Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Left Ventricular Diastolic Dysfunction in End‐Stage Kidney Disease: Pathogenesis, Diagnosis, and Treatment

Diastolic dysfunction is frequently observed in end‐stage kidney disease (ESKD), and ESKD patients have many risk factors for heart failure (HF), including hypertension, diabetes, and coronary artery disease. Diastolic HF, also called HF with preserved ejection fraction, refers to a clinical syndrome in which patients have symptoms and signs of HF, normal or near normal left ventricular (LV) systolic function, and evidence of diastolic dysfunction manifested by abnormal LV filling and elevated filling pressure. Recent reports suggest that HF with preserved ejection fraction is more common in hemodialysis patients than HF with low ejection fraction. Diastolic HF in ESKD patients is a strong predictor of death. In this article, we review the information available in the literature on the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and potential treatment strategies of diastolic dysfunction or diastolic HF based on evidence obtained in the general population that is potentially applicable to ESKD patients.
Stool DNA testing for the detection of pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer (PanC) presents at late stage with high mortality. Effective early detection methods are needed. Aberrantly methylated genes are unexplored as markers for noninvasive detection by stool testing. The authors aimed to select discriminant methylated genes and to assess accuracy of these and mutant KRAS in stool to detect PanC.
Study of water sorption in modified flax fibers

Because of their good mechanical properties and low density, natural fibers are more and more considered as reinforcement in composite materials. To improve the adhesion between the polymer matrix and natural fibers and to reduce the water sorption, helium cold plasma and autoclave treatments have been performed on flax fibers. The effect of these treatments on water sorption has been investigated by means of a gravimetric static equilibrium method (IGA). Water sorption isotherms have been deduced from kinetic data. Specific mathematical models have been tested to predict the water sorption isotherms of the treated flax fibers. The Park model based on the three sorption modes: Langmuir, Henry's law, and clustering, was successfully used to simulate the experimental sorption data. The results show no significant effect after plasma treatment while an increase of moisture resistance has been observed after autoclave treatment. This effect of autoclave treatment is interpreted in terms of modifications of cell-wall structure. In a kinetic point of view, for the untreated and treated flax fibers, the variation of the diffusion coefficient with water concentration is in agreement with the three sorption modes of the Park model. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 4281–4289, 2006
CS 0.5: a better approach to introductory computer science for majors

There are often problems when students enter a course with widely different experience levels with key course topics. If the material is covered too slowly, those with greater experience get bored and lose interest. If the material is covered too quickly, those with less experience get lost and feel incompetent. This problem with incoming students of our Computer Science Major led us to create CS 0.5: an introductory Computer Science course to target those CS majors who have little or no background with programming. Our goal is to provide these students with an engaging curriculum and prepare them to keep pace in future courses with those students who enter with a stronger background. Following the lead of Mark Guzdial's work on using media computation for non-majors at Georgia Tech, we use media computation as the tool to provide this engaging curriculum. We report here on our experience to date using the CS 0.5 approach with a media computation course.
Asymmetric Tensor Field Visualization for Surfaces

Asymmetric tensor field visualization can provide important insight into fluid flows and solid deformations. Existing techniques for asymmetric tensor fields focus on the analysis, and simply use evenly-spaced hyperstreamlines on surfaces following eigenvectors and dual-eigenvectors in the tensor field. In this paper, we describe a hybrid visualization technique in which hyperstreamlines and elliptical glyphs are used in real and complex domains, respectively. This enables a more faithful representation of flow behaviors inside complex domains. In addition, we encode tensor magnitude, an important quantity in tensor field analysis, using the density of hyperstreamlines and sizes of glyphs. This allows colors to be used to encode other important tensor quantities. To facilitate quick visual exploration of the data from different viewpoints and at different resolutions, we employ an efficient image-space approach in which hyperstreamlines and glyphs are generated quickly in the image plane. The combination of these techniques leads to an efficient tensor field visualization system for domain scientists. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our visualization technique through applications to complex simulated engine fluid flow and earthquake deformation data. Feedback from domain expert scientists, who are also co-authors, is provided.
Best-Effort Top-k Query Processing Under Budgetary Constraints

We consider a novel problem of top-k query processing under budget constraints. We provide both a framework and a set of algorithms to address this problem. Existing algorithms for top-k processing are budget-oblivious, i.e., they do not take budget constraints into account when making scheduling decisions, but focus on the performance to compute the final top-k results. Under budget constraints, these algorithms therefore often return results that are a lot worse than the results that can be achieved with a clever, budget-aware scheduling algorithm. This paper introduces novel algorithms for budget-aware top-k processing that produce results that have a significantly higher quality than those of state-of-the-art budget-oblivious solutions.
Regulation of Tight Junctions in Upper Airway Epithelium

The mucosal barrier of the upper respiratory tract including the nasal cavity, which is the first site of exposure to inhaled antigens, plays an important role in host defense in terms of innate immunity and is regulated in large part by tight junctions of epithelial cells. Tight junction molecules are expressed in both M cells and dendritic cells as well as epithelial cells of upper airway. Various antigens are sampled, transported, and released to lymphocytes through the cells in nasal mucosa while they maintain the integrity of the barrier. Expression of tight junction molecules and the barrier function in normal human nasal epithelial cells (HNECs) are affected by various stimuli including growth factor, TLR ligand, and cytokine. In addition, epithelial-derived thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), which is a master switch for allergic inflammatory diseases including allergic rhinitis, enhances the barrier function together with an increase of tight junction molecules in HNECs. Furthermore, respiratory syncytial virus infection in HNECs in vitro induces expression of tight junction molecules and the barrier function together with proinflammatory cytokine release. This paper summarizes the recent progress in our understanding of the regulation of tight junctions in the upper airway epithelium under normal, allergic, and RSV-infected conditions.
A Process for Multi-agent Domain and Application Engineering - The Domain Analysis and Application Requirements Engineering Phases

Domain Engineering is a process for the development of a reusable application family in a particular domain problem, and Application Engineering, the one for the construction of a specific application based on the reuse of software artifacts in the application family previously produced in the Domain Engineering process. MADAE-Pro is an ontology-driven process for multi-agent domain and application engineering which promotes the construction and reuse of agent-oriented applications families. This article introduces an overview of MADAE-Pro emphasizing the description of its domain analysis and application requirements engineering phases and showing how software artifacts produced from the first are reused in the last one.
Axon extension in the fast and slow lanes: Substratum‐dependent engagement of myosin II functions

Axon extension involves the coordinated regulation of the neuronal cytoskeleton. Actin filaments drive protrusion of filopodia and lamellipodia while microtubules invade the growth cone, thereby providing structural support for the nascent axon. Furthermore, in order for axons to extend the growth cone must attach to the substratum. Previous work indicates that myosin II activity inhibits the advance of microtubules into the periphery of growth cones, and myosin II has also been implicated in mediating integrin‐dependent cell attachment. However, it is not clear how the functions of myosin II in regulating substratum attachment and microtubule advance are integrated during axon extension. We report that inhibition of myosin II function decreases the rate of axon extension on laminin, but surprisingly promotes extension rate on polylysine. The differential effects of myosin II inhibition on axon extension rate are attributable to myosin II having the primary function of mediating substratum attachment on laminin, but not on polylysine. Conversely, on polylysine the primary function of myosin II is to inhibit microtubule advance into growth cones. Thus, the substratum determines the role of myosin II in axon extension by controlling the functions of myosin II that contribute to extension. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol, 2007.
Deploying Google Search by Voice in Cantonese

We describe our efforts in deploying Google search by voice for Cantonese, a southern Chinese dialect widely spoken in and around Hong Kong and Guangzhou. We collected audio data from local Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou by using our DataHound smartphone application. This data was used to create appropriate acoustic models. Language models were trained on anonymized query logs from Google Web Search for Hong Kong. Because users in Hong Kong frequently mix English and Cantonese in their queries, we designed our system from the ground up to handle both languages. We report on experiments with different techniques for mapping the phoneme inventories for both languages into a common space. Based on extensive experiments we report word error rates and web scores for both Hong Kong and Guangzhou data. Cantonese Google search by voice was launched in December 2010. Index Terms: voice search, Cantonese speech recognition, multilingual speech recognition
Watermarking Based Quality Assessment for DIBR 3D Images

The quality assessment of 3D images is playing a critical role in 3D multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking based quality assessment scheme for depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) 3D images. The scheme utilizes the extracted watermarks to evaluate the quality of the watermarked images under various distortions. In this scheme, the watermark is embedded into the selected dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) coefficients of the center view. The watermark can be detected from the watermarked center view, the synthesized left and right views separately, and the quality of these views under various attacks can be estimated by the extracted watermark degradation. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of both the classical 2D quality metrics and some well-known 3D quality models. The estimated quality and the calculated quality are highly correlated, which demonstrates that the proposed scheme can assess the quality of DIBR 3D images with high accuracy under JPEG compression, JPEG2000 compression, Gaussian noise and Gaussian blur.
Multistability and delayed recurrent loops.

Multistable dynamical systems have important applications as pattern recognition and memory storage devices. Conditions under which time-delayed recurrent loops of spiking neurons exhibit multistability are presented. Our results are illustrated on both a simple integrate-and-fire neuron and a HodgkinHuxley-type neuron, whose recurrent inputs are delayed versions of their output spike trains. Two kinds of multistability with respect to initial spiking functions are found, depending on whether the neuron is excitable or repetitively firing in the absence of feedback.
Cloud-Oriented Platforms: Bearing on Application Architecture and Design Patterns

The business problems that are handled by today's computing systems have grown much in complexity. Handling data volumes in excess of peta-scale are no longer restricted to few narrow application areas. Computing platforms ecosystem has also advanced with virtualization based and cloud oriented platforms emerging as most disruptive ones. Unique characteristics of such platforms have important implications for how the architecture of business applications is designed - particularly the ability to achieve certain non-functional requirements. In this paper we first bring out properties of the said computing platforms that are architecturally significant from business applications' view point. We then bring out implications that such properties have for software design and architecture. We demonstrate the use of this knowledge about platform properties by devising a novel architectural design pattern “Platform Level Aspect-Orientation” which can be used to address a variety of application scenarios.
The Effect of Cryotherapy on Intraarticular Temperature and Postoperative Care After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

The objective of this study was to elucidate how cryotherapy after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction affects intraarticular temperature and clinical results. A prospective and randomized study was performed on 21 knees of 21 patients. The ligament reconstruction was performed by single-incision arthroscopy using autogenous ham-string tendon. On completion of the surgery, thermosensors were implanted in the suprapatellar pouch and the intracondylar notch, and the intraarticular temperature was monitored while the joint was cooled. Cooling was performed in one group at 5°C (N 7) and in another at 10°C (N 7), for 48 hours. A control group (N 7) did not undergo cryotherapy. The cooled groups showed three temperature phases: a low-temperature phase immediately after the ligament reconstruction, followed by a temperature-rising phase and a thermostatic phase. The control group had no low-temperature phase and immediately entered a thermostatic phase. During the low-temperature phase in the treated groups, the temperature of the suprapatellar pouch and of the intercondylar notch were significantly lower than the body temperature. The pain score and the number of times an analgesic had to be administered were both significantly lower in the 10°C group than in the control group. Blood loss was significantly less in the 5°C group than in the control group.
Accelerated aging of high voltage encapsulated transformers for electronics applications

This paper presents the result of accelerated aging tests under AC, DC and DC-AC superimposed voltages on high voltage encapsulated transformers of multi-layer insulation system. The aim of this work is to study the aging behavior of insulation system and find a mathematical model to estimate the lifetime of the insulation exposed to AC and DC voltages. The statistical distribution of times-to-breakdown were presented by Weibull probability distribution, and related to the test aging voltage by the inverse power law model. The arbitrary constants of the combined Weibull-inverse power law model were evaluated using maximum likelihood estimation. It was found in this study that aging of the insulation system at AC voltage is mainly caused by dielectric losses and partial discharges in the voids in the bulk of the insulation, whereas at DC voltage insulation failure is attributed to thermal breakdown. It was also found that the presence of small AC voltage component superimposed on DC high voltage accelerates the aging process very significantly and causes insulation failure in very short time.
Arginine synthesis in enterocytes of neonatal pigs.

Arginine is deficient in porcine colostrum and milk, and yet the piglet has a particularly high requirement for this essential amino acid for rapid postnatal growth. To explain this paradox, arginine synthesis was quantified in enterocytes from newborn (0-day-old) and 2- to 7-day-old suckling pigs. Arginine was found to be synthesized from glutamine in 0- to 7-day-old pig enterocytes, but the rates of arginine synthesis were three- to fourfold greater in 0- to 2-day-old pigs than in 7-day-old pigs. To elucidate the developmental change of the intestinal arginine synthesis, the metabolism of glutamine to citrulline, the conversion of citrulline to arginine, and the activities of the enzymes involved were measured. The rates of metabolism of glutamine to citrulline were 2.5- to 3.5-fold greater in enterocytes from 0- to 2-day-old pigs than in cells from 7-day-old pigs, as were the rates of conversion of citrulline to arginine. The activities of all enzymes that synthesize arginine from glutamine, except pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthase and argininosuccinate lyase (ASL), increased in enterocytes from 2-day-old pigs compared with 0-day-old pigs. The activities of all these enzymes decreased by approximately 75% in 7-day-old pigs compared with 2-day-old pigs. Arginase activity was negligible in enterocytes from 0- to 7-day-old pigs, thus minimizing intestinal hydrolysis of newly synthesized arginine and maximizing the endogenous provision of arginine. The results of this study demonstrate the presence of arginine-synthesizing enzymes and their developmental changes in postnatal pig enterocytes. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Signature Quadratic Form Distance

The Signature Quadratic Form Distance is an adaptive similarity measure for flexible content-based feature representations of multimedia data. In this paper, we present a deep survey of the mathematical foundation of this similarity measure which encompasses the classic Quadratic Form Distance defined only for the comparison between two feature histograms of the same length and structure. Moreover, we give the benefits of the Signature Quadratic Form Distance and experimental evaluation on numerous real-world databases.
RNase MRP and disease

The human RNase MRP complex consists of a catalytic RNA and several protein components. RNase MRP is a ubiquitously expressed eukaryotic endoribonuclease that cleaves various RNAs, including ribosomal, messenger, and mitochondrial RNAs, in a highly specific fashion. In several autoimmune diseases autoantibodies targeting RNase MRP have been found. These so‐called anti‐Th/To autoantibodies, which most frequently can be detected in the sera of scleroderma patients, are directed to several protein components of the RNase MRP and the evolutionarily related RNase P complex. It is not yet known whether the anti‐Th/To immune response is an epiphenomenon or whether these autoantibodies play a role in the pathophysiology of the disease. The gene encoding the RNase MRP RNA was the first nuclear non‐coding RNA gene demonstrated to be associated with a genetic disease. Mutations in this gene are causing the highly pleiotropic disease cartilage‐hair hypoplasia (CHH). CHH patients are characterized by a short stature, hypoplastic hair, and short limbs. In addition, they show a predisposition to lymphomas and other cancers and suffer from defective T‐cell immunity. Since the identification of the first CHH‐associated mutations in 2001, many distinct mutations have been found in different patients. These mutations either affect the structure of the RNase MRP RNA or are located in the promoter region and reduce the expression levels. In this review article we will, after describing the biochemical aspects of RNase MRP, discuss the targeting of RNase MRP in autoimmunity and the role of mutations in the RNase MRP RNA gene in CHH. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Définition et exploitation des méta-rôles des utilisateurs pour la recherche d'information collaborative

La recherche d’information collaborative est un processus particulier impliquant un ensemble d’utilisateurs partageant un meme besoin en information. Dans ce contexte, l’exploitation de la division du travail au travers des roles est une des techniques utilisees pour structurer la session de recherche et optimiser son efficacite. Dans ce papier, nous proposons d’etudier les caracteristiques de comportement d’une paire de collaborateurs sur la base d’hypotheses de leur complementarite. Nous definissons ainsi la notion de roles latents qui sont (a) detectes en temps reel et (b) ensuite reinjectes dans un modele d’ordonnancement de documents. Les experimentations, menees sur des fichiers logs de sessions de collaboration reelles impliquant des paires d’utilisateurs, mettent en evidence l’efficacite de notre approche comparativement a des strategies de recherche individuelles ou a celles qui considerent des roles fixes.
Factors that influence treatment adherence of tuberculosis patients living in Java, Indonesia

Background and objective: Due to nonadherence of tuberculosis (TB) patients to treatment, complications may arise and if remaining infectious, these patients may infect other people with TB. To obtain information about factors associated with nonadherence, we performed a study comparing adherent and nonadherent TB patients. Methods: Adherent and nonadherent patients randomly selected from hospital records in one urban and two rural districts were interviewed using semi-structured questionnaires. Key informant interviews were done with TB nurses and doctors. Results: The most frequently mentioned reason for nonadherence to treatment was feeling better. Although the drugs were given free of charge, many patients were nonadherent because of lack of money. Social support was considered very important for adherence. The study indicated that some patients had a negative image about the health care staff, treatment, and quality of medication. Conclusion: Treatment adherence of TB patients receiving treatment in hospitals in Central Java might be improved by providing health education about treatment duration and side effects, facilitating procedures for receiving treatment free of charge and reducing costs of transportation and consultation. Qualified friendly health care staff able to motivate patients might further improve adherence.