Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
University of Birmingham Anterior leaflet replacement and reconstruction with Admedus Cardiocel™ decellularized pericardial patch in tricuspid valve endocarditis

We present the case of a 28 year-old lady with a history of intravenous drug use who presented to our institution with symptomatic right heart failure secondary to tricuspid valve regurgitation.She presented with infective endocarditis leading to dyspnoea and peripheral oedema secondary to torrential tricuspid regurgitation. Transthoracic echocardiography confirmed right ventricular dysfunction and congestive hepatomegaly. Intra-operatively findings an infected and destroyed anterior leaflet of the tricuspid valve with posterior leaflet prolapse was found to cause severe tricuspid regurgitation. She had complex tricuspid valve reconstruction using anterior leaflet reconstruction using Admedus Cardiocel™ patch, posterior leaflet prolapse correction and commissural reduction with a McGoon imbrication and annuloplasty ring to stabilize the repair.This case demonstrates the importance of reconstructive tricuspid valve surgery in the setting of infective endocarditis. Furthermore, this case demonstrates the possibility of anterior leaflet excision and reconstruction with an excellent durable functional result.
In ﬂ uence of the molecular weight and size distribution of PSS on mixed ionic-electronic transport in PEDOT:PSS †

The commercially available polyelectrolyte complex poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfo-nate) (PEDOT:PSS) is ubiquitous in organic and hybrid electronics. As such, it has often been used as a benchmark material for fundamental studies and the development of new electronic devices. Yet, most studies on PEDOT:PSS have focused on its electronic conductivity in dry environments, with less consideration given to its ion transport, coupled ionic-electronic transport, and charge storage properties in aqueous environments. These properties are essential for applications in bioelectronics (sensors, actuators), charge storage devices, and electrochromic displays. Importantly, past studies on mixed ionic-elec-tronic transport in PEDOT:PSS neglected to consider how the molecular structure of PSS a ﬀ ects mixed ionic-electronic transport. Herein, we therefore investigated the e ﬀ ect of the molecular weight and size distribution of PSS on the electronic properties and morphology of PEDOT:PSS both in dry and aqueous environments, and overall performance in organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs). Using reversible addition – fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization with two di ﬀ erent chain transfer agents, six PSS samples with monomodal, narrow ( Đ = 1.1) and broad ( Đ = 1.7) size distributions and varying molecular weights were synthesized and used as matrices for PEDOT. We found that using higher molecular weight of PSS ( M n = 145 kg mol − 1 ) and broad dispersity led to OECTs with the highest transconductance (up to 16 mS) and [ μ C *] values ( ∼ 140 F cm − 1 V − 1 s − 1 ) in PEDOT:PSS, despite having a lower volumetric capacitance ( C * = 35 ± 4 F cm − 3 ). The di ﬀ erences were best explained by studying the microstructure of the ﬁ lms by atomic force microscopy (AFM). We found that heterogeneities in the PEDOT:PSS ﬁ lms (inter-connected and large PEDOT-and PSS-rich domains) obtained from high molecular weight and high dis-persity PSS led to higher charge mobility ( μ OECT ∼ 4 cm 2 V − 1 s − 1 ) and hence transconductance. These studies highlight the importance of considering molecular weight and size distribution in organic mixed ionic-electronic conductor, and could pave the way to designing high performance organic electronics for biological interfaces.
. (2016). The range of peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer and optic disc parameters, in children aged up to but not including 18 years of age who were born prematurely: protocol for a systematic review. Systematic Reviews, 5, [144]

Background: The parameters of the optic disc and peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer (pRNFL) in premature children may vary with disease processes that contribute to visual impairment and blindness and so could be useful as an objective measure in at-risk children. Methods: A systematic review of current literature on the range of pRNFL and optic disc parameters in children aged less than 18 years, who were born before 37 weeks gestation, will be performed. The bibliographic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, Scopus and Web of Science will be systematically searched. Where possible and appropriate, study-specific estimates will be combined using meta-analysis to obtain an overall summary estimate of pRNFL thickness and cup-disc ratio across studies, and results will be presented by age of population. Discussion: This review aims to improve understanding of what might be considered within/outside the range of normality for this high-risk group. Systematic review registration: The review is registered on PROSPERO: CRD42016037933
Analysis and design for thermally autonomous housing in resource-constrained communities : a case study in Bhuj, India

In the 2010 International Workshop on Housing, Health and Climate Change Meeting Report, the World Health Organization identifies housing as a primary cause of poor health in developing countries. The report cites inadequate protection from extreme heat as one of six major concerns for healthy housing environments. As India’s population rapidly increases, informal settlements face particular heat risk because of harsh climate conditions, sub-standard building construction and lack of access to electricity for mechanical cooling. There is a need for housing to provide thermal comfort and health by passive means at low cost. Climate specific passive cooling techniques are well known, but are rarely implemented in informal settlements because of density, lack of resources, design integration, and materials availability. This thesis is situated in the practical connection of two normally disparate parts: applied research in passive cooling techniques, and design for development. The work presented results from the establishment of an international co-design partnership between MIT and The Hunnarshala Foundation for Building Technology and Innovations, an NGO based in the hot and arid region of Bhuj, India. It presents data analysis and codesign work that drove the development, field prototyping, and evaluation of appropriate, implementable building solutions to improve thermal conditions in affordable housing in hot and arid climates. New low-cost, multi-layered roof assembly designs are presented and evaluated. Experimental results show that even in severe arid climates the interior conditions can approach ASHRAE and EN 15251 Adaptive Thermal Comfort standards through most of the operating hours. The results of this research will be an important contribution to the designs of the initial phase of the large-scale Rajiv Awas Yojana Slum Free Bhuj re-development housing construction over the next five years in Western India. Thesis Supervisor: Leon R. Glicksman Title: Professor of Building Technology and Mechanical Engineering
Single-Precision Floating-Point

—This paper proposes a novel method for performing division on ﬂoating-point numbers represented in IEEE-754 single-precision (binary32) format. The method is based on an inverter, implemented as a combination of Parabolic Synthesis and second-degree interpolation, followed by a multiplier. It is implemented with and without pipeline stages individually and synthesized while targeting a Xilinx Ultrascale FPGA. The implementations show better resource usage and latency results when compared to other implementations based on different methods. In case of throughput, the proposed method outperforms most of the other works, however, some Altera FPGAs achieve higher clock rate due to the differences in the DSP slice multiplier design. Due to the small size, low latency and high throughput, the presented ﬂoating-point division unit is suitable for high performance embedded systems and can be integrated into accelerators or be used as a stand-alone accelerator.
2020). Theory as a Source of Software Requirements. In Proceedings of International Requirements Engineering Conference (Vol. 1, pp. 227-237). (

—Today, when undertaking requirements elicitation, engineers attend to the needs and wants of the user groups considered relevant for the software system. However, answers to some relevant question (e.g., how to improve adoption of the intended system) cannot always be addressed through direct need and want elicitation. Using an example of energy demand-response systems, this paper demonstrates that use of grounded theory analysis can help address such questions. The theory emerging from such analysis produces a set of additional requirements which cannot be directly elicited from individuals/groups, and would otherwise be missed out. Thus, we demonstrate that the theory generated through grounded theory analysis can serve as an additional valuable source of software system requirements.
Domain Knowledge Acquisition for Information Retrieval using Neural Networks

This paper presents the results of some experiments investigating the use of Neural Networks in the learning engine of an Connectionist Information Retrieval system called CIRS. CIRS uses the learning and generalisation capabilities of the Back Propagation learning algorithm to acquire and use application domain knowledge in the form of a sub-symbolic knowledge representation. This paper describes the architecture of CIRS and reports on experiments on three di erent learning strategies. 1 The Information Retrieval problem The storage, management, and retrieval of weakly structured or unstructured data is usually called IR application. The objects handled by an Information Retrieval (IR) application are usually called documents, where for document we mean any information bearer such as a book, a report, a letter, an image, or a drawing. The software tool which automatically manages these documents is called Information Retrieval System (IRS). The task of an IRS is to help a user to nd, in a collection of documents, those documents which contain the information the user is searching, that is helping the user to satisfy his information need . To give a clue to the size of the task, it must be noticed that usually these collections contain several thousands or even millions of documents. Frequently IR is confused with database (DB) technology. The fundamental di erence between IR and DB is that IR systems usually provide only references to or a description of the data they manage, while a DBMS provides the actual data. User queries to an IRS are usually in the form: \I want documents about
University of Birmingham Myc-induced nuclear antigen constrains a latent intestinal epithelial cell-intrinsic anthelmintic pathway

Expulsion of parasitic gastrointestinal nematodes requires diverse effector mechanisms coordinated by a Th2-type response. The evolutionarily conserved JmjC protein; Myc Induced Nuclear Antigen (Mina) has been shown to repress IL4, a key Th2 cytokine, suggesting Mina may negatively regulate nematode expulsion. Here we report that expulsion of the parasitic nematode Trichuris muris was indeed accelerated in Mina deficient mice. Unexpectedly, this was associated not with an elevated Th2-but rather an impaired Th1-type response. Further reciprocal bone marrow chimera and conditional KO experiments demonstrated that retarded parasite expulsion and a normal Th1-type response both required Mina in intestinal epithelial cells (IECs). Transcriptional profiling experiments in IECs revealed anti-microbial α -defensin peptides to be the major target of Mina-dependent retention of worms in infected mice. In vitro exposure to recombinant α -defensin
First Results of Scanning Thermal Diffusivity Microscope (STDM) Measurements on Irradiated Monolithic and Dispersion Fuel

The evolution of thermal conductivity and related changes in thermal diffusivity during irradiation of research-reactor fuel plays a significant role in fuel element performance. To correctly simulate the heat fluxes and temperatures in the fuel meat during normal reactor operation, and also during potential accident scenarios, it is crucial to investigate the change in thermal conductivity and, thus, thermal diffusivity as a function of fission density and U-235 burnup. The Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL’s) scanning thermal diffusivity microscope (STDM) was used to measure the thermal diffusivity of two irradiated monolithic U-10wt%Mo test plates having different burnup, and one irradiated dispersion U-7wt%Mo with a burnup profile similar to the high-burnup monolithic test plate. The measurement of the two monolithic U-10wt%Mo samples resulted in a mean thermal diffusivity of 4.5mm 2 /s, which is significantly below non-irradiated U-10wt%Mo (6.4mm²/s). The STDM is a LASER-based instrument that measures the thermal diffusivity of irradiated fuel on a micrometer scale in a hot cell. Using the principle of photothermal deflection spectroscopy, the STDM focuses two concentric LASER beams onto the sample, one to heat the sample and the other for data-acquisition.
Quantification of MODIS fire radiative power (FRP) measurement uncertainty for use in satellite‐based active fire characterization and biomass burning estimation

Satellite measurements of fire radiative power (FRP) are increasingly used to estimate the contribution of biomass burning to local and global carbon budgets. Without an associated uncertainty, however, FRP‐based biomass burning estimates cannot be confidently compared across space and time, or against estimates derived from alternative methodologies. This work addresses this issue and quantifies the precision of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements of FRP by collecting duplicate, off‐nadir, overlapping observations of the same fires. Differences in the per‐pixel FRP measured near‐simultaneously in consecutive MODIS scans are approximately normally distributed with a standard deviation (ση) of 26.6%. Simulations demonstrate that this uncertainty decreases to less than ~5% (at ±1 ση) for aggregations larger than ~50 MODIS active fire pixels. Although FRP uncertainties limit the confidence in flux estimates on a per‐pixel basis, the sensitivity of biomass burning estimates to FRP uncertainties can be mitigated by conducting inventories at coarser spatiotemporal resolutions.
University of Birmingham Design, fabrication, and characterization of a D-band bolometric power sensor

— This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a D-band (110 – 170 GHz) bolometric power sensor, used for millimetre-wave metrology. This sensor type is new thin-film based sensor which consists of a multilayer-chip embedded in a silicon substrate as a microwave absorber. The sensor demonstrates reasonable performance with a return loss of better than 15 dB across the entire D-band and a rise-and fall-time better than 1.8 ms. The sensor achieves high power linearity between -10 dBm and +8 dBm. Frequency response of the sensor was measured and its flatness changes no more than 20 % across the frequency band. Furthermore, this power sensor has been characterized in the microcalorimeter and an effective efficiency of over 90 % could be achieved. For the first time, the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel power sensor prototype with excellent performance at D-band are presented.
Automatic Vulnerability Detection in Embedded Device Firmware and Binary Code: Survey and Layered Taxonomies

In the era of the internet of things (IoT), software-enabled inter-connected devices are of paramount importance. The embedded systems are very frequently used in both security and privacy-sensitive applications. However, these software (a.k.a. firmware) very often suffer from a wide range of security vulnerabilities, mainly due to their outdated systems or reusing existing vulnerable libraries, which is evident by the surprising rise in the number of attacks against embedded systems. Therefore, to protect those embedded systems, detecting the presence of vulnerabilities in the large pool of embedded devices and their firmware plays a vital role. To this end, there exist several approaches to identify and trigger potential vulnerabilities within deployed embedded systems firmware. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art proposals, which detect vulnerabilities in embedded systems and firmware images by employing various analysis techniques, including static analysis, dynamic analysis, symbolic execution, or hybrid approaches. Furthermore, we perform both quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the surveyed approaches. Moreover, we devise taxonomies based on the features used in the literature, a comprehensive summary of different proposed approaches, and the applications of those approaches. Finally, we identify the unresolved challenges and discuss possible future directions in this field of research.
Cirrus induced polarization in 122 GHz aura Microwave Limb Sounder radiances

Previous simulation studies have outlined the possibility of significant polarization signals in microwave limb sounding due to horizontally aligned ice crystals in cirrus clouds. From the recently launched Aura MLS instrument, we present the first polarized microwave limb sounding observations of cirrus clouds. We also present polarized radiative transfer simulations, which show qualitative agreement with these observations, and indicate the limits to which aligned non‐spherical particles are influencing bulk optical properties of cirrus clouds at microwave wavelengths. Although 122 GHz is not ideal for cloud measurements due to strong O2 absorption, data and simulations suggest that preferential crystal orientation is causing small, but noticeable, partial vertical polarization, which can be replicated in simulations by considering all particles as horizontally aligned oblate spheroids with aspect ratios of around 1.2 ± 0.15.
A Conﬁguration-Independent Score-Based Benchmark for Distributed Databases

—The business potential of big data is leading to a data-driven economy , where low-cost and low-latency data analysis represents a major competitive advantage. The research community has proposed many technological solutions for big data, such as NoSQL databases, which are difﬁcult to evaluate and compare via standard IT procurement procedures. In addition, lack of competences in big data domains make procurement of big data solutions a tedious and uncertain process, which might impair the success of a business. In this paper, we present a score-based benchmark for distributed databases, which supports adopters in selecting a solution that ﬁts their needs. The proposed benchmark is independent from the conﬁgurations of the speciﬁc database and deployment environment, requires low effort on the part of end users, is extensible and can be applied to both SQL and NoSQL databases, can be used to evaluate databases according to different properties (e.g., performance, consistency), and can be integrated with existing benchmarks to reduce the burden of their execution. We experimentally evaluate our methodology to validate its effectiveness.
H IGHERSTRUCTURES Controlled objects as a symmetric monoidal functor

The goal of this paper is to associate functorially to every symmetric monoidal additive category A with a strict G -action a lax symmetric monoidal functor V G A : G BornCoarse → Add ∞ from the symmetric monoidal category of G -bornological coarse spaces G BornCoarse to the symmetric monoidal ∞ -category of additive categories Add ∞ . Among others, this allows to refine equivariant coarse algebraic K -homology to a lax symmetric monoidal functor.
Asthma and coagulation: A clinical and pathophysiological evaluation

Background Epidemiological studies have shown that patients with asthma, in particular those with severe disease, have increased risk of pulmonary embolism. It is unknown whether these patients have a prothrombotic state under stable conditions. Objective To compare coagulation and fibrinolysis parameters between healthy subjects, and patients with mild, severe and prednisolone-dependent asthma under stable conditions and to investigate whether hemostatic markers correlate with airway inflammation. Methods In 126 adults (33 healthy controls, 31 mild asthma, 32 severe asthma, and 30 prednisolone-dependent asthma) parameters of inflammation (peripheral blood eosinophils and neutrophils), and markers of hemostasis (endogenous thrombin potential (ETP), thrombin-antithrombin complex (TATc), plasmin-α2-antiplasmin complex (PAPc), plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1), D-dimer and von Willebrand factor (vWF)) were measured in plasma. One-way ANOVA with post-hoc Bonferroni test was used for group comparison, and linear regression analysis was used for correlations.
Contribution of Tibetan Plateau Snow Cover to the Extreme Winter Conditions of 2009/10

Most of the northern hemisphere experienced extreme climate conditions during winter 2009/10. This winter in Canada was characterized by the warmest and driest conditions in the past 60 years. Across much of the United States, Europe and northern Asia, persistent below-normal temperatures caused a significant adverse economic and societal impact. Dynamical seasonal forecasting systems failed to predict this winter's extreme conditions. Here we show that the snow-cover anomaly over the Tibetan Plateau and adjacent areas is significantly correlated with the atmospheric circulation pattern that contributes to these anomalous winter conditions. A statistical model using this snow-cover information and the El Niño signal in autumn 2009 was able to predict the general distribution of the anomalous conditions for this winter. This implies that an improved understanding of the Tibetan Plateau snow-cover effect and its representation in general circulation models are important for seasonal predictions, particularly of high-impact climate events. R ésumé [Traduit par la rédaction] Pendant l'hiver 2009/10, les conditions climatiques ont été extrêmes dans la majeure partie de l'hémisphère Nord. Cette année-là, les mois d'hiver au Canada ont été les plus chauds et les plus secs jamais enregistrés au cours des 60 dernières années. Un peu partout aux États-Unis, en Europe et dans le nord de l'Asie, les températures inférieures à la normale persistantes ont eu des conséquences catastrophiques sur le plan socio-économique. Or les systèmes dynamiques de prévisions saisonnières ne sont pas parvenus à prévoir les conditions extrèmes de cet hiver. Dans la présente étude, nous démontrons la corrélation étroite entre l’épaisseur anormalement faible de la couverture de neige sur le plateau Tibétain et dans les régions limitrophes, d'une part, et la configuration de la circulation atmosphérique, responsable de ces conditions hivernales anormales. Grâce au traitement des données sur la couverture de neige et du signal El Niño au moyen d'un modèle statistique, nous avons réussi à prédire la répartition générale des conditions anormales pour l'hiver. Nous en déduisons qu'il est important de mieux comprendre les effets de la couverture de neige du plateau Tibétain et sa représentation dans les modèles de circulation générale pour les prévisions saisonnières, notamment les phénomènes météorologiques lourds de conséquences.