Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deformable registration using edge‐preserving scale space for adaptive image‐guided radiation therapy

Incorporating of daily cone‐beam computer tomography (CBCT) image into online radiation therapy process can achieve adaptive image‐guided radiation therapy (AIGRT). Registration of planning CT (PCT) and daily CBCT are the key issues in this process. In our work, a new multiscale deformable registration method is proposed by combining edge‐preserving scale space with the multilevel free‐form deformation (FFD) grids for CBCT‐based AIGRT system. The edge‐preserving scale space, which is able to select edges and contours of images according to their geometric size, is derived from the total variation model with the L1 norm (TV‐L1). At each scale, despite the noise and contrast resolution differences between the PCT and CBCT, the selected edges and contours are sufficiently strong to drive the deformation using the FFD grid, and the edge‐preserving property ensures more meaningful spatial information for mutual information (MI)‐based registration. At last, the deformation fields are gained by a coarse to fine manner. Furthermore, in consideration of clinical application we designed an optimal estimation of the TV‐L1 parameters by minimizing the defined offset function for automated registration. Six types of patients are studied in our work, including rectum, prostate, lung, H&N (head and neck), breast, and chest cancer patients. The experiment results demonstrate the significance of the proposed method both quantitatively with ground truth known and qualitatively with ground truth unknown. The applications for AIGRT, including adaptive deformable recontouring and redosing, and DVH (dose volume histogram) analysis in the course of radiation therapy are also studied. PACS numbers: 87.57. Gg, 87.57. Ce, 87.62. +n
Application of response surface methodology (Rsm) for optimizing production condition for removalof Pb (Ii) and Cu (Ii) onto kenaf fiber based activated carbon

This research aims to find out the feasibility of preparing kenaf fiber based carbon for removal of divalent cations of Pb (II) and Cu (II) from waste water. Activated carbon was prepared by using physiochemical activation method which involves two step of potassium hydroxide impregnation (KOH) with carbon dioxide activation of the semi carbonized char. The effects of three preparation variables; temperature (500-700oC), time (1-3 h) and Impregnation Ratio (IR) by using KOH (1-3) on the removal percentage of Pb (II) and Cu (II) ions were investigated by using Design of Experiment (DOE). Quadratic models were developed to correlate activated carbon preparation variables from kenaf fibers with the two responses by applying Central Composite Design (CCD). Experimental data were analysed by using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the most influential factor on each experimental design response was identified. Process optimization was done by validating both the model to obtain maximum removal efficiency with possible maximum yield of activated carbon.
Investigating First-Year Engineering Students' Educational Technology Use and Academic Achievement: Development and Validation of an Assessment Tool

Previous scholars have examined the use of educational technology as a strategy for improving student outcomes and skills. Generally, past studies of technology have focused on devices such as computers and cellphones or word processing and web-based software. Students have reported positive perceptions of educational technology as it relates to their learning, involvement and connectedness, to name a few. However, differences exist in undergraduate students’ reported technological skill and use by major, class rank, gender, and race/ethnicity. Since technology is ever-changing and context-specific, this paper describes the development and validation of a particular assessment tool – one focused on the specific types of and ways that educational technology is used by first-year engineering students (FYES). More specifically, the assessment tool was used in an investigation of the relationship between first-year engineering students’ perceived (a) knowledge, (b) usefulness, as well as (c) frequency and nature of use of educational technology and their academic achievement (i.e., grades). Differences were analyzed by race/ethnicity and gender. After distributing the assessment tool and collecting data from nearly 500 students at a single institution, results revealed there are significant racial/ethnic differences in FYES’ perceived usefulness as well as frequency and nature of use of educational technology. There are also significant gender differences in FYES’ perceived knowledge and usefulness of educational technology. Furthermore, FYES’ background characteristics significantly predict their final course grades in the second of two introductory engineering courses. Future work will explore the aforementioned findings in detail. However, this paper offers implications for practice, research, and theory surrounding the assessment tool.
Health Care Professionals’ Perception of Contraindications for Physical Activity During Cancer Treatment

Introduction Suggested medical contraindications for physical activity (PA) during cancer therapy might have an influence on PA recommendation behavior of Health Care Professionals (HCP). The purpose of the present study was to examine perceptions of physicians and oncology nurses (ON) toward specific medical conditions as contraindications for PA during cancer treatment. Materials and methods A total of 539 physicians and 386 ON were enrolled in this cross-sectional survey. HCP judged 13 medical conditions as to whether they are contraindications for PA during cancer treatment. Answering format was “no contraindication”/“potentially a contraindication”/“yes, a contraindication. ” Results χ2 analyses revealed significant differences between general practitioners, specialized physicians, and ON in their perception of 10 medical conditions. Approximately half of the medical conditions were answered cautiously, showing high numbers on the response option potentially (36–72%). Moreover, physicians’ ratings differed significantly depending on their practical experience with particular medical conditions. Those being familiar with a specific medical condition was more permissive to PA during treatment, with effect sizes (Cramer’s V) ranging from 0.13 to 0.27. Conclusion Results indicate high cautiousness among HCP in judging medical conditions and their impact on PA during cancer treatment. However, group comparisons show that familiarity and clinical experience with potential contraindications facilitate a confident handling of safety issues, which at best leads to higher levels of PA recommendations during cancer treatment.
Promoting a healthy lifestyle: Towards an improved personalized feedback approach

Technology supported services for achieving a healthy lifestyle have shown their short term effects and are receiving increasing interest from the research community. However, long term adherence to these services is poor. This paper describes research-in-progress regarding the implementation of automated goal-setting and tailored feedback messages into one such technology supported service, which aims to improve the user's physical activity pattern. Tailored feedback messages for several personas were set up based on theories from behavioral science and categorized by experts during an expert workshop. Results indicate reasonable agreement on the matching of motivational messages to four personas. Additional expert input is discussed descriptively. Future research will focus on examining the effectiveness of the new version of the service under investigation.
A Semantic Similarity Evaluation Method and a Tool Utilised in Security Applications Based on Ontology Structure and Lexicon Analysis

This paper discusses a semantic similarity evaluation method within semantic models represented as ontologies or an instance bases. The capabilities of the method can be used for semantic pattern recognition within knowledge bases, which can be utilised by analytical tools especially in the security domain. The specificity of security applications requires methods for analysis of hidden, in direct, comprehensive and versatile data in search for new knowledge. Proposed method and its implementation in form of ETOSE plugin serves as an analytical process evaluating instance bases. The mechanisms has been designed to operate as a data flow interceptor, collecting the data and transforming them into instances expressed in a specific domain ontology (set of ontology modules). After such migration ETOSE plugin performs evaluation of instance base and provides the analyst mechanisms for identification of hidden associations and patterns. The quantitative approach has been applied in financial fraud identification tasks where certain templates of behaviour and associations can be described. Proposed method and tool utilize structural and lexicon comparison of compared ontologies in order to deliver multicriteria evaluation of concepts, relationships and indirectly implemented axioms. The paper demonstrates the theoretical side of designed method as well as practical examples, developed ontologies and analytical environment application.
Structural and Immunological Characterization of Novel Recombinant MOMP-Based Chlamydial Antigens

Chlamydia is the most common cause of bacterial sexually transmitted infections worldwide. While infections resolve with antibiotic treatment, this is often neglected in women due to frequent asymptomatic infections, leading to disease progression and severe sequelae (pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, infertility). Development of a vaccine against Chlamydia is crucial. Whole organism-based vaccines have short-lived activity, serovar/subgroup-specific immunity and can cause adverse reactions in vaccinated subjects. The Chlamydia major outer membrane protein (MOMP) is a prime candidate for a subunit vaccine. MOMP contains four regions of sequence variability (variable domains, VDs) with B-cell and T-cell epitopes that elicit protective immunity. However, barriers for developing a MOMP-based vaccine include solubility, yield and refolding. We have engineered novel recombinant antigens in which the VDs are expressed into a carrier protein structurally similar to MOMP and suitable for recombinant expression at a high yield in a correctly folded and detergent-free form. Using a carrier such as the PorB porin from the human commensal organism N. lactamica, we show that PorB/VD chimeric proteins are immunogenic, antigenic and cross-reactive with MOMP. VDs are unique for each serovar but if combined in a single vaccine, a broad coverage against the major Chlamydia serovars can be ensured.
The change in optical characteristics of ZnO crystals under ruby laser irradiation

The influence of pulsed ruby laser irradiation on luminescence and optical transmission spectra of nominally undoped ZnO single crystals was investigated. Both treatment and measurements were performed at 300 K. The irradiation was found to cause the increase of crystal transmission in absorption edge region and the rise of shortwave wing of exciton luminescence with respect to its longwave one. These changes were accompanied with the rise of electric conductivity. The analysis of obtained results in common with earlier data led to the conclusion that the movement of mobile shallow donors from dislocations to crystal bulk took place under the influence of ultrasound wave excited by laser pulse. The decrease of shallow donor density near dislocations resulted in the shrinkage of c-band state density "tail" in these regions, which caused the shift of the optical absorption edge to the shortwave side.
Robust, precise, and calibration-free shape acquisition with an off-the-shelf camera and projector

Recently, three-dimensional (3D) shape acquisition systems composed of simple commercial devices have received significant attention from both professional and nonprofessional users. In this work, we propose a flexible projector-camera system that can accurately acquire whole shapes of 3D objects without requiring any special calibrations. The proposed system is based on structured-light and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques that use coded patterns as dense discriminative features instead of the local features popularly used in SfM. To this end, recordings of coded patterns are inserted by moving the camera (to capture image data from multiple camera view points) and projection of the patterns by moving the projector. The proposed system can accurately recover even texture-less objects owing to the advantages of both SfM and structured-light. We demonstrate the benefits of this system by several experiments using real data and compare it to current methods.
Construction of anthropomorphic phantoms for use in dosimetry studies

This paper reports on the methodology and materials used to construct anthropomorphic phantoms for use in dosimetry studies, improving on methods and materials previously described by Jones et al. [Med Phys. 2006;33(9):3274–82]. To date, the methodology described has been successfully used to create a series of three different adult phantoms at the University of Florida (UF). All phantoms were constructed in 5 mm transverse slices using materials designed to mimic human tissue at diagnostic photon energies: soft tissue‐equivalent substitute (STES), lung tissue‐equivalent substitute (LTES), and bone tissue‐equivalent substitute (BTES). While the formulation for BTES remains unchanged from the previous epoxy resin compound developed by Jones et al. [Med Phys. 2003;30(8):2072—81], both the STES and LTES were redesigned utilizing a urethane‐based compound which forms a pliable tissue‐equivalent material. These urethane‐based materials were chosen in part for improved phantom durability and easier accommodation of real‐time dosimeters. The production process has also been streamlined with the use of an automated machining system to create molds for the phantom slices from bitmap images based on the original segmented computed tomography (CT) datasets. Information regarding the new tissue‐equivalent materials, as well as images of the construction process and completed phantom, are included. PACS number: 87.53. Bn
Attentive Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Diacritic Restoration of Yorùbá Language Text

Yor\`ub\'a is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in tonal and orthographic diacritics. With very few exceptions, diacritics are omitted from electronic texts, due to limited device and application support. Diacritics provide morphological information, are crucial for lexical disambiguation, pronunciation and are vital for any Yor\`ub\'a text-to-speech (TTS), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Reframing Automatic Diacritic Restoration (ADR) as a machine translation task, we experiment with two different attentive Sequence-to-Sequence neural models to process undiacritized text. On our evaluation dataset, this approach produces diacritization error rates of less than 5%. We have released pre-trained models, datasets and source-code as an open-source project to advance efforts on Yor\`ub\'a language technology.
Differential Attention for Visual Question Answering

In this paper we aim to answer questions based on images when provided with a dataset of question-answer pairs for a number of images during training. A number of methods have focused on solving this problem by using image based attention. This is done by focusing on a specific part of the image while answering the question. Humans also do so when solving this problem. However, the regions that the previous systems focus on are not correlated with the regions that humans focus on. The accuracy is limited due to this drawback. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by using an exemplar based method. We obtain one or more supporting and opposing exemplars to obtain a differential attention region. This differential attention is closer to human attention than other image based attention methods. It also helps in obtaining improved accuracy when answering questions. The method is evaluated on challenging benchmark datasets. We perform better than other image based attention methods and are competitive with other state of the art methods that focus on both image and questions.
Harnessing the crowd wisdom for software trustworthiness

Recently, Open-Source Software (OSS) has significant changed our understanding of software development. Since the 1980s, OSS has continued to grow in both quality and quantity (more than 64,000,000 projects are hosted in GitHub alone), and has become a source of software for numerous organizations. OSS development is different from traditional development in several aspects: projects are open to all the developers, teams are decentralized, resources are rapidly shared, new versions are frequently released, and online communities of developers have formed [1][2]. These characteristics enable users from all over the world, regardless of their prior training or experience, to create software in a distributed and collaborative manner. Thus, software development is greatly facilitated through this openness and massive participation, i.e., software development will profit from an efficient ecosystem powered by crowd wisdom [3][4]. However, development based on crowd wisdom also has several limitations, such as guaranteeing the progress and quality of production process. Crowd wisdom is essentially elusive and unpredictable. Without central control, OSS development can hardly guarantee quality or trustworthiness of software systems, which is intolerable for most commercial products. For the above reasons, we do not advocate that the crowd wisdom method should replace the engineering method. Instead, we propose that these two paradigms should be combined. Based on this idea we design and implement TRUSTIE which balance the crowd wisdom and software trustworthiness in a well-controlled way. TRUSTIE enables crowd-oriented collaboration among internal development teams and the external crowds by combining the software creation and software manufacturing. Ecosystem-based software development In the world of open source, software is being developed based on ecosystem. Everything that is involved in the development and evolution of a software project belongs to its ecosystem. Figure 1 gives an abstract illustration of the ecosystem of Rails, where red kernel node represents the Rails core project and other nodes represent the satellite projects in Rails ecosystem. All of those satellite projects have technical relationships with the Rails core project, i.e., their runtime or development environment depends on Rails. Compared to the single project, the development of ecosystem-based projects brings us new opportunities as well as new challenges. Contributors: The openness of open source ecosystem leads to the diversity of the contributors. Every developer who is interested in a specific project can contribute to its ecosystem. Besides the project leader and manager, a great number of peripheral contributors volunteer to act as issue reporter, bug fixer, patch reviewer, code tester and other characters that are crucial to the well development of an open source project. In some scenarios, even the end users can participate in the discussion of a specific topic and provide their feedbacks. The aggregated performance of the active crowd will often outperform any single elite or small teams of elites.
Mutual coupling of conformai slot array on a dielectric coated conducting cylinder

A conformai array of two identical z-directed slot on a dielectric coated conducting cylinder has been designed to obtain the mutual coupling. At the resonant frequency of the structure, variation of mutual coupling as a function of outer layer radius of the geometry has been obtained. Also, the dependence of mutual coupling on the antenna separation is investigated.
Crack detection in PM-rotors using magnetic field measurement and data processing

Electric drives efficiency is determined by the mechanical and magnetic properties of the functional elements stator and rotor. Focus element for this investigation is the rotor including its permanent magnets. Due to several manufacturing influences the properties of those magnets vary considerably. Magnet failures that can occur during manufacture are cracks, blowholes or inclusions, which can lead to commutation problems or to increased noise [1]. Crack propagation is a long-lasting process and cause unintentional failure in field. Currently no automated quality inspection of micro cracks is available in electric drive production. Consequently, the challenge is to develop reliable and safe process concept, to separate bad from good rotors based on magnetic field measurements in order to detect failures at the internal or external assembled magnets. For this purpose, a data analyzing method was developed to identify and characterize micro cracks in already assembled permanent magnets.
Biochemical Effects of Aqueous Extract of Persea americana (Mill) on the Myocardium of Left Ventricle of High Salt–Fed Adult Wistar Rats

Background. The cardioprotective effects of Persea americana extract was investigated on biochemical activities of high salt–fed adult Wistar rats in this study. Method. Forty healthy Wistar rats of both sexes weighing 120 to 150 g were randomly assigned into 8 groups of 5 rats each (groups A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H). Rats in groups A, F, G, and H were fed with standard laboratory pellets, while groups B, C, D, and E were fed on the high-salt diet for 4 weeks. Concomitantly, daily administration of 50, 100, and 150 mg/kg of the P americana extract were given orally to groups C and F, D and G, and E and H, respectively, while rats in groups A and B were administered distilled water. Blood samples were taken by cardiac puncture; concentration of sodium ion, potassium ion, nitric oxide, and activity of lactate dehydrogenase were determined. One-way analysis of variance was used to analyze data, followed by Student-Newman-Keuls (SNK) test for multiple comparison. Results. Results revealed that concentration of potassium ion and nitric oxide was significantly lower (P < .05) in high salt–fed groups. Sodium ion concentration and activity of lactate dehydrogenase were higher in high salt–fed group while P americana prevented biochemical perturbations in other experimental groups. Conclusion. In conclusion, high salt–diet induced biochemical alterations which were significantly protected by oral administration of P americana extract.
Standard cell camouflage method to counter silicon reverse engineering

Payment and identification IDs using smart cards technology are vulnerable to a physical attack by reverse engineering the netlist of an embedded integrated circuit. An attacker gains access to a netlist by de-packaging and delayering a chip and processing its micrograph images. We proposed a low performance impact and novel method to obfuscate gates by using a current digital design flow with a layout standard cell generator to obfuscate non-critical paths. Results indicate that at cell and block level, a 15% timing and power overhead is incurred in applied worst-performance benchmarks. After applying the method to a set of benchmark circuits, results shown a 40% average obfuscation, or not detected gates, of the resultant netlist.