Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photo-realistic visual speech synthesis based on AAM features and an articulatory DBN model with constrained asynchrony

This paper presents a photo realistic visual speech synthesis method based on an audio visual articulatory dynamic Bayesian network model (AF_AVDBN) in which the maximum asynchronies between the articulatory features, such as lips, tongue and glottis/velum, can be controlled. Perceptual linear prediction (PLP) features from the audio speech and active appearance model (AAM) features from mouth images of the visual speech are adopted to train the AF_AVDBN model for continuous speech. An EM-based optimal visual feature learning algorithm is deduced given the input auditory speech and the trained AF_AVDBN parameters. Finally, photo realistic mouth images are synthesized from the learned AAM features. In the experiments, mouth animations are synthesized for 30 connected digit audio speech sentences. Objective evaluation results show that the learned visual features using AF_AVDBN track the real parameters much more closely than those from the audio visual state synchronous DBN model (SS_DBN, the DBN implementation of multi-stream Hidden Markov Model), as well the state asynchronous DBN model (SA_DBN). Subjective evaluation results show that by considering the asynchronies between articulatory features in the AF_AVDBN (as well between audio and visual states in the SA_DBN), the synchronization between the audio speech and mouth animations are well obtained. Moreover, since AF_AVDBN captures the dynamic movements of articulatory features and model the pronunciation process more precisely, the accuracy of the mouth animations from the AF_AVDBN is much higher than those from the SA_DBN and the SS_DBN models, very accurate, clear, and natural mouth animations can be obtained through the AF_AVDBN model and AAM features.
Cross‐reactivity of IgG anti‐DNA‐secreting B cells in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus

This study is the first to analyze the cross‐reactivity of in vivo activated B cells from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. A chamber ELIspot assay was used to determine whether lymphocytes secreting antibodies that bound to DNA or 2,4,6‐trinitrophenol (TNP)‐keyhole limpet‐hemocyanin (KLH) could simultaneously bind to the unrelated antigens actin or ovalbumin.
Aspergillus fumigatus antigens activate innate immune cells via toll‐like receptors 2 and 4

Invasive aspergillosis (IA) is a leading cause of mortality in haematological patients. Appropriate activation of the innate immune system is crucial for the successful clearance of IA. Therefore, we studied the Aspergillus fumigatus‐mediated activation of human granulocytes and monocyte‐derived immature dendritic cells (DCs), as well as murine bone marrow‐derived DCs (BMDCs) from wild type, toll‐like receptor (TLR)4‐deficient, TLR2 knockout, and TLR2/TLR4 double deficient mice. Aspergillus fumigatus antigens induced the activation and maturation of immature DCs as characterized by CD83 expression, upregulation of major histocompatibility complex and co‐stimulatory molecules. Moreover, fungal antigens enhanced the phagocytosis and production of interleukin (IL)‐8 in granulocytes. The release of IL‐12 by BMDCs in response to A. fumigatus antigens was dependent on the expression of TLR2, whereas the release of IL‐6 was dependent on the expression of functional TLR4 molecules. The protein precipitate of A. fumigatus supernatant provided strong stimulation of DCs and granulocytes, indicating that a factor secreted by A. fumigatus might activate innate immune cells. In conclusion, A. fumigatus antigens induced the activation of DCs and granulocytes. Our results indicated that this activation was mediated via TLR2 and TLR4. Future studies are needed to assess the clinical impact of these findings in patients at high risk for IA.
Ethyl t-butyl ether: review of reproductive and developmental toxicity.

Ethyl t-butyl ether (ETBE) is a motor fuel oxygenate used in reformulated gasoline. Knowledge of developmental and reproductive toxicity potential of ETBE is critical for making informed decisions about acceptance and regulations. This review discusses toxicology studies providing information about effects on reproduction and the conceptus. Seven GLP-compliant studies following widely accepted protocols have focused specifically on developmental and reproductive toxicity (DART) in rats and rabbits exposed to ETBE by gavage with doses up to 1,000 mg/kg body weight/day, the limit specified in standardized test guidelines. Other repeat-dose general toxicology studies have administered ETBE to rodents for up to 180 days, and included reproductive organ weights, histology, or other indications of reproductive system structure or function. DART potential of the main ETBE metabolite t-butyl alcohol and class-related MTBE has also been studied. More GLP-compliant studies exist for evaluating ETBE using well-established, currently recommended protocols than are available for many other chemicals used today. The database for determining ETBE DART potential is adequate, although not all study details are currently easily accessible for peer-review. ETBE does not appear to be selectively toxic to reproduction or embryofetal development in the absence of other manifestations of general toxicity. Studies using recommended methods for sample preservation and analysis have shown no targeted effect on the reproductive system. No embryofetal effects were observed in rabbits. Early postnatal rat pup deaths show no clear dose-response and have largely been attributed to total litter losses with accompanying evidence of maternal neglect or frank maternal morbidity. Birth Defects Res (Part B) 89:239–263, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Survey of Various Methods for Image Denoising

An Image is a worth, a thousand words & in this digital age, images are everywhere. Most of the digital images contain some form of noise. The purpose of denoising is to reconstruct the original image from its noisy observation as accurately as possible. The important property of a good image denoising model is that it should completely remove noise as far as possible. Estimation of the noise level in an image is a very important parameter to improve the efficiency of denoising. This article presents different approaches used so far by the researchers for the estimation of blind noise level using the statistical and averaging method and denoising of an image. The paper also contains problems in different approaches identified by the survey. Image denoising has a very rich history beginning from the mid-70s. Patch based image modeling has achieved a great success in low-level vision such as image denoising. In particular, the use of image nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior, which refers to the fact that a local patch often has many nonlocal similar patches to it across the image, has significantly enhanced the denoising performance. However, in most existing methods only the NSS of input degraded image is exploited, while how to utilize the NSS of clean natural images is still an open problem.
A high-protein, moderate-energy, regular cheesy snack is energetically compensated in human subjects

Snacking is often regarded as a cause of overweight. However, the main issue is to determine whether the consumption of snacks leads to an increase in energy intake or whether a compensation phenomenon exists and maintains daily energy intake at a constant level. The objective of the present study was to determine whether the repeated consumption of a high-protein, moderate-energy, cheesy snack given as a preload 1 h before a meal altered energy intake at the next meal and then throughout the day, and if this kind of snack was energetically compensated. Normal-weight women (n 27) were recruited for the study. All subjects were healthy non-smokers, aged 18–60 years. The snacks consisted of portions of cheese containing 22 g protein, with an energy value of 836 kJ. Two types of snack were compared, differing in terms of the type of milk proteins they contained: the first contained casein only (CAS), while the second contained a mixture of casein and whey proteins (WHEY+CAS; 2:1). The principal finding of the present study was that the ingestion of the two snacks 1 h before lunch led to energy compensation of 83·1 (sem 9·4) and 67·0 (sem 16·4) % for WHEY+CAS and CAS respectively, at lunch, and 121·6 (sem 36·5) and 142·1 (sem 29·7) % for WHEY+CAS and CAS respectively, regarding the whole-day energy intake. In conclusion, the repeated consumption of a high-protein, moderate-energy, regular cheesy snack should not promote overweight because energy intake appears to be regulated during subsequent meals on the same day.
Response, survival, and long-term toxicity after therapy with the radiolabeled somatostatin analogue [90Y-DOTA]-TOC in metastasized neuroendocrine cancers.

PURPOSE To investigate response, survival, and safety profile of the somatostatin-based radiopeptide (90)yttrium-labeled tetraazacyclododecane-tetraacetic acid modified Tyr-octreotide ([(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC) in neuroendocrine cancers. PATIENTS AND METHODS In a clinical phase II single-center open-label trial, patients with neuroendocrine cancers were treated with repeated cycles of [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC. Each cycle consisted of a single intravenous injection of 3.7GBq/m(2) body-surface [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC. Additional cycles were withheld in case of tumor progression and/or permanent toxicity. RESULTS Overall, 1,109 patients received 2,472 cycles of [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC (median, two; range, one to 10 cycles per patient). Of the 1,109 patients, 378 (34.1%) experienced morphologic response; 172 (15.5%), biochemical response; and 329 (29.7%), clinical response. During a median follow-up of 23 months, 491 patients (44.3%) died. Longer survival was correlated with each: morphologic (hazard ratio [HR], 0.46; 95% CI, 0.38 to 0.56; median survival, 44.7 v 18.3 months; P < .001), biochemical (HR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.59 to 0.96; 35.3 v 25.7 months; P = .023), and clinical response (HR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.56 to 0.82; 36.8 v 23.5 months; P < .001). Overall, 142 patients (12.8%) developed grade 3 to 4 transient hematologic toxicities, and 103 patients (9.2%) experienced grade 4 to 5 permanent renal toxicity. Multivariable regression revealed that tumoral uptake in the initial imaging study was predictive for overall survival (HR, 0.45; 95% CI, 0.29 to 0.69; P < .001), whereas the initial kidney uptake was predictive for severe renal toxicity (HR, 1.59; 95% CI, 1.17 to 2.17; P = .003). CONCLUSION This study documents the long-term outcome of [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC treatment in a large cohort. Response to [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC is associated with longer survival. Somatostatin receptor imaging is predictive for both survival after [(90)Y-DOTA]-TOC treatment and occurrence of renal toxicity.
Cellular energy status is indispensable for perillyl alcohol mediated abrogated membrane transport in Candida albicans

The prevalence of fungal infections and their resistance patterns in fungal isolates from large number of patients with impaired immunity still remains poorly monitored. In spite of significant advances being made in the improvement of antifungal drugs, only a limited number of antifungal drugs are currently available. The present study aimed to gain further mechanistic insights into the previously described anticandidal activity of natural monoterpenoid, perillyl alcohol (PA). We found that cellular transport across cell membrane was abrogated in presence of PA. This was demonstrated by dose and time dependent enhanced cellular leakage accompanied by inhibited sodium and potassium cellular transport. In addition, we found disrupted pH homeostasis which was depicted by enhanced extracellular pH. We further observed that mitochondrial energy status is highly integrated with the antifungal activity of PA. This was evident from inhibited propidium iodide (PI) uptake in presence of sodium azide and di-nitro phenol (DNP) which showed no fluorescence when treated with PA. Moreover, we observed that PA leads to disrupted mitochondrial membrane potential. Additional cell death hallmarks in response to PA such as nuclear fragmentation was also observed with 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) staining. Taken together, PA is a novel candidate that deserves further attention to be exploited as effective antifungal agent of pharmacological interest.
Robust Hand Gesture Recognition Using Machine Learning With Positive and Negative Samples

Human action understanding is one of the most attractive research areas in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on a subset of human action which is the gesture performed by hand motion. To track the trajectory of motion, we adopt efficient and robust object detection and tracking schemes, which used Randomized Forest and Online Appearance model. Multiple hand templates are leaned using positive and negative samples (P-N learning). According to robust hand tracking and trajectory enhancement, we recognize the gesture with the baseline SVM tool. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by experiments on the dataset of hand signed digit gestures.
The seminoma cell line TCam‐2 is sensitive to HDAC inhibitor depsipeptide but tolerates various other chemotherapeutic drugs and loss of NANOG expression

Seminomas and embryonal carcinomas (EC) are both type II germ cell tumor (GCT) entities and develop from the same precursor lesion (carcinoma‐in situ, CIS). However, they show significant differences in growth behavior, differentiation potential, and gene expression. Although ECs are prone to differentiate into all three germ layers and give rise to the non‐seminomatous GCT entities teratoma, choriocarcinoma, and yolk‐sac tumor, differentiation of seminomas to these entities is only rarely observed. This might reflect the ability of seminomas to actively inhibit differentiation processes evoked by environmental cues. Also, it is not known why CIS gives rise to seminoma in some patients and to non‐seminoma in the others. Here, we treated the seminoma‐like cell line TCam‐2 with the HDAC‐inhibitor Depsipeptide, the global demethylating agent 5‐aza‐2′‐deocycytidine, all‐trans retinoic acid and the monaminooxidase inhibitor Tranylcipromine and also used knock down approaches to reduce expression of the pluripotency marker NANOG and/or the inhibitor of primordial germ cell differentiation TFAP2C. We found that TCam‐2 cells induce apoptosis when treated with Depsipeptide (>10 nM) but are resistant to treatments with 5‐aza‐2′‐deocycytidine, all‐trans retinoic acid and Tranylcipromine, highlighting Depsi as a treatment option for seminomas. We show that TCam‐2 cells up‐regulate endoderm‐ and throphectoderm‐associated genes after down‐regulation of NANOG expression; however, morphologically no indications of differentiation could be found. Instead, we observed up‐regulation of OCT3/4 and SOX17 in TCam‐2‐NANOG knockdown and speculate that this compensates for the loss of the NANOG protein. Hence, NANOG is not a primary target gene responsible for the inhibition of differentiation in seminomas. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Ex vivo-expanded autologous bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells in human spinal cord injury/paraplegia: a pilot clinical study.

BACKGROUND AIMS Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a medically untreatable condition for which stem cells have created hope in the last few years. Earlier pre-clinical reports have shown that transplantation of bone marrow (BM) mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) in SCI-simulated models can produce encouraging results. In a clinical pilot study, we investigated the growth kinetics of BM MSC from SCI patients, their safety and functional improvement post-transplantation. METHODS Thirty patients with clinically complete SCI at cervical or thoracic levels were recruited and divided into two groups based on the duration of injury. Patients with <6 months of post-SCI were recruited into group 1 and patients with >6 months of post-SCI were included into group 2. Autologous BM was harvested from the iliac crest of SCI patients under local anesthesia and BM MSC were isolated and expanded ex vivo. BM MSC were tested for quality control, characterized for cell surface markers and transplanted back to the patient via lumbar puncture at a dose of 1 x 10(6) cells/kg body weight. RESULTS At the time of writing, three patients had completed 3 years of follow-up post-BM MSC administration, 10 patients 2 years follow-up and 10 patients 1 year follow-up. Five patients have been lost to follow-up. None of the patients have reported any adverse events associated with BM MSC transplantation. CONCLUSIONS The results indicate that our protocol is safe with no serious adverse events following transplantation in SCI patients. The number of patients recruited and the uncontrolled nature of the trial do not permit demonstration of the effectiveness of the treatment involved. However, the results encourage further trials with higher doses and different routes of administration in order to demonstrate the recovery/efficacy if any, in SCI patients.
Effect of Reduced Attention on Auditory Amplitude-Modulation Following Responses: A Study With Chirp-Evoked Potentials

Summary: The amplitude of the auditory amplitude-modulation following responses (AMFR) is variable, depending on the modulation rate. Although 40-Hz responses have higher amplitudes in adults, the AMFR in the 80- to 120-Hz range are less influenced by sleep and more consistent in children. The effect of attention on 40-Hz responses has been addressed in some studies; however, no study to our knowledge has investigated the effect of attention on other stimulation rates. Our aim was to test the effect of attention on the AMFR to different frequencies of stimulation, using a chirp-modulated tone as stimulus. We recorded chirp-evoked responses in 12 subjects while attending to the sound (first condition) and reading a novel (second condition), in a randomly determined sequence. The energy of the response and the intertrial coherence (ITC) were measured by means of time-frequency transforms. The frequency range of response was similar in both conditions. No significant differences were found in the ITC values in the 40-Hz and the 80- to 120-Hz ranges, nor in the energy of the 40-Hz response. The only statistically significant difference found was the lower energy of the response in the 80- to 120-Hz range in the reading condition. Our results suggest that attention may affect auditory steady-state clinical testing using amplitude values. Phase measures may be preferable in this context.
Model selection procedure for high‐dimensional data

For high‐dimensional regression, the number of predictors may greatly exceed the sample size but only a small fraction of them are related to the response. Therefore, variable selection is inevitable, where consistent model selection is the primary concern. However, conventional consistent model selection criteria like Bayesian information criterion (BIC) may be inadequate due to their nonadaptivity to the model space and infeasibility of exhaustive search. To address these two issues, we establish a probability lower bound of selecting the smallest true model by an information criterion, based on which we propose a model selection criterion, what we call RICc, which adapts to the model space. Furthermore, we develop a computationally feasible method combining the computational power of least angle regression (LAR) with that of RICc. Both theoretical and simulation studies show that this method identifies the smallest true model with probability converging to one if the smallest true model is selected by LAR. The proposed method is applied to real data from the power market and outperforms the backward variable selection in terms of price forecasting accuracy. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining 3: 350‐358, 2010
Structures informationnelles et linguistiques du français et du chinois dans le discours de description spatiale

L'objectif de cette etude experimentale est d'analyser les interactions qui existent entre les structures informationnelles et linguistiques dans la construction d'un type de discours que l'on appellera « description spatiale statique » (Carroll & von Stutterheim 1993 ; Watorek 1998 ; Trevisiol et al. 2010). Nous comparons ces interactions dans deux langues, le francais et le chinois. Nous essayons ainsi de repondre a la question suivante : la grammaire d'une langue at -elle une influence sur les choix des informations a transmettre et leur organisation dans le discours pendant le processus de production langagiere ? (Levelt 1989 ; Slobin 1996) La procedure utilisee est celle d'une analyse de corpus oraux basee sur la description d'une image (representant un centre-ville constitue d'une place, de rues et de bâtiments). Les informateurs se divisent en deux groupes : 18 locuteurs natifs du francais et 18 locuteurs natifs du chinois. Le modele d'analyse du discours utilise est celui de la Quaestio (von Stutterheim & Klein 1989). Les reponses ont ete etudiees au niveau de la structure du discours (structures principales et secondaires), des domaines referentiels encodes dans le topique (espace et/ou entites) et du mouvement referentiel en topique (deroulement de l'information du domaine des entites entre les enonces). Les resultats revelent les phenomenes suivants : (1) les francophones utilisent une des deux structures principales possibles plus frequemment que les sinophones ; (2) les francophones produisent plus de topiques implicites et moins de topiques encodant simultanement les domaines de l'espace et des entites que les sinophones ; (3) le type de maintien anaphorique des entites en topique privilegie par les francophones est different de celui des sinophones. Ces resultats montrent que les moyens linguistiques les plus operatoires dans une langue (propositions relatives, complements circonstanciels de lieu, adverbes, particules locatives…) ont une influence sur le choix et l'organisation des informations transmise dans le discours.