Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does the fat cell listen to what the heart tells in human obesity? Role of atrial natriuretic peptide in fat mobilization and metabolic health in human obesity

Introduction: In the past decade, atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) has been identified as an stimulator of lipolysis. However, in obese population, ANP-mediated lipolysis is blunted, thereby limiting the clinical effectiveness of training programs that aim to stimulate weight loss to prevent the development of secondary comorbidities (diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer). However, recently, it has been shown that a 4-month endurance training program restored ANP-mediated lipolysis in the subcutaneous adipose tissue (SCAT) of overweight subjects. We hypothesized that such a training program also enhances ANP-induced lipolysis in the SCAT of obese subjects. Material & methods: Thirty middle-aged men (10 lean, obese insulin-sensitive and obese insulinresistant) were recruited. Prior and after 4-months combined training (3 days/wk, endurance and strength at 65% VO2max), subjects were screened (glucose tolerance test, DEXA scan and maximal endurance test) to assess their cardiometabolic health and physical fitness. ANP-mediated lipid mobilization in the SCAT was determined at rest, during exercise and recovery by in situ microdialysis. Results: Prior exercise intervention, adipose tissue mass was significantly higher in obese subjects compared to lean controls, whereas lean tissue mass was equal. No baseline differences regarding physical fitness were present. At this moment, 11 obese subjects (4 insulin-sensitive and 7 insulinresistant) have completed the training protocol. Overall, combined training significantly lowered adipose tissue mass in obese subjects, whereas lean tissue mass remained unchanged. Additionally, workload and CO2 elimination significantly increased, indicating an improved aerobic capacity. Discussion & Conclusion: Combined training improved physical fitness and cardiometabolic health of obese subjects, thereby decreases the chance of secondary comorbidities. However, it remains uncertain if these improvements are related to an enhanced ANP-responsiveness because microdialysis samples are not yet analyzed. But so far, our findings are in line with the study done in overweighed persons, which enlighten that ANP could be responsible. However, this will be checked in the near future.
Projection-type integral 3D display using mirrors facing each other for a wide viewing angle with a downsized system

In this work, we aim to realize a wide viewing-angle and a space saving configuration in a projection-type integral 3D display composed of a projector and lens array. In the conventional method, for a wide viewing-angle, light rays should be incident on the lens array at a large incident angle. In order to achieve a large incident angle, projectors are installed diagonally behind the lens array. This requires a large space for projectors behind the display. We propose a projection method that realizes a wide viewing-angle using a space saving configuration in which one projector is installed behind the lens array. In the proposed configuration, two mirrors are arranged facing each other between the projector and the lens array. Light rays enter the lens array from the mirror image positions of the projector through multiple reflections between these two mirrors. The proposed method requires no projector other than the projector installed directly behind the lens array. In this way, wide viewing angle is achieved with a downsized system. First, the proposed configuration was simulated and its feasibility was evaluated. Second, based on the simulation results, the specifications of the proposed configuration were evaluated in the experiment. The actual display system was then prepared for the experiment. As a result of the simulation and experiment, a viewing-angle that requires a configuration employing three or more projectors was realized using a configuration employing one projector.
Hailstorm: Disaggregated Compute and Storage for Distributed LSM-based Databases

Distributed LSM-based databases face throughput and latency issues due to load imbalance across instances and interference from background tasks such as flushing, compaction, and data migration. Hailstorm addresses these problems by deploying the database storage engines over a distributed filesystem that disaggregates storage from processing, enabling storage pooling and compaction offloading. Hailstorm pools storage devices within a rack, allowing each storage engine to fully utilize the aggregate rack storage capacity and bandwidth. Storage pooling successfully handles load imbalance without the need for resharding. Hailstorm offloads compaction tasks to remote nodes, distributing their impact, and improving overall system throughput and response time. We show that Hailstorm achieves load balance in many MongoDB deployments with skewed workloads, improving the average throughput by 60%, while decreasing tail latency by as much as 5X. In workloads with range queries, Hailstorm provides up to 22X throughput improvements. Hailstorm also enables cost savings of 47-56% in OLTP workloads.
Accelerometer: Understanding Acceleration Opportunities for Data Center Overheads at Hyperscale

At global user population scale, important microservices in warehouse-scale data centers can grow to account for an enormous installed base of servers. With the end of Dennard scaling, successive server generations running these microservices exhibit diminishing performance returns. Hence, it is imperative to understand how important microservices spend their CPU cycles to determine acceleration opportunities across the global server fleet. To this end, we first undertake a comprehensive characterization of the top seven microservices that run on the compute-optimized data center fleet at Facebook. Our characterization reveals that microservices spend as few as 18% of CPU cycles executing core application logic (e.g., performing a key-value store); the remaining cycles are spent in common operations that are not core to the application logic (e.g., I/O processing, logging, and compression). Accelerating such common building blocks can greatly improve data center performance. Whereas developing specialized hardware acceleration for each building block might be beneficial, it becomes risky at scale if these accelerators do not yield expected gains due to performance bounds precipitated by offload-induced overheads. To identify such performance bounds early in the hardware design phase, we develop an analytical model, Accelerometer, for hardware acceleration that projects realistic speedup in microservices. We validate Accelerometer's utility in production using three retrospective case studies and demonstrate how it estimates the real speedup with ≤ 3.7% error. We then use Accelerometer to project gains from accelerating important common building blocks identified by our characterization.
HaRMony: Heterogeneous-Reliability Memory and QoS-Aware Energy Management on Virtualized Servers

The explosive growth of data increases the storage needs, especially within servers, making DRAM responsible for more than 40% of the total system power. Such a reality has made researchers focus on energy saving schemes that relax the pessimistic DRAM circuit parameters at the cost of potential faults. In an effort to limit the resultant risk of critical data disruption, new methods were introduced that split DRAM into domains with varying reliability and power. The benefits of such schemes may have been showcased on simulators but have neither been implemented on real systems with a complete software stack, nor have been combined with any energy-reliability OS management policies. In this paper, we are the first to implement and evaluate HaRMony, a heterogeneous-reliability memory framework, in conjunction with QoS-aware energy management policies on a server with a complete virtualization stack. HaRMony overcomes the practical restrictions stemming from default hardware specifications, which were neglected in prior works, by introducing a software-based memory interleaving scheme. Furthermore, we expose the capabilities of HaRMony to the QEMU-KVM hypervisor through two unique policies. The first policy enables the hypervisor to seek the most power efficient DRAM circuit parameters based on the server availability requested by the user. The second policy enables users to exploit the inherent application error-resiliency by allowing them to limit the error protection mechanisms and allocate data structures on variably-reliable memory domains. Our evaluation shows that HaRMony reduces the performance overhead incurred due to disabling hardware interleaving from 29.3% down to 1.1% and leads to 17.7% DRAM energy savings and 8.6% total system energy savings on average in case of native execution of 28 benchmarks on an ARMv8-based server. Finally, we demonstrate that our QoS-aware scaling governor integrated with QEMU-KVM can dynamically scale the DRAM parameters, while reducing the system energy by 8.4% and meeting the targeted QoS even under extreme temperatures.
On the use of machine learning for solving computational imaging problems

It has recently been recognized that compressed sensing, especially dictionaries and related methods, formally map to machine learning architectures, e.g. recurrent neural networks. This has led to rapid growth in algorithms and methods based on deep neural networks (but not only) for solving a variety of inverse and computational imaging problems. In this paper, we review these developments in the specific context of quantitative phase imaging and emphasizing the impact of object power spectral density and noise properties on the quality of the reconstructions.
FlatStore: An Efficient Log-Structured Key-Value Storage Engine for Persistent Memory

Emerging hardware like persistent memory (PM) and high-speed NICs are promising to build efficient key-value stores. However, we observe that the small-sized access pattern in key-value stores doesn't match with the persistence granularity in PMs, leaving the PM bandwidth underutilized. This paper proposes an efficient PM-based key-value storage engine named FlatStore. Specifically, it decouples the role of a KV store into a persistent log structure for efficient storage and a volatile index for fast indexing. Upon it, FlatStore further incorporates two techniques: 1) compacted log format to maximize the batching opportunity in the log; 2) pipelined horizontal batching to steal log entries from other cores when creating a batch, thus delivering low-latency and high-throughput performance. We implement FlatStore with the volatile index of both a hash table and Masstree. We deploy FlatStore on Optane DC Persistent Memory, and our experiments show that FlatStore achieves up to 35 Mops/s with a single server node, 2.5 - 6.3 times faster than existing systems.
STABILISING TRENDS OF OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY AMONG 5-14-YEAR-OLDS IN LIECHTENSTEIN BETWEEN 2004 AND 2012

Background: The worldwide trends in childhood obesity and associated health-related risks are a cause of concern. In view of this alarming tendency continuous monitoring and information on a wide age-range of children is important. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to observe national trends of childhood overweight (ow) and obesity (ob) among 5-14-year-olds in Liechtenstein over a 9-year period. Methods: The study is based on a series of 5 cross-sectional screening examinations conducted at two-year intervals from 2004 to 2012 and includes data of 3,711 children. Boys and girls are equally represented (50.1 % and 49.9 %). BMI was calculated on standardised measurements and classified by using the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) cut-offs. Results: Using IOTF reference, currently 16.6 % of pre-schoolers and school children in Liechtenstein are overweight (incl. obesity), i.e. approximately every 6th child is affected. Over the studied 9-year period, a non-significant decrease in the combined prevalence (owob) was observed in both boys and girls. Gender specific analysis showed that differences between boys and girls were rather weakly expressed, but seemed to increase during school age with a tendency of more overweight boys in secondary school. Conclusions: This study suggests an apparent levelling off in childhood overweight and obesity in Liechtenstein between 2004 and 2012 and corroborates similar findings from other countries.
New onset Sarcoidosis following treatment of Cushing's Disease

A diagnosis of Cushing’s Disease was made and the patient underwent an uncomplicated left sided transphenoidal hemi-hypophysectomy. The results of the initial biochemical, radiological and subsequent pathology investigations can be viewed in table 1. On postoperative day three the patient’s serum cortisol was < 30 nmol/l and therefore replacement hydrocortisone was commenced. Despite an initial tranquil postoperative convalescence the patient was frequently admitted and readmitted to hospital with a systemic illness of unclear aetiology.
Progressive use of medical therapies in type 2 diabetes

Korzyści wynikające z bardziej intensywnego leczenia hiperglikemii, nadciśnienia tetniczego, dyslipidemii i nadkrzepliwości u chorych na cukrzyce typu 2 są oczywiste. Wciąz nowe doniesienia i rozwoj badan klinicznych sprawiają, ze kryteria wyrownania metabolicznego stają sie coraz bardziej wymagające. Artykul ten zawiera przegląd metod leczenia skojarzonego, prowadzących do minimalizacji czynnikow ryzyka u chorych na cukrzyce typu 2. W ostatniej dekadzie nastąpily rewolucyjne zmiany dotyczące leczenia cukrzycy, spowodowane postepem w wielu dziedzinach. Wyniki 4 znaczących badan klinicznych [1–8] udowodnily hipoteze hiperglikemii, wskazując, ze optymalna glikemia u osob chorych na cukrzyce powinna byc tak niska, jak to mozliwe, bez nadmiernego ryzyka hipoglikemii i innych dzialan niepoządanych. Do 1995 roku insulina i pochodne sulfonylomocznika byly jedynymi lekami w Stanach Zjednoczonych, dopuszczonymi do stosowania w leczeniu cukrzycy. Nastepnie zaakceptowano analogi insulin, nowe pochodne sulfonylomocznika oraz 4 inne grupy lekow [9]. Towarzyszyly temu takze znaczne postepy technologiczne dotyczące monitorowania glikemii, ulatwiające prowadzenie samokontroli [10]. Wyniki badan klinicznych potwierdzily korzyści interwencji eliminujących czynniki ryzyka chorob sercowo-naczyniowych w leczeniu makroangiopatii — glownej przyczyny śmierci i niepelnosprawności chorych na cukrzyce [11, 12]. Zmiany systemu ubezpieczen zdrowotnych oraz federalnych i stanowych aktow prawnych przyczynily sie do poprawy finansowania lekow, zaopatrzenia medycznego i edukacji, co pozwolilo na obnizenie docelowych wartości glikemii, ciśnienia tetniczego i stezenia lipidow. Artykul ten opisuje praktyczne i konstruktywne wytyczne dotyczące opieki diabetologicznej. Cele kontroli glikemii i metody modyfikacji trybu zycia nie są tu przedmiotem dyskusji. Na początku zostaly omowione dostepne klasy lekow stosowanych w cukrzycy oraz sugerowane sposoby progresywnego leczenia hiperglikemii. Nastepnie przedstawiono poglądy na temat zwalczania czynnikow ryzyka chorob sercowo-naczyniowych z krotkim omowieniem lekow i ich zastosowania.
Distribution of Cortical Diffusion Tensor Imaging Changes in Multiple Sclerosis

Purpose Diffuse cortical damage in relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) is clinically relevant but cannot be directly assessed with conventional MRI. In this study, it was aimed to use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) techniques with optimized intrinsic eddy current compensation to quantify and characterize cortical mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA) changes in RRMS and to analyze the distribution of these changes across the cortex. Materials and Methods Three-Tesla MRI acquisition, mapping of the MD providing information about the integrity of microstructural barriers and of the FA reflecting axonal density and surface-based analysis with Freesurfer were performed for 24 RRMS patients and 25 control subjects. Results Across the whole cortex, MD was increased in patients (p < 0.001), while surface-based analysis revealed focal cortical FA decreases. MD and FA changes were distributed inhomogeneously across the cortex, the MD increase being more widespread than the FA decrease. Cortical MD correlated with the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS, r = 0.38, p = 0.03). Conclusion Damage of microstructural barriers occurs inhomogeneously across the cortex in RRMS and might be spatially more widespread than axonal degeneration. The results and, in particular, the correlation with the clinical status indicate that DTI might be a promising technique for the monitoring of cortical damage under treatment in larger clinical studies.
Detecting Epileptic Seizures in EEG Signals with Complementary Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and Extreme Gradient Boosting

Epilepsy is a common nervous system disease that is characterized by recurrent seizures. An electroencephalogram (EEG) records neural activity, and it is commonly used for the diagnosis of epilepsy. To achieve accurate detection of epileptic seizures, an automatic detection approach of epileptic seizures, integrating complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), named CEEMD-XGBoost, is proposed. Firstly, the decomposition method, CEEMD, which is capable of effectively reducing the influence of mode mixing and end effects, was utilized to divide raw EEG signals into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and residues. Secondly, the multi-domain features were extracted from raw signals and the decomposed components, and they were further selected according to the importance scores of the extracted features. Finally, XGBoost was applied to develop the epileptic seizure detection model. Experiments were conducted on two benchmark epilepsy EEG datasets, named the Bonn dataset and the CHB-MIT (Children’s Hospital Boston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) dataset, to evaluate the performance of our proposed CEEMD-XGBoost. The extensive experimental results indicated that, compared with some previous EEG classification models, CEEMD-XGBoost can significantly enhance the detection performance of epileptic seizures in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.
Primary hyperparathyroidism : challenges and pitfalls in management

In patients with sporadic PHPT, the rate of persistence after initial PTx is 7% and that of recurrence none. In the case of persistent PHPT, the sensitivity of the widely used, non-invasive Tc99m-MIBI-SPECT imaging technique is decreased and is significantly lower than that of the invasive technique of selective venous sampling for PTH. Chronic excess of PTH has a catabolic effect on bone, leading to mineral depletion of bone. Patients with pre-operative radiological signs of severe PTH-associated bone disease are at risk of developing hungry bone syndrome after surgery, which may be prevented by pre-operative treatment with bisphosphonates and 1,25(OH)2D. PTH inhibits sclerostin production and stimulates FGF23 production, presumably to counterbalance its own actions on bone and on 1,25(OH)2D, resulting in novel feedback loops. In contrast to sporadic PHPT, recurrent PHPT does occur in patients with parathyroid carcinoma. In these patients, downregulation of CASR, HRPT2/CDC73 mutations and global loss of parafibromin are strong negative determinants of the disease-free survival and overall survival. Recent progresses in surgical and medical treatment of patients with parathyroid carcinoma have made it possible to secure longer survival, even in patients with tumors demonstrating 2 of the 3 identified molecular negative prognostic factors.
EPO: An Optimization technique for Urban Traffic Management While Limiting the Pollution using WSN

In the world, the vehicular traffic is endlessly expanding all over the place and at the point of intersection can cause terrible traffic congestion. Today, the vast majority of the traffic lights is fixed green light system; therefore, it is resolved without considering the incidence of vehicles emergency. The vehicles of emergency like fire trucks and ambulances are need to reach their destinations at the time. Many people face danger situation when they spent lot of time in traffic. To resolve the above mentioned problem, this paper proposed an optimization technique (Emperor Penguin Optimizer) for urban traffic organisation while limiting the pollution using wireless sensor network. At first, the basic parameters are explained like headway, throughput, density, flow, volume, and waiting time. After that, find the traffic pollutions and calculate the emergency vehicle based on the priority. Lastly, based on the above conditions, the traffic light will be displayed. The proposed work will be evaluated by using MATLAB in terms of latency (32 s), buffer (30 KB/s/vehicle), packet delivery ratio (99%), delay (0.7 s), overhead (20%), packet loss ratio (1%), throughput (99%), and time. Proposed work can also be compared with other recent techniques for the research evaluation.
A new range‐free PCA‐based localization algorithm in wireless sensor networks

Range‐free localization algorithms in wireless sensor networks have been an interesting field for researchers over the past few years. The combining of different requirements such as storage space, computational capacities, communication capabilities, and power efficiency is a challenging aspect of developing a localization algorithm. In this paper, a new range‐free localization algorithm, called PCAL, is proposed using soft computing techniques. The proposed method utilizes hop‐count distances as the data to train and build a neural network. Before feeding the data into the neural network for the purpose of training, the dimensionality of data is reduced by principal component analysis algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using simulation. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance in contrast to other algorithms based on storage space, communication overhead, and localization accuracy. Furthermore, the effect of various parameters on the PCAL algorithm is studied.
M5.3 { Final Evaluation

This document presents the evaluation results from the CLUBS project. We describe the design of the evaluation experiment that allows us to compare the di(cid:11)erent systems that were developed. After presenting the outcomes (e.g., inter-annotator agreement) from a pilot experiment that was conducted before the (cid:12)nal user evaluation, we give a detailed report about the di(cid:11)erent systems and their single evaluation results. The system that makes use of translated metadata performs best.