Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
YU-net Lung Segment Image Preprocess Methods Used for Common Chest Diseases Prediction

With the availability of large-scale data set of X-ray images and development of CNNs(Convolutional Neural Networks), using CNNs assist diagnose become more and more popular. But training CNNs using global image may be affected by the excessive irrelevant noisy areas. Due to the poor alignment of some Chest X-ray(CXR) images, the existence of irregular border hinders the neural network performance. In our work, we address the above problems by proposing a YU-net to segment lung fields on CXR images based on U-net, remove those areas of the images outside the lungs. In order to prove the effectiveness of YU-net, we trained, validated and tested the same 112,120 pictures of 30,536 patients on ResNet-50 and DenseNet-121 with both original Chest X-ray images and YU-net cleaned images. Compare the predicted result of DenseNet-121 and ResNet-50 with both YU-net processed images and original dataset, we found that use the YU-net cleaned images improve the performance of CNNs to recognize the multiple common thorax diseases.
Degradation of SAMHD1 Restriction Factor Through Cullin-Ring E3 Ligase Complexes During Human Cytomegalovirus Infection

Sterile alpha motif (SAM) and histidine-aspartate (HD) domain-containing protein 1 (SAMHD1) acts as a restriction factor for several RNA and DNA viruses by limiting the intracellular pool of deoxynucleoside triphosphates. Here, we investigated the regulation of SAMHD1 expression during human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection. SAMHD1 knockdown using shRNA increased the activity of the viral UL99 late gene promoter in human fibroblasts by 7- to 9-fold, confirming its anti-HCMV activity. We also found that the level of SAMHD1 was initially increased by HCMV infection but decreased partly at the protein level at late stages of infection. SAMHD1 loss was not observed with UV-inactivated virus and required viral DNA replication. This reduction of SAMHD1 was effectively blocked by MLN4924, an inhibitor of the Cullin-RING-E3 ligase (CRL) complexes, but not by bafilomycin A1, an inhibitor of vacuolar-type H+-ATPase. Indirect immunofluorescence assays further supported the CRL-mediated SAMHD1 loss at late stages of virus infection. Knockdown of CUL2 and to a lesser extent CUL1 using siRNA stabilized SAMHD1 in normal fibroblasts and inhibited SAMHD1 loss during virus infection. Altogether, our results demonstrate that SAMHD1 inhibits the growth of HCMV, but HCMV causes degradation of SAMHD1 at late stages of viral infection through the CRL complexes.
Equine Asthma: Current Understanding and Future Directions

The 2019 Havemeyer Workshop brought together researchers and clinicians to discuss the latest information on Equine Asthma and provide future research directions. Current clinical and molecular asthma phenotypes and endotypes in humans were discussed and compared to asthma phenotypes in horses. The role of infectious and non-infectious causes of equine asthma, genetic factors and proposed disease pathophysiology were reviewed. Diagnostic limitations were evident by the limited number of tests and biomarkers available to field practitioners. The participants emphasized the need for more accessible, standardized diagnostics that would help identify specific phenotypes and endotypes in order to create more targeted treatments or management strategies. One important outcome of the workshop was the creation of the Equine Asthma Group that will facilitate communication between veterinary practice and research communities through published and easily accessible guidelines and foster research collaboration.
MVCLang: A Software Modeling Language for the Model-View-Controller Design Pattern

: The Model-View-Controller (MVC) software design pattern promotes separating software systems into the model, view, and controller elements. The views represent the user-interfaces, the models represent the system data, and the controllers handle the requests sent by the views and coordinate the interactions between views and models. While many software frameworks are available for the MVC-based software developments, no any attempt have been made on increasing the level of abstraction for the MVC developments and provide a model-based approach. Indeed, none of the high-level software modeling languages support the MVC design pattern. So, we propose in this paper a visual, MVC-based modeling language called MVCLang, which enables to model MVC-based software architectures that can be easily analysed and implemented. MVCLang is supported with an Eclipse-based prototype toolset for specifying the visual MVC architectures and analysing them for a number of wellformedness rules. MVCLang’s toolset can further produce ASP.NET MVC code that reﬂects the architectural design decisions. We evaluated MVCLang on a software company that offers e-commerce solutions. Therein, 5 developers used MVCLang for their e-commerce project developments and provided feedback for a set of pre-determined questions.
The Penile Microbiota in Uncircumcised and Circumcised Men: Relationships With HIV and Human Papillomavirus Infections and Cervicovaginal Microbiota

While the human microbiota especially that of the gut, cervix, and vagina continue to receive great attention, very little is currently known about the penile (glans, coronal sulcus, foreskin, and shaft) microbiota. The best evidences to date for the potential role of the penile microbiota in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) acquisition have come from studies examining medical male circumcision. We are still at the foothills of identifying specific penile bacteria that could be associated with increased risk of STI/HIV acquisition. In this review, we summarize the available literature on the human penile microbiota and how it is impacted by circumcision. We also discuss the potential role of penile microbiota in STIs and its impact on cervicovaginal microbiota. Taken together, the findings from the penile microbiota studies coupled with observational studies on the effect of male circumcision for reduction of STI/HIV infection risk suggest that specific penile anaerobic bacteria such as Prevotella spp. potentially have a mechanistic role that increases the risk of genital infections and syndromes, including bacterial vaginosis in sexual partners. Although penile Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus have been associated with healthy cervicovaginal microbiota and have been found to increase following male circumcision, further investigations are warranted to ascertain the exact roles of these bacteria in the reproductive health of men and women. This review aims to address existing gaps and challenges and future prospects in the penile microbiota research. The information described here may have translational significance, thereby improving reproductive health and management of STI/HIV.
Potential Factors Affected Safety and Efficacy of Transcatheter Plug Closure for Pediatric Hemoptysis with Anomalous Bronchial Arteries

Objective To evaluate the safety and efficacy of interventional care in pediatric hemoptysis for anomalous bronchial arteries (BAs) and to identify the potential factors resulting in hemoptysis recurrence. Methods 20 children complained of hemoptysis were diagnosed with anomalous BAs. All patients received transcatheter plug occlusion in Department of Cardiology, Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University. The safety and efficacy were evaluated according to clinical symptoms and images monitoring of enrolled subjects grouped as recurrence group and nonrecurrence group. The potential factors causing hemoptysis recurrence were reviewed and summarized. Results No deaths were recorded in a follow-up. Otherwise, hemoptysis recurrence was found in 8 subjects for 14 times, accounting for about 40%. Compared with nonrecurrence group, it indicated a statistical significance in hemoglobin levels (P=0.049), mycoplasma pneumonia particle assays (MP-PA) titers (P=0.030), and number of anomalous BAs (P=0.020). Meanwhile, 50% recurrent scenarios were associated with a respiratory infection by microbiological assessment before transcatheter plug occlusion. The repeat occlusion was applied for unclosed BAs leading to visual recurrent hemoptysis, the average interval time of which was 5.4 ± 3.6 mon. Conclusion The data from this retrospective study have shown that transcatheter plug occlusion is a relatively safe procedure with a low mortality. The number of abnormal BAs has been identified as a highly significant predictor of recurrence, and the role of MP and other potential factors should be verified in a multicenter, larger sample size, and randomized controlled trial.
CROOT: Code-based Round-Optimal Oblivious Transfer

In this paper, we present a new functionality for 1-out-of-2 Oblivious Transfer. This functionality lives between the classical and the weak-Oblivious Transfer ones. We motivate this functionality to adapt and prove a formerly proposed (and retracted) framework that was shown to be unprovable with the classical OT functionality. Our functionality still remains reasonably close to natural expectation for Oblivious Transfer. Once our global framework is proven in the new functionality, we propose two instantiations using recent code-based candidates of the NIST post-quantum standardization process. We show that the resulting instantiations are both efficient and secure. Our new functionality opens the way to round-optimal oblivious transfer instantia-
Visualization Method of Important Regions by Combination of Webpage Structures and Saliency Maps

: In this research, we propose a new visualization method for important areas of a webpage by calculating the saliency in element units using a combination of the structure of the webpage and the saliency map at the development stage. By arranging important information in areas where attention is likely to be focused, users can easily find such information, leading to efficient user acquisition. In addition, a summary map that summarizes particularly important areas into one image should help grasp the page contents. Compared to a traditional saliency map, the visibility of important areas is easier to see, allowing designers to accurately determine which elements are likely to be noticed when a user views a webpage during the development phase.
Toolchain Development for Automated Scene Reconstruction using Artificial Neural Network Object Detection and Photogrammetry for the Application in Driving Simulators

This paper presents an automated process chain for the reconstruction of characteristic 3D objects, which can be used in a simulation environment. The process chain can distinguish between recurring objects such as trees and cars and specific objects like buildings. To acquire this, it detects and classifies objects in images from a previously recorded video. In contrast to the specific objects, which are reconstructed during the workflow of the process chain, the recurrent objects are loaded from already existing models and are placed multiple times into the simulation environment. In terms of quality a visual comparison between the two integrated programs for the reconstruction (Metashape and Meshroom) is carried out. Furthermore the accuracy of the positioning of standard objects in the Unity game engine is examined.
Mitochondrial Contact Sites in Inflammation-Induced Cardiovascular Disease

The mitochondrion, the ATP-producing center, is both physically and functionally associated with almost all other organelles in the cell. Mitochondrial-associated membranes (MAMs) are involved in a variety of biological processes, such as lipid exchange, protein transport, mitochondrial fission, mitophagy, and inflammation. Several inflammation-related diseases in the cardiovascular system involve several intracellular events including mitochondrial dysfunction as well as disruption of MAMs. Therefore, an in-depth exploration of the function of MAMs will be of great significance for us to understand the initiation, progression, and clinical complications of cardiovascular disease (CVD). In this review, we summarize the recent advances in our knowledge of MAM regulation and function in CVD-related cells. We discuss the potential roles of MAMs in activating inflammation to influence the development of CVD.
Trading Desk Behavior Modeling via LSTM for Rogue Trading Fraud Detection

: Rogue trading is a term used to designate a fraudulent trading activity and rogue traders refer to operators who take unauthorised positions with regard to the mandate of the desk to which they belong and to the regulations in force. Through this fraudulent behavior, a rogue trader exposes his group to operational and market risks that can lead to heavy ﬁnancial losses and to ﬁnancial and criminal sanctions. We present a two-step methodology to detect rogue trading activity among the deals of a desk. Using a dataset of transactions booked by operators, we ﬁrst build time series behavioral features that describe their activity in order to predict these features’ future values using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The detection step is then performed by comparing the predictions made by the LSTM to real values assuming that unexpected values in our trading behavioral features predictions reﬂect potential rogue trading activity. In order to detect anomalies, we deﬁne a prediction error that is used to compute an anomaly score based on the Mahalanobis distance.
Real-time On-board Detection of Components and Faults in an Autonomous UAV System for Power Line Inspection

The inspection of power line components is periodically conducted by specialized companies to identify possible faults and assess the state of the critical infrastructure. UAV-systems represent an emerging technological alternative in this field, with the promise of safer, more efficient, and less costly inspections. In the Drones4Energy project, we work toward a vision-based beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) power line inspection architecture for automatically and autonomously detecting components and faults in real-time on board of the UAV. In this paper, we present the first step towards the vision system of this architecture. We train Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and tune them for reliability under different conditions such as variations in camera used, lighting, angles, and background. For the purpose of real-time on-board implementation of the architecture, experimental evaluations and comparisons are performed on different hardware such as Raspberry Pi 4, Nvidia Jetson Nano, Nvidia Jetson TX2, and Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier. The use of such Single Board Devices (SBDs) is an integral part of the design of the proposed power line inspection architecture. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be effective and efficient for fully-automatic real-time on-board visual power line inspection.
Optimal Transport Layer for Secure Computation

: Although signiﬁcantly improved, the performance of secure two-party computation (2PC) is still prohibitive for practical systems. Contrary to common belief that bandwidth is the remaining bottleneck for 2PC implementation, we show that the network is under-utilised due to the use of standard TCP sockets. Nevertheless, using other sockets is non-trivial: the developers of secure computation need to integrate them into the operating systems, which is a challenging task even for systems experts. To resolve the efﬁciency barrier of 2PC, we develop a framework, we call Transputation , which automates the integration of transport layer sockets into 2PC implementations. Transputation is the ﬁrst tool which enables developers of 2PC protocols to easily identify and use the optimal transport layer protocol for the given computation task and network conditions. We integrate selected transport layer protocols into Transputation and evaluate the performance for a number of computational tasks. As a highlight, even a general purpose transport layer protocol, such as SABUL, improves the run-time of 2PC over TCP on EU-Australia connection for circuits with > 10 6 Boolean gates by a factor of 8. To enable evaluations of 2PC implementations in real life setups in the Internet we setup a distributed testbed.The testbed provides automated generation of network scenarios and runs evaluations of 2PC implementations. We evaluate Transputation on in different network setups and report on our experimental results in this work.
Droppix: Towards More Realistic Video Fingerprinting

We present preliminary results for a way of video fingerprinting that is different from typical methods based on paradigms from watermarking of still images. Our approach is based on modifying some fragments of the clip in a carefully chosen manner. We show the robustness of our approach against a number of typical of attacks. The marks introduced by our modifications are almost imperceptible to the viewer and their impact can be adjusted. Finally, our protocol is computationally light and can be combined with others schemes as an extra security layer.
Towards a Better Understanding of Genetic Operators for Ordering Optimization: Application to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

: Genetic Algorithms (GA) have long been used for ordering optimization problems with some considerable efforts to improve their exploration and exploitation abilities. A great number of GA implementations have been proposed varying from GAs applying simple or advanced variation operators to hybrid GAs combined with different heuristics. In this work, we propose a short review of genetic operators for ordering optimization with a classiﬁcation according to the information used in the reproduction step. Crossover operators could be position (”blind”) operators or heuristic operators. Mutation operators could be applied randomly or using local optimization. After studying the contribution of each class on solving two benchmark instances of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), we explain how to combine the variation operators to allow simultaneously a better exploration of the search space with higher exploitation. We then propose the random and the balanced hybridization of the operators’ classes. The hybridization strategies are applied to solve 24 CVRP benchmark instances. Results are analyzed and compared to demonstrate the role of each class of operators in the evolution process.
Application of Computer Vision Technologies for Automated Utility Meters Reading

: This paper presents a study on automated reading of utility meters using two computer vision techniques: an open-source solution Tensorﬂow Object Detection (Tensorﬂow) and a commercial solution Anyline. We aimed to identify the limitations and beneﬁts of each solution applied to utility meters reading, especially focusing on aspects such as accuracy and inference time. Our goal was to determine the solution that is the most suitable for this particular application area, where there are several speciﬁc challenges.
We Might Need More Education for BreakthroughCancer Pain: The Pilot Survey among Korean MedicalOncologist

Introduction: Breakthrough cancer pain (BTcP) has been reported to occur in more than half of cancer patients. However, despite the introduction of various treatment options, BTcP remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. Because physicians’ knowledge and attitudes are related to adequate BTcP management, it is important to explore physicians’ knowledge, attitude and clinical practice in managing BTcP. Objectives:
Modulating the Crosstalk between the Tumor and Its Microenvironment Using RNA Interference: A Treatment Strategy for Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver malignancy with one of the highest mortality rates among solid cancers. It develops almost exclusively in the background of chronic liver inflammation, which can be caused by viral hepatitis, chronic alcohol consumption or an unhealthy diet. Chronic inflammation deregulates the innate and adaptive immune responses that contribute to the proliferation, survival and migration of tumor cells. The continuous communication between the tumor and its microenvironment components serves as the overriding force of the tumor against the body’s defenses. The importance of this crosstalk between the tumor microenvironment and immune cells in the process of hepatocarcinogenesis has been shown, and therapeutic strategies modulating this communication have improved the outcomes of patients with liver cancer. To target this communication, an RNA interference (RNAi)-based approach can be used, an innovative and promising strategy that can disrupt the crosstalk at the transcriptomic level. Moreover, RNAi offers the advantage of specificity in comparison to the treatments currently used for HCC in clinics. In this review, we will provide the recent data pertaining to the modulation of a tumor and its microenvironment by using RNAi and its potential for therapeutic intervention in HCC.
Speech Enhancement Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Overlapping Group Sparsity Constraint

We consider speech enhancement techniques and probe into the group-sparsity peculiarity possessed by speech signals. Common structured sparsity penalties, e.g., block sparsity, incorporated by nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) models to penalize predefined rows of coefficients, cannot sufficiently capture the grouping features within a row of activation coefficients. To circumvent this defect, a structured penalty known as overlapping group sparsity is introduced, which slides across the coefficients for group shrinkage. In this work, we propose an NMF variant in combination with the sparsity of overlapping group lasso (termed NMF-OGL), to adaptively promote the parsimony across small overlapped groups, as applied to enhancing single-channel speech mixture with different real-world background noise. Experimental verification indicates that the introduced penalty improves the denoising performance in comparisons to standard NMF and the overlapping group shrinkage model.
Are Experts Representative of Non-Experts? Elective Modernism, Aspects of Representation, and the Argument from Inductive Risk

The approach to expert communities and political representation of non-experts in Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ elective modernism reflects the conviction that experts are not representative of ordinary citizens. I use an analysis of aspects of representation and the argument from inductive risk to argue that experts can be seen as representative of (some) non-experts, when we understand representation as resemblance based on shared social perspectives and acknowledge the inevitable involvement of such perspectives in decisions under inductive risk. This, in turn, has implications for some of the proposals about practices and institutions made in elective modernism.