Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transapical aortic valve implantation: mid-term outcome from the SOURCE registry.

OBJECTIVES Transapical (TA) aortic valve implantation using the Edwards SAPIEN bioprosthesis was commercially introduced in Europe in January 2008. Limited data on the mid-term results are available. METHODS Using data from the SOURCE-Registry (largest consecutive cohort treated using Edwards SAPIEN bioprosthesis in Europe), we report on the mid-term results (≥30 days-2 years) of TA patients. RESULTS Between November 2007 and December 2009, a total of 1387 patients from 38 European centres underwent TA aortic valve implantation. The mean follow-up is 14.9 months, with 1004 patients who completed 1 year and 464 patients who completed the 2-year follow-up. The mean age of patients was 80.6 ± 7.1 years with a logistic-EuroSCORE of 27.6%. The main co-morbidities were coronary artery disease (55.8%), previous bypass grafting (25.5%), porcelain aorta (10.2%), previous stroke (6.5%) and peripheral vascular disease (26.4%). A total of 840 patients (60.6%) received a 26 mm and 535 (38.6%) a 23 mm Edwards SAPIEN bioprosthesis. Survivals at 30 days, 1 year and 2 years were 88.7, 73.8 and 65.1%, respectively. Causes of the 276 deaths observed between >30 days and 2-year follow-up were cardiac in 86 patients (31.2%), non-cardiac in 142 (51.4%) and unknown in 48 (17.4%). Cardiac causes of death included heart failure (33.7%), sudden cardiac death (33.7%), myocardial infarct (8.1%), endocarditis (5.8%) and others (18.6%). Non-cardiac deaths were related to pulmonary disease (21.1%), cancer (12.7%), renal failure (11.3%), stroke (10.6%), gastrointestinal disease (7.7%) and others (36.6%). Using univariable and multivariable analyses, logistic EuroSCORE, renal insufficiency and liver diseases were identified as independent predictors of 2-year mortality. CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate that in elderly patients with severe co-morbidities, TA aortic valve implantation results in excellent mid-term results. Causes of death during the mid-term follow-up are mainly non-cardiac and related to co-morbidities.
Annotation and detection of blended emotions in real human-human dialogs recorded in a call center

In the context of call centers, emotion detection is potentially important for customer care. Emotions in natural interaction are often blended. For example, in a Stock Exchange service centre, some customers are angry because they are afraid to lose money. A 100 agent-client dialog corpus has been annotated at the speaker turn level with one label among 5 emotions including fear and anger. In this paper, we report on our experiments of automatic emotion detection using acoustic cues with several classifiers. 73% correct detection was achieved in discriminating between negative and neutral emotions and 60% between anger and fear. An analysis of the confusions led us to question the validity of the initial single valued annotation scheme. It was found that customer emotional states can be a mixture of anger and fear. As a result a new annotation scheme is used allowing the selection of two verbal labels per segment.
Clustering using bursty information

Panagiotis Zagorisios. MSc, Computer Science Department, University of Ioannina, Greece. Text Stream Clustering using bursty information. Supervisor: Aristidis Likas Document clustering in text streams is a text mining problem with increasing interest in recent years due to its relation to the problems of topic detection and tracking. The existence of temporal information in the form of document timestamps provides the opportunity to modify and improve the typical approaches for document representation and clustering. A way to exploit temporal information is through the detection and exploitation of bursty terms in text streams, ie terms that appear in many documents during the same time window. At rst, a description of methods that have been developed for the detection of bursty terms is presented. Next several document representations are presented that integrate the bursty information in the typical vector space model, and novel forms of term similarity matrices are proposed that take into account the correlation between bursty terms. Moreover, we propose an alternative approach that rst partitions the bursty features into groups and then uses this information for the clustering of the text stream collections. Finally, experimental results on benchmark collections are provided followed by empirical conclusions on the performance of the compared approaches.
The Critical Success Factors for Effective ICT Governance in Malaysian Public Sector: A Delphi Study

: The fundamental issues in ICT Governance (ICTG) implementation for Malaysian Public Sector (MPS) is how ICT be applied to support improvements in productivity, management effectiveness and the quality of services offered to its citizens. Our main concern is to develop and adopt a common definition and framework to illustrate how ICTG can be used to better align ICT with government’s operations and strategic focus. In particular, we want to identify and categorize factors that drive a successful ICTG process. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study to identify, validate and refine such Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and confirmed seven CSFs and nineteen sub-factors as influential factors that fit MPS after further validated and refined. The Delphi method applied in validation and refining process before being endorsed as appropriate for MPS. The identified CSFs reflect the focus areas that need to be considered strategically to strengthen ICT Governance implementation and ensure business success.
Blocking reduction strategies in hierarchical text classification

One common approach in hierarchical text classification involves associating classifiers with nodes in the category tree and classifying text documents in a top-down manner. Classification methods using this top-down approach can scale well and cope with changes to the category trees. However, all these methods suffer from blocking which refers to documents wrongly rejected by the classifiers at higher-levels and cannot be passed to the classifiers at lower-levels. We propose a classifier-centric performance measure known as blocking factor to determine the extent of the blocking. Three methods are proposed to address the blocking problem, namely, threshold reduction, restricted voting, and extended multiplicative. Our experiments using support vector machine (SVM) classifiers on the Reuters collection have shown that they all could reduce blocking and improve the classification accuracy. Our experiments have also shown that the Restricted Voting method delivered the best performance.
Headaches and sleep problems among adults in the United States: Findings from the National Comorbidity Survey–Replication Study

Background: Several studies have demonstrated an association between headache and disturbed sleep. None have examined this association across the headache spectrum. Our goal was to determine whether migraine and migraine with aura differ from nonmigraine headache in terms of associated insomnia complaints or severity of sleep problems. Methods: A probability sample of US adults was used. A structured interview administered by trained interviewers was used. Diagnostic criteria for migraine and migraine with aura were based on the International Headache Society classification. The presence or absence of four forms of sleep disturbance associated with an insomnia diagnosis was ascertained. Results: There was a significant association between frequent severe headache, including migraine with and without aura, and disordered sleep. Adults with headache reported more frequently difficulty initiating sleep (odds ratio [confidence interval] = 2.0 [1.6–2.5]), difficulty staying asleep (2.5 [2.1–3]), early morning awakening (2.0 [1.7–2.5]) and daytime fatigue (2.6 [2.2–3.2]) and also were more than twice as likely to report three or more of these symptoms(2.5 [2–3.1]) compared to the individuals without headache. Discussion: Adults with severe headache are at significantly higher risk of also suffering from sleep problems, when compared with the general population, regardless of specific headache type. Optimal treatment of headache must include investigation for sleep disorders and vice versa.
Reliability and relevance of radiographic measures of metatarsus primus elevatus and arch alignment in individuals with midfoot arthritis and controls.

BACKGROUND Low arch alignment and metatarsus primus elevatus (MPE) have been postulated to increase dorsal compressive stresses in the joints of the medial column of the foot and to contribute to the development of degenerative changes. The primary purposes of this study were (1) to examine the relationship between radiographic measures of arch alignment and MPE and (2) to assess arch alignment and MPE in individuals with midfoot arthritis and in asymptomatic controls. The secondary aim was to examine the reliability of radiographic measures of arch alignment and MPE. METHODS Radiographic measures of arch height and MPE were quantified on 28 individuals with midfoot arthritis and 22 individuals in a control group. Reliability was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The Pearson product moment correlation (r) was used to assess the relationship between arch alignment and MPE. Between-group differences were assessed using a two-sample t test (α = 0.05). RESULTS Good to excellent reliability was noted for measures of arch height (ICC[2,3] = 0.919-0.994) as well as MPE (ICC[2,3] = 0.891-0.882). A modest positive association was noted between normalized cortical elevation and normalized navicular height (r = 0.274, P = .030) and calcaneal inclination angle (r = 0.263, P = .035). Individuals with midfoot arthritis demonstrated lower arch alignment, reflected in a significantly higher calcaneal-first metatarsal angle (P = .002), lower calcaneal inclination angle (P = .004), and lower normalized navicular height (P < .001) compared with controls. No evidence was found to support between-group differences in lateral intermetatarsal angle (P = .495) and normalized cortical elevation (P = .146). CONCLUSIONS These findings provide objective data establishing the reliability of measures of MPE and arch alignment and their potential clinical significance.
RDF-4G: algorithmic building blocks for large-scale graph analytics

We present RDF-4G, the first three miles towards a large-scale graph-analytics engine built on top of the state-of-the-art RDF engine, RDF-3X. The algorithmic building blocks that make up this work help answering fundamental questions about relationships between entities in a graph-structured world. More precisely, our system provides insights into what we define as the trilogy of relationship analyis: Is there a relationship between entities? Who participates in the connection? How can the relationship be characterized? While the first two questions correspond to the algorithmic primitives of graph processing, reachability and shortest path queries, for answering the third question we propose a novel graph-theoretic concept, relatedness cores. The technical contributions we make in this work are efficient index structures for reachability and shortest path query processing together with a new notion of and algorithms for relationship characterization. The latter can be efficiently computed based on the techniques we have developed in our work on graph indexing. All our methods are integrated into the RDF-3X engine, the state-of-the-art system for querying RDF-structured data. Future work includes the exposure of our algorithmic building blocks to the user, via extensions to the de-facto standard query language for graph-structured data, SPARQL.
Compulsive Consumption Tendencies Among Television Shoppers

Compulsive buying and binge eating are consumption behaviors that are similarly related to low self-esteem and poor impulse control, occurring more frequently in women. Using a national random sample, the authors examined the extent to which compulsive buying and binge eating were related in a nonclinical population of known television shoppers. Mailed questionnaires were completed by 334 women. Multiple regression analyses revealed that (a) binge-eating and compulsive-buying scores were positively related, and (b) both compulsive-buying and bingeeating scores were positively related to television shopping channel exposure. About 10% of the television shoppers in this study were found to have compulsive-buying tendencies. Strategies for coping with unwise compulsive consumption are offered.
A Primer on IPv4 Scarcity

With the ongoing exhaustion of free address pools at the registries serving the global demand for IPv4 address space, scarcity has become reality. Networks in need of address space can no longer get more address allocations from their respective registries. In this work we frame the fundamentals of the IPv4 address exhaustion phenomena and connected issues. We elaborate on how the current ecosystem of IPv4 address space has evolved since the standardization of IPv4, leading to the rather complex and opaque scenario we face today. We outline the evolution in address space management as well as address space use patterns, identifying key factors of the scarcity issues. We characterize the possible solution space to overcome these issues and open the perspective of address blocks as virtual resources, which involves issues such as differentiation between address blocks, the need for resource certification, and issues arising when transferring address space between networks.
On Strategic Choice and Organizational Ambidexterity : An agent-based modeling approach

Organizational ambidexterity, defined as the simultaneous pursuit of exploitation and exploration, has become a very important topic in the study of organizations. Yet, as a recent and comprehensive review notes, “Despite the rapidly expanding number of studies referring to organizational ambidexterity, empirical tests of the ambidexterity–performance relationship remain scarce. ” The contribution of this paper is to introduce an agent-based model that captures many of the key aspects and tradeoffs, which have been identified in the literature, of the exploration–exploitation dilemma faced by firms. When data become available, the model can be calibrated to the data. Until then, the model serves as a useful tool for exploring hypotheses and revealing surprising aspects of the subject.
Factors Associated with Willingness to Use Mental Health Services in Korean Immigrants

Responding to the concern about underutilization of mental health services in immigrant populations, the present study explored the factors associated with Korean immigrants' willingness to use mental health services. Guided by Andersen's behavioral model, consideration was given to the role of predisposing (age, gender, marital status, education, and years in the United States), need (depressive symptoms), and enabling (health insurance, acculturation, and personal beliefs about depression) variables. The study estimated, using data from a sample of 205 Korean immigrants (ages 18–45), a logistic regression model of willingness to use mental health services. Although participants experiencing more depressive symptoms tend to be less willing to use these services (odds ratio [OR] = .89, p < .05), an increase in the odds of willingness to use them are found among women (OR = 2.52, p < .01), highly acculturated individuals (OR = 1.09, p < .05), and individuals who believe that depression is a medical condition (OR = 4.71, p < .01). Educational interventions focused on increasing mental health literacy may be beneficial in promoting mental health services for Korean immigrants.
The Desmoteplase in Acute Ischemic Stroke Trial (DIAS): A Phase II MRI-Based 9-Hour Window Acute Stroke Thrombolysis Trial With Intravenous Desmoteplase

Background and Purpose— Most acute ischemic stroke patients arrive after the 3-hour time window for recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rtPA) administration. The Desmoteplase In Acute Ischemic Stroke trial (DIAS) was a dose-finding randomized trial designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of intravenous desmoteplase, a highly fibrin-specific and nonneurotoxic thrombolytic agent, administered within 3 to 9 hours of ischemic stroke onset in patients with perfusion/diffusion mismatch on MRI. Methods— DIAS was a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized, dose-finding phase II trial. Patients with National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) scores of 4 to 20 and MRI evidence of perfusion/diffusion mismatch were eligible. Of 104 patients, the first 47 (referred to as Part 1) were randomized to fixed doses of desmoteplase (25 mg, 37.5 mg, or 50 mg) or placebo. Because of an excessive rate of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (sICH), lower weight-adjusted doses escalating through 62.5 &mgr;g/kg, 90 &mgr;g/kg, and 125 &mgr;g/kg were subsequently investigated in 57 patients (referred to as Part 2). The safety endpoint was the rate of sICH. Efficacy endpoints were the rate of reperfusion on MRI after 4 to 8 hours and clinical outcome as assessed by NIHSS, modified Rankin scale, and Barthel Index at 90 days. Results— Part 1 was terminated prematurely because of high rates of sICH with desmoteplase (26.7%). In Part 2, the sICH rate was 2.2%. No sICH occurred with placebo in either part. Reperfusion rates up to 71.4% (P=0.0012) were observed with desmoteplase (125 &mgr;g/kg) compared with 19.2% with placebo. Favorable 90-day clinical outcome was found in 22.2% of placebo-treated patients and between 13.3% (62.5 &mgr;g/kg; P=0.757) and 60.0% (125 &mgr;g/kg; P=0.0090) of desmoteplase-treated patients. Early reperfusion correlated favorably with clinical outcome (P=0.0028). Favorable outcome occurred in 52.5% of patients experiencing reperfusion versus 24.6% of patients without reperfusion. Conclusions— Intravenous desmoteplase administered 3 to 9 hours after acute ischemic stroke in patients selected with perfusion/diffusion mismatch is associated with a higher rate of reperfusion and better clinical outcome compared with placebo. The sICH rate with desmoteplase was low, using doses up to 125 &mgr;g/kg.
A Novel Voltage-dependent Chloride Current Activated by Extracellular Acidic pH in Cultured Rat Sertoli Cells*

Sertoli cells from mammalian testis are key cells involved in development and maintenance of stem cell spermatogonia as well as secretion of a chloride- and potassium-rich fluid into the lumen of seminiferous tubules. Using whole-cell patch clamp experiments, a novel chloride current was identified. It is activated only in the presence of an extracellular acidic pH, with an estimated half-maximal activation at pH 5.5. The current is strongly outwardly rectifying, activated with a fast time-dependent onset of activation but a slow time-dependent kinetic at depolarization pulses. The pH-activated chloride current was not detected at physiological or basic pH and is not sensitive to intracellular or extracellular Ca2+ variation. Diphenylamine-2-carboxylic acid and 4,4′-diisothiocyanatostilbene-2,2′-disulfonic acid blocked the induced currents, and its anionic selectivity sequence was Cl— > Br— > I—> gluconate. We have performed a reverse transcription-PCR analysis to search for voltage-dependent chloride rClC channels in cultured rat Sertoli cells. Among the nine members of the family only rClC-2, rClC-3, rClC-6, and rClC-7 have been identified. The inwardly rectifying rClC-2 chloride current was activated by hyperpolarization but not by pH variation. A different depolarization-activated outwardly rectifying chloride current was activated only by hypotonic challenge and may correspond either to rClC-3 or rClC-6. Immunolocalization experiments demonstrate that rClC-7 resides in the intracellular compartment of Sertoli cells. This study provides the first functional identification of a native acid-activated chloride current. Based on our molecular analysis of rClC proteins, this new chloride current does not correspond to rClC-2, rClC-3, rClC-6, or rClC-7 channels. The potential physiological role of this native current in an epithelial cell from the reproductive system is discussed.
Decomposition of three-dimensional medical images into visual patterns

In this paper, we present a method for the decomposition of a volumetric image into its most relevant visual patterns , which we define as features associated to local energy maxima of the image. The method involves the clustering of a set of predefined bandpass energy filters according to their ability to segregate the different features in the image, thus generating a set of composite-feature detectors tuned to the specific visual patterns present in the data. Clustering is based on a measure of statistical dependence between pairs of frequency features. We will illustrate the applicability of the method to the initialization of a three-dimensional geodesic active model.
The intercultural recognition of emotional expressions by three national racial groups : English, Italian and Japanese

Similar samples of English, Italian and Japanese subjects were asked to identify 8 emotional states and 4 interpersonal attitudes from video-taped expressions of 2 performers from each of these cultures. AN sets of judgements were above chance, except Italians judging Japanese. The Japanese subjects were no different from English and Italian subjects in recognition ability but the Japanese performances were harder to recognize supporting Ekman's theory of display rules; in fact all Japanese expressions were difficult to recognize, with the exception of happy-friendly. The Japanese (performers) make a clearer distinction between sad and depressed than other cultural groups, but did not distinguish between happy and friendly, or between angry and hostile.
Power-Efficient System Design for Cellular-Based Machine-to-Machine Communications

The growing popularity of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications in cellular networks is driving the need to optimize networks based on the characteristics of M2M, which are significantly different from the requirements that current networks are designed to meet. First, M2M requires large number of short sessions as opposed to small number of long lived sessions required by the human generated traffic. Second, M2M constitutes a number of battery operated devices that are static in locations such as basements and tunnels, and need to transmit at elevated powers compared to the traditional devices. Third, replacing or recharging batteries of such devices may not be feasible. All these differences highlight the importance of a systematic framework to study the power and energy optimal system design in the regime of interest for M2M, which is the main focus of this paper. For a variety of coordinated and uncoordinated transmission strategies, we derive results for the optimal transmit power, energy per bit, and the maximum load supported by the base station, leading to the following design guidelines: (i) frequency division multiple access (FDMA), including equal bandwidth allocation, is sum-power optimal in the asymptotically low spectral efficiency regime, (ii) while FDMA is the best practical strategy overall, uncoordinated code division multiple access (CDMA) is almost as good when the base station is lightly loaded, (iii) the value of optimization within FDMA is not significant in the regime of interest for M2M.
Do words go to sleep? Exploring consolidation of spoken forms through direct and indirect measures

We address the notion of integration of new memory representations and the potential dependence of this phenomenon on sleep, in light of recent findings on the lexicalization of spoken words. A distinction is introduced between measures tapping directly into the strength of the newly acquired knowledge and indirect measures assessing the influence of this knowledge on spoken word identification.