Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical trial of video-assisted thoracoscopic segmentectomy using infrared thoracoscopy with indocyanine green.

OBJECTIVES The maintenance of a good surgical view is mandatory in video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS). For routine segmentectomy, it is necessary to re-inflate the lung in order to identify the intersegmental line. However, such re-inflation can occasionally obstruct the surgical view. Infrared thoracoscopy (IRT) with indocyanine green (ICG) can reveal the intersegmental line based on blood flow differences, without the need for lung re-inflation. The purpose of this study was to confirm the usefulness of IRT with ICG for VATS. METHODS Between October 2008 and September 2011, 44 consecutive patients underwent segmentectomy at our institution. In 13 patients, VATS segmentectomy using IRT with ICG was employed. Informed consent was obtained from all patients. Computed tomography was performed to identify the dominant pulmonary artery supplying the target segment. The operations were performed using two ports and one mini-thoracotomy (3-6 cm). The dominant arteries were interrupted, and the intersegmental line was identified using IRT with ICG. RESULTS Identification of the intersegmental line was possible in 11 (84.6%) of the 13 patients. The average age was 70 years, and 6 of the patients were male. The mean operation time was 191 min, and the mean bleeding volume was 64 ml. The operation time and bleeding volume were similar to the values in the other 31 patients who underwent thoracotomy (167 min/115 ml, P = 0.212/0.361, respectively). No complications attributable to IRT with ICG were observed. CONCLUSIONS VATS segmentectomy using IRT with ICG allows the maintenance of a clear surgical view and identification of the intersegmental line in a high proportion of cases. Therefore, we consider this method to be useful for minimally invasive thoracic surgery.
Adaptive fair channel allocation for QoS enhancement in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

The emerging widespread use of real-time multimedia applications over wireless networks makes the support of quality of service (QoS) a key problem. In this paper, we focus on QoS support mechanisms for IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks. First, we review limitations of the upcoming IEEE 802.11e enhanced DCF (EDCF) and other enhanced MAC schemes that have been proposed to support QoS for 802.11 ad-hoc networks. Then, we describe a new scheme called adaptive fair EDCF that extends EDCF, by increasing the contention window during deferring periods when the channel is busy, and by using an adaptive fast backoff mechanism when the channel is idle. Our scheme computes an adaptive backoff threshold for each priority level by taking into account the channel load. The new scheme significantly improves the quality of multimedia applications. Moreover, it increases the overall throughput obtained both in medium and high load cases. Simulution results show that our new scheme outperforms EDCF and other enhanced schemes. Finally, we show that the adaptive fair EDCF scheme achieves a high degree of fairness among applications of the same priority level.
Vitamin D supplementation and body weight status: a systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials

Vitamin D is anticipated to have many extra‐skeletal health benefits. We questioned whether supplementation with the vitamin influenced body weight and composition. A systematic review and meta‐analysis was conducted on high‐quality, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that had supplemented vitamin D without imposing any caloric restriction. Eighteen trials reporting either body weight, body mass index (BMI), fat mass (FM), percentage fat mass (%FM) or lean body mass (LBM) met our criteria. Twelve studies provided the required data for the meta‐analysis. Vitamin D supplementation did not influence the standardized mean difference (SMD) for body weight, FM, %FM or LBM. A small but non‐significant decrease in BMI (SMD = −0.097, 95% confidence interval: [−0.210, 0.016], P = 0.092) was observed. Meta‐regression confirmed that neither the absolute vitamin D status achieved nor its change from baseline influenced the SMD of any obesity measure. However, increasing age of the subjects predicted a shift in the SMD for FM towards the placebo treatment, whereas a greater percentage of women in these studies favoured a decrease in FM following vitamin D. Vitamin D supplementation did not decrease measures of adiposity in the absence of caloric restriction. A potential confounding by age and gender was encountered.
Realtime classification with structure adapting neuro-fuzzy systems

Neural networks with a structure adaptation capability that are equivalent to fuzzy systems are investigated with the goal of designing hardware architectures for application in time critical classification problems. The consecutive steps adopted to build a realtime prototype of a structure adapting neural network include the modification of learning algorithms making them suitable for hardware implementation, the development of a hardware architecture, and the system implementation and test. Structure adaptation must be integrated into the learning algorithm implementable in hardware. Fusion of information hidden in data with the existing knowledge expressed in rules should also be possible. Three types of structure adapting algorithms have been mapped onto the proposed hardware architecture. Performance of the system implementation is evaluated comparing the speeds using software implementations for benchmarks and real applications.
The Black Teacher Shortage: A Literature Review of Historical and Contemporary Trends

Abstract:Desegregation marked the beginning of a long period of loss of Black teachers within the profession. First, Black teachers were not hired in desegregated schools, and then as other professional opportunities opened up in society, fewer Blacks entered the teacher pipeline. The purpose of this literature review is to synthesize research relevant to understanding factors influencing the current number of Black teachers in the workforce and how to increase this number using alternative certification routes. Nontraditional programs that have been successful in recruiting and retaining Black teachers are highlighted.
Prevalence of DNSSEC for hospital websites in Illinois

The domain name system translates human friendly web addresses to a computer readable internet protocol address. This basic infrastructure is insecure and can be manipulated. Deployment of technology to secure the DNS system has been slow, reaching about 20% of all web sites based in the USA. Little is known about the efforts hospitals and health systems make to secure the domain name system for their websites. To investigate the prevalence of implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), we analyzed the websites of the 210 public hospitals in the state of Illinois, USA. Only one Illinois hospital website was found to have implemented DNSSEC by December, 2017.
New industrial testing and maintenance for AESA radars

The Active Antennas (AESA) technology has dramatically increased the operational capability of modern radars. It is also important to reduce as much as possible the cost of production. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of achievements in the production of AESA radars. The first part deals with improvements for reducing the costs and the complexity of industrial testing. In the second part, a new method aiming a better efficiency of test data exploitation is presented. A new method of using data from integrated testing (Built-In-Test) is presented. It is a method of Data Mining based on Bayesian networks that processes all the raw data issued from the Built-In-Test (B.I.T.). It allows detecting and diagnosing accurately defects that are difficult to catch with current methods, such as fugitive failures or initiation of youth's defects. Originally planned for testing in production, this method could replace, in the future, the current B.I. T. which is used in operational use. By improving the preventive detection of faults, the operational availability of the equipment is increased and the ownership cost is reduced.
Generation of recombinant adenovirus vectors with modified fibers for altering viral tropism

To expand the utility of recombinant adenovirus vectors for gene therapy applications, methods to alter native viral tropism to achieve cell-specific transduction would be beneficial. To this end, we are pursuing genetic methods to alter the cell recognition domain of the adenovirus fiber. To incorporate these modified fibers into mature virions, we have developed a method based on homologous DNA recombination between two plasmids. A fiber-deleted, propagation-defective rescue plasmid has been designed for recombination with a shuttle plasmid encoding a variant fiber gene. Recombination between the two plasmids results in the derivation of recombinant viruses containing the variant fiber gene. To establish the utility of this method, we constructed a recombinant adenovirus containing a fiber gene with a silent mutation. In addition, we generated an adenovirus vector containing chimeric fibers composed of the tail and shaft domains of adenovirus serotype 5 and the knob domain of serotype 3. This modification was shown to alter the receptor recognition profile of the virus containing the fiber chimera. Thus, this two-plasmid system allows for the generation of adenovirus vectors containing variant fibers. This method provides a rapid and facile means of generating fiber-modified recombinant adenoviruses. In addition, it should be possible to use this system in the development of adenovirus vectors with modified tropism to allow cell-specific targeting.
SNR enhancement method for energy detection

The proposed method is intended to improve the performance of the classical energy detector. The method preserves the characteristic advantages of the energy detector while simultaneously achieves SNR gain and variance reduction. We utilize the Welch method as the basic platform of analysis, derive performance function, and perform computer simulations to confirm the performance function. We also show the performance improvement of the proposed method employing SNR and ROC curves.
A regression framework incorporating quantitative and negative interaction data improves quantitative prediction of PDZ domain–peptide interaction from primary sequence

Motivation: Predicting protein interactions involving peptide recognition domains is essential for understanding the many important biological processes they mediate. It is important to consider the binding strength of these interactions to help us construct more biologically relevant protein interaction networks that consider cellular context and competition between potential binders. Results: We developed a novel regression framework that considers both positive (quantitative) and negative (qualitative) interaction data available for mouse PDZ domains to quantitatively predict interactions between PDZ domains, a large peptide recognition domain family, and their peptide ligands using primary sequence information. First, we show that it is possible to learn from existing quantitative and negative interaction data to infer the relative binding strength of interactions involving previously unseen PDZ domains and/or peptides given their primary sequence. Performance was measured using cross-validated hold out testing and testing with previously unseen PDZ domain–peptide interactions. Second, we find that incorporating negative data improves quantitative interaction prediction. Third, we show that sequence similarity is an important prediction performance determinant, which suggests that experimentally collecting additional quantitative interaction data for underrepresented PDZ domain subfamilies will improve prediction. Availability and Implementation: The Matlab code for our SemiSVR predictor and all data used here are available at http://baderlab.org/Data/PDZAffinity. Contact: gary.bader@utoronto.ca; dengnaiyang@cau.edu. cn Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Distinct Roles of Plasmodium Rhomboid 1 in Parasite Development and Malaria Pathogenesis

Invasion of host cells by the malaria parasite involves recognition and interaction with cell-surface receptors. A wide variety of parasite surface proteins participate in this process, most of which are specific to the parasite's particular invasive form. Upon entry, the parasite has to dissociate itself from the host-cell receptors. One mechanism by which it does so is by shedding its surface ligands using specific enzymes. Rhomboid belongs to a family of serine proteases that cleave cell-surface proteins within their transmembrane domains. Here we identify and partially characterize a Plasmodium berghei rhomboid protease (PbROM1) that plays distinct roles during parasite development. PbROM1 localizes to the surface of sporozoites after salivary gland invasion. In blood stage merozoites, PbROM1 localizes to the apical end where proteins involved in invasion are also present. Our genetic analysis suggests that PbROM1 functions in the invasive stages of parasite development. Whereas wild-type P. berghei is lethal to mice, animals infected with PbROM1 null mutants clear the parasites efficiently and develop long-lasting protective immunity. The results indicate that P. berghei Rhomboid 1 plays a nonessential but important role during parasite development and identify rhomboid proteases as potential targets for disease control.
Study on the Dynamic Changes in Synaptic Vesicle-Associated Protein and Axonal Transport Protein Combined with LPS Neuroinflammation Model

Microglia activation is the major component of inflammation that constitutes the characteristic of neurodegenerative disease. A large amount of researches have demonstrated that inflammation involved in the pathogenesis of PD process activated microglia acting on the neurons through the release of a variety of inflammatory factors. However, the molecular mechanism underlying how it does work on neurons is still unclear. Here, we show that intracerebral injections of LPS induced Parkinson's disease pathology in C57BL/6J mice. Furthermore, study on the dynamic changes in Synaptic vesicle-associated protein and axonal transport Protein in this process. The results indicated that after administration of LPS in the brain, the inflammatory levels of TNF-α and IL-1β both are elevated, and have a time-dependent.
Fit the elephant in a box - towards IP lookup at on-chip memory access speed

Fitting large and ever increasing routing tables in small on-chip memory is just like fitting an elephant in a box, which has been considered as impossible. In this paper, we propose the data structure of two-Dimensional Division Bloom Filter (D2BF) that can compactly encode almost all the needed information for performing IP lookup from a FIB in small on-chip memory. With pipelining, we further achieve the throughput of one packet per on-chip memory access.
Oblivious Routing of Highly Variable Traffic in Service Overlays and IP Backbones

The emergence of new applications on the Internet like voice-over-IP, peer-to-peer, and video-on-demand has created highly dynamic and changing traffic patterns. In order to route such traffic with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees without requiring detection of traffic changes in real-time or reconfiguring the network in response to it, a routing and bandwidth allocation scheme has been recently proposed that allows preconfiguration of the network such that all traffic patterns permissible within the network's natural ingress-egress capacity constraints can be handled in a capacity efficient manner. The scheme routes traffic in two phases. In the first phase, incoming traffic is sent from the source to a set of intermediate nodes and then, in the second phase, from the intermediate nodes to the final destination. The traffic in the first phase is distributed to the intermediate nodes in predetermined proportions that depend on the intermediate nodes. In this paper, we develop linear programming formulations and a fast combinatorial algorithm for routing under the scheme so as to maximize throughput (or, minimize maximum link utilization). We compare the throughput performance of the scheme with that of the optimal scheme among the class of all schemes that are allowed to even make the routing dependent on the traffic matrix. For our evaluations, we use actual Internet Service Provider topologies collected for the Rocketfuel project. We also bring out the versatility of the scheme in not only handling widely fluctuating traffic but also accommodating applicability to several widely differing networking scenarios, including i) economical Virtual Private Networks (VPNs); ii) supporting indirection in specialized service overlay models like Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3); iii) adding QoS guarantees to services that require routing through a network-based middlebox; and iv) reducing IP layer transit traffic and handling extreme traffic variability in IP-over-optical networks without dynamic reconfiguration of the optical layer. The two desirable properties of supporting indirection in specialized service overlay models and static optical layer provisioning in IP-over-optical networks are not present in other approaches for routing variable traffic, such as direct source-destination routing along fixed paths.
Cd47 (Integrin-Associated Protein) Engagement of Dendritic Cell and Macrophage Counterreceptors Is Required to Prevent the Clearance of Donor Lymphohematopoietic Cells

Integrin-associated protein (CD47) is a broadly expressed protein that costimulates T cells, facilitates leukocyte migration, and inhibits macrophage scavenger function. To determine the role of CD47 in regulating alloresponses, CD47+/+ or CD47−/− T cells were infused into irradiated or nonconditioned major histocompatibility complex disparate recipients. Graft-versus-host disease lethality was markedly reduced with CD47−/− T cells. Donor CD47−/− T cells failed to engraft in immunodeficient allogeneic recipients. CD47−/− marrow was unable to reconstitute heavily irradiated allogeneic or congenic immune–deficient CD47+/+ recipients. These data suggested that CD47−/− T cells and marrow cells were cleared by the innate immune system. To address this hypothesis, dye-labeled CD47−/− and CD47+/+ lymphocytes or marrow cells were infused in vivo and clearance was followed. Dye-labeled CD47−/− cells were engulfed by splenic dendritic cells and macrophages resulting in the clearance of virtually all CD47−/− lymphohematopoietic cells within 1 day after infusion. Host phagocyte-depleted CD47+/+ recipients partially accepted allogeneic CD47−/− T cells. Thus, dendritic cells and macrophages clear lymphohematopoietic cells that have downregulated CD47 density. CD47 expression may be a critical indicator for determining whether lymphohematopoietic cells will survive or be cleared.
Visual tracking with dual modeling

In this paper, a new visual tracking method with dual modeling is proposed. The proposed method aims to solve the problems of occlusions, background clutters, and drifting simultaneously with the proposed dual model. The dual model is consisted of single Gaussian models for the foreground and the background. Both models are combined to form a likelihood, which is then efficiently maximized for visual tracking through random sampling and mean-shift. Through dual modeling the proposed method becomes robust to occlusions and background clutters through exclusion of non-target information during maximization of the likelihood. Also, non-target information is unlearned from the foreground model to prevent drifting. The performance of the proposed method is extensively tested against six representative trackers with nine test sequence including two long-term sequences. The experimental results show that our method outperforms all other compared trackers.
IIIT Hyderabad in Summarization and Knowledge Base Population at TAC 2011

In this report, we present details about the participation of IIIT Hyderabad in Guided Summarization and Knowledge Base Population tracks at TAC 2011. we have enhanced our summarization system with knowledge based measures. Wikipedia based extraction methods and topic modelling are used to score sentences in guided summarization track. For multilingual summarization task, we investigated the HAL ( Hyperspace Analogue to Language Model) where we created a semantic space from word co-occurrences. We show that the results obtained with this unsupervised language independent method are competitive with other state-of-the-art systems. For monolingual and multilingual entity linking task, we extended our previous year’s model to a light weight language independent system without utilizing any other external knowledge or resource.
H∞ fault estimation for nonlinear discrete time-delay system with actuator and sensor faults using nonlinear t-s fuzzy models

This paper deal with the problem of H∞ robust fault estimation for discrete time nonlinear system with a sector bounded nonlinear additive terms and multiple bounded state delay using the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model. A fuzzy-fault estimation observer (FFEO) design is proposed to achieve fault estimation of T-S state delay models using fuzzy Lyapunov functions (FLF) with actuator and sensor faults. The disturbance rejection attenuation is constrained to a given level using a H∞-performance index. Sufficient conditions are established for the existence of the desired (FFEO) in terms of linear-matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, simulation results of numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method.
Getting Personal with Computers: How to Design Personalities for Agents

Recent research indicates that people respond socially to computers and perceive themas having personalities. Software agents are artifacts that particularly embody those qualities most likely to elicit social responses: fulelling a social role, using language, and exhibiting contingent behavior. People’s disposition to respond socially can be so strong that they may perceive software agents as having a personality, even when none was intended. The following is a discussion about intentionally designing personalities for social agents. To design personalities, it is necessary to consider the nature of personality and its role in interactions between people and artifacts. In addition, a case study of designing a social software agent is presented. The conclusions fromthis experience are summarized as guidelines for future agent developers. Personality is a fundamental linchpin of social relationships. In the context of human interaction, people automatically and unintentionally organize the behavior of their partners into simplifying traits (Uleman et al., 1996), and people tend to agree about which partners are best described by particular traits (Moskowitz, 1988). Beyond categorization, personality shapes the very nature of social relationships, even impacting how satisfying an interaction is for the participants (Dryer & Horowitz, 1997).