Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbamezapine for pain management in Guillain‐Barré syndrome patients in the intensive care unit

Objective: To evaluate carbamezapine (CBZ) for neuritic pain relief in Guillain‐Barré syndrome (GBS) patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). Design: Prospective, double‐blind, randomly allocated crossover study days. Setting: ICU in a tertiary care university hospital. Participants: Twelve consecutive, conscious adult (22‐54 yrs) patients with GBS during recovery from the muscular weakness and receiving pressure‐support ventilation in the ICU. All patients complained of severe backache and/or leg cramps and tenderness in muscles, and they required opioids for pain relief. Interventions: CBZ (100 mg every 8 hrs) or equivalent placebo was given to nursing staff in coded powder form. Medication was given to patients through a nasogastric feeding tube. The same coded medicine was given for 3 days, and after a 1‐day omission, a second set of coded powder was given for the next 3 days in a randomized, double‐blind, crossover fashion. Pethidine (1 mg·kg−1) was given intravenously in between, if the pain score was >2. Group 1 (n = 6) patients were given a placebo on the first 3 days, followed by CBZ. Group 2 (n = 6) patients were given CBZ on the first 3 days, followed by a placebo. Measurements and Main Results: In these two study periods of different medications, we observed and scored pain (1, no pain; 5, severe pain), sedation (1, alert; 6, asleep, does not respond to verbal command), and total pethidine requirement per day. In group 1 patients, a significant (p < .001) improvement in the sedation score and a low requirement for pethidine was observed 3 days later, when CBZ was started. However, in group 2 patients, a gradual increase in the pethidine requirement and a high sedation score were noteworthy in the later days of placebo medication. Observations were also analyzed for CBZ days vs. placebo days. Overall, the pain score (1.7 ± 0.8) during the CBZ period of both regimens was significantly (p < .001) lower than during the placebo days (3.1 ± 0.9). Significantly higher doses of pethidine (3.7 ± 0.9 mg/kg/day) were used on the placebo days than on the CBZ days (1.7 ± 1.0 mg/kg/day). Conclusion: The pain in GBS has a dual origin, and we recommend CBZ as an adjuvant to treat pain in GBS patients, during the recovery phase in the ICU, to reduce the narcotic requirement.
Towards mutual trust, transparency and equity in virus sharing mechanism: the avian influenza case of Indonesia.

INTRODUCTION As the country hardest hit by avian influenza, both in poultry and in human, Indonesia's decision to withhold samples of avian influenza virus A (H5N1) has fired up a global controversy. The objective of this paper is to describe the position taken by Indonesia in the events leading to the decision and in those conducted to resolve the situation. METHODS The sources for this paper are the Indonesian human influenza A(H5N1) case reports and study results, summaries, minutes and reports of national and international meetings of virus sharing, and other related Indonesian and WHO documents. RESULTS The International Health Regulations 2005 have been applied in different ways based on different interpretations. While one party insists on the importance of free, non-conditional, virus sharing for risk assessment and risk response, Indonesia--as supported by most of the developing countries--stresses on the more basic principles such as sovereignty of a country over its biological materials, transparency of the global system, and equity between developed and developing nations. CONCLUSIONS This event demonstrates the unresolved imbalance between the affluent high-tech countries and the poor agriculture-based countries. Regional, global and in-country meetings must continue to be conducted to find solutions acceptable to all.
Muscle Extension Model for FES-Assisted Knee Swinging Ergometer for Stroke Patient

This work is focused on the development of physiological and mathematical model of muscle extension induced by FES-assisted knee swinging ergometer. A muscle model composed of muscle activation, muscle contraction and body segmental dynamics is developed to perform full knee extension. The developed muscle model is then incorporated with a humanoid model and a knee swinging ergometer model to perform simulation of FES-assisted knee swinging exercise. The developed humanoid model possesses the characteristics of stroke patient while the knee swinging ergometer was developed with the ability of utilizing the non-paretic knee in assisting the swinging of the paretic knee. The developed muscle model is evaluated under the dynamic simulation of FES-assisted knee swinging ergometer. The active torque and knee trajectories are recorded and the results shows that the design of knee swinging ergometer had successfully reduced the required stimulation pulse width in performing full knee extension. It is also suggested that the muscle model developed can be used for future analysis and control development of FES-assisted knee swinging ergometer for stroke patient.
How to deal with low performance IMUs in an integrated navigation system: Step by step

The Project of Research and Technologies on Unmanned Air Vehicles (PITVANT) undertaken and led by the Portuguese Air Force Academy (PAFA) had its beginning in January, 2009. The PITVANT project main focus goes to the development of new technologies and operation concepts for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) of small dimensions, keeping in mind the necessary field tests for the transition to bigger vehicles. Within the project objectives are the development, construction and testing of small and medium platforms; cooperative control of various vehicles; enhanced systems' interoperability; development of advanced vision systems; fusion of multiple sensor data and development of navigation systems. Fulfilling the previous goals allows for the usage of UAV's in multiple mission scenarios such as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), combat missions performed by cooperative teams of unnamed vehicles, perimeter surveillance missions, etc. Among the wide range of objectives of such a project, our focus is the PITVANT UAV navigation system. The main focus is on the development and validation of a low performance IMU/GNSS navigation system, which can, in the meantime, replace the commercial autopilot existent onboard the UAVs. However, the task of selecting the correct Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to use in a specific integrated navigation system is not as easy as it could seem. As a matter of fact, there is an enormous diversity of technologies applied to inertial navigation sensors making them different from one another; the large quality range of the inertial sensor market leads to the need and importance of some type of inertial sensor classification. Although this may be true, it should be stated, that up to now there is no universally agreed definition of high, medium, and, low grade IMUs. In fact, frequently, the lack of information on the reliability of the IMUs (MEMS-based) leads to its incorrect application. Equally important is the fact that, when faced with such a variety of inertial sensors, it is also quite hard to know which technical data one should analyze and compare before making a decision. Sometimes it can be very difficult, especially for inexpert users of such technology, to make the right decision about which one will meet the application's requirements the best. Important to realize is also the fact that sometimes many different sensor technologies offer a different range of advantages and disadvantages while offering a similar performance. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology that has been developed to compare two different low performance IMUs in order to select one of them for our application. This methodology is also developed to evaluate if the procedures applied to one sensor are adaptable to others in order to achieve a unique methodology when working with such a category of inertial sensors.
Characterization of Extremal Controls for Infinite Dimensional Time-Varying Systems

In this paper we prove some properties of attainable sets for time-varying infinite dimensional linear control systems with time-varying constrained controls and target sets. We also characterize the extremal controls and give necessary and sufficient conditions for the normality of the system. Moreover, we prove an existence theorem for the time optimal control, establishing two maximum principles.
P-SAMS: a web site for plant artificial microRNA and synthetic trans-acting small interfering RNA design

Summary: The Plant Small RNA Maker Site (P-SAMS) is a web tool for the simple and automated design of artificial miRNAs (amiRNAs) and synthetic trans-acting small interfering RNAs (syn-tasiRNAs) for efficient and specific targeted gene silencing in plants. P-SAMS includes two applications, P-SAMS amiRNA Designer and P-SAMS syn-tasiRNA Designer. The navigation through both applications is wizard-assisted, and the job runtime is relatively short. Both applications output the sequence of designed small RNA(s), and the sequence of the two oligonucleotides required for cloning into ‘B/c’ compatible vectors. Availability and implementation: The P-SAMS website is available at http://p-sams.carringtonlab. org. Contact: acarbonell@ibmcp.upv. es or nfahlgren@danforthcenter.org
Situated local and global orientation in mobile you-are-here maps

This paper presents a novel solution to the focus-and-context problem of mobile maps provided for local and global orientation. Our solution is inspired by the design principles of static You-Are-Here maps and realizes principles of human spatial cognition to enable efficient communication of location information. We further propose selective interaction with the presented information to improve the speed and accuracy of interpretation of the geographic information. Tests show strong evidence for the cognitive and interaction efficiency of the resulting maps, as users were faster and more accurate than with conventional mobile maps.
Antifungal, Cytotoxic, and Immunomodulatory Properties of Tea Tree Oil and Its Derivative Components: Potential Role in Management of Oral Candidosis in Cancer Patients

Candida albicans forms oral biofilms that cause disease and are difficult to treat with conventional antifungal agents. Tea tree oil (TTO) is a natural compound with reported antimicrobial and immunomodulatory activities. The aims of the study were to evaluate the antifungal efficacy of TTO and key derivatives against C. albicans biofilms, to assess the toxicological effects of TTO on a clinically relevant oral cell line, and to investigate its impact on inflammation. TTO and its derivatives were examined against 100 clinical strains of C. albicans. Planktonic minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) were determined using the CLSI M-27A broth microdilution method. Sessile MICs were determined using an XTT reduction assay. Inhibition, time-kill, and mode of action studies were performed. OKF6-TERT2 epithelial cells were used for cytotoxicity and cytokine expression assays. Planktonic C. albicans isolates were susceptible to TTO, terpinen-4-ol (T-4-ol), and α-terpineol, with an MIC50 of 0.5, 0.25, and 0.25%, respectively. These three compounds also displayed potent activity against the 69 biofilm-forming strains, of which T-4-ol and α-terpineol displayed rapid kill kinetics. For all three compounds, 1 × MIC50 effectively inhibited biofilm growth when C. albicans were treated at 0, 1, and 2 h post adhesion. By scanning electron microscopy analysis and PI uptake, TTO and derivative components were shown to be cell membrane active. TTO and T-4-ol were cytotoxic at 1 × MIC50, whereas at 0.5 × MIC50 T-4-ol displayed no significant toxicity. Transcript and protein analysis showed a reduction of IL-8 when treated with TTO and T-4-ol. These data provide further in vitro evidence that TTO and its derivative components, specifically T-4-ol, exhibit strong antimicrobial properties against fungal biofilms. T-4-ol has safety advantages over the complete essential oil and may be suitable for prophylaxis and treatment of established oropharyngeal candidosis. A clinical trial of T-4-ol is worthy of consideration.
On the necessity of looped-functionals arising in the analysis of pseudo-periodic, sampled-data and hybrid systems

Looped-functionals have been shown to be relevant for the analysis of a wide variety of systems. However, the conditions obtained in previous papers on the analysis of sampled-data, impulsive and switched systems have only been shown to be sufficient for the characterisation of their associated discrete-time stability conditions. We prove here that these conditions are also necessary. This result is derived for a wider class of linear systems, referred to as impulsive pseudo-periodic systems, that encompass periodic, impulsive, sampled-data and switched systems as special cases.
Efficient methods for identifying mutated driver pathways in cancer

MOTIVATION The first step for clinical diagnostics, prognostics and targeted therapeutics of cancer is to comprehensively understand its molecular mechanisms. Large-scale cancer genomics projects are providing a large volume of data about genomic, epigenomic and gene expression aberrations in multiple cancer types. One of the remaining challenges is to identify driver mutations, driver genes and driver pathways promoting cancer proliferation and filter out the unfunctional and passenger ones. RESULTS In this study, we propose two methods to solve the so-called maximum weight submatrix problem, which is designed to de novo identify mutated driver pathways from mutation data in cancer. The first one is an exact method that can be helpful for assessing other approximate or/and heuristic algorithms. The second one is a stochastic and flexible method that can be employed to incorporate other types of information to improve the first method. Particularly, we propose an integrative model to combine mutation and expression data. We first apply our methods onto simulated data to show their efficiency. We further apply the proposed methods onto several real biological datasets, such as the mutation profiles of 74 head and neck squamous cell carcinomas samples, 90 glioblastoma tumor samples and 313 ovarian carcinoma samples. The gene expression profiles were also considered for the later two data. The results show that our integrative model can identify more biologically relevant gene sets. We have implemented all these methods and made a package called mutated driver pathway finder, which can be easily used for other researchers. AVAILABILITY A MATLAB package of MDPFinder is available at http://zhangroup.aporc. org/ShiHuaZhang. CONTACT zsh@amss.ac. cn. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Tolerating Overload Attacks Against Packet Capturing Systems

Passive network monitoring applications such as intrusion detection systems are susceptible to overloads, which can be induced by traffic spikes or algorithmic singularities triggered by carefully crafted malicious packets. Under overload conditions, the system may consume all the available resources, dropping most of the monitored traffic until the overload condition is resolved. Unfortunately, such an awkward response to overloads may be easily capitalized by attackers who can intentionally overload the system to evade detection. In this paper we propose Selective Packet Paging (SPP), a two-layer memory management design that gracefully responds to overload conditions by storing selected packets in secondary storage for later processing, while using randomization to avoid predictable evasion by sophisticated attackers. We describe the design and implementation of SPP within the widely used Libpcap packet capture library. Our evaluation shows that the detection accuracy of Snort on top of Libpcap is significantly reduced under algorithmic complexity and traffic overload attacks, while SPP makes it resistant to both algorithmic overloads and traffic bursts.
Interference graphs for procedures in static single information form are interval graphs

Static Single Information (SSI) Form is a compiler intermediate representation that extends the more well-known Static Single Assignment (SSA) Form. In 2005, several research groups independently proved that interference graphs for procedures represented in SSA Form are chordal graphs. This paper performs a similar analysis concerning SSI Form, and proves that interference graphs are interval graphs. The primary consequences of this paper are threefold: (1) Linear scan register allocation for programs in SSI Form can be implemented in such a way that there are no lifetime holes, thereby sidestepping one of the drawbacks that plagued non-SSI implementations; (2) the k-colorable subgraph problem can be solved in polynomial-time for interval graphs, but remains NP-Complete for chordal graphs---to date, no register allocation algorithms have been implemented that solve the k-colorable subgraph problem directly; and (3) liveness analysis converges after a single iteration for programs represented in SSI Form.
La atención al parto en España: Cifras para reflexionar sobre un problema

Childbirth is the first reason for hospitalization in Spain. After giving birth, it is not easy to get out unscathed from the hospital, in the sense of not having gone through a surgery (cesarean), a cut in the vagina (episiotomy), or other invasive procedures. The aim of this article is to question how scientific evidence is integrated in medical decisions about the delivery. For this, the article describes and analyzes the existing variability of perinatal care in Spain, which shows that the result of the delivery depends much more on factors such as the geography zone or whether the hospital is public or private, rather than the delivery process of women itself. It also analyzes the adequacy of interventions to the standards set by organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health.
Noise reduction algorithm for full-waveform lidar signal

Noise is an inevitable problem which affects coherent imaging systems and consequently reduces the capability of lidar systems to resolve variations in the target heights. Common noise-reduction procedures, including moving Mean and Median filters, operate on a global level and do not perform adaptively on different segments of the backscattered signal. As such, spikes in the trailing edge of the measured signal due to multiple scattering are systematically classified as noise. Such filtering approaches do not account for changes in the characteristics of the waveform. It is assumed that contiguous scatterers are similarly affected by noise, and therefore need to be treated separately. This paper proposes a new adaptive local filter based on an averaging function, called adaptive mean filter (ADMF). Using a 2-D photographic ray-tracing model of a stand-alone tree, a signal with random white Gaussian noise, carrying the responses of the tree structure was simulated. The new filter along with Mean and median filters were examined on ten simulated signals. According to the results, the ADMF filter is abale to reduce noise, as shown by the lower root mean square error (RMSE), higher contrast and signal-to-noise ratio more efficient than the other two filters.
Code choice and code-switching in Swiss-German Internet Relay Chat rooms

In the German-speaking regions of Switzerland, dialect is spoken by all social groups in most communicative situations, Standard German being used only when prescribed. Swiss dialects rarely appeared in written form before the 1980s, apart from the genre of dialect literature. Due to the growing acceptance of informal writing styles in many European languages, dialect is increasingly employed for written personal communication, in particular in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In Swiss Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, varieties of German are used side by side as all chatters have a command of both standard and dialectal varieties. Depending on the channel, the proportion of dialectal contributions can be as high as 90 percent. The choice of a particular variety depends on both individual preference and on the predominant variety used within a specific thread. In this paper I take a quantitative approach to language variation in IRC and demonstrate how such an approach can help embed qualitative research on code-switching in CMC.
A miniaturized dual polarization antenna for a small wireless terminal

The growth of mobile communication has been very rapid and people can call from everywhere even in moving vehicles. Another trend is that personal computers (PCs) are becoming indispensable communication tools for business. Naturally, people desire to communicate through PCs even from outdoors, and research has considered wireless computer communication. One technical problem of wireless computer communication is how to realize a small efficient antenna for installation on a wireless IC-card. There have been some antennas reported. However, the only one that can be integrated into an IC-card is installed on the face of the IC card, so its performance degrades when it is inserted into the card-slot. We propose a new type of antenna for an IC-card which can be seen through the aperture of the card-slot. Since this antenna consists of two radiation elements which radiate V-polarization and H-polarization beams, it has a good performance regardless of the terminal inclination. This paper describes the configuration of the proposed antenna and its performance and shows its feasibility as a 2 GHz wireless system antenna.
Key words: cadastre systems, integration, financial-accounting systems

Cadastre systems are mission critical systems designed for the registration of parcels, buildings and apartments as well as their owners and users. These systems belong to the most important public systems used by various organizations and individual persons. There is no integrated cadastre system in Poland. The maintenance of real estate cadastre registers is dispersed among above 400 information centres located in district local self-governments as well as in the municipalities of bigger towns which exploit their local cadastre systems. So the attempt to create a unified cadastral system over the country is one of the goals of Polish government in the field of information technology. Architectures of integrated cadastre systems on the central level as well as on the level of a province or a district are analysed in the paper. Two main IT projects aimed at the creation of an integrated system are presented and discussed. Also the approaches to assure interoperability between a cadastre system and land usage payment system and a financial-accounting system in a municipality are shown.
Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes

Key Words and Phrases: parallel processes, parallel or asynchronous computations, partial orders of events, Actor theory. CR Categories: 5.21, 5.24, 5.26. This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C-0522.