Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feasibility Study of Radiation Dose Reduction in Adult Female Pelvic CT Scan with Low Tube-Voltage and Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction

Objective To evaluate image quality of female pelvic computed tomography (CT) scans reconstructed with the adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction (ASIR) technique combined with low tube-voltage and to explore the feasibility of its clinical application. Materials and Methods Ninety-four patients were divided into two groups. The study group used 100 kVp, and images were reconstructed with 30%, 50%, 70%, and 90% ASIR. The control group used 120 kVp, and images were reconstructed with 30% ASIR. The noise index was 15 for the study group and 11 for the control group. The CT values and noise levels of different tissues were measured. The contrast to noise ratio (CNR) was calculated. A subjective evaluation was carried out by two experienced radiologists. The CT dose index volume (CTDIvol) was recorded. Results A 44.7% reduction in CTDIvol was observed in the study group (8.18 ± 3.58 mGy) compared with that in the control group (14.78 ± 6.15 mGy). No significant differences were observed in the tissue noise levels and CNR values between the 70% ASIR group and the control group (p = 0.068-1.000). The subjective scores indicated that visibility of small structures, diagnostic confidence, and the overall image quality score in the 70% ASIR group was the best, and were similar to those in the control group (1.87 vs. 1.79, 1.26 vs. 1.28, and 4.53 vs. 4.57; p = 0.122-0.585). No significant difference in diagnostic accuracy was detected between the study group and the control group (42/47 vs. 43/47, p = 1.000). Conclusion Low tube-voltage combined with automatic tube current modulation and 70% ASIR allowed the low CT radiation dose to be reduced by 44.7% without losing image quality on female pelvic scan.
Clinical Experience of the Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome

Background The Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome (KTS) is characterized by three clinical features, namely cutaneous capillary malformations, venous malformations, and soft tissue and/or bony hypertrophy of the extremities. The varied manifestations are attributed to the unpredictable clinical nature and prognosis of the syndrome. To elucidate the clinical characteristics of this disease, we reviewed a relatively large number of KTS patients who presented to our vascular anomalies center. Methods We conducted a retrospective study with 19 patients who were diagnosed with KTS and treated in our vascular anomalies clinic between 2003 and 2014, and examined their demographic characteristics, their clinical features, and the treatments administered. Results The sex distribution was balanced, with 9 (47%) males and 10 (53%) females. The mean follow-up period was 4.1 years (range, 7 months-9 years). Most of the patients received conservative treatments such as medication or physiotherapy. Compression therapies such as wearing of elastic garments/bandages were also administered, and surgical interventions were considered only when the patients became excessively symptomatic. Other treatments included laser therapy and sclerotherapy, and all the treatments were adjusted according to each case, tailored to the conditions of the individual patients. Conclusions KTS is an extremely rare, multifactorial disorder that induces widely varied symptoms. Because of this unique feature, plastic surgeons, when not careful, tend to attach a one-sided importance to typical symptoms such as limb hypertrophy or capillary malformation and thus overlook other symptoms and clinical features. KTS can be suspected in all infants who show capillary malformations or limb hypertrophy and require a multi-disciplinary approach for comprehensive management.
Cognitive and Social Issues, Modeling and Simulation, C2 Technologies and Systems Draft Paper Submission Number: I-188

Aggregating, assimilating, and understanding the ever-larger amounts of heterogeneous information present in network-centric environments presents distinct cognitive challenges to the command and control staff. Under previous efforts (Pfautz, 2006), we have detailed our efforts to analyze how qualifiers of information, or meta-information (e.g., uncertainty, recency, pedigree), impact information processing and situational awareness in an already challenging decision-making environment. To date, few existing systems explicitly support the management and representation of meta-information. Here, we describe several specific efforts to develop methods for the representation of meta-information in C2 decision-support tools, including methods to support asset allocation (e.g., for air-based ISR, for addressing ground-based threats, for neutralizing near-space or space-based threats). These methods include techniques for the visual portrayal of meta-information in C2 decision-making systems as well as approaches to the computation, when necessary, of that metainformation. In this paper, we discuss these methods within example domains, and discuss lessons learned for the design of future C2 decision-support systems.
Representações de alunos sobre a integração curricular das TIC no ensino básico

This article is a summation of a broader research project carried out for a PhD thesis, which investigated the potential and limits of the implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a cross-subject educational area. The study was undertaken using a qualitative methodology, compatible with the phenomenological approach, which aimed to capture the meaning that a group of primary school pupils attributed to an integrated educational experience based on the involvement of teachers of different school subjects. Hence, the content of interviews with the pupils was analysed, which gave rise to their representations about the experience and their ideas on the topic, including a set of suggestions for making improvements. The conclusion arrived at is that despite the importance attributed to ICT as a cross-subject educational area, the curricular model based on a framework of subjects is a difficult paradigm to break, even by the pupils, who do not reject the possibility of retaining a specific time and space to learn about the technology.
Can Financial Incentive Influence Medical Practice ?

Background: Economic policy determines the allocation of funds and provides the framework within which health services are initiated, maintained or abandoned. Its implementation introduces financial incentives/disincentives likely to influence the attitudes and/or conduct of the people involved. The literature review presented in this article documents the existence of personal financial interest as a factor in the clinical decision-making of medical personnel. Findings:. Allocated payments (including merit pay and profit sharing) appear to shift doctors’ practice to meet targets (e.g. population coverage, reduced spending) while generating possible perverse effects (e.g. emphasis on quantity vs. quality). Remuneration strategies (e.g. capitation, shared financial risk, fee-for-service and salary systems) alter spending patterns, interrelationships, medical protocols, work codes and statistical recording. Conclusions: The choice of payment mechanisms is not a neutral decision and has significant policy and practice implications. The extent to which these factors influence care patterns depends on the interplay of financial incentives/disincentives, urgency of patient need and the doctor’s value system.
Collective Behavior for Group of Generic Linear Agents Interacting Under Arbitrary Network Topology

This paper formulates the coordination control for continuous- and discrete-time homogeneous linear multiagent systems under network topology without any structural confinement. This general setting is proved to unify most of the existing models, such as (leaderless and leader-following) synchronization/consensus control and containment control, which are usually considered separately using different analyses, within the same framework. More important, it unravels the most general collective behavior inherent in the network of diffusively coupled agents with identical dynamics: agents outside the closed strong components asymptotically move into the convex space spanned by those agents in the closed strong components. Coordination analysis for such a general framework is successfully performed based on the exploitation of tools from matrix analysis, linear system theory, and algebraic graph theory.
Slip frequency detection for indirect field oriented control drives

The paper presents a new technique to detect the slip angular frequency in induction motor drives based on indirect field oriented control. According to the proposed technique, the slip frequency is calculated by processing the effects exerted by an additional high frequency signal on the zero sequence stator voltage. By measuring such a zero sequence voltage, it is possible to evaluate the air gap flux and to detect the slip frequency in order to implement an indirect field oriented control algorithm. According to the proposed approach, rotor time constant errors are not influent as in conventional field oriented control schemes. Therefore complex tuning or compensation techniques are not required. Simulations and experimental tests using have been performed in order to evaluate the consistency of the proposed approach.
Erythropoietin for the Treatment of Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: A Feasible Ingredient for a successful Medical Recipe

Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) following aneurysm bleeding accounts for 6% to 8% of all cerebrovascular accidents. Although an aneurysm can be effectively managed by surgery or endovascular therapy, delayed cerebral ischemia is diagnosed in a high percentage of patients resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. Cerebral vasospasm occurs in more than half of all patients after aneurysm rupture and is recognized as the leading cause of delayed cerebral ischemia after SAH. Hemodynamic strategies and endovascular procedures may be considered for the treatment of cerebral vasospasm. In recent years, the mechanisms contributing to the development of vasospasm, abnormal reactivity of cerebral arteries and cerebral ischemia following SAH, have been investigated intensively. A number of pathological processes have been identified in the pathogenesis of vasospasm, including endothelial injury, smooth muscle cell contraction from spasmogenic substances produced by the sub-arachnoid blood clots, changes in vascular responsiveness and inflammatory response of the vascular endothelium. To date, the current therapeutic interventions remain ineffective as they are limited to the manipulation of systemic blood pressure, variation of blood volume and viscosity and control of arterial carbon dioxide tension. In this scenario, the hormone erythropoietin (EPO) has been found to exert neuroprotective action during experimental SAH when its recombinant form (rHuEPO) is administered systemically. However, recent translation of experimental data into clinical trials has suggested an unclear role of recombinant human EPO in the setting of SAH. In this context, the aim of the current review is to present current evidence on the potential role of EPO in cerebrovascular dysfunction following aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Glucocortiocoid Treatment of MCMV Infected Newborn Mice Attenuates CNS Inflammation and Limits Deficits in Cerebellar Development

Infection of the developing fetus with human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major cause of central nervous system disease in infants and children; however, mechanism(s) of disease associated with this intrauterine infection remain poorly understood. Utilizing a mouse model of HCMV infection of the developing CNS, we have shown that peripheral inoculation of newborn mice with murine CMV (MCMV) results in CNS infection and developmental abnormalities that recapitulate key features of the human infection. In this model, animals exhibit decreased granule neuron precursor cell (GNPC) proliferation and altered morphogenesis of the cerebellar cortex. Deficits in cerebellar cortical development are symmetric and global even though infection of the CNS results in a non-necrotizing encephalitis characterized by widely scattered foci of virus-infected cells with mononuclear cell infiltrates. These findings suggested that inflammation induced by MCMV infection could underlie deficits in CNS development. We investigated the contribution of host inflammatory responses to abnormal cerebellar development by modulating inflammatory responses in infected mice with glucocorticoids. Treatment of infected animals with glucocorticoids decreased activation of CNS mononuclear cells and expression of inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IFN-β and IFNγ) in the CNS while minimally impacting CNS virus replication. Glucocorticoid treatment also limited morphogenic abnormalities and normalized the expression of developmentally regulated genes within the cerebellum. Importantly, GNPC proliferation deficits were normalized in MCMV infected mice following glucocorticoid treatment. Our findings argue that host inflammatory responses to MCMV infection contribute to deficits in CNS development in MCMV infected mice and suggest that similar mechanisms of disease could be responsible for the abnormal CNS development in human infants infected in-utero with HCMV.
Entity versus Rhetorical Coherence for Information Ordering: Initial Experimentation

This paper investigates whether the model of local rhetorical coherence suggested in Knott et al. (2001) can boost the performance of the Centering-based metrics of entity coherence employed by Karamanis et al. (2004) for the task of information ordering. Our results indicate that (a) the simplest metric continues to perform better than its competitors even when local rhetorical coherence is taken into account, and (b) this extra coherence constraint decreases its performance.
Construction of some families of nested orthogonal arrays

A (symmetric) nested orthogonal array is a symmetric orthogonal array OA(N, k, s, g) which contains an OA(M,k, r, g) as a subarray, where M < N and r < s. In this communication, some methods of construction of nested symmetric orthogonal arrays are given. Asymmetric nested orthogonal arrays are defined and a few methods of their construction are described.
Managerial Skill Acquisition and the Theory of Economic Development

Micro level studies in developing countries suggest managerial skills play a key role in the adoption of modern technologies. The human resources literature suggests that managerial skills are difficult to codify and learn formally, but instead tend to be learned on the job. In this paper we present a model of the interactive process between on-the-job managerial skill acquisition and the adoption of modern technology. The environment considered is one where all learning possibilities are internalized in the market, and where managers are complementary inputs to non-managerial workers. The paper illustrates why some countries may adopt modern technologies while others stay backwards. The paper also explains why managers may not want to migrate from rich countries to poor countries as would be needed to generate income convergence.
Analysis of Cell Lineage Relationships in Taste Buds

Taste buds are a heterogeneous population of cells exhibiting diverse morphological and biochemical characteristics. Because taste buds arise from multiple progenitors, the different types of taste cells may represent distinct lineages. The present study was undertaken to determine the following: (1) how many progenitors contribute to a taste bud, and (2) whether the specific subpopulation of serotonin-immunoreactive (IR) taste cells are related by lineage to a restricted set of progenitor cells. These questions were addressed using cell lineage analysis of taste buds from H253 X-inactivation mosaic mice. After random X-inactivation of the lacZtransgene, the tongue of hemizygous female mice displays discrete patches of epithelial cells, which are either β-galactosidase (β-gal) positive or β-gal negative. By analyzing the proportion of the two differently stained cell populations in taste buds located at the boundary between positive and negative epithelial patches, we can determine the minimum number of progenitors that may contribute to the formation of a taste bud. The presence of taste buds containing only 6–12% labeled cells indicates that at least eight progenitors contribute to an average taste bud of 55 cells, assuming progenitors contribute equally to the cell population. Cell lineage analysis of serotonin-IR taste cells in such mixed taste buds suggests that this subpopulation likely arises from only one to two progenitors and often is related by lineage. Thus, at least some of the cell types in a taste bud represent distinct lineages of cells and are not merely phenotypic stages as a cell progresses from a young to a mature state.
Transcript Profile Analyses of Maize Silks Reveal Effective Activation of Genes Involved in Microtubule-Based Movement, Ubiquitin-Dependent Protein Degradation, and Transport in the Pollination Process

Pollination is the first crucial step of sexual reproduction in flowering plants, and it requires communication and coordination between the pollen and the stigma. Maize (Zea mays) is a model monocot with extraordinarily long silks, and a fully sequenced genome, but little is known about the mechanism of its pollen–stigma interactions. In this study, the dynamic gene expression of silks at four different stages before and after pollination was analyzed. The expression profiles of immature silks (IMS), mature silks (MS), and silks at 20 minutes and 3 hours after pollination (20MAP and 3HAP, respectively) were compared. In total, we identified 6,337 differentially expressed genes in silks (SDEG) at the four stages. Among them, the expression of 172 genes were induced upon pollination, most of which participated in RNA binding, processing and transcription, signal transduction, and lipid metabolism processes. Genes in the SDEG dataset could be divided into 12 time-course clusters according to their expression patterns. Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis revealed that many genes involved in microtubule-based movement, ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, and transport were predominantly expressed at specific stages, indicating that they might play important roles in the pollination process of maize. These results add to current knowledge about the pollination process of grasses and provide a foundation for future studies on key genes involved in the pollen–silk interaction in maize.
Improved time synchronization in presence of imperfect channel state information

This paper addresses the time synchronization problem in IEEE 802.11a OFDM wireless systems. To enhance the coarse time synchronization mechanism, recent methods exploit not only traditional training sequences as specified by the standard but also additional knowledge available when the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance mechanism (CSMA/CA) is triggered. In this case, additional information can be used as training sequences based on the protocol knowledge training sequence known by the receiver. This step is followed by a time synchronization and channel estimation which results in the smallest Channel Estimate Errors (CEE) according to the selected criterion (e.g. LS, MAP). However it was found that the synchronization failure probability heavily depends on the channel estimate quality. Therefore to improve the performance of this class of algorithms, we propose an optimal time synchronization metric that minimizes the average of the transmission error over all CEE. Simulation results show a strongly improved performance in terms of synchronization failure probability in comparison with the existing algorithms.
ASYMPTOTICS OF AN OPTIMAL COMPLIANCE-LOCATION PROBLEM

SUMMARY We consider the problem of placing n small balls of given radius in a certain domain subject to a force f in order to minimize the compliance of the configuration. Then we let n tend to infinity and look at the asymptotics of the minimization problem, after properly scaling the functionals involved, and to the limit distribution of the centres of the balls. This problem is both linked to optimal location and shape optimization problems.
On q-ary antipodal matchings and applications

We define a g-ary antipodal matching to be a perfect matching in the bipartite graph with vertices corresponding to words of length ℓ over the integer alphabet Q = {0, 1, . , q -1}, wherein the left and right vertices are those with respective component sums greater and smaller than ℓ(q -1)/2, and wherein two vertices are connected by an edge if one of the corresponding words dominates the other. We present two different constructions of efficiently computable g-ary antipodal matchings. We then show how such matchings can be used for encoding arbitrary data into n × n arrays over the alphabet Q all of whose row and column sums are at most n(q -1)/2. Such encoders might be useful for mitigating parasitic currents in a next generation memory technology based on crossbar arrays of resistive devices.
Utility of NT-proBNP for Identifying LV Failure in Patients with Acute Exacerbation of Chronic Bronchitis

Background NT-proBNP has been widely regarded as a useful tool for diagnosis or exclusion of heart failure (HF) in many settings. However, in patients with acute exacerbation of chronic bronchitis (AECB), its roles have not been well described. The objective of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of NT-proBNP for identifying left ventricular (LV) failure in such patients. Methods and Results 311 AECB patients and 102 stable chronic bronchitis patients with no history of HF were enrolled. Plasma NT-proBNP concentrations were measured using Roche Elecsys. The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) diagnostic principles were adopted to identify HF and the diagnostic performance of NT-proBNP was evaluated by ROC. Our results showed, the median NT-proBNP level in patients with LV failure [4828.4 (2044.4–9203.6) ng/L] was significantly higher than that in those without LV failure [519.2 (179.1–1409.8) ng/L, p<0.001] and stable controls [207.5 (186.5–318.2) ng/L, p<0.001]. LV failure, renal function, atrial fibrillation and systolic pulmonary artery pressure were independent predictors of NT-proBNP levels (all p<0.05). The area under ROC curve (AUC) of NT-proBNP for identifying LV failure was 0.884, significantly superior to clinical judgment alone (AUC 0.835, p = 0.0294). At the optimal cutoff value of 935.0 ng/L, NT-proBNP yielded sensitivity 94.4%, specificity 68.2%, accuracy 74.3% and negative predictive value 97.6%. Adding the results of NT-proBNP to those of clinical judgment improved the diagnostic accuracy for LV failure. Conclusion As a tool for diagnosis or exclusion of HF, NT-proBNP can help physicians identify LV failure in patients with AECB.