Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Contribution of Biomechanical-Biological Interactions of the Spine to Low Back Pain

Objective: The objective of this mini-review is to examine a subset of literature that demonstrates multiple interactions between mechanics and biology within the spine and propose how incorporation of these mechano-biologic interactions can be applied to improve the conceptual understanding of tissue tolerances. Background: Low back pain represents a major musculoskeletal problem in the workplace. Traditional biomechanical assessments have employed tissue tolerances as an approach for reducing workplace injuries; however, development of more universal biologically sensitive tolerances requires incorporation of mechano-biologic interactions. Methods: A focused literature review addressing the interactions between mechanical loading and biology in the spine. Results: Mechanical loads applied to the body are distributed across all spatial scales from the body to the tissues to the cells. These mechanical loads regulate cellular metabolism and over time can lead to tissue strengthening or weakening. Mechanical loading also interacts with the biologic environment (e.g., tissue inflammation, nerve sensitization) to influence the perception of pain, thereby changing the risk of experiencing pain. Biologic tissues also exhibit time-dependent changes in mechanical behaviors that occur throughout the day and with disease, suggesting tissue tolerances are time dependent. Conclusion: Incorporating mechano-biologic interactions into the traditional tissue tolerance paradigm through describing tissue tolerances as a function of multiple factors (e.g., preexisting risk factors, underlying pathology, and time) may lead to the development of tissue tolerances that are more representative of the in vivo situation. Application: Efforts must work toward incorporating biological concepts into tissue tolerances in order to improve risk assessment tools.
EEG-EMG Signal Processing and Analysis for the Neuromuscular Activity Patterns with Three Motion Modes under Two Time Intervals

To address the issue that how the EEG-EMG signals change according to different motion modes, an experiment was conducted on ten subjects with three tasks performing the voluntary, stimulated and imaginary finger flexion activities. The experiment was set two programs including 10s and 2s time intervals. Electroencephalogram (EEG) from C3/C4 channels and electromyogram (EMG) from flexor digitorum superficialis were recorded simultaneously. Besides the threshold detection of wave peaks between two points, morlet wavlet-based time-frequency analysis was adopted to study the independent variation mechanisms between EEG and EMG under different motion modes. The results indicated that EMG signals of 2s intervals exhibited a similar trend with 10s intervals. The EMG energy increased over 50 Hz when actions occurred. On the contrary, there were no significant changes in imaginary task. In addition, EEG signals performed obviously different. No pronounced similar changes were found in 10s and 2s intervals. Finally, the results demonstrated that EEG-EMG causality was high during 2s intervals in stimulation task.
Vascular Displacement in Idiopathic Macular Hole after Single-layered Inverted Internal Limiting Membrane Flap Surgery

Purpose To compare vascular displacement in the macula after surgical closure of idiopathic macular hole (MH) after single-layered inverted internal limiting membrane (ILM) flap technique and conventional ILM removal. Methods This retrospective study included patients who underwent either vitrectomy and ILM removal only or vitrectomy with single-layered inverted ILM flap for idiopathic MH larger than 400 µm from 2012 to 2015. A customized program compared the positions of the retinal vessels in the macula between preoperative and postoperative photographs. En face images of 6 × 6 mm optical coherence tomography volume scans were registered to calculate the scale. Retinal vessel displacement was measured as a vector value by comparing its location in 16 sectors of a grid partitioned into eight sectors in two rings (inner, 2 to 4 mm; outer, 4 to 6 mm). The distance and angle of displacement were calculated as an average vector and were compared between the two groups for whole sectors, inner ring, outer ring, and for each sector. Results Twenty patients were included in the ILM flap group and 22 in the ILM removal group. There were no statistical differences between the groups for baseline characteristics. The average displacement in the ILM flap group and the ILM removal group was 56.6 µm at −3.4° and 64.9 µm at −2.7°, respectively, for the whole sectors (p = 0.900), 76.1 µm at −1.1° and 87.3 µm at −0.9° for the inner ring (p = 0.980), and 37.4 µm at −8.2° and 42.7 µm at −6.3° for the outer ring (p = 0.314). There was no statistical difference in the displacement of each of the sectors. Conclusions Postoperative topographic changes showed no significant differences between the ILM flap and the ILM removal group for idiopathic MH. The single-layered ILM flap technique did not appear to cause additional displacement of the retinal vessels in the macula.
PDOA Based Indoor Positioning Using Visible Light Communication

A novel indoor positioning algorithm with improved location accuracy is proposed for visible light communication system. The novelty of the positioning algorithm lies in a hybrid approach of making use of both frequency and variable phase of the transmitted signal. The algorithm has the capability of estimating the position of an object with localization error in millimeters when the signal passes through an optical channel. The LEDs are modulated at very high frequencies. The simulation results demonstrate that the positioning error is reasonably reduced compared with other existing approaches (algorithms). Unlike existing work, the current work also evaluates the performance of the positioning algorithm in the presence of different noise distributions and shows that 1 – 2 cm positioning accuracy can be achieved in the presence of the noise. Finally, multiple potential applications are discussed in which the proposed positioning scheme can be deployed.
Plant-parasitic nematodes: towards understanding molecular players in stress responses

Background Plant‐parasitic nematode interactions occur within a vast molecular plant immunity network. Following initial contact with the host plant roots, plant‐parasitic nematodes (PPNs) activate basal immune responses. Defence priming involves the release in the apoplast of toxic molecules derived from reactive species or secondary metabolism. In turn, PPNs must overcome the poisonous and stressful environment at the plant‐nematode interface. The ability of PPNs to escape this first line of plant immunity is crucial and will determine its virulence. Scope Nematodes trigger crucial regulatory cytoprotective mechanisms, including antioxidant and detoxification pathways. Knowledge of the upstream regulatory components that contribute to both of these pathways in PPNs remains elusive. In this review, we discuss how PPNs probably orchestrate cytoprotection to resist plant immune responses, postulating that it may be derived from ancient molecular mechanisms. The review focuses on two transcription factors, DAF‐16 and SKN‐1, which are conserved in the animal kingdom and are central regulators of cell homeostasis and immune function. Both regulate the unfolding protein response and the antioxidant and detoxification pathways. DAF‐16 and SKN‐1 target a broad spectrum of Caenorhabditis elegans genes coding for numerous protein families present in the secretome of PPNs. Moreover, some regulatory elements of DAF‐16 and SKN‐1 from C. elegans have already been identified as important genes for PPN infection. Conclusion DAF‐16 and SKN‐1 genes may play a pivotal role in PPNs during parasitism. In the context of their hub status and mode of regulation, we suggest alternative strategies for control of PPNs through RNAi approaches.
Hybrid Optimization Algorithm of Improved Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (iBPSO) And Cuckoo Search for Review Spam Detection

With the development of the Internet, people are interested to share their views and opinions about the product on the web, forums, blogs etc. These online reviews are important for individual users and organization. Recently, it is a common tendency to the user to read the reviews or comments before purchasing some products or services. The online reviews are helpful for the business organizations in order to promote their product. However, in practice, these online reviews may be fake in order to promote or devalue the product. These fake reviews are called as opinion spam. Objective of the research paper is that, to select the best feature subset for detecting the fake review. To select a small subset of features out of the thousands of feature is important for accurate classification of review spam detection. Therefore, a good feature selection method is needed in order to speed up the processing rate, predictive accuracy. In this paper hybrid improved Binary Particle Swarm optimization (iBPSO) and cuckoo search (CS) is used for feature selection and Naive Bayes and k Nearest Neighbor classifier is used for classifying the review as spam and ham. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm has yielded the best performance compared with the swarm intelligence techniques Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) and Shuffled Frog Leaping (SFL).
Long-term effect of farmyard manure and N on the distribution of zinc and copper in soil fractions under pearl millet - wheat cropping system

A long-term field experiment was initiated in November, 1967 to study the response of N on pearl millet (Pennisetum typhoides )-wheat ( Triticum aestivum ) cropping sequence for various doses and modes of farmyard manure (FYM) application. Increasing levels of FYM from 0 to 45 Mg /ha increased the exchangeable, carbonate bound, oxide bound, organic bound and residual fraction of both Zn and Cu in surface (0-15 cm) and sub-surface (15-30 cm) soil. FYM applied during the winter (rabi) season caused a greater increase in all Zn and Cu fractions as compared to summer (kharif) application. The percent contribution of different Zn and Cu fractions towards total Zn and Cu in surface and sub-surface soil revealed the following order: exchangeable < carbonated bound < oxide bound < organic bound < residual.
The Tardieu Scale differentiates contracture from spasticity whereas the Ashworth Scale is confounded by it

Objective: To compare the Tardieu Scale as a clinical measure of spasticity after stroke with the Ashworth Scale. Design: Cross-sectional study. Participants: Sixteen people, living in the community three years after their stroke. Main measures: The Ashworth Scale and Tardieu Scale as well as laboratory measures of spasticity (stretch-induced electromyographic (EMG) activity) and contracture (maximum passive joint excursion) were collected from the affected elbow flexors and extensors and ankle plantarflexors and dorsiflexors by three examiners who were blinded to the results of the other measures. Results: The percentage exact agreement (PEA) between the Tardieu Scale and a laboratory measure of spasticity was 100% for both the elbow flexors and ankle plantarflexors. This was significantly (P=0.02) greater than the PEA of 63% for both muscles between the Ashworth Scale and the same laboratory measure of spasticity. For contracture, the PEA between the Tardieu Scale and a laboratory measure was 94% for both the elbow flexors and the ankle plantarflexors. Pearson correlation coefficients between the Tardieu Scale and laboratory measures of spasticity were 0.86 for the elbow flexors and 0.62 for the ankle plantarflexors and between the Tardieu Scale and laboratory measures of contracture were 0.89 for the elbow flexors and 0.84 for the ankle plantarflexors. Conclusion: In all cases that spasticity was overestimated by the Ashworth Scale, participants had a contracture. These findings suggest that the Tardieu Scale differentiates spasticity from contracture whereas the Ashworth Scale is confounded by it.
Mobility support enhancement for RPL

In recent years, Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have attracted the attention of researchers. They typically operate with strict resource constraints in communication, computation, memory, and energy. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is an ad-hoc Distance Vector routing protocol for LLNs that adapts IPv6 and runs on top of IEEE 802.15. 4 standard. Although RPL was originally designed for static topologies, for many applications mobility support has been a major requirement in LLNs. This paper focuses on addressing mobility support in RPL. We propose an enhancement based on signal strength monitoring and rank updating in order to improve the RPL performance in mobility scenarios where all nodes are moving. This enhancement helps RPL to better cope with mobility scenarios and to make faster decisions on updating next-hop neighbors. Moreover, we propose a dynamic management of control messages in order to reduce the overhead in the network. The simulation results show that our technique outperforms the standard RPL for different routing metrics.
Body-wide anatomy recognition in PET/CT images

With the rapid growth of positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT)-based medical applications, body-wide anatomy recognition on whole-body PET/CT images becomes crucial for quantifying body-wide disease burden. This, however, is a challenging problem and seldom studied due to unclear anatomy reference frame and low spatial resolution of PET images as well as low contrast and spatial resolution of the associated low-dose CT images. We previously developed an automatic anatomy recognition (AAR) system [15] whose applicability was demonstrated on diagnostic computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images in different body regions on 35 objects. The aim of the present work is to investigate strategies for adapting the previous AAR system to low-dose CT and PET images toward automated body-wide disease quantification. Our adaptation of the previous AAR methodology to PET/CT images in this paper focuses on 16 objects in three body regions – thorax, abdomen, and pelvis – and consists of the following steps: collecting whole-body PET/CT images from existing patient image databases, delineating all objects in these images, modifying the previous hierarchical models built from diagnostic CT images to account for differences in appearance in low-dose CT and PET images, automatically locating objects in these images following object hierarchy, and evaluating performance. Our preliminary evaluations indicate that the performance of the AAR approach on low-dose CT images achieves object localization accuracy within about 2 voxels, which is comparable to the accuracies achieved on diagnostic contrast-enhanced CT images. Object recognition on low-dose CT images from PET/CT examinations without requiring diagnostic contrast-enhanced CT seems feasible.
NS5A inhibitors unmask differences in functional replicase complex half-life between different hepatitis C virus strains

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA is synthesized by the replicase complex (RC), a macromolecular assembly composed of viral non-structural proteins and cellular co-factors. Inhibitors of the HCV NS5A protein block formation of new RCs but do not affect RNA synthesis by pre-formed RCs. Without new RC formation, existing RCs turn over and are eventually lost from the cell. We aimed to use NS5A inhibitors to estimate the half-life of the functional RC of HCV. We compared different cell culture-infectious strains of HCV that may be grouped based on their sensitivity to lipid peroxidation: robustly replicating, lipid peroxidation resistant (LPOR) viruses (e.g. JFH-1 or H77D) and more slowly replicating, lipid peroxidation sensitive (LPOS) viruses (e.g. H77S.3 and N.2). In luciferase assays, LPOS HCV strains declined under NS5A inhibitor therapy with much slower kinetics compared to LPOR HCV strains. This difference in rate of decline was not observed for inhibitors of the NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase suggesting that the difference was not simply a consequence of differences in RNA stability. In further analyses, we compared two isoclonal HCV variants: the LPOS H77S.3 and the LPOR H77D that differ only by 12 amino acids. Differences in rate of decline between H77S.3 and H77D following NS5A inhibitor addition were not due to amino acid sequences in NS5A but rather due to a combination of amino acid differences in the non-structural proteins that make up the HCV RC. Mathematical modeling of intracellular HCV RNA dynamics suggested that differences in RC stability (half-lives of 3.5 and 9.9 hours, for H77D and H77S.3, respectively) are responsible for the different kinetics of antiviral suppression between LPOS and LPOR viruses. In nascent RNA capture assays, the rate of RNA synthesis decline following NS5A inhibitor addition was significantly faster for H77D compared to H77S.3 indicating different half-lives of functional RCs.
New method on preparing of nylon 6 micropowder and PA6/PP/wollastonite composite

The structure and mechanical performance of PA6 and the PA6 mixed with PPgMAH and wollastonite induced by panmilling were studied by particle size analysis, TEM observation, viscosity average molecular weight measurement and mechanical properties testes. The results showed that the pan type milling equipment has very high efficiency in pulverizing engineering plastic PA6; wollastonite contributes to the crushing of PA6 particles and the decreasing of its molecular weight when they are ground together. The particle size of PA6 decreased to about 80 nm when PA6 was comilled with wollastonite and PPgMAH for 28 cycles of pan milling. The high mechanical performance PA6/PP/wollastonite composite was prepared using the micropowder, which was obtained by comilling PA6 with wollastonite and PPgMAH.
The development and testing of the dementia friendly communities environment assessment tool (DFC EAT)

ABSTRACT Background: There is a growing recognition of the need to make the built environment in towns and cities more enabling for people with dementia. This study reports the development of a reliable tool to assess the support provided to people with dementia by public and commercial buildings such as council offices, supermarkets, banks, and medical centers as they approach, use, and leave them. Methods: A three-step process was carried out to develop and establish the reliability of the tool: (1) a review of principles and available tools informed the development and modification of an environmental audit tool of proven utility, (2) the draft tool was subjected to an iterative process of evaluation by a team of people with expertise in design and town planning, people with dementia and their carers, (3) inter-rater reliability and internal consistency were assessed on a sample of 60 public and commercial buildings. Results: The review of available tools led to the drafting of a tool that was refined through iterative, experience-based evaluation resulting in a tool that has high inter-rater reliability and internal validity. The data gathered enabled a sample of banks, libraries, shops, medical facilities, supermarkets and council offices to be compared. Conclusions: The new tool aids the collection of reliable information on the strengths and weaknesses of public and commercial buildings. This information is likely to be of use in the refurbishment of these buildings to improve their support of people with dementia as they use them in their daily life.
Electrochemical Immunoassay Using Open Circuit Potential Detection Labeled by Platinum Nanoparticles

In this work, a simple electrochemical immunoassay based on platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) using open circuit potential (OCP) detection was developed. The detection of human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (hCG) as a model analyte, was demonstrated by direct electrical detection of PtNPs in hydrazine solution using OCP measurement without any application of either potential or current to the system. Disposable screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs) were utilized for the development of our immunosensor, which required a sample volume as small as 2 μL. After preparation of a sandwich-type immunosystem, hydrazine solution was dropped on the electrode’s surface, which was followed immediately by electrical detection using OCP. The change of the OCP signal originated from electrocatalytic oxidation of the hydrazine on PtNPs. Under the optimal conditions of a pH of 6.0 and a hydrazine concentration of 1 mM, a detection limit of 0.28 ng mL−1 and a linearity of 0–10 ng mL−1 were obtained. The PtNP-based OCP method is a simpler electrochemical detection procedure than those obtained from other electrochemical methods and has an acceptable sensitivity and reproducibility. The simplicity of the detection procedure and the cost-effectiveness of the disposable SPCE illustrate the attractive benefits of this sensor. Moreover, it could be applied to a simplified and miniaturized diagnostic system with minimal user manipulation.
The Impact of Outgroup Choice and Missing Data on Major Seed Plant Phylogenetics Using Genome-Wide EST Data

Background Genome level analyses have enhanced our view of phylogenetics in many areas of the tree of life. With the production of whole genome DNA sequences of hundreds of organisms and large-scale EST databases a large number of candidate genes for inclusion into phylogenetic analysis have become available. In this work, we exploit the burgeoning genomic data being generated for plant genomes to address one of the more important plant phylogenetic questions concerning the hierarchical relationships of the several major seed plant lineages (angiosperms, Cycadales, Gingkoales, Gnetales, and Coniferales), which continues to be a work in progress, despite numerous studies using single, few or several genes and morphology datasets. Although most recent studies support the notion that gymnosperms and angiosperms are monophyletic and sister groups, they differ on the topological arrangements within each major group. Methodology We exploited the EST database to construct a supermatrix of DNA sequences (over 1,200 concatenated orthologous gene partitions for 17 taxa) to examine non-flowering seed plant relationships. This analysis employed programs that offer rapid and robust orthology determination of novel, short sequences from plant ESTs based on reference seed plant genomes. Our phylogenetic analysis retrieved an unbiased (with respect to gene choice), well-resolved and highly supported phylogenetic hypothesis that was robust to various outgroup combinations. Conclusions We evaluated character support and the relative contribution of numerous variables (e.g. gene number, missing data, partitioning schemes, taxon sampling and outgroup choice) on tree topology, stability and support metrics. Our results indicate that while missing characters and order of addition of genes to an analysis do not influence branch support, inadequate taxon sampling and limited choice of outgroup(s) can lead to spurious inference of phylogeny when dealing with phylogenomic scale data sets. As expected, support and resolution increases significantly as more informative characters are added, until reaching a threshold, beyond which support metrics stabilize, and the effect of adding conflicting characters is minimized.