Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New vessels detected on wide-field imaging compared to two-field and seven-field imaging: implications for diabetic retinopathy screening image analysis

Introduction Wide-field retinal imaging (Optomap), used for detecting diabetic retinopathy (DR), has been shown to compare well with seven-field early treatment diabetic retinopathy study (ETDRS) photographs. An Optomap 200° image covers 80% of the retinal surface, compared with the standard seven-field, 30° images, covering 30% of the retinal surface. In England, DR screening is performed by grading two, 45° images per eye, by the DR screening service (DRSS). Purpose To assess how often retinal new vessels (NVs) are observed on Optomap imaging, outside the DRSS two fields and standard seven-field photography, in a cohort of patients referred by the DRSS. Method A consecutive series of treatment naïve patients with DR, referred from DRSS with pre-proliferative or proliferative DR or diabetic maculopathy, were imaged with Optomap colour images, within 3 months of DRSS referral. The incidence and distribution of NVs were recorded in relation to two-field and seven-field areas. Results NVs were found in 102 of 1562 treatment naïve eyes (6.5%) of 781 patients. Of these, 72 were referred from DRSS as having NVs, but an additional 30 eyes (29% of NVs detected) from 25 patients were referred with a lesser degree of DR. In 25 of the 30 eyes without NVs reported on referral, NVs were located outside the standard two fields taken at DRSS, and in 12, NVs were outside the area covered on seven-field imaging (11.7% of eyes with NVs). Conclusions Wide-field imaging with Optomap detected approximately 30% more NVs than standard two-field imaging in patients referred from a UK DRSS.
Centrosomes : methods for preparation

The centrosome of higher eukaryotic cells is the main microtubule-organising centre. To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying this organelle's biogenesis and important functions in several cellular processes, such as microtubule nucleation, cell division and stress response, it was critical to develop methods for isolating biochemically meaningful quantities of centrosomes. Centrosomes have been isolated from a variety of organisms and based on these preparations, numerous aspects of this intriguing organelle's morphological, functional and biochemical properties have been uncovered. Better isolation procedures along with the development of new technologies, like RNAi (ribonucleic acid interference) and the increasing accuracy of mass spectrometry and electron microscopy techniques, have profoundly improved our knowledge of the centrosome, leading to a better understanding of its implications in various cellular processes and in diseases. Key concepts Cultured animal cells, animal tissue, Drosophila embryos, green algae, budding yeast, fungi and surf clams are suitable starting materials for centrosome isolation. Centrosome isolation from animal cells requires cell lysis in low ionic strength buffers. Enrichment of centrosomes is achieved by density centrifugation in sucrose step gradients. Immunoaffinity purification has been employed to further enrich centrosomes from Drosophila embryos. Isolated centrosomes are competent to nucleate microtubules. The analysis of isolated centrosomes has provided a wealth of information on their biochemical composition and novel structural and functional features. Many centrosome components have been identified by applying mass spectrometry and antibody approaches. RNAi has been used to study centrosome functions in cellular signalling pathways and the cell cycle and to identify novel components. Electron tomography will be an informative tool to study the supramolecular structures of isolated centrosomes. Keywords: centrosome; centriole; microtubule nucleation; isolation; affinity purification; mammalian cells; Drosophila
Middle Miocene − Oligocene grasses in southwestern Europe during the Early 4 Isotopic evidence of C

ABSTRACTC 4 plants are widely successful in the grass-dominated ecosys-tems of tropical, subtropical, and warm-temperate regions, largely as a result of their ability to limit photorespiration and improve water-use efﬁ ciency. A widely held paradigm is that low (<~400 ppm) atmospheric CO 2 concentrations were an important factor selecting for the origin of C 4 plants, although support in geological records is limited. We determined the carbon isotopic composition of 686 indi-vidual grass-pollen grains preserved in eight samples of lacustrine and shallow-marine sediments from three basins spanning the Early Oligocene to Middle Miocene in southwestern Europe. Grasses com-posed <15% of the total abundance of terrestrial pollen grains, and 26%–62% of the grass pollen was from C 4 grasses. Thus C 4 grasses occurred on the landscape as early as the earliest Oligocene, ~14 m.y. earlier than previous isotopic evidence of ﬁ rst C 4 plants and before p CO 2 fell during the Oligocene.INTRODUCTION
A note on proactive password checking

Nowadays, proactive password checking algorithms are based on the philosophy of the dictionary attack, and they often fail to prevent some weak passwords with low entropy. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to deal with this new class of weak passwords by (roughly) measuring entropy. A simple example is given to exploit effective patterns to prevent low-entropy passwords as the first step of entropy-based proactive password checking.
Performance Evaluation of Virtualized Hadoop Clusters

In this report we investigate the performance of Hadoop clusters, deployed with separated storage and compute layers, on top of a hypervisor managing a single physical host. We have analyzed and evaluated the different Hadoop cluster configurations by running CPU bound and I/O bound workloads. The report is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a brief description of the technologies involved in our study. An overview of the experimental platform, setup test and configurations are presented in Section 3. Our benchmark methodology is defined in Section 4. The performed experiments together with the evaluation of the results are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes with lessons learned.
Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation between English and Welsh

This paper shows how a baseline phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system can be set up for translation between English and Welsh, a UK language spoken by about 610,000 people, using well-documented and freely available tools and techniques. Our results indicate that the achievable performance for this language pair is among the better of those European languages reported in Koehn (2005). We argue that these preliminary results should be seen as a rst step towards hybrid systems where linguistic knowledge from lexical and morphological resources are combined with additional terminology and stochastic preferences acquired from existing translations.
A Persian OCR System Using Morphological Operators

� Abstract— Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a very old and of great interest in pattern recognition field. In this paper we introduce a very powerful approach to recognize Persian text. We have used morphological operators, especially Hit/Miss operator to descript each sub-word and by using a template matching approach we have tried to classify generated description. We used just one font in two different sizes to verify our approach. We achieved a very good rate, up to 99.9%.
Prosthetic joint infection: challenges of diagnosis and treatment

Arthroplasty for arthritis has led to remarkable improvement in patient quality of life and alleviation of symptoms. A major complication of this surgery is infection. This review examines current understanding of epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of prosthetic joint infections. In particular, this article focuses on the role of biofilm formation in the pathogenesis of device infections and the diagnostic and treatment challenges associated with this process.
Journal of Information Technology Management Service-oriented Architecture Adoption: Key Factors and Approaches

Organizations across many industries have moved or in the process of moving towards a service-oriented IT architecture. This article explores the challenges and impacts that organizations are facing in the process of adopting a service-oriented architecture with Web services. While some adoption issues are relevant for any organization, others depend on the industry and type of organization. The results of multiple case studies suggest that differences in the business environment need to be considered in the decision of when and how to move to a service-oriented architecture with Web services.
Least-squares path-summation diffraction imaging using sparsity constraints

Diffraction imaging aims to emphasize small-scale subsurface heterogeneities, such as faults, pinch-outs, fracture swarms, channels, etc. and can help seismic reservoir characterization. The key step in diffraction imaging workflows is based on the separation procedure suppressing higher energy reflections and emphasizing diffractions, after which diffractions can be imaged independently. Separation results often contain crosstalk between reflections and diffractions and are prone to noise. We have developed an inversion scheme to reduce the crosstalk and denoise diffractions. The scheme decomposes an input full wavefield into three components: reflections, diffractions, and noise. We construct the inverted forward modeling operator as the chain of three operators: Kirchhoff modeling, plane-wave destruction, and path-summation integral filter. Reflections and diffractions have the same modeling operator. Separation of the components is done by shaping regularization. We impose sparsity constraints to extract diffractions, enforce smoothing along dominant local event slopes to restore reflections, and suppress the crosstalk between the components by local signal-and-noise orthogonalization. Synthetic- and field-data examples confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Partially reversible bortezomib-induced cardiotoxicity: an unusual cause of acute cardiomyopathy

Chemotherapy-associated cardiotoxicity can present as a spectrum from arrhythmia to acute congestive heart failure. Unlike anthracyclines, proteasome inhibitors – for example, bortezomib – are not notorious for causing cardiotoxicity in absence of pre-existing cardiac dysfunction or without concomitant use of other cardiotoxic agents. We describe a 66-year-old woman with end-stage renal disease who developed acute dyspnea hours after a third treatment with bortezomib for IgG kappa myeloma. The Naranjo adverse drug reaction probability scale indicated a probable relationship (score of 5) between bortezomib and acute left ventricular dysfunction. Patients receiving proteasome inhibitors should be closely monitored for evidence of cardiac dysfunction during treatment.
PStorM: Profile Storage and Matching for Feedback-Based Tuning of MapReduce Jobs

The MapReduce programming model has become widely adopted for large scale analytics on big data. MapReduce systems such as Hadoop have many tuning parameters, many of which have a significant impact on performance. The map and reduce functions that make up a MapReduce job are developed using arbitrary programming constructs, which make them black-box in nature and therefore renders it difficult for users and administrators to make good parameter tuning decisions for a submitted MapReduce job. An approach that is gaining popularity is to provide automatic tuning decisions for submitted MapReduce jobs based on feedback from previously executed jobs. This approach is adopted, for example, by the Starfish system. Starfish and similar systems base their tuning decisions on an execution profile of the MapReduce job being tuned. This execution profile contains summary information about the runtime behavior of the job being tuned, and it is assumed to come from a previous execution of the same job. Managing these execution profiles has not been previously studied. This paper presents PStorM, a profile store and matcher that accurately chooses the relevant profiling information for tuning a submitted MapReduce job from the previously collected profiling information. PStorM can identify accurate tuning profiles even for previously unseen MapReduce jobs. PStorM is currently integrated with the Starfish system, although it can be extended to work with any MapReduce tuning system. Experiments on a large number of MapReduce jobs demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of profile matching. The results of these experiments show that the profiles returned by PStorM result in tuning decisions that are as good as decisions based on exact profiles collected during pervious executions of the tuned jobs. This holds even for previously unseen jobs, which significantly reduces the overhead of feedback-driven profile-based MapReduce tuning.
Pomegranate(Punica granatum L.), jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.), almond (Prunus dulcis (Mill.) D.A. Webb), strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo L.) and common hackberry (Celtis australis L.) in Istria

U okviru projekta Rast Istre zadali smo si cilj, otkriti gdje u prirodi (pogranicno podrucje Istre) rastu stabla/grmovi žižula i sipka. Pratili smo vegetaciju pojedinih stabala sipka i žižula u 2014. godini na razlicitim lokacijama koje su navedene u monografiji. Pojedina su stabla morfoloski opisana (listovi, cvjetovi, plodovi) te genetski analizirana. Za sipak je utvrđena velika raznolikost – bioraznolikost. Genetske su analize pokazale da na podrucju Istre uspijevaju genotipovi sipka koji do sada jos nisu bili opisani. U slucaju žižule nesto je drugacije i pronađena su samo tri genotipa. Plodovima i listovima sipka, žižule, badema, planike i koprivica određivali smo prehrambenu vrijednost i sadržaj fenolnih spojeva. Vodene i etanolne ekstrakte testirali smo i s obzirom na njihovo antioksidacijsko, antibakterijsko i protugljivicno djelovanje.
Energy Efficiency Maximization of Full-Duplex Two-Way Relay With Non-Ideal Power Amplifiers and Non-Negligible Circuit Power

In this paper, we maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of full-duplex (FD) two-way relay (TWR) systems under non-ideal power amplifiers (PAs) and non-negligible transmission-dependent circuit power. We start with the case where only the relay operates full duplex and two timeslots are required for TWR. Then, we extend to the advanced case, where the relay and the two nodes all operate full duplex, and accomplish TWR in a single timeslot. In both cases, we establish the intrinsic connections between the optimal transmit powers and durations, based on which the original non-convex EE maximization can be convexified and optimally solved. Simulations show the superiority of FD-TWR in terms of EE, especially when traffic demand is high. The simulations also reveal that the maximum EE of FD-TWR is more sensitive to the PA efficiency, than it is to self-cancellation. The full FD design of FD-TWR is susceptible to traffic imbalance, while the design with only the relay operating in the FD mode exhibits strong tolerance.
A Fungus-Specific Ras Homolog Contributes to the Hyphal Growth and Virulence of Aspergillus fumigatus

ABSTRACT The Ras family of GTPase proteins has been shown to control morphogenesis in many organisms, including several species of pathogenic fungi. In a previous study, we identified a gene encoding a fungus-specific Ras subfamily homolog, rasB, in Aspergillus fumigatus. Here we report that deletion of A. fumigatus rasB caused decreased germination and growth rates on solid media but had no effect on total biomass accumulation after 24 h of growth in liquid culture. The ΔrasB mutant had an irregular hyphal morphology characterized by increased branching. Expression of rasBΔ113-135, a mutant transgene lacking the conserved rasB internal amino acid insertion, did not complement the deletion phenotype of delayed growth and germination rates and abnormal hyphal morphology. Virulence of the rasB deletion strain was diminished; mice infected with this strain exhibited ∼65% survival compared to ∼10% with wild-type and reconstituted strains. These data support the hypothesis that rasB homologs, which are highly conserved among fungi that undergo hyphal growth, control signaling modules important to the directional growth of fungal hyphae.
Etanercept in adult patients with early onset ankylosing spondylitis.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether twice-weekly subcutaneous etanercept improves the signs and symptoms of adult patients with early onset ankylosing spondylitis (AS). METHODS A retrospective analysis was performed on a subgroup of patients with AS with onset < 18 years of age from a multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study of etanercept in the treatment of patients with AS. Twenty patients met criteria and are presented. RESULTS As early as week four, 5/9 (56%) patients who received etanercept achieved an Assessments in Ankylosing Spondylitis 20% response (ASAS 20) versus only 1/11 (9%) of those who received placebo (p = 0.032). The observed ASAS 20 response continued through week 24, with 6/9 (66%) patients receiving etanercept responding, versus 2/11 of patients receiving placebo (p = 0.025). CONCLUSION Etanercept improves signs and symptoms of early onset AS in adult patients for at least 24 weeks.
NRSF regulates the fetal cardiac gene program and maintains normal cardiac structure and function

Reactivation of the fetal cardiac gene program is a characteristic feature of hypertrophied and failing hearts that correlates with impaired cardiac function and poor prognosis. However, the mechanism governing the reversible expression of fetal cardiac genes remains unresolved. Here we show that neuron‐restrictive silencer factor (NRSF), a transcriptional repressor, selectively regulates expression of multiple fetal cardiac genes, including those for atrial natriuretic peptide, brain natriuretic peptide and α‐skeletal actin, and plays a role in molecular pathways leading to the re‐expression of those genes in ventricular myocytes. Moreover, transgenic mice expressing a dominant‐negative mutant of NRSF in their hearts exhibit dilated cardiomyopathy, high susceptibility to arrhythmias and sudden death. We demonstrate that genes encoding two ion channels that carry the fetal cardiac currents If and ICa,T, which are induced in these mice and are potentially responsible for both the cardiac dysfunction and the arrhythmogenesis, are regulated by NRSF. Our results indicate NRSF to be a key transcriptional regulator of the fetal cardiac gene program and suggest an important role for NRSF in maintaining normal cardiac structure and function.
Cadherins at cell-autonomous membrane contacts control macropinocytosis

Cadherins aggregate and stabilize cell–cell junctions through interactions with adjacent cells. In addition, N-cadherin and E-cadherin concentrate at free edges or at the lamellipodia of migrating cells and are found within large vesicles called macropinosomes, which develop from membrane ruffles. The binding properties of cadherins have not previously been associated with the localization of cadherins at membrane ruffles; however, we report that the dorsal, ventral and lateral membrane contacts that occur as a result of the overlap of membrane ruffles aggregate N-cadherin, and that both N-cadherin and E-cadherin promote macropinosome closure and fluid-phase uptake in macropinosomes. These data reveal a previously unsuspected function for cadherin-mediated cell–cell adhesion molecules in the closure of cell-autonomous membrane contacts at membrane ruffles, resulting in macropinocytosis.
VoxMM: Rich Transcription of Conversations in the Wild

This paper presents a multi-modal dataset that contains rich transcriptions of spoken conversations. As diverse multi-modal and multi-task models emerge, there is a growing need for multi-modal training and evaluation datasets accompanied by rich metadata. However, there is no universal dataset that addresses these requirements for the diverse tasks partially due to the cost of annotation. To overcome this limitation, we develop a semi-automatic pipeline that makes the annotation more feasible. The resulting dataset is VoxMM , a multi-modal, multi-domain dataset. VoxMM incorporates video, audio, and text modalities. In terms of labels, it offers a wide array of metadata such as speaker labels, transcriptions, gender, and more. VoxMM supports both the training and the evaluation of any-to-any modality mapping models. It also offers a more accurate representation of real-world scenarios, bridging the gap between controlled laboratory experiments and the varying performances in the real-world. We present initial benchmarks on automatic speech recognition and speaker diarisation. The VoxMM dataset can be downloaded from https://mm.kaist. ac.kr/projects/voxmm
Prostaglandin E2 Stimulates Sodium-Dependent Phosphate Transport in Osteoblastic Cells via a Protein Kinase C-Mediated Pathway.

Eicosanoids are released by bone cells in response to physical, hormonal, and cytokine stimulation, and they can both inhibit and stimulate bone formation. We investigated the effect of PGE2 on sodium-dependent phosphate (NadPi) transport in a rat bone-derived cell line, PyMS. PGE2 and 12-O-tetradecanoyl phorbol-13-acetate (TPA), an activator of protein kinase C, increased NadPi uptake in a dose- and time-dependent manner. There was no change in Na-dependent alanine transport, and the effects of PGE2 and TPA were not associated with corresponding changes in cell number or protein content. Their effects on NadPi uptake were not additive. Calphostin C, an inhibitor of protein kinase C (10−8 m) completely blocked TPA- and PGE2-stimulated NadPi uptake. The results are consistent with a crucial role of protein kinase C activation in the short term stimulation of NadPi transport by PGE2 in PyMS cells.
A New Family of Synthetic Diterpenes that Regulates Cytokine Synthesis by Inhibiting IκBα Phosphorylation

The synthesis and the biological evaluation of a new family diterpenes are presented. The synthetic studies were inspired by the structural framework of acanthoic acid (1) and yielded a family of compounds that were evaluated as anti‐inflammatory agents. Among them, compounds 2, 10, 12, and 16 exhibited a very low nonspecific cytotoxicity and inhibited the synthesis of TNF‐α with greater than 65 % efficacy at low micromolar concentrations. Cytokine‐specificity studies revealed that these compounds also inhibited the synthesis of the proinflammatory cytokines IL‐1β and IL‐6, while inhibition of IL‐1ra and IL‐8 synthesis was marginal and only occurred at high concentrations. Further studies, through EMSA and Western blot analyses, indicated that these compounds decreased the extent of phosphorylation of IκBα; this suggests that they exert their anti‐inflammatory profile by inhibiting NF‐κB‐mediated cytokine synthesis. These findings imply that these diterpenes represent promising leads for the development of novel anti‐inflammatory agents.