Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fingertip detection based on protuberant saliency from depth image

We propose a new approach for detecting a protuberant region from a depth image by leveraging a notion of protuberant saliency which describes how much the protuberant region stands out from its surroundings in the depth image. An intuitive and simple method is designed to calculate protuberant saliency from depth image, which can be used effectively together with the nearness information to detect the tip of a protuberant object such as a fingertip. We evaluate and compare our method with several state-of-the-art saliency methods for fingertip detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the comparing methods in terms of detection accuracy, being more robust against the rotation and isometric deformation of a fingertip region, the scale and depth noise issues, and the low resolution of a depth image.
Differentiation of the Follicular Variant of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma From Classic Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma: An Ultrasound Analysis and Complement to Fine‐Needle Aspiration Cytology

It is difficult to establish a diagnosis of the follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) using fine‐needle aspiration cytology (FNAC). Preoperative features on ultrasound (US) imaging are different between follicular PTC and classic PTC. This study developed a risk score system to differentiate follicular PTC from classic PTC and to correlate the risk score of follicular PTC with its FNAC categories and pathologic features.
Long-travel electrothermally driven resonant cantilever microactuators

Silicon microactuators capable of very long travel are described. The design is based on a laterally resonant cantilever, driven by an electrothermal shape bimorph located at the root. Performance characteristics are given for deep structures fabricated in bonded silicon-on-insulator material. Peak-to-peak displacements of more than 500 μm are obtained with cantilevers of 14 mm length, 30 μm width and 100 μm depth using a 20 V drive, when the resonant frequency of the cantilever is matched to the frequency response of the electrothermal transducer. Experimental data are compared with a simple model, and variables affecting the quality factor are discussed. The actuators are shown to be suitable for use in optical scanning systems based on moving waveguides.
Multiplex Gene Synthesis and Error Correction from Microchips Oligonucleotides and High-throughput Gene Screening with Programmable Double Emulsion Microfluidics Droplets

Multiplex Gene Synthesis and Error Correction from Microchips Oligonucleotides and High-throughput Gene Screening with Programmable Double Emulsion Microfluidics Droplets by Siying Ma Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Jingdong Tian, Supervisor ___________________________ Fan Yuan, Chair ___________________________ Lingchong You ___________________________ Joseph Lucas ___________________________ Kam W. Leong An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 Copyright by Siying Ma 2015 iv Abstract Promising applications in the design of various biological systems hold critical implications as heralded in the rising field of synthetic biology. But, to achieve these goals, the ability to synthesize and screen in situ DNA constructs of any size or sequence rapidly, accurately and economically is crucial. Today, the process of DNA oligonucleotide synthesis has been automated but the overall development of gene and genome synthesis and error correction technology has far lagged behind that of gene and genome sequencing. What even lagged behind is the capability of screening a large population of information on a single cell, protein or gene level. Compartmentalization of single cells in water-in-oil emulsion droplets provides an opportunity to screen vast numbers of individual assays with quantitative readouts. However these singleemulsion droplets are incompatible with aqueous phase analysis and are not controllable through molecule transports. This thesis presents the development of a multi-tool ensemble platform targeted at high-throughput gene synthesis, error correction and screening. An inkjet oligonucleotide synthesizer is constructed to synthesize oligonucleotides as sub-arrays onto patterned and functionalized thermoplastic microchips. The arrays are married to microfluidic wells that provide a chamber to for enzymatic amplification and assembly of the DNA from the microarrays into a larger construct. Harvested product is then amplified off-chip and error corrected using a mismatch endonuclease-based reaction.
Sentiment analysis of Hollywood movies on Twitter

In recent years, analysis of opinions from social web has witnessed a boom merely because such a volume of opinions is difficult to obtain through any other normal means of collecting opinion like surveys, polls etc. The analysis is interesting but at the same time difficult because of the sheer volume of information that the social media generates on the internet and the range of opinions possible to be expressed. Twitter is one such social media where opinions expressed play a significant influence on the marketability of a product. Hence, an accurate method for predicting sentiments could enable us to understand customers' preferences, their views on the product and services offered by the companies. These have the potential to create positive or negative wave in the market. Hence, this information is valuable for both companies and consumers. Enterprises can leverage this information for formalizing their strategies. The main focus of this paper is to analyze the sentiments expressed on Hollywood movies on Twitter so that customers' opinions, habits and preferences are extracted, analyzed and used to understand the market behaviour for better customer experience.
Launching the movement disorders society genetic mutation database (MDSGene)

Institute of Neurogenetics, University of L€ ubeck, L€ ubeck, Germany L€ ubeck Interdisciplinary Platform for Genome Analytics (LIGA), Institutes of Neurogenetics & Integrative and Experimental Genomics, University of L€ ubeck, L€ ubeck, Germany Morton and Gloria Shulman Movement Disorders Centre and the Edmond J Safra Program in Parkinson’s Disease, Toronto Western Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, UK
Relative pose estimation for cylinder-shaped spacecrafts using single image

This paper describes a novel framework to determine the relative pose and range of a solid-of-revolution-shaped spacecraft from a single image without any artificial beacons. The translation and the symmetry axis of the spacecraft can be estimated from the imaged cross sections of the spacecraft body. Then the pose and range of the spacecraft are fully determined by means of the images of its solar panels and asymmetric feature. Our method has been validated by both synthetic and real images.
Allometric growth estimation of Prunus armeniaca L. leaves from danyore valley, gilgit-baltistan, Pakistan

Prunus armeniaca L. , apricot, is a member of family Rosaceae bears deciduous tree [1]. Still its origin is unclear among the researchers. In olden times it was known in America, then started to cultivate [2]. It is assumed that it may have originated in Northeastern China close to the Russian border. According to Morikian ES [3] it was known to Armenians which is supported by the discovery of its ancient seeds (6,000-year-old). Now it is grown in the republic [3].
Distal Scaphoid Excision in Treatment of Symptomatic Scaphoid Nonunion: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Background: Current treatment options for persistent scaphoid nonunion are limited to salvage procedures such as proximal row carpectomy (PRC) or 4-corner fusion (4CF). Several small studies have demonstrated that distal scaphoid excision may provide a simpler alternative with faster recovery. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of distal scaphoid excision as a treatment option for symptomatic scaphoid nonunion. Methods: The MEDLINE and PubMed databases were searched for the use of distal scaphoid excision in scaphoid nonunions. Studies included reported on either the functional or patient-centered outcomes following distal scaphoid excision for symptomatic scaphoid nonunion. Results: Six articles described the outcomes of 70 patients with an average of 11.7 patients per study. Functional outcomes including flexion-extension arc, radial-ulnar deviation, and grip strength improved by an average of 98.95%, 58.96%, and 131.08%, respectively. Patient-derived outcomes included the Modified Mayo Wrist Score, which improved by 92.6%, and the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand, which improved by 137.17%. An average of 68.75% of patients experience complete relief of pain with 20.83% of patients experiencing pain with strenuous activity. The average postoperative visual analog scale (0-10) was 0.71. On average, 93.33% of patients returned to work with an average time of return being 6.89 weeks. Complete satisfaction was reported by 87.80% of patients. Complications included progression into 4CF or PRC and newly developed midcarpal arthritis. Conclusions: Given favorable outcomes, our analysis suggests that distal scaphoid excision may be a favorable, low-risk treatment for scaphoid nonunion without eliminating more extensive options such as 4CF and wrist arthrodesis.
Precondition Coverage in Software Testing

Preconditions indicate when it is permitted to use a given function. However, it is not always the case that both outcomes of a precondition are observed during testing. A precondition that is always false makes a function unusable, a precondition that is always true may turn out to be actually an invariant. In model-based testing, preconditions describes when a transition may be executed from a given state. If no outgoing transition is enabled in a given state because all preconditions of all outgoing transitions are false, the test model may be flawed. Experiments show a low test coverage of preconditions in the Scala library. We also investigate preconditions in Modbat models for model-based testing, in that case, a certain number of test cases is needed to produce sufficient coverage, but remaining cases of low coverage indeed point to legitimate flaws in test models or code.
Penetration Deep of Non-Deformable Projectile into Concrete Targets

A dynamic cavity-expansion penetration model for concrete targets impacted by non-deformable projectile is developed. Based on the dynamic cavity-expansion penetration model, the equations of the final penetration depth were determined including the effect of additional mass and sliding frictional coefficient. The predicted final Penetration depth was compared with the depth of penetration data and a good agreement was achieved. The analysis indicated the additional mass was negligible compared to the mass of the projectile and independent of the striking velocity. When the friction between the concrete and the nose surface is assumed to be negligible, the final penetration depth increases slightly. The relationship between the principle stress difference at failure and unconfined compressive strength was determined by curve fitting.
Cardiac-Autonomic Responses to In-Season Training Among Division-1 College Football Players.

Despite having to endure a rigorous in-season training schedule, research evaluating daily physiological recovery status markers among American football players is limited. The purpose of this study was to determine if recovery of cardiac-autonomic activity to resting values occurs between consecutive-day, in-season training sessions among college football players. Subjects (n = 29) were divided into groups based on position: receivers and defensive backs (SKILL, n = 10); running backs, linebackers and tight-ends (MID-SKILL, n = 11) and linemen (LINEMEN, n = 8). Resting heart rate (RHR) and the natural logarithm of the root-mean square of successive differences multiplied by twenty (LnRMSSD) were acquired at rest in the seated position prior to Tuesday and Wednesday training sessions and repeated over three weeks during the first month of the competitive season. A position × time interaction was observed for LnRMSSD (p = 0.04), but not for RHR (p = 0.33). No differences in LnRMSSD between days was observed for SKILL (Tuesday = 82.8 ± 9.3, Wednesday = 81.9 ± 8.7, p > 0.05). Small reductions in LnRMSSD were observed for MID-SKILL (Tuesday = 79.2 ± 9.4, Wednesday = 76.2 ± 9.5, p < 0.05) and LINEMEN (Tuesday = 79.4 ± 10.5, Wednesday = 74.5 ± 11.5, p < 0.05). The individually averaged changes in LnRMSSD from Tuesday to Wednesday were related to PlayerLoad (r = 0.46, p = 0.02) and body mass (r = -0.39, p = 0.04). Cardiac-parasympathetic activity did not return to resting values for LINEMEN or MID-SKILL prior to the next training session. Larger reductions in LnRMSSD tended to occur in players with greater body mass despite having performed lower workloads, though some individual variability was observed. These findings may have implications for how coaches and support staff address training and recovery interventions for players demonstrating inadequate cardiovascular recovery between sessions.
Generic driver injection for automated IoT application deployments

In the domain of IoT a major objective is the interconnection of a variety of devices with higher level applications. Therefore, several IoT middleware systems have been developed. These IoT integration middleware systems are heterogeneous, e.g., in terms of the supported transport protocols. Thus, IoT environments often differ due to the utilized middleware. As a result, by deploying applications in different environments the communication clients on the application side have to be adjusted manually. This leads to a greater development effort for each deployment and hampers the application's portability. In this paper, we present a generic driver injection concept to enable the development of portable IoT applications and the automated deployment in different environments without manual adaptation efforts. For this, a programming model and a deployment modeling concept are introduced. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with a TOSCA-based prototype.
Learning High-level Representations from Demonstrations

Hierarchical learning (HL) is key to solving complex sequential decision problems with long horizons and sparse rewards. It allows learning agents to break-up large problems into smaller, more manageable subtasks. A common approach to HL, is to provide the agent with a number of high-level skills that solve small parts of the overall problem. A major open question, however, is how to identify a suitable set of reusable skills. We propose a principled approach that uses human demonstrations to infer a set of subgoals based on changes in the demonstration dynamics. Using these subgoals, we decompose the learning problem into an abstract high-level representation and a set of low-level subtasks. The abstract description captures the overall problem structure, while subtasks capture desired skills. We demonstrate that we can jointly optimize over both levels of learning. We show that the resulting method significantly outperforms previous baselines on two challenging problems: the Atari 2600 game Montezuma's Revenge, and a simulated robotics problem moving the ant robot through a maze.
A Time-Aware Programming Framework for Constructing Predictable Real-Time Systems

Real-time systems need reliable guarantees for the satisfaction of their timing constraints. However, novel speed-up hardware architectures and software mechanism, which target improving average-case performances, ignore and sometimes worsen the ability to obtain guarantees. An alternative approach is the Logical Execution Time (LET) model, but there are some deficiencies in existing LET-based development tools. In this paper, we propose a novel LET-based time-aware programming framework called TipFrame. The framework introduces Servants to improve the responsiveness of LET-based periodic tasks further. The runtime makes behaviors in the system level consistent with the semantics of LET model for predictability. TipFrame implements in C language providing time-aware programming interfaces called TipFrame-C. The programming paradigm of TipFrame-C is described using an autopilot avionic control system. Evaluation results demonstrate that our approach is effective and efficient to construct LET-based real-time systems.
Nonlinear system identification based on NARX network

This paper discusses identification of nonlinear system with nonlinear AutoRegressive models with eXogenous inputs (NARX). NARX network is a dynamic neural network which appears effective in the input-output identification of both linear and nonlinear systems. When identifying them by NARX model, the first step is to collect training data and the final results vary considerably with different training data. The paper compares the training results of three kinds of signals, including SPHS signal, Gaussian white noise and mixed signal. Our results show the response characteristics of NARX model trained by different signals can be used to design the input training signal.
Transfer Boosting With Synthetic Instances for Class Imbalanced Object Recognition

A challenging problem in object recognition is to train a robust classifier with small and imbalanced data set. In such cases, the learned classifier tends to overfit the training data and has low prediction accuracy on the minority class. In this paper, we address the problem of class imbalanced object recognition by combining synthetic minorities over-sampling technique (SMOTE) and instance-based transfer boosting to rebalance the skewed class distribution. We present ways of generating synthetic instances under the learning framework of transfer Adaboost. A novel weighted SMOTE technique (WSMOTE) is proposed to generate weighted synthetic instances with weighted source and target instances at each boosting round. Based on WSMOTE, we propose a novel class imbalanced transfer boosting algorithm called WSMOTE-TrAdaboost and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness on four datasets (Office, Caltech256, SUN2012, and VOC2012) for object recognition application. Bag-of-words model with SURF features and histogram of oriented gradient features are separately used to represent an image. We experimentally demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our approaches by comparing it with several baseline algorithms in boosting family for class imbalanced learning.
Gene Expression Signatures and Immunohistochemical Subtypes Add Prognostic Value to Each Other in Breast Cancer Cohorts

Purpose: Gene signatures and Ki67 stratify the same breast tumor into opposing good/poor prognosis groups in approximately 20% of patients. Given this discrepancy, we hypothesized that the combination of a clinically relevant signature and IHC markers may provide more prognostic information than either classifier alone. Experimental Design: We assessed Ki67 alone or combined with ER, PR and HER2 (forming IHC subtypes), and the research versions of the Genomic Grade Index, 70-gene, cell-cycle score, recurrence score (RS), and PAM50 signatures on matching TMA/whole tumor sections and microarray data in two Swedish breast cancer cohorts of 379 and 209 patients, with median follow-up of 12.4 and 12.5 years, respectively. First, we fit Cox proportional hazards models and used the change in likelihood ratio (Δ LR) to determine the additional prognostic information provided by signatures beyond that of (i) Ki67 and (ii) IHC subtypes. Second and uniquely, we then assessed whether signatures could compete well with pathology-based IHC classifiers by calculating the additional prognostic information of Ki67/IHC subtypes beyond signatures. Results: In cohort 1, only RS and PAM50 provided additional prognostic information beyond Ki67 and IHC subtypes (Δ LR-χ2 Ki67: RS = 12.8, PAM50 = 20.7, IHC subtypes: RS = 12.9, PAM50 = 11.7). Conversely, IHC subtypes added prognostic information beyond all signatures except PAM50. Similar results were observed in cohort 2. Conclusions: RS and PAM50 provided more prognostic information than the IHC subtypes in all breast cancer patients; however, the IHC subtypes did not add any prognostic information to PAM50. Clin Cancer Res; 23(24); 7512–20. ©2017 AACR.
Supervised heterogeneous transfer learning using random forests

Supervised transfer learning algorithms utilize labeled data from auxiliary domains for learning in another domain where labeled data is scarce or absent. Given sufficient cross-domain corresponding instances, one can learn a robust transformation that maps the features across the domains by using any multi-output regression task. However, this cross-domain corresponding data is not available for real-world transfer tasks across heterogeneous feature spaces such as, cross-domain activity recognition and cross-lingual text/sentiment classification. In this paper, we present a shared label space driven algorithm that transfers labeled knowledge between heterogeneous feature spaces. The proposed algorithm treats the similar label distributions across the domains as pivots to generate cross-domain corresponding data. The shared label distributions and the corresponding data is obtained from the random forest models of the source and target domain. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets having dissimilar modalities validate the performance of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art heterogeneous transfer learning approaches.
Dexamethasone Is One of the Factors Minimizing the Inner Ear Damage from Electrode Insertion in Cochlear Implantation

The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of preoperative and intraoperative steroid administration for inner ear protection in cochlear implantation (CI). Nineteen subjects who underwent CI were included in the study, and 10 subjects were enrolled as controls (steroid-administered group, n = 19; control group, n = 10). Dexamethasone (dexamethasone sodium phosphate, 5 mg/ml) was systemically administered preoperatively (1 ml) and topically applied during CI (0.5 ml). The extent of hearing preservation (HP) after CI and the change in the bithermal caloric response were evaluated. Hearing level was calculated using mean thresholds [(250 Hz + 500 Hz + 1,000 Hz + 2,000 Hz)/4]. Preoperative hearing thresholds were similar in the steroid-administered and control groups (100.92 ± 12.60 vs. 103.29 ± 14.39 dB, p = 0.650). The mean thresholds significantly increased in both groups after surgery (108.46 ± 14.08 dB, p = 0.006, for the steroid-administered group; 117.50 ± 6.34 dB, p = 0.027, for the control group), and the difference between the groups was also significant (p = 0.027). The postoperative shift in the hearing thresholds at frequencies of 500 and 1,000 Hz was significant in the steroid-administered group and that at the frequencies of 500, 1,000 and 2,000 Hz was significant in the control group. However, the extent of the shift in hearing threshold levels at each frequency was not significantly different between the groups. Preservation of hearing thresholds was compared between the groups, and there were significantly more subjects with complete and partial HP in the steroid-administered group than in the control group (p = 0.008). The preoperative caloric response was maintained after CI in the steroid-administered group. This study suggests that the perioperative use of a steroid could minimize the inner ear damage after CI.