Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of The Protective Effect of Hydro-Alcoholic Extract of Raspberry Fruit on Aquaporin1 Expression in Rats Kidney Treated by Methotrexate

Objective Methotrexate (MTX) is an antimetabolite drug commonly prescribed for the various cancers and autoimmune diseases. Despite its considerable therapeutic effects, nephrotoxicity is the most important side-effect of treatment with MTX. Aquaporin1 (AQP1) is a water channel proteins which is present in mammalian kidney. Raspberry fruit with antioxidant properties is able to protect biological systems from the harmful effects of free radicals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of raspberry extract on expression of AQP1 and the MTX-induced nephrotoxicity in rats. Materials and Methods In this experimental study, 60 adult male Wistar rats were divided into nine groups including control, sham, MTX treated group [single dose of 20 mg/kg of body weight (BW) MTX at the third day], raspberry treated groups [intraperitoneal (I.P) injection of 100, 200, 400 mg/kg of BW raspberry extract for ten consecutive days], MTX and raspberry treated groups. At day 11, rats were sacrificed via chloroform inhalation and kidney tissues were fixed in formalin solution for histological and immunohistochemistry analysis. The serological assays for urea, creatinine, uric acid and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels were also performed. Results MTX elevated serum level of the urea, creatinine, uric acid, IL-6, renal tissue damage and decreased the AQP1 expression level. Raspberry fruit extract improved the kidney function and reduced side effects of MTX in treated rats. Expression of AQP1, in a dose dependent manner was also ameliorated, as compared to control group. Conclusion According to the findings of this study, it can be concluded that biological activity of compounds presented in raspberry fruit extract especially anthocyanins may have chemo-protective effect on kidney function and AQP1 expression in rats treated by MTX.
Overview of the Medical Question Answering Task at TREC 2017 LiveQA

We present an overview of the medical question answering task organized at the TREC 2017 LiveQA track. The task addresses the automatic answering of consumer health questions received by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. We provided both training question-answer pairs, and test questions with reference answers 1 . All questions were manually annotated with the main entities (foci) and question types. The medical task received eight runs from ﬁve participating teams. Diﬀerent approaches have been applied, including classical answer retrieval based on question analysis and similar question retrieval. In particular, several deep learning approaches were tested, including attentional encoder-decoder networks, long short-term memory networks and convolutional neural networks. The training datasets were both from the open domain and the medical domain. We discuss the obtained results and give some insights for future research in medical question answering.
Seabird bycatch in Alaska demersal longline fishery trials: a demographic summary

Incidental mortality of seabirds in longline fisheries is a worldwide conservation concern (Tasker et al. 2000). Because most seabirds are long-lived and monogamous, with delayed maturity and low annual reproductive rates, populations are vulnerable to subtle but chronic adult mortality (Melvin & Parrish 2001). Population-level recovery from significant adult mortality tends to be slow (Russell 1999), and the death of a breeding adult can affect reproductive success of the widowed mate in subsequent years, considering the costs involved in finding and successfully mating with another partner (Wooller et al. 1989).
Ultrastretchable Strain Sensors Using Carbon Black‐Filled Elastomer Composites and Comparison of Capacitive Versus Resistive Sensors

The advent of soft robotics has led to the development of devices that harness the compliance and natural deformability of media with nonlinear elasticity. This has led to a need of batch‐manufacturable soft sensors that can sustain large strains and maintain kinematic compatibility with the systems they track. In this article, an approach to address this challenge is presented with highly stretchable strain sensors that can operate at strains up to 500%. The sensors consist of a carbon black‐filled elastomer composite that is batch manufactured using film‐casting techniques and CO2 laser ablation. This process facilitates the rapid multilayered fabrication of both capacitive and resistive sensing elements. When measuring capacitance, these sensors exhibit high linearity (R2 = 0.9995), low hysteresis under cyclic loading with varying strain amplitude (50–500%), and high repeatability (≥104 cycles). The sensors possess gauge factors of 0.83–0.98 in capacitive mode and 1.62–3.37 in resistive mode.
Urban Biodiversity, City-Dwellers and Conservation: How Does an Outdoor Activity Day Affect the Human-Nature Relationship?

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the influence of an urban conservation activity day on individual knowledge, awareness and actions towards biodiversity, in both the short and longer term. We organised three activity days in Paris (France), during which people were invited to participate in urban conservation efforts. Both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interviews) methods were employed to investigate the influence of this short urban nature experience on the relationships that city-dwellers develop with nearby biodiversity. We found a strong positive correlation between the levels of participation and an immediate interest towards local urban biodiversity. In the longer term, however, although participants claimed to have gained more knowledge, local awareness and interest for species in their daily environment, they did not seem to extend this interest to participating in other related activities. These results highlight the complexity of validating the effectiveness of this type of education program for achieving conservation goals. Although such a short activity may only have a limited environmental impact, it nevertheless seems to increase people's knowledge, awareness, interest and concern. We therefore believe that when repeated locally, these short conservation education programs could enhance people's experience with nature in cities and achieve conservation goals more fully.
Morphology, wettability, and mechanical properties of polycaprolactone/hydroxyapatite composite scaffolds with interconnected pore structures fabricated by a mini‐deposition system

A new mini-deposition system (MDS) was developed to fabricate scaffolds with interconnected pore structures and anatomical geometry for bone tissue engineering. Polycaprolactone/hydroxyapatite (PCL/HA) composites with varying hydroxyapatite (HA) content were adopted to manufacture scaffolds by using MDS with a porosity of 54.6%, a pore size of 716 μm in the x-y plane, and 116 μm in the z direction. The water uptake ratio and compressive modulus of PCL/HA composite scaffold increase from 8 to 39% and from 26.5 to 49.8 MPa, respectively, as the HA content increases from 0 to 40%. PCL/HA composite scaffolds have better wettability and mechanical properties than pure PCL scaffold. A PCL/HA composite scaffold for mandible bone repair was successfully fabricated with both interconnected pore structures and anatomical shape to demonstrate the versatility of MDS. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2012. © 2012 Society of Plastics Engineers
Characterization of thermally sprayed micro- and nanocrystalline cylinder wall coatings by means of a cavitation test

Abstract The future development of motor engine design and technology governs the increasingly demanding requirements on materials in terms of friction and wear properties. In order to reduce emissions and achieve economical and environmentally sound solutions, thermal-spray processes became an interesting alternative to manufacture wear resistant and low-friction cylinder surfaces. Three thermal-spray processes are of major interest: twin wire arc system, high-velocity oxygen fuel and plasma transferred wire arc. The energy to heat the feedstock and the kinetic energy to accelerate the molten particles to the substrate differ within these processes consequently resulting in differing lamellar microstructures of the coatings. Hitherto, low-alloyed carbon steels with 0.1–0.8 wt% carbon have been successfully used for cylinder coatings. The motivation to alleviate friction losses is currently based on the material development of a new iron-base alloy with chromium and boron. This should solidify into a nanocrystalline or even amorphous matrix of high wear resistance. Prior to engine tests these coatings are characterized in laboratory by means of bench tests for adhesive tensile strength, tribological properties, and fatigue of the composite. Thus cavitation tests should reveal the tribological stability of these coatings and their ability to resist high-frequency cyclic impact stresses. The objective in this investigation is to describe the cavitation behaviour and the influence of voids like pores or oxides.
Parallel Scheduling of DAGs under Memory Constraints

Scientific workflows are frequently modeled as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) of tasks, which represent computational modules and their dependencies, in the form of data produced by a task and used by another one. This formulation allows the use of runtime systems which dynamically allocate tasks onto the resources of increasingly complex and heterogeneous computing platforms. However, for some workflows, such a dynamic schedule may run out of memory by exposing too much parallelism. This paper focuses on the problem of transforming such a DAG to prevent memory shortage, and concentrates on shared memory platforms. We first propose a simple model of DAG which is expressive enough to emulate complex memory behaviors. We then exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm that computes the maximum memory peak of a DAG, that is, the maximum memory needed by any parallel schedule. We consider the problem of reducing this maximum memory peak to make it smaller than a given bound by adding new fictitious edges, while trying to minimize the critical path of the graph. After proving this problem NP-complete, we provide an ILP solution as well as several heuristic strategies that are thoroughly compared by simulation on both synthetic and actual computation DAGs. We show that on most instances, we are able to decrease the maximum memory peak at the cost of a small increase in the critical path, thus with little impact on quality of the final parallel schedule.
Robust compliant motion for manipulators, part I: The fundamental concepts of compliant motion

A method for the design of controllers of constrained manipulators in the presence of model uncertainties is developed. The controller must carry out fine maneuvers when the manipulator is not constrained, and compliant motion, with or without interaction-force measurement, when the manipulator is constrained. At the same time stability must be preserved if bounded uncertainties are allowed in modelling the manipulators. Stability of the manipulator and environment as a whole and the preservation of stability in the face of changes are two fundamental issues that have been considered in the design method. A set of practical design specifications in the frequency domain is presented that is meaningful from the standpoint of control theory and assures the desired compliant motion in the Cartesian coordinate frame and stability in the presence of bounded uncertainties. This approach also assures the global stability of the manipulator and its environment. The consequence of inexact achievement of performance specifications on stability is also specified. Part I concerns the fundamentals of compliant motion, while Part II is devoted to the controller design method.
The Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Children’s Brain Structure

Children’s cognitive abilities and school achievements are deeply affected by parental socioeconomic status (SES). Numerous studies have reported lower cognitive performance in relation to unfavorable environments, but little is known about the effects of SES on the child’s neural structures. Here, we systematically explore the association between SES and brain anatomy through MRI in a group of 23 healthy 10-year-old children with a wide range of parental SES. We confirm behaviorally that language is one of the cognitive domains most affected by SES. Furthermore, we observe widespread modifications in children’s brain structure. A lower SES is associated with smaller volumes of gray matter in bilateral hippocampi, middle temporal gyri, left fusiform and right inferior occipito-temporal gyri, according to both volume- and surface-based morphometry. Moreover, we identify local gyrification effects in anterior frontal regions, supportive of a potential developmental lag in lower SES children. In contrast, we found no significant association between SES and white matter architecture. These findings point to the potential neural mediators of the link between unfavourable environmental conditions and cognitive skills.
Technology in Parkinson's disease: Challenges and opportunities

The miniaturization, sophistication, proliferation, and accessibility of technologies are enabling the capture of more and previously inaccessible phenomena in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, more information has not translated into a greater understanding of disease complexity to satisfy diagnostic and therapeutic needs. Challenges include noncompatible technology platforms, the need for wide‐scale and long‐term deployment of sensor technology (among vulnerable elderly patients in particular), and the gap between the “big data” acquired with sensitive measurement technologies and their limited clinical application. Major opportunities could be realized if new technologies are developed as part of open‐source and/or open‐hardware platforms that enable multichannel data capture sensitive to the broad range of motor and nonmotor problems that characterize PD and are adaptable into self‐adjusting, individualized treatment delivery systems. The International Parkinson and Movement Disorders Society Task Force on Technology is entrusted to convene engineers, clinicians, researchers, and patients to promote the development of integrated measurement and closed‐loop therapeutic systems with high patient adherence that also serve to (1) encourage the adoption of clinico‐pathophysiologic phenotyping and early detection of critical disease milestones, (2) enhance the tailoring of symptomatic therapy, (3) improve subgroup targeting of patients for future testing of disease‐modifying treatments, and (4) identify objective biomarkers to improve the longitudinal tracking of impairments in clinical care and research. This article summarizes the work carried out by the task force toward identifying challenges and opportunities in the development of technologies with potential for improving the clinical management and the quality of life of individuals with PD. © 2016 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society
A Romanian language modeling using linguistic factors

Language modeling plays an important role in continuous speech recognition and understanding providing an improvement of their performances. But language modeling has been shown to be a difficult task due to the many sources of variability that are present in natural languages. Therefore has been developed different method to process the language. The most used of them are grammar and statistical models. This paper presents a statistical modeling of Romanian language using factored language model and linguistic knowledge (morphosyntactic description, part-of-speech and lemma).
Deep De-Aliasing for Fast Compressive Sensing MRI

Fast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is highly in demand for many clinical applications in order to reduce the scanning cost and improve the patient experience. This can also potentially increase the image quality by reducing the motion artefacts and contrast washout. However, once an image field of view and the desired resolution are chosen, the minimum scanning time is normally determined by the requirement of acquiring sufficient raw data to meet the Nyquist-Shannon sampling criteria. Compressive Sensing (CS) theory has been perfectly matched to the MRI scanning sequence design with much less required raw data for the image reconstruction. Inspired by recent advances in deep learning for solving various inverse problems, we propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Networks-based deep learning framework for de-aliasing and reconstructing MRI images from highly undersampled data with great promise to accelerate the data acquisition process. By coupling an innovative content loss with the adversarial loss our de-aliasing results are more realistic. Furthermore, we propose a refinement learning procedure for training the generator network, which can stabilise the training with fast convergence and less parameter tuning. We demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art CS-MRI methods, in terms of reconstruction error and perceptual image quality. In addition, our method can reconstruct each image in 0.22ms--0.37ms, which is promising for real-time applications.
InkAnchor: enhancing informal ink-based note taking on touchscreen mobile phones

Although touchscreen mobile phones are widely used for recording informal text notes (e.g., grocery lists, reminders and directions), the lack of efficient mechanisms for combining informal graphical content with text is a persistent challenge. In this paper, we present InkAnchor, a digital ink editor that allows users to easily create ink-based notes by finger drawing and writing on a mobile phone touchscreen. InkAnchor incorporates flexible anchoring, focus-plus-context input, content chunking, and lightweight editing mechanisms to support the capture of informal notes and annotations. We describe the design and evaluation of InkAnchor through a series of user studies, which revealed that the integrated support enabled by InkAnchor is a significant improvement over current mobile note taking applications on a range of mobile note-taking tasks.
Characterization of Atrazine-Induced Gonadal Malformations in African Clawed Frogs (Xenopus laevis) and Comparisons with Effects of an Androgen Antagonist (Cyproterone Acetate) and Exogenous Estrogen (17β-Estradiol): Support for the Demasculinization/Feminization Hypothesis

Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor that both chemically castrates and feminizes male amphibians. It depletes androgens in adult frogs and reduces androgen-dependent growth of the larynx in developing male larvae. It also disrupts normal gonadal development and feminizes the gonads of developing males. Gonadal malformations induced by atrazine include hermaphrodites and males with multiple testes [single sex polygonadism (SSP)], and effects occur at concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb (μg/L). Here, we describe the frequencies at which these malformations occur and compare them with morphologies induced by the estrogen, 17β-estradiol (E2), and the antiandrogen cyproterone acetate, as a first step in testing the hypothesis that the effects of atrazine are a combination of demasculinization and feminization. The various forms of hermaphroditism did not occur in controls. Nonpigmented ovaries, which occurred at relatively high frequencies in atrazine-treated larvae, were found in four individuals out of more than 400 controls examined (1%). Further, we show that several types of gonadal malformations (SSP and three forms of hermaphroditism) are produced by E2 exposure during gonadal differentiation, whereas a final morphology (nonpigmented ovaries) appears to be the result of chemical castration (disruption of androgen synthesis and/or activity) by atrazine. These experimental findings suggest that atrazine-induced gonadal malformations result from the depletion of androgens and production of estrogens, perhaps subsequent to the induction of aromatase by atrazine, a mechanism established in fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals (rodents and humans).
Geometric dilution of localization and bias-correction methods

A particular geometric problem-the collinearity problem-which may prevent effective use of localization algorithms is described in detail in this paper. Further analysis illustrates the methods for improving the estimate for localization algorithms also can be affected by the collinearity problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to deal with the collinearity problem for a localization improvement method-the bias-correction method [1, 2, 3]. Compare to earlier work such as [4], the main feature of the proposed approach is that it takes the level of the measurement noise into consideration as a variable. Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Further simulation illustrates the influence of two factors on the effect of the bias-correct method: the distance between sensors and the level of noise. Though it mainly aims to the bias-correction method, the proposed approach is also valid for localization algorithms because of the consistent performance of localization algorithms and the bias-correction method.
Predictability of Biometry in Patients Undergoing Cataract Surgery

Purpose To compare measurements of axial length (AL), anterior chamber depth (ACD), keratometry (K), and the refractive predictability of the Aladdin and IOLMaster biometry devices in cataract surgery patients. Methods A retrospective observational study of eyes undergoing cataract surgery. Data were retrieved on AL, ACD, and K measurements obtained by the Aladdin and the IOLMaster. Furthermore, the postoperative refractive prediction errors were compared between the devices. Results The study included 127 consecutive eyes of 127 patients undergoing cataract surgery. Mean measurements of AL were not significantly different between the Aladdin (24.18 ± 1.89 mm) and IOLMaster (24.18 ± 1.89 mm) (p = 0.792). Mean K measurements were different between Aladdin (43.84 ± 1.56 D) and IOLMaster (43.97 ± 1.61 D) (p < 0.001). For AL, Aladdin measurements correlated strongly with IOLMaster measurements (r = 0.9997). For K, Aladdin measurements correlated strongly with IOLMaster measurements (r = 0.9912). Fifty-eight of the 127 eyes underwent cataract surgery with a monofocal intraocular lens. For these, mean absolute error (MAE) in predicting refraction relative to the measured postoperative refraction differed between Aladdin (MAE = 0.54 ± 0.40D) and IOLMaster (MAE = 0.49 ± 0.41D) (p = 0.001). After adjustment for the systematic difference in K measurements, the difference in MAE was no longer significant (p = 0.601). The ACD measurements did not differ significantly (p = 0.873) and were well correlated (r = 0.8327). Conclusions A very good correlation was found in AL, K, and ACD measurements between the Aladdin biometer and the IOLMaster. Minimal adjustment for the constant difference in keratometry measurements matched the refractive predictability of both devices.