Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Form-wound stator winding for high-speed induction motors

Random-wound stator windings of high-speed induction motors (HSIM) have serious problems with eddy-current losses because their circular copper wires are randomly distributed. As a result, the differences in the total electromotive forces induced in the parallel conductors cause high additional losses in random-wound windings. Moreover, the eddy-current losses are underestimated during design stage due to difficulties of modeling eddy-current effect in the random-wound windings. A form-wound stator winding is an alternative option to reduce those losses. A roughly designed model of form-wound winding is presented based on the original random-wound stator windings of HSIM. Time-discretized finite-element analysis (FEA) is used to model losses in a 300 kW HSIM with random and form-wound stator windings. Those losses are used as the input data for the temperature rise analysis to check temperature rise constraints of the designed machine. Possibilities using form-wound windings for HSIM are evaluated from the losses and temperature rise analysis.
An empirical study of patients' expectations and satisfactions in Egyptian hospitals.

PURPOSE This paper seeks to investigate how patients perceive service quality in Egypt's public and private hospitals. The paper also tests the SERVQUAL dimensions in hospitals within an Arab, non-Western context. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The authors used a cross-sectional questionnaire survey, performed in 2005. A sample of 332 patients from eight hospitals in Egypt participated in the study. FINDINGS The results highlighted a three-factor solution for the SERVQUAL instrument with 67 per cent of variance explained. This result does not support the five-components original SERVQUAL. A discriminant function was estimated for patients who selected public hospitals and those who selected private hospitals. The model was found to be significant in explaining patients' choice of the type of hospital. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS The use of quantitative methods alone is valuable in establishing relationships between variables, but is considered weak when attempting to identify the reasons for those relationships. Patients may have a complex set of important beliefs that cannot be captured in the questionnaire. Therefore, using qualitative research along quantitative methods in future studies may enhance the findings of this study. ORIGINALITY/VALUE This article will be of interest to both public and private hospitals wishing to determine what patients expect from the quality of service provided to them.
Prevalence of Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans in Sudanese patients with aggressive periodontitis: a case-control study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans is considered a possible etiological agent for aggressive periodontitis. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of the JP2 clone and non-JP2 genotypes of A. actinomycetemcomitans in the subgingival plaque of patients with aggressive periodontitis and controls among Sudanese high-school students. MATERIAL AND METHODS In a previous study we examined a large representative sample of students attending high schools in Khartoum, Sudan. In this population, 17 patients with aggressive periodontitis and 17 controls (14-19 years of age) consented to participate in the present study. The subjects underwent a clinical periodontal examination, and subgingival dental plaque samples were collected using paper points. The presence of the A. actinomycetemcomitans JP2 clone and non-JP2 genotypes were assessed using loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and the PCR. RESULTS The JP2 clone of A. actinomycetemcomitans was not detected in the subgingival plaque of either the cases or the controls. Non-JP2 types of A. actinomycetemcomitans were detected in the subgingival plaque of 12 (70.6%) patients with aggressive periodontitis and from only one (5.9%) control subject, showing a significantly higher frequency of detection in cases than in controls (p = 0.0001). The odds ratio for the detection of A. actinomycetemcomitans in the subgingival plaque of the patients with aggressive periodontitis was 38.4 (95% confidence interval: 4.0-373.0; p = 0.002). The PCR and LAMP methods showed identical results pertaining to the identification of non-JP2 types of A. actinomycetemcomitans. CONCLUSIONS The JP2 clone of A. actinomycetemcomitans was not detected in the subgingival plaque of high school subjects in Sudan. The detection of non-JP2 types of A. actinomycetemcomitans may be a useful marker of increased risk for development of aggressive periodontitis in young subjects.
Glia unglued: How signals from the extracellular matrix regulate the development of myelinating glia

The health and function of the nervous system relies on glial cells that ensheath neuronal axons with a specialized plasma membrane termed myelin. The molecular mechanisms by which glial cells target and enwrap axons with myelin are only beginning to be elucidated, yet several studies have implicated extracellular matrix proteins and their receptors as being important extrinsic regulators. This review provides an overview of the extracellular matrix proteins and their receptors that regulate multiple steps in the cellular development of Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes, the myelinating glia of the PNS and CNS, respectively, as well as in the construction and maintenance of the myelin sheath itself. The first part describes the relevant cellular events that are influenced by particular extracellular matrix proteins and receptors, including laminins, collagens, integrins, and dystroglycan. The second part describes the signaling pathways and effector molecules that have been demonstrated to be downstream of Schwann cell and oligodendroglial extracellular matrix receptors, including FAK, small Rho GTPases, ILK, and the PI3K/Akt pathway, and the roles that have been ascribed to these signaling mediators. Throughout, we emphasize the concept of extracellular matrix proteins as environmental sensors that act to integrate, or match, cellular responses, in particular to those downstream of growth factors, to appropriate matrix attachment. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 71: 924‐955, 2011
Two Distinct Stages in the Transition from Naive CD4 T Cells to Effectors, Early Antigen-Dependent and Late Cytokine-Driven Expansion and Differentiation1

Efficient peptide presentation by professional APC to naive and effector CD4 T cells in vitro is limited to the first 1–2 days of culture, but is nonetheless optimum for effector expansion and cytokine production. In fact, prolonging Ag presentation leads to high levels of T cell death, decreased effector expansion, and decreased cytokine production by recovered effectors. Despite the absence of Ag presentation beyond day 2, T cell division continues at a constant rate throughout the 4-day culture. The Ag-independent later stage depends on the presence of IL-2, and we conclude optimum effector generation depends on an initial 2 days of TCR stimulation followed by an additional 2 days of Ag-independent, cytokine driven T cell expansion and differentiation.
Diffusion-weighted MRI determined cerebral embolic infarction following transcatheter aortic valve implantation: assessment of predictive risk factors and the relationship to subsequent health status

Background ‘Silent’ cerebral infarction and stroke are complications of transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). Objective To assess the occurrence of cerebral infarction, identify predictive risk factors and examine the impact on patient health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Methods Cerebral diffusion weighted MRI of 31 patients with aortic stenosis undergoing CoreValve TAVI was carried out. HRQoL was assessed at baseline and at 30 days by SF-12v2 and EQ5D questionnaires. Results New cerebral infarcts occurred in 24/31 patients (77%) and stroke in 2 (6%). Stroke was associated with a greater number and volume of cerebral infarcts. Age (r=0.37, p=0.042), severity of atheroma (arch and descending aorta; r=0.91, p<0.001, r=0.69, p=0.001, respectively) and catheterisation time (r=0.45, p=0.02) were predictors of the number of new cerebral infarcts. HRQoL improved overall: SF-12v2 physical component summary increased significantly (32.4±6.2 vs 36.5±7.2; p=0.03) with no significant change in mental component summary (43.5±11.7 vs 43.1±14.3; p=0.85). The EQ5D score and Visual Analogue Scale showed no significant change (0.56±0.26 vs 0.59±0.31; p=0.70, and 54.2±19 vs 58.2±24; p=0.43). Conclusion Multiple small cerebral infarcts occurred in 77% of patients with TAVI. The majority of infarcts were ‘silent’ with clinical stroke being associated with a both higher infarct number and volume. Increased age and the severity of aortic arch atheroma were independent risk factors for the development of new cerebral infarcts. Overall HRQoL improved and there was no association between the number of new cerebral infarcts and altered health status.
Is altropane SPECT more sensitive to fluoroDOPA PET for detecting early Parkinson's disease?

BACKGROUND Positron emission tomography (PET) cameras are expensive and scarce, and the tests are non-reimbursable. A less costly and more available test such as a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) may be helpful in the diagnosis of early or atypical Parkinson's disease (PD) if its sensitivity is comparable to a PET scan. Altropane is an iodinated form of the N-allyl analog of WIN 35,428 which acts as a dopamine transport inhibitor. When radiolabeled with the gamma emitting isotope [123I], altropane serves as a SPECT ligand with high affinity and selectivity for the dopamine transporter. It is a good marker for dopamine neurons and is useful in detecting PD. MATERIAL AND METHODS We describe 2 patients with typical, early PD and their [123I]-altropane SPECT and [18F]-6-flouroDOPA PET scan results which were performed within a three-month interval. PET studies were performed using a PC-4096 scanner (Scanditronix AB, Sweden) with 15 axial slices and resolution of 6 mm FWHM. The SPECT acquisitions were performed on a MultiSPECT gamma camera (Siemens, Hoffman Estates, IL) equipped with fan-beam collimators with an intrinsic resolution of 4.6 FWHM (for Case 1) and a DSI Ceraspect camera with an annular crystal, with resolution of approximately 6.4 mm FWHM (for Case 2). RESULTS Both patients, aged 54 and 38 years, had a one-year history of intermittent right hand tremor with right arm rigidity and hypokinesia and bradykinesia on fine finger movements. A significant and sustained improvement of their parkinsonian symptoms was noted using a dopamine agonist. SPECT and PET scans showed non-diagnostic fluoroDOPA PET scans with clear unilateral striatal reduction of tracer uptake contralateral to their parkinsonian side on altropane SPECT scans. CONCLUSIONS Altropane SPECT may be an accessible and sensitive imaging modality for detecting early PD. Further and more controlled studies are needed to define its potential role in detecting presymptomatic, early and atypical PD cases.
Pharmacokinetics, Safety, and Tolerability Following Single and Multiple Doses of Pibrentasvir in a First‐in‐Human Study

This first‐in‐human dose‐ascending study investigated pharmacokinetics, safety, and tolerability of pibrentasvir following single and multiple doses in healthy volunteers. Additionally, the effects of food and ritonavir on pibrentasvir were assessed in a crossover study design. The starting dose of pibrentasvir was selected based on the no‐observed‐adverse‐effect‐level exposure from preclinical studies. Dose escalations of subsequent cohorts were dependent on reviews of the safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetic data from previous dose cohorts. Pibrentasvir exposures increased in a greater than dose‐proportional manner across the 1.5‐ to 120‐mg dose range and became linear across the 120‐ to 600‐mg dose range. Following multiple dosing, pibrentasvir steady state was attained by day 5 with an accumulation ratio of 25% to 35%. Pibrentasvir harmonic mean terminal half‐life ranged from 20 to 22 hours. Food had minimal effect (<14%) on pibrentasvir bioavailability, but ritonavir increased pibrentasvir peak concentration and area under the concentration‐time curve by 60% and 89%, respectively. All adverse events were assessed by the investigator as mild, and no clinically significant vital signs, electrocardiogram, or clinical laboratory values were observed. The pharmacokinetic results from this study support once‐daily dosing and administration of pibrentasvir without regard to food. A maximum tolerated dose was not attained in the single‐ and multiple‐ascending‐dose assessments for pibrentasvir.
Atrous Faster R-CNN for Small Scale Object Detection

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks based object detection has made significant progress recent years. However, detecting small scale objects is still a challenging task. This paper addresses the problem and proposes a unified deep neural network building upon the prominent Faster R-CNN framework. This paper has two main contributions. Firstly, an Atrous Region Proposal Network (ARPN) is proposed to explore object contexts at multiple scales by sliding a set of atrous filters with increasing dilation rates over the last convolutional feature map. Secondly, to enrich the representations of small scale image regions, this paper incorporates atrous convolution into Fast R-CNN and proposes a Dense Fast R-CNN (DFRCN), that improves the resolution of the ROI-pooled convolutional feature maps without increasing the number of parameters. In combination of the two, this paper proposes a unified network termed as Atrous Faster R-CNN. On PASCAL object detection challenge dataset, our method achieves superior performance to the state of the arts, especially for small scale objects.
Regularon development governing linguistic attention classrooms for school children of foreign nationality

Our interest in this paper is to analyze the regulatory impulse that lies behind the emergence of "special classes" to teach the official language of schooling to those new students called immigrants who arrive at Spanish schools. The question we want to answer is: what are the regional governments respond by implementing “special classes" for linguistic attention to students of foreign nationality? After a detailed description of the rules governing these classrooms in each Spanish autonomous community and see the similarities and differences, we try to identify if there is a gap between those rules and the actual practice at school. However, our response aims to go beyond description. Once the provisional nature of some of the rules has been observed, we will reflect on whether those classrooms have been designed for integration or not. Finally, we will consider if their achievements may also be developing some kind of exclusion and/or segregation.
First patient with trisomy 21 accompanied by an additional der(4)(:p11 → q11:) plus partial uniparental disomy 4p15‐16

We report on a rare additional numerical chromosomal aberration in a child with Down syndrome due to free trisomy 21. The karyotype showed 48,XY,+21,+mar after GTG banding, with the marker present in 80% of cells. The supernumerary marker chromosome (SMC) was as small as approximately one‐third of 18p, and with the recently developed centromere‐specific multi‐color fluorescence in situ hybridization (cenM‐FISH) technique, it was shown that the SMC was a derivative chromosome 4. The SMC was not specifically stained by arm‐specific probes for chromosome 4; thus, it has been described as der(4)(:p11 → q11:). Microsatellite analysis resulted in a partial maternal uniparental isodisomy (UPD) for chromosome 4p15–16 and a maternal origin for two chromosomes 21. Until now only two similar cases have been described in the literature, but without clarifying the origin of the SMC and without looking for an additional UPD. This is the only reported case of a UPD 4p in a liveborn child. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A likelihood approach to estimating sensitivity and specificity for binocular data: application in ophthalmology

Binocular data typically arise in ophthalmology where pairs of eyes are evaluated, through some diagnostic procedure, for the presence of certain diseases or pathologies. Treating eyes as independent and adopting the usual approach in estimating the sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test ignores the correlation between eyes. This may consequently yield incorrect estimates, especially of the standard errors. The paper proposes a likelihood‐based method of accounting for the correlations between eyes and estimating sensitivity and specificity using a model for binocular or paired binary outcomes. Estimation of model parameters via maximum likelihood is outlined and approximate tests are provided. The efficiency of the estimates is assessed in a simulation study. An extension of the methodology to the case of several diagnostic tests, or the same test measured on several occasions, which arises in multi‐reader studies, is given. A further extension to the case of multiple diseases is outlined as well. Data from a study on diabetic retinopathy are analysed to illustrate the methodology. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
How Taxes Can Contribute to The Implementation of The Public Governance Strategy? – An Analysis for Eastern European Countries

Abstract The paper begins with a short literature review regarding the public governance concept in the EU approach and its methods for establishing a common way to manage different situations for all member states; we discovered that the problems they confront with have to do with good governance and qualitative public administration. In the second part, we developed an econometric model for three Eastern European countries and we found a strong correlation between the total revenues from taxes and social contributions and total gross debt in 2002-2014 period. We ended the paper by emphasizing the conclusions obtained.
Cognitive assessment of dyslexic students in higher education.

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that the phonological deficits that characterise dyslexia persist into adulthood. There is a growing number of dyslexic students in higher education for whom sensitive diagnostic tests of their reading and reading related difficulties are required. AIMS The main aim of this study was to compare the cognitive skills of dyslexic students with those of their non-dyslexic peers, and to ascertain the impact of cognitive difficulties on their study skills. A second aim was to produce guidelines for the assessment of dyslexia in higher education. SAMPLE The performance of 23 dyslexic students was compared with that of a comparison group of 50 students from the same university who did not report a history of reading difficulty. METHOD Participants completed standardised tests of IQ, reading, spelling and arithmetic and tests tapping phonological processing, verbal fluency and speed of processing. Their performance on a set of study-related tasks including proof reading and précis writing was also assessed and they completed the Brown ADD scales. RESULTS Although dyslexic students did not differ in general cognitive ability from controls, they had deficits in reading and reading related phonological processes. Discriminant function analyses indicated that dyslexia in adulthood can be confirmed with 95% accuracy using only four tests: spelling, nonword reading, digit span and writing speed. CONCLUSIONS The study highlighted the difficulties of dyslexic adults. The persisting difficulties of dyslexic students that affect their study skills need to be recognised by HE institutions so that appropriate support programmes can be put in place.
An eight‐month study of a population of verocytotoxigenic Escherichia coli (VTEC) in a Scottish cattle herd

Aims: Strains of Verocytotoxin‐producing Escherichia coli (VTEC) from Scottish beef cattle on the same farm were isolated during four visits over a period of eight months. Characteristics of these strains were examined to allow comparisons with strains of VTEC associated with human infection.
Mobile reminder system for furthering patient adherence utilizing commodity smartwatch and Android devices

Patients' non-adherence is a common problem that significantly reduces the effectiveness of treatments and increases mortality and healthcare costs. Forgetfulness is reported as a usual barrier to adherence. Electronic reminder systems consist an increasingly used type of intervention, which assists patients that are facing this problem. Important requirements regarding the design of such systems are multimodality, personalization and easy integration into the patient's daily life. The goal of this work is to present a multimodal electronic reminder system that supports the use of smart devices and utilizes the recently introduced Pebble smartwatch. The system employs cloud technology and also allows for other types of users with a supportive role in the patient's health care, such as the patient's doctor and pharmacist. Patient compliance is measured automatically with the method of self-reporting. The paper includes a brief evaluation of the user interface and some future research directions.
Dual Stimulation of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)-Specific CD4+- and CD8+-T-Cell Responses by a Chimeric Antigen Construct: Potential Therapeutic Vaccine for EBV-Positive Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

ABSTRACT Virus-associated malignancies are potential targets for immunotherapeutic vaccines aiming to stimulate T-cell responses against viral antigens expressed in tumor cells. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-associated nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a high-incidence tumor in southern China, expresses a limited set of EBV proteins, including the nuclear antigen EBNA1, an abundant source of HLA class II-restricted CD4+ T-cell epitopes, and the latent membrane protein LMP2, a source of subdominant CD8+ T-cell epitopes presented by HLA class I alleles common in the Chinese population. We used appropriately modified gene sequences from a Chinese EBV strain to generate a modified vaccinia virus Ankara recombinant, MVA-EL, expressing the CD4 epitope-rich C-terminal domain of EBNA1 fused to full-length LMP2. The endogenously expressed fusion protein EL is efficiently processed via the HLA class I pathway, and MVA-EL-infected dendritic cells selectively reactivate LMP2-specific CD8+ memory T-cell responses from immune donors in vitro. Surprisingly, endogenously expressed EL also directly accesses the HLA class II presentation pathway and, unlike endogenously expressed EBNA1 itself, efficiently reactivates CD4+ memory T-cell responses in vitro. This unscheduled access to the HLA class II pathway is coincident with EL-mediated redirection of the EBNA1 domain from its native nuclear location to dense cytoplasmic patches. Given its immunogenicity to both CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, MVA-EL has potential as a therapeutic vaccine in the context of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.