Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Patient Age and Stenosis Location on Wingspan In-Stent Restenosis

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Wingspan is a self-expanding, microcatheter-delivered microstent specifically designed for the treatment of symptomatic intracranial atherosclerotic disease. Our aim was to discuss the effect of patient age and lesion location on in-stent restenosis (ISR) rates after percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting (PTAS) with the Wingspan system. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Clinical and angiographic follow-up results were recorded for all patients from 5 participating institutions. ISR was defined as >50% stenosis within or immediately adjacent (within 5 mm) to the implanted stent and >20% absolute luminal loss. For the present analysis, patients were stratified into younger (≤55 years) and older (>55 years) age groups. RESULTS: ISR occurred at a rate of 45.2% (14/31) in the younger group and 24.2% (15/62) in the older group (odds ratio, 2.6; 95% confidence interval, 1.03–6.5). In the younger group, ISR occurred after treatment of 13/26 (50%) anterior circulation lesions versus only 1/5 (20%) posterior circulation lesions. In the older group, ISR occurred in 9/29 (31.0%) anterior circulation lesions and 6/33 (18.2%) posterior circulation lesions. In young patients, internal carotid artery lesions (10/17 treated, 58.8%), especially those involving the supraclinoid segment (8/9, 88.9%), were very prone to ISR. When patients of all ages were considered, supraclinoid segment lesions had much higher rates of both ISR (66.6% versus 24.4%) and symptomatic ISR (40% versus 3.9%) in comparison with all other locations. CONCLUSION: Post-Wingspan ISR is more common in younger patients. This increased risk can be accounted for by a high prevalence of anterior circulation lesions in this population, specifically those affecting the supraclinoid segment, which are much more prone to ISR and symptomatic ISR than all other lesions.
Understanding the effectiveness of computer graphics for decision support: a cumulative experimental approach

A total of 840 junior and senior-level undergraduate business students particpated in three experiments that compared computer-generated graphical forms of data presentation to traditional tabular reports. The first experiment compared tables and bar charts for their effects on readability, interpretation accuracy, and decision making. No differences in interpretation accuracy or decision quality were observed for the two groups, although tabular reports were rated as "easier to read and understand" than graphical reports. The second experiment compared line plots to tables for their effects on interpretation accuracy and decision quality. Subjects with graphical reports outperformed those with tables. There were no meaningful differences in interpretation accuracy across treatment groups. The third experiment compared graphical and tabular reports for their ability to convey a "message" to the reader. Only in situations in which a vast amount of information was presented and relatively simple impressions were to be made, did subjects given graphs outperform those using tables. This program of cumulative experiments indicates that generalized claims of superiority of graphic presentation are unsupported, at least for decision-related activities. In fact, the experiments suggest that the effectiveness of the data display format is largely a function of the characteristics of the task at hand, and that impressions gleaned from "one shot" studies of the effectiveness of the use of graphs may be nothing more than situationally dependent artifacts.
Greedy Anti-Void Forwarding Strategies for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes (SNs) with wireless communication capabilities for specific sensing tasks. Each SN maintains connectivity and exchanges messages between the decentralized nodes in the multi-hop manners. A source node can communicate with its destination via a certain number of relaying nodes, which consequently enlarges the wireless coverage of the source node. In conventional multi-hop routing algorithms, either the proactive or reactive schemes, significant amounts of routing tables and control packets are required for the construction of routing paths. Due to the limited available resources, efficient design of localized multi-hop routing protocols (Estrin et al., 1999) becomes a crucial subject within the WSNs. How to guarantee delivery of packets is considered an important issue for the localized routing algorithms. The wellknown greedy forwarding (GF) algorithm (Finn, 1987) is considered a superior localized scheme with its low routing overheads, which is fit for conducting the routing task of WSNs. However, the void problem (Karp & Kung, 2000) that occurs within the GF technique will fail to guarantee the delivery of data packets. Several routing algorithms are proposed to either resolve or reduce the void problem, which can be classified into non-graph-based and graph-based schemes. In the non-graph-based algorithms, the intuitive schemes as proposed in the research work (Stojmenovi c & Lin, 2001) construct a two-hop neighbor table for implementing the GF algorithm. The network flooding mechanism is adopted while the void problem occurs. There also exist routing protocols that adopt the backtracking method at the occurrence of the network holes, such as GEDIR (Stojmenovic & Lin, 2001), DFS (Stojmenovic et al., 2000), and SPEED (He et al., 2003). The routing schemes as proposed by ARP (Giruka & Singhal, 2005) and LFR (Liu & Feng, 2006) memorize the routing path after the void problem takes place. Moreover, other routing protocols, such as PAGER (Zou & Xiong, 2005), NEAR (Arad & Shavitt, 2006), DUA (Chen et al., 2006), and YAGR (Na et al., 2007), propagate and update the information of the observed void node in order to reduce the probability of encountering the void problem. By exploiting these routing algorithms, however, the void problem can only be either (i) partially alleviated or (ii) resolved with considerable routing overheads and significant converging time. On the other hand, there are research works on the design of graph-based routing algorithms to deal with the void problem. Several routing schemes as surveyed in the literature (Frey & Stojmenovic, 2006) adopt the planar graph (West, 2000) as their network O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w . in te ch w eb . o rg
When users are professionals: Effective User Participation for Information Systems Assimilation

Prior research on the role of user participation in system development has yielded inconsistent results. One of reasons might be attributed to the various users and research in this field needs to take into consideration of the characteristics of users themselves. Users’ professional background has been documented as one of major reasons for resistance. However, very little research has investigated how to resolve such resistance. Our study makes a significant step forward to understand and empirically validate the contingencies of business professional users’ participation. With an exploratory case study, we identify three important contingencies that determine the effectiveness of professional users’ participation in IT projects in terms of assimilation, i.e., IT competence, work-identity integrity and alignment as perceived by the professionals. The resulting model is also empirically validated involving professional users from different industries and organizations.
Lithographically defined porous carbon electrodes.

The special nature of the CÀC bond can lead to various polymorphic forms of carbon such as graphite, glassy-carbon, fullerenes (such as buckyballs), carbon nanotubes, and diamond. Electrodes made from carbon exhibit many useful properties including wide potential windows, low background capacitance, resistance to fouling, and catalytic activity for many analytes compared to solid metal electrodes. [1] In addition to the intrinsic material properties of carbon, functionalized films can be produced through chemical modification using a wide range of chemistries. Because of this flexibility and utility, fabrication of both macro-and microporous carbon films, with their commensurate increase in surface area, continues to receive significant research interest. [2] Some of the specific applications for porous carbon materials include fuel cells, electrochemical double layer capacitors, high surface area catalytic supports, water purification, and gas separation. Recently, it has been found that pyrolyzed photoresist films (PPFs) have the same unique properties of carbon electrodes with an advantage that they can be lithographically defined. The goal of this work was to create lithographically defined porous pyrolyzed carbon electrodes and characterize the deposition and electrochemical properties of metal nanoparticles on these electrodes. We report a robust fabrication method capable of producing large area (%10 0 s cm 2) submicrometer porous carbon films. In our approach, interferometric lithography (IL) is used to pattern thick photoresist films into 3D periodic lattices. These structures are then converted to carbon via pyrolysis under flowing forming gas. [3] During pyrolysis, the non-carbon species in the resist polymer backbone are removed, while the bulk of the carbon remains. The patterned structures undergo significant shrinkage, but remarkably maintain their morphology and adhesion to the substrate. The degree of carbonization is a function of the pyrolysis temperature, which has a profound effect on the direct current (DC) conductivity. The resulting porous carbon structures proved to be conductive and suitable for the electrochemical deposition of ultrasmall (1–3 nm) gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) with high catalytic surface area. Second, palladium was electrolessly deposited on the previously deposited AuNPs supported on the surface of the porous carbon electrode as a demonstration of the potential scope of the methodology. The palladium-modified electrodes exhibit a catalytic response for methanol oxidation with potential application towards microfabricated fuel cells. This Communication details the fabrication and electrochemical characterization of these carbon electrodes. IL is a maskless lithography approach where coherent planewaves are combined forming an interference pattern. [4] Because it is maskless, …
Power Aware Hybrid Proxy Cache-Prefetch Model using Combined Energy Conservation Policies

The World Wide Web (WWW) is growing exponentially in terms of number of users and number of Web applications. Due to enormous traffic in the network and several factors like bandwidth availability, request processing time at server, round trip time and object size, the Web latency is increasing. The sophisticated integration of Web prefetching and caching deployed at proxy server with Web log mining technique is the most attractive and successful solution to reduce this latency and improve Web Quality of Service. To provide uninterrupted services to the Web users’, Web servers at the data centres are seamlessly operating always in 24X7 mode. Low power consumption and efficient energy management of individual hardware components, system software, to network applications is a critical and urgent issue in today’s highly demanding eco-friendly computing world. In this paper, we incorporate an energy efficient feedback driven control framework along with sleep proxy mechanism in our Hybrid Cache-Prefetch System Model. The proposed model periodically monitors proxy server performance parameters dynamically. We have also developed an optimized load allocation algorithm with the proposed combined strategy for proxy servers’ cluster along with some guidelines for energy efficient design solutions towards green IT. Even though we emphasize power saving as much as possible the performance of proxy servers is ensured without sacrificing on client experiences. Experimental results show that using our proposed scheme 28% less power consumption and 18% power efficiency improvement can be achieved. Keywords— Proxy Cache-Prefetch model, Power and Energy Estimation, Feedback Driven Control Framework, Sleep Proxy, Optimal Load Allocation.
Tracking all traffic: computer vision algorithms for monitoring vehicles, individuals, and crowds

This article presents a vision-based system for monitoring crowded urban scenes. The approach combines an effective detection scheme based on optical flow and background removal that can locate vehicles, individual pedestrians, and crowds. The detection phase is followed by the tracking phase that tracks all the detected entities. Traffic objects are not simply tracked but a wealth of information (position, velocity, acceleration/deceleration, bounding rectangle, and shape features) is gathered about them also. Potential applications of the methods include intersection control, traffic data collection, and even crowd control after athletic events. Extensive experimental results for a variety of weather conditions are presented. Future work would focus on methods to deal with shadows and occlusions.
The Effect of Cold Climate upon North Atlantic Deep Water Formation in a Simple Ocean-Atmosphere Model

The sensitivity of North Atlantic Deep Water formation to variations in mean surface temperature is explored with a meridional-vertical plane ocean model coupled to an energy balance atmosphere. It is found that North Atlantic Deep Water formation is favored by a warm climate, while cold climates are more likely to produce Southern Ocean deep water or deep-decoupling oscillations (when the Southern sinking region is halocline covered). This behavior is traced to a cooling-induced convective instability near the North Atlantic sinking region, that is, to unstable horizontal spreading of a halocline that stratifies part of the region. Under the convective instability it is found that climate cooling is generally equivalent to increased freshwater forcing. This is because in a cold climate, high-latitude water masses approach the temperature of maximum density and the convectiondriving, upward thermal buoyancy flux induced by surface cooling becomes insufficient to overcome the stratifying effect of surface freshening (a downward buoyancy flux). An extensive halocline is then formed and this halocline interferes with the heat loss necessary for the steady production of North Atlantic Deep Water.
Brain Norepinephrine: The locus coeruleus and regulation of behavioral flexibility and attention: clinical implications

It has been proposed that the locus coeruleus (LC) regulates nonspecific arousal and thereby may participate in a wide range of functions. Our work indicates that, while the LC may indeed play an important role in arousal, it has more specific effects on behavior and may regulate cortical mechanisms involved in selective attention and task performance. In one study, we recorded impulse activity of LC neurons in monkeys performing a visual discrimination task. Phasic and tonic firing characteristics of LC neurons varied in close relation to task performance. Phasically, LC neurons were selectively activated by target cues and not by other task events, including behavioral responses. The target-elicited LC responses were limited to periods of good performance, when tonic firing rates were at an intermediate level (∼ 1 to 2 spikes/s). Higher levels of tonic activity were associated with few or no phasic LC responses, and poor task performance. Direct manipulations of LC activity via local microinfusions yielded behavioral results consistent with the above recordings. A computational model was constructed to explore mechanisms that underlie these patterns of LC activity and their relationship to task performance.1 This model revealed that electrotonic coupling among LC neurons can provide a mechanism for regulating the pattern of LC activity between two modes of functioning, which may in turn regulate task performance. In one mode (high electrotonic coupling, resulting in intermediate levels of tonic LC activity and robust phasic responses to task-defined target stimuli), LC responses facilitate the processing of target stimuli while responses to distractors are reduced. In the
Detection of combined occurrences

In this paper it is supposed that the variables x<subscrpt>1</subscrpt>, … , x<subscrpt>n</subscrpt> each have finite range with the variable x<subscrpt>i</subscrpt> taking on p<subscrpt>i</subscrpt> possible values and that the values of the variables are changing with time. It is supposed further that it is desired to detect occurrences in which some subset of the variables achieve particular values. Finally, it is supposed that the problem involves the detection of a large number of combined occurrences for a large number of changes of values of variables. Two efficient solutions for this problem are described. Both methods have the unusual property of being faster for systems where the sum p<subscrpt>1</subscrpt> + … + p<subscrpt>n</subscrpt> is larger. The first solution is error-free and suitable for most cases. The second solution is slightly more elegant and allows negation as well as conjunction, but is subject to the possibility of errors. An error analysis is given for the second method and an empirical study is reported.
Reducing Calibration Time in PET Systems Based on Monolithic Crystals

In the past years, the gamma-ray detector designs based on the monolithic crystals have demonstrated to be excellent candidates for the design of high-performance PET systems. The monolithic crystals allow to achieve the intrinsic detector resolutions well below state-of-the-art; to increase packing fraction thus, increasing the system sensitivity; and to improve lesion detectability at the edges of the scanner field of view (FOV) because of their intrinsic depth of interaction (DOI) capabilities. The bottleneck to translate to the clinical PET systems based on a large number of monolithic detectors is eventually the requirement of mechanically complex and time-consuming calibration processes. To mitigate this drawback, several methods have been already proposed, such as using non-physically collimated radioactive sources or implementing the neuronal networks (NN) algorithms trained with simulated data. In this work, we aimed to simplify and fasten a calibration process of the monolithic based systems. The Normal procedure consists of individually acquiring a 11 × 11 22Na source array for all the detectors composing the PET system and obtaining the calibration map for each module using a method based on the Voronoi diagrams. Two reducing time methodologies are presented: (i) TEST1, where the calibration map of one detector is estimated and shared among all others, and (ii) TEST2, where the calibration map is slightly modified for each module as a function of their detector uniformity map. The experimental data from a dedicated prostate PET system was used to compare the standard calibration procedure with both the proposed methods. A greater similarity was exhibited between the TEST2 methodology and the Normal procedure; obtaining spatial resolution variances within 0.1 mm error bars and count rate deviations as small as 0.2%. Moreover, the negligible reconstructed image differences (13% deviation at most in the contrast-to-noise ratio) and almost identical contrast values were reported. Therefore, this proposed method allows us to calibrate the PET systems based on the monolithic crystals reducing the calibration time by approximately 80% compared with the Normal procedure.
Expert Witnessing in Forensic Accounting: A Handbook for Lawyers and Accountants

Preface The Forensic Accountant The Accounting Expert Witness The Expert's Job Engagement Letter Where to Begin How to Continue Substance versus Form and the Nonfactual Fact The Effect of the Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product Doctrine Research Sources for the Expert The Expert's Written Report The Expert's Testimony Additional Work after the Trial
BREEDING SOFTWARE TEST CASES WITH GENETIC ALGORITHMS

The genetic algorithm includes a fossil record that records past organisms, allowing any current fitness calculations to be influenced by past generations. This paper describes breeding software test cases using genetic algorithms as part of a software testing cycle. An evolving fitness function that relies on a fossil record of organisms results in search behavior, based on the concept of novelty, proximity and severity. It explores strategies that combine automated test suite generation techniques with high volume or long sequence testing. Long sequence testing repeats test cases many times, simulating extended execution intervals. These testing techniques have been found useful for uncovering errors resulting from component coordination problems, as well as system resource consumption (e.g. memory leaks) or corruption. Coupling automated test suite generation with long sequence testing could make this approach more scalable and effective in the field.
Retinal arteriolar caliber and urine albumin excretion: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.

BACKGROUND Changes in retinal microvascular caliber, which occur prior to onset of retinopathy, may indicate presence of kidney damage. METHODS This study examined the association between retinal arteriolar [central retinal artery equivalent (CRAE)] and venular caliber [central retinal venule equivalent (CRVE)] and presence of albuminuria (micro- or macroalbuminuria) among participants of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a cohort of adults aged 45-84 years without baseline clinical cardiovascular disease. During the second MESA exam, digital fundus photography was completed in 5897 participants who provided spot urine specimens. Albuminuria was defined by spot urine albumin/creatinine ratios ≥ 30 mg/g. Multivariable adjusted odds of albuminuria by quintiles of CRAE and CRVE were determined using logistic regression. Analyses were repeated after stratifying by presence of type 2 diabetes. RESULTS Albuminuria was noted in 11.5% (n = 675) and included 584 subjects with microalbuminuria and 91 with macroalbuminuria. A significant U-shaped pattern was seen with higher prevalence of albuminuria across quintile extremes in CRAE (15.7, 8.8 and 10.6% in CRAE Quintiles 1, 3 and 5, respectively; P <0.0001). After adjustment for covariates, both narrower CRAE [odds ratios (OR) 1.55; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.17-2.04, Quintile 1 versus 3) and wider CRAE (OR 1.44; 95% CI 1.07-1.93, Quintile 5 versus 3) were significantly associated with albuminuria. Associations appeared substantially stronger in adults with than without type 2 diabetes but the interaction term for diabetes and CRAE on presence of albuminuria did not meet statistical significance (P = 0.3). No association was noted between CRVE quintiles and albuminuria. CONCLUSIONS Albuminuria is associated with narrower and wider arteriolar caliber. Future studies should determine whether variation in arteriolar caliber predicts incident albuminuria and whether associations are mediated by hypertension and diabetes. Such information could further clarify early microvascular processes in the pathogenesis of kidney disease.
Efficient Implementation of the Second Order Volterra Filter

– This paper investigates a new implementation of the second order isotropic filter using the Walsh Hadamard Transform. The new implementation is used in a second order Volterra filter. It's performances are evaluated in a typical nonlinear system identification application. For the second order adaptive Volterra filter an LMS adaptive algorithm with variable step size for the linear and the quadratic parts is proposed. Experimental results show that by using the WHT, the computational complexity of the adaptive second order filter is considerably reduced and the convergence rate of this filter is also significantly improved. Adaption is working well even for high levels of the input signal. The mean-squared error of the proposed filter is compared with those of a classic second order LMS adaptive filter.