Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increasing Neuroforaminal Volume by Anterior Interbody Distraction in Degenerative Lumbar Spine

Study Design. This study quantified changes in the size of the stenotic neuroforamen in degenerative lumbar spines. The volume and area of the neuroforamen were measured before and after the application of anterior distraction using the BAK interbody fusion system. Objective. To quantitatively assess the neuroforaminal area and volume when the BAK interbody fusion system is applied to lumbar spines with neuroforaminal stenosis. Summary of Background Data. The spatial relationship between the nerve root and the osseous and nonosseaous elements of the neuroforamen is clinically important. Few studies have focused on changes in neuroforaminal size in the lumbar spine after anterior interbody distraction. No previous study has assessed the neuroforaminal volume. Methods. The BAK instrumentation sustem was applied anteriourly at L4–L5 and L5–S1 intervertabral discs in nine degenerative cadaver lumbar spines. The neuroforaminal volumes of L4–L5 and L5–S1 were measured from silicon molds take of the neuroforamen. In addition, computed tomography and circular blunt probes were used to determine the neuroforaminal areas. The disc height was recorded from lateral radiographs. Results. After the BAK instrumentation, the volume of the neuroforamen increased significantly—by 22.9% for L4–L5 and 21.5% for L5–S1. The posterior disc height increased by 37.1% at L4–L5 and 45.1% at L5–S1. The neuroforaminal areas significantly increased—by 29.0% at L4–L5 and 33.8% at L5–S1. There was good correlation between the volume and the posterior disc height (R2 = 0.50) and the volume and the area of the narrowest portion of neuroforamen (R2 = 0.56). Conclusions. The results indicated that anterior systems such as the BAK system, which increase disc heights, can significantly incerease neuroforaminal volume and area, providing adequate space for the nerve root and improving neuroforaminal stenosis.
Job seeker to vacancy matching using social network analysis

Social network analysis is the investigation of social structures by using methods such as graph theory and machine learning. Social networks characterize networked structures in terms of nodes (i.e., individuals) and their relationships to each other as acquaintances, colleagues, collaborators and/or classmates. Through these relationships, one can find their ties with their connections, professions, and the degree of the ties. Networking sites such as LinkedIn® and Researchgate® also contain more information of the knowledge of connections about the skill of an individual. The purpose of this study is to identify methods that measure the skills, expertise and experience of a job seeker and to investigate importance of using social networking data as input to user modeling that determines the strength of skills to be used for recommending matching job vacancies. Result of preliminary experiment using social network data in skill measurement shows consistent improvement in accuracy of matching job seekers to vacancies.
A Practical Congestion Attack on Tor Using Long Paths

In 2005, Murdoch and Danezis demonstrated the first practical congestion attack against a deployed anonymity network. They could identify which relays were on a target Tor user's path by building paths one at a time through every Tor relay and introducing congestion. However, the original attack was performed on only 13 Tor relays on the nascent and lightly loaded Tor network. We show that the attack from their paper is no longer practical on today's 1500-relay heavily loaded Tor network. The attack doesn't scale because a) the attacker needs a tremendous amount of bandwidth to measure enough relays during the attack window, and b) there are too many false positives now that many other users are adding congestion at the same time as the attacks. We then strengthen the original congestion attack by combining it with a novel bandwidth amplification attack based on a flaw in the Tor design that lets us build long circuits that loop back on themselves. We show that this new combination attack is practical and effective by demonstrating a working attack on today's deployed Tor network. By coming up with a model to better understand Tor's routing behavior under congestion, we further provide a statistical analysis characterizing how effective our attack is in each case.
Oxygen Saturation of Retinal Vessels in All Stages of Diabetic Retinopathy and Correlation to Ultra-Wide Field Fluorescein Angiography.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine retinal hemoglobin oxygen saturation (SO2) in patients with diabetic retinopathy (DR) using retinal oximetry (RO) and to correlate the degree of retinal ischemia using intravenous fluorescein angiography (IVFA). Methods This is a single-center cross-sectional cohort study. Twenty-seven controls and 60 adult patients with diabetes mellitus (16 without DR and 44 with DR) were enrolled. Patients were stratified according to DR severity. Using RO, SO2 was measured in major retinal arterioles (SaO2) and venules (SvO2). Using IVFA, the percentage of retinal ischemia in 31 patients with DR was calculated and correlated with RO. Results Pairwise one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a significant increase in SaO2 and SvO2 in patients with proliferative DR (PDR) compared with controls (SaO2: PDR, 100 ± 7% vs. controls, 91 ± 4% [P = 0.003]; SvO2: PDR, 66 ± 11% vs. controls, 53 ± 6% [P < 0.00001]). The percentage of retinal ischemia also increased with DR severity: ANOVA showed a significant difference in retinal ischemia between all categories of nonproliferative DR vs. PDR: 2.31 ± 2% vs. 7.92 ± 9% (P = 0.017), respectively. Pearson two-tailed correlation showed significant correlation between SaO2 and ischemia (R = 0.467, P = 0.011). Conclusions Hemoglobin oxygen saturation of retinal arterioles and venules increases with DR severity; SaO2 correlates with increasing ischemia measured by IVFA. Retinal oximetry may complement current imaging strategies to noninvasively augment the diagnosis and risk stratification of patients with diabetes.
Developing web applications for different architectures: The MoWebA approach

This study presents the Architecture Specific Model (ASM) defined by the MoWebA approach to improve the development of web applications for different architectures. MoWebA is a model-driven approach to web applications development. The article presents a general overview of MoWebA, including the methodological aspects related to its modeling and transformation processes, the process of defining the ASM, and an example of an ASM model. We finally present a preliminary validation experience and its main results. The experience was structured according to the proposal of Runeson et al. for case studies.
Estimating Cure Rates From Survival Data

This article considers the utility of the bounded cumulative hazard model in cure rate estimation, which is an appealing alternative to the widely used two-component mixture model. This approach has the following distinct advantages: (1) It allows for a natural way to extend the proportional hazards regression model, leading to a wide class of extended hazard regression models. (2) In some settings the model can be interpreted in terms of biologically meaningful parameters. (3) The model structure is particularly suitable for semiparametric and Bayesian methods of statistical inference. Notwithstanding the fact that the model has been around for less than a decade, a large body of theoretical results and applications has been reported to date. This review article is intended to give a big picture of these modeling techniques and associated statistical problems. These issues are discussed in the context of survival data in cancer.
Color Maximal-Dissimilarity Pattern for pedestrian detection

Feature plays an important role in pedestrian detection, and considerable progress has been made on shape-based descriptors. However, color cues have barely been devoted to detection tasks, seemingly due to the variable appearance of pedestrians. In this paper, Color Maximal-Dissimilarity Pattern (CMDP) is proposed to encode color cues by two core operations, i.e., oriented filtering and max-pooling, which emulate the functions of primary visual cortex (V1). The extensively experimental results reveal that the biologically-explainable encoding scheme increases the invariance of color cues, and outperforms the state-of-the-art color descriptor in terms of both accuracy and speed.
Learning To Teach Collaboratively: The Use of Subject Pairs in the School Practicum.

The dominant models of initial teacher preparation have relied primarily on a school-based practicum where a single student is placed with a single ‘cooperating teacher’ or ‘mentor’. This paper reports on a number of research projects of teacher preparation at the secondary level suggesting that placing student teachers in subject pairs can be more conducive to effective professional learning than placing them individually.
Low cost implementation of software defined radio for improved transmit quality of 4G signals

This paper presents the development and implementation of digital pre-distortion algorithm for a low cost FPGA based platform. The targeted setup is implemented using AD9361 and FPGA based processing boards Xilinx Zynq 7000 to provide wideband, high performance, highly integrated RF transceiver, which is well suited for wireless communications infrastructure, defense electronics systems, RF test equipment, instrumentation and general software-defined radio platforms. The FPGA based setup is reconfigurable as (1 × 1) SISO or (2 × 2) MIMO transmitters. For transmitter branch, digital predistortion has been implemented and results are reported for ZX60-2522M power amplifier from Mini-Circuits and 4G LTE signal implementation having input power of 10dBm and operating range of 0.5 to 2.5 GHz. The platform provides a flexible wireless research tool with the implementation of SDR solutions.
Nurse-staffing levels and the quality of care in hospitals.

BACKGROUND It is uncertain whether lower levels of staffing by nurses at hospitals are associated with an increased risk that patients will have complications or die. METHODS We used administrative data from 1997 for 799 hospitals in 11 states (covering 5,075,969 discharges of medical patients and 1,104,659 discharges of surgical patients) to examine the relation between the amount of care provided by nurses at the hospital and patients' outcomes. We conducted regression analyses in which we controlled for patients' risk of adverse outcomes, differences in the nursing care needed for each hospital's patients, and other variables. RESULTS The mean number of hours of nursing care per patient-day was 11.4, of which 7.8 hours were provided by registered nurses, 1.2 hours by licensed practical nurses, and 2.4 hours by nurses' aides. Among medical patients, a higher proportion of hours of care per day provided by registered nurses and a greater absolute number of hours of care per day provided by registered nurses were associated with a shorter length of stay (P=0.01 and P<0.001, respectively) and lower rates of both urinary tract infections (P<0.001 and P=0.003, respectively) and upper gastrointestinal bleeding (P=0.03 and P=0.007, respectively). A higher proportion of hours of care provided by registered nurses was also associated with lower rates of pneumonia (P=0.001), shock or cardiac arrest (P=0.007), and "failure to rescue," which was defined as death from pneumonia, shock or cardiac arrest, upper gastrointestinal bleeding, sepsis, or deep venous thrombosis (P=0.05). Among surgical patients, a higher proportion of care provided by registered nurses was associated with lower rates of urinary tract infections (P=0.04), and a greater number of hours of care per day provided by registered nurses was associated with lower rates of "failure to rescue" (P=0.008). We found no associations between increased levels of staffing by registered nurses and the rate of in-hospital death or between increased staffing by licensed practical nurses or nurses' aides and the rate of adverse outcomes. CONCLUSIONS A higher proportion of hours of nursing care provided by registered nurses and a greater number of hours of care by registered nurses per day are associated with better care for hospitalized patients.
Enhancement of Near-Field Optical Throughput using Double Grating Structure for HAMR Head

New heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) head of double grating structure is proposed and simulated using FDTD. Since the near-field optical power strongly depends on the polarization of light, structure of waveguide metal film and enhancement of surface plasmon polariton, it is expected for new head structure to provide greater optical power from the optimization of grating structure for the best resonance tunneling effect and constructive interference
Motion Guidance for a Passive Robot Walking Helper via User's Applied Hand Forces

As the elderly population is rapidly growing in our society, robot walking helpers are receiving more attention these days. To be practical and safe for use in daily life, an important issue is whether these robot walking helpers can be effectively maneuvered and provide guidance to the users. These concerns become even more important for a passive robot walking helper, as it relies mainly on the user's applied forces to move. In this paper, we propose a motion guidance system for a passive robot walking helper. More specifically, we develop a system to identify user's intentions from applied grip forces. This system consists of a pair of force-sensing grips attached to the handles of the robot walking helper and a learning scheme for the mapping between the measured grip forces and the driving force/torque imposed on the helper. The learning scheme, combined with an assistive strategy extended from our previous work, provides motion guidance to the elders during walking. The feasibility of the proposed system is demonstrated via a series of experiments involving motion assistance with i-Go, a passive robot walking helper developed in our laboratory.
Meta-analysis of microRNAs as biomarkers for muscle-invasive bladder cancer

Bladder cancer is the most common cancer of the urinary tract. A quarter of bladder cancer patients presenting with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) suffer significant morbidity and succumb to the disease. MicroRNA (miRNA) from tissue, urine or blood samples of MIBC patients have been demonstrated to differ from healthy individuals, and possibly have diagnostic value. The aim of the present meta-analysis was to access the overall diagnostic accuracy comprehensively and quantitatively. Systematic searching in PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure database was conducted. The pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative likelihood ratios (PLR and NLR) and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were calculated via the random effects model to evaluate the overall test performance. Deeks' funnel plot asymmetry test was used to test the publication bias. A total of 10 studies were included in the meta-analysis, with a total of 577 patients and 412 controls. The pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.78 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.69–0.86] and 0.77 (95% CI, 0.72–0.81), respectively. The pooled PLR was 2.9 (95% CI, 2.1–3.8), the NLR was 0.31 (95% CI, 0.27–0.35), the DOR was 7 (95% CI, 4–13) and the pooled AUC was 0.80 (95% CI, 0.69–0.87). In conclusion, the current miRNA assays support their use as markers for MIBC diagnosis.
Neuroprotective agents in traumatic brain injury

The role of neuroprotection in traumatic brain injury (TBI) is reviewed. Basic research and experimental investigations have identified many different compounds with potential neuroprotective effect. However, none of the Phase III trials performed in TBI have been successful in convincingly demonstrating efficacy in the overall population. A common misconception is that consequently these agents are ineffective. The negative results as reported in the overall population may in part be caused by specific aspects of the head injury population as well as by aspects of clinical trial design and analysis. The heterogeneity of the TBI population causes specific problems, such as a risk of imbalances between placebo and treated groups but also causes problems when a possible treatment effect is evaluated in relation to the prognostic effect present. Trials of neuroprotective agents should be targeted first of all to a population in which the mechanism at which the agent is directed is likely to be present and secondly to a population in which the chances of demonstrating efficacy are realistic, e.g., to patients with an intermediate prognosis. The possibilities for concomitant or sequential administration of different neuroprotective agents at different times deserve consideration. The potential for neuroprotection in TBI remains high and we should not be discouraged by recent failures obtained up until now. Rather, prior to initiating new trials, careful consideration of experimental evidence is required in order to optimise chances for mechanistic targeting and lessons learned from previous experience need to be taken to heart in the design of future studies.
Bounds on Fast Decodability of Space-Time Block Codes, Skew-Hermitian Matrices, and Azumaya Algebras

We study fast lattice decodability of space-time block codes for n transmit and receive antennas, written very generally as a linear combination Σ<sub>i=1</sub><sup>2l</sup> s<sub>i</sub> A<sub>i</sub>, where the si are real information symbols and the A<sub>i</sub> are n×n ℝ-linearly independent complex-valued matrices. We show that the mutual orthogonality condition A<sub>i</sub> A<sub>j</sub>* + A<sub>j</sub> A<sub>i</sub>* = 0 for distinct basis matrices is not only sufficient but also necessary for fast decodability. We build on this to show that for full-rate (l = n<sup>2</sup>) transmission, the decoding complexity can be no better than |S|(n<sup>2</sup>+1), where |S| is the size of the effective real signal constellation. We also show that for full-rate transmission, g-group decodability, as defined by Jithamithra and Rajan, is impossible for any g ≥ 2. We then use the theory of Azumaya algebras to derive bounds on the maximum number of groups into which the basis matrices can be partitioned so that the matrices in different groups are mutually orthogonal-a key measure of fast decodability. We show that in general, this maximum number is of the order of only the 2-adic value of n. In the case where the matrices A<sub>i</sub> arise from a division algebra, which is most desirable for diversity, we show that the maximum number of groups is only 4. As a result, the decoding complexity for this case is no better than |S|⌈l/2⌉ for any rate l.
Bystander effects of nucleoside analogs phosphorylated in the cytosol or mitochondria.

The efficiency of nucleoside kinase suicide gene therapy for cancer is highly dependent on "bystander" cell killing, i.e., the transfer of cytotoxic phosphorylated nucleoside analogs to cells adjacent to those expressing the suicide enzyme. We have recently studied the possible use of mitochondrial nucleoside kinases as suicide genes. In the present study, we investigated if nucleoside analogs phosphorylated in the mitochondrial matrix cause bystander killing. We used deoxycytidine kinase-deficient Chinese hamster ovary cells reconstituted with deoxycytidine kinase targeted to either the cytosol or mitochondria matrix and determined the bystander cell killing when these cells were incubated with the nucleoside analogs 1-beta-D-arabinofuranosylcytosine and 2',2'-difluorodeoxycytidine. A bystander effect occurred when nucleoside analogs were phosphorylated in the cytosol, but not when these compounds were phosphorylated in the mitochondria. These findings suggest that nucleoside kinases targeted to the mitochondrial matrix have limited use in suicide gene therapy when efficient bystander cell killing is required.
Genetic Distance between Species Predicts Novel Trait Expression in their Hybrids

Interspecific hybridization can generate transgressive hybrid phenotypes with extreme trait values exceeding the combined range of the parental species. Such variation can enlarge the working surface for natural selection, and may facilitate the evolution of novel adaptations where ecological opportunity exists. The number of quantitative trait loci fixed for different alleles in different species should increase with time since speciation. If transgression is caused by complementary gene action or epistasis, hybrids between more distant species should be more likely to display transgressive phenotypes. To test this prediction we collected data on transgression frequency from the literature, estimated genetic distances between the hybridizing species from gene sequences, and calculated the relationship between the two using phylogenetically controlled methods. We also tested if parental phenotypic divergence affected the occurrence of transgression. We found a highly significant positive correlation between transgression frequency and genetic distance in eudicot plants explaining 43% of the variance in transgression frequency. In total, 36% of the measured traits were transgressive. The predicted effect of time since speciation on transgressive segregation was unconfounded by the potentially conflicting effects of phenotypic differentiation between species. Our analysis demonstrates that the potential impact hybridization may have on phenotypic evolution is predictable from the genetic distance between species.
Lateral thinking: Creativity Step by Step

According to the Oxford English dictionary, Lateral Thinking is “. a way of thinking which seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods, or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking. ” Edward De Bono differentiates this from vertical thinking, which can be described as traditional, logical thought; vertical thinking looks at a reasonable view of a problem or situation and works through it, generally in a path of least resistance. On the other hand, Lateral Thinking suggests that the student or problem solver should explore different ways of examining a challenging task, instead of accepting what appears to be the solution with seemingly the most potential and going forward. De Bono is not opposed to vertical thinking; he sees Lateral Thinking as complementary (each make the other more effective).
Active Queue Management for MAC Client Implementation of Resilient Packet Rings

The IEEE 802.17 is a standardized ring topology network architecture, called the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), to be used mainly in metropolitan and wide area networks. This paper focuses on the RPR MAC Client implementation of the IEEE 802.17 RPR MAC in the aggressive mode of operation and introduces a new active queue management scheme for ring networks that achieves higher overall utilization of the ring bandwidth with simpler and less expensive implementation than the generic implementation provided in the standard. The scheme introduced in this paper provides performance comparable to the per destination queuing implementation, the best achievable performance.