Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased cell-free fetal DNA in plasma of two women with invasive placenta.

Invasive placenta, often involving placenta accreta, placenta increta, and placenta percreta, is a life-threatening complication of pregnancy characterized by invasion of placental villi into the underlying myometrium. Invasive placenta is usually diagnosed as a result of abnormalities encountered during removal of the placenta at delivery. Because of profuse hemorrhaging in the early postpartum period, blood transfusion or emergency hysterectomy is often required in patients with invasive placenta. Invasive placenta is also associated with high maternal morbidity and a high risk of mortality. Therefore, prenatal prediction of this disease would be of great clinical benefit. Recently, Lo et al. (1) discovered the presence of fetal DNA in maternal plasma. They developed a real-time quantitative PCR assay with which to measure the concentration of fetal DNA within maternal plasma. In addition, they analyzed the Y-chromosome-specific SRY sequence to quantify the number of genome equivalents per milliliter of plasma in women carrying male fetuses (2). Although cell-free fetal DNA is reported to increase in maternal plasma in cases of preterm delivery (3), preeclampsia (4)(5), and pregnancy with a trisomy 21 fetus (6), it is unclear where this fetal DNA originates. In the …
Blockade of Extracellular High-Mobility Group Box 1 Attenuates Systemic Inflammation and Coagulation Abnormalities in Rats with Acute Traumatic Coagulopathy

Background As an extracellularly released mediator, high-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) initiates sterile inflammation following severe trauma. Serum HMGB1 levels correlate well with acute traumatic coagulopathy (ATC) in trauma patients, which is independently associated with higher mortality. We investigated the involvement of HMGB1 in ATC through blocking extracellular HMGB1. Material/Methods The ATC model was induced by polytrauma and hemorrhage in male Sprague-Dawley rats, which were randomly assigned to sham, ATC, and ATCH (ATC with HMGB1 blockade) groups. Thrombelastography (TEG) was performed to monitor changes in coagulation function. Serum levels of HMGB1, TNF-α, and IL-6 were measured, as well as lung levels of HMGB1 and nuclear factor (NF)-κB and expression of receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE). Results Compared with the sham group, HMGB1 increased the serum levels of TNF-α and IL-6, whereas HMGB1 blockade inhibited the induction of TNF-α and IL-6. HMGB1 also induced elevated serum soluble P-selectin and fibrinolysis markers plasmin-antiplasmin complex, which both were reduced by HMGB1 blockade. Thrombelastography revealed the hypocoagulability status in the ATC group, which was attenuated by anti-HMGB1 antibody. Furthermore, the lung level of NF-κB and expression of RAGE were decreased by anti-HMGB1 antibody, suggesting the role of RAGE/NF-κB pathway in ATC. Conclusions HMGB1 blockade can attenuate inflammation and coagulopathy in ATC rats. Anti-HMGB1 antibody might exert protective effects partly through the RAGE/NF-κB pathway. Thus, HMGB1 has potential as a therapeutic target in ATC.
Complexity and Pilot Workload Metrics for the Evaluation of Adaptive Flight Controls on a Full Scale Piloted Aircraft

Flight research has shown the effectiveness of adaptive flight controls for improving aircraft safety and performance in the presence of uncertainties. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA)’s Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) project designed and conducted a series of flight experiments to study the impact of variations in adaptive controller design complexity on performance and handling qualities. A novel complexity metric was devised to compare the degrees of simplicity achieved in three variations of a model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) for NASA’s F-18 (McDonnell Douglas, now The Boeing Company, Chicago, Illinois) Full-Scale Advanced Systems Testbed (Gen-2A) aircraft. The complexity measures of these controllers are also compared to that of an earlier MRAC design for NASA’s Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) project and flown on a highly modified F-15 aircraft (McDonnell Douglas, now The Boeing Company, Chicago, Illinois). Pilot comments during the IRAC research flights pointed to the importance of workload on handling qualities ratings for failure and damage scenarios. Modifications to existing pilot aggressiveness and duty cycle metrics are presented and applied to the IRAC controllers. Finally, while adaptive controllers may alleviate the effects of failures or damage on an aircraft’s handling qualities, they also have the potential to introduce annoying changes to the flight dynamics or to the operation of aircraft systems. A nuisance rating scale is presented for the categorization of nuisance side-effects of adaptive controllers.
Drusen exudate lesion discrimination in colour fundus images

Automatic screening and diagnosis of ocular disease through fundus images are in place and considered worldwide. One of the leading sight loosing disease known as age related macular degeneration (AMD) has many proposed automatic screening systems. These systems detect yellow bright lesion and through the number of lesion and their size the disease is graded as advance and earlier stage. It becomes difficult for these systems to differentiate drusens from exudates another bright lesion associated with Diabetic retinopathy. These two lesions look similar on retinal surface. Differentiating these two lesions can improve the performance of any automatic system. In this paper we proposed a novel approach to discriminate these lesions. The approach consists of two stage procedure. The first stage after pre-processing detects all bright pixels from the image. The suspicious pixels are removed from the detected region. On the second stage bright regions are classified as drusen and exudates through Support Vector Machine (SVM). Proposed method was evaluated on publically available dataset STARE. The system achieve 92% accuracy.
Anomalously low negative cloud-to-ground lightning flash rates in intense convective storms observed during STERAO-A

Abstract Concurrent measurements from the CSU-CHILL multiparameter Doppler radar, the Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aerospatiales VHF lightning interferometer, and the National Lightning Detection Network, obtained during phase A of the Stratosphere–Troposphere Experiments: Radiation, Aerosols, Ozone (STERAO-A) field project, provided a unique dataset with which to study the relationships between convective storm microphysics and associated lightning. Two storms have been examined in detail in this study: 10 and 12 July 1996. Both storms were long lived, existing in some form for over 4 h apiece, and produced very low cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flash rates, in particular negative CG flash rates (generally 30 min−1 at peak). For both storms, radar reflectivity intensity and the production of ha.
Making programming education more accessible for visually impaired

Modern programming paradigms have brought many different challenges for visually impaired programmers. Graphical interfaces have become one of the biggest obstacles for visually impaired programming professionals. The same problems that relate to visually impaired programmers also apply to programming education in which it is very challenging to make educational interfaces accessible for visually impaired and for other students with disabilities. In order to make programming more suitable for students with visual impairment an educational system that enables voice-based control of its elements has been developed for the purpose of their programming education. The results of using this kind of system and its impact on visually impaired students are presented and discussed in this paper.
Inverse Effects of Mucin on Survival of Matched Hereditary Nonpolyposis Colorectal Cancer and Sporadic Colorectal Cancer Patients

Purpose: To compare survival and histologic features of hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC; Lynch syndrome) cases to well-matched sporadic colon cancers from the same patient population. Experimental Design: Between January 1995 and March 2002, a total of 5,138 consecutive patients underwent resection of primary colorectal adenocarcinoma in a single institution. According to the Amsterdam criteria, 56 HNPCC patients were matched to 147 sporadic colorectal cancer (SCRC) with no family history of cancer and with the same gender, tumor location, and age within 3 years. Immunohistochemical analyses were done for MUC1, MUC2, MUC3, and MUC5AC. Results: The HNPCC group had a marginally significantly better long-term outcome than the SCRC group (P = 0.058). The trend disappeared after adjustment by tumor-node-metastasis stage in a Cox model (P = 0.774). We noted a difference of >50% in the 5-year cancer-specific survival rates of HNPCC- and SCRC-mucinous groups (92% versus 31%, P = 0.0003). Interaction between mucin and HNPCC and its effects on survival were further confirmed by comparing the Cox models with and without interaction terms (hazard ratio, 0.1; P = 0.034 with adjusting stage). Patients with tumors showing dual expression of mucin and MUC1, which appeared in 11% of those with HNPCC and 50% of those with SCRC, had a lower 5-year cancer-specific survival rate than patients without (30% versus 60%; P = 0.004 by log-rank test; P = 0.039 with adjustment for tumor-node-metastasis stage). Conclusions: These results suggest that mucin has an inverse effect on survival in patients with HNPCC and SCRC, which might be partly explained by a lower prevalence of MUC1 expression in the mucinous HNPCC group than in the SCRC groups.
Serotonin and octopamine have opposite modulatory effects on the crayfish's lateral giant escape reaction

Serotonin and octopamine have opposite effects on a simple behavioral response, the crayfish's lateral giant escape reaction. Specifically, serotonin depresses the lateral giants' responsiveness, whereas octopamine enhances it. Both effects are largely confined to the disynaptic pathway from the sensory afferents to the lateral giants, although, occasionally, small effects are also seen in the monosynaptic pathway to the lateral giants. One specific locus of the octopaminergic effect is the synapse between the afferents and the largest of the sensory interneurons in the disynaptic pathway, interneuron A. Serotonin, however, does not have a consistent effect at this synapse. Although serotonin and octopamine modulate the excitability of the escape response, neither monoamine appears to significantly alter the rate at which this response habituates.
The impact of modern neurosurgical approaches and extent of resection on patient outcome

Despite advances in preoperative imaging, intraoperative techniques, and postoperative care, it remains unclear whether greater glioma resection affects patient survival. Although the available evidence supports the utility of surgery for diagnosis and decompression, there is controversy as to whether a greater extent of resection can influence outcome. We have reviewed every major clinical publication since 1990 that comments on the role of greater resection in changing survival. This review of the modern neurosurgical literature has identified 37 manuscripts in total. These studies were evaluated in terms of design, statistics, and raw data. Overall, their cumulative findings underscore the value of a greater extent of resection, which is not only associated with improved survival, but also may delay the malignant transformation of low grade tumors. Although we still lack incontrovertible evidence in favour of extent of resection, the entire body of literature in the modern neurosurgery still supports its survival benefit for glioma patients.
Design and Analysis of 4-GHz SOP FMCW HMIC Radar

The demand for higher performance systems that are smaller and have the potential to be more cost effective has lead hardware designers to adopt integration of many components and modules in a package (SOP) or on a chip (SOC). A compact SOP (single-substrate) L-band FMCW HMIC radar module for high-resolution sensor application has been demonstrated. For use with a single transmit- receive antenna, a miniature microstrip hexaferrite circulator has been integrated to the transceiver module. The module was based on a transceiver HMIC with an integrated branch divider and 5-port ring coupler to enable both broadband modulation and single-antenna operation. The integrated substrate size could be reduced to 40 cm 2 . The analysis of the designed radar is introduced which reflects a good performance and achieves a higher efficiency.
Java and C / C + + Language Features in Terms of Network Programming

This research paper is a concise comparison between the Java and the C/C++ programming languages with special consider to the functionality of each in networking applications. A brief overview of the origins of each language is given as foundation for this comparison. The features of each language are then analyzed with respect to three categories: ease of use, security, and efficiency.
The AppCard : a Migrating Processor Card for General-Purpose Computing

In this paper, we present a new approach to mobile computing based on an all-silicon computer. It facilitates application and data migration as a user moves between heterogeneous, disconnected machines. General purpose applications permanently run on a removable processor card, called an AppCard. An AppCard connects to a host computer through a standard interface, such as a PCMCIA slot. The card has its own operating system which provides basic services , but it relies on the host for many resources, such as a user interface and a network connection. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an initial AppCard prototype. It includes early performance measurements and presents ideas on further development in this area.
The Fault Diagnosis Problem: Residual Generators Design Using Neural Networks in a Two-Tanks Interconnected System

In this work, a fault detection method based on a neural-network models bank to residual generation and a residual evaluation scheme using a fuzzy rules type is developed. The case of study is a nonlinear hydraulic system consisting of two interconnected tanks which is simulated, in normal conditions and fault conditions. In this case we use also its equivalent Takagi-Sugeno Model in discreet time. This way, the simulation provides the data to train each one of the neuronal models. The update the weights is based on the algorithm BP (Back Propagation) with a stage of scale applied to the training data in order to avoid over-training on the neural network, due to the asymptotic limits of the sigmoid function used. The results show a correct identification on the different fault scenes and it motivates us to the real implementation of faults diagnosis procedure.
Learner: a system for acquiring commonsense knowledge by analogy

One of the long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence is construction of a machine that is capable of reasoning about the everyday world the way humans are. In this paper, I first argue that construction of a large collection of statements about everyday world (a repository of commonsense knowledge) is a valuable step towards this long-term goal. Then, I point out that volunteer contributors over the Internet --- a frequently overlooked source of knowledge --- can be tapped to construct such a knowledge repository. To operationalize construction of a large commonsense knowledge repository by volunteer contributors, I then introduce cumulative analogy, a class of analogy-based reasoning algorithms that leverage existing knowledge to pose knowledge acquisition questions to the volunteer contributors. The algorithms have been implemented and deployed as the Learner system. To date, about 3,400 volunteer contributors have interacted with the system over the course of 11 months, increasing a starting collection of 47,147 statements by 362% to a total of 217,971. The deployed system and the growing collection of knowledge it acquired are publicly available from http://teach-computers.org. The knowledge is beginning to be used in follow-on research to address some well-recognized and novel reasoning tasks.
Convective Forcing in the Intertropical Convergence Zone of the Eastern Pacific

Abstract One of the goals of the East Pacific Investigation of Climate, year 2001 process study (EPIC2001), was to understand the mechanisms controlling the forcing of deep atmospheric convection over the tropical eastern Pacific. An intensive study was made of convection in a 4° × 4° square centered on 10°N, 95°W in September and October of 2001. This is called the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) study region because it encompasses the eastern Pacific intertropical convergence zone. Starting from an analysis of the theoretical possibilities and a plethora of dropsonde, in situ, radar, and satellite data, it is found that newly developing convection occurs where a deep layer of air (of order 1 km deep or deeper) is conditionally unstable with only weak convective inhibition. Shallower conditionally unstable layers are associated with numerous small clouds, but do not seem to produce deep convection. The occurrence of deep convection over the ITCZ study region is presumably related to the propensity .
Weekly administration of rapamycin improves survival and biomarkers in obese male mice on high-fat diet

Recent discoveries have revealed the key role of mTOR (target of rapamycin) in aging. Furthermore, rapamycin extends lifespan in mice, especially in female mice. Here, we treated obese male mice on high‐fat diet with rapamycin given intermittently: either weekly (once a week) or alternating bi‐weekly (three injections every other week). While only marginally reducing obesity, intermittent administration of rapamycin significantly extended lifespan. Significance was achieved for weekly treated group and for the three rapamycin‐received groups combined. In weekly treatment group, 100% mice were alive by the age of 2 years, whereas 60% of mice died in untreated group by this age. The effect of weekly treatment on survival was highly significant and cannot be fully explained by partial reduction in obesity. Alternating bi‐weekly treatments seem to be less effective than weekly treatment, although effects of additional factors (see ) may not be excluded. After one year of treatment, all survived mice were sacrificed 8 days after the last administration of rapamycin to avoid its direct interference with parameters examined. Fasting levels of cardiac and hepatic p‐S6, a marker of mTORC1 activity, were lower in weekly treatment group compared with control mice. In contrast, levels of p‐Akt (S473), glucose, triglycerides and insulin were unchanged, whereas leptin and IGF‐1 tended to be lower. Thus, weekly treatment with rapamycin may slow down aging in obese male mice on high‐fat diet.
POSTER: Leveraging deep memory hierarchies for data staging in coupled data-intensive simulation workflows

Next generation in-situ/in-transit data processing has been proposed for addressing data challenges at extreme scales. However, further research is necessary in order to understand how growing data sizes from data intensive simulations coupled with limited DRAM capacity in High End Computing clusters will impact the effectiveness of this approach. In this work, we propose using deep memory levels for data staging, utilizing a multi-tiered data staging method with both DRAM and solid state disk (SSD). This approach allows us to support both code coupling and data management for data intensive simulations in cluster environment. We also show how an application-aware data placement mechanism can dynamically manage and optimize data placement across DRAM and SSD storage levels in staging method. We present experimental results on Sith - an Infiniband cluster at Oak Ridge, and evaluate its performance using combustion (S3D) and fusion (XGC) simulations.
Empirical analysis on the application of simulated annealing for RFID reader networks

Allocation of time slots for RFID readers so as to avoid collision has been an active research problem in recent years. Various techniques have been proposed and demonstrated with success in small scale reader networks. In this paper, a heuristic algorithm and three simulated annealing (SA) algorithms for solving this problem are studied. Clearly, heuristic algorithm converges faster to a local solution than the SA algorithms. However, SA algorithms provide slightly better solution in terms of the number of time slots required for collision free interrogation.
Accelerating Gate Sizing Using Graphics Processing Units

In this paper, we investigate the gate sizing problem and develop techniques for improving the runtime by effectively exploiting the graphics processing unit (GPU) resources. Theoretically, we investigate a randomized cutting plane-based convex optimization technique which is highly parallelizable and can effectively exploit the single instruction multiple data structure imposed by GPUs. In order to further improve the runtime, we also develop GPU-oriented implementation guidelines that exploit the specific structure that convex gate sizing formulations impose. We implemented our method on NVIDIA Tesla 10 GPU and obtain 21× to 400× speedup compared to the MOSEK optimization tool implemented on conventional CPU. The quality of solution of our method is very close to that achieved by MOSEK, since both are optimal.
Delayed Random Walk Models of Neural Information Processing

We present and compare two delayed random walk models of neural information processing. A delayed random walk is a random walk in which the transition probability depends on the position of the walker at a time in the past. The rst model is of human neuro-muscular control for postural sway. The other model is for a stochastic single neuron which has a delayed self{exciting feedback. We study each model using computer simulation to examine its time{ dependent and asymptotic stochastic behaviors. The similarities and di erences between the two models are discussed as well as how they relate to empirical data.
DNA methylation mediates genetic variation for adaptive transgenerational plasticity

Environmental stresses experienced by individual parents can influence offspring phenotypes in ways that enhance survival under similar conditions. Although such adaptive transgenerational plasticity is well documented, its transmission mechanisms are generally unknown. One possible mechanism is environmentally induced DNA methylation changes. We tested this hypothesis in the annual plant Polygonum persicaria, a species known to express adaptive transgenerational plasticity in response to parental drought stress. Replicate plants of 12 genetic lines (sampled from natural populations) were grown in dry versus moist soil. Their offspring were exposed to the demethylating agent zebularine or to control conditions during germination and then grown in dry soil. Under control germination conditions, the offspring of drought-stressed parents grew longer root systems and attained greater biomass compared with offspring of well-watered parents of the same genetic lines. Demethylation removed these adaptive developmental effects of parental drought, but did not significantly alter phenotypic expression in offspring of well-watered parents. The effect of demethylation on the expression of the parental drought effect varied among genetic lines. Differential seed provisioning did not contribute to the effect of parental drought on offspring phenotypes. These results demonstrate that DNA methylation can mediate adaptive, genotype-specific effects of parental stress on offspring phenotypes.