Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sickle cell disease status and outcomes of African-American men presenting with priapism.

INTRODUCTION Priapism is associated with sickle cell disease (SSD); however, few men receive education about this condition, which contributes to attenuated return of functional erections. AIM To define the demographics, SSD status, and treatment outcomes of African-American men presenting with priapism. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Demographics, medical history, self-report of sickle cell status, and outcome assessment using International Inventory of Erectile Function (IIEF) of men with priapism were retrospectively reviewed. METHODS A review of 39 cases of venocclusive priapism in African-American men was conducted. Charts were reviewed for demographics, medical history including SSD status by patient self-report, serum hemoglobin electrophoresis results, and priapism treatment and outcome. RESULTS Mean duration of presenting priapism episode was 22 +/- 12 hours (6-70 hours). Eight percent of men had priapism for <12 hours, 59% 12-24 hours, 22% 24-36 hours, and 11% >36 hours. All patients with priapism events of >12 hours complained of reduction in erectile rigidity. No patients with priapism >36 hours duration had return of spontaneous functional erections, but 44% (24-36 hours), 78% (12-24 hours) and 100% (<12 hours) were able to generate functional erections with or without the use of sildenafil. Follow-up IIEF erectile function domain scores paralleled incidence of functional erections. Penile shunt surgery was required in 28%. Only 5% of men recalled learning that priapism was a complication of SSD. Six men denied a history of SSD; however, hemoglobin electrophoresis revealed abnormal hemoglobin S and elevated hemoglobin F levels in four of these men. CONCLUSIONS The association of SSD and venocclusive priapism is well known in the medical community, yet few patients ever receive education regarding the emergency nature of the condition. The majority of men presents in a delayed fashion, and a significant proportion requires shunt surgery leading to long-term erectile dysfunction. Of those who denied having SSD, two-thirds had SSD by hemoglobin electrophoresis.
The SUMO Ship Detector Algorithm for Satellite Radar Images

Search for Unidentified Maritime Objects (SUMO) is an algorithm for ship detection in satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. It has been developed over the course of more than 15 years, using a large amount of SAR images from almost all available SAR satellites operating in L-, C- and X-band. As validated by benchmark tests, it performs very well on a wide range of SAR image modes (from Spotlight to ScanSAR) and resolutions (from 1–100 m) and for all types and sizes of ships, within the physical limits imposed by the radar imaging. This paper describes, in detail, the algorithmic approach in all of the steps of the ship detection: land masking, clutter estimation, detection thresholding, target clustering, ship attribute estimation and false alarm suppression. SUMO is a pixel-based CFAR (Constant False Alarm Rate) detector for multi-look radar images. It assumes a K distribution for the sea clutter, corrected however for deviations of the actual sea clutter from this distribution, implementing a fast and robust method for the clutter background estimation. The clustering of detected pixels into targets (ships) uses several thresholds to deal with the typically irregular distribution of the radar backscatter over a ship. In a multi-polarization image, the different channels are fused. Azimuth ambiguities, a common source of false alarms in ship detection, are removed. A reliability indicator is computed for each target. In post-processing, using the results of a series of images, additional false alarms from recurrent (fixed) targets including range ambiguities are also removed. SUMO can run in semi-automatic mode, where an operator can verify each detected target. It can also run in fully automatic mode, where batches of over 10,000 images have successfully been processed in less than two hours. The number of satellite SAR systems keeps increasing, as does their application to maritime surveillance. The open data policy of the EU’s Copernicus program, which includes the Sentinel-1 satellite, has hugely increased the availability of SAR images. This paper aims to cater to the consequently expected wider demand for knowledge about SAR ship detectors.
Bit-depth expansion for noisy contour reduction in natural images

We propose a bit-depth expansion (BDE) method targeting natural images. In the analog part of an imaging system, signal intensity fluctuations occur due to noise (e.g. thermal noise in the image sensor). After that, in the digital part, the intensities are rounded off to limited levels. The latter process, which is quantization, increases the intensity of fluctuation errors caused by stochastic resonance. These errors are viewed as false contour artifacts in the gradation region. Our goal was to obtain the original signal from the quantized noisy signal. We formulated a probabilistic model based on this quantization process, and successfully reconstructed smooth gradations from noisy contours. Subjective evaluation by voting clarified that the output image has higher quality.
The Protective Role of Racial Identity and Africentric Worldview in the Association Between Racial Discrimination and Blood Pressure

Objective To examine the protective effects of racial identity and Africentric worldview on the association between racial discrimination and blood pressure (BP). Methods Two hundred ten African American young adults completed questionnaires assessing demographic characteristics, prior racial discrimination experiences, racial identity, and Africentric worldview. Resting BP was assessed before and after completion of the study measures. Results Racial discrimination was unrelated to BP in the overall sample (systolic BP, p = .444; diastolic BP [DBP], p = .915; mean arterial pressure, p = .774). However, racial identity and Africentric worldview moderated the association between racial discrimination and BP. Racial discrimination was negatively related to DBP for participants who felt that others viewed African Americans less favorably and who endorsed the uniqueness of the African American experience (B = −2.59, standard error [SE] = 1.29, p = .046). These individuals also had the lowest DBP at high levels of racial discrimination. Racial discrimination was positively associated with DBP for individuals with low levels of Africentric orientation (B = 1.43, SE = 0.72, p = .048) but was unrelated to DBP at moderate (B = 0.24, SE = 0.65, p = .718) and high (B = −0.96, SE = 1.01, p = .341) levels of Africentric worldview. Conclusions Racial and cultural personal characteristics such as racial identity and Africentric orientation may serve an important protective function for BP in African American young adults. Abbreviations SBP = systolic blood pressure DBP = diastolic blood pressure MAP = mean arterial pressure HBCU = historically black college/university PWU = predominately white university SES = socioeconomic status BSAS = Belief Systems Analysis Scale BMI = body mass index
Electrocorticographic Activation within Human Auditory Cortex during Dialog-Based Language and Cognitive Testing

Current models of cortical speech and language processing include multiple regions within the temporal lobe of both hemispheres. Human communication, by necessity, involves complex interactions between regions subserving speech and language processing with those involved in more general cognitive functions. To assess these interactions, we utilized an ecologically salient conversation-based approach. This approach mandates that we first clarify activity patterns at the earliest stages of cortical speech processing. Therefore, we examined high gamma (70–150 Hz) responses within the electrocorticogram (ECoG) recorded simultaneously from Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and lateral surface of the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Subjects were neurosurgical patients undergoing evaluation for treatment of medically intractable epilepsy. They performed an expanded version of the Mini-mental state examination (MMSE), which included additional spelling, naming, and memory-based tasks. ECoG was recorded from HG and the STG using multicontact depth and subdural electrode arrays, respectively. Differences in high gamma activity during listening to the interviewer and the subject’s self-generated verbal responses were quantified for each recording site and across sites within HG and STG. The expanded MMSE produced widespread activation in auditory cortex of both hemispheres. No significant difference was found between activity during listening to the interviewer’s questions and the subject’s answers in posteromedial HG (auditory core cortex). A different pattern was observed throughout anterolateral HG and posterior and middle portions of lateral STG (non-core auditory cortical areas), where activity was significantly greater during listening compared to speaking. No systematic task-specific differences in the degree of suppression during speaking relative to listening were found in posterior and middle STG. Individual sites could, however, exhibit task-related variability in the degree of suppression during speaking compared to listening. The current study demonstrates that ECoG recordings can be acquired in time-efficient dialog-based paradigms, permitting examination of language and cognition in an ecologically salient manner. The results obtained from auditory cortex serve as a foundation for future studies addressing patterns of activity beyond auditory cortex that subserve human communication.
Backlog-Aware Crossbar Schedulers: A New Algorithm and its Efficient Hardware Implementation

Crossbars switches with input queues are the common building blocks of high-speed networks, while their speed and performance critically depend on their scheduler. In this paper we combine ideas from randomized backlog-aware schedulers, and their round-robin (RR) counterparts, to propose a practical, deterministic crossbar scheduler, that: (i) achieves almost full throughput under the many adverse traffic patterns tested, using just 1 Mbyte buffer memory per input, (ii) provides deterministic delay service guarantees, (Hi) yields low delays under both uniform and non-uniform load, and (iv) achieves these performances with a single iteration of an iSLIP-like algorithm. With simple extensions, the proposed crossbar scheduler is shown to distribute the bandwidth of congested links in a fair RR or WRR manner. In order to prove the efficiency of the new scheduling algorithm, we implemented in hardware a 32times32 scheduler, using a novel design for programmable-priority RR arbiters, that is significantly more area-speed efficient than present state-of-the- art. The scheduler's ASIC occupies roughly 3 mm2, when implemented at 130 nm, and gives a new crossbar match every 3.2 ns as needed for above hundred Gb/s line rates, and short packet lengths.
Learning Deep Representations of EEG Signals in Mental-Task Brain-Computer Interfaces using Convolutional and Recurrent Networks Preliminary Exam

Classification of spontaneously produced Electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a challenging problem with important applications in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). A successful classifier must be able to capture spatiotemporal patterns while remaining time invariant and robust to noise and artifacts. The classifier should also be able to model the transient, nonstationary and nonlinear patterns found in EEG signals, despite the fact that these patterns have not yet been fully characterized. Current approaches have not yet reached a level of performance that is acceptable for use in many practical applications and often involve extensive manual tuning and feature selection. These approaches also tend to rely heavily on prior assumptions and discard information that may be useful for classification. The recent trend in machine learning has been to move away from manually engineered solutions in favor of multilayer (deep) networks that rely on few prior assumptions. Along these lines, we propose several variants of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that we have designed for analyzing and classifying EEG signals. The convolutional layers in these networks are designed to capture nonlinear spatiotemporal patterns at multiple time scales while maintaining time invariance. These convolutional layers can be viewed as nonlinear finite impulse response filters that automatically learn to process the signals. Class labels can then be assigned using a fully connected network or by accumulating evidence over a brief period of time. Alternately, infinite impulse response can be attained by replacing the convolutional layers with recurrent layers. Since recurrent layers contain feedback connections, they are able to capture temporal information without explicitly embedding a window of time. This may lead to better filtering characteristics and increased memory capacity while requiring fewer free parameters. This preliminary work highlights the limitations of current approaches and demonstrates the feasibility of using deep convolutional and recurrent networks to model EEG signals. Using an offline EEG dataset, we show that a minimally tuned CNN using raw EEG signals performs comparably to a highly tuned baseline classifier with extensive preprocessing. We also outline a number of methods and experiments for interpreting the models learned by our networks. Since these networks rely on few prior assumptions, we believe that they will learn to utilize patterns in EEG signals that current approaches are unable to identify. This will lead to insights into the types of patterns contained in EEG signals and how these patterns change during various mental tasks. In turn, this may lead to a better understanding of human cognition and improved methods for use in the next generation of noninvasive BCI systems.
Cardiac-specific overexpression of the human type 1 angiotensin II receptor causes delayed repolarization.

AIMS Mice with cardiac-specific overexpression of human angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) undergo cardiac remodelling and die prematurely of sudden death. Since excessive QT prolongation is a major risk factor for ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death, we hypothesize that chronic stimulation of AT1R might contribute to sudden death by promoting delayed repolarization and ventricular arrhythmias. METHODS In the present study, a detailed analysis of ventricular repolarization parameters was undertaken in AT1R mice. RESULTS Measurement of K+ currents in ventricular myocytes isolated from 6-8 months AT1R male mice revealed a significant reduction of the Ca2+-independent transient outward (I(to)), the ultra-rapid delayed rectifier (I Kur)), and the inward rectifier (I K1) K+ currents compared with littermate controls (CTL). The expression of the underlying K+ channels was also decreased in AT1R ventricles. Moreover, reactivation of I(to) was slower in AT1R mice. Consistent with these findings, AT1R mice presented a longer action potential duration (APD90, CTL: 19.0 +/- 1.8 ms; AT1R: 39.1 +/- 4.7 ms, P = 0.0001) and QTc interval (CTL: 53.6 +/- 1.5 ms, AT1R: 64.2 +/- 1.4 ms, P = 0.0005). In addition, spontaneous ventricular arrhythmias were reported in the AT1R mice. Importantly, the increased incidence of arrhythmia and the repolarization defects also occurred in much younger AT1R mice that do not present signs of hypertrophy, confirming that these arrhythmogenic changes are not secondary to cardiac remodelling. CONCLUSION These results strongly suggest that chronic stimulation of AT1R directly leads to an increased incidence of cardiac arrhythmia associated with delayed repolarization.
Optimizing SAR change detection based on log-ratio features

The paper investigates how to optimize the performances of unsupervised log-ratio based change detection algorithms for two-date 1-look amplitude SAR images. The usual approach of pre-processing the SAR images at different dates with state-of-the-art despeckling filters is critically discussed. Those adaptive filters are very efficient, also for the challenging case of 1-look images, for speckle reduction of single-date image data and then for providing reliable classification, detection, or parameter estimation results. However, they are not able to ease the discrimination of statistical from structural changes in 1-look SAR images for which reliable point-target detection is nearly impractical. A simple, yet very effective, multiscale method for change detection and automatic change mapping is proposed and tested on simulated 1-look SAR images. The adopted pre-processing is based on guided image filtering with different window sizes. It improves the detection of changed regions without introducing any geometrical constraint and significantly reduces the false alarm rate. Experimental tests on simulated SAR images and Spotlight COSMO-SkyMed images demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm.
Coherent and squeezed phonons in single wall carbon nanotubes

Coherent states of phonon manifest in macroscopic beatings of reflectance or transmittance following the phonons frequencies when a material is excited with an ultrashort pulse. Such beatings predominantly arise from a single phonon excitation. The two-phonon (overtone or combination modes) excitations, such as the G′ (or 2D) band phonons in single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), on the other hand, are not compatible with the coherent phonon states picture. Nevertheless, their macroscopic beatings are observed in the experiment. Here we formulate a more general framework involving the so-called squeezed states of phonon to explain the origin of the two-phonon signals in the pump-probe experiment of SWNTs. For a given SWNT chirality, the G′ band phonon intensity in terms of the squeezed states of phonons is compared with that in terms of coherent states of phonons. Our calculation reveals that the G′ band intensity from the squeezed states of phonons is some orders of magnitude larger than that from the coherent states of phonons. We also compare the G′ band phonon intensity with the intensities of other coherent phonon modes generated in ultrafast spectroscopy such as the G band. Furthermore, the coherent G band and squeezed G′ band phonon intensities are found to be sensitive to the laser pulse width used in ultrafast spectroscopy.
Nutritional care of preterm infants: Scientific basis and practical guidelines

With the increasing survival of preterm infants the concept of “neurological intact survival” rather than just ‘survival’ has become important. Along with initiation of advanced cardio-respiratory support, a physician caring for a preterm infant is met with day-to-day challenges in replicating the in utero nutritional needs of these vulnerable preterm infants for optimal growth and neurodevelopment. This book is a part of the 110th volume of “World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics” series and has been written and edited by several world renowned neonatologists and nutrition specialists. The book looks at the nutritional needs of the preterm infants, an area where much is still unclear. The chapters are arranged in a logical sequence, starting with historical perspectives, defining the nutritional needs and looking at nutrition, growth and outcome of preterm infants. Subsequent chapters deal with each component of nutrition (water, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins & minerals, including trace elements) which has been discussed and elaborated citing recent references and trials. Conventional uses and newer insights regarding the use of several vitamins have also been discussed. The chapters on gut microbiota, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and the role of pre- and probiotics have been written in a well balanced manner. This is important in this era where many neonatologists have started using probiotics without looking into this type and dose. Nutrition and its effect on the brain and lung has also been addressed and the various challenges met during growth faltering of preterm infants and postdischarge nutrition have been discussed. Of use for readers from India is the chapter on meeting the challenges of preterm nutrition in low resource settings. This chapter has addressed the common problem of lack of total parenteral nutrition, human milk and human milk fortifiers and has provided a pragmatic and practical approach which will be useful for practitioners in India. What is useful is that each chapter is summarized at the end with a practical recommendation which will be appreciated by clinicians and students. There are also research suggestions in each area of preterm nutrition which can stimulate research in areas where evidence is lacking. However, in some of the chapters, the title does not provide the reader with an insight into its contents. Also the chapter, “Assessing the Evidence from Neonatal Nutrition Research” does not fit in well with the flow of the book. In summary, this book provides a practical and comprehensive evidence-based review of nutritional care of preterm infants from the time of birth extending until early infancy and will be especially useful to practicing neonatologists, paediatricians and medical students.
THE CASE AGAINST THE CONTROLLABILITY OF AUFOMATIC STEREOTYPE EFFECTS

This chapter provides a more or less opinionated hismcy of the standard dual-process model of stereotyping effects on judgment and behavior. It focuses particularly on the fluctuations ovec the past 30 years in the relative power ascribed to the automatic influences of stereotypes versus the conscious, intentional anempts to conu()\ them. The major theme is that the evidence of controllability is weaker and more problematic than we would like to believe.
Detection of membrane and soluble interleukin‐6 receptor in lymphoid malignancies

Summary. We studied the membrane expression of the gp80 chain of IL‐6 receptor (IL‐6R) by quantitative flow cytometry in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and leukaemic centrocytic lymphoma using a panel of seven monoclonal antibodies. IL‐6R was detected in 18/26 CLL cases and 4/7 lymphoma cases, with a mean antigen density <3000 molecules/cell. Multiple labelling experiments confirmed the IL‐6R expression by neoplastic cells. Specific mRNA was found by RT‐PCR in neoplastic cells. A specific ELISA test was designed using two anti‐IL‐6 receptor MAbs to measure the serum soluble IL‐6R (sIL‐6R) in CLL (n = 48), B‐cell non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL; n = 40), and monoclonal gammopathy (MG; n = 32). SIL‐6R was higher in CLL (170±12.6ng/ml) in NHL (160 ± 12ng/ml) and MG patients (183±23ng/ml) than in age‐matched controls (100 ±5.6 ng/ml; P < 0.001) and higher in high‐grade than low‐grade NHL. No correlation was noted with a previous treatment. Among CLL cases the patients classified as stage B according to the Binet's staging of the disease had the highest sIL‐6R values, thus suggesting a link with tumour cell mass.