Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Chemotherapy Regimens on Body Composition of Breast Cancer Women: A Multicenter Study across Four Brazilian Regions

This study aimed to investigate the effect of chemotherapy (CT) and its different types of regimens on the anthropometry and body composition of women with breast cancer. Three-hundred-and-four women with breast cancer were enrolled in this multicenter study. The participants were evaluated before the infusion of the first cycle of CT (pre-CT), and until two weeks after CT completion (post-CT), regarding body weight, body mass index (BMI); waist circumference (WC); waist-to-height ratio (WHtR); conicity index (C-index); fat mass index (FMI); and fat-free mass index (FFMI). CT regimens were classified as anthracycline-based (AC—doxorubicin or epirubicin); anthracyclines and taxane (ACT); cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and 5-fluorouracil (CMF); or isolated taxanes (paclitaxel or docetaxel). Women significantly increased BMI and FMI post-CT (p < 0.001 and p = 0.007, respectively). The ACT regimen increased FMI (p < 0.001), while FFMI increased after AC (p = 0.007). It is concluded that the CT negatively impacted body composition and the type of regime had a strong influence. The ACT regimen promoted an increase in FMI compared to other regimens, and the AC increased FFMI. These findings reinforce the importance of nutritional monitoring of breast cancer patients throughout the entire CT treatment.
Distributionally Robust Model Predictive Control for Smart Electric Vehicle Charging Station With V2G/V2V Capability

This paper proposes a distributionally robust model predictive control (DRMPC) for energy management of a vehicle-to-grid (V2G)/vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-enabled smart electric vehicle charging station (EVCS) with a photovoltaic (PV) system and an energy storage system. The proposed DRMPC method aims to reduce the operational cost of the EVCS while ensuring the desired charging demands of electric vehicle (EV) users under uncertainties in electricity buying/selling prices, PV generation outputs, and future EV charging demands. To cope with these uncertainties, the proposed method includes the following three features: i) tractable reformulation of the worst-case expected buying cost and selling revenue using a Wasserstein metric and duality theory, ii) determination of a distributionally robust bound on the random PV generation output using its support information, and iii) a scenario-based approach to predicting the future EV charging demand. To improve computational efficiency, a penalty method is proposed to relax the complementarity constraints, while still ensuring nonsimultaneous charging and discharging of EVs under the derived sufficient conditions. Numerical examples using a real-world operational dataset of the EVCS are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRMPC method under uncertain environments in terms of the EVCS cost saving via V2G/V2V capability, data utilization, and computational complexity.
Metasurface Optics With On-Axis Polarization Control for Terahertz Sensing Applications

Nondestructive testing (NDT) and imaging of materials with unknown properties are important applications of terahertz technology. Different contrast-forming methods are available to obtain diverse information on the imaged region, including intensity, color, phase, and polarization. Polarimetric imaging is relatively under-investigated owing to the difficulty in its implementation with complex optical arrangements. In this article, we present the design and monolithic fabrication of an anisotropic metasurface that incorporates several beam-forming functions in a single layer with high efficiency thus simplifying instrument construction. The probe beam generated by the metasurface consists of an orthogonally polarized pair of collinear Bessel beams that create a well-defined on-axis change of polarization. The metasurface is integrated into a polarimetric imaging microscope for 3-D beam profiling and sensing experiments at 2.52 THz. An analytical model to describe the on-axis polarization variation was found to be in excellent agreement with both finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations and the experimental results. The setup was used to measure the refractive index and diattenuation of homogeneous sample regions in a proof-of-principle application. We anticipate this technology will find future applications in NDT and polarimetric imaging of polymer composites and 3-D profilometry of reflective surfaces.
Successful Transplantation of a Liver from a Donor with HELLP Syndrome Undergoing Hypothermic Oxygenated Machine Perfusion (HOPE) Prior to Implantation

Patient: Male, 45-year-old Final Diagnosis: Brain death • HELLP syndrome • liver cirrhosis Symptoms: Cirrhosis • elevated liver enzymes • low platelet counts Clinical Procedure: — Specialty: Gastroenterology and Hepatology • Obstetrics and Gynecology • Surgery • Transplantology Objective: Unusual setting of medical care Background: Liver transplantation (LT) has become the treatment of choice for patients with end-stage liver disease (ESLD). The organ shortage forced clinicians to use livers from donors with certain risk factors, so-called extended-criteria donor (ECD) organs. Hypothermic oxygenated machine perfusion (HOPE) is an alternative to conventional static cold storage and reduces early allograft injury in ECD organs. In this article we present the case of a 45-year-old man with hepatitis B virus (HBV)-associated cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who underwent successful liver transplantation supported by pretransplant hypothermic oxygenated machine perfusion (HOPE) from a 34-year-old extended-criteria donor (ECD) with hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets (HELLP) syndrome. Case Report: Liver transplantation was scheduled for a 45-year-old man with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) due to hepatitis B virus-induced liver cirrhosis. The organ donor was a 34-year-old woman who had developed intracerebral hemorrhage and brain death due to HELLP syndrome after delivery. Compared to the day of admission to the intensive care unit, a decrease in the donor’s transaminases was observed prior to organ procurement. Before transplantation, HOPE was conducted after regular back-table preparation of the graft. LT was performed according to the standard surgical techniques and a standardized immunosuppressive regimen was conducted. In the post-transplant period, transaminases peaked directly after the operation and normalized after 1 week. No major surgical complications occurred. The patient was discharged after a 24-day hospital stay with normal liver function. Conclusions: This case report supports the benefits of using HOPE in ECD organs and it should be considered in livers of donors with HELLP syndrome to improve post-transplant outcome.
Mine-scale modeling of lithologies with multiple- point geostatistical simulation

Modeling of categorical variables is relevant to define the geological units that support the spatial distribution of grades in mining applications. Multiple-point geostatistical simulation offers new tools to characterize the relationships that exist between categories. This paper shows the modeling of lithologies at mine-scale at Escondida Norte in northern Chile, using multiple point simulation. The SNESIM algorithm is used for the construction of stochastic geological models, based on the current geological interpretation. Sensitivities over the representativeness of the training image and the amount of conditioning data are done to assess their impact over the quality of the obtained results. Models are checked verifying the reproduction of global and vertical proportions, indicator variograms, and by jack-knife with the logging of the available drillhole samples. Also, an attempt to improve the model defining regions to impose a non-stationary behavior is illustrated. Results show that imposing regions with different local proportions does not improve significantly the results. Conditioning data is the most relevant parameter to improve the final models.
Temperature-dependent viscosity effects on free convection flow over a vertical moving cylinder with constant axial velocity under consideration of radial magnetohydrodynamic

In this present work the effects of temperature-dependent viscosity on MHD free convection flow over a vertical moving cylinder with, the surface of which is exposed to constant wall temperatures. Numerical solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations and energy equation are derived in this problem. A reduction of these equations is obtained by use of appropriate transformations. The semi-similar solution of the Navier-Stokes equations and energy equation has been obtained numerically using by the implicit finite difference scheme of Crank–Nicolson’s type. The velocity and temperature profiles for constant values of cylinder axial velocity are plotted. The influence of the Grashof number, Prandtl number, viscosity-variation parameter, thermal conductivity-variation parameter and magnetic parameter on free convection flow and heat transfer is discussed. Keywords : MHD free convection; moving cylinder; temperature-dependent.
Impact of Hydrophobic and Electrostatic Forces on the Adsorption of Acacia Gum on Oxide Surfaces Revealed by QCM-D

The adsorption of Acacia gum from two plant exudates, A. senegal and A. seyal, at the solid-liquid interface on oxide surfaces was studied using a quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D). The impact of the hydrophobic and electrostatic forces on the adsorption capacity was investigated by different surface, hydrophobicity, and charge properties, and by varying the ionic strength or the pH. The results highlight that hydrophobic forces have higher impacts than electrostatic forces on the Acacia gum adsorption on the oxide surface. The Acacia gum adsorption capacity is higher on hydrophobic surfaces compared to hydrophilic ones and presents a higher stability with negatively charged surfaces. The structural configuration and charge of Acacia gum in the first part of the adsorption process are important parameters. Acacia gum displays an extraordinary ability to adapt to surface properties through rearrangements, conformational changes, and/or dehydration processes in order to reach the steadiest state on the solid surface. Rheological analysis from QCM-D data shows that the A. senegal layers present a viscous behavior on the hydrophilic surface and a viscoelastic behavior on more hydrophobic ones. On the contrary, A. seyal layers show elastic behavior on all surfaces according to the Voigt model or a viscous behavior on the hydrophobic surface when considering the power-law model.
Letter Migrations between Words in Reading Aloud Can Result either from an Impairment in Orthographic Input or in Phonological Output

Letter migrations between words in reading aloud (e.g., reading “cane love” as “lane love” or “lane cove”) are known to result from a deficit in the visual-orthographic analysis and characterize attentional dyslexia. In spontaneous speech, individuals with impairment in the phonological output buffer may show migrations of phonemes between words. The purpose of this study was to examine whether migrations between words in reading aloud can also result from a deficit in the phonological output buffer, to explore the characteristics of migrations resulting from orthographic input and from phonological output deficits, and to examine methods to distinguish these two sources. Using tasks of reading aloud of lists of 92–182 word pairs, we identified 18 adults and adolescents with developmental dyslexia who made between-word letter migrations in reading aloud, significantly more than age-matched controls (372 adults, 26 7th-graders and 44 4th–5th-graders). To distinguish between the orthographic input and phonological output sources for these migrations, we administered a test assessing orthographic input without spoken output (written semantic decision on 140 migratable word pairs) and a repetition test of 36 auditorily presented migratable word pairs, assessing spoken output without orthographic input (as well as nonword repetition and 3 span tests). These tests indicated that the migrations in reading aloud of 10 of the participants with dyslexia resulted from an orthographic input deficit—they made migrations not only in reading aloud but also in written word pair comprehension, but not in word pair repetition. For the other 8 participants, the migrations resulted from a phonological output deficit: they made migrations in reading aloud and in word pair repetition, but not in comprehension, and had limited spans and made errors in nonword repetition. We identified several differences between the two types of between-word errors: first, the individuals with attentional dyslexia made omissions of a letter that appeared in the same position in the two words, but the phonological output buffer group did not make such omissions. Second, the groups differed in the origin of migration: orthographic input migrations involve letters that are orthographically adjacent, whereas phonological output migrations involve phonologically adjacent phonemes: phonemes that have just been spoken or that are prepared together in the phonological buffer for production. Migrations from the line below and from 2 lines above the target occurred only in the orthographic input group. This study thus indicates that between-word migrations in reading aloud can result not only from attentional dyslexia, but also from a phonological output buffer deficit, and offers ways to distinguish between the two.
Dimensionless criteria for the production‐dissipation equilibrium of scalar fluctuations and their implications for scalar similarity

In water resources it is common to consider that two scalars have a similar behavior in the atmospheric surface layer. This is a consequence of Monin‐Obukhov similarity theory whose direct implication is that all similarity functions between two scalars are equal. However, many works show that scalar similarity does not always hold under unstable conditions, a fact for which it is often difficult to establish a physical cause. In this paper, using a data set measured during winter over a tropical lake in Brazil (Furnas Lake), we found a relation between temperature–water vapor similarity and the strength of the surface forcing; we also confirmed that the classical balance between gradient production and molecular dissipation of scalar variance and covariance is key to scalar similarity. This balance can be disrupted by large values of the third‐order transport terms, and possibly by nonstationary terms as well. In connection with the scalar variance and covariance budgets, we propose a new set of dimensionless scalar flux numbers which are able to make a good diagnosis of the aforementioned balance (or the lack thereof) for each budget. The fact that different Monin‐Obukhov functions are not equally capable of identifying scalar similarity is also demonstrated and a new bulk indicator of scalar flux similarity is proposed whose absolute value, unlike the relative transfer efficiency, is bounded above by 1; this new indicator holds also in the spectral domain. Finally, we verify that low‐frequency dissimilarity has a larger impact over scalar similarity than over scalar flux similarity.
Bounds on Data Compression Ratio with a Given Tolerable Error Probability

The paper treats data compression from the viewpoint of probability theory where a certain error probability is tolerable. We obtain bounds for the minimal rate given an error probability for blockcoding of general stationary ergodic sources. An application of the theory of large deviations provides numerical methods to compute for memoryless sources, the minimal compression rate given a tolerable error probability. Interesting connections between Cramer's functions and Shannon's theory for lossy coding are found.
Advance on Engineering of Bacteriophages by Synthetic Biology

Abstract Since bacteriophages (phages) were firstly reported at the beginning of the 20th century, the study on them experiences booming-fading-emerging with discovery and overuse of antibiotics. Although they are the hotspots for therapy of antibiotic-resistant strains nowadays, natural phage applications encounter some challenges such as limited host range and bacterial resistance to phages. Synthetic biology, one of the most dramatic directions in the recent 20-years study of microbiology, has generated numerous methods and tools and has contributed a lot to understanding phage evolution, engineering modification, and controlling phage-bacteria interactions. In order to better modify and apply phages by using synthetic biology techniques in the future, in this review, we comprehensively introduce various strategies on engineering or modification of phage genome and rebooting of recombinant phages, summarize the recent researches and potential directions of phage synthetic biology, and outline the current application of engineered phages in practice.
A CTC Alignment-Based Non-Autoregressive Transformer for End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition

Recently, end-to-end models have been widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Two of the most representative approaches are connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models. Autoregressive transformers, variants of AED, adopt an autoregressive mechanism for token generation and thus are relatively slow during inference. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of a CTC Alignment-based Single-Step Non-Autoregressive Transformer (CASS-NAT) for end-to-end ASR. In CASS-NAT, word embeddings in the autoregressive transformer (AT) are substituted with token-level acoustic embeddings (TAE) that are extracted from encoder outputs with the acoustical boundary information offered by the CTC alignment. TAE can be obtained in parallel, resulting in a parallel generation of output tokens. During training, Viterbi-alignment is used for TAE generation, and multiple training strategies are further explored to improve the word error rate (WER) performance. During inference, an error-based alignment sampling method is investigated in depth to reduce the alignment mismatch in the training and testing processes. Experimental results show that the CASS-NAT has a WER that is close to AT on various ASR tasks, while providing a $\sim$24x inference speedup. With and without self-supervised learning, we achieve new state-of-the-art results for non-autoregressive models on several datasets. We also analyze the behavior of the CASS-NAT decoder to explain why it can perform similarly to AT. We find that TAEs have similar functionality to word embeddings for grammatical structures, which might indicate the possibility of learning some semantic information from TAEs without a language model.
Scattering by an indentation satisfying a dyadic impedance boundary condition

We derive a pair of boundary integral equations for the problem of scattering of an electromagnetic wave by an indentation in a perfectly conducting screen. The wall of the indentation obeys a dyadic impedance boundary condition. The unknowns are the electric current density on the wall of the indentation and the total tangential magnetic field in the opening of the indentation. We also derive integral representations for the fields everywhere in free space, including the far-field region. In all cases, the integrals involved extend over finite surfaces only.
The Wolter telescope designer (WTD): a user-friendly web facility for the design of x-ray multishell telescopes

The design of a Wolter X-ray telescope takes into account the geometrical dimensioning of the shells and the choice of the coating for each of them. In this work we present a user-friendly web interface aimed to the design of multishell Wolter telescopes and to the calculation of their effective area. The application is available at http://heawww.harvard. edu/WTD/. An example is presented.
HMOs Exert Marked Bifidogenic Effects on Children’s Gut Microbiota Ex Vivo, Due to Age-Related Bifidobacterium Species Composition

Prebiotics are substrates that are selectively utilized by host microorganisms, thus conferring a health benefit. There is a growing awareness that interpersonal and age-dependent differences in gut microbiota composition impact prebiotic effects. Due to the interest in using human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) beyond infancy, this study evaluated how HMOs [2’Fucosyllactose (2’FL), Lacto-N-neotetraose (LNnT), 3’Sialyllactose (3’SL), 6’Sialyllactose (6’SL)] and blends thereof affect the microbiota of 6-year-old children (n = 6) and adults (n = 6), compared to prebiotics inulin (IN) and fructooligosaccharides (FOS). The ex vivo SIFR® technology was used, given its demonstrated predictivity in clinical findings. First, HMOs and HMO blends seemed to maintain a higher α-diversity compared to FOS/IN. Further, while 2′FL/LNnT were bifidogenic for both age groups, 3′SL/6′SL and FOS/IN were exclusively bifidogenic for children and adults, respectively. This originated from age-related differences in microbiota composition because while 3′SL/6′SL stimulated B. pseudocatenulatum (abundant in children), FOS/IN enhanced B. adolescentis (abundant in adults). Moreover, all treatments significantly increased acetate, propionate and butyrate (only in adults) with product- and age-dependent differences. Among the HMOs, 6′SL specifically stimulated propionate (linked to Bacteroides fragilis in children and Phocaeicola massiliensis in adults), while LNnT stimulated butyrate (linked to Anaerobutyricum hallii in adults). Indole-3-lactic acid and 3-phenyllactic acid (linked to immune health) and gamma-aminobutyric acid (linked to gut-brain axis) were most profoundly stimulated by 2′FL and HMO blends in both children and adults, correlating with specific Bifidobacteriaceae. Finally, 2′FL/LNnT increased melatonin in children, while 3′SL remarkably increased folic acid in adults. Overall, age-dependent differences in microbiota composition greatly impacted prebiotic outcomes, advocating for the development of age-specific nutritional supplements. HMOs were shown to be promising modulators in the adult, and particularly the children’s microbiota. The observed HMO-specific effects, likely originating from their structural heterogeneity, suggest that blends of different HMOs could maximize treatment effects.
Wearable High Voltage Compliant Current Stimulator for Restoring Sensory Feedback

Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) is a promising technique for eliciting referred tactile sensations in patients with limb amputation. Although several studies show the validity of this technique, its application in daily life and away from laboratories is limited by the need for more portable instrumentation that guarantees the necessary voltage and current requirements for proper sensory stimulation. This study proposes a low-cost, wearable high-voltage compliant current stimulator with four independent channels based on Components-Off-The-Shelf (COTS). This microcontroller-based system implements a voltage-current converter controllable through a digital-to-analog converter that delivers up to 25 mA to load up to 3.6 kΩ. The high-voltage compliance enables the system to adapt to variations in electrode-skin impedance, allowing it to stimulate loads over 10 kΩ with currents of 5 mA. The system was realized on a four-layer PCB (115.9 mm × 61 mm, 52 g). The functionality of the device was tested on resistive loads and on an equivalent skin-like RC circuit. Moreover, the possibility of implementing an amplitude modulation was demonstrated.