Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automated static perimetry in myopes with peripapillary crescents‐‐Part II

Central visual fields were investigated by automated static perimetry, using programs 30‐2 and 30‐1 of the Humphrey Field Analyzer (HFA), in a group of healthy myopic individuals with peripapillary crescents and tigroid fundus changes only. Results were compared with ‘non‐myopic’ and ‘myopic subjects without crescents’ control groups. The sample comprised 122 young, healthy volunteers between the ages of 18.5 and 35.4 years, free from any ocular or systemic disease, with refractive errors ranging from +4.00 to −25.75 D. Linear regression results are presented and may be useful in predicting the global indices mean deviation (MD) and mean sensitivity (MS), given either the axial length of ocular refraction, for medium and high myopes. Analysis of the HFA printouts revealed significantly depressed locations in all subject groups. However, locations identified at the 2, 1 and 0.5% probability levels were observed more frequently and more commonly in the myopes with peripapillary crescents than in the control groups. In this non‐glaucomatous sample, four myopes had a borderline glaucoma hemifield test and two fell outside normal limits of this test. The superior hemifield, particularly the upper temporal quadrant, appeared to be most affected. Enlargement of the blind spot occurred in some subjects. Several possible explanations are suggested for the visual field sensitivity reduction in myopia.
Missing Data Imputation in the Electronic Health Record Using Deeply Learned Autoencoders

Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a vital source of patient outcome data but the widespread prevalence of missing data presents a major challenge. Different causes of missing data in the EHR data may introduce unintentional bias. Here, we compare the effectiveness of popular multiple imputation strategies with a deeply learned autoencoder using the Pooled Resource Open-Access ALS Clinical Trials Database (PRO-ACT). To evaluate performance, we examined imputation accuracy for known values simulated to be either missing completely at random or missing not at random. We also compared ALS disease progression prediction across different imputation models. Autoencoders showed strong performance for imputation accuracy and contributed to the strongest disease progression predictor. Finally, we show that despite clinical heterogeneity, ALS disease progression appears homogenous with time from onset being the most important predictor.
Hilar and suprapancreatic cholangiocarcinoma: value of 3D angiography and multiphase fusion images using MDCT.

OBJECTIVE We evaluated the feasibility of creating 3D and multiphase fusion images of cholangiocarcinoma. The 3D rendering of the biliary tree provide valuable information for planning surgery, including the location of the obstruction and its relationship to the surrounding vessels. CONCLUSION Our data emphasize that 3D and multiphase fusion images may be an accurate and routinely applicable tool for the diagnosis and therapeutic management of patients with biliary system abnormalities.
One Size Policy Does Not Fit All: Latent Farmer Groups in Crop Insurance Markets in Finland

This paper assesses how farmers differ in their willingness to pay (WTP) for crop insurance. Data from a choice experiment were analysed using the latent class approach to reveal the number of latent groups and differences in farmers' WTP for crop insurance in Finland. The analysis identified three homogeneous groups that differed significantly from each other. Farmers in these classes were characterized as ‘catastrophic loss preventers’, ‘risk lovers' and ‘shallow loss preventers' based on their implicit prices for insurance attributes. The outputs provide valuable information when these latent groups are connected to farm typology. The results indicate that the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is not sufficiently flexible to take into account the differing needs of farmers for agricultural risk management. If the EU is to implement efficient risk management policies for agriculture, flexibility will be needed in the legislation, and shallow loss insurances will also need to be introduced to cover all risk prevention needs equally.
A two-degree-of-freedom motor-powered gait orthosis for spinal cord injury patients

Abstract A number of orthoses have been developed to restore stance and walking in paraplegic subjects. Compliance, however, has been limited, mainly owing to walking effort. Use of the forces produced by actuators is an effective way to solve the problem of the considerable effort required for orthotic gait, namely high muscular effort and high energy expenditure. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of assistance by external actuators on the orthotic gait of spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. Two kinds of linear actuator were developed by using direct current (d.c.) motors for assisting the knee and hip joint of a gait orthosis. They were mounted on the knee and hip joint of a commercial advanced reciprocating gait orthosis (ARGO), and a new two-degree-of-freedom externally powered gait orthosis was thus developed. The orthosis was assessed through inter-subject experiments on five male adult complete SCI patients. Owing to the short training period available for the assisted gait, simultaneous operation of both joint actuators was not conducted: either the knee actuation or the hip actuation was executed only. Thus, the knee actuator and the hip actuator were assessed with a T12 subject and with subjects for T5, T8, T11, and T12 respectively. The motions of the gaits, assisted by the linear actuators, were measured by a Vicon 370 system, and the general gait parameters and compensatory motions were evaluated. Results demonstrated that (a) all subjects could walk without falling, assisted either by the knee or the hip actuator; (b) both the knee and hip joint actuator increased the gait speed and the step length; (c) the knee flexion produced by the orthosis improved the dynamic cosmesis of walking; and (d) lateral compensatory motions as well as vertical ones tended to decrease when the hip joint was assisted, which could contribute to a reduction in walking effort.
Application of finite-element modeling tools for analysis and design of AC drive power bus structures

AC motor drives contain several power bus structures, which include the DC bus structure between the capacitor bank and inverter, IGBT power module internal bus structure to parallel several chips to obtain high current rating, and bus structures between low power AC drive units that are paralleled to obtain a high power AC drive. It is necessary to model these bus structures to perform circuit simulations for optimum drive design, to minimize voltage overshoot on the power module during transient conditions, which eliminates the need for snubber circuits, and to ensure that paralleled drives share load current, thus increasing the reliability of the drive. Commercial finite-element tools are available to model three-dimensional bus structures and extract equivalent circuit parameters. In this paper, some examples of application of these tools to AC drive bus structure design and optimization will be provided, supported with experimental results.
Changes in regional airflow obstruction over time in the lungs of patients with asthma: evaluation with 3He MR imaging.

PURPOSE To determine changes in regional airflow obstruction over time in the lungs of patients with asthma, as demonstrated with hyperpolarized helium 3 ((3)He) magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, and to assess correlations with disease severity and use of asthma medications. MATERIALS AND METHODS Institutional review board approval and written informed consent were obtained for this HIPAA-compliant study. Use of (3)He was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Forty-three patients underwent 103 MR imaging studies in total; 26 were imaged twice within 42-82 minutes (same day), and 17 were imaged on 3 days between 1 and 476 days (multiday). Each day, spirometry was performed, disease severity was determined, and the use of asthma medications was recorded. Images were reviewed in a pairwise fashion to determine total ventilation defect number, defects in same location between imaging studies, and size. Parametric and nonparametric statistical methods were used. RESULTS For the same-day examinations, the mean number of defects per image section was similar at baseline and repeat imaging (1.8 +/- 1.9 [standard deviation] vs 1.6 +/- 1.9, respectively; P = .15), with 75% of defects remaining in the same location and 71% of these not changing size. For the multiday examinations, the mean number of defects per section was higher for study 2 (2.4 +/- 1.5) than study 1 (1.7 +/- 0.9, P = .02), was lower for study 3 (1.5 +/- 1.1) than for study 2 (P < .01), and was similar for studies 1 and 3 (P = .56). Time between examinations was not associated with change in mean number of defects per section (median intrasubject correlation [r(m)] = 0.01, P = . 64) or change in spirometric values (range of r(m) values: -0.56 to -0.31; range of P values: . 09-. 71). Defects in the same location decreased with time (r(m) = -0.83, P < . 01), with 67% persisting between studies 1 and 2 (median interval, 31 days), 43% persisting between studies 2 and 3 (median interval, 41 days), and 38% persisting between studies 1 and 3 (median interval, 85 days); 46%-58% of defects remained unchanged in size. These trends were the same regardless of disease severity or medication use. CONCLUSION In asthma, focal airflow impediment within the lungs can be markedly persistent over time, regardless of disease severity or treatment.
Considerations on lung cancer management reengineering

From the health perspective, lung cancer represents a critical health concern with high rates of incidence and mortality and incurred incremental costs for care that pose a serious burden on health systems.1,2 From the social perspective, it causes productivity losses and other intangible costs that increases significantly its consideration as a public health problem. The social perspective needs to be addressed from new models of disease management.3,4
System level 5G evaluation of MIMO-GFDM in an LTE-A platform

The 5G physical layer will support applications with different requirements, such as high data rate, ultra low power consumption and low latency. Recently, there is significant interest in the design and performance of new waveforms for 5G. One of the most important candidates is the Generalised Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) waveform. The new waveform must support a smooth transition from current 4G solutions. In this paper, the performance of MIMO-GFDM with spatial multiplexing is studied in the context of LTE-A using the 3D 3GPP-ITU channel model. Additionally, results are compared with corresponding OFDM solutions. Our investigations illustrate that GFDM achieves comparable performance (Packet Error Rate (PER) and throughput), while offering additional gains such as decreased out-of-band radiation, which is a key factor for many 5G applications such as M2M and IoT.
Existing antimalarial agents and malaria-treatment strategies

In the absence of prompt and efficacious treatment, malaria patients may progress within a few hours from having minor symptoms to severe disease and death. These last years have seen the development of several artemisinin-based combinations, new treatments for severe malaria patients, and new strategies such as intermittent preventive treatment or the home-based/near-home management of malaria. The health sector is now confronted with several treatment options and strategies, in contrast with the period when chloroquine monotherapy was the standard treatment. The major challenge remains the large-scale deployment, in the most efficient way, of the tools available today, including artemisinin-based combination treatments, within health systems that remain extremely weak in malaria endemic countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Health system research, exploring new potential approaches for the large-scale implementation of these interventions, should be promoted in parallel with that on new therapeutic agents to be used in the unlucky event of the emergence and spread of artemisinin resistance. The prospects of substantially decreasing the malaria burden are brighter today than 20 – 30 years ago, but the efforts and resources committed to this purpose should be maintained over a long period.
DeepPositioning: Intelligent Fusion of Pervasive Magnetic Field and WiFi Fingerprinting for Smartphone Indoor Localization via Deep Learning

Since WiFi has been pervasively available indoor, most smartphone indoor localization systems are based on WiFi fingerprinting although they only give coarse-grained location estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based indoor fingerprinting system (called DeepPositioning), combining Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of WiFi and pervasive magnetic field to obtain richer fingerprinting. DeepPositioning includes an offline learning phase and an online serving phase. In the offline learning phase, deep learning is utilized to automatically extract rich intrinsic features from a large number of multi-class fingerprints collected using mobile phones. Experimental results demonstrate that deep learning models with the intelligent fusion of pervasive WiFi and magnetic field data can effectively improve smartphone indoor localization compared to existing approaches based on WiFi only.
Self-rated health in adolescence: A multifactorial composite

Background and aims: Self-rated health is an important health predictor, and it has only rarely been studied in adolescents. This study examined the relationships between self-rated health and a broad spectrum of structural, medical, psychological, and social variables. The association between these variables and negative health rating through to good health rating versus good to very good health rating was also compared. Methods: Analyses were based on cross-sectional data from the Young-HUNT II study in Norway. A total of 2,800 students aged 16 to 20 years participated, with a response rate of 81%. Separate logistic regression analyses for each gender were performed for a broad set of independent variables with self-rated health as the dependent variable. The effect of the variables at the negative (poor/not good) and positive (very good) ends of the scale were estimated and compared. Results: Self-rated health in adolescence was significantly associated with a broad spectrum of independent variables reflecting medical, social, and personal factors. The associations were also present in multivariate analyses controlling for the interrelations between the independent variables. The negative and positive ends of the scale were affected in much the same way. The association with general well-being was especially strong. Conclusions: Adolescents conceptualize health as a construct related to medical, psychological, social, and lifestyle factors. Positive rating of health was affected in a similar manner to negative rating. However, the absolute importance of hampering positive health may be greater because of the higher prevalence of such health ratings.
Simultaneous Feature Selection and Cluster Analysis Using Genetic Algorithm

Cluster analysis being one of the important techniques of data mining applied in several fields such as bioinformatics, social networks, computer vision, and so on. It is an unsupervised learning technique for exploring the structure of the data without class label. Many clustering algorithms have been proposed to analyze high volume of data, but very few of them evaluate the quality of the clusters due to irrelevant and inconsistent features present in the dataset. So, feature selection is an important pre-processing step in data analysis mainly for high dimensional dataset. In the paper, we select optimal subset of features and perform clusters analysis simultaneously using genetic algorithm. Basically, genetic algorithm is used to select the optimal subset of features which automatically finds optimal number of clusters sat the end of the process. Optimality of the clusters is measured by calculating various cluster validation indices. The overall performance of the method is investigated on popular UCI datasets and the experimental results are compared with Fuzzy C-Means algorithm to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method.
Output feedback tracking control of robot manipulators with model uncertainty via adaptive fuzzy logic

Many robot controllers require not only joint position measurements but also joint velocity measurements; however, most robotic systems are only equipped with joint position measurement devices. In this paper, a new output feedback tracking control approach is developed for the robot manipulators with model uncertainty. The approach suggested herein does not require velocity measurements and employs the adaptive fuzzy logic. The adaptive fuzzy logic allows us to approximate uncertain and nonlinear robot dynamics. Only one fuzzy system is used to implement the observer-controller structure of the output feedback robot system. It is shown in a rigorous manner that all the signals in a closed loop composed of a robot, an observer, and a controller are uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, computer simulation results on three-link robot manipulators are presented to show the results which indicate good position tracking performance and robustness against payload uncertainty and external disturbances.
Extracellular pH in the isolated retina of the toad in darkness and during illumination.

1. Extracellular pH (pHo) was measured in the isolated retina preparation of the toad, Bufo marinus, using H(+)‐selective microelectrodes. During superfusion with phosphate‐buffered solution (pH 7.8), which had a low buffering capacity, pHo in the inner retina was 7.0‐7.2 and there was a pHo gradient throughout the distal retina and into the bathing solution. 2. The retinal acidity appears to be due in part to the combined reactions of glycolysis and ATP hydrolysis, since anoxia greatly increased the pHo gradient, while superfusion with either glucose‐free pyruvate solution or strophanthidin decreased this gradient. 3. Maintained illumination evoked both an acidification in the proximal retina and an alkalinization in the distal retina. Blocking synaptic transmission to second‐order neurones (1.0 mM‐aspartate) decreased the acidification but had little effect on the alkalinization, consistent with the notion that the alkalinization is of receptoral origin, while the acidification is of post‐receptoral origin. 4. Retinal neurones extrude a significant amount of acid via Na(+)‐H+ exchange, since 2.0 mM‐amiloride, a blocker of Na(+)‐H+ exchange, caused a sustained alkalinization in darkness and decreased the light‐evoked changes in pHo, while 1.0 mM‐4‐acetamido‐4'‐isothiocyanatostilbene‐2.2'‐disulphonic acid (SITS), a blocker of Cl(‐)‐HCO3‐ exchange, produced a much smaller alkalinization. 5. Switching to a bicarbonate‐buffered solution having a 75 times greater buffering capacity than the phosphate‐buffered solution caused retinal pHo to become less acidic and significantly decreased the amplitude of the light‐evoked pHo changes. 6. Addition of 2.0 mM‐acetazolamide, a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, to the bicarbonate‐buffered solution increased both the pHo gradient and the light‐evoked changes in pHo. These data are consistent with the idea that carbonic anhydrase, which is concentrated in Müller (glial) cells and to a lesser extent in horizontal cells, increases the effectiveness of the bicarbonate buffer system. 7. Switching from bicarbonate‐buffered to phosphate‐buffered solutions attenuated the b‐wave of the electroretinogram, most likely by acidifying pHo. Overall, our results emphasize the importance of the bicarbonate buffer system in buffering pHo during periods of variable acid extrusion in light and in darkness.
Integrating Short History for Improving Clustering Based Network Traffic Anomaly Detection

Traffic anomaly detection is of premier importance for network administrators as anomalies have a dramatic impact on network performances, and QoS perceived by users. It is, however, a very time consuming and costly task that often requires decision from network and security experts. For making anomaly detection autonomous, many research works started investigating the use of unsupervised machine learning techniques, and in most cases traffic clustering. Identifying the clusters corresponding to anomalous traffic classes among the full set of detected clusters still remains a challenge. This is mostly due to the nature of clustering techniques that work on traffic samples of a given duration, each cluster being classified after an uncertain post processing stage. In this paper, we show how anomaly detectors can benefit from keeping a temporal track of the clustering results along time. This improvement has been added to ORUNADA (Online Real-time Unsupervised Network Anomaly detection Algorithm) that aimed at providing efficient anomaly detection on high speed networks. This new ORUNADA version - called H-ORUNADA for History-ORUNADA - is then evaluated on a new ground truth, called SynthONTS, that is currently designed to provide a modern and complete dataset with labeled anomaly. H-ORUNADA has also been implemented on Spark Streaming for being able to work on very high speed networks (targeting several hundreds of Gbits/s), and evaluated on the Google Cloud Platform.
Normal Development of Mice and Unimpaired Cell Adhesion/Cell Motility/Actin-based Cytoskeleton without Compensatory Up-regulation of Ezrin or Radixin in Moesin Gene Knockout*

Ezrin/radixin/moesin (ERM) proteins are general cross-linkers between the plasma membrane and actin filaments. Because their expression is regulated in a tissue-specific manner, each ERM protein has been proposed to have unique functions. On the other hand, experiments at the cellular level and in vitro have suggested their functional redundancy. To assess the possible unique functions of ERM proteins in vivo, the moesin gene located on the X chromosome was disrupted by gene targeting in embryonic stem cells. Male mice hemizygous for the mutation as well as homozygous females were completely devoid of moesin but developed normally and were fertile, with no obvious histological abnormalities in any of the tissues examined. In the tissues of the mutant mice, moesin completely disappeared without affecting the expression levels or subcellular distribution of ezrin and radixin. Also, in platelets, fibroblasts, and mast cells isolated from moesin-deficient mice, targeted disruption of the moesin gene did not affect their ERM-dependent functions, i.e. platelet aggregation, stress fiber/focal contact formation of fibroblasts, and microvillar formation of mast cells, without compensatory up-regulation of ezrin or radixin. These findings favor the notion that ERM proteins are functionally redundant at the cellular as well as the whole body level.