Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Urban building detection from optical and insar features exploiting context

We investigate the potential of combined features of aerial images and high-resolution interferometric SAR (InSAR) data for building detection in urban areas. It is shown that completeness and correctness may be increased if we integrate both InSAR double-bounce lines and 3D lines of stereo data in addition to building hints of a single optical orthophoto. In order to exploit context information, which is crucial for object detection in urban areas, we use a Conditional Random Field approach. It proves to be a valuable method for context-based building detection with multi-sensor features. * Corresponding author
Interlimb Coupling and Left Hemiplegia Because of Right Cerebral Vascular Accident

This study examined interlimb coupling in a left hemiplegic population. Participants were 20 healthy individuals and 18 individuals who were status post right cerebral vascular accident with left hemiparesis. Participants oscillated each elbow at both preferred-unilateral and preferred-symmetrical bilateral rates. One-tailed paired t-tests using frequency of oscillation and peak velocity supported the hypothesis that the unaffected limb would adapt its movement dynamics from the unilateral to the bilateral movement conditions (ps < .0125), while the affected limb did not differ its performance across the unilateral and bilateral conditions (ps > .0125). No significance (p > .0125) was found between the unilateral and bilateral performances for either of the normal group's limbs. This study suggests that during bilateral movements, the affected limb may constrain the unaffected limb. More research is needed to examine the coupling relationship between the affected and unaffected limbs and how occupation may facilitate the ability to adapt to novel situations.
Diffusion-Weighted Imaging and Cognition in the Leukoariosis and Disability in the Elderly Study

Background and Purpose— The mechanisms by which leukoariosis impacts on clinical and cognitive functions are not yet fully understood. We hypothesized that ultrastructural abnormalities of the normal-appearing brain tissue (NABT) assessed by diffusion-weighted imaging played a major and independent role. Methods— In addition to a comprehensive clinical, neuropsychologic, and imaging work-up, diffusion-weighted imaging was performed in 340 participants of the multicenter leukoariosis and disability study examining the impact of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) on 65- to 85-year old individuals without previous disability. WMH severity was rated according to the Fazekas score. Multivariate regression analysis served to assess correlations of histogram metrics of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of whole-brain tissue, NABT, and of the mean ADC of WMH with cognitive functions. Results— Increasing WMH scores were associated with a higher frequency of hypertension, a greater WMH volume, more brain atrophy, worse overall cognitive performance, and changes in ADC. We found strong associations between the peak height of the ADC histogram of whole-brain tissue and NABT with memory performance, executive dysfunction, and speed, which remained after adjustment for WMH lesion volume and brain atrophy and were consistent among centers. No such association was seen with the mean ADC of WMH. Conclusions— Ultrastructural abnormalities of NABT increase with WMH severity and have a strong and independent effect on cognitive functions, whereas diffusion-weighted imaging metrics within WMH have no direct impact. This should be considered when defining outcome measures for trials that attempt to ameliorate the consequences of WMH progression.
CpG_MI: a novel approach for identifying functional CpG islands in mammalian genomes

CpG islands (CGIs) are CpG-rich regions compared to CpG-depleted bulk DNA of mammalian genomes and are generally regarded as the epigenetic regulatory regions in association with unmethylation, promoter activity and histone modifications. Accurate identification of CpG islands with epigenetic regulatory function in bulk genomes is of wide interest. Here, the common features of functional CGIs are identified using an average mutual information method to differentiate functional CGIs from the remaining CGIs. A new approach (CpG mutual information, CpG_MI) was further explored to identify functional CGIs based on the cumulative mutual information of physical distances between two neighboring CpGs. Compared to current approaches, CpG_MI achieved the highest prediction accuracy. This approach also identified new functional CGIs overlapping with gene promoter regions which were missed by other algorithms. Nearly all CGIs identified by CpG_MI overlapped with histone modification marks. CpG_MI could also be used to identify potential functional CGIs in other mammalian genomes, as the CpG dinucleotide contents and cumulative mutual information distributions are almost the same among six mammalian genomes in our analysis. It is a reliable quantitative tool for the identification of functional CGIs from bulk genomes and helps in understanding the relationships between genomic functional elements and epigenomic modifications.
Learning Subgraph Patterns from text for Extracting Disease - Symptom Relationships

To some extent, texts can be represented in the form of graphs, such as dependency graphs in which nodes represent words and edges represent grammatical dependencies between words. Graph representation of texts is an interesting alternative to string representation because it provides an additional level of abstraction over the syntax that is sometime easier to compute. In this paper, we study the use of graph mining methods on texts represented as dependency graphs, for extracting relationships between pairs of annotated entities.We propose a three step approach that includes (1) the transformation of texts in a collection of dependency graphs; (2) the selection of frequent subgraphs, named hereafter patterns, on the basis of positive sentences; and (3) the extraction of relationships by searching for occurrences of patterns in novel sentences. Our method has been experimented by extracting disease-symptom relationships from a corpus of 51,292 PubMed abstracts (428,491 sentences) related to 50 rare diseases. The extraction of correct disease-symptom relationships has been evaluated on 565 sentences, showing a precision of 0.91 and a recall of 0.49 (F-Meaure is 0.63). These preliminary experiments show the feasibility of extracting good quality relationships using frequent subgraph mining.
New laurane-type sesquiterpenoids from the Chinese red alga Laurencia okamurai Yamada

Abstract Two new laurane-type sesquiterpenoids, debromo-3α-hydroperoxy-3-epiaplysin (1) and debromo-3β-hydroperoxyaplysin (2), together with seven known related compounds (3–9), were isolated from the Chinese red alga Laurencia okamurai. Their structures were elucidated by detailed analysis of spectroscopic data and by comparison with the literature. In bioassay, compounds 2, 4, 8, and 9 exhibited significant PTP1B inhibitory activity with IC50 values ranging from 4.9 to 14.9 μg/ml.
Deaf and hearing students' referential strategies in writing: What referential cohesion tells us about deaf students' literacy development

The ability to organize the referential content of narrative has usually been investigated as a mark of the development of discourse skills. In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high-school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second-graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, Frog, Where are you? , for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing and, in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. However, the referential strategies of the deaf students were more nominal and less anaphoric than those of their hearing peers. It is concluded that the referential strategies of deaf writers are only superficially similar to those of hearing novice writers, suggesting that deaf students' referential strategies in writing are not merely the product of a delay in development of discourse skills.
Use of randomly amplified polymorphic DNA markers to distinguish isolates of Aspergillus fumigatus

Forty-four oligonucleotide decamers were tested for their abilities to generate randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers from genomic DNAs of three different isolates of Aspergillus fumigatus. Seven primers generated RAPDs that allowed the three isolates to be differentiated; one of the primers also yielded a unique RAPD pattern in each of an additional six fungal isolates, demonstrating the utility of this technique for distinguishing between A. fumigatus isolates.
The Impact of Mechanical Forces in Heart Morphogenesis

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect in humans and results from deficient cardiac development, a complex process that is not completely understood. The heart starts to function before its morphogenesis is complete and the increasing needs of the growing embryo for oxygen and nutrients demand a proportional increase in the performance of the organ. We review recent findings supporting the hypothesis that the activity of the developing heart influences its morphogenesis and that internal or external factors, which significantly modify its functional capability, can in turn, induce anatomic cardiac defects. We propose that a role for early cardiac contraction in heart development is supported by recent experimental evidence and that the Notch pathway acts as a key transducer between hemodynamic stimuli and cardiogenesis. ### Cardiac Contraction Begins Before Convective Transport Is Necessary Several pieces of evidence suggest that heart primordium contraction starts well before the active transport of oxygen and nutrients by the circulation is required to meet the needs of the embryonic tissues. For example, rhythmic action potentials can be detected in the chick heart primordium as early as Hamburger-Hamilton stage 9 (HH9, 7-somite stage, 29–33 hours after laying). 1 The chick heart tube starts showing contraction as early as HH10 (10-somite, 33–38 hours), whereas effective blood flow starts during looping at HH12 (16-somite, 45–49 hours). 2 By days 3 to 4 (HH20-23), vigorous circulation is established.3 However, total elimination of cardiac ejection by complete ligation of the cardiac outflow tract in 3- or 4-day chick embryos has no significant effect on O2 consumption or eye growth in the 4 hours after the procedure4 and no correlation between cardiac output and eye, vessel growth, or body mass accumulation was observed in 24 hours after partial conotruncal ligation.5 Moreover, chick embryos show no hemoglobin-mediated transport of oxygen up to about 3 …
Efficient Implementation of Interior Point Decoding Based on Barrier Function for LDPC Codes

In this paper, an efficient implementation of the interior point algorithm recently proposed by Wadayama [5] for linear programming (LP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is presented. The main idea behind the modification is to approximate the barrier function for the fundamental polytope defining the code so that it contains only one linear constraint for each of the parity-check constraints. Simulation results show that the approximations introduced do not result in any performance degradation, while considerably reducing the decoding complexity and latency.
Preventing falls in elderly people

We need to target interventions at people most likely to benefit from them In 1960 Sheldon described the literature on falling as “meagre. ”w1 Now so much has been published on the topic that it is difficult to make sense of the evidence and identify clear messages for policy and practice. We know that more than 30% of people aged 65 or older living in the community fall each year, many fall more than once, andthe risk of falling increases with age.1 2 Although only 3-10% of these falls result in serious injury, they have serious implications for healthcare resources. What do we know about how to prevent falls? Over 60 randomised controlled trials of interventions to prevent falling have now been published. This issue contains a systematic review of interventions for the prevention of falling (p 680). 3 Chang et al searched up to 2002 and include 40 trials; a further six trials were identified after they had completed their analysis. A Cochrane review, updatedin July 2003 (for which the author is …
The Role of Cognitions and Emotions in Human–Coyote Interactions

In this article, emotional and cognitive variables were used to explain reactions to human–coyote interactions. Anticipated emotional dispositions were hypothesized to mediate the influence of general attitude and symbolic existence beliefs toward coyotes on acceptability of killing a coyote. Residents around Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada were mailed a questionnaire in 2011 (n = 556; response rate = 70%). Acceptability of killing a coyote was evaluated for three situations: (a) a coyote crossed the trail, (b) a coyote approached you, and (c) a snarling coyote approached you. In all three scenarios, symbolic existence beliefs and anticipated emotional dispositions directly influenced acceptability of lethal management. Emotional dispositions also mediated the relationship between attitudes and symbolic existence beliefs on lethal management in all scenarios except for scenario 3 (snarling coyote). Acceptability of lethal control was best explained by symbolic beliefs, followed by anticipated emotional disposition.
Separable Prefrontal Cortex Contributions to Free Recall

In everyday life, we often must remember the past in the absence of helpful cues in the environment. In these cases, the brain directs retrieval by relying on internally maintained cues and strategies. Free recall is a widely used behavioral paradigm for studying retrieval with minimal cue support. During free recall, individuals often recall semantically related items consecutively—an effect termed semantic clustering—and previous studies have sought to understand clustering to gain leverage on the basic mechanisms supporting strategic recall. Successful recall and semantic clustering depend on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, as a result of methodological limitations, few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have assessed the neural mechanisms at encoding that support subsequent recall, and none have tested the event-related correlates of recall itself. Thus, it remains open whether one or several frontal control mechanisms operate during encoding and recall. Here, we applied a recently developed method (Öztekin et al., 2010) to assess event-related fMRI signal changes during free recall. During encoding, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation was predictive of subsequent semantic clustering. In contrast, subregions of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) were predictive of subsequent recall, whether clustered or nonclustered, and were inversely associated with clustering during recall. These results suggest that DLPFC supports relational processes at encoding that are sufficient to produce category clustering effects during recall. Conversely, controlled retrieval mechanisms supported by VLPFC support item-specific search during recall.
Superiority of Portal Venous Drainage Over Systemic Venous Drainage in Pancreas Transplantation: A Retrospective Study

ObjectiveTo compare portal and systemic venous drainage of pancreas transplants and demonstrate an immunologic and survival superiority of portal venous drainage. Summary Background DataTraditionally, solitary pancreas transplants have been performed using systemic venous and bladder drainage, but more recently, the advantages of enteric drainage have been well documented. Although physiologic benefits for portal venous drainage have been described, the impact of portal venous drainage, especially with solitary pancreas transplants, has yet to be determined. MethodsSince August 1995, 280 pancreas transplants with enteric duct drainage were analyzed. One hundred and seventeen were simultaneous pancreas and kidney (SPK), 63 with systemic venous drainage (SV) and 54 with portal venous drainage (PV). The remainder were solitary transplants; 97 pancreas after kidney (PAK; 42 SV and 55 PV) and 66 transplants alone (PTA; 26 SV and 40 PV). Immunosuppressive therapy was equivalent for both groups. ResultsThe groups were similar with respect to recipient characteristics and HLA matching. Thirty-six month graft survival for all transplants was 79% for PV and 65% for SV (P = .008). By category, SPK graft survival was 74% for PV and 76% for SV, PAK graft survival was 70% for PV and 56% for SV, and PTA graft survival was 84% for PV and 50% for SV. The rate of at least one rejection episode was also significantly higher in the SV group. At 36 months, for all pancreas transplants, the rejection rate was 21% for PV and 52% for SV (P < .0001). For SPK, rejection rates were 9% for PV and 45% for SV. For PAK, rejection rates were 16% for PV and 65% for SV, and for PTA 36% for PV and 51% for SV. The rejection rates for kidneys following SPK were also lower in the PV group (26% versus 43% for SV). Furthermore, the grades of rejection were milder in PV for all transplants (P = .017). By multivariate analysis, portal venous drainage was the only parameter that significantly affected rejection. ConclusionGraft survival and rejection is superior for PV. These clinical findings are consistent with published reports of experimentally induced portal tolerance and strongly argue that PV drainage should be the procedure of choice for pancreas transplantation.
Implications of philosophical and personal belief exemptions on re-emergence of vaccine-preventable disease: The role of spatial clustering in under-vaccination

Vaccine exemption policies vary by state, and it has been demonstrated that easier protocols for personal/ philosophical belief exemptions are associated with lower vaccine coverage at the state level. However, this does not lead to ubiquitously lower immunization rates across the state, as shown by variability in county-level exemption rates. Rather, there is geographical clustering of areas which are then more vulnerable to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Understanding both state and local patterns of vaccine exemptions and developing policies and public health interventions to increase coverage in high-risk areas is critical. At all levels of healthcare, efforts must be made to encourage vaccination education and legislation to protect the public’s health.
Correction of Postkeratoplasty Ametropia in Keratoconus Patients Using a Toric Implantable Collamer Lens

Purpose TO evaluate the efficacy and safety of a toric implantable Collamer lens (Visian TICL®) for correction of high postkeratoplasty ametropia in patients with keratoconus. Methods Seven eyes of 7 keratoconus patients postkeratoplasty (5 M, 2 F; mean age 34.1±5.9 years, range 28–44) unable to wear glasses or contact lenses were included in the study. A foldable phakic posterior chamber Collamer toric lens was injected through a standard 3.0-mm clear corneal temporal incision. Uncorrected distance visual acuity (UCDVA, logMAR), best-corrected distance visual acuity (BCDVA, logMAR), spherical refraction, cylindrical refraction, and refractive spherical equivalent (RSE) were measured preoperatively and postoperatively. Postoperative adverse events were recorded. Results The mean follow-up was 12.8±8.8 months (range 4–30). A significant (p<0.01) improvement was observed postoperatively in mean UCDVA (1.18±0.4 vs 0.2±0.1), spherical refraction (-5.89±3.43 vs 0.53±0.75), cylindrical refraction (-4.39±0.75 vs −1.74±0.84), and RSE (-8.09±3.77 vs −0.33±0.54). The BCDVA changes were not significant (0.09±0.11 vs 0.05±0.08). All patients gained ≥5 lines of UCDVA (average 7.6±1.9 lines). The number of patients with UCDVA ≥6/12 (0.3 logMAR) increased after surgery (0% vs 87.5%; p<0.01), while the number of patients with BCDVA ≥6/12 was unchanged (100% vs 100%; NS), with 0% (0/7) of patients losing ≥2 BCDVA lines. No complications were observed postoperatively. Conclusions Toric implantable Collamer lens was safe and effective in correcting postkeratoplasty myopia and astigmatism in keratoconus patients.
Redundant Coding Can Speed Up Segmentation in Multiclass Displays

Multiclass data visualizations allow viewers to compare one dataset to another. The visual marks that represent these datasets, or classes, are visually distinguished from one another by easily perceived visual feature differences, such as color or shape. A designer of a graph or map might encode one class of marks as either red, or circular, and another class as either blue, or triangular. One common technique is to combine these cues in a redundant fashion, encoding one class as red and circular, and the other as blue and triangular, under the assumption that a larger difference (via multiple differing features) should help. Recent work [6] has empirically demonstrated strengthened grouping and improved accuracy in segmentation of redundantly coded objects. Does this redundancy benefit generalize to more realistic displays, and to other measures such as segmentation speed? We demonstrate in an experiment that redundant coding can lead to a small improvement in speed of visual differentiation in a simulated dataset in a crowded display.
Visual landscapes and psychological well‐being

Summary and Discussion The findings suggest that stressed individuals feel significantly better after exposure to nature scenes rather than to American urban scenes lacking nature elements. Compared to the influences of the urban scenes, the salient effect of the nature exposures was to increase Positive Affect — including feelings of affection friendliness, playfulness, and elation. The increase in positive affect produced by the nature scenes is consistent with the finding that the nature exposures also significantly reduced Fear Arousal. According to psychological theories, a reduction in arousal or activation produces pleasurable feelings if an individual is experiencing stress or excessive arousal (Berlyne, 1971, pp. 81–82). In contrast to the nature scenes, the urban views tended to work against emotional well‐being. The major effect of the urban scenes was to significantly increase Sadness. There was also a consistent but non‐significant tendency for the urban scenes to‐aggravate feelings of Anger/.