Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An integrated molecular landscape implicates the regulation of dendritic spine formation through insulin-related signalling in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

BACKGROUND Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood and is characterized by obsessions (recurrent, intrusive, persistent thoughts, impulses and/or ideas that often cause anxiety or distress) and compulsions (ritualized and stereotypic behaviours or mental acts that are often performed to relieve anxiety or distress associated with obsessions). Although OCD is a heritable disorder, its complex molecular etiology is poorly understood. METHODS We combined enrichment analyses and an elaborate literature review of the top-ranked genes emerging from the 2 published genome-wide association studies of OCD and candidate genes implicated through other evidence in order to identify biological processes that, when dysregulated, increase the risk for OCD. RESULTS The resulting molecular protein landscape was enriched for proteins involved in regulating postsynaptic dendritic spine formation - and hence synaptic plasticity - through insulin-dependent molecular signalling cascades. LIMITATIONS This study is a first attempt to integrate molecuar information from different sources in order to identify biological mechanisms underlying OCD etiology. Our findings are constrained by the limited information from hypothesis-free studies and the incompleteness and existing limitations of the OCD literature and the gene function annotations of gene enrichment tools. As this study was solely based on in silico analyses, experimental validation of the provided hypotheses is warranted. CONCLUSION Our work suggests a key role for insulin and insulin-related signalling in OCD etiology and - if confirmed by independent studies - could eventually pave the way for the development of novel OCD treatments.
Integrated uncooled infrared detector imaging arrays

The authors describe a new type of infrared (IR) focal plane consisting of a 2-D array of microminiature bolometers (microbolometers) fabricated, complete with readout electronics, as a monolithic silicon chip. These focal planes require no cooling for sensitive detection of IR radiation. The authors report high-quality IR imaging obtained with such focal planes. <<ETX>>
Dendritic Cell Migration Toward CCL21 Gradient Requires Functional Cx43

Dendritic cells (DCs) travel through lymphatic vessels to transport antigens and present them to T cells in lymph nodes. DCs move directionally toward lymphatics by virtue of their CCR7 and a CCL21 chemotactic gradient. We evaluated in vivo and in bone marrow-derived dendritic cells (BMDCs) whether the gap junction protein Cx43 contributes to CCL21/CCR7-dependent DC migration in wild-type (WT) mice, heterozygous (Cx43+/−) mice and mice expressing a truncated form of Cx43 lacking its regulatory C-terminus (Cx43K258/−). In a model of flank skin inflammation, we found that the recruitment of myeloid DCs (mDCs) to skin draining lymph nodes was reduced in Cx43K258/− mice as compared to WT and Cx43+/− mice. In addition, the migration of Cx43K258/− BMDCs toward CCL21 was abolished in an in vitro chemotactic assay while it was only reduced in Cx43+/− cells. Both mutant genotypes showed defects in the directionality of BMDC migration as compared to WT BMDCs. No difference was found between the three populations of BMDCs in terms of expression of surface markers (CD11c, CD86, CD80, CD40, MHC-II, and CCR7) after differentiation and TLR activation. Finally, examination of the CCR7-induced signaling pathways in BMDCs revealed normal receptor-induced mobilization of intracellular Ca2+. These results demonstrate that full expression of an intact Cx43 is critical to the directionality and rate of DC migration, which may be amenable to regulation of the immune response.
Characteristics and Factors Associated with Mortality in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis : An Experience from a Tertiary Care Center in Pakistan

Introduction: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a chronic, progressive interstitial lung disease (ILD) that predominantly affects older adults . IPF has the highest mortality burden of all ILDs. Data on mortality in patients with IPF is limited in developing countries. Objectives: To identify factors associated with mortality in patients with IPF at a tertiary care center in Pakistan. Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) in Karachi, Pakistan from January 2005 to December 2015. Patients were assessed for smoking status, clinical onset of disease, pulmonary hypertension, disease severity based on spirometry, and hypoxemia. Results: A total of 239 cases were reviewed, of which 103 were nonsurvivors. A total of 45 (18%) were current smokers and 71 (29.7%) were ex smokers. Smoking was more common in non-survivors (56.3% p=<0.01). Pulmonary hypertension was present in 18.8% of patients. 95.4% of patients who had received pirfenidone treatment were alive at the time of study. On multivariate analysis, pirfenidone treatment (OR 0.03; 95% CI 0.01 to 0.08), current smoking (OR 2.60; 95% CI 1.04 to 6.58), age older than 60 years (OR 2.63; 95% CI 1.04 to 6.58) and hypoxemia (OR 3.29; 95% CI 1.58 to 6.84) were the factors associated with mortality. Conclusion: Smoking, age greater than 60 years, and hypoxemia were identified as factors that increased the odds of mortality in IPF patients, whereas pirfenidone was found to lower the odds of mortality.
NEW ALUMINUM LITHIUM ALLOYS FOR AEROSPACE APPLICATIONS

This paper discusses two aluminum-lithium alloys for aerospace applications, 2099 and 2199, including the relationship between their alloying elements and thermal-mechanical processing, to the alloy’s properties. The paper also includes selected properties of these alloys in sheet, plate and extrusion forms. Finally, a trade study conducted between Alcoa and Bombardier using these alloys is discussed which highlights the weight and performance benefits to an aircraft when alloys with optimized properties are selected for specific aircraft applications.
Active tracking movements of flexion and extension on the elbow joint for an initial prototype of EMG-driven assistant exoskeleton

Various exoskeletons have been developed for the assistance of upper and lower limbs rehabilitation, however, therapists and doctors have pointed out that passive-repeating motions of limbs is ineffective in terms of neurological recovery. To improve the neurological recovery of human motor control, active-assisted encouragement as therapist and doctors manually provided should also be simulated with help of exoskeleton targeting for rehabilitative purpose. In this paper, a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) robotic joint to mimic elbow movements is developed and EMG signals are collected using as a bio-feedback signal. A pair of muscles including biceps and triceps that involved in flexion and extension on the elbow joint are selected, acquisition and processing of EMG signals is then achieved by designed hardware filtering and proposed software algorithms. By analysis of the resultant EMG signals, the intentions of flexion and extension movements are quantitatively presented. Online control commands for the exoskeleton are then spontaneously produced. A close-loop control with EMG-driven in real time is applied on an initial prototype of human-machine interface (HMI) for an active assistance using the exoskeleton. Initial applications on the experimental prototype have proved the effectiveness of the proposed active tracking method that has successfully tracking effort that bridge the wearer and the wearable exoskeleton together.
License plate detection using convolutional neural network

This paper proposes a robust method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) for license plate detection. Our system is composed of 3 modules. The first module applies CNN to the vehicle image to generate convolutional feature maps. The second module uses a single-scale sliding-window detector on convolutional feature maps to search for a subwindow containing the complete license plate. The final module uses a regression network to accurately locate the license plate. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method can detect various types of license plates with high accuracy and relatively short running time.
Towards robust and optimal image stitching for pavement crack inspection and mapping

Crack detection on pavement is a vital task for road maintenance. To create a composite global view of a large pavement span, an image sequence is aligned computationally to create a continuous mosaic in this paper. The pavement image stitching is customarily solved by estimating a projective homography model that is justified when the scene is planar. However, on one hand, such condition is easily violated in practice since the pavement is often uneven and with potholes. On the other hand, the basic on which these approaches rely is sufficient matched features between images, that may be unable to meet. To this end, we propose a robust and optimal image stitching algorithm for pavement crack inspection and mapping. Firstly, point and crack pixel featuers are extracted, and a crack region alignment method is proposed to make up the situation where the matched point features are less. Then, a multilayer and multi-scale homography model is developed to deal with the problem that the scene is not a complete planar. Finally, an optimization step based on local bundle adjustment is adopted to optimally fulfil the image sequence stitching. We present convincing results to show that our method can achieve accurate stitching results from complex input pavement images. Furthermore, the proposed method can improve the image stitching performance compared with existing popular technique.
A Brief Overview of Atom Probe Tomography Research

Atom probe tomography (APT) stems from the field-ion microscope (Müller, 1956) equipped with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer developed by Erwin Müller and his coworkers in 1967 to 1968 (Müller et al., 1968). The technique is henceforth about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Field ion microscopy makes use of an intense electric field, in the rage of 10 Vm, to ionize rare gas atoms in the vicinity of the specimen surface. The specimen is shaped as a sharp needle, with a radius of curvature R in the range of 30 to 200 nm, which enables the generation of electric fields of the appropriate magnitude by biasing the specimen to a few kilovolts (the field is proportional to V/R). The specimen is maintained at low temperature (20~80 K) to prevent surface migration and improve the control over the field evaporation process, and the analysis takes place in ultra-high vacuum conditions (≈10 Pa), prior to the introduction of the imaging gas (≈10 Pa). The beams of ions generated near the surface are projected, under the effect of the very intense electric field, onto a screen and the image formed reveals the topography of the specimen surface down to the atomic-level (Müller & Bahadur, 1956), allowing to image lattice defects (Beavan et al., 1971; Dagan et al., 2015; Wilde et al., 2000) as well as secondary phases (Faulkner & Ralph, 1972). In atom probe experiments, no imaging gas is used, and it is the atoms from the specimen itself that are successively removed in the form of ions. The prevalent theory of field evaporation from metal surfaces involves atoms escaping while their charge is progressively drained back into the surface (Forbes, 1995), and as the singly-charged ion is accelerated away from the surface, it can undergo one or more successive electricfield-induced ionization (Kingham, 1982). In order to achieve time-control of the field evaporation process, high-voltage (Müller et al., 1968) or laser pulses (Bunton et al., 2007; Gault et al., 2006; Kellogg & Tsong, 1980) are superimposed to a direct current high voltage (VDC) field, as depicted in Fig. 1, to trigger the departure of the ions. This, in turns, allows for elemental identification of each evaporated ion by timeof-flight mass spectrometry. The emission of the ions takes place during the pulse, and in the case of the voltage-pulsed instrument, and although the pulse is in the nanosecond time range, ions are emitted with a range of energies, that cause a spread of the times-of-flight for ions of a single element, which limit the mass resolving power of the technique.
Domain Adaptation in MT Using Titles in Wikipedia as a Parallel Corpus: Resources and Evaluation

This paper presents how an state-of-the-art SMT system is enriched by using an extra in-domain parallel corpora extracted from Wikipedia. We collect corpora from parallel titles and from parallel fragments in comparable articles from Wikipedia. We carried out an evaluation with a double objective: evaluating the quality of the extracted data and evaluating the improvement due to the domain-adaptation. We think this can be very useful for languages with limited amount of parallel corpora, where in-domain data is crucial to improve the performance of MT sytems. The experiments on the Spanish-English language pair improve a baseline trained with the Europarl corpus in more than 2 points of BLEU when translating in the Computer Science domain.
Detection of Long Chain Bio-Polymers using Atomic Force Microscopy

The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is demonstrated as a detector for long chain polymers and soft organics on mineral surfaces. Long chain (linear) polymers have been proposed as a general bio-markers [1-3]. The AFM provides very sensitive detection of polymeric strands using the force spectroscopy mode of operation [4]. In this mode, the force is measured as the AFM tip makes intermittent contact with a polymeric sample. As polymer strands are pulled from the surface onto the AFM tip, a characteristic detachment signal is measured in the force-distance plot. AFM force spectroscopy provides polymer length, folding information and is capable detecting single molecules. AFM force spectroscopy of synthetic proteins, fossils surfaces and algae on mineral surfaces are presented as test examples. AFM instruments have flown on two space missions, the Phoenix MECA experiment and the Rosetta MIDAS experiment [5,6]. In addition to providing high resolution imaging, this work demonstrates a powerful new application of the AFM that is relevant to astrobiology missions.
Exploring feature spaces with svd and unlabeled data for Word Sense Disambiguation

Current Word Sense Disambiguation systems suffer from the lack of hand-tagged data, as well as performance degradation when moving to other domains. In this paper we explore three different improvements to state-of-the-art systems: 1) using Singular Value Decomposition in order to find correlations among features, trying to deal with sparsity, 2) using unlabeled data from a corpus related to the evaluation corpus, and 3) splitting the feature space into smaller, more coherent, sets. Each of the proposals improves the results, and properly combined they achieve the best results to date for the Senseval 3 lexical sample dataset. The analysis of the results provides further insights and possibilities for the future.
Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance in systemic transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR)

Abstract Objective: To identify the prevalence of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) in patients with transthyretin (ATTR) amyloidosis. Patients and methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of patients with biopsy-proven ATTRwt (wild-type transthyretin amyloid protein) and genopositive ATTR V122I (valine-to-isoleucine substitution at position 122 of the TTR gene) amyloidosis evaluated at the Amyloidosis Center at Boston University and Boston Medical Center between 1 January 2003 and 31 December 2016. Results: There were a total of 226 patients with ATTRwt and ATTR V122I amyloidosis evaluated during the specified time frame with 155 and 71 patients in each cohort, respectively. Those with complete medical records, 140 patients with ATTRwt and 57 V1221 ATTRm subjects, were included in the analyses. Fifty-five patients (39%) in the ATTRwt cohort and 28 patients (49%) in the ATTR V122I cohort had an MGUS, as indicated by an abnormality in the serum-free light-chain ratio and/or serum immunofixation electrophoresis. Conclusion: These data confirm the high prevalence of coexistent MGUS with ATTR amyloidosis in this patient population, with an MGUS rate that is higher than the general population. These findings also highlight the importance of a thorough diagnostic evaluation in patients with amyloidosis to determine the precursor protein, as the clinical course and treatment of AL (light-chain amyloid protein) and ATTR amyloidosis are distinct.
Aberrant cortical excitability reflects the loss of hand dexterity in musician's dystonia

Dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by abnormalities at multifaceted aspects of motor dexterity and neural functions. Evidence bridging between pathophysiology and movement abnormalities is limited. A novel finding was that in focal task‐specific dystonia (FTSD), an aberrantly reduced inhibition at the motor cortex was related to the temporal imprecision of the dexterous finger movements, whereas an elevated facilitation was associated with an abnormally sluggish transition of finger movements from flexion to extension. We newly identified two sets of behavioural–physiological covariations as hallmarks of hand FTSD, which is clinically significant because these findings provide novel evidence connecting distinct types of malfunctions within the motor cortex at rest with distinct aspects of motor dexterity degradation in FTSD patients.
Motion adaptive video coding scheme for time‐varying network

Adaptive video coding algorithms can encode a video stream dynamically on the basis of the amount of bandwidth available in a network. In this paper, a novel approach for adaptive video coding based on look‐up tables has been proposed. On the basis of the network conditions, the proposed codec estimates quantization parameter (QP) and also the spatial resolution for a group of pictures from the look‐up table. Then, QP for each frame is estimated on the basis of the motion content in each frame. More motion leads to more burden of bits while encoding the motion vectors. Also, quantization noise is less prominent in high‐motioned frames than frames possessing low motion information because of the temporal masking phenomenon of the human eyes. So, the main trick of the proposed scheme is to assign higher QP to the frames having higher motion than those having less motion. This method also reduces the requirement of excess bits for encoding of motion vectors having higher motion content. Additionally, QP is adjusted on the basis of the buffer availability in order to avoid bit loss error. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed codec. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
TCR-like antibody drug conjugates mediate killing of tumor cells with low peptide/HLA targets

ABSTRACT The currently marketed antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) destabilize microtubule assembly in cancer cells and initiate apoptosis in patients. However, few tumor antigens (TA) are expressed at high densities on cancer lesions, potentially minimizing the therapeutic index of current ADC regimens. The peptide/human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex can be specifically targeted by therapeutic antibodies (designated T cell receptor [TCR]-like antibodies) and adequately distinguish malignant cells, but has not been the focus of ADC development. We analyzed the killing potential of TCR-like ADCs when cross-linked to the DNA alkylating compound duocarmycin. Our data comprise proof-of-principle results that TCR-like ADCs mediate potent tumor cytotoxicity, particularly under common scenarios of low TA/HLA density, and support their continued development alongside agents that disrupt DNA replication. Additionally, TCR-like antibody ligand binding appears to play an important role in ADC functionality and should be addressed during therapy development to avoid binding patterns that negate ADC killing efficacy.
Effect of Solvent Exposure on the Filtration Performance of Electrostatically Charged Polypropylene Filter Media

Solvent-induced performance deterioration in corona charged polypropylene electret filter media was studied. Electret media, exposed to isopropanol (IPA) in the liquid phase, exhibited reduced filtration efficiency with negligible changes in the pressure drop across the media. Scanning electron microscopy imaging indicated no observable morphological changes after IPA exposure. Solvent-induced efficiency deterioration of electret filter media was hypothesized to originate from charge deterioration rather than charge masking. The charge of the individual fibers in filter media was characterized using electrostatic force microscopy (EFM). EFM investigation produced evidence that exposure to IPA in the liquid phase affected the electrostatic charges on fibers. Exposure to organic solvents such as xylene, toluene, and ethyl benzene has been reported to increase charge mobility in polypropylene fibers, thereby reducing the electrostatic charge and the ability of the fibers in the electret filter media to capture particulates.
Obstacle-guided informed planning towards robot navigation in cluttered environments

Informed sampling, a sampling method that focuses the search by sampling the subset of states that potentially improve the current solution, has been adopted in path-planning algorithms like Informed RRT∗ [1] and its successor, Batch Informed Trees (BIT∗) [2], for speeding up the convergence and improving the quality of solution. In this paper, we consider the problem of path planning in cluttered environments containing narrow passages. We build as an extension to BIT∗ our obstacle-guided sampling and biasing strategy. With a neighbourhood sampling step, we embed obstacle-based Gaussian sampling in the underlying uniform sampling, which gives rise to the sample density in difficult-to-sample homotopy classes. The local obstacle information is implicitly extracted with simple heuristics to recognize “navigators” that belong to narrow passages, and to inform the planner for subsequent sample biasing, so that the convergence of the solution towards optimum can be locally accelerated leveraging obstacle information. Our strategy combines the exploratory advantage of uniform informed sampling and the exploitative feature of obstacle-based Gaussian sampling, while retaining the asymptotic sample coverage of the free space to search for the global optimal solution. We apply such customization of the BIT∗ algorithm to robot navigation path planning instances and demonstrate hte improved planning efficiency in 2D and 3D cluttered environments with narrow passages.