Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CACam: Consecutive Angular Measurements with Camera on Smartphone for Distance Estimation

To estimate the distance between a user and the target object for personal interest or for subsequent actions, the commonly used method is to search the target in the map application. However this is limited by GPS signal status under different environments and incomplete information on the map application of smartphones. This paper introduces a ranging method, CACam, which utilizes consecutive angle measurement based on camera of smartphone. Geometric model and ranging process are proposed to calculate the distance. When the user aligns the target from different position points, we record readings from the gyroscope sensor during every rotation in the procedure. The camera is used for aligning the target to build geometric model. Vector mapping of angular readings and data processing of intermediate points are used to get more accurate angles, which is suitable for the situation that the smartphone could not be strictly rotated in perpendicular to the plane of the gravity. The effectiveness of our ranging method is verified through experiments in outdoor environments.
Bacterial Colony Phenotyping with Hyperspectral Elastic Light Scattering Patterns

The elastic light-scatter (ELS) technique, which detects and discriminates microbial organisms based on the light-scatter pattern of their colonies, has demonstrated excellent classification accuracy in pathogen screening tasks. The implementation of the multispectral approach has brought further advantages and motivated the design and validation of a hyperspectral elastic light-scatter phenotyping instrument (HESPI). The newly developed instrument consists of a supercontinuum (SC) laser and an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF). The use of these two components provided a broad spectrum of excitation light and a rapid selection of the wavelength of interest, which enables the collection of multiple spectral patterns for each colony instead of relying on single band analysis. The performance was validated by classifying microflora of green-leafed vegetables using the hyperspectral ELS patterns of the bacterial colonies. The accuracy ranged from 88.7% to 93.2% when the classification was performed with the scattering pattern created at a wavelength within the 473–709 nm region. When all of the hyperspectral ELS patterns were used, owing to the vastly increased size of the data, feature reduction and selection algorithms were utilized to enhance the robustness and ultimately lessen the complexity of the data collection. A new classification model with the feature reduction process improved the overall classification rate to 95.9%.
Self-derived angular intra prediction mode for chroma

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) procured an impressive coding gain with the help of various new coding tools. In the case of intra chroma coding, chroma separate tree (CST) and cross-component linear model (CCLM) show remarkable coding gain. However, there are only 8 prediction mode candidates in intra chroma coding which is much fewer than the 67 prediction mode candidates and up to 32 matrix-weighted intra prediction (MIP) mode candidates in intra luma coding. Excluding the three CCLM modes, the number of intra prediction mode candidates for chroma is just five, which is less than one tenth of luma channel which uses 67 intra prediction mode candidates except the MIP modes. In this paper, we investigate adding one more intra chroma prediction mode whose prediction direction is derived from the neighboring reconstructed area. The proposed method achieves a BDBR gain of 0.36% and 0.26% in the Cb and Cr channels without loss in Y channel under the all intra configuration.
Investigating Brain Injury Tolerance in the Sagittal Plane Using a Finite Element Model of the Human Head

Despite decades of research and regulation, brain injuries remain a leading cause of traffic related death and disability worldwide. In this study, the human tolerance to brain injury was investigated by applying pure angular and linear kinematic loading conditions in the sagittal plane to a finite element model of the head. The relationship between peak acceleration and impact duration was determined at several levels of constant injury risk for two strain-based injury criteria. Results revealed that brain injury tolerance depends on peak acceleration and impact duration, which were found to be inversely related for constant injury risk.
Preparation and Characterization of a Novel Natural Quercetin Self-Stabilizing Pickering Emulsion

In contrast to their well-known physiological properties, phytochemicals, such as flavonoids, have been less frequently examined for their physiochemical properties (e.g., surface activity). A natural quercetin self-stabilizing Pickering emulsion was fabricated and characterized in the present study. The antisolvent precipitation method was used to modify quercetin (in dihydrate form), and the obtained particles were characterized by light microscope, atom force microscope, XRD, and contact angle. The antisolvent treatment was found to reduce the particle size, crystallinity, and surface hydrophobicity of quercetin. We then examined the effects of the antisolvent ratio, particle concentration, and oil fraction on the properties of the quercetin particle-stabilized emulsions. In addition, increasing the antisolvent ratio (1:1~1:10) effectively improved the emulsification performance of the quercetin particles. The emulsion showed good storage stability, and the particle size of the emulsion decreased with the rising particle concentration and increased with the rising oil phase ratio. The findings indicate that natural quercetin treated with antisolvent method has a good ability to stabilize Pickering emulsion, and this emulsion may have good prospective application potential for the development of novel and functional emulsion foods.
Calculations of doubly excited states in helium-like systems using Hylleraas functions

Doubly excited or Feshbach-type resonances in helium-like systems have been calculated using the complex-rotation method. Using Hylleraas-type wavefunctions of up to 1632 terms, we calculate resonance parameters (both resonance positions and widths) below the N = 3 and 4 thresholds of the hydrogenic systems with nuclear charge from Z = 2 to Z = 10. Comparisons are made with the other calculations for in the literature.
Mid-rapidity multi-strange baryon production at √sNN = 130 GeV

We report preliminary results on production of multi-strange Ξ− and their anti-particles, +, at mid-rapidity in √sNN = 130 GeV Au + Au collisions from the STAR experiment. An exponential fit to the Ξ− transverse mass spectrum for the 14% most central collisions results in an inverse slope parameter T = 346 ± 7 MeV, an invariant yield dN/dy = 3.07 ± 0.13 (stat) and a non-identical particle ratio Ξ−/Λ = 0.244 ± 0.011. The multi-strange baryon production with respect to negative hadrons is found to be Ξ−/h− = 0.0122 ± 0.0006.
Evaluation of multiple radar target trackers in stressful environments

This paper evaluates the performance of multiple target tracking (MTT) algorithms in real-life stressful radar tracking environments. Real closely spaced maneuver radar data, generated by six F-18 fighters and other targets, were collected jointly by the defence departments of Canada and United States to support this practical MTT algorithm evaluation study. A set of performance metrics was defined here to compare the suboptimal nearest neighbor (SNN), global nearest neighbor (GNN), and various variants of the joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) MTT trackers. Results reveal an interesting result that all these MTT algorithms exhibited very close performance. In addition, the weighted sum approach of the PDA/JPDA trackers which are theoretically effective were observed to perform poorly in tracking closely spaced targets. Overall speaking, the GNN filter based on the Munkres algorithm had the best performance in terms of both tracking performance and robustness.
Characterizations on Non-stationary Channel Statistics for High-Speed Train Communications in Viaduct Scenario

In this paper, results for non-stationary channel statistics based on the wideband high-speed train (HST) channel measurement in the rich-scattering viaduct scenario are presented. Due to the fast movement of the train, both the fading characteristics and the Doppler-delay statistics change rapidly with time. The measurement campaign is implemented on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen passenger-dedicated railway at a central frequency of 2.4 GHz. The parameters of multi-path components (MPCs) are estimated by the Subspace-Alternating Generalized Expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm. The large-scale fading properties and the small-scale Doppler-delay statistics, including path loss, shadow fading, Rician K factor, number of MPCs, root-mean-square (RMS) delay spread, RMS angular spread, power-delay profile (PDP), and Doppler-power spectrum are analyzed. The non-stationary statistical models of the above parameters are given based on the measured results. The correlation property is characterized by the correlation matrix distance (CMD). It is shown that the HST channel in the rich-scattering viaduct scenario has strong non-stationarity characteristics. This work provides references for the design of HST communication systems and promotes technical developments.
Optimization of mycelial growth and cultivation of wild Ganoderma sinense

Ganoderma sinense, a well-known medicinal macrofungus of Basidiomycetes, is widely used in traditional medicine for promoting health and longevity in East Asia. The fruiting bodies of G. sinense contain polysaccharides, ergosterol, and coumarin, which have antitumor, antioxidant, and anticytopenia activities. Mushroom cultivation requires suitable conditions for the formation of fruiting bodies and yield. However, little is known about the optimal culture conditions for mycelial growth and cultivation of G. sinense. In this study, the successful cultivation of a G. sinense strain collected from the wild was reported. The optimal culture conditions were identified by examining one factor at a time. The results of this study revealed that the nutritional requirements for the optimal mycelial growth of G. sinense were fructose (15 g/l) as the carbon source and yeast extract (1 g/l) as the nitrogen source. The optimal pH and temperature for G. sinense were 7 and 25–30°C, respectively. The mycelia grew fastest in treatment II (69% rice grains + 30% sawdust + 1% calcium carbonate). G. sinense produced fruiting bodies under all tested conditions and showed the highest biological efficiency (2.95%) in treatment B (96% sawdust, 1% wheat bran, 1% lime). In summary, under optimal culture conditions, G. sinense strain GA21 showed satisfactory yield and a high potential for commercial cultivation.
Source-Goal (in)difference and the typology of motion events in the clause

Abstract Starting from the clause, the functional domain of motion events with the three loci Verbal, Adnominal, and Adverbal, the paper investigates various grammatical and lexical means of expression for the encoding of the local roles Source and Goal in a sample of 117 languages and in more detail in one language with grammatically indifferent Source-Goal encoding, Mapudungun. It is found that the feature Source-Goal (in)difference forms a global cline with Consistent languages clustering in Eurasia and Indifferent languages being most frequent in the New World.
A Comprehensive Study on Non-Proprietary Ultra-High-Performance Concrete Containing Supplementary Cementitious Materials

Ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) is a novel cement-based material with exceptional mechanical and durability properties. Silica fume, the primary supplementary cementitious material (SCM) in UHPC, is expensive in North America, so it is often substituted with inexpensive class F fly ash. However, future availability of fly ash is uncertain as the energy industry moves toward renewable energy, which creates an urgent need to find cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to fly ash. This study investigated replacing cement, fly ash, and silica fume in UHPC mixtures with ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBFS), metakaolin, and a natural pozzolan (pumicite). To identify acceptable UHPC mixtures (28-day compressive strength greater than 120 MPa), workability, compression, and flexural tests were conducted on all mixtures. Then, durability properties including shrinkage, frost resistance, and chloride ion permeability (rapid chloride permeability and surface resistivity tests) were evaluated for the acceptable UHPC mixtures. Results showed that 75, 100, and 40% of fly ash in the control mixture could be replaced with pumicite, metakaolin, and GGBFS, respectively, while still producing acceptable strengths. Flexural strengths were greater than 14.20 MPa for all mixtures. For durability, UHPC mixtures had shrinkage strains no greater than 406 μstrain, durability factors of at least 105, and “very low” susceptibility to chloride ion penetration, indicating that these SCMs are suitable candidates to completely replace fly ash and partially replace silica fume in non-proprietary UHPC.
Rheumatic Diseases Development in Patients Treated by Anti-PD1 Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: A Single-Centre Descriptive Study

The introduction of the so-called immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) substantially changed the history of cancer therapy. On the other hand, they can induce the development of rheumatic immune-related adverse events (Rh-irAEs). In the scenario of a joint oncology/rheumatology outpatient clinic, we conducted a single-centre descriptive study to define from a laboratory, clinical and therapeutic point of view, rheumatic conditions developed during anti-PD1 treatment. The study included 32 patients (M/F 16/16, median age 69, IQR 16.5). According to the international classification criteria, eight patients could be classified as affected by Rheumatoid Arthritis, one by Psoriatic Arthritis, six by Polymyalgia Rheumatica, five by systemic connective tissue diseases (two systemic lupus erythematosus, two Sjögren’s syndrome, one undifferentiated connective tissue disease). The remaining patients were diagnosed as having undifferentiated arthritis or inflammatory arthralgia. The median interval between ICIs starting and the onset of symptoms was 14 weeks (IQR 19.75). Moving to treatment, the longitudinal observation revealed that all RA, PsA and CTD patients required the introduction of treatment with DMARDs. In conclusion, the growing use of ICIs in a real-life setting confirmed the possible development of different rheumatological conditions, further emphasising the need for shared oncology/rheumatology management.
Capability of Copper Hydroxy Nitrate (Cu2(OH)3NO3) as an Additive to Develop Antibacterial Polymer Contact Surfaces: Potential for Food Packaging Applications

The globalization of the market, as well as the increasing world population, which require a higher demand for food products, pose a great challenge to ensure food safety and prevent food loss and waste. In this sense, active materials with antibacterial properties are an important alternative in the prolongation of shelf life and ensuring food safety. In this work, the ability of copper(II) hydroxy nitrate (CuHS) to obtain antibacterial films based on low density polyethylene (LDPE) and polylactic acid (PLA), was evaluated. The thermal properties of the composites, evaluated using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), showed that the concentrations of added CuHS do not particularly change these characteristics with respect to the neat polymer matrix films. The mechanical properties, determined using dynamic mechanical analysis (DMTA), indicate a small increase in the brittleness of the material in PLA-based composites. The antibacterial properties against Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica were evaluated using a surface contact test, and a bacterial reduction of at least 8 to 9 logarithmic units for the composites with 0.3% CuHS, both in LDPE and PLA and against both bacteria, were achieved. The reusability of the composite films after their first use demonstrated a higher stability against Listeria monocytogenes. The migration and cytotoxicity of the composites loaded with 0.3% CuHS was evaluated, demonstrating the safety of these materials, which reinforces their potential use in food packaging applications.
Recent Progress in Functional-Nucleic-Acid-Based Fluorescent Fiber-Optic Evanescent Wave Biosensors

Biosensors capable of onsite and continuous detection of environmental and food pollutants and biomarkers are highly desired, but only a few sensing platforms meet the “2-SAR” requirements (sensitivity, specificity, affordability, automation, rapidity, and reusability). A fiber optic evanescent wave (FOEW) sensor is an attractive type of portable device that has the advantages of high sensitivity, low cost, good reusability, and long-term stability. By utilizing functional nucleic acids (FNAs) such as aptamers, DNAzymes, and rational designed nucleic acid probes as specific recognition ligands, the FOEW sensor has been demonstrated to be a general sensing platform for the onsite and continuous detection of various targets ranging from small molecules and heavy metal ions to proteins, nucleic acids, and pathogens. In this review, we cover the progress of the fluorescent FNA-based FOEW biosensor since its first report in 1995. We focus on the chemical modification of the optical fiber and the sensing mechanisms for the five above-mentioned types of targets. The challenges and prospects on the isolation of high-quality aptamers, reagent-free detection, long-term stability under application conditions, and high throughput are also included in this review to highlight the future trends for the development of FOEW biosensors capable of onsite and continuous detection.
Temperature-dependent investigation of carrier transport, injection, and densities in AlGaAs-based multi-quantum-well active layers for vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

Abstract. The electro-optical efficiency of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) strongly depends on the efficient carrier injection into the quantum wells (QWs) in the laser active region. Carrier injection degrades with increasing temperature, which limits VCSEL performance in high-power applications where self-heating imposes high-operating temperatures. In a numerical model, we investigate the transport of charge carriers in an 808-nm AlGaAs multi-quantum-well structure with special attention to the temperature dependence of carrier injection into the QWs. Experimental reference data were extracted from oxide-confined, top-emitting VCSELs. The transport simulations follow a drift-diffusion-model complemented by an energy-resolved carrier-capture model. The QW gain was calculated in the screened Hartree–Fock approximation. With the combination of the gain and transport model, we explain experimental reference data for the injection efficiency and threshold current. The degradation of the injection efficiency with increasing temperature is not only due to increased thermionic escape of carriers from the QWs, but also to state filling in the QWs initiated from higher threshold carrier densities. With a full opto-electro-thermal VCSEL model, we demonstrate how changes in VCSEL properties affecting the threshold carrier density, like mirror design or optical confinement, have consequences on the thermal behavior of the injection and the VCSEL performance.
Top-Down Detection for SAR Regular Minefield based on Faster R-CNN and CFAR

The traditional minefield detection methods are based on detection of single mines, whose performance is dependent on the results of single mines. However, the minefield environment is complex and the background clutter changes greatly, which induces a lot of false alarms and missed mines. To improve the detection performance, this work proposes a top-down detection method for SAR regular minefield based on Faster R-CNN and CFAR. The candidate minefields as a whole are first detected by Faster R-CNN. Then, CFAR is applied to detect the single mines in the minefields. This top-down detection method can avoid the meaningless searching of single mines in strong clutter area. Furthermore, the distribution law of the minefield is utilized to refine the detection of single mines. As a result, the performance is improved. Measured data of the AMUSAR system validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
3D Tumor Models in Urology

Three-dimensional tumor models have become established in both basic and clinical research. As multicellular systems consisting of tumor and tumor-associated cells, they can better represent tumor characteristics than monocellular 2D cultures. In this review, we highlight the potential applications of tumor spheroids and organoids in the field of urology. Further, we illustrate the generation and characteristics of standardized organoids as well as membrane-based 3D in vitro models in bladder cancer research. We discuss the technical aspects and review the initial successes of molecular analyses in the three major urologic tumor entities: urinary bladder carcinoma (BCa), prostate carcinoma (PCa), and renal cell carcinoma (RCC).
Detection of Alternative Ovarian Cancer Biomarker via Word Embedding

Diagnosis of cancer with biomarkers is relatively simple with the use of blood samples, and it can detect cancer at an early stage with expense compared to the other diagnosis methods. We use word embedding to find an alternative biomarker for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer from the biomedical corpus. Word embedding is a word vector representation with previously proven efficiency in the biomedical domain. First, we derived a low dimensional representation of each biomarker embedding induced from Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), which is a powerful and flexible statistical technique for dimensionality reduction. Second, we found a similar pair of biomarkers in the literature by using cosine similarity of biomarker embedding. In order to determine the clinical similarity between the pair of biomarkers, we used the area under the curve (AUC) of the combination of 2 biomarkers used previously. In the experiment, we confirmed that correlation between the high similarity biomarker pair, was highly correlated as the average 0.710 of the actual AUC correlation of the top 10% of the pair.
Steady and unsteady solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

An algorithm for the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in three-dimensional generalized curvilinear coordinates is presented. The algorithm can be used to compute both steady-state and time-dependent flow problems. The algorithm is based on the method of artificial compressibility and uses a third-order flux-difference splitting technique for the convective terms and the second-order central difference for the viscous terms. The accuracy is obtained in the numerical solutions by subiterating the equations in pseudotime for each physical time step. The equations are solved with a line-relaxation scheme that allows the use of very large pseudotime steps leading to fast convergence for steady-state problems as well as for the subiterations of time-dependent problems. The steady-state solution of flow through a square duct with a 90-deg bend is computed, and the results are compared with experimental data. Good agreement is observed. Computations of unsteady flow over a circular cylinder are presented and compared to other experimental and computational results. Finally, the flow through an artificial heart configuration with moving boundaries is calculated and presented. 28 refs.