Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two mechanisms coordinate the recruitment of the chromosomal passenger complex to the plane of cell division

Proper positioning of the chromosomal passenger complex (CPC) at the cell division plane is required for cytokinesis. We show here that CPC targeting to the equatorial cortex depends on both the kinesin MKlp2 and a direct interaction with actin. These recruitment mechanisms converge to promote successful cleavage furrow ingression.
Segmentation-based extraction of important objects from video for object-based indexing

We describe a method to automatically extract important video objects for object-based indexing. Most of the existing salient object detection approaches detect visually conspicuous structures in images, while our method aims to find regions that may be important for indexing in a video database system. Our method works on a shot basis. We first segment each frame to obtain homogeneous regions in terms of color and texture. Then, we extract a set of regional and inter-regional color, shape, texture and motion features for all regions, which are classified as being important or not using SVMs trained on a few hundreds of example regions. Finally, each important region is tracked within each shot for trajectory generation and consistency check. Experimental results from news video sequences show that the proposed approach is effective.
Influence of Microwave Calcination on Microstructure and Magnetic Properties of Sr-Hexagonal Ferrite

The improvement of the microstructure of Sr-hexagonal ferrite and their magnetic properties by microwave calcined method was studied, the aim of the study was to obtain a fine grained microstructure in calcined stage. There was tendency to induce a large anisotropic during grain growth, microwave calcination method can succeed in obtaining homogeneous grain growth ,and help to reduce the calcination temperature and shorten the calcination time. The ferrites with saturation magnetization, remanent magnetization and intrinsic coercivity of 70.322emu/g, 36.182emu/g, 3343.1Oe, respectively, obtained in samples calcined at 1140°C for 30 min.
A Two-Layer Recurrent Neural Network for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization Problems

In this paper, a two-layer recurrent neural network is proposed to solve the nonsmooth convex optimization problem subject to convex inequality and linear equality constraints. Compared with existing neural network models, the proposed neural network has a low model complexity and avoids penalty parameters. It is proved that from any initial point, the state of the proposed neural network reaches the equality feasible region in finite time and stays there thereafter. Moreover, the state is unique if the initial point lies in the equality feasible region. The equilibrium point set of the proposed neural network is proved to be equivalent to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality set of the original optimization problem. It is further proved that the equilibrium point of the proposed neural network is stable in the sense of Lyapunov. Moreover, from any initial point, the state is proved to be convergent to an equilibrium point of the proposed neural network. Finally, as applications, the proposed neural network is used to solve nonlinear convex programming with linear constraints and L1-norm minimization problems.
Antenatal screening for Down's syndrome.

A method of screening for fetal Down's syndrome is described. Screening marker levels are measured. These may be measurements of a biochemical marker in a maternal sample or measurements of a marker from an ultrasound scan. The marker levels are used to calculate a risk of Down's syndrome. Instead of using markers from a single stage of pregnancy, the method uses markers from two or more different stages of pregnancy, typically one being in the first and another being in second trimester. The method may be automated.
Identification of homozygous hemochromatosis subjects by measurement of hepatic iron index

The value of measurement of hepatic iron concentration and determination of the hepatic iron index in distinguishing homozygotes from heterozygotes for hemochromatosis was examined. The study group included 42 homozygotes with an unequivocal diagnosis of hemochromatosis and six individuals who had initial equivocal results but were established as homozygous after extensive follow‐up. These were compared with 15 heterozygotes with no sign of increasing body iron stores who had undergone liver biopsy because of an initial suspicion of raised iron levels. In these subjects a hepatic iron concentration of greater than 75 μmol/gm dry weight was clearly indicative of homozygous hemochromatosis. Body iron accumulation was age‐related both in homozygotes and in these heterozygotes with mild biochemical abnormalities (r = 0.476; p = 0.001 and r = 0.689; p = 0.01, respectively), with a rate of accretion of approximately 5 μmol/gm dry weight/year in homozygotes and 0.9 μmol/gm dry weight/year in heterozygotes. Thus, lower values in young subjects may be consistent with homozygosity, and higher values in older individuals are consistent with heterozygosity. To overcome this problem, the hepatic iron index (hepatic iron concentration divided by age in years) was analyzed and found to separate the two groups effectively, with no homozygote having an index of less than 1.9 and no heterozygote having an index of greater than 1.5. These results in a series of patients who have been followed for a median of 3 yr (range = 1 to 30 yr) validate the use of the hepatic iron index to discriminate hemochromatosis homozygotes from heterozygotes with raised levels of serum ferritin, transferrin saturation or both. (HEPATOLOGY 1990;12:20–25).
Ultrasound goes GPU: real-time simulation using CUDA

Despite the increasing adoption of other imaging modalities, ultrasound guidance is widely used for surgical procedures and clinical imaging due to its low cost, non-invasiveness, and real-time visual feedback. Many ultrasound-guided procedures require extensive training and where possible training on simulations should be preferred over patients. Computational resources for existing approaches to ultrasound simulation are usually limited by real-time requirements. Unlike previous approaches we simulate freehand ultrasound images from CT data on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We build upon the method proposed by Wein et al. for estimating ultrasound reflection properties of tissue and modify it to a computationally more efficient form. In addition to previous approaches, we also estimate ultrasound absorption properties from CT data. Using NVIDIA's "Compute Unified Device Architecture" (CUDA), we provide a physically plausible simulation of ultrasound reflection, shadowing artifacts, speckle noise and radial blurring. The same algorithm can be used for simulating either linear or radial imaging, and all parameters of the simulated probe are interactively configurable at runtime, including ultrasound frequency and intensity as well as field geometry. With current hardware we are able to achieve an image width of up to 1023 pixels from raw CT data in real-time, without any pre-processing and without any loss of information from the CT image other than from interpolation of the input data. Visual comparison to real ultrasound images indicates satisfactory results.
Pregnancy in high risk cardiac conditions

Heart disease is present in 0.5–1% of all pregnant women and is the biggest killer of pregnant women in the developed world (fig 1). Surprisingly, there have been no signs of decline in this incidence over the past two decades (fig 2). In the UK, all maternal deaths (during pregnancy and within the first post partum year) are recorded and examined in detail every 3 years. Of the maternal cardiac deaths reported for the 2003–5 triennium, more than half were due to coronary artery disease, puerperal cardiomyopathy and aortic dissection (table 1). 1 As in previous triennial reports, substandard care continues to be an important factor, and contributed to the woman’s death in more than a third of cases. Figure 1 Overall death rates per million maternities UK, 2003–05. AFE, amniotic fluid embolism; CNS, central nervous system; VTE, venous thromboembolism. Adapted with permission from Saving mothers’ lives: reviewing maternal deaths to make motherhood safer. 7th report of the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in the UK . London: Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 2007. Figure 2 Increase in maternal death from cardiac disease in the UK (deaths/1 000 000 maternities). View this table: Table 1 Major causes of maternal death from cardiac disease; UK 2003–2005. Adapted from: Saving mothers’ lives: reviewing maternal deaths to make motherhood safer. 7th report of the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in the UK. London: Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 2007. These conditions often present acutely and catastrophically in women with no known pre-existing disease. Rapid recognition of the acute presentation and appropriate management will improve their chances of survival. In addition, identifying risk factors for these conditions should flag up at risk patients for targeted ante- and post-natal care. Modifiable risk factors such as obesity and smoking appear particularly important for this group of women and are a growing public health problem. In addition, social deprivation and immigrant status are significant risk factors for maternal deaths of all causes, including heart disease, underscoring the need to improve access to health care for these vulnerable groups. ### Death from ischaemic heart disease Maternal deaths from acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and ischaemic …
Phagocytosis as a Biomarker of Immunotoxicity in Wildlife Species Exposed to Environmental Xenobiotics1

Synopsis In the present paper, we are reviewing experimental evidence demonstrating that phagocytic cells, such as macrophages, may be used as a biomarker of immunotoxicity in wildlife studies. We will first present data obtained after exposure in vitro with selected chemicals showing the comparative sensitivity of phagocytic cells from different species. These results demonstrate that, at least for metals, each species produce a similar shaped dose-response curve, although considerate interspecies sensitivity is evident. These results also demonstrate the sensitivity of the phagocytic activity, suggesting indeed that this function could be used to monitor exposure to chemicals. The similar shaped dose-response curves imply that mechanisms of action may also be similar. Furthermore, based on the relative speices sensitivity, sentinel species could be selected for field monitoring. Such an approach may also be useful to establish correction factors required to extrapolate results between species. This sensitivity of the phagocytic activity of macrophages will be further under controlled conditions in laboratory animal models. Finally, the reliability of this approach will be demonstrated using case studies with wildlife species.
Trading Inequality? Insights from the Two Globalizations in Latin America

Trade flows among countries have increased dramatically during the last globalization episode creating new winners and losers between and within countries. This paper revisits the contested topic of the impact of globalization on within-country inequality in Latin America from a historical perspective. By comparing the two globalization waves (1870-1914, 1970-present) we look at the link between globalization and inequality.
Design and Implementation of a High Efficiency, Low Component Voltage Stress, Single-Switch High Step-Up Voltage Converter for Vehicular Green Energy Systems

In this study, a novel, non-isolated, cascade-type, single-switch, high step-up DC/DC converter was developed for green energy systems. An integrated coupled inductor and voltage lift circuit were applied to simplify the converter structure and satisfy the requirements of high efficiency and high voltage gain ratios. In addition, the proposed structure is controllable with a single switch, which effectively reduces the circuit cost and simplifies the control circuit. With the leakage inductor energy recovery function and active voltage clamp characteristics being present, the circuit yields optimizable conversion efficiency and low component voltage stress. After the operating principles of the proposed structure and characteristics of a steady-state circuit were analyzed, a converter prototype with 450 W, 40 V of input voltage, 400 V of output voltage, and 95% operating efficiency was fabricated. The Renesas MCU RX62T was employed to control the circuits. Experimental results were analyzed to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system.
A MDA Approach to Model & Implement Transformations

Only in software and in linguistics a model has the same nature as the thing it models. In software at least, this opens the possibility to automatically derive software from its model. This property is well known from any compiler writer (and others), but it was recently be made quite popular with an OMG initiative called the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The model transformations allowing the engineers to more or less automatically go from platform-independent models (PIM) to platform-specific models (PSM) are increasingly seen as vital assets that must be managed with sound software engineering principles. We believe that transformations should be first-class models in the MDA world; we propose to adopt the object-oriented approach and to leverage the expressive power of UML as a metamodel defining the transformation language.
University_Of_Sheffield: Two Approaches to Semantic Text Similarity

This paper describes the University of Sheffield's submission to SemEval-2012 Task 6: Semantic Text Similarity. Two approaches were developed. The first is an unsupervised technique based on the widely used vector space model and information from WordNet. The second method relies on supervised machine learning and represents each sentence as a set of n-grams. This approach also makes use of information from WordNet. Results from the formal evaluation show that both approaches are useful for determining the similarity in meaning between pairs of sentences with the best performance being obtained by the supervised approach. Incorporating information from WordNet also improves performance for both approaches.
Fast Computation of 2-Dimensional Depth Contours

"One person's noise is another person's signal. '' For many applications, including the detection of credit card frauds and the monitoring of criminal activities in electronic commerce, an important knowledge discovery problem is the detection of exceptional/outlying events. In computational statistics, a depth-based approach detects outlying data points in a 2-D dataset by, based on some definition of depth, organizing the data points in layers, with the expectation that shallow layers are more likely to contain outlying points than are the deep layers. One robust notion of depth, called depth contours, was introduced by Tukey. ISODEPTH, developed by Ruts and Rousseeuw, is an algorithm that computes 2-D depth contours. In this paper, we give a fast algorithm, FDC, which computes the first k 2-D depth contours by restricting the computation to a small selected subset of data points, instead of examining all data points. Consequently, FDC scales up much better than ISODEPTH. Also, while ISODEPTH relies on the non-existence of collinear points, FDC is robust against collinear points.
Temporal Correlations between Spam and Phishing Websites

To implement a phishing scam, attackers must create a fake website and send spam to attract visitors. To date, empirical research into phishing's impact has studied either the spam being sent or the website lifetimes. In this paper, we examine both phishing websites and the associated spam to gauge the overall effectiveness of phishing attack and defense. We find that while the bulk of spam is sent around the time of the website's first appearance, spam continues to be sent for many longer lived websites until they are finally removed. We also find that attackers using 'fast-flux' techniques are savvier than ordinary attackers, sending out more spam prior to detection and stopping faster once the websites are taken down. Finally, we conclude that fast-flux attacks pose the greatest phishing threat since they account for 68% of spam despite comprising just 3% of hosts.
The Genomic Grade Index predicts postoperative clinical outcome in patients with soft-tissue sarcoma

Background Soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs) are a group of rare, heterogeneous, and aggressive tumors, with high metastatic risk and relatively few efficient systemic therapies. We hypothesized that the Genomic Grade Index (GGI), a 108-gene signature previously developed in early-stage breast cancer, might improve the prognostic assessment of patients with early-stage STS. Patients and methods We collected gene expression and clinicopathological data of 678 operated STS, and searched for correlations between the GGI-based classification and clinicopathological variables, including the metastasis-free survival (MFS). Results Based on GGI, 275 samples (41%) were classified as 'GGI-low' and 403 (59%) as 'GGI-high'. The 'GGI-high' class was more associated with poor-prognosis features than the 'GGI-low' class: pathological grade 3 (P = 9.50E-11), undifferentiated sarcomas and leiomyosarcomas (P < 1.00E-06), location in extremities (P < 1.00E-06), and complex genetic profile (P = 2.1E-20). The 5-year MFS was 53% (95%CI 47-59) in the 'GGI-high' class versus 78% (95%CI 72-85) in the 'GGI-low' class (P = 3.02E-11), with a corresponding hazard ratio for metastatic relapse equal to 2.92 (95%CI 2.10-4.07; P = 2.23E-10). In multivariate analysis, the GGI-based classification remained significant, whereas the pathological grade did not. In fact, the GGI-based classification stratified the patients with pathological grades 1 and 2 and those with pathological grade 3 in two classes with different 5-year MFS. Comparison of the GGI and CINSARC multigene signatures revealed similar correlations with clinicopathological variables, which were, however, stronger with GGI than with CINSARC, a strong concordance (71%) in terms of low-risk or high-risk classifications, and independent prognostic value for MFS in multivariate analysis, suggesting complementary prognostic information. Conclusion GGI refines the prediction of MFS in operated STS and might improve the tailoring of adjuvant chemotherapy. Further clinical validation is warranted in larger retrospective, then prospective series, as well as the functional validation of relevant genes that could provide new therapeutic targets.
Opleiding ICT in Business On the Impact of Data Set Size in Transfer Learning using Deep Neural Networks Name :

In this thesis we study the effect of target set size on transfer learning in deep learning convolutional neural networks. This is an important problem as labelling is a costly task, or for new or specific classes the number of labelled instances available may simply be too small. We first discuss feedforward neural networks and convolutional networks to provide some context. In the main section of the thesis we present results for a series of experiments where we either train on a target of classes from scratch, retrain all layers, or subsequently lock more layers in the network, for the Tiny-ImageNet and MiniPlaces2 data sets. Our findings indicate that for smaller target data sets freezing the weights for the initial layers of the network give better results on the target set classes. We present a simple and easy to implement training heuristic based on these findings, and provide interesting directions for future research.
Speaker normalization and pronunciation variant modeling: helpful methods for improving recognition of fast speech

The presented paper addresses the problem of creating hidden Markov models for fast speech. The major issues discussed are robust parameter estimation and reducing within-model variations. Regarding the first issue, the use of the maximum a posteriori parameter estimation is discussed. To reduce within-model variations, a maximum likelihood based vocal tract length normalization procedure and a statistical approach to model pronunciation variants are applied. Experiments with a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system were carried out on the German spontaneous scheduling task (Verbmobil) to prove the effectiveness of the investigated methods. The results show that a combination of pronunciation variant modeling and vocal tract length normalization is most effective. On fast speech, a relative improvement of 16.3% compared to the baseline models was achieved. Pronunciation variant modeling combined with the maximum a posteriori reestimation proved to be the second best method resulting in a 14.9% relative improvement. In addition, this combination does not cause any additional computational load during recognition.
Blood-brain barrier disruptions in the acute phase of ischemic stroke in human patients

Introduction: In acute ischemic stroke, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a valuable tool for diagnosis, treatment decisions, and assessment of outcome. Baseline and early follow-up MRI examinations can help us predict and understand tissue fate. Until now, blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability changes after stroke have been poorly studied in humans. However, they might be a risk factor for worse outcome and hemorrhagic transformation, especially after thrombolytic therapy. Methods: Acute stroke patients received an MRI examination with contrast agent based perfusion imaging within 24 h after stroke onset, as well as on day 2. In a subgroup of patients, repetitive MRI examinations every two hours were performed on the first day. Volumes of hypoperfusion were assessed automatically with three different software packages and compared to a rater-based approach. Development of lesion size and vessel status was assessed in thrombolysed patients who received follow-up MRI examinations after therapy. On fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images, the natural signal-intensity-time course of the lesion within the first 24 h of stroke onset was determined relative to the contralateral side. Furthermore, the hyperintense acute reperfusion marker (HARM) was evaluated as a sign for BBB disturbances. Results: We found that vessel recanalization up until 24 h after treatment is still associated with a good clinical outcome and only moderate lesion growth. We also found that volumes of hypoperfused tissue were substantially overestimated when using an automated approach. We were able to show, that the natural time course of relative signal intensities on FLAIR images is significantly influenced by the presence of HARM, since HARM seems to go along with markedly increased contrast agent enhancement in the brain parenchyma. In a proportion of stroke patients, HARM was seen as early as a few hours after stroke onset. Conclusions: MRI is a suitable and highly sensitive tool to monitor tissue fate in the acute phase of cerebral ischemia. We showed that HARM as a marker for blood-brain barrier permeability changes is a frequent and early occurring phenomenon. It might be associated with worse clinical outcome and is therefore worth monitoring. Ostwaldt: Blood-brain barrier disruption in acute ischemic stroke 3