Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computerization of a Preanesthetic Evaluation and User satisfaction evaluation

Preanesthetic evaluation purpose is to reduce morbidity and mortality through the review of the patient's medical history, clinical examination, and targeted clinical studies, providing referrals for medical consultations when appropriated. Changes in patient care, standards of health information management and patterns of perioperative care, have resulted in a re-conceptualization of this process where the documentation of patient medical information, the efforts in training and maintaining the integrity of the medical-legal evaluation are areas of concern. The aim of this paper is to describe the design, development, training, and implementation of a computerized preanesthetic evaluation form associated to the evaluation of the user satisfaction with the system. Since the system went live in September 2008 there were 15121 closed structured forms, 60% for ambulatory procedures and 40 % for procedures that required hospital admission. 82% of total closed structured forms had recorded a risk of the procedures of 1-2, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists classification. The survey indicates a positive general satisfaction of the users with the system.
Real World Privacy Expectations in VANETs

Vehicular communication technology is nearing deployment in the market. We see initial plug tests in 2013 to confirm interoperability of multiple independent implementations. As the entrance into the market is coming closer it is time to consider the privacy expectations of the relevant standards. These expectations are built upon location privacy through unlinkable pseudonyms. In this paper we focus on the real world privacy expectations that can be fulfilled in the first generation of vehicular communication technology using pseudonymity. What level of privacy is really achievable and does the effort to achieve this level privacy justify the cost and complexity of introducing pseudonymity into vehicular communication?
The rat suprachiasmatic nucleus: the master clock ticks at 30 Hz

Light‐responsive neurones in the rat suprachiasmatic nucleus discharge with a harmonic distribution of interspike intervals, whereas unresponsive neurones seldom do. This harmonic patterning has a fundamental frequency of close to 30 Hz, and is the same in light‐on cells as in light‐off cells, and is unaffected by exposure to light. Light‐on cells are more active than light‐off cells in both subjective day and subjective night, and both light‐on cells and light‐off cells respond more strongly to changes in light intensity during the subjective night than during the subjective day. Paired recordings indicate that the discharge of adjacent light‐responsive cells is very tightly synchronized. The gap junction inhibitor carbenoxolone increases the spontaneous activity of suprachiasmatic nucleus neurones but does not block the harmonic discharge patterning.
Coupling-Based Internal Clock Synchronization for Large-Scale Dynamic Distributed Systems

This paper studies the problem of realizing a common software clock among a large set of nodes without an external time reference (i.e., internal clock synchronization), any centralized control, and where nodes can join and leave the distributed system at their will. The paper proposes an internal clock synchronization algorithm which combines the gossip-based paradigm with a nature-inspired approach, coming from the coupled oscillators phenomenon, to cope with scale and churn. The algorithm works on the top of an overlay network and uses a uniform peer sampling service to fulfill each node's local view. Therefore, differently from clock synchronization protocols for small scale and static distributed systems, here, each node synchronizes regularly with only the neighbors in its local view and not with the whole system. An evaluation of the convergence speed and the synchronization error of the coupled-based internal clock synchronization algorithm has been carried out, showing how convergence time and the synchronization error depends on the coupling factor and the local view size. Moreover, the variation of the synchronization error with respect to churn and the impact of a sudden variation of the number of nodes have been analyzed to show the stability of the algorithm. In all these contexts, the algorithm shows nice performance and very good self-organizing properties. Finally, we showed how the assumption on the existence of a uniform peer-sampling service is instrumental for the good behavior of the algorithm and how, in system models where network delays are unbounded, a mean-based convergence function reaches a lower synchronization error than median-based convergence functions exploiting the number of averaged clock values.
Lattice Boltzmann model for simulation of magnetohydrodynamics.

A numerical method, based on a discrete Boltzmann equation, is presented for solving the equations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). The algorithm provides advantages similar to the cellular automaton method in that it is local and easily adapted to parallel computing environments. Because of much lower noise levels and less stringent requirements on lattice size, the method appears to be more competitive with traditional solution methods. Examples show that the model accurately reproduces both linear and nonlinear MHD phenomena.
A 1.9 GHz wide-band IF double conversion CMOS integrated receiver for cordless telephone applications

A number of recent efforts have concentrated on highly-integrated radio receivers using a low-cost silicon process such as CMOS. This prototype monolithic CMOS receiver combines RF and baseband functionality by taking the carrier signal at the LNA input and producing a 10 b digital baseband waveform. A wide-band intermediate frequency double conversion (WBIFDC) architecture eliminates the need for external narrow-band IF filters.
Doppler ultrasound in the fetus: A review of current applications

With the recent introduction of Doppler pulsed and continuous wave as well as color‐flow mapping, assessment of blood velocity in the human fetus has added a new dimension to fetal assessment. Although investigators initially examined blood flow in the descending aorta and umbilical vein, there was a wide variation in normal values because of the difficulty of accurately measuring the area of the vessels, a requirement for computation of blood volume. Using duplex sector scanners, velocity and blood flow have been obtained from the right and left ventricular chambers and aortic and pulmonic outflow tracts. At the present time the clinical application of the latter measurements is still under investigation. Doppler color‐flow mapping appears to be promising for elucidation of abnormal flow in fetuses suspected of having structural and/or functional cardiovascular disease. Because of the difficulty in computing volume flow due to the above mentioned factors, more recently investigators have examined angle independent parameters of blood velocity from the aorta, carotid and umbilical arteries in an attempt to quantify peripheral resistance. This latter technique appears to be promising for elucidation of placental pathology as is found in a number of fetal and placental diseases.
Association between sarcoidosis and lymphoma revisited.

AIMS: To investigate the relation between sarcoidosis and lymphoma. METHODS: The hospital notes of five patients with sarcoidosis and a lymphoproliferative disorder were reviewed. Histological material on which the diagnoses of sarcoidosis and lymphoma were made was re-analysed. RESULTS: Four of the five patients had well documented sarcoidosis preceding the development of lymphoma by 18 months to 28 years; the fifth patient had lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma with a reactive granuloma reaction. Two patients had chronic sarcoidosis and three were treated with prednisolone. The types of lymphoma were: Hodgkin's disease (n = 1), B cell lymphoma (n = 2) (mantle cell and lymphoplasmacytic/local plasmacytoma) and large granular lymphocyte leukaemia (T cell) (n = 1). CONCLUSIONS: The association between sarcoidosis and lymphoma is confirmed, suggesting that sarcoidosis may be a predisposing factor for the development of a lymphoid malignancy due to disturbance of the immune system. All types of lymphoma may develop. The first case of T cell granular lymphocytic leukaemia in a patient with sarcoidosis has been documented.
Modelling long duration transactions with time constraints in active database

The applications like situation assessment, object tracking, trading & stock control, and workflow management require actions to be taken in stringent time frame for full benefit of the system. These applications also require identifying the occurrence of desired event, to take appropriate action when an event of interest is found to have occurred while maintaining timing constraints. Active database with ECA rule provides the mechanism to capture the different database events and provide timely response but do not guarantee timely processing of real time transactions because of their inability to express time constraints explicitly. Most of the time constrained real life application requires both active and real time characteristics. Long duration transactions with explicit time constraints are more vulnerable to failures and they are subject to heavy compensations in case of aborts. The paper intends to investigate the construct required for modelling of transactions with timing constraints, cooperation semantics and run time monitoring of these constraints in active database.
Embryonic implantation and leukocyte transendothelial migration: different processes with similar players?

A clear parallelism between the different steps in human embryo‐endometrial apposition/adhesion/invasion and leukocyte‐endothelium rolling/adhesion/extravasation can be established. During human implantation and leukocyte trafficking, a first wave of soluble mediators regulates the expression and functional activity of adhesion molecules such as L‐selectin and integrins, which mediate both processes. Apical surfaces of human endometrial epithelium and endothelium are key elements for the initiation of molecular interactions to capture the blastocyst or leukocyte, respectively. Subsequently, the blastocyst and the leukocyte migrate through the epithelium and endothelium toward their final destination, the endometrial stroma, to initiate placentation or the inflammatory foci as part of the immune response. Similarities between the intermediate molecular mechanisms of these two physiologically unrelated processes are discussed. Dominguez, F. , Yáñez‐Mó, M. , Sanchez‐Madrid, F. , Simón, C. Embryonic implantation and leukocyte trans‐endothelial migration: different processes with similar players? FASEB J. 19, 1056–1060 (2005)
El estudio de las actitudes lingüísticas en el contexto sociocultural: el caso del mexicano de Cuetzalan

The present work has the objective to highlight the importance of the studies it has more than enough linguistic attitudes to understand the situation sociolinguistic of the indigenous languages of Mexico better. I propose a Model of the Attitudes to guide the investigation on this phenomenon in the sociocultural context and intercultural based on a perspective psico-socio-linguistics. I recapture the theoretical and methodological contributions that the social psychology has made on the attitudes and the silver proposals, inside the sociolinguistic to study the attitudes toward the languages. I consider, like particular case, the attitudes that the maseualmej of Cuetzalan expresses toward the Mexican and Spanish that you/they speak in different social situations and, at the same time, I center the discussion in the current situation of the Mexican in front of Spanish as part of the social processes of bilingualism and their possible tendency toward the linguistic displacement.
Augmented ICOS expression in patients with early diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE Inducible costimulator (ICOS), expressed on activated T cells, and its ligand, ICOS ligand (ICOSL), expressed on antigen-presenting cells, have been considered a single receptor-ligand pair. Here we investigated the expression of ICOS and ICOSL in patients with SSc. METHODS ICOS expression on peripheral blood T cells, and ICOSL expression on B cells and macrophages was determined by flow cytometry. Expression of ICOS and ICOSL was assessed by immunohistological staining and real-time PCR of lesional skin. RESULTS ICOS expression levels were specifically increased on both peripheral blood memory T cells and Tregs from early dcSSc patients compared with those from healthy controls. Mean ICOSL expression on B cells or macrophages was comparable between SSc patients and healthy controls. ICOS-expressing T cells, ICOSL-expressing macrophages and mRNA levels of ICOS and ICOSL were increased in the lesional skin of patients with early dcSSc. In vitro ICOS costimulation enhanced production of IFN-γ, IL-4 and IL-17A from T cells in SSc patients vs normal controls. Soluble ICOS levels were significantly increased in SSc patients and were negatively associated with the presence of ACAs and positively associated with CRP values. Serum levels of soluble ICOS were more closely associated with clinical features compared with levels of soluble IL-2 receptor. CONCLUSION Augmented ICOS signalling may contribute to the pathogenesis of SSc during early progressive disease. Soluble ICOS levels may be used as a serum marker for the activity and severity of SSc.
A novel 1D trifocal tensor-based control for differential-drive robots

This paper presents an image-based approach to perform visual control for differential-drive robots. We use for the first time the elements of the 1D trifocal tensor directly in the control law. The visual control utilizes the usual teach-by showing strategy without requiring any a prior knowledge of the scene and does not need any auxiliary image. The main contribution of the paper is that the proposed two-steps control law ensures total correction of both position and orientation without switching to any other visual constraint rather than the 1D trifocal tensor. The paper exploits the sliding mode control technique in a square system, ensuring stability and robustness for the closed loop. The good performance of the control system is proven via simulations.
Nearcast: A locality-aware P2P live streaming approach for distance education

Peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming has been widely used in distance education applications to deliver the captured video courses to a large number of online students. By allowing peers serving each other in the network, P2P technology overcomes many limitations in the traditional client-server paradigm to achieve user and bandwidth scalabilities. However, existing systems do not perform well when the number of online students increases, and the system performance degrades seriously. One of the reasons is that the construction of the peer overlay in existing P2P systems has not considered the underlying physical network topology and can cause serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical network. The topology mismatch problem brings great link stress (unnecessary traffic) in the Internet infrastructure and greatly degrades the system performance. In this article, we address this problem and propose a locality-aware P2P overlay construction method, called Nearcast, which builds an efficient overlay multicast tree by letting each peer node choose physically closer nodes as its logical children. We have conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of Nearcast in comparison with the existing RTT and NICE protocols. Also, Nearcast has been deployed on a wide-area network testbed to delivery video coursed to about 7200 users distributed across 100 collages in 32 cities in China. The experimental results show that Nearcast leads to lower link stress and shorter end-to-end latencies compared with the RTT and NICE protocols.
Handwritten Text Recognition for Historical Documents

The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents. The vast majority of them remain waiting to be transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF) that would provide historians and other researchers new ways of indexing, consulting and querying them. In this work, the state-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition techniques are applied for the automatic transcription of these historical documents. We report results for several ancient documents.
Estimating Soil Displacement from Timber Extraction Trails in Steep Terrain: Application of an Unmanned Aircraft for 3D Modelling

Skid trails constructed for timber extraction in steep terrain constitute a serious environmental concern if not well planned, executed and ameliorated. Carrying out post-harvest surveys in monitoring constructed trails in such terrain is an onerous task for forest administrators, as hundreds of meters need to be surveyed per site, and the quantification of parameters and volumes is largely based on assumptions of trail symmetry and terrain uniformity. In this study, aerial imagery captured from a multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was used in generating a detailed post-harvest terrain model which included all skid trails. This was then compared with an Airborne Laser Scanning derived pre-harvest terrain model and the dimensions, slopes and cut-and-fill volumes associated with the skid trails were determined. The overall skid trail length was 954 m, or 381 m·ha−1 with segments varying from 40–60 m, inclinations from 3.9% to 9.6%, and cut volumes, from 1.7 to 3.7 m3 per running meter. The methods used in this work can be used in rapidly assessing the extent of disturbance and erosion risk on a wide range of sites. The multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was found to be highly suited to the task, given the relatively small size of harvested stands, their shape and their location in the mountainous terrain.
Design of an exergaming station for children with cerebral palsy

We report on the design of a novel station supporting the play of exercise video games (exergames) by children with cerebral palsy (CP). The station combines a physical platform allowing children with CP to provide pedaling input into a game, a standard Xbox 360 controller, and algorithms for interpreting the cycling input to improve smoothness and accuracy of gameplay. The station was designed through an iterative and incremental participatory design process involving medical professionals, game designers, computer scientists, kinesiologists, physical therapists, and eight children with CP. It has been tested through observation of its use, through gathering opinions from the children, and through small experimental studies. With our initial design, only three of eight children were capable of playing a cycling-based game; with the final design, seven of eight could cycle effectively, and six reached energy expenditure levels recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine while pedaling unassisted.
Modeling the performance of the Web service platform using Layered Queueing Networks

The current evolution towards complex software systems consisting of relatively loosely coupled components, owned and exploited by different players, implies important challenges for both the application developers as well as the providers of the final software system. In this area, we currently witness the adaption of the Web service model as one of the major component standards. This paper presents an analytical model to evaluate the impact of using Web services as middleware on the overall system performance. Specifically, Layered Queueing Networks are used to model the Web service middleware layer. When designing a distributed application, this model can be used to predict the overall system performance, even for complex systems. For comparison reasons, the LQN model when using CORBA as middleware is presented as well. The results show that the proposed LQN models, of both the Web services framework as well as CORBA, produce very accurate estimates of the response time.
Estimating brain functional connectivity with sparse multivariate autoregression

There is much current interest in identifying the anatomical and functional circuits that are the basis of the brain's computations, with hope that functional neuroimaging techniques will allow the in vivo study of these neural processes through the statistical analysis of the time-series they produce. Ideally, the use of techniques such as multivariate autoregressive (MAR) modelling should allow the identification of effective connectivity by combining graphical modelling methods with the concept of Granger causality. Unfortunately, current time-series methods perform well only for the case that the length of the time-series Nt is much larger than p, the number of brain sites studied, which is exactly the reverse of the situation in neuroimaging for which relatively short time-series are measured over thousands of voxels. Methods are introduced for dealing with this situation by using sparse MAR models. These can be estimated in a two-stage process involving (i) penalized regression and (ii) pruning of unlikely connections by means of the local false discovery rate developed by Efron. Extensive simulations were performed with idealized cortical networks having small world topologies and stable dynamics. These show that the detection efficiency of connections of the proposed procedure is quite high. Application of the method to real data was illustrated by the identification of neural circuitry related to emotional processing as measured by BOLD.
Adaptive large MISO downlink with Predictor Antenna array for very fast moving vehicles

Recently, a “Separate Receive and Training Antenna” technique has been proposed to provide energy efficient and robust wireless downlink data transmission towards antennas placed upon fast moving vehicles. Energy efficiency is attained thanks to Large Multiple Input Single Output Beamforming. Robustness to beamforming mispointing at high speed is obtained by using the recent “Predictor Antenna” concept. However, for some speeds, the Separate Receive and Training Antenna technique suffers from residual mispointing. To improve the robustness of this technique, we propose three new schemes: the “Border Switch Off Scheme”, the “Random Switch Off Scheme” and the “Polynomial Interpolation” scheme. The two first schemes dynamically mute transmit antennas selectively when the residual mispointing is too severe. The third scheme generalizes the Predictor Antenna concept and uses all antennas upon the vehicle as a Predictor Antenna Array. These schemes are here assessed over spatially correlated channels. The two first schemes reduce energy saving to slightly improve robustness, whereas the third scheme perfectly compensates all speeds up to 300 kmph with maximum energy saving, at the cost of extra complexity.
A case study on the establishment of enterprise core competence based on knowledge management

In order to find out how knowledge management (KM) can improve corporate core competence. Firstly, this article surveys the actual situation of some municipal engineering company. Secondly, analyses the underlying reasons of lack of core competence. Lastly, finds out methods and ways to cultivate and promote core KM. The conclusion shows that KM is the key factor for enterprise to establish its core competence, and is also the base of surviving in fierce competition.