Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Pilot Study on the Inter-Operator Reproducibility of a Wireless Sensors-Based System for Quantifying Gait Asymmetries in Horses

Repeatability and reproducibility of any measuring system must be evaluated to assess possible limitations for its use. The objective of this study was to establish the repeatability and the inter-operator reproducibility of a sensors-based system (EQUISYM®) for quantifying gait asymmetries in horses. Seven wireless IMUs were placed on the head, the withers, the pelvis, and the 4 cannon bones on three horses, by four different operators, four times on each horse, which led to a total of 48 repetitions randomly assigned. Data were collected along three consecutive days and analysed to calculate total variance, standard deviation and the variance attributable to the operator on multiple asymmetry variables. Maximal percentage of variance due to the operator (calculated out of the total variance) was 5.3% and was related to the sensor placed on the head. The results suggest a good reproducibility of IMU-based gait analysis systems for different operators repositioning the system and repeating the same measurements at a succession of time intervals. Future studies will be useful to confirm that inter-operator reproducibility remains valid in larger groups and on horses with different degrees of locomotor asymmetry.
Mountains and their ecotones increase landscape heterogeneity and maintain a unique assemblage of grasshoppers in the southern Kalahari

South Africa is a megadiverse country. Here, natural communities are unevenly distributed across, and within, seven distinct biomes. In such heterogeneous landscapes, understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity is essential for planning and implementing efficient conservation measures. The southern Kalahari, forming part of South Africa's savanna biome, is an arid region of peculiarly high diversity and endemism. The responses of orthopteran assemblages to changing environmental conditions across the Kalahari were investigated by comparing alpha and beta diversity levels across discrete vegetation types in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. The degree of association between species and specific vegetation types were also studied and how a key life history trait ‐ dispersal ability – influences community composition was determined. This study identified 46 grasshopper species within the reserve, which compares well with richness levels in other more productive habitats of the country. Local (alpha) diversity was higher in mountain and mountain‐ecotone sites versus vegetation types on the plains, and species turnover was also exceptionally high – approaching 100% ‐ across these two groups. The few (3) dispersal limited species recovered were associated only with the mountain‐ecotone group, with emergent dominance patterns suggesting that competitive rather than dispersal abilities determine the species composition of unique assemblages in the landscape. Topology plays a key role in maintaining spatial diversity across the southern Kalahari landscape. Mountains, and their ecotones, promote not only species turnover, but also richness and functional diversity. These can be viewed as islands of diversity, and should be targeted priority areas for conservation beyond the boundaries of protected areas.
Interacting effects of environmental enrichment across multiple generations on early life phenotypes in zebrafish.

The environment plays an important role in an individual's development during early life, however, parents may also influence offspring development through so called "parental effects. " We examined the effects of environmental enrichment in zebrafish (Danio rerio) across two generations through the paternal lineage. Fathers and grandfathers were exposed to either standard or high levels of housing enrichment for 4-weeks during adulthood. First-generation (F1) and second-generation (F2) offspring were obtained from controlled breeding and tested as larvae for changes in morphology at hatching stage (72hpf), and in locomotor activity at larval stage (120hpf) in both generations. We found paternal experience of enrichment resulted in changes in trunk length of F1 offspring and changes in spine curvature and dorsal length of F2 offspring, while changes in snout morphology of F2 offspring seemed to be driven by whether grandpaternal and paternal experience of the environment was matched or not. We found that while paternal enrichment increased the frequency of spontaneous movement in F1 and F2 offspring, interacting effects of paternal and grandpaternal enrichment on movement distance were seen in F2 offspring, and that spontaneous movement and the distance that larvae swam are thus distinct phenotypes that were differentially affected by the experiences of previous paternal generations. Taken together, these findings suggest that the parental and grandparental environment influence zebrafish behavior and morphology. The nature of these effects and the design of this study mean that these phenotypes were likely the result of nongenetic transmission through the paternal germline.
Electrohydrodynamic printing of submicron-microscale hybrid scaffolds with improved cellular adhesion and proliferation behaviors

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing has been considered as a mature strategy to mimic the hierarchical microarchitectures in native extracellular matrix (ECM). Most of the EHD-printed scaffolds possess single-dimensional fibrous structures, which cannot mimic the multi-dimensional architectures for enhanced cellular behaviors. Here we developed a two-nozzle EHD printing system to fabricate hybrid scaffolds involving submicron and microscale features. The polyethylene oxide- polycaprolactone (PEO-PCL) submicron fibers were fabricated via solution-based EHD printing with a width of 527 ± 56 nm. The PCL microscale fibers were fabricated via melt-based EHD printing with a width of 11.2 ± 2.3 μm. The hybrid scaffolds were fabricated by printing the submicron and microscale fibers in a layer-by-layer manner. The microscale scaffolds were utilized as a control group. Rat myocardial cells (H9C2 cells) were cultured on the two kinds of scaffolds for the culturing period of 1, 3 and 5 d. Biological results indicated that H9C2 cells showed enhanced adhesion and proliferation behaviors on the hybrid scaffold than those on the pure microscale scaffold. This work offers a facile and scalable strategy to fabricate multiscale synthetic scaffolds, which might be further explored to regulate cellular behaviors in the fields of tissue regeneration and biomedical engineering.
Bouveret Syndrome in a Cirrhotic Patient

Here, we present a case of Bouveret syndrome, a rare etiology of gallstone impaction in the setting of chole-enteric fistula, in a cirrhotic patient. This syndrome is most often seen in elderly patients with multiple comorbidities and as such has high morbidity and mortality rates. Because of its prevalence in this patient population and its rarity, there are no established guidelines for the workup and management of this disease. We discuss currently available options for management and thoughts on our comorbid patient and her clinical course.
Spatial-spectral metric learning for hyperspectral remote sensing image classification

A spatial-spectral metric learning (SSML) framework for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is proposed. SSML learns a metric by considering both the spectral characteristics and spatial features represented as the mean of neighboring pixels. It first performs the local pixel neighborhood preserving embedding (LPNPE) to reduce the dimensionality of HSI and meanwhile to preserve the spatial local similarity structure. Then, it learns a spectral and spatial distance metric, separately. Finally, the combination of the spectral and spatial metrics yields a joint spatial-spectral metric. It is followed by a nearest neighbor (NN) classifier for HSI classification. SSML shows good performance over the spectral and spatial NN and SVM on the benchmark hyperspectral data set of Indian Pines.
Multi-Reception and Multi-Gradient Discriminator for Image Inpainting

Many deep learning methods for image inpainting rely on the encoder-decoder architecture to estimate missing contents. When guidance information from uncorrupted regions cannot be adequately represented or utilized, the encoder may have difficulty handling the rich surrounding or background pixels, and the decoder could not recover visually sophisticated or realistic content. This paper proposes an effective multi-scale optimization network to alleviate these issues and generate coherent results with fine details. It adaptively encodes multi-receptive fields feature maps and puts multi-scale outputs into a discriminator to guide training. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Receptive feature maps & masks Selective Fusion (MRSF) operator that can adaptively extract features in different receptive fields to handle sophisticated destroyed images. Then a multi-gradient discriminator (MGD) module uses the intermediate features of the discriminator to guide the generator to produce results with natural textures and semantically real contents. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize more realistic and coherent image content.
A Multicenter, Investigator-Blinded, Randomized Controlled Trial to Assess the Efficacy of Calf Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation Program on Walking Performance in Peripheral Artery Disease: The ELECTRO-PAD Study Protocol

This paper describes a currently on-going multicenter, randomized controlled trial designed to assess the efficacy of calf neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) on changes in maximal walking distance in people with lower extremity peripheral artery disease (PAD), compared with a non-intervention control-group. This study (NCT03795103) encompasses five participating centers in France. PAD participants with a predominant claudication at the calf level and a maximal treadmill walking distance ≤300 m are randomized into one of the two groups: NMES group or Control group. The NMES program consists of a 12-week program of electrical stimulations at the calf-muscle level. The primary outcome of the study is the change in maximal treadmill walking distance at 12 weeks. Main secondary outcomes include changes in the pain-free treadmill walking distance; 6 min total walking distance; global positioning system (GPS)-measured outdoor walking capacity; daily physical activity level by accelerometry; self-reported walking impairment; self-reported quality of life; ankle-brachial index; and skin microvascular function, both at the forearm and calf levels. Recruitment started in September 2019 and data collection is expected to end in November 2022.
Content Analysis of LGCSE Religious Studies Syllabus: To What Extend Does It Address the 21st Century Skills?

Recently, there has been renewed interest of countries to reform their curriculum in order to promote 21st century skills among learners. It is expected too, that subject syllabi should align with the curriculum in promoting such skills. However, most studies in the field of religious studies in Lesotho have not focused on the extent to which this subject contributes to the promotion of 21st century skills and that prompted the present study. Qualitative Content Analysis was employed to determine the extent to which religious studies syllabus promotes 21st century skills. Document Analysis was used to analyze aims of the syllabus to establish different skills which are promoted by each aim. The findings indicated that religious studies syllabus aims differ in terms of the degree at which they promote 21st century skills. It also appeared that learning and innovation skills are predominantly promoted by the syllabus aims. However, the syllabus’ aims seem to shrink from promoting technological skills. As a result, the following suggestions were made; first, the curriculum developers should emphasize all skills equivalently. Additionally, curriculum developers should restructure the curriculum to promote technological skills.
A Compact Vehicle-Mounted Garden-Themed Artistic Antenna With Isolation Improvement for 2G/3G/LTE/5G Sub-6-GHz/WiFi/Bluetooth Communications

A multi-band vehicle-mounted garden-themed antenna with isolation improvement for 2G/3G/LTE/5G sub-6 GHz/WiFi/Bluetooth is proposed in this paper. This antenna is mainly comprised of three printed circuit board (PCB) substrates. For good isolation level, two pavilion-shaped 4G-band (including the 2G/3G/LTE frequency bands) patches and two tree-shaped 5G-band (including the 5G sub-6 GHz bands) patches are diagonally placed at the four corners of the top-layer substrate, whereas the other two tree-shaped 5G-band patches and a peach-shaped WiFi-band patch, are arranged in a line on the bottom substrate. To further improve the isolation, two fence posts are arranged between the neighboring antenna elements on the bottom substrate. Finally, a flower-shaped patch array printed on the middle substrate is employed to reduce the mutual coupling factor, broaden the frequency bandwidth, improve the peak gain and the radiation efficiency, especially for the 5G-band antenna element printed on the bottom-layer substrate. Characteristic mode analysis (CMA) method is introduced to the antenna radiation pattern and frequency bandwidth. The measured results showed good impedance bandwidths of 20.69<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> (0.78-0.96 GHz) and 106.8<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> (1.37-4.51 GHz) for 2G/3G/LTE bands, 71.81<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> (2.41-5.11 GHz) for 5G bands, and 84.34<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> (2.4-5.9 GHz) for WiFi bands are achieved with a compact size of 0.338 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times\; 0.130\;\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> 0.094 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda _{0}^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula> (free-space wavelength at the starting frequency). Furthermore, across the above bands of interest, an isolation level of better than 16 dB can be achieved.
Preparation and optimization of porous regenerated cellulose microspheres from cellulose tetraethyl-ammonium/urea solution for adsorption of cationic methylene blue dye

Porous regenerated cellulose microspheres (RCMs) have attracted increasing attention due to their wide range of applications from medical carriers to environmental remediation. Here, porous RCMs were synthesized for adsorption of cationic methylene blue dye using a simple emulsification–acid coagulation–oven-drying technique after dissolving pulp cellulose with a degree of polymerization (DP) of approximately 1500 in tetraethylammonium hydroxide (TEAOH)/urea solvents at room temperature. The RCMs with controllable size (20 to 224 µm) and high pore volume (8.24 to 10.20 mL/g) were prepared by varying the dosage of the surfactant polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate (polysorbate 80). Moreover, the viscosity of the cellulose solution steadily decreased with storage time due to the decrease in cellulose DP, but the effect on the particle size and morphology of RCMs was negligible, which could be advantageous to the scalable production of RCMs. When used as an adsorbent for cationic methylene blue dye removal, it showed high adsorption efficiency (1 h to achieve equilibrium, 24.5 mg/g), stability, recyclability, and reusability.
Is Thermal Imaging a Helpful Tool in Diagnosis of Asymptomatic Odontogenic Infection Foci—A Pilot Study

Since the identification of periapical lesions typically requires invasive testing that may adversely affect individuals suffering from concomitant disease, the diagnosis of apical periodontitis remains a challenge. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of infrared thermal imaging for the detection of asymptomatic odontogenic inflammatory response in patients with a high risk of systemic infections. The examinations were performed using the FLIR T1020 thermal camera. The acquired images were analyzed with a ThermaCAM TM Researcher Pro 2.8 SR-3. Statistical analyses were conducted using the Statistica 10 software. The Mann–Whitney U test was used for data that were not normally distributed or did not meet the assumption of homogeneity of variance, while normally distributed data were analyzed with the t-test. The mean temperature difference between the periapical regions of the suspect and contralateral teeth was found to be greatest at 30 s of mouth opening. This is a preliminary study conducted to evaluate the potential of infrared thermal imaging as a diagnostic tool for the identification and elimination of odontogenic infection foci. Thermography seems to facilitate the quantitative assessment of inflammation by displaying temperature differences between the affected and unaffected regions.
Polarization modulation of an optical trap's spring constant

Using a Fresnel zone plate, we demonstrate optical trapping with a larger numerical aperture than is commonly available with commercial objective lenses. The zone plate is fabricated onto the inner wall of the fluidic cell and, consequently, focusing is free from on axis aberrations due to an absence of dielectric interfaces. Using zone plates with extremely large focusing angles, we observe an enhanced ellipticity in the trapping volume. For a zone plate with a numerical aperture of 0.986nwater (1.308), we observe a trapping stiffness that is more than four times stiffer perpendicular to the polarization than parallel to the polarization. By rotating the incident linear polarization state, the trapping stiffness along a given direction can be modulated by a factor of four. The ellipticity in the focal volume is due to the presence of an axial field component whose magnitude is proportional to the sine of the focusing angle of the lens.
An investigation on tribological behavior of methacrylated κ-carrageenan and gellan gum hydrogels as a candidate for chondral repair

Natural polysaccharides have recently attracted attention as structural biomaterials to replace focal chondral defects. In the present study, in-vitro tribological performance of methacrylated κ-carrageenan and gellan gum hydrogels (KA-MA and GG-MA) was evaluated under physiological conditions. Coefficient of friction (COF) was continuously recorded over testing whilst worn area was measured post-testing. The findings help improve our understanding of KA-MA-H and GG-MA-H tribological performance under various physiological conditions. The friction and wear performance of the hydrogels improved in bovine calf serum lubricant at lower applied loads. Adhesion was the dominant wear mechanism detected by SEM. Among the proposed hydrogels GG-MA-H found robust mechanical properties, increased wear resistance and considerably low COF, which may suggest its potential usage as a cartilage substitute. Graphical Abstract
Speed‐Accuracy Trade

The study investigated the speed‐accuracy trade for detecting a weak 1000‐Hz tone presented in continuous noise. Reaction times were measured in a YES‐NO design with a fixed response deadline and various payoffs for the four stimulus‐response combinations. The deadline was varied from 300 to 2000 msec in various experiments, and the payoff schedule was varied at a fixed deadline to determine different points on an ROC curve. With 300 msec deadline, performance is near chance; with a 2000 msec deadline, performance is practically perfect. With a fixed‐response deadline imposed on both signal and noise trials the data favor a counter model, since the mean reaction time for all events is roughly the same, and the ROC curve has a slope less than unity. When the deadline is imposed on only signal trials, the data favor an interarrival time model, since the mean reaction time on noise trials is a linear function of the mean reaction time on signal trials and the ROC curve has a slope greater than unity. [This research was supported by a grant from National Science Foundation. ]
Computer Simulation of Ultrasonic Images with Self-Similarity of Tissue Structures

A simulation model of reflection source distribution in biological tissues is proposed. The tissue is considered to consist of cells of various sizes. The distribution is computed using the fractal Brownian function. The ultrasound wave is reflected at the center of a cell and the coefficient of reflection is proportional to the area of a cell. The cell distribution is computed for the initial Hurst coefficient range of 0.2 to 0.8. The occupied area of every image is equal, because the cell density is kept constant. The Hurst coefficient of the ultrasonic image which is computed from the cell distribution is dependent on the initial Hurst coefficient for the cell distribution. As a result, it is indicated that the fractal analysis is effective for the characterization of tissue structure.
On Delaunay random cluster models

We examine continuum percolative problems on the Delaunay hypergraph structure. In particular, we investigate the existence of a percolation transition for a class of Gibbsian particle systems with random hyperedges between groups of particles. Each such system will take the form of a random cluster representation of a corresponding continuum Potts model with geometric interactions on hyperedges of the Delaunay hypergraph structure. Any percolation results in the random cluster representation will lead to the existence of a phase transition for the continuum Potts model: that is, the existence of more than one Gibbs measure. The original components of this research are as follows. After extending the random cluster representation of [GH96] to hypergraph structures, we achieve a phase transition for Delaunay continuum Potts models with infinite range type interactions – extending the work of [BBD03] in the process. Our main result is the existence of a phase transition for Delaunay continuum Potts models with no background interaction and just a soft type interaction. This is an extension of the phase transition results for the hardcore (resp. softcore) Widom–Rowlinson model of [R71] and later [CCK94], (resp. [LL72]). Our final piece of originality comes in the guise of an overview of the obstacles faced when investigating further percolative problems in the Delaunay hypergraph structure such as the Russo–Seymour–Welsh Theorem.
FIRST ORDER QUASILINEAR EQUATIONS IN SEVERAL INDEPENDENT VARIABLES

In this paper we construct a theory of generalized solutions in the large of Cauchy's problem for the equations in the class of bounded measurable functions. We define the generalized solution and prove existence, uniqueness and stability theorems for this solution. To prove the existence theorem we apply the "vanishing viscosity method"; in this connection, we first study Cauchy's problem for the corresponding parabolic equation, and we derive a priori estimates of the modulus of continuity in of the solution of this problem which do not depend on small viscosity.Bibliography: 22 items.
Cell Palpation System Based on a Force Measurement by Optical Tweezers for Investigation of Local Mechanical Properties of a Cell Membrane

We have developed a cell palpation system, which enables to investigate mechanical properties of a cell in local with an optically manipulated particle. In this system, the particle attached on a cell surface is forced to move back-and-forth in sinusoidal manner by optical tweezers. Position of the particle position is recorded and analyzed to extract force exerted on the particle by using a physical model of the particle. We have demonstrated to measure cell membrane stiffness in local and temporal change of that with the detection limit of the force in pN order.