Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance Assessment of CMUT Arrays Based on Electrical Impedance Test Results

A quantitative quality assessment method for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays based on electrical impedance measurements made at wafer level is proposed. The resonant response in air of CMUTs is described and then used to obtain a quantitative quality value. Several issues that could occur in CMUT arrays as well as their effect on the output of the assessment are analyzed. This method has been applied on a wafer containing several CMUT designs and the obtained results are summarized.
Kirurgiska checklistan: granskning av implementeringsprocessen på operativa enheter

The World Health Organizations (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist that was presented in 2009 is global and aims to improve the safety of surgical care (Ikonen et al 2009). The surgical checklist was tested in eight countries and found to reduce the number of postoperative complications and deaths by over a third (Haynes et al. 2009). The National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) has launched a campaign aimed at the surgical checklist to be used in all surgical units in Finland. This master's thesis was done on behalf of THL and reviews the surgical checklist implementation process in two surgical wards in southern Finland. The real world impact of surgical safety checklists on patient outcomes depends, according to Conley et al. (2011) on the effectiveness of the hospital s implementation processes. The purpose of this master s thesis was to produce guidelines that are valuable for a successful implementation of the surgical safety checklist. This study was carried out by interviewing operating ward staff and the material was processed by using qualitative content analysis. Theories of implementation processes and patient safety based on safety theories were used as a theoretical framework. The study s questions were: 1.How has the implementation process gone? 2. How did the staff feel about the implementation process? 3. Which positive and negative factors emerged in the implementation process? Content analysis shows that eight categories are important for a successful implementation process: need; project manager; supporting, encouraging and active leadership; commitment and team spirit; same game rules for all; education and open communication; adaptation; feedback. All categories should been considered in the implementation process. Together the categories support a positive and successful implementation process of the surgical safety checklist and will lead to improved patient safety.
The influence of androgenization on the tensile properties of the rat uterus.

We have previously found that neonatal androgen treatment (androgenization) increases uterine collagen and inhibits the uterine growth response to estrogen. In order to determine whether increased uterine collagen might act as a partial physical barrier to growth, the tensile properties of uteri from normal diestrous females (NF), from NF treated for 14 days with estradiol, and from androgenized adult female rats (AF) were determined on an Instron Universal Testing Machine. Androgenization significantly increased the ultimate tensile strength of the uterus over that of the normal female but did not alter the total amount of stretch. lnjectioh of estrogen for 14 days increased the load bearing capacity of the uterus of NF over that of untreated NF but not to the level of AF. In addition, estrogen injection significantly increased the total amount of stretch. Our data suggest that the increased rigidity in AF is most probably due to an increase in the number of collagen fibers which may potentially act as a partial physical barrier to uterine growth.
Cybersecurity Strategy’s Role in Raising Kenyan Awareness of Mobile Internet Threats

Cybersecurity has become a global concern, particularly in rapidly de- veloping countries like Kenya. Kenya's ICT revolution followed the laying of un- dersea cables in 2009. Kenya's growth in Internet use has been facilitated by high proliferation and adoption of mobile communications. Speedy diffusion and adop- tion has exposed the Kenyan public to unprecedented individual security threats via the mobile platform. A national drive to foster awareness and nurture detection and coping skills is urgently required. This paper focuses on the role of governmental cybersecurity strategy in this area and explores the approaches to be used for im- proving public awareness of mobile Internet threats. Without addressing this vital aspect, the core aim of the strategy could be defeated, despite its comprehensive- ness and excellence in other areas. This paper presents the outcome of an online study and comparative analysis of cybersecurity strategies of two developing coun- tries. We conclude by proposing techniques for raising national awareness of cyber threats of mobile Internet, with a clear mandate to governments in developing countries to address this as a matter of urgency, and to include it in their respective cybersecurity strategies.
Topic supervised non-negative matrix factorization

Topic models have been extensively used to organize and interpret the contents of large, unstructured corpora of text documents. Although topic models often perform well on traditional training vs. test set evaluations, it is often the case that the results of a topic model do not align with human interpretation. This interpretability fallacy is largely due to the unsupervised nature of topic models, which prohibits any user guidance on the results of a model. In this paper, we introduce a semi-supervised method called topic supervised non-negative matrix factorization (TS-NMF) that enables the user to provide labeled example documents to promote the discovery of more meaningful semantic structure of a corpus. In this way, the results of TS-NMF better match the intuition and desired labeling of the user. The core of TS-NMF relies on solving a non-convex optimization problem for which we derive an iterative algorithm that is shown to be monotonic and convergent to a local optimum. We demonstrate the practical utility of TS-NMF on the Reuters and PubMed corpora, and find that TS-NMF is especially useful for conceptual or broad topics, where topic key terms are not well understood. Although identifying an optimal latent structure for the data is not a primary objective of the proposed approach, we find that TS-NMF achieves higher weighted Jaccard similarity scores than the contemporary methods, (unsupervised) NMF and latent Dirichlet allocation, at supervision rates as low as 10% to 20%.
Clinicoepidemiological Profiles and Outcomes during First Hospital Admission of Head Injury Patients in Ikeja, Nigeria

Background: Although head injury (HI) is a major public health problem in Nigeria and other low and middle income countries of the world, there is a paucity of data from these societies. This is largely due to under-reporting. We carried out a prospective study of the clinicoepidemiological profiles and outcomes following the first hospitalization of a cohort of head-injured patients in Ikeja, Nigeria, a metropolitan African city. Methods: In an 8-month period from May until December 2005, data from all HI cases seen in our neurosurgical unit were prospectively recorded for subsequent analysis. These include demographics, mechanism of injury, pre-neurosurgical care received, severity of injury using the Glasgow Coma Scale, presence of hemodynamic instability, pupillary anomalies and associated systemic injuries, cranial computed tomography (CT) findings and the number of surgical interventions, as well as outcomes after the first hospital admission using the Glasgow Outcome Scale. Determinants of outcome were explored using the χ2 test and the level of significance was put at p = 0.05. Results: There were 143 cases of HI, which is about one fifth of our total workload, including 122 males and 21 females aged 0.5–85 years (mean age 29.15). The majority (88%) were either school children or low income earners. Road accidents accounted for 75% of the cases; three quarter of the cases had some initial care in other health facilities before the arrival in our unit, at an average of 33 h. Mild, moderate and severe HI accounted for 60, 18 and 22%, respectively. About a quarter of the patients sustained other systemic injuries. Cranial CT scanning was obtainable in 40 patients (28%); 9 of these revealed surgical mass lesions, of whom 5 had life-saving operations. Many well-known determinants of a poor outcome of HI were prevalent in this study group and found to have a significantly adverse effect on patient outcome. Conclusions: HI is a major public health problem in Nigeria, taking up at least one fifth of the neurosurgical workload. The prehospital emergency medical service is poorly organized. Determinants of a poor outcome of HI are highly prevalent, including poor accessibility to cranial CT scanning, absence or inadequacy of logistics for neurocritical care and an inadequate number of neurosurgeons.
Stereotactic Guided Laser-Induced Interstitial Thermotherapy (SLITT) in Gliomas with Intraoperative Morphologic Monitoring in an Open MR: Clinical Expierence

Stereotactic guided laser-induced interstitial thermotherapy (SLITT) is a minimal invasive method to produce thermonecrosis in cerebral tumour tissue. Clinical data are sparse due to its limited application until now and the value of this approach for tumour control and survival time remain to be defined. Twenty-four patients (7 low-grade gliomas, 11 anaplastic gliomas, 6 glioblastomas) with brain tumours, most recurrences, were treated with SLITT, in total 30 laser procedures were performed. Under local anaesthesia a 600 micro m laser-fiber was inserted by the stereotactic-guided technique. In open low-field MR the denaturation of the tumour by a Nd-YAG-laser (1064 nm) was monitored using T 1 -weighted 3-D turbo FLASH sequences. The ablation procedure had to be stopped twice because of neurological deficit, one major infection occurred. In two cases neurological improvement was observed. Mean survival times for low grade astrocytomas, anaplastic gliomas and glioblastomas were 144 months, 39 months, 17 months, respectively. Mean survival times after SLITT were 34 months, 30 months and 9 months, respectively. Mean times to progression after SLITT for the 3 histological subgroups were 16 months, 10 months and 4 months, respectively. Five patients with low grade astrocytoma and a KI greater or equal 70 maintained a high quality functional status for 11, 20, 21, 33 and 43 months. In anaplastic tumours patients maintained a KI of 70 for a median time of 15 months and for those with glioblastoma the respective high quality duration was 7.5 months after SLITT. SLITT for selected patients with glioma could have a clinical value in a multimodality treatment schedule maintaining quality of live. Due to the minimal invasive technique, the method is a therapy of choice and may be favoured to reoperation. Major indications of this treatment are small tumours, in eloquent regions and deep seated, as well as in older patients or patients in poor functional status.
Tear Film Lipid Layer Thickness as a Function of Blinking

Alterations in the tear film lipid layer as a function of blinking were investigated using a custom-designed specular reflection monitoring system. The tear film lipid layer of 104 subjects under conditions of normal (“baseline”) blinking and “forceful” blinking was quantitated on the basis of specific interference colors. Deliberate, forceful blinking was found to significantly increase the lipid layer thickness (LLT) of the tear film. The magnitude of increase was found to be correlated with the baseline LLT values; individuals with baseline LLT values of 75-150 nm demonstrated a mean increase in LLT of 33 nm following forceful blinking, whereas subjects with baseline LLT values ≤ 60 nm experienced a mean increase of 19 nm. The difference in the magnitude of increase between the groups was highly significant (p=0.0001). The data suggest that, in addition to playing a role in the spreading of lipid across the tear film, the blinking mechanism may be important in the maintenance of the lipid layer by augmenting the expression of lipids from the meibomian glands.
A novel chemometric classification for FTIR spectra of mycotoxin-contaminated maize and peanuts at regulatory limits

ABSTRACT The rapid identification of mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol and aflatoxin B1 in agricultural commodities is an ongoing concern for food importers and processors. While sophisticated chromatography-based methods are well established for regulatory testing by food safety authorities, few techniques exist to provide a rapid assessment for traders. This study advances the development of a mid-infrared spectroscopic method, recording spectra with little sample preparation. Spectral data were classified using a bootstrap-aggregated (bagged) decision tree method, evaluating the protein and carbohydrate absorption regions of the spectrum. The method was able to classify 79% of 110 maize samples at the European Union regulatory limit for deoxynivalenol of 1750 µg kg–1 and, for the first time, 77% of 92 peanut samples at 8 µg kg–1 of aflatoxin B1. A subset model revealed a dependency on variety and type of fungal infection. The employed CRC and SBL maize varieties could be pooled in the model with a reduction of classification accuracy from 90% to 79%. Samples infected with Fusarium verticillioides were removed, leaving samples infected with F. graminearum and F. culmorum in the dataset improving classification accuracy from 73% to 79%. A 500 µg kg–1 classification threshold for deoxynivalenol in maize performed even better with 85% accuracy. This is assumed to be due to a larger number of samples around the threshold increasing representativity. Comparison with established principal component analysis classification, which consistently showed overlapping clusters, confirmed the superior performance of bagged decision tree classification. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Maintenance and Regulation of mRNA Stability of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae OLE1 Gene Requires Multiple Elements within the Transcript That Act through Translation-independent Mechanisms*

The Saccharomyces cerevisiae OLE1 gene encodes a membrane-bound Δ-9 fatty acid desaturase, whose expression is regulated by unsaturated fatty acids through both transcriptional and mRNA stability controls. In fatty acid-free medium, the mRNA has a half-life of 10 ± 1.5 min (basal stability) that drops to 2 ± 1.5 min when cells are exposed to unsaturated fatty acids (regulated stability). A deletion analysis of elements within the transcript revealed that the sequences within the protein-coding region that encode transmembrane sequences and a part of the cytochrome b5 domain are essential for the basal stability of the transcript. Deletion of any of the three essential elements produced unstable transcripts and loss of regulated instability. By contrast, substitution of the 3′-untranslated region with that of the stable PGK1 gene did not affect the basal stability of the transcript and did not block regulated decay. Given that Ole1p is a membrane-bound protein whose activities are a major determinant of membrane fluidity, we asked whether membrane-associated translation of the protein was essential for basal and regulated stability. Insertion of stop codons within the transcript that blocked either translation of the entire protein or parts of the protein required for co-translation insertion of Ole1p had no effect. We conclude that the basal and regulated stability of the OLE1 transcript is resistant to the nonsense-mediated decay pathway and that the essential protein-encoding elements for basal stability act cooperatively as stabilizing sequences through RNA-protein interactions via a translation-independent mechanism.
CROSS-REACTIVITY BETWEEN ANTIGENS OF ANISAKIS SIMPLEX S . L . AND OTHER ASCARID NEMATODES

A study of the cross-reactivity among somatic and excretorysecretory antigens of the third stage larvae of Anisakis simplex s.l. and somatic antigens of other ascarid nematodes (Ascaris lumbricoides, A. suum, Toxocara canis, Anisakis physeteris, Hysterothylacium aduncum and H. fabri) was carried out by immunoblotting. It was revealed a high degree of cross-reactivity among ascarids in the 30 and > 212 kDa range by using sera against somatic and excretory-secretory antigens of A. simplex s.l. It has been revealed also specific components of the Anisakis genus (< 7.2, 9, 19 and 25 kDa) that will be interesting in diagnosis.
In pursuit of excellence: the third phase of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 1997-2002.

In 1996, I was honored to be selected by a search committee, chaired by Dr. Robert Haggerty, as the third editor of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. In certain respects, my charge was less ambitious and certainly less daunting than that of my predecessors. Dr. Marvin Gottlieb conceptualized and founded a new journal in a field lacking formal recognition, while Dr. Stanford Friedman was responsible for the integration of the Journal as the official publication of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (SDBP). With an established infrastructure and superb managing editor in Mary Sharkey, a firm commitment and outstanding support from the publisher Williams & Wilkins, and the confidence and encouragement of SDBP leadership, my major focus was to nurture and sustain the growth and development of the Journal in pursuit of excellence. I am proud of our accomplishments over 6 years. I am delighted to have this opportunity to reflect on my editorship in celebration of the Journal`s 25 anniversary and thank current editor, Dr. Suzanne Dixon, for her invitation. In preparation for this assignment, I reviewed those issues published from 1997Y2002, read the minutes of our annual meetings of the Editorial Board, and spoke with colleagues. Reflection suggested several prominent themes: innovation; opportunism; collaboration; relevance; and achievement. I will briefly discuss each of these themes, in the hope of capturing the essence of my tenure.
Fatal Falls in an Ethnically Diverse Urban Community: The Link between Demographic Factors and the Circumstances Surrounding Fatal Falls

Objectives Fatal falls cause more than 15,000 deaths per year in the United States. Despite this, the circumstances surrounding fatal falls in elderly adults are poorly understood. It is unknown whether these circumstances differ across ethnicities, although Hispanic American individuals are at reduced risk for fatal falls. This study sought to describe fatal falls in an urban, predominantly Hispanic, and white non-Hispanic community and to determine the association of demographics with the circumstances surrounding these falls (proximate factors). Methods The death certificates and medical examiners’ reports for all 328 elderly individuals experiencing a fatal fall in Miami-Dade County, FL, from 2005 to 2007 were reviewed for demographic and proximate factors such as the preceding activity and fall location. Results Fatal falls in elderly adults were experienced mostly by individuals living in the community (80%) and affected all demographic subgroups, although 80% occurred in individuals older than 74 years. Most fatal falls occurred at home (74%), indoors (75%), and during nonvigorous activities such as walking (58%) and these tended to affect the oldest elderly. In addition, a significant number of fatal falls occurred in public locations, outdoors, and during vigorous activity, with these falls tending to affect younger individuals living without family. Hispanic ethnicity was not associated with proximate factors. Conclusions Fatal fall prevention is needed for elderly individuals living in the community and should target the oldest elderly adults living at home while helping to ensure that individuals who are living without family have the appropriate support. These data suggest that Hispanic individuals may benefit from prevention strategies developed in other populations.
Informal Influences in the Process of IDIQ Contractor Selection for Task Award

Abstract : The selection of a contractor for task award using the Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract often involves dynamics and relationships that are difficult to understand. There are unanswered questions that relate to how government agents define "best value" to the government. The selection decisions often differ between government agents. The government streamlined the acquisition process by creating the multiple award IDIQ contract. Government agents are relied upon to make sound business judgments in determining which contractor represents the best value to the government. Informal influences can impact the determination of the final selection of a contractor. This thesis attempts to create a better conceptual framework for the informal influences that affect the dynamic selection process of contractors for task award. The research consisted of interviews with members of government agencies that routinely make IDIQ contract task awards. Results indicate that informal, or soft, factors play a large role in determining which contractor will be awarded a task. The most influential factors that affect task award are identified and discussed in depth. The research determined that some marketing processes can be totally ineffective or even counterproductive at times. The results also show that formal rating systems are often replaced by informal peer networks. Existing research on selection processes in the private sector proved comparable to processes used at the government agencies participating in this study.
Conservatism Analysis on Indian Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)

The quality of accounting information is the basic objective every accounting standards aims to achieve. It is therefore essential to found out the level of conservative and prudence between Indian GAAP (AS) and Ind.AS (IFRS). This study has measured the accounting information quality between AS and Ind.AS (IFRS) by using Gray’s Index of Conservatism (GIC) on 5 years consolidated financial statement. F-test and T-test were used to test the hypothesis.It was found that IFRS provides current and quality information on liquidity ratios than AS reporting. However there was a mix results on the quality of accounting information on leverage.In general all the profitability ratios GIC signify that, the computed ratios of AS are higher than IFRS ratio in both companies inferring that IFRS is conservative and prudent in profitability reporting, hence accounting information on profitability ratio per IFRS is quality than AS ratios. The hypothesis testing results indicates that averagely the impact of IFRS adoption have similar impact on accounting ratio of both companies but at different timings.The study therefore concludes that Ind.AS will provide current and quality accounting information on accounting ratios but the quality level will not be same over the years.
Relationship between body mass index and incidence of breast cancer.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and the breast cancer incidence, so as to making contribution to breast cancer screening in high-risk groups, to adjustment from passive medical treatment to active treatment Methods: BMI status of 206 breast cancer patients and that of 210 healthy subjects at different ages were compared and analyzed. RESULTS The mean BMI was significantly higher in breast cancer patients than in healthy subjects 24.45±3.50 vs. 23.80±3.10 kg/m(2), t=-2.189, P=0.001. When stratified by age, BMI were significantly higher in ≥60 age for breast cancer than that of control group (Z=-3.408, P=0.001) and no significant difference in <60 years old . Logistic regression analysis showed that BMI was a risk factor of breast cancer (OR=1.886, 95% CI: 1.122-3.009). CONCLUSION BMI have a relationship with the occurrence of breast cancer, especially for ≥60 years old.