Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Sex, Age, and Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Aortoiliac Segment Geometry

Background: To investigate the geometry of the aortoiliac (AI) segment and its correlation with sex, age, and cardiovascular (CV) risk factors. Methods: Abdominal and pelvic CTA/MRA scans of 204 subjects (120 males; median age: 53 [IQR, 27–75] years) without AI steno-occlusive disease or scoliosis were retrospectively analyzed. The participants were enrolled consecutively, ensuring the representation of each age decade. An in-house written software was developed to assess AI elongation using the tortuosity index (TI) and absolute average curvature (AAC). Aortic bifurcation angle, common iliac artery (CIA) take-off and planarity angles, bifurcation asymmetry, and deviation from optimal bifurcation were calculated and evaluated. Demographic data, CV risk factors, and medical history were collected from electronic health records. Results: The elongation of the iliac arteries was more pronounced in males (TI: left CIA, p = 0.011; left EIA, p < 0.001; right CIA, p = 0.023; right EIA, p < 0.001; AAC: left EIA, p < 0.001; right EIA, p = 0.001). Age significantly influenced TI and AAC in all AI segments (all p < 0.001), but was also positively associated with the aortic bifurcation angle (p < 0.001), both CIA planarities (left, p < 0.001; right, p = 0.002), aortic bifurcation asymmetry (p = 0.001), and radius discrepancy (p < 0.001). Significant positive correlations were found between infrarenal aortic TI/AAC and chronic kidney disease (CKD) (p = 0.027 and p = 0.016), AAC of both CIAs and hypertension (left, p = 0.027; right, p = 0.012), right CIA take-off angle and CKD (p = 0.031), and left CIA planarity and hyperlipidemia (p = 0.006). Conclusion: Sex, age, and CV risk factors have a significant effect on the geometry of the AI segment.
Towards a free viewpoint and 3D intensity adjustment on multi-view display

As often declared by customers, wearing glasses is a clear limiting factor for 3D adoption in the home. Autostereoscopic systems bring an interesting answer to this issue. These systems are evolving very fast providing improved picture quality. The system we describe here is able to generate multi-view content for autostereoscopic displays adapted to some user requirements. The viewpoint and the 3D intensity are adjusted at the rendering side taking advantage of available texture and disparity maps provided by the heterogeneous network. A GPU-based solution is proposed that ensures real-time performances. Dedicated work has been performed exploiting network capabilities to satisfy the user request (viewpoint, 3D intensity) but still with an optimization of the bandwidth. Finally, proposals for evaluation methodology have been given.
Mice Lacking the α4 Nicotinic Receptor Subunit Fail to Modulate Dopaminergic Neuronal Arbors and Possess Impaired Dopamine Transporter Function

Neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) at presynaptic sites can modulate dopaminergic synaptic transmission by regulating dopamine (DA) release and uptake. Dopaminergic transmission in nigrostriatal and mesolimbic pathways is vital for the coordination of movement and is associated with learning and behavioral reinforcement. We reported recently that the D2 DA receptor plays a central role in regulating the arbor size of substantia nigra dopaminergic neurons. Given the known effects of nAChRs on dopaminergic neurotransmission, we assessed the ability of the α4 nAChR subunit to regulate arbor size of dopaminergic neurons by comparing responses of wild-type and α4 nAChR subunit knockout [α4(-/-)] mice to long-term exposure to cocaine, amphetamine, nicotine, and haloperidol, and after substantia nigra neurotoxic lesioning. We found that dopaminergic neurons in adult drug-naive α4(-/-) mice had significantly larger terminal arbors, and despite normal short-term behavioral responses to drugs acting on pre- and postsynaptic D2 DA receptors, they were unable to modulate their terminal arbor in response to pharmacological manipulation or after lesioning. In addition, although synaptosome DA uptake studies showed that the interaction of the D2 DA receptor and the dopamine transporter (DAT) was preserved in α4(-/-) mice, DAT function was found to be impaired. These findings suggest that the α4 subunit of the nAChR is an independent regulator of terminal arbor size of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons and that reduced functionality of presynaptic DAT may contribute to this effect by impairing DA uptake.
A cyber-physical systems approach to develop a generic enterprise architecture

Integrating physical objects in virtual environments has been a major research topic in the past years. The major paradigms in which the research efforts are concentrated are: Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems. The present paper is focused on the large-scale integration of the physical and cyber world and the applications that it will enable for Future Enterprise Systems. A new Enterprise System paradigm is discussed: Cyber Intelligent Enterprise and a generic system architecture is proposed.
Shared medical appointments and quality of life for children with HIV-AIDS

Background The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects immune cells and weakens the immune system. There are 36.9 million HIV sufferers worldwide, with 1.8 million of them being children. Children with HIV and their parents may benefit from focus group discussions, also known as shared medical appointments (SMAs). SMAs represent an educational method capable of enhancing the quality of healthcare services. However, this method remains relatively under-researched in HIV/AIDS patients. Objective To assess the impact of SMA on the quality of life of children with HIV-AIDS. Methods This quasi-experimental study with a cross-sectional approach was carried out for 2 months. Subjects participated in SMAs, accompanied by a pediatrician as facilitator. Subjects filled three Pediatric Quality of Life (PedsQL) questionnaires (Inventory 4.0, General Well-Being Scale 3.0, and Healthcare Satisfaction 3.0), before and after attending SMAs. We compared the results. Results There were 12 respondents, with the majority aged 5-10 years (50%), and a higher proportion of male than female (33.3%). The majority of boys had stage 3 HIV, while most girls had stage 2 HIV. According to the PedsQL Inventory module, the average quality of life for the physical aspect was the highest (83), while the lowest was observed in the school aspect (45). In the General Well-being module, the average emotional health scores were 84 before and 93 after SMAs, which were higher than the overall health scores (68 and 77 before and after SMAs, respectively). In the Healthcare Satisfaction module, the lowest average scores were in family satisfaction (52 before and 64 after SMAs), whereas the highest were in satisfaction with healthcare provider treatment (87 and 81 before and after SMAs, respectively). There was a significant increase before and after the SMAs in emotional health (P=0.009). Conclusion An improvement in emotional health was observed based on the General Well-being module of the PedsQL before and after SMAs intervention. Thus, SMAs may potentially improve the quality of life for children with HIV-AIDS.
The economic costs of surgical site infection.

BACKGROUND Surgical site infections (SSIs) remain common and are a major cause of postoperative morbidity. Less well recognized is the cost of these complications, both in the direct costs of care and also in terms of lost economic productivity when workers are disabled as a result of an infection. This review was undertaken to bring into focus the relevant literature regarding the costs associated with SSI. METHODS Review of the pertinent English language literature. RESULTS The estimated costs of SSI vary as a function of locale, type of operation, and the extent (depth) of the infection itself. Superficial SSIs cared for in the National Health Service of the United Kingdom have an estimated cost of less that 400 dollars/case, whereas estimates range into the tens of thousands of dollars per case in the United States for complex infections such as infected joint prostheses or sternal infections following cardiac surgery. The magnitude of the problem is emphasized by a report from Denmark, which shows that the cost of care for surgical site infections consumes 0.5% of the annual hospital budget. CONCLUSION SSI is morbid and expensive. However, not all SSIs are the same. Reports of economic costs that do not stratify for the depth of the infection or the context in which the infection occurs are potentially misstating the magnitude of these complications.
On k-Anonymity and the Curse of Dimensionality

In recent years, the wide availability of personal data has made the problem of privacy preserving data mining an important one. A number of methods have recently been proposed for privacy preserving data mining of multidimensional data records. One of the methods for privacy preserving data mining is that of anonymization, in which a record is released only if it is indistinguishable from k other entities in the data. We note that methods such as k-anonymity are highly dependent upon spatial locality in order to effectively implement the technique in a statistically robust way. In high dimensional space the data becomes sparse, and the concept of spatial locality is no longer easy to define from an application point of view. In this paper, we view the k-anonymization problem from the perspective of inference attacks over all possible combinations of attributes. We show that when the data contains a large number of attributes which may be considered quasi-identifiers, it becomes difficult to anonymize the data without an unacceptably high amount of information loss. This is because an exponential number of combinations of dimensions can be used to make precise inference attacks, even when individual attributes are partially specified within a range. We provide an analysis of the effect of dimensionality on k-anonymity methods. We conclude that when a data set contains a large number of attributes which are open to inference attacks, we are faced with a choice of either completely suppressing most of the data or losing the desired level of anonymity. Thus, this paper shows that the curse of high dimensionality also applies to the problem of privacy preserving data mining.
A Shortest-path Method for Arc-factored Semantic Role Labeling

We introduce a Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) parser that finds semantic roles for a predicate together with the syntactic paths linking predicates and arguments. Our main contribution is to formulate SRL in terms of shortest-path inference, on the assumption that the SRL model is restricted to arc-factored features of the syntactic paths behind semantic roles. Overall, our method for SRL is a novel way to exploit larger variability in the syntactic realizations of predicate-argument relations, moving away from pipeline architectures. Experiments show that our approach improves the robustness of the predictions, producing arc-factored models that perform closely to methods using unrestricted features from the syntax.
Gearbox Fault Diagnosis Method Based on PSM-BN

The gearbox fault diagnosis method based on deep learning lacks good interpretability, and the complexity of the model leads to prolonged diagnostic times. Based on this, this paper proposes a Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallelized Bayesian Network (BN) approach for gearbox fault diagnosis. To address the problem of the Max-Min Hill-Climbing (MMHC) algorithm easily getting trapped in local optima during BN learning, this paper introduces the Snake Optimization (SO) algorithm. This algorithm utilizes multiple individuals to represent potential solutions and updates their positions at each iteration, employing a diversity search strategy to avoid falling into local optima. In response to the high complexity and poor real-time inference of BN fault diagnosis methods, this paper utilizes the CUDA platform as a development framework and employs a CPU+GPU heterogeneous parallel BN to improve the operational efficiency of the model, thereby enhancing the real-time capability of fault diagnosis. Finally, validation is conducted on the gearbox dataset from Southeast University, demonstrating that the proposed method achieves a diagnosis accuracy of 99.7% on 800 fault samples with a training time of 10.4 seconds. Compared to traditional methods, this approach exhibits significant advantages in diagnostic accuracy and training speed, effectively enhancing the accuracy and stability of fault diagnosis.
Learning perceptual texture similarity and relative attributes from computational features

Previous work has shown that perceptual texture similarity and relative attributes cannot be well described by computational features. In this paper, we propose to predict human's visual perception of texture images by learning a non-linear mapping from computational feature space to perceptual space. Hand-crafted features and deep features, which were successfully applied in texture classification tasks, were extracted and used to train Random Forest and rankSVM models against perceptual data from psychophysical experiments. Three texture datasets were used to test our proposed method and the experiments show that the predictions of such learnt models are in high correlation with human's results.
Proinflammatory and Immunoregulatory Roles of Eicosanoids in T Cells

Eicosanoids are inflammatory mediators primarily generated by hydrolysis of membrane phospholipids by phospholipase A2 to ω-3 and ω-6 C20 fatty acids that next are converted to leukotrienes (LTs), prostaglandins (PGs), prostacyclins (PCs), and thromboxanes (TXAs). The rate-limiting and tightly regulated lipoxygenases control synthesis of LTs while the equally well-controlled cyclooxygenases 1 and 2 generate prostanoids, including PGs, PCs, and TXAs. While many of the classical signs of inflammation such as redness, swelling, pain, and heat are caused by eicosanoid species with vasoactive, pyretic, and pain-inducing effects locally, some eicosanoids also regulate T cell functions. Here, we will review eicosanoid production in T cell subsets and the inflammatory and immunoregulatory functions of LTs, PGs, PCs, and TXAs in T cells.
Delay optimal server assignment to symmetric parallel queues with random connectivities

In this paper, we investigate the problem of assignment of K identical servers to a set of N parallel queues in a time slotted queueing system. The connectivity of each queue to each server is randomly changing with time; each server can serve at most one queue and each queue can be served by at most one server per time slot. Such queueing systems were widely applied in modeling the scheduling (or resource allocation) problem in wireless networks. It has been previously proven that Maximum Weighted Matching (MWM) is a throughput optimal server assignment policy for such queueing systems [1], [2]. In this paper, we prove that for a symmetric system with i.i. d. Bernoulli packet arrivals and connectivities, MWM minimizes, in stochastic ordering sense, a broad range of cost functions of the queue lengths including total queue occupancy (or equivalently average queueing delay).
Travelling without Moving: 802.11 Access Points backed by Secure NETLMM

In network-based localized mobility management (NETLMM), a mobile node is not involved in signalling related to mobility support, and keeps the same IP address after handoff from one link to another. The mobile node's current access router acts as a mobility access gateway by sending Proxy Local Binding Updates to the local mobility anchor on behalf of the mobile node. Due to some properties of the NETLMM domain, implementing it efficiently using IEEE 802.11 radio access networks is not straightforward. This paper presents the challenges involved with such an implementation, presents solutions to them, and analyze the overall performance of the complete system.
Microtubules and Their Role in Cellular Stress in Cancer

Microtubules are highly dynamic structures, which consist of α- and β-tubulin heterodimers, and are involved in cell movement, intracellular trafficking, and mitosis. In the context of cancer, the tubulin family of proteins is recognized as the target of the tubulin-binding chemotherapeutics, which suppress the dynamics of the mitotic spindle to cause mitotic arrest and cell death. Importantly, changes in microtubule stability and the expression of different tubulin isotypes as well as altered post-translational modifications have been reported for a range of cancers. These changes have been correlated with poor prognosis and chemotherapy resistance in solid and hematological cancers. However, the mechanisms underlying these observations have remained poorly understood. Emerging evidence suggests that tubulins and microtubule-associated proteins may play a role in a range of cellular stress responses, thus conferring survival advantage to cancer cells. This review will focus on the importance of the microtubule–protein network in regulating critical cellular processes in response to stress. Understanding the role of microtubules in this context may offer novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of cancer.
System software architecture for advancing human robot interaction by cloud
 services and multi-robot cooperation

Human-like interactions with robots based on Conversational AI facilitate assistance and teamwork in various contexts. Those interactions are further enhanced by utilizing physical presence and context from the robot's hardware. Robot cooperation is also especially useful, when software or hardware resources have to be shared in a multi-robot system. Therefore, we propose a modular software architecture for multi-robot cooperation that extends the integration of Conversational AI into Socially Assistive Robots, previously suggested by authors. It utilizes a flow-based approach that involves shared repositories and direct or message-driven communication to convey natural language transcriptions among robots in order to support their cooperation. By experiments we evaluated the cooperation between NAOqi based robots and Furhat robot. Our experimental results demonstrate architecture's modularity and adaptability to different cloud services, along with its effectiveness for interactions involving multiple robots.
Mucins and mucosal protection in the gastrointestinal tract: new prospects for mucins in the pathology of gastrointestinal disease

The luminal surface of the gastrointestinal tract is covered by a viscoelastic mucous gel layer that acts as a protective barrier against the harsh luminal environment. The structural characteristics of this barrier are primary indicators of its physiological function and changes to its composition have long been identified in gastrointestinal pathologies. During the past decade significant improvements in analytical techniques coupled with detailed knowledge of the genes coding for the mucin proteins have provided exciting new insights into the role of the mucous layer and its relevance to gastrointestinal disease. The high molecular weight mucins are responsible for the viscoelastic properties of the mucous barrier. They are widely expressed in epithelial tissues and are characterised by variable number tandem repeat peptide sequences rich in serine, threonine, and proline which carry large numbers of O -linked oligosaccharide chains.1 2 At present, 12 genes have been described, shown in table 1.1 3 Secreted and membrane associated forms have been found based on their function as extracellular viscous secretions or viscoelastic polymer gels or location as membrane anchored molecules in the glycocalyx.3 4 Two clusters have been reported, the secretory mucin genes MUC2, MUC5AC, MUC5B, and MUC6 on chromosome 11p15.5, and MUC3, MUC11, and MUC12 on chromosome 7q22.3 View this table: Table 1 Mucin genes and their location in the human gastrointestinal tract Histochemical techniques for mucin detection rely on the ability to detect carbohydrate or negative charge and were widely used for classification of changes in disease.5 6 The use of lectins and anticarbohydrate antibodies has greatly improved the specific detection of mucins histochemically and biochemically.5 6 A group of mucin oligosaccharide antigens, including Tn, sialyl-Tn, T, Lewisx and Lewisy, sialyl and sulpho-Lewisx and -Lewisa, and the blood group ABH antigens, have been identified …
Factors Related to Stroke Incidence in Hawaii Japanese Men: The Honolulu Heart Study

As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of coronary heart disease and stroke among Japanese men in Hawaii, 8,006 men of Japanese ancestry living on the island of Oahu and aged 45–68 at entry examination have been followed by reexamination and surveillance. One hundred and eleven were found to have evidence of prior stroke at the time of the initial examination. During a six-year follow up period of the remaining 7,895 men, 94 developed definite thromboembolic stroke, 33 definite intracranial hemorrhage, and 6 developed stroke of unknown type. The principal risk factors for thromboembolic stroke were: elevated blood pressure, glucose intolerance, age, and electrocardiographic evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy or strain. Attributes associated with increased risk of intracranial hemorrhage were elevated blood pressure, electrocardiographic evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy or strain, and alcohol intake. Serum cholesterol level was negatively associated with risk of intracranial hemorrhage.
Effect of age on changes in motor units functional connectivity

With age, there is a change in functional connectivity of motor units in muscle. This leads to reduced muscle strength. This study has investigated the effect of age on the changes in the motor unit recruitment by measuring the mutual information between multiple channels of surface electromyogram (sEMG) of biceps brachii muscle. It is hypothesised that with ageing, there is a reduction in number of motor units, which can lead to an increase in the dependency of remaining motor units. This increase can be observed in the mutual information between the multiple channels of the muscle activity. Two channels of sEMG were recorded during the maximum level of isometric contraction. 28 healthy subjects (Young: age range 20-35years and Old: age range - 60-70years) participated in the experiments. The normalized mutual information (NMI), a measure of dependency factor, was computed for the sEMG recordings. Statistical analysis was performed to test the effect of age on NMI. The results show that the NMI among the older cohort was significantly higher when compared with the young adults.