Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integration nerveuse de la regulation des sCcrCtions digestives au niveau tissulaire et chez l’animal entier

Les importants progrks rkalisks rkcemment dans le domaine de la biologie cellulaire et moleculaire ont permis d’apporter de nombreuses donnees sur les rkcepteurs membranaires et les mkcanismes intracellulaires de transduction du signal dans les cellules digestives 2 fonction skcrktoire. Toutefois, chez l’animal entier, comme chez l’homme normal, les rkgulations cellulaires dans les circonstances physiologiques doivent prendre en compte de multiples facteurs de I’environnement tissulaire, et en particulier les connections affkrentes et effkrentes du tube digestif avec le systkme nerveux central. L’innervation sensitive du tube digestif, bien que trks majoritairement inconsciente, informe en permanence et de manikre dktaillee le cerveau et les centres nerveux pkriphkriques sur 1’Ctat de la digestion. Les neurones sensitifs du tube digestif comportent de nombreux capteurs capables de donner des informations sur l’ktat chimique de la lumikre intestinale (pH, nutriments prksents, etc.), ainsi que sur les Cvenements physiques en cours (tension, contractions, osmolaritk, tempkrature, etc.). De plus, ces neurones sensitifs portent de nombreux rkcepteurs capables de dktecter la presence dans le milieu extracellulaire de divers messagers endocrines, paracrines ou neurocrines, et ces messagers sont capables de moduler le message sensitif. Aprks avoir rksume quelques aspects importants de l’innervation sensitive et motrice du tube digestif, cet article prksente quelques exemples montrant qu’in vivo, des peptides regulateurs endocrines ou paracrines agissent souvent de manikre indirecte sur l’effecteur qu’ils contralent, par I’intermkdiaire de la modulation de boucles nerveuses sensorimotrices. Les rkcepteurs portes par les neurones semblent alors mis en jeu a des concentrations plus faibles que les rkcepteurs des cellules skcrktantes effectrices ellesmCmes. Bien que plus complique, ce systkme de rkgulation indirecte permet probablement l’organisme d’exercer une regulation plus fine des processus skcrktoires, griice aux excellentes propriktks d’intkgration du systkme nerveux, qui peut prendre en compte a chaque instant l’ensemble des informations dont il dispose concernant l’etat de l’organisme ,
Frequency-tuned microwave ring resonator using varactor diodes

Four identical varactor-based tuning circuits are proposed to tune the centre frequency of a microwave quarter-wavelength side-coupled ring resonator (QWSCR). Each of the tuning circuit is placed at every corner of the ring to give a shunt capacitor effect. The overall electrical length of the resonator can be varied according to the desired resonant frequency through the biased voltage applied to the varactor-diode that controls the value of the resultant shunt capacitor. The complete tunable resonator circuit is simulated using the integration of microstrip technology and lumped elements on FR4 substrate. The proposed concept of the tunable QWSCR filters allows a tuning up to 15% of the nominal frequency of the filter.
Visualizing early frog development with motion-sensitive 3-D optical coherence microscopy

A motion-sensitive en-face-scanning 3-D optical coherence microscope (OCM) has been designed and constructed to study critical events in the early development of plants and animals. We describe the OCM instrument and present time-lapse movies of frog gastrulation, an early developmental event in which three distinct tissue layers are established that later give rise to all major organ systems. OCM images constructed with fringe-amplitude data show the mesendoderm migrating up along the blastocoel roof, thus forming the inner two tissue layers. Motion-sigma data, measuring the random motion of scatterers, is used to construct complementary images that indicate the presence of Brownian motion in the yolk cells of the endoderm. This random motion provides additional intrinsic contrast that helps to distinguish different tissue types. Depth penetration at 850 nm is sufficient for studies of the outer ectoderm layer, but is not quite adequate for detailed study of the blastocoel floor, about 500 to 800 /spl mu/m deep into the embryo. However, we measure the optical attenuation of these embryos to be about 35% less at 1310 nm. 2-D OCT images at 1310 nm are presented that promise sufficient depth penetration to test current models of cell movement near the blastocoel floor during gastrulation.
A power-efficient integrated input/output completion detection circuit for asynchronous-logic quasi-delay-insensitive Pre-Charged Half-Buffer

We propose a power- and area-efficient completion detection circuit for improved asynchronous-logic (async) quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) Pre-Charged Half-Buffer (PCHB) handshake communications. These improved attributes can be achieved by integrating the (separate) input and output completion detection circuits (within the async QDI PCHB circuit) into an integrated input/output completion detection circuit in the transistor level, hereby reducing leakage current paths (leakage power dissipation) and circuit overheads. Moreover, by integrating a reset signal into the integrated input/output completion detection circuit, a stable output state can be achieved during the initialization stage. Based on the simulations on 4×4-bit pipeline multipliers (@1V, 65nm CMOS process), we show that the multiplier with our proposed approach is 37% lower power dissipation (@400MHz input rate), yet 39% lower energy dissipation (per-operation), 35% lower energy-delay product and 21% lesser number of transistors (compared to a conventional design with separate input and output completion detection circuits). These improved results are achieved with an insignificant cost of 5% longer delay (slower speed).
Lithium ion battery model based on Kalman filter

In this paper, the electrochemical properties of lithium-ion batteries are studied. Primary factors, such as state-of-charge, and battery current are separately experimented. Kalman filter algorithm is applied to analyze the long-time recorded data, so as to identify the over-potential features during each stage. According to the features, lumped circuit elements can be adopted to mimic the battery's dynamic behavior.
Contract Specification of Hardware Designs at Different Abstraction Levels: Application to Functional Verification

The paper touches upon the issues of functional specification and verification of digital hardware at different abstraction levels. It shows how behavioral models of various degrees of abstraction can be represented by means of the contract paradigm and how contract specifications can be applied to generate test sequences in an automated way. The testing technique under consideration is based on the traversal of FSM derived from specifications. Taking into account that contract specifications are well known to be a high-efficient tool for constructing response checkers and estimating test coverage, we can assuredly report that the contract-based approach is a universal solution for hardware verification at different levels of abstraction.
On multivariate method of qualitative analysis of Hodgkin-Huxley model with decision tree induction

This paper presents a data mining technique for qualitative analysis of Hodgkin-Huxley model of cell excitability. Such problem cannot be solved analytically. Therefore we apply Monte-Carlo techniques for the generation of model parameters, and use data mining algorithm for classification of learning tuples obtained. As a result we attain a decision tree capable of classifying the excitability depending on the relationship between initial conditions and between rate constants. Details of software development and issues of computational complexity are presented. The software includes the package of Java-classes. An example for classification of excitability of three types is presented.
Modelling IP darkspace traffic by means of clustering techniques

An IP darkspace is an unused IP address range. Addresses are announced by routing, but no hosts are attached. Therefore all traffic directed to IP darkspace addresses is unsolicited and usually originates from attacks, attack preparation activities or misconfigurations. Most of the observed traffic belongs to known phenomena (e.g. horizontal scanning targeting a specific port) and is of limited interest to security analysts. But hidden in the vast amount of common attacks, smaller unusual events may indicate new malicious activities. In this paper we present a methodology to distinguish IP darkspace sources with common traffic patterns from sources that show uncommon behavior and may be the origin of novel attacks. For this, we model IP darkspace sources based on clustering techniques. We extract data from one complete month of a large /8 darkspace capture and use a very simple feature vector. Our analysis is purely based on clustering techniques and does not require any pre-knowledge about phenomena in darkspace traffic. We found that about 75% of the darkspace IP sources contributes to a set of very stable clusters, 4% to less stable clusters and 21% to outliers. This allows us to concentrate the effort for searching for new attacks in just 21% of the sources.
Pannexin1 is expressed by neurons and glia but does not form functional gap junctions

Pannexins are a newly described family of proteins that may form gap junctions. We made antisera against mouse pannexin1 (Panx1). HeLa cells expressing Panx1 have cell surface labeling, but not gap junction plaques, and do not transfer small fluorescent dyes or neurobiotin in a scrape‐loading assay. Neuro2a cells expressing Panx1 are not electrophysiologically coupled. Intracellular Panx1‐immunoreactivity, but not gap junction plaques, is seen in cultured oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and hippocampal neurons. Thus, at least in these mammalian cells lines, Panx1 does not form morphological or functional gap junctions, and it remains to be demonstrated that Panx1 forms gap junction‐forming protein in the CNS. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Ultra low noise low cost octave-band hybrid-tuned VCO

The application where coarse and fine-tuning is prime requirement, phase noise gets drastically degraded in presence of the fine tuning network if incorporated with a coarse tuning network. A VCO with a frequency that is less sensitive to tuning control voltage fluctuations imparts less phase jitter to the system, but suffers from a narrower tuning range, thereby it is limited by tuning band. This paper describes the unique approach of the hybrid tuning capability of the octave-band VCO (1000-2000 MHz/2000-4000 MHz) without sacrificing the phase noise and the tuning range. The design is based on innovative topology, which supports the fast convergence by using coarse-tuning and fine adjustments, by fine-tuning network. The measured phase noise is better than -103 dBc/Hz @ 10 kHz offset for the frequency band 1000-2000 MHz
Blood vessels segmentation with GUI in digital fundus images for automated detection of diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the retinal disease caused by diabetes that involves damage to the small blood vessels in the posterior of the eye. Early stage of DR may not cause symptoms. But the progression of the disease leads to the proliferative stage. This causes leakage of protein and blood in the retina. Blood vessel segmentation is a helpful tool in the treatment of diabetic retinopathy. Many studies have been carried out in the last decade in order to derive an accurate blood vessel detection and segmentation in retinal images because vascular anomalies are one of the strongest signs of DR. An user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) which is MATLAB based that segments the blood vessels by means of adaptive median thresholding is proposed in this paper. From the segmented image, various features of blood vessels like area, mean, standard deviation, energy, entropy and histogram are calculated, in order to distinguish the image as normal or abnormal. With respect to the ground truth, performance measures like accuracy, specificity and sensitivity are calculated. The GUI is implemented using MATLAB and the feature parameters are calculated. The average accuracy, specificity and sensitivity were found to be 0.95, 0.99 and 0.77 respectively for drive images using Adaptive median thresholding.
A Systems Genetics Approach Provides a Bridge from Discovered Genetic Variants to Biological Pathways in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have yielded novel genetic loci underlying common diseases. We propose a systems genetics approach to utilize these discoveries for better understanding of the genetic architecture of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Current evidence of genetic associations with RA was sought through PubMed and the NHGRI GWAS catalog. The associations of 15 single nucleotide polymorphisms and HLA-DRB1 alleles were confirmed in 1,287 cases and 1,500 controls of Japanese subjects. Among these, HLA-DRB1 alleles and eight SNPs showed significant associations and all but one of the variants had the same direction of effect as identified in the previous studies, indicating that the genetic risk factors underlying RA are shared across populations. By receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, the area under the curve (AUC) for the genetic risk score based on the selected variants was 68.4%. For seropositive RA patients only, the AUC improved to 70.9%, indicating good but suboptimal predictive ability. A simulation study shows that more than 200 additional loci with similar effect size as recent GWAS findings or 20 rare variants with intermediate effects are needed to achieve AUC = 80.0%. We performed the random walk with restart (RWR) algorithm to prioritize genes for future mapping studies. The performance of the algorithm was confirmed by leave-one-out cross-validation. The RWR algorithm pointed to ZAP70 in the first rank, in which mutation causes RA-like autoimmune arthritis in mice. By applying the hierarchical clustering method to a subnetwork comprising RA-associated genes and top-ranked genes by the RWR, we found three functional modules relevant to RA etiology: “leukocyte activation and differentiation”, “pattern-recognition receptor signaling pathway”, and “chemokines and their receptors”. These results suggest that the systems genetics approach is useful to find directions of future mapping strategies to illuminate biological pathways.
Stereo correspondence for underwater images using adaptive weight-based cross-correlation

In this paper, we introduce an approach called as adaptive weight-based cross-correlation method to estimate the disparity map for a pair of underwater images. A majority of the existing stereo correspondence algorithms assume that the corresponding color values are similar to each other. However, it is not in the case of underwater images; variations in corresponding color values are very high due to factors such as, attenuation and scattering of light in underwater environment. The attenuation and scattering of light cause variations in the measured color of each scene point at its projections on the two images, which leads to radiometric variations between a pair of images. We employ comprehensive color image normalization method to normalize the input color images. The conventional correlation methods compute the disparity at a given point depends only on intensity values within a local window, but these techniques are sensitive to illuminative variations and relatively lower performance in the featureless regions. Therefore, instead of intensity value, we use color dependent adaptive weights computed for each pixel lies within support window, and the cross-correlation measure between the support window is employed to estimate the disparity. The experiments are evaluated qualitatively, and the result reveals that our method outperforms the conventional correlation methods under conditions such as variations in illumination and blur.
Eurographics/siggraph Symposium on Computer Animation (2003) an Evaluation of a Cost Metric for Selecting Transitions between Motion Segments

Designing a rich repertoire of behaviors for virtual humans is an important problem for virtual environments and computer games. One approach to designing such a repertoire is to collect motion capture data and pre-process it to form a structure that can be walked in various orders to re-sequence the data in new ways. In such an approach identifying the location of good transition points in the motion stream is critical. In this paper, we evaluate the cost function described by Lee et al. 15 for determining such transition points. Lee et al. proposed an original set of weights for their metric. We compute a set of optimal weights for the cost function using a constrained least-squares technique. The weights are then evaluated in two ways: first, through a cross-validation study and second, through a medium-scale user study. The cross-validation shows that the optimized weights are robust and work for a wide variety of behaviors. The user study demonstrates that the optimized weights select more appealing transition points than the original weights.
Obstacle detection in stereo bird's eye view images

Navigation is an essential function for a mobile robot to make it navigate in its environment. The navigation based on bird's eye view images is a newly proposed indoor visual navigation framework, which can help to simplify the navigation problems, such as self-localization, map-building, path planning and other competences. In the paper, an obstacle detection method is proposed, which is applied in the stereo bird's view image based indoor visual navigation. Firstly, the mathematic principle of obstacle detection is derived by using four camera assumptions and imaging geometric relationship. Then the algorithm implementation was explained. Finally, practical experiments were implemented and the results proved that the proposed method can work well.
NK cells force cytomegalovirus to use hematopoietic cells and immune evasion for dissemination after mucosal infection

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infects most people in the world and causes clinically important disease in immune compromised and immune immature individuals. How the virus disseminates from the initial site of infection is poorly understood. We used an innovative approach, involving insertion of target sites for the haematopoietic specific miRNA miR-142-3p into an essential viral gene in murine cytomegalovirus. This virus was unable to disseminate to the salivary gland following intranasal infection, demonstrating a strict need for hematopoietic cells for dissemination from the natural site of infection. Viral immune evasion genes that modulate MHC-I expression and NKG2D activation were also required in this setting, as MCMV lacking these genes exhibited impaired dissemination of the viral genome to the salivary gland, and there was no detectable viral replication in the salivary gland. Depletion of T cells rescued the replication of this evasion-deficient virus in the salivary gland. Surprisingly however, the early dissemination to the salivary gland of this evasion-deficient virus, could be rescued by depletion of NK cells, but not T cells. These data are the first to show a profound loss of MCMV fitness in the absence of its MHC-I evasion genes and suggest that they protect the virus from NK cells during hematopoietic dissemination to the salivary gland, where they continued to need the three evasion genes to avoid T cell responses. Remarkably, we found that depletion of NK cells also freed the virus from the need to infect hematopoietic cells in order to reach the salivary gland. Thus, our data show that MCMV adapts to NK cell pressure after intranasal infection by using hematopoietic cells for dissemination while immune evasion genes protect the virus from NK cells during dissemination and from T cells within mucosal tissues.
Improving the Literacy Skills of Struggling Writers

A focus on teaching effective written communication skills is a necessity in our nation's schools. Students must develop good writing skills not only to ensure academic success but also to later thrive in the workplace and in society. For struggling writers, difficulties with written communication that emerged during elementary school will persist into middle school, high school, and beyond if effective interventions are not employed. Implementing a response to intervention (RTI) literacy model that promotes the integration of writing across the curriculum can help schools make huge strides in improving the motivations, skills, and outcomes of struggling writers. This chapter presents specific elements of effective writing instruction as well as instructional strategies that can be employed within an RTI framework to assist struggling writers schoolwide. The focus is on informing not only English/language arts teachers but also content area teachers on research-based classroom writing supports and practical tips for implementation.
Clinical Implementation of Laryngeal High-Speed Videoendoscopy: Challenges and Evolution

High-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) captures the true intracycle vibratory behavior of the vocal folds, which allows for overcoming the limitations of videostroboscopy for more accurate objective quantification methods. However, the commercial HSV systems have not gained widespread clinical adoption because of remaining technical and methodological limitations and an associated lack of information regarding the validity, practicality, and clinical relevance of HSV. The purpose of this article is to summarize the practical, technological and methodological challenges we have faced, to delineate the advances we have made, and to share our current vision of the necessary steps towards developing HSV into a robust tool. This tool will provide further insights into the biomechanics of laryngeal sound production, as well as enable more accurate functional assessment of the pathophysiology of voice disorders leading to refinements in the diagnosis and management of vocal fold pathology. The original contributions of this paper are the descriptions of our color high-resolution HSV integration, the methods for facilitative playback and HSV dynamic segmentation, and the ongoing efforts for implementing HSV in phonomicrosurgery, as well as the analysis of the challenges and prospects for the clinical implementation of HSV, additionally supported by references to previously reported data.
A compositional logic for polymorphic higher-order functions

This paper introduces a compositional program logic for higher-order polymorphic functions and standard data types. The logic enables us to reason about observable properties of polymorphic programs starting from those of their constituents. Just as types attached to programs offer information on their composability so as to guarantee basic safety of composite programs, formulae of the proposed logic attached to programs offer information on their composability so as to guarantee fine-grained behavioural properties of polymorphic programs. The central feature of the logic is a systematic usage of names and operations on them, whose origin is in the logics for typed π-calculi. The paper introduces the program logic and its proof rules and illustrates their usage by non-trivial reasoning examples, taking a prototypical call-by-value functional language with impredicative polymorphism and recursive types as a target language.