Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of Advanced Glycation End Products With Oxidative Stress in Resistance Artery Dysfunction in Type 2 Diabetic Mice

Objective—Type 2 diabetes is associated with increased advanced glycation end product (AGE) formation and vasculopathy. We hypothesized that AGEs contribute to resistance artery dysfunction. Methods and Results—Type 2 diabetic db−/db− (diabetic) and nondiabetic db−/db+ (control) mice were treated with the AGE inhibitor (aminoguanidine: 50 mg/Kg/d) for 3 months. Isolated mesenteric resistance arteries (MRAs) were mounted in an arteriograph. Pressure-induced myogenic tone (MT) was increased in diabetic mice but was unaffected by aminoguanidine treatment. Phenylephrine-induced contraction and nitric oxide donor–induced endothelium-independent relaxation were similar in all groups. In diabetic mice, endothelium-dependent relaxation in response to shear-stress or acetylcholine was altered and was associated with reduced eNOS protein and mRNA expression. Aminoguanidine treatment improved endothelial function and restored eNOS expression. AGE formation and hypoxia markers (plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 and Bnip3) were increased in MRA from diabetic mice and normalized with Aminoguanidine. Primary cultured endothelial cells (ECs) isolated from resistance arteries subjected to high glucose for 48 hours showed decreased eNOS expression and phosphorylation in response to calcium ionophore. High glucose decreased antioxidant protein (MnSOD) and increased prooxidant proteins (gp91phox) expression leading to increased oxidative stress generation, as assessed by DHE staining and endothelial NADH/NADPH oxidase activity. The preincubation of ECs with aminoguanidine restored eNOS-phosphorylation and expression as well as the balance between pro- and antioxidant factors induced by high glucose. Conclusions—We provide evidence of a link between AGEs, oxidative stress, and resistance artery EC dysfunction in type 2 diabetic mice. Thus, AGEs and oxidative stress may be a potential target for overcoming diabetic microvessels complications.
AN ATTEMT TO DEFINE CONTEXT AWARENESS IN MOBILE EHEALTH ENVIRONMENTS

Nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists and other professionals or specialists come together to provide care to home residing patients, making continuous assessment, diagnosis and treatment possible beyond the walls of hospitals. Such teams of professionals are focused on each individual patient, and are virtual, i.e. they make decisions without being together physically, dynamically, i.e. professionals come and go as needed, and collaborate, as they combine their knowledge to provide effective care. Our system, coined DITIS, is a web based system that enables the effective management and collaboration of virtual healthcare teams and accessing medical information in a secure manner from a variety of mobile devices from anytime and anyplace, adapting the information according to various parameters like, user role, access right, device capabilities and wireless medium. This paper introduces the DITIS system, and identifies the needs and challenges of co-ordinated teams of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals (HCPs) functioning in a context awareness environment under the wireless environment. Pilot implementations of the systems as well as an evaluation study of the system are also briefly presented.
The application of business activity diagram to capture use case

At present, use case has been used in many large-scale application systems and has achieved good results. At the same time, it has also showed a strong applicability and has become the mainstream technology in object-oriented software analysis and design. So far, however, there is not a standardized approach to capture use cases in a complex system. It is arbitrarily controlled by designers in most practical applications. For this reason, according to the concept and characteristics of use case, this paper discusses an approach based on business activity diagrams to capture use cases. Then, some related rules are established to capture high quality use cases from business activity diagrams. Finally, a practical case study is given to illustrate the application of the proposed approach.
Syphilis Trends among Men Who Have Sex with Men in the United States and Western Europe: A Systematic Review of Trend Studies Published between 2004 and 2015

Globally, men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately burdened with syphilis. This review describes the published literature on trends in syphilis infections among MSM in the US and Western Europe from 1998, the period with the fewest syphilis infections in both geographical areas, onwards. We also describe disparities in syphilis trends among various sub-populations of MSM. We searched electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Global Health, PsychInfo, CAB Abstracts, CINAHL, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and LILACS) for peer-reviewed journal articles that were published between January 2004 and June 2015 and reported on syphilis cases among MSM at multiple time points from 1998 onwards. Ten articles (12 syphilis trend studies/reports) from the US and eight articles (12 syphilis trend studies/reports) from Western Europe were identified and included in this review. Taken together, our findings indicate an increase in the numbers and rates (per 100,000) of syphilis infections among MSM in the US and Western Europe since 1998. Disparities in the syphilis trends among MSM were also noted, with greater increases observed among HIV-positive MSM than HIV-negative MSM in both the US and Western Europe. In the US, racial minority MSM and MSM between 20 and 29 years accounted for the greatest increases in syphilis infections over time whereas White MSM accounted for most syphilis infections over time in Western Europe. Multiple strategies, including strengthening and targeting current syphilis screening and testing programs, and the prompt treatment of syphilis cases are warranted to address the increase in syphilis infections among all MSM in the US and Western Europe, but particularly among HIV-infected MSM, racial minority MSM, and young MSM in the US.
A Cost-Effective High-Efficiency Power Conditioner With Simple MPPT Control Algorithm for Wind-Power Grid Integration

In this paper, a novel grid integration system for a variable-speed wind turbine using an interior permanent-magnet synchronous generator (IPMSG) is developed. The power conditioner system (PCS) consists of a series-type 12-pulse uncontrolled diode rectifier powered by a phase-shifting transformer and then cascaded to a pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) voltage source inverter. The active current of the grid-side PWM inverter is only controlled to follow the optimal active current reference which is determined by using a simple maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control strategy. The MPPT algorithm requires only three sensors in order to track the maximum power of the wind turbine. The most significant advantage of the proposed system is that the passive filter together with a series-type 12-pulse rectifier provides high efficiency by compensating the power factor angle of the IPMSG and suppresses distortions presented in the IPMSG voltages and currents. The laboratory results indicate that the proposed construction and scheme are simple, cheap, and efficient.
Effects of Government Policies on Urban and Rural Income Inequality

We use three conventional inequality indices-the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income-and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981 to 1997. We find that these programs have qualitatively similar but quantitatively different effects on urban and rural areas. Most importantly, taxes are more effective in redistributing income in urban than in rural areas, while welfare and other government transfer programs play a larger role in rural areas. Copyright © 2006 The Authors; Journal compilation © International Association for Research in Income and Wealth 2006.
Multilingual Hierarchy Generation and Alignment Using Self-Organizing Maps

Multilingual information retrieval has attracted lots of attention in recent years due to the explosive increase of multilingual Web pages. It will not be easy to retrieve documents written in languages other than the query if the relationships among entities of different languages were not found. In this work, we will develop a method based on self-organizing maps to organize documents into hierarchy. When hierarchies of individual languages are developed, an alignment process is then applied on these hierarchies to discover the associations between entities of different languages. The method had been performed on a set of parallel corpora containing Chinese and English documents and obtained promising result.
Therapeutic Potential of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor Modulators

Glutamate is the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) and is a major player in complex brain functions. Glutamatergic transmission is primarily mediated by ionotropic glutamate receptors, which include NMDA, AMPA and kainate receptors. However, glutamate exerts modulatory actions through a family of metabotropic G-protein-coupled glutamate receptors (mGluRs). Dysfunctions of glutamatergic neurotransmission have been implicated in the etiology of several diseases. Therefore, pharmacological modulation of ionotropic glutamate receptors has been widely investigated as a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of several disorders associated with glutamatergic dysfunction. However, blockade of ionotropic glutamate receptors might be accompanied by severe side effects due to their vital role in many important physiological functions. A different strategy aimed at pharmacologically interfering with mGluR function has recently gained interest. Many subtype selective agonists and antagonists have been identified and widely used in preclinical studies as an attempt to elucidate the role of specific mGluRs subtypes in glutamatergic transmission. These studies have allowed linkage between specific subtypes and various physiological functions and more importantly to pathological states. This article reviews the currently available knowledge regarding the therapeutic potential of targeting mGluRs in the treatment of several CNS disorders, including schizophrenia, addiction, major depressive disorder and anxiety, Fragile X Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and pain.
Markerless extraction of gait features using Haar-like template for view-invariant biometrics

Many research studies have recently shown the possibility of recognizing people by the way they walk i.e. gait. This research is mainly fuelled by the wide range of potential applications where gait biometrics could be useful as the case of visual smart surveillance and forensic systems. In this research paper, we present a Haar-like template for the temporal markerless extraction of gait features under various camera viewpoints. A markerless model-based method whereby angular model templates describing the human motion are employed to guide the extraction process. Gait features consist of the angular measurements for the lower legs in addition to the spatial displacement of the human body. To further refine gait features based on their discriminatory potency, a feature selection algorithm is applied using a newly proposed validation-criterion based on the proximity of neighbours belonging to the same class. Experimental results revealed that gait angular measurements derived from the joint motions can achieve a correct classification rate of 73.6% after applying a rectification process back into the sagittal plane.
Advanced Topics in Robotics and Mechanism Synthesis Term Projects

On 4/23/09 and 4/30/09 you will present a 20-25 minute presentation about your work. During this presentation you will focus on explaining the problem and how you mathematically modeled it and verified the theory using simulations. The focus of the presentation will be on the breadth of literature review that your present, the thoroughness of your results, and the success you achieve in conveying your lessons learned from your project to your class members. On 5/8/09 you will be required to submit a written report including all programs that you wrote. Suggested topics 1. Applications of elimination methods for direct kinematics of parallel robots. Based on papers [1], [2], and chapter 2 of [3]. The aim of this work will be to verify and adapt the solution in [2] to use an eigenvalues solution as in [1] and [3]. The specific robots to be solved is the 3-PPSR parallel robot presented in [2] and also a planar 5-bar mechanism. The presentation should explain 1) the theoretical background on the transition from polynomial systems to eigenvalues problem. 2) the resultants method and the method you plan to use 3) explain the transition from a resultant formulation to a generalized eigenvalue problem 4) explain the generalized eigenvalue problem and how it is solved. The written report should also include Matlab/Mathematica/Maple simulations that show the effectiveness of the solution and all the material you included in your presentation. The simulation should also draw the robot in all real configurations of the direct kinematics solution. You should also explain how you determined the upper bounds for the number of solutions. 2. Stability of grasps with soft fingers having point contact with friction. Based on extending the material presented in class and also based on the works of [4-7]. The problem will be to analyze the stability of a 3-fingered hand holding a ball with three fingers. During the presentation you should: explain 1) the mathematical modeling of the problem 2) the conditions for stability assuming linearized finger model 3) the difference between linearized and non-linearized finger models 4) a kinematic model of a ball held by 3 fingers and perturbed by two angles x and y (I suggest using quaternions). This kinematic model should relate the movement of the contact points on the ball with the movement along the finger " spring ". 5) The concept of grasp regions as defined by friction cones. …
Mars Global Digital Dune Database and initial science results

[1] A new Mars Global Digital Dune Database (MGD3) constructed using Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) infrared (IR) images provides a comprehensive and quantitative view of the geographic distribution of moderate- to large-size dune fields (area >1 km2) that will help researchers to understand global climatic and sedimentary processes that have shaped the surface of Mars. MGD3 extends from 65°N to 65°S latitude and includes ∼550 dune fields, covering ∼70,000 km2, with an estimated total volume of ∼3,600 km3. This area, when combined with polar dune estimates, suggests moderate- to large-size dune field coverage on Mars may total ∼800,000 km2, ∼6 times less than the total areal estimate of ∼5,000,000 km2 for terrestrial dunes. Where availability and quality of THEMIS visible (VIS) or Mars Orbiter Camera narrow-angle (MOC NA) images allow, we classify dunes and include dune slipface measurements, which are derived from gross dune morphology and represent the prevailing wind direction at the last time of significant dune modification. For dunes located within craters, the azimuth from crater centroid to dune field centroid (referred to as dune centroid azimuth) is calculated and can provide an accurate method for tracking dune migration within smooth-floored craters. These indicators of wind direction are compared to output from a general circulation model (GCM). Dune centroid azimuth values generally correlate to regional wind patterns. Slipface orientations are less well correlated, suggesting that local topographic effects may play a larger role in dune orientation than regional winds.
Experimental studies of erythropoietin protection following traumatic brain injury in rats

This study aimed to explore the effect of erythropoietin (EPO) on brain tissue after traumatic brain injury in rats. Animals were divided into sham, control and EPO groups. The model was constructed using the improved Feeney’s free falling weight traumatic brain injury model. The brain water content and the number of the apoptotic monocyte chemotactic protein-1+ (MCP-1+) and CD68+ cells were monitored at 12, 48 and 120 h post-trauma. The water content was lower in the EPO group at each time point compared to the control group. The number of apoptotic MCP-1+ and CD68+ cells surrounding the traumatic brain injury lesion was less in the EPO group compared to these values in the control group. In conclusion, following traumatic brain injury, EPO significantly decreased the number of apoptotic cells, the expression of MCP-1, the infiltration of CD68+ cells as well as brain edema to protect the brain.
Homology Search for Genes Using Biased HMMs

A method for forming color images and silver halide color photographic material for use therewith are provided by the present invention. The method comprises imagewise exposing a silver halide color photographic material processing with a color developer and then successively processing with a solution having a bleaching ability and having a pH of about 6.5 or less for a period of time of about 75 seconds or less, wherein the silver halide color photographic material contains at least one light-sensitive layer on a support, the light-sensitive layer containing at least one coupler capable of forming a dye by the coupling reaction with the oxidation product of an aromatic primary amine color developing agent and a silver halide emulsion which substantially excludes silver iodide but contains silver chloride in an amount of about 80 mol % or more and which has been spectrally-sensitized with a dye as represented by general formula (I), (II) or (III) described herein. The characteristic aspect of the present invention includes the high spectral sensitivity, the sufficient color forming property and desilvering property almost without the generation of fog, and the possibility of the rapid processing with a color developer which does not substantially contain benzyl alcohol.
SIMILARITY-BASED SOUND SOURCE LOCALIZATION WITH A COINCIDENT MICROPHONE ARRAY

This paper presents a robust, accurate sound source localization method using a compact, near-coincident microphone array. We derive features by combining the microphone signals and determine the direction of a single sound source by similarity matching. Therefore, the observed features are compared with a set of previously measured reference features, which are stored in a look-up table. By proper processing in the similarity domain, we are able to deal with signal pauses and low SNR without the need of a separate detection algorithm. For practical evaluation, we made recordings of speech signals (both loudspeaker-playback and human speaker) with a planar 4-channel prototype array in a medium-sized room. The proposed approach clearly outperforms existing coincident localization methods. We achieve high accuracy ( 2 ◦ mean absolute azimuth error at 0 dB SNR) for static sources, while being able to quickly follow rapid source angle changes.
Anterior Displacement of Lamina Cribrosa during Valsalva Maneuver in Young Healthy Eyes

Purpose To investigate lamina cribrosa (LC) displacement during the Valsalva maneuver in young healthy eyes using enhanced depth imaging (EDI) spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). Methods Forty-eight eyes of 48 young healthy volunteers (age range: 20–34 years) underwent intraocular pressure (IOP) measurement by Goldmann applanation tonometry as well as Cirrus HD-OCT scans before and during the Valsalva maneuver. The optic nerve head (ONH) parameters (average retinal nerve fiber layer thickness, rim area, disc area, average C/D ratio, vertical C/D ratio, cup volume), anterior LC depth (LCD), subfoveal and peripapillary choroidal thickness, and neural canal opening diameter were measured on compensated OCT and compared during Valsalva challenge. The subjects were asked to take a five-minute break after each Valsalva maneuver. Results During the Valsalva maneuver, the IOP significantly increased, from 12.7 ± 3.0 mmHg to 16.0 ± 3.2 mmHg (P < 0.001), while the LCD sharply decreased, from 463.4 ± 118.8 μm to 427.3 ± 106.4 μm (P < 0.001). The subfoveal choroidal thickness (300.7 ± 90.6 vs. 309.6 ± 93.5 μm), peripapilllary choroidal thickness (152.2 ± 55.4 vs. 150.8 ± 49.3 μm), neural canal opening diameter (1651.8 ± 204.2 vs. 1651.0 ± 217.6 μm), and all of the ONH parameters did not change significantly (all P > 0.05). Conclusions The Valsalva maneuver induced anterior displacement of the LC, but did not alter the choroidal thickness or ONH morphology. The data describe the positional characteristics of the LC in response to the Valsalva maneuver in young healthy eyes.
Hebbian Learning of Recurrent Connections: A Geometrical Perspective

We show how a Hopfield network with modifiable recurrent connections undergoing slow Hebbian learning can extract the underlying geometry of an input space. First, we use a slow and fast analysis to derive an averaged system whose dynamics derives from an energy function and therefore always converges to equilibrium points. The equilibria reflect the correlation structure of the inputs, a global object extracted through local recurrent interactions only. Second, we use numerical methods to illustrate how learning extracts the hidden geometrical structure of the inputs. Indeed, multidimensional scaling methods make it possible to project the final connectivity matrix onto a Euclidean distance matrix in a high-dimensional space, with the neurons labeled by spatial position within this space. The resulting network structure turns out to be roughly convolutional. The residual of the projection defines the nonconvolutional part of the connectivity, which is minimized in the process. Finally, we show how restricting the dimension of the space where the neurons live gives rise to patterns similar to cortical maps. We motivate this using an energy efficiency argument based on wire length minimization. Finally, we show how this approach leads to the emergence of ocular dominance or orientation columns in primary visual cortex via the self-organization of recurrent rather than feedforward connections. In addition, we establish that the nonconvolutional (or long-range) connectivity is patchy and is co-aligned in the case of orientation learning.
Outlier Detection for Transaction Databases Using Association Rules

Outlier detection, a data mining technique to detect rare events, deviant objects, and exceptions from data, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Much existing research targets record data constructed with numerical attributes or a set of points having numeric values. However, very few studies have attempted to detect outliers from data having items. We focus on transaction data and propose a framework for detecting outlier transactions that behave abnormally compared to others. As an outlier, we are interested in a transaction t in which more items are not observed even though they should normally have a strong dependency on item sets in t. We use information of association rules with high confidence for the outlier degree calculation. In this paper, we first discuss what outliers of transactions are, and provide an outlier degree for systematically detecting outlier transactions. We also propose algorithms for efficiently detecting outlier transactions from transaction databases. We present two devices for faster detection that (i) remove redundant association rules and (ii) prune candidates of outlier transactions utilizing maximal frequent itemsets. In experiments using synthetic and real world data sets, we show that our proposal can derive enough detection accuracies and detect outlier transactions faster than a brute force algorithm.