Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Water flush technique: a noninvasive method of optimizing visualization of the distal esophagus in patients with primary achalasia.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to assess the use of a water flush technique to optimize visualization of the distal esophageal mucosa during barium esophagography of patients with moderate to severe primary achalasia. The water flush consists of having patients drink tap water at end esophagography in an attempt to clear the standing barium column. CONCLUSION The water flush technique is a simple, noninvasive maneuver that improves the extent of diagnostic visualization of the distal esophageal mucosa in patients with moderate to severe primary achalasia. It facilitated detection of a tumor in one patient and identification of additional pathologic changes in two other patients in this series.
Diagnosis in Infinite-State Probabilistic Systems

In a recent work, we introduced four variants of diagnosability (FA, IA, FF, IF) in (finite) probabil-istic systems (pLTS) depending whether one considers (1) finite or infinite runs and (2) faulty or all runs. We studied their relationship and established that the corresponding decision problems are PSPACE-complete. A key ingredient of the decision procedures was a characterisation of diagnosability by the fact that a random run almost surely lies in an open set whose specification only depends on the qualitative behaviour of the pLTS. Here we investigate similar issues for infinite pLTS. We first show that this characterisation still holds for FF-diagnosability but with a G δ set instead of an open set and also for IF-and IA-diagnosability when pLTS are finitely branching. We also prove that surprisingly FA-diagnosability cannot be characterised in this way even in the finitely branching case. Then we apply our characterisations for a partially observable probabilistic extension of visibly pushdown automata (POpVPA), yielding EXPSPACE procedures for solving diagnosability problems. In addition, we establish some computational lower bounds and show that slight extensions of POpVPA lead to undecidability.
Localization of points of interest from georeferenced and oriented photographs

The geographic coordinates automatically assigned to photos by the built-in GPS devices of cameras register the location a photo was taken at, rather than the location of the main point of interest within the depicted scene. While scientific advances have been made in the efforts to accurately locate the actual positions of such points of interest, these resort to either crude clustering-based approaches or expensive content-based approaches in order to estimate their geographic coordinates. In this paper we propose a novel technique that incorporates the compass direction supplied by modern cameras, allowing us to compute the most probable locations of the point of interest by analyzing intersections between the lines of sight originating from the cameras focusing on the same scene. Since the accuracy of the digital devices that supply the geographic coordinates and the compass direction can vary, we take these imprecisions into account when estimating the location.
Diagnostic value of CSF proteins assay in differential diagnosis of CNS disease

The differential diagnosis between inflammatory and noninflammatory diseases of CNS includes CSF quantitative measurements of immunoglobulin and albumin concentrations and their comparison to the serum. For that purpose we estimated the concentrations of albumin and immunoglobulin G both in CSF and serum of patients with inflammatory and noninflammatory diseases of CNS. Parallely, these parameters were determined in the control group composed of patients having the values of investigated parameters within reference ranges. The obtained data were statistically evaluated by nonparametric Mann-Whitney test. The values of calculated CSF/albumin ratio have shown significant differences between the both patient groups and the control one (p 0.05). On the contrary, significant difference have been observed between the group with inflammatory diseases and the control (p < 0.05), proving the existence of IgG intrathecal synthesis. Values of both indexes were much higher in patients with inflammatory than noninflamatory diseases, meaning that they can be used in differential diagnosis.
Prenatal testing in ICSI pregnancies: incidence of chromosomal anomalies in 1586 karyotypes and relation to sperm parameters.

BACKGROUND Prenatal testing was offered in all pregnancies obtained after ICSI with ejaculated or non-ejaculated sperm as part of the evaluation of the safety of ICSI. METHODS Between 1990 and 2001, a chorionic villus sampling (CVS) or amniocentesis was offered for multiple or singleton pregnancies respectively during a genetic counselling session for all couples applying for ICSI. ICSI was carried out using ejaculated, epididymal or testicular sperm. RESULTS In total, 1586 ICSI fetuses obtained after fresh embryo transfer were tested by CVS (n = 698) or by amniocentesis (n = 888). Abnormal fetal karyotypes were found in 47 samples [3.0%; 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.2-3.9%]; 25 anomalies (1.6%; 95% CI 1.0-2.3%) were de novo. These were 10 sex chromosomal anomalies and 15 autosomal anomalies [either numerical (n = 8) or structural (n = 7)], and 22 inherited abnormalities (1.4%; 95% CI 0.9-2.1%) (21 balanced, one unbalanced). In 17/22 inherited cases the chromosomal structural defect was inherited from the father. A significantly higher percentage of 2.1% de-novo prenatal chromosomal anomalies was observed for sperm concentrations of <20x10(6) sperm per ml, as compared with 0.24% if the sperm concentration was vertical line 20x10(6) sperm per ml (Fisher's exact test, P = 0.006). No statistical difference in frequency of chromosomal anomalies was observed for lower threshold values of sperm concentration (<1x10(6), <5x10(6), <10x10(6) and <15x10(6)). A statistical difference was observed for motility criteria, but not morphology. Three chromosomal anomalies were found prenatally after use of epididymal or testicular sperm in a total of 94 samples; two (of 83 tested) were from patients with obstructive and one (of nine tested) was from a patient with non-obstructive azoospermia. CONCLUSIONS A significantly higher rate of de-novo chromosomal anomalies (1.6 versus 0.5% in amniocentesis for a mean maternal age of 33.5 years; P < 0.007) was observed in ICSI offspring, relating mainly to a higher number of sex chromosomal anomalies and partly to a higher number of autosomal structural anomalies. This finding was related to sperm concentration and motility. The significantly higher rate of observed inherited anomalies (1.4 versus 0.3-0.4% in prenatal tests in the general population; P < 0.001) was related to a higher rate of constitutional chromosomal anomalies, mainly in the fathers. The hypothesis of a higher risk of post-zygotic events as a consequence of the ICSI procedure leading to a higher proportion of chromosomal mosaicism was not confirmed in this study. Couples should be informed of the risks of an abnormal result related to sperm quality, and of the risk linked to a prenatal procedure as well as about the relatively benign character of some chromosomal anomalies such as de-novo structural anomalies or sex chromosomal anomalies in order to be able to make a choice for prenatal testing, or not.
Energy-aware geographic routing in lossy wireless sensor networks with environmental energy supply

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by multihop wireless lossy links and resource constrained nodes. Energy efficiency is a major concern in such networks. In this paper, we study Geographic Routing with Environmental Energy Supply (GREES) and propose two protocols, GREES-L and GREES-M, which combine geographic routing and energy-aware routing techniques and take into account the realistic lossy wireless channel condition and the renewal capability of environmental energy supply when making routing decisions. Simulation results show that GREESs are more energy efficient than the corresponding residual energy based protocols and geographic routing protocols without energy awareness. GREESs can maintain higher mean residual energy on nodes, and achieve better load balancing in terms of having smaller standard deviation of residual energy on nodes. Both GREES-L and GREES-M exhibit graceful degradation on end-to-end delay, but do not compromise the end-to-end throughput performance.
Co‐variation between the intensity of behavioural manipulation and parasite development time in an acanthocephalan–amphipod system

Pomphorhynchus laevis, a fish acanthocephalan parasite, manipulates the behaviour of its gammarid intermediate host to increase its trophic transmission to the definitive host. However, the intensity of behavioural manipulation is variable between individual gammarids and between parasite populations. To elucidate causes of this variability, we compared the level of phototaxis alteration induced by different parasite sibships from one population, using experimental infections of Gammarus pulex by P. laevis. We used a naive gammarid population, and we carried out our experiments in two steps, during spring and winter. Moreover, we also investigated co‐variation between phototaxis (at different stages of infection, ‘young’ and ‘old cystacanth stage’) and two other fitness‐related traits, infectivity and development time. Three main parameters could explain the parasite intra‐population variation in behavioural manipulation. The genetic variation, suggested by the differences between parasite families, was lower than the variation owing to an (unidentified) environmental factor. Moreover, a correlation was found between development rate and the intensity of behavioural change, the fastest growing parasites being unable to induce rapid phototaxis reversal. This suggests that parasites cannot optimize at the same time these two important parameters of their fitness, and this could explain a part of the variation observed in the wild.
Evaluating the Noisy Channel Model for the Normalization of Historical Texts: Basque, Spanish and Slovene

This paper presents a method for the normalization of historical texts using a combination of weighted finite-state transducers and language models. We have extended our previous work on the normalization of dialectal texts and tested the method against a 17th century literary work in Basque. This preprocessed corpus is made available in the LREC repository. The performance of this method for learning relations between historical and contemporary word forms is evaluated against resources in three languages. The method we present learns to map phonological changes using a noisy channel model. The model is based on techniques commonly used for phonological inference and producing Grapheme-to-Grapheme conversion systems encoded as weighted transducers and produces F-scores above 80% in the task for Basque. A wider evaluation shows that the approach performs equally well with all the languages in our evaluation suite: Basque, Spanish and Slovene. A comparison against other methods that address the same task is also provided.
Thermal design in the open compute datacenter

The advent of Web-based services and cloud computing has instigated an explosive growth in demand for datacenters. Traditionally, Internet companies would lease datacenter space and servers from vendors that often emphasize flexibility over efficiency. But as these companies grew larger, they sought to reduce acquisition and operation costs by building their own datacenters. Facebook reached this stage earlier in 2011 when it unveiled its first customized datacenter in Prineville, Oregon. In designing this datacenter, Facebook took a blank-slate approach where all aspects were rethought for maximum efficiency. Although the resulting datacenter is optimized for Facebook's workload, it is general enough to be appeal to a wide variety of applications. This paper describes our choices and innovations in the thermal design of the datacenter building, which employs 100% outside-air economization. The efficiency of this design is manifest in an average infrastructure energy use reduction of 86% compared to leased space, and an overall energy use reduction of 29%. This reduction in turn translates to a power usage efficiency of 1.08, measured over the summer of 2011.
Effects of cigarette smoking on cardiac autonomic function during dynamic exercise

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the acute effect of cigarette smoking on cardiac autonomic function in young adult smokers during dynamic exercise. Fourteen healthy young smokers (21.4 ± 3.4 years) performed peak and submaximal exercise protocols under control and smoking conditions. Resting and submaximal beat-to-beat R-R series were recorded and spectrally decomposed using the fast Fourier transformation. Smoking resulted in a significant decrease in work time, [Vdot]O2peak and peak O2 pulse (P < 0.05). Heart rate increased at rest and during submaximal exercise after smoking (P < 0.05). The raw high frequency and low frequency power were significantly reduced by smoking, both at rest and during exercise (P < 0.05). The low to high frequency ratio was higher after smoking (P < 0.05). The normalised low frequency power was also significantly increased by smoking, but only at rest (P < 0.05). These data demonstrate that the tachycardic effect elicited by smoking is accompanied by acute changes in heart rate spectral components both at rest and during exercise. Therefore, the cardiac autonomic control is altered by smoking not only at rest, but also during exercise, resulting in reduced vagal modulation and increased sympathetic dominance.
Frame Packing for Minimizing the Bandwidth Consumption of the FlexRay Static Segment

The FlexRay protocol has emerged as the de facto standard for automotive communication systems, and it offers the advantages of both the event-triggered and time-triggered paradigms. To minimize bandwidth consumption (BC) in the static segment of the FlexRay communication cycle, we propose a frame-packing algorithm called BC minimizing with various periodic signals (BCMVPS), which is formulated as generalized integer linear programming that allows the packing of signals with different periods into a message frame. We also present the lower and upper bounds of the size of a static slot, as well as present a heuristic called BC best fit decreasing for linear frame selection for reducing the computing time of the BCMVPS algorithm. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithms with existing algorithms using the Society of Automotive Engineers benchmark data and GNU linear programming kit. The experimental results show that the BC of the proposed algorithms is less than that of the existing frame-packing algorithms.
Using i * Models to Enrich User Stories

In agile methods the user stories are widely used to describe require- ments. However, the user stories are an artifact too narrow to represent and de- tail the requirements. Issues like software context and dependencies between stories are also limited with the use of only this artifact. The lack of documenta- tion in agile development environment is identified as one of the main chal- lenges of the methodology. This work proposes the use of i* model that aims to reduce this lack of existing documentation in agile methods. We propose a set of heuristics to perform the mapping of the requirements presented as user sto- ries in i* models. The i* models are used as a form of documentation in agile environment, thus the user stories can be viewed more broadly and with their proper relationships according to the business environment that they will meet.
Frequent pattern discovery based on co-occurrence frequent item tree

Existing association rule mining algorithms like a priori, partition algorithm, FP-growth suffers from many problems when mining massive transactional datasets. Some of the major problems are: (i) the repetitive I/O disk scans, (2) the huge computation involved during the candidacy generation, and (3) the high memory dependency. This paper presents the implementation of frequent itemset mining algorithm, COFI, which achieves its efficiency by applying four new ideas. First, it can mine using compact memory based data structures. Second, for each frequent item assigned, a relatively small independent tree is built summarizing co-occurrences. Third, clever pruning reduces the search space drastically. Finally, a simple and non-recursive mining process reduces the memory requirements as minimum candidacy generation and counting is needed to generate all relevant frequent patterns.
Rescue of the autoimmune scurfy mouse by partial bone marrow transplantation or by injection with T‐enriched splenocytes

The scurfy mutant mouse is the genetic and phenotypic equivalent of the single‐gene human autoimmune disease immunodysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X‐linked (IPEX). The scurfy mutation disrupts the Foxp3 gene, a putative master switch for T regulatory cell development. Bone marrow transplant without conditioning was previously reported to be ineffective in scurfy mice, yet clinical remission occurs in transplanted human IPEX patients despite limited donor engraftment. In view of this contradiction, we sought to validate scurfy as a model for studying the pathogenesis and treatment of human IPEX, in particular the phenomenon of dominant immune regulation. One half of scurfy mice given bone marrow transplants after sublethal irradiation recovered and survived long‐term with donor chimerism ranging from 1·7% to 50%. Early transfer of 2 × 107 normal T cell‐enriched splenocytes also prevented or limited disease and permitted long‐term survival. Donor T cells in rescued mice made up 3–5% of lymphocytes and became highly enriched for CD25+ T cells over time. Transfer of 106 CD4+ CD25+ sorted T cells showed some beneficial effect, while CD4+ CD25‐ cells did not. Thus, both partial bone marrow transplant and T‐enriched splenocyte transfer are effective treatments for scurfy. These results indicate that scurfy results from a lack of cells with dominant immune regulatory capacity, possibly T regulatory cells. The potency of small numbers of normal cells indicates that IPEX may be a feasible target for gene therapy.
PDFs testing of combinational circuits based on covering ROBDDs

A method of deriving test pair v1, v2 for robust PDFs of special combinational circuit is suggested. Circuit is obtained by covering Shared ROBDD with LUT based CLBs. Test for all PDFs of a circuit is test for all multiple PDFs and for single stuck-at faults at the CLB poles of a circuit.
A Sensory-Driven Trade-Off between Coordinated Motion in Social Prey and a Predator’s Visual Confusion

Social animals are capable of enhancing their awareness by paying attention to their neighbors, and prey found in groups can also confuse their predators. Both sides of these sensory benefits have long been appreciated, yet less is known of how the perception of events from the perspectives of both prey and predator can interact to influence their encounters. Here we examined how a visual sensory mechanism impacts the collective motion of prey and, subsequently, how their resulting movements influenced predator confusion and capture ability. We presented virtual prey to human players in a targeting game and measured the speed and accuracy with which participants caught designated prey. As prey paid more attention to neighbor movements their collective coordination increased, yet increases in prey coordination were positively associated with increases in the speed and accuracy of attacks. However, while attack speed was unaffected by the initial state of the prey, accuracy dropped significantly if the prey were already organized at the start of the attack, rather than in the process of self-organizing. By repeating attack scenarios and masking the targeted prey’s neighbors we were able to visually isolate them and conclusively demonstrate how visual confusion impacted capture ability. Delays in capture caused by decreased coordination amongst the prey depended upon the collection motion of neighboring prey, while it was primarily the motion of the targets themselves that determined capture accuracy. Interestingly, while a complete loss of coordination in the prey (e.g., a flash expansion) caused the greatest delay in capture, such behavior had little effect on capture accuracy. Lastly, while increases in collective coordination in prey enhanced personal risk, traveling in coordinated groups was still better than appearing alone. These findings demonstrate a trade-off between the sensory mechanisms that can enhance the collective properties that emerge in social animals and the individual group member’s predation risk during an attack.
Brain reorganization after bilateral arm training and distributed constraint-induced therapy in stroke patients: a preliminary functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

BACKGROUND Bilateral arm training (BAT) and constraint-induced therapy (CIT) have shown beneficial effects in improving motor control and function of the upper extremities (UE) for patients with stroke. Thus far, no study has directly investigated the relative effects of BAT versus CIT on brain reorganization. This study compared the effects of BAT with distributed CIT (dCIT) on brain reorganization and motor function in 6 stroke patients. METHODS In a pre-post randomized controlled trial, 6 stroke patients received BAT (intensive bilateral simultaneous and symmetrical training) or dCIT (restraint of the unaffected UE combined with intensive training of the affected UE) for a period of 3 weeks, 5 days per week. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examination and 3 clinical measures (Fugl-Meyer Assessment, Action Research Arm Test, and Motor Activity Log) were administered before and after the intervention. RESULTS After intervention, patients showed varied patterns of fMRI changes and improved motor function. Two well-recovered patients, one from each group, showed large increases in bilateral hemisphere activation, especially in the ipsilesional hemisphere during affected hand movement and in the contralesional hemisphere during unaffected hand movement. During bilateral elbow movement, 3 of the 4 BAT patients showed increased bilateral cerebellum activation, especially in the left cerebellum, whereas 2 dCIT patients showed decreased cerebellar activation. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this preliminary research revealed that neuroplastic changes after stroke motor rehabilitation may be specific to the intervention. Further research using a larger sample and more complex fMRI tasks is warranted to validate the findings.
Thermal Conductivity of YBCO Coated Conductors Reinforced by Metal Tape

We have measured the thermal conductivity, κ(T), of YBCO coated conductors (YCCs) reinforced by Cu or CuNi tape. κ(T) of YCC reinforced by Cu tape with 100-300 μm in thickness, YCC-Cu, was 250-400 W m-1K-1 at 77 K, which depended on the thickness of Cu tape and was roughly one order of magnitude larger than that of the bare YCC. On the other hand, κ(T) of YCC reinforced by CuNi tape of 300 μm thickness, YCC-CuNi, was comparable to that of the bare YCC except for the low temperatures. The contribution of each reinforcing material to the thermal transport was estimated by analyzing the measured κ(T) using an equivalent heat current circuit. The applied heat flows mainly through the Cu tape for the YCC-Cu tapes and through both CuNi tape and stabilizing Ag layer for the YCC-CuNi tapes, respectively. Phonons cannot be ignored as thermal carriers in YCC-CuNi tapes.