Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical Predictors of 30-day Cardiac Events in Patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome at a Community Hospital

Objective We sought to determine predictors of coronary events (cardiac death, acute myocardial infarction, and urgent revascularization) within 30 days after admission. Methods We prospectively collected data on 400 patients admitted through our emergency room for unstable angina and acute coronary syndromes. Patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and those who required thrombolysis were excluded. Results Of 383 patients who were eligible, 120 patients had coronary events within 30 days. Statistically significant variables associated with coronary events were advanced age, male sex, family history of premature coronary artery disease (CAD), diabetes mellitus, tobacco abuse, prior congestive heart failure, prior myocardial infarction, and history of CAD. Symptoms at presentation associated with cardiac events were typical angina and shortness of breath. Objective measures of ischemia associated with cardiac events were elevated troponin T, elevated creatine kinase MB, and ischemic electrocardiographic changes. Using forward stepwise regression analysis, we generated a model to predict 30-day major adverse cardiac events. The strongest predicting variable was serum troponin T (accounting for 33% of predicting r2, P < 0.001) followed by typical angina (r2 increasing to 37%), ischemic electrocardiographic changes (40%), prior CAD (42%), family history of premature CAD (44%), shortness of breath (46%), and positive creatine kinase MB (48%). The positive predictive power of the complete model was r2 = 48%, P < 0.001. Conclusion Our model incorporating elements from the patient's demographic, medical history, presentation, and ischemic assessment identified 48% of patients presenting with unstable angina and acute coronary syndromes who will suffer a major adverse cardiac event within 30 days of admission. Although the strongest predictor was identified as serum troponin T, other clinical criteria offered improvement in our predictive abilities. Therefore, good initial clinical evaluation in addition to simple tests such as serum cardiac markers and electrocardiography are valuable in risk stratification of patients presenting with acute coronary syndromes and cardiac chest pain. Additional testing may be necessary to improve the positive predictive value of the model. Cardiac enzymes and electrocardiographic changes have the highest negative predictive value for occurrence of major adverse cardiac events. Identification of high-risk patients is essential to direct resources toward these patients and to avoid unnecessary costs and risk to the low-risk population.
Power-aware scheduling for makespan and flow

We consider offline scheduling algorithms that incorporate speed scaling to address the bicriteria problem of minimizing energy consumption and a scheduling metric. For makespan, we give a linear-time algorithm to compute all non-dominated solutions for the general uniprocessor problem and a fast arbitrarily-good approximation for multiprocessor problems when every job requires the same amount of work. We also show that the multiprocessor problem becomes NP-hard when jobs can require different amounts of work.For total flow, we show that the optimal flow corresponding to a particular energy budget cannot be exactly computed on a machine supporting exact real arithmetic, including the extraction of roots. This hardness result holds even when scheduling equal-work jobs on a uniprocessor. We do, however, extend previous work by Pruhs et al. to give an arbitrarily-good approximation for scheduling equal-work jobs on a multiprocessor.
Extracting Interaction-Based Stateful Behavior in Rich Internet Applications

Although asynchronous technologies such as Ajax make Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) responsive, they can result in unexpected behavior due to nondeterministic client-side processing and asynchronous communication. One difficulty in understanding such erroneous behavior lies in the unpredictable contexts of the running system. Dynamic behavior analysis techniques do not help to verify the correctness of certain "blind spots" in the execution path. In this work, we present a static approach for extracting all possible state transitions described in source code from the RIAs. Our approach is based on the assumption that user, server and self interactions with the RIAs can change the states of the application. Our method consists of three steps: (i) annotating interactions and extracting their controls in source code (ii) abstracting a call graph to extract relationships among the interactions and (iii) refining the relationships with interaction controls By extracting the state machines of test scenarios of the correct and wrong behavior, it can help developers to pinpoint the statements in the source code that lead to the erroneous behavior. Our approach has been evaluated against a few experimental cases and we conclude that it can extract comprehensible state machines in a reasonable time.
Sinonasal T-Cell Expression of Cytotoxic Mediators Granzyme B and Perforin is Reduced in Patients with Chronic Rhinosinusitis

Background CD8+ T cells and natural killer (NK) cells are cytotoxic cells that use granzyme B (GrB) and perforin. Defective cytotoxic function is known to play a role in dysregulated immune response as seen in chronic sinusitis, also referred to as chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS). However, to our knowledge, in the United States, neither GrB or perforin expression has been reported in patients with CRS. Objective The aim of this study was to investigate sinonasal cytotoxic cells, their mediators, and cell-specific distribution of these mediators in patients with CRS with nasal polyp (CRSwNP) and in patients with CRS without nasal polyp (CRSsNP). Methods Blood and sinus tissue samples were taken from patients with CRSsNP (n = 8) and CRSwNP (n = 8) at the time of surgery. Control subjects (n = 8) underwent surgery for cerebrospinal fluid leak repair or to remove non-hormone-secreting pituitary tumors. The cells were analyzed via flow cytometry by using CD8 expression to identify cytotoxic T cells and CD56 expression to identify NK cells. Intracellular GrB and perforin expression were analyzed with flow cytometry. Results We observed no significant differences in plasma or peripheral blood immune cell numbers or specific levels of GrB or perforin among the groups. In the sinonasal mucosa of the patients with CRSsNP and the patients with CRSwNP, there was a significant decrease in GrB and perforin levels (p <0.05) despite similar or increased numbers of cytotoxic cells when compared with the controls. The overall decrease in GrB and perforin in the sinonasal mucosa of the patients with CRSsNP and the patients with CRSwNP was due to decreased T cell production. There was no difference in total NK cell count or expression of perforin or GrB among all the groups. Conclusion Total levels of sinonasal GrB and perforin were decreased in the sinonasal mucosa of both the patients with CRSwNP and the patients with CRSsNP compared with the controls, whereas sinonasal CD8+ T cells, (but not NK cells,), intracellular stores of GrB and perforin were reduced in the patients with CRSwNP compared with the controls.
Incremental Redundancy Cooperative Coding for Wireless Networks: Cooperative Diversity, Coding, and Transmission Energy Gains

We study an incremental redundancy (IR) cooperative coding scheme for wireless networks. To exploit the distributed spatial diversity we propose a cluster-based collaborating strategy for a quasi-static Rayleigh-fading channel model. Our scheme allows for enhancing the reliability performance of a direct communication over a single hop. The collaborative cluster consists of M - 1 nodes between the sender and the destination. The transmitted message is encoded using a mother code which is partitioned into M blocks each assigned to one of M transmission slots. In the first slot, the sender broadcasts its information by transmitting the first block, and its helpers attempt to decode this message. In the remaining slots, each of the next M - 1 blocks is sent either through a helper which has successfully decoded the message or directly by the sender where a dynamic schedule is based on the ACK-based feedback from the cluster. By employing powerful good codes including turbo, low-density parity-check (LDPC), and repeat-accumulate (RA) codes, our approach illustrates the benefit of collaboration through not only a cooperation diversity gain but also a coding advantage. The basis of our error rate performance analysis is based on a derived code threshold for the Bhattacharyya distance which describes the behavior of good codes. The new simple code threshold is based on the modified Shulman-Feder bound and the relationship between the Bhattacharyya parameter and the channel capacity for an arbitrary binary-input symmetric-output memoryless channel. An average frame-error rate (FER) upper bound and its asymptotic (in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)) version are derived as a function of the average fading channel SNRs and the code threshold. Based on the asymptotic bound, we investigate both the diversity, the coding, and the transmission energy gain in the high and moderate SNR regimes for three different scenarios: transmitter clustering, receiver clustering, and cluster hopping. We observe that the energy saving of the IR cooperative coding scheme is universal for all good code families in the sense that the gain does not depend on the sender-to-destination distance and the code threshold.
On the Notion of Cognition

We discuss philosophical issues concerning the notion of cognition basing ourselves in experimental results in cognitive sciences, especially in computer simulations of cognitive systems. There have been debates on the "proper" approach for studying cognition, but we have realized that all approaches can be in theory equivalent. Different approaches model different properties of cognitive systems from different perspectives, so we can only learn from all of them. We also integrate ideas from several perspectives for enhancing the notion of cognition, such that it can contain other definitions of cognition as special cases. This allows us to propose a simple classification of different types of cognition.
Resource Allocation for Delay Differentiated Traffic in Multiuser OFDM Systems

Most existing work on adaptive allocation of sub- carriers and power in multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems has focused on homogeneous traffic consisting solely of either delay-constrained data (guaranteed service) or non-delay-constrained data (best-effort service). In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem in a heterogeneous multiuser OFDM system with both delay-constrained (DC) and non-delay-constrained (NDC) traffic. The objective is to maximize the sum-rate of all the users with NDC traffic while maintaining guaranteed rates for the users with DC traffic under a total transmit power constraint. Through our analysis we show that the optimal power allocation over subcarriers follows a multi-level water-filling principle; moreover, the valid candidates competing for each subcarrier include only one NDC user but all DC users. By converting this combinatorial problem with exponential complexity into a convex problem or showing that it can be solved in the dual domain, efficient iterative algorithms are proposed to find the optimal solutions. To further reduce the computational cost, a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm is also developed. Numerical studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of service outage probability, achievable transmission rate pairs for DC and NDC traffic, and multiuser diversity.
Integrated 60-GHz LTCC circularly polarized antenna array

A 60-GHz wideband circular polarized (CP) patch array of 4×4 elements is designed and fabricated in low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) technology. By applying a strip line sequential rotation feeding scheme this array exhibits wide impedance bandwidth (VSWR<2) and 3-dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth, both over 8 GHz. In addition, it exhibits a peak gain of 16.8 dBi and a beam-shaped pattern with a 3-dB beam width of 20º. With a grounded co-planar waveguide (GCPW) to strip line (SL) transition added to facilitate the testing, the array performance is not degraded except of a 0.6-dB peak gain penalty. The fabricated antenna sample measures 13×18.7×1.4 mm3. The wireless test is finally conducted to demonstrate the CP characteristic and wide impedance bandwidth over 8 GHz (VSWR<2) of this antenna.
The Linguistic DS: Linguisitic Description in MPEG-7

MPEG-7 (Moving Picture Experts Group Phase 7) is an XML-based international standard on semantic description of multimedia content. This document discusses the Linguistic DS and related tools. The linguistic DS is a tool, based on the GDA tag set (this http URL), for semantic annotation of linguistic data in or associated with multimedia content. The current document text reflects `Study of FPDAM - MPEG-7 MDS Extensions' issued in March 2003, and not most part of MPEG-7 MDS, for which the readers are referred to the first version of MPEG-7 MDS document available from ISO (this http URL). Without that reference, however, this document should be mostly intelligible to those who are familiar with XML and linguistic theories. Comments are welcome and will be considered in the standardization process.
The oxidative stress in cataract patients.

BACKGROUND The recent studies on cataract formation focus on the primary role of the systemic oxidative stress which is generated outside the lens. Our research was directed to assess the oxidative stress by measuring the lipid peroxidation products in the form of the Thiobarbituric Acid Reactive Substances (TBARS) and the antioxidant enzyme levels in the blood. The antioxidant therapy may have a role to play in delaying the onset and the progression of age related cataracts. MATERIAL AND METHOD This was a case control study. It comprised of 100 age matched subjects (50 with cataracts and 50 controls) with their ages ranging from 45- 75 years. Oxidative stresses such as the Thiobarbituric Acid Reactive Substances (TBARS) and the antioxidant enzymes, Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) and Glutathione Peroxidase( GPX ) were investigated in all the patients and the controls. RESULTS Significantly increased levels of serum lipid peroxide in the form of Malondialdehyde (MDA) (p<0.001) were observed in the cataract patients as compared to the controls. Significantly decreased blood levels of SOD and GPX were observed in all the patients. CONCLUSION In the present study, it was concluded that oxidative stress plays an important role in the onset and the progression of cataracts. The pro-oxidant i.e. serum malondialdehyde (MDA) levels were increased in the cataract patients. The blood levels of the enzymatic anti-oxidants, SOD and GPX were decreased. The plasma TBARS can be used as biomarkers of the degeneration in the lens.
Random variational-like inclusion and random proximal operator equation for random fuzzy mappings in Banach spaces

In this paper, we introduce and study a random variational-like inclusion and its corresponding random proximal operator equation for random fuzzy mappings. It is established that the random variational-like inclusion problem for random fuzzy mappings is equivalent to a random fixed point problem. We also establish a relationship between random variational-like inclusion and random proximal operator equation for random fuzzy mappings. This equivalence is used to define an iterative algorithm for solving random proximal operator equation for random fuzzy mappings. Through an example, we show that the random Wardrop equilibrium problem is a special case of the random variational-like inclusion problem for random fuzzy mappings.
Nonlinear spectral shifts in multimode photonic-crystal fibers induced by femtosecond Cr:Forsterite oscillator

Intermodally phase-matched third harmonic generation (THG) in a multimode microstructured fiber (PCF) accompanied by nonlinear spectral shifts both for fundamental and for third harmonic (TH) was observed. Femtosecond pulses of a Cr:Forsterite laser oscillator with the central wavelength of 1240 nm were used to excite several PCF samples. This wavelength plays important role for actual optical communication systems being in close proximity to the 1.3 μm window. Depending on the coupling geometry, two different high-order third harmonic fiber modes were observed accompanied by spectral shifts in IR. Instead of broadband radiation as in the IR, isolated peaks were generated in the TH region of the spectrum. By the rotation of input polarization, changes in the THG mode patterns were observed and a detailed analysis revealed the intensity and a polarization effects on the sampled spectra. Observed phenomena are interpreted by numerical calculations of modal dispersion properties for the examined PCF. Simulation results confirm the narrow band multi-peak character of the THG radiation and a good agreement was found between experimental and theoretical peak positions. This work is aimed to extend the knowledge about the spectral control of third harmonic signal by tailoring parameters of the fiber.
Treatment of human African trypanosomiasis.

Human African trypanosomiasis presents a health challenge to the international community -- a challenge both to poor countries and to rich countries (where there is often a shocking surfeit of health resources). In the year 2000, human African trypanosomiasis is on the increase, even though we know how to tackle it since the tsetse fly, which transmits the trypanosomes that cause the disease, can survive only in tropical Africa and there is no human-to-human transmission. Although control and perhaps eradication of the disease are therefore theoretically possible, its incidence is on the rise despite having been well under control 50 years ago. The emergence of independent nations, political upheaval, the frequent state of insecurity that results, and the consequent disappearance of the health monitoring systems established during the colonial era, are some of the factors behind this. To these must be added the growing poverty of the countries affected by the disease. A further complication has been the need to take immediate action to deal with human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), while there has been a background of marked demographic growth in the countries concerned. Over and above all this there is, however, a much more basic reason: the absence of a non-toxic treatment that is easily administered, reasonably priced, and effective at every stage of the disease, especially the neurological. Suramin and pentamidine are effective drugs during the initial phase of the disease but are almost totally ineffective in the neurological phase, since they are not able to cross the blood-brain barrier. Melarsoprol is effective against all stages of the disease but is particularly so against the neurological and is consequently kept in reserve for this purpose; it is also toxic and expensive (ca US$ 100 per patient). Elfornithine is an alternative to melarsoprol and is active against all stages of the disease, but has the great advantage of being less toxic; however, it is prohibitively expensive (ca US$ 700 per patient) and recipients have to be hospitalized and given the drug by perfusion for at least two weeks. With an effort from wealthy countries, these financial considerations could be overcome, although the necessary medical facilities are rarely to be found outside of towns in the areas where the patients with sleeping sickness live. The challenge presented by human African trypanosomiasis must be taken up by developed countries. The disease can be curtailed because it is geographically limited. Smallpox has been eradicated; and poliomyelitis is on the way to elimination thanks to vaccination strategies that have been pursued despite political upheavals, wars and other tragedies. A political willingness, in particular the release of funds, has facilitated these successes. Trypanosomiasis, whose very existence preserves underdevelopment, could enjoy a similar fate. …
Value of Cyfra 21-1, TPA, and SCC-Ag in predicting extracervical disease and prognosis in cervical cancer.

BACKGROUND The value of serum Cyfra 21-1 level was compared with tissue polypeptide antigen (TPA), and squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCC-Ag) in squamous cell cervical cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Pre- and post-treatment serum levels of patients were compared with lymph node status, parametrial involvement, and prognostic data. RESULTS Pretreatment serum levels of each marker were significantly related to tumor stage, tumor size and the presence of either lymph node metastases or parametrial involvement. The clinical performance of each marker in predicting extracervical disease at initial diagnosis appeared to be similar. None of these tests achieved the conditions of a perfect test. Pretreatment serum levels of each marker showed prognostic value in the univariate analysis. The clinical performance of post-treatment SCC-Ag levels in predicting complete remission versus the presence of tumor during follow-up was better than Cyfra 21-1 or TPA. CONCLUSION SCC-Ag appears to be more useful than Cyfra 21-1 for monitoring patients with cervical cancer.
Optimal design of metal/elastomer hybrid lattices for combined stiffness and damping

A number of advanced engineering systems require structures that are stiff and strong, while being capable of efficiently damping vibrations. These conflicting requirements are typically addressed by connecting two components, one providing stiffness and strength and the other offering an energy loss mechanism. Combining these opposing functions in a single architected material (possibly hybrid) could result in significant weight savings. This research explores the design space of solid elastomeric truss lattice materials coated with metallic films, and aims at identifying the lattice architecture that optimizes the combination of stiffness, strength and vibration damping.
Kinetics of Eotaxin Generation and Its Relationship to Eosinophil Accumulation in Allergic Airways Disease: Analysis in a Guinea Pig Model In Vivo

Challenge of the airways of sensitized guinea pigs with aerosolized ovalbumin resulted in an early phase of microvascular protein leakage and a delayed phase of eosinophil accumulation in the airway lumen, as measured using bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL). Immunoreactive eotaxin levels rose in airway tissue and BAL fluid to a peak at 6 h falling to low levels by 12 h. Eosinophil numbers in the tissue correlated with eotaxin levels until 6 h but eosinophils persisted until the last measurement time point at 24 h. In contrast, few eosinophils appeared in BAL over the first 12 h, major trafficking through the airway epithelium occurring at 12–24 h when eotaxin levels were low. Constitutive eotaxin was present in BAL fluid. Both constitutive and allergen-induced eosinophil chemoattractant activity in BAL fluid was neutralized by an antibody to eotaxin. Allergen-induced eotaxin appeared to be mainly in airway epithelium and macrophages, as detected by immunostaining. Allergen challenge of the lung resulted in a rapid release of bone marrow eosinophils into the blood. An antibody to IL-5 suppressed bone marrow eosinophil release and lung eosinophilia, without affecting lung eotaxin levels. Thus, IL-5 and eotaxin appear to cooperate in mediating a rapid transfer of eosinophils from the bone marrow to the lung in response to allergen challenge.