as a whole. Eighteen (56%) of students completed the survey, and responses were generally positive. The mean GPA of students in the dual degree program was higher than that of both pharmacy (3.37 vs 3.08, p < 0.001) and business (3.72 vs 3.64, not statistically significant) students not enrolled in the dual degree program. CONCLUSIONS Students enrolled in the dual degree program did better academically than their counterparts and indicated an overall high level of satisfaction with the program.
Self and narrative in schizophrenia: time to author a new story

The prevailing, clinical view of schizophrenia, as reflected in the psychiatric literature, suggests both that people with schizophrenia have lost their sense of self and that they have a diminished capacity to create coherent narratives about their own lives. Drawing on our empirical research in the growing area of recovery, we describe not only the disruptions and discontinuities introduced by the illness and its social and personal consequences, but also the person’s efforts to overcome these, to reconstruct a sense of self, to regain agency and to create a coherent life narrative. We suggest in closing that, rather than simply being a byproduct of recovery, these processes of re-authoring one’s life story are actually integral components of the recovery process itself.
Contribution of Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the Characterization of Hepatocellular Carcinomas and Dysplastic Nodules in Cirrhotic Liver

Objectives: To evaluate the diagnostic value of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) for the characterization of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and dysplastic nodule (DN) in cirrhotic liver, compared with contrast material-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI). Methods: A total of 54 patients with 40 HCC and 19 DN lesions were included in our study, and all lesions were histopathologically confirmed. All lesions were evaluated with CE-MRI, and breath-hold DWI was performed with b = 500 s/mm2. The signal intensity (SI) of the lesions were classified as low, iso-, slightly high, and strongly high SI compared with that of the surrounding liver parenchyma on DWI for qualitative assessment. Apparent diffusion coefficients (ADCs) and lesion-to-liver ADC ratio of HCCs and DNs were measured and compared by using the Mann-Whitney U test. The lesions were characterized with the use of CE-MRI criteria and DWI, respectively. Receiver operating characteristic analysis was performed to assess the diagnostic value of DWI, CE-MRI, and these techniques combined in the differentiation of HCCs from DNs. Results: In the qualitative analysis, among 40 HCCs, 39 (97.5%) had slightly high or strongly high SI on DWI, and 1 (2.5%) had low SI; only 4 (21.5%) of 19 DNs had slightly high SI, and 15 (78.95%) had iso-SI or low SI. The mean (SD) ADC and ADC ratio for HCCs (1.28 × 10−3 [0.25] mm2/s and 0.88 [0.15], respectively) were significantly lower (P < 0.01 and P < 0.001, respectively) than those for DNs (1.53 × 10−3 [0.33] mm2/s and 1.00 [0.08], respectively). The area, Az, under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the SI feature, the ADC ratio, and the ADCs based on the diagnosis of HCC versus DN were 0.88, 0.81, and 0.68, respectively. When the slightly high SI of lesion with a cutoff ADC ratio less than 0.92 was applied as a criterion, the Az, the sensitivity, the specificity, and the accuracy of DWI for the diagnosis of HCC versus DN were 0.81, 67.50%, 94.74%, and 76.27%, respectively. The corresponding Az, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of CE-MRI were 0.70, 82.50%, 57.89%, and 74.58%, respectively. Combined DWI plus CE-MRI had 0.91 Az, 97.50% sensitivity, and 93.22% accuracy, which increased significantly compared with those of CE-MRI alone. Conclusions: Diffusion-weighted MRI can provide additional information to differentiate HCC from DN. Combined with CE-MRI, DWI allows improved characterization of HCC versus DN in cirrhotic liver.
An Analysis of Age, Technology Usage, and Cognitive Characteristics Within Information Retrieval Tasks

This work presents two studies that aim to discover whether age can be used as a suitable metric for distinguishing performance between individuals or if other factors can provide greater insight. Information retrieval tasks are used to test the performance of these factors. First, a study is introduced that examines the effect that fluid intelligence and Internet usage has on individuals. Second, a larger study is reported on that examines a collection of Internet and cognitive factors in order to determine to what extent each of these metrics can account for disorientation in users. This work adds to growing evidence showing that age is not a suitable metric to distinguish between individuals within the field of human-computer interaction. It shows that factors such as previous Internet experience and fluid-based cognitive abilities can be used to gain better insight into users’ reported browsing experience during information retrieval tasks.
Effectiveness of Supported Self-Help in Recurrent Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Primary Care

Background: The burden and economic consequences of depression are high, mostly due to its recurrent nature. Due to current budget and time restraints, a preventive, low- cost, accessible minimal intervention is much needed. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a supported self-help preventive cognitive therapy (S-PCT) added to treatment as usual (TAU) in primary care, compared to TAU alone. Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled trial among 248 patients with a history of depression, currently in full or partial remission or recovery. Participants were randomized to TAU augmented with S-PCT (n = 124) or TAU alone (n = 124). S-PCT consisted of an 8-week self-help intervention, supported by weekly telephone guidance by a counselor. The intervention included a self-help book that could be read at home. The primary outcome was the incidence of relapse or recurrence and was assessed over the telephone by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV axis 1 disorders. Participants were observed for 12 months. Secondary outcomes were depressive symptoms, quality of life (EQ-5D and SF-12), comorbid psychopathology, and self-efficacy. These secondary outcomes were assessed by digital questionnaires. Results: In the S-PCT group, 44 participants (35.5%) experienced a relapse or recurrence, compared to 62 participants (50.0%) in the TAU group (incidence rate ratio = 0.71, 95% CI 0.52-0.97; risk difference = 14, 95% CI 2-24, number needed to treat = 7). Compared to the TAU group, the S-PCT group showed a significant reduction in depressive symptoms over 12 months (mean difference -2.18; 95% CI -3.09 to -1.27) and a significant increase in quality of life (EQ-5D) (mean difference 0.04; 95% CI 0.004-0.08). S-PCT had no effect on comorbid psychopathology, self-efficacy, and quality of life based on the SF-12. Conclusions: A supported self-help preventive cognitive therapy, guided by a counselor in primary care, proved to be effective in reducing the burden of recurrent depression.
An Efficient Power Control Scheme for Cognitive Radios

In this paper, we design a transmit power control system using fuzzy logic system to provide cognitive radios the ability to coexist with primary (licensed) users in the same frequency band. With our built-in fuzzy power controller, a cognitive radio is able to opportunistically adjust its transmit power in response to the changes of the interference level to primary user (PU), the distance to PU and its received power difference at the base station (BS) while satisfying the requirement of sufficiently low interference to PU. We increase the reliability of our power control scheme by using linguistic knowledge of transmit power control (TPC) obtained from a group of network experts rather than a single expert. Simulation results show that using our proposed fuzzy power control scheme, we can decrease average transmit power consumption and achieve lower average outage probability compared with the fixed-step power control scheme.
Uma Ferramenta para Projeto de Sistemas de Diálogos para Call Center Baseados em Asterisk (A Tool for the Design of Dialog Systems for Asterisk-based Call Centers) [in Portuguese]

This article presents DialogBuilder, an open-source Java tool that provides to its user an interface for designing dialog systems and exporting them to code that can be deployed in Asterisk, the most popular VoIP framework. DialogBuilder offers to the novice users a wizard so that they can design their own dialog system without learning the intricacies of programming for Asterisk. The software separates the stages of dialog conception and its programming and is positioned to make technically and economically viable, even for small businesses, to construct and maintain dialog systems for telephony applications. Resumo. Este artigo apresenta o aplicativo DialogBuilder, uma ferramenta open-source escrita em Java que disponibiliza ao usuário uma interface para projeto de sistemas de diálogo e exportação deste para implantação no Asterisk, o mais popular framework VoIP. DialogBuilder disponibiliza um wizard para que o usuário leigo possa projetar seu sistema sem precisar aprender a programar para Asterisk. O software separa a fase de concepção do diálogo de sua codificação e se posiciona para tornar técnica e economicamente viável, mesmo para pequenas empresas, construir e manter sistemas de diálogo para aplicações telefônicas. 1. Introdução Softwares capazes de dialogar com os clientes são de grande valia para o call center de uma empresa. E a eficiência deste tipo de atendimento é proporcional à sua capacidade de processamento de linguagem natural, campo da inteligência artificial que busca viabilizar a comunicação falada entre homem e máquina [Jurafsky e Martin 2009]. Um dos maiores problemas para que uma empresa inclua em seu call center aplicações de diálogo como as citadas anteriormente é que não existem ferramentas simples para que elas próprias possam projetar e implantar tais sistemas, mesmo quando já existem ferramentas como o Asterisk, que fornece, inclusive, meios gratuitos para implementação e hospedagem de tais tipos de aplicação. A contribuição deste artigo é apresentar um aplicativo desenvolvido com esse cenário em vista e uma importante característica: prover uma forma intuitiva, simples e com auxílio de reconhecimento de fala, para que o próprio usuário possa projetar e construir um sistema de diálogo a ser hospedado no software Asterisk. O intuito é que a ferramenta evolua e seja capaz de prover suporte a sofisticadas estratégias de
Symmetric Pattern Matching Analysis for English Coordinate Structures

The authors propose a model for analyzing English sentences including coordinate conjunctions such as “and”, “or”, “but” and equivalent words. The syntactic analysis of English coordinate sentences is one of the most difficult problems in machine translation (MT) systems. The problem is selecting, from all possible candidates, the correct syntactic structure formed by an individual coordinate conjunction, i. e. determining which constituents are coordinated by the conjunction. Typically, so many possible structures are produced that MT systems cannot select the correct one, even if the grammars allow us to write the rules in simple notations. This paper presents an English coordinate structure analysis model, which provides top-down scope information on the correct syntactic structure by taking advantage of the symmetric patterns of parallelism. The model is based on a balance-matching operation for two lists of feature sets. It has four effects, namely: a reduction in analysis costs, a decrease in word disambiguation, the interpretation of ellipses, and robust analysis. This model was practically implemented and incorporated into the English-Japanese MT system, and it had about 70%accuracy for 3215Wall Street Journal sentences.
Can Deep Effectiveness Metrics Be Evaluated Using Shallow Judgment Pools?

Increasing test collection sizes and limited judgment budgets create measurement challenges for IR batch evaluations, challenges that are greater when using deep effectiveness metrics than when using shallow metrics, because of the increased likelihood that unjudged documents will be encountered. Here we study the problem of metric score adjustment, with the goal of accurately estimating system performance when using deep metrics and limited judgment sets, assuming that dynamic score adjustment is required per topic due to the variability in the number of relevant documents. We seek to induce system orderings that are as close as is possible to the orderings that would arise if full judgments were available. Starting with depth-based pooling, and no prior knowledge of sampling probabilities, the first phase of our two-stage process computes a background gain for each document based on rank-level statistics. The second stage then accounts for the distributional variance of relevant documents. We also exploit the frequency statistics of pooled relevant documents in order to determine a threshold for dynamically determining the set of topics to be adjusted. Taken together, our results show that: (i) better score estimates can be achieved when compared to previous work; (ii) by setting a global threshold, we are able to adapt our methods to different collections; and (iii) the proposed estimation methods reliably approximate the system orderings achieved when many more relevance judgments are available. We also consider pools generated by a two-strata sampling approach.
Privacy-area aware dummy generation algorithms for Location-Based Services

Location-Based Services (LBSs) have been one of the most popular activities in our daily life. Users can send queries to the LBS server easily to learn their surroundings. However, these location-related queries may result in serious privacy concerns since the un-trusted LBS server has all the information about users and may track them in various ways. In this paper, we propose two dummy-based solutions to achieve k-anonymity for privacy-area aware users in LBSs with considering that side information may be exploited by adversaries. We first choose some candidates based on a virtual circle or grid method, then blur these candidates into the final positions of dummy locations based on the entropy-based privacy metric. Security analysis and evaluation results indicate that the V-circle solution can significantly improve the privacy anonymity level. The V-grid solution can further enlarge the cloaking region while keeping similar privacy level.
Evaluating User Experiences of the Secure Messaging Tool on the Veterans Affairs’ Patient Portal System

Background The United States Department of Veterans Affairs has implemented an electronic asynchronous “Secure Messaging” tool within a Web-based patient portal (ie, My HealtheVet) to support patient-provider communication. This electronic resource promotes continuous and coordinated patient-centered care, but to date little research has evaluated patients’ experiences and preferences for using Secure Messaging. Objective The objectives of this mixed-methods study were to (1) characterize veterans’ experiences using Secure Messaging in the My HealtheVet portal over a 3-month period, including system usability, (2) identify barriers to and facilitators of use, and (3) describe strategies to support veterans’ use of Secure Messaging. Methods We recruited 33 veterans who had access to and had previously used the portal’s Secure Messaging tool. We used a combination of in-depth interviews, face-to-face user-testing, review of transmitted secure messages between veterans and staff, and telephone interviews three months following initial contact. We assessed participants’ computer and health literacy during initial and follow-up interviews. We used a content-analysis approach to identify dominant themes in the qualitative data. We compared inferences from each of the data sources (interviews, user-testing, and message review) to identify convergent and divergent data trends. Results The majority of veterans (27/33, 82%) reported being satisfied with Secure Messaging at initial interview; satisfaction ratings increased to 97% (31/32, 1 missing) during follow-up interviews. Veterans noted Secure Messaging to be useful for communicating with their primary care team to manage health care needs (eg, health-related questions, test requests and results, medication refills and questions, managing appointments). Four domains emerged from interviews: (1) perceived benefits of using Secure Messaging, (2) barriers to using Secure Messaging, (3) facilitators for using Secure Messaging, and (4) suggestions for improving Secure Messaging. Veterans identified and demonstrated impediments to successful system usage that can be addressed with education, skill building, and system modifications. Analysis of secure message content data provided insights to reasons for use that were not disclosed by participants during interviews, specifically sensitive health topics such as erectile dysfunction and sexually transmitted disease inquiries. Conclusions Veterans perceive Secure Messaging in the My HealtheVet patient portal as a useful tool for communicating with health care teams. However, to maximize sustained utilization of Secure Messaging, marketing, education, skill building, and system modifications are needed. Data from this study can inform a large-scale quantitative assessment of Secure Messaging users’ experiences in a representative sample to validate qualitative findings.
Inverting back the inversion of control or, continuations versus page-centric programming

Our thesis is that programming web applications with continuations is superior to the current page-centric technology. A continuation is a program-level manageable value representing the rest of the computation of the program. "What to do next" is precisely what has to be explicitly encoded in order to program non trivial web interactions. Continuations allow web applications to be written in direct style that is, as a single program that displays forms and reads form submission since continuations automatically capture everything (control point, lexical bindings, etc.) that is needed to resume the computation. Programming is therefore safer, easier and more re-usable.