Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of a real-time hand gesture recognition wristband based on sEMG and IMU sensing

Human computer interaction is becoming more integrated in daily life with the proliferation of mobile devices and virtual reality technology. Hand gesture recognition is a potentially promising mechanism to facilitate human computer interaction, however wrist-mounted surface electromyography (sEMG) hand gesture classification is particularly challenging given the relatively small sEMG signals as compared to traditional forearm-based sEMG sensing. This paper introduces the development of a wristband for detecting eight air gestures and four surface gestures at two different force levels through sEMG and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor fusion. To validate the wrist-worn device, ten healthy subjects performed hand gesture recognition experiments resulting in a total average recognition rate of 92.6% for air gestures and 88.8% for surface gestures. This paper demonstrates the potential of wrist-worn devices for accurate hand gesture recognition applications.
Zoonotic and Non-Zoonotic Diseases in Relation to Human Personality and Societal Values: Support for the Parasite-Stress Model

The parasite-stress model of human sociality proposes that humans' ontogenetic experiences with infectious diseases as well as their evolutionary historical interactions with these diseases exert causal influences on human psychology and social behavior. This model has been supported by cross-national relationships between parasite prevalence and human personality traits, and between parasite prevalence and societal values. Importantly, the parasite-stress model emphasizes the causal role of non-zoonotic parasites (which have the capacity for human-to-human transmission), rather than zoonotic parasites (which do not), but previous studies failed to distinguish between these conceptually distinct categories. The present investigation directly tested the differential predictive effects of zoonotic and non-zoonotic (both human-specific and multihost) parasite prevalence on personality traits and societal values. Supporting the parasite-stress model, cross-national differences in personality traits (unrestricted sexuality, extraversion, openness to experiences) and in societal values (individualism, collectivism, gender equality, democratization) are predicted specifically by non-zoonotic parasite prevalence.
Efficiency of real-time Gaussian transient detectors: comparing the Karhunen-Loeve and the wavelet decompositions

In general, finite-dimensional discrete-time representations of continuous-time Gaussian transients is not complete. Such representations typically lead to suboptimal detectors, where the compromise between computational complexity and processor performance requires optimization, specially when real-time processing is mandatory. This paper proposes a procedure for the optimization of the processor parameters, using the Bhattacharyya distance to evaluate the resemblance between the original continuous-time signal and its finite dimensional discrete representation. Two different decompositions are analyzed and compared, namely the Karhunen-Loeve decomposition (KLD) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). It is shown that the DWT presents serious advantages when the signals to detect have a large number of important eigenvalues, which is often the case in some applications such as passive sonar.
Immunocytochemical analysis of connexin expression in the healthy and diseased cardiovascular system

Gap junctions play essential roles in the normal function of the heart and arteries, mediating the spread of the electrical impulse that stimulates synchronized contraction of the cardiac chambers, and contributing to co‐ordination of activities between cells of the arterial wall. In common with other multicellular systems, cardiovascular tissues express multiple connexin isotypes that confer distinctive channel properties. This review highlights how state‐of‐the‐art immunocytochemical and cellular imaging techniques, as part of a multidisciplinary approach in gap junction research, have advanced our understanding of connexin diversity in cardiovascular cell function in health and disease. In the heart, spatially defined patterns of expression of three connexin isotypes—connexin43, connexin40, and connexin45—underlie the precisely orchestrated patterns of current flow governing the normal cardiac rhythm. Derangement of gap junction organization and/or reduced expression of connexin43 are associated with arrhythmic tendency in the diseased human ventricle, and high levels of connexin40 in the atrium are associated with increased risk of developing atrial fibrillation after coronary by‐pass surgery. In the major arteries, endothelial gap junctions may simultaneously express three connexin isotypes, connexin40, connexin37, and connexin43; underlying medial smooth muscle, by contrast, predominantly expresses connexin43, with connexin45 additionally expressed at restricted sites. In normal arterial smooth muscle, the abundance of connexin43 gap junctions varies according to vascular site, and shows an inverse relationship with desmin expression and positive correlation with the quantity of extracellular matrix. Increased connexin43 expression between smooth muscle cells is closely linked to phenotypic transformation in early human coronary atherosclerosis and in the response of the arterial wall to injury. Current evidence thus suggests that gap junctions in both their guises, as pathways for cell‐to‐cell signaling in the vessel wall and as pathways for impulse conduction in the heart, contribute to the initial pathogenesis and eventual clinical manifestation of human cardiovascular disease. Microsc. Res. Tech. 52:301–322, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Adaptive filters in digital transmission based on improved LMS algorithm

In digital communication system the major obstacle for proper communication is Inter symbol Interference (ISI). An adaptive filter is required to suppress the ISI which is present in the system and to get proper data conduction. This article proposes a new move to adaptive filters in transmission channels using variable step size of LMS (Least Mean Square). The performance of the proposed network is compared with other LMS algorithm based on channel equalizer. The simulation results are observed, the proposed algorithm is better competence of the VSSLMS in the acknowledged data.
Extended-Spectrum β-Lactamase Genes of Escherichia coli in Chicken Meat and Humans, the Netherlands

We determined the prevalence and characteristics of extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) genes of Enterobacteriaceae in retail chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands. Raw meat samples were obtained, and simultaneous cross-sectional surveys of fecal carriage were performed in 4 hospitals in the same area. Human blood cultures from these hospitals that contained ESBL genes were included. A high prevalence of ESBL genes was found in chicken meat (79.8%). Genetic analysis showed that the predominant ESBL genes in chicken meat and human rectal swab specimens were identical. These genes were also frequently found in human blood culture isolates. Typing results of Escherichia coli strains showed a high degree of similarity with strains from meat and humans. These findings suggest that the abundant presence of ESBL genes in the food chain may have a profound effect on future treatment options for a wide range of infections caused by gram-negative bacteria.
Stress physiology as a predictor of survival in Galapagos marine iguanas

Although glucocorticoid hormones are considered important physiological regulators for surviving adverse environmental stimuli (stressors), evidence for such a role is sparse and usually extrapolated from glucocorticoid effects under laboratory, short-term and/or non-emergency conditions. Galápagos marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) provide an excellent model for determining the ultimate function of a glucocorticoid response because susceptibility to starvation induced by El Niño conditions is essentially their only major natural stressor. In a prospective study, we captured 98 adult male marine iguanas and assessed four major components of their glucocorticoid response: baseline corticosterone titres; corticosterone responses to acute stressors (capture and handling); the maximal capacity to secrete corticosterone (via adrenocorticotropin injection); and the ability to terminate corticosterone responses (negative feedback). Several months after collecting initial measurements, weak El Niño conditions affected the Galápagos and 23 iguanas died. The dead iguanas were typified by a reduced efficacy of negative feedback (i.e. poorer post-stress suppression of corticosterone release) compared with surviving iguanas. We found no prior differences between dead and alive iguanas in baseline corticosterone concentrations, responses to acute stressors, nor in capacity to respond. These data suggest that a greater ability to terminate a stress response conferred a survival advantage during starvation.
Exposure to hycanthone alters chromatin structure around specific gene functions and specific repeats in Schistosoma mansoni

Schistosoma mansoni is a parasitic plathyhelminth responsible for intestinal schistosomiasis (or bilharzia), a disease affecting 67 million people worldwide and causing an important economic burden. The schistosomicides hycanthone, and its later proxy oxamniquine, were widely used for treatments in endemic areas during the twentieth century. Recently, the mechanism of action, as well as the genetic origin of a stably and Mendelian inherited resistance for both drugs was elucidated in two strains. However, several observations suggested early on that alternative mechanisms might exist, by which resistance could be induced for these two drugs in sensitive lines of schistosomes. This induced resistance appeared rapidly, within the first generation, but was metastable (not stably inherited). Epigenetic inheritance could explain such a phenomenon and we therefore re-analyzed the historical data with our current knowledge of epigenetics. In addition, we performed new experiments such as ChIP-seq on hycanthone treated worms. We found distinct chromatin structure changes between sensitive worms and induced resistant worms from the same strain. No specific pathway was discovered, but genes in which chromatin structure modifications were observed are mostly associated with transport and catabolism, which makes sense in the context of the elimination of the drug. Specific differences were observed in the repetitive compartment of the genome. We finally describe what types of experiments are needed to understand the complexity of heritability that can be based on genetic and/or epigenetic mechanisms for drug resistance in schistosomes.
A Comparative Pharmacokinetic Study of a Fixed Dose Combination for Essential Hypertensive Patients: A Randomized Crossover Study in Healthy Human Volunteers

BACKGROUND This study was aimed to investigate the relative bioavailability of fixed-dose-combination (FDC) product of amlodipine, telmisartan and hydrochlorothiazide with individual marketed products in healthy male volunteers. Control of blood pressure with fixed dose combination of the above drugs acting through different mechanism have a benefit of convenient dosing in terms of compliance, lower the dose and subsequently reduce the side effects. METHODS The authors investigated the relative bioavailability under a fasting state of the 3 drugs in a randomized, open-label, 2-treatment, 2-period, 2-sequence, crossover bioequivalence study with a washout period of 21 days. Plasma concentration of the analytes were assayed in timed samples with a simple, highly sensitive and rapid validated method using HPLC coupled to tandem mass spectrometry that had a lower limit of quantification of 1 ng/mL for all the 3 components. RESULTS Test and reference formulations gave a mean Cmax of 5.234±0.914 ng/mL and 4.991±0.563 ng/mL, 108.839±13.601 ng/mL and 114.783±12.315 ng/mL and 97.814±10.779 ng/mL and 93.731±10.018 ng/mL for amlodipine, telmisartan and hydrochlorothiazide respectively. The AUC0-t of amlodipine, telmisartan and hydrochlorothiazide was 161.484 ng.h/mL, 1 917.644 ng.h/mL and 822.847 ng.h/mL for test formulation and 162.108 ng.h/mL, 2 014.764 ng.h/mL and 829.323 ng.h/mL for reference in the fasting state. CONCLUSION The 90% confidence intervals for the test/reference ratio of the pharmacokinetic parameters in fasting state (mean Cmax, AUC0-t, and AUC0-∞) were within the acceptable range of 80.00-125.00. Thus, these findings clearly indicate that the FDC product is bioequivalent with the individual marketed products in terms of rate and extent of drug absorption and is well tolerated with no significant adverse reactions.
Nutrigenetics, Nutrigenomics, and Selenium

Selenium (Se) is an important micronutrient that, as a component of selenoproteins, influences oxidative and inflammatory processes. Its’ levels vary considerably, with different ethnic and geographic population groups showing varied conditions, ranging from frank Se deficiencies to toxic effects. An optimum Se level is essential for the maintenance of homeostasis, and this optimum may vary according to life stage, general state of health, and genotype. Nutrigenetic studies of different Se levels, in the presence of genetic variants in selenoproteins, suggest that an effective dietary Se intake for one individual may be very different from that for others. However, we are just starting to learn the significance of various genes in selenoprotein pathways, functional variants in these, and how to combine such data from genes into pathways, alongside dietary intake or serum levels of Se. Advances in systems biology, genetics, and genomics technologies, including genetic/genomic, epigenetic/epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic information, start to make it feasible to assess a comprehensive spectrum of the biological activity of Se. Such nutrigenomic approaches may prove very sensitive biomarkers of optimal Se status at the individual or population level. The premature cessation of a major human Se intervention trial has led to considerable controversy as to the value of Se supplementation at the population level. New websites provide convenient links to current information on methodologies available for nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. These new technologies will increasingly become an essential tool in optimizing the level of Se and other micronutrients for optimal health, in individuals and in population groups. However, definitive proof of such effects will require very large collaborative studies, international agreement on study design, and innovative approaches to data analysis.
Analysis experiences using information visualization

Professional analysts deal with a high volume of information and must constantly work to separate out the valuable data. However, analysts have difficulty determining what data is useful without reading or skimming almost all returned documents from a search. This presents them with a difficult tradeoff. Searching information broadly returns hundreds or thousands of documents. We present lessons learned from an observational study of the application of the InSpire visually oriented text exploitation system in an operational analysis environment.
Extending and Scaling up the Chinese Treebank Annotation

We discuss on-going efforts to scale up the Chinese Treebank annotation and extending Chinese treebanking to informal genres like conversational speech, news groups and weblogs, as well as discussion forums. The original Chinese Treebank annotation scheme was designed for formal genres such as newswire and magazine articles, where the language is very formal and each document is carefully edited. When moving to informal genres, we can no longer assume that the data is error-free and we have to extend the annotation scheme to account for disfluencies. We show that the disfluencies can be characterized into a finite set of categories, consistent with what has been reported in theoretical linguistic literature. Treebanking is also a timeconsuming process that requires extensive linguistic training from annotators, and the limited pool of qualified treebankers is a major obstacle for largescale treebanking efforts. To address bottleneck, we implemented a procedure that decomposes the treebanking process into five self-contained steps. In so doing, we reduced the cognitive load on the annotators at each step and thus enlarged the annotator pool, and we show that we are able to increase the throughput by 30%.
Cooperative micro-differential evolution for high-dimensional problems

High-dimensional optimization problems appear very often in demanding applications. Although evolutionary algorithms constitute a valuable tool for solving such problems, their standard variants exhibit deteriorating performance as dimension increases. In such cases, cooperative approaches have proved to be very useful, since they divide the computational burden to a number of cooperating subpopulations. In contrast, Micro-evolutionary approaches constitute light versions of the original evolutionary algorithms that employ very small populations of just a few individuals to address optimization problems. Unfortunately, this property is usually accompanied by limited efficiency and proneness to get stuck in local minima. In the present work, an approach that combines the basic properties of cooperation and Micro-evolutionary algorithms is presented for the Differential Evolution algorithm. The proposed Cooperative Micro-Differential Evolution approach employs small cooperative subpopulations to detect subcomponents of the original problem solution concurrently. The subcomponents are combined through cooperation of subpopulations to build complete solutions of the problem. The proposed approach is illustrated on high-dimensional instances of five widely used test problems with very promising results. Comparisons with the standard Differential Evolution algorithm are also reported and their statistical significance is analyzed.
A Parallelized Network Traffic Classification Based on Hidden Markov Model

This paper implemented a network traffic classification method on the basis of Guassian Mixture Model-Hidden Markov Model using packet-level properties in network traffic flows (PLGMM-HMM). Our model firstly builds PLGMM-HMMs via two packet-level properties, inter packet time and payload size, respectively; then, we construct the estimation function by computing the F-Measure value through classifying another training set using the PLGMM-HMMs. Hadoop Streaming based MapReduce has been evaluated while performing our classification experiment. Results show that our PLGMM-HMM based classification method could obtain considerable accuracy, giving out the accuracy over 90% on collected datasets, and comparatively outperforming classifiers based on HMMs with variables obeying other distributions. It is recommended that this framework could be applied to other machine learning methods as a multi-classifier template.
Exome-Wide Somatic Microsatellite Variation Is Altered in Cells with DNA Repair Deficiencies

Microsatellites (MST), tandem repeats of 1–6 nucleotide motifs, are mutational hot-spots with a bias for insertions and deletions (INDELs) rather than single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The majority of MST instability studies are limited to a small number of loci, the Bethesda markers, which are only informative for a subset of colorectal cancers. In this paper we evaluate non-haplotype alleles present within next-gen sequencing data to evaluate somatic MST variation (SMV) within DNA repair proficient and DNA repair defective cell lines. We confirm that alleles present within next-gen data that do not contribute to the haplotype can be reliably quantified and utilized to evaluate the SMV without requiring comparisons of matched samples. We observed that SMV patterns found in DNA repair proficient cell lines without DNA repair defects, MCF10A, HEK293 and PD20 RV:D2, had consistent patterns among samples. Further, we were able to confirm that changes in SMV patterns in cell lines lacking functional BRCA2, FANCD2 and mismatch repair were consistent with the different pathways perturbed. Using this new exome sequencing analysis approach we show that DNA instability can be identified in a sample and that patterns of instability vary depending on the impaired DNA repair mechanism, and that genes harboring minor alleles are strongly associated with cancer pathways. The MST Minor Allele Caller used for this study is available at https://github.com/zalmanv/MST_minor_allele_caller.
Glutamatergic Pathway Targeting in Melanoma: Single-Agent and Combinatorial Therapies

Purpose: Melanoma is a heterogeneous disease where monotherapies are likely to fail due to variations in genomic signatures. B-RAF inhibitors have been clinically inadequate but response might be augmented with combination therapies targeting multiple signaling pathways. We investigate the preclinical efficacy of combining the multikinase inhibitor sorafenib or the mutated B-RAF inhibitor PLX4720 with riluzole, an inhibitor of glutamate release that antagonizes metabotropic glutamate receptor 1 (GRM1) signaling in melanoma cells. Experimental Design: Melanoma cell lines that express GRM1 and either wild-type B-RAF or mutated B-RAF were treated with riluzole, sorafenib, PLX4720, or the combination of riluzole either with sorafenib or with PLX4720. Extracellular glutamate levels were determined by glutamate release assays. MTT assays and cell-cycle analysis show effects of the compounds on proliferation, viability, and cell-cycle profiles. Western immunoblotting and immunohistochemical staining showed apoptotic markers. Consequences on mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway were assessed by Western immunoblotting. Xenograft tumor models were used to determine the efficacy of the compounds in vivo. Results: The combination of riluzole with sorafenib exhibited enhanced antitumor activities in GRM1-expressing melanoma cells harboring either wild-type or mutated B-RAF. The combination of riluzole with PLX4720 showed lessened efficacy compared with the combination of riluzole and sorafenib in suppressing the growth of GRM1-expressing cells harboring the B-RAFV600E mutation. Conclusions: The combination of riluzole with sorafenib seems potent in suppressing tumor proliferation in vitro and in vivo in GRM1-expressing melanoma cells regardless of B-RAF genotype and may be a viable therapeutic clinical combination. Clin Cancer Res; 17(22); 7080–92. ©2011 AACR.