Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Testing and Evaluation of Nine Different Air Samplers: End-to-End Sampling Efficiencies as Specific Performance Measurements for Bioaerosol Applications

Accurate exposure assessments are needed to evaluate health hazards caused by airborne microorganisms and require air samplers that efficiently capture representative samples. This highlights the need for samplers with well-defined performance characteristics. While generic aerosol performance measurements are fundamental to evaluate/compare samplers, the added complexity caused by the diversity of microorganisms, especially in combination with cultivation-based analysis methods, may render such measurements inadequate to assess suitability for bioaerosols. Specific performance measurements that take into account the end-to-end sampling process, targeted bioaerosol and analysis method could help guide selection of air samplers. Nine different samplers (impactors/impingers/cyclones/ electrostatic precipitators/filtration samplers) were subjected to comparative performance testing in this work. Their end-to-end cultivation-based biological sampling efficiencies (BSEs) and PCR-/microscopy-based physical sampling efficiencies (PSEs) relative to a reference sampler (BioSampler) were determined for gram-negative and gram-positive vegetative bacteria, bacterial spores, and viruses. Significant differences were revealed among the samplers and shown to depend on the bioaerosol's stress–sensitivity and particle size. Samplers employing dry collection had lower BSEs for stress-sensitive bioaerosols than wet collection methods, while nonfilter-based samplers showed reduced PSEs for 1 μm compared to 4 μm bioaerosols. Several samplers were shown to underestimate bioaerosol concentration levels relative to the BioSampler due to having lower sampling efficiencies, although they generally obtained samples that were more concentrated due to having higher concentration factors. Our work may help increase user awareness about important performance criteria for bioaerosol sampling, which could contribute to methodological harmonization/standardization and result in more reliable exposure assessments for airborne pathogens and other bioaerosols of interest. Copyright 2014 American Association for Aerosol Research
An Efficient Segmentation Of Optic Disc Using Convolution Neural Network For Glaucoma Detection In Retinal Images

Blindness is a growing problem worldwide. The major causes of blindness are glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Increased intraocular pressure causes glaucoma. In glaucoma detection, it is very difficult to identify the edge of the optic cup because the image is blurred where blood vessels pass through the optic cup. Current methods do not effectively address the issue of peripheral blurring of the blood vessels surrounding the optic cup. In this paper, it is recommended to automatically detect glaucoma in retinal images using an efficient method. Initially, optic disk and cup segmentation is done by the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Modified Region Growing Mechanism (MRG). Then, texture features are extracted from the separated results. Finally, a neural network is used to diagnose glaucoma. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better glaucoma detection result (accuracy, sensitivity and specificity) compared to few other approaches.
The Application of Multilevel Colour Thresholding for Coffee Colour Detection in a Coffee Maker Prototype

: The development of computer vision has expanded widely as there is a vast number of its applications in various aspects of daily life. One of its implementations is integrating the image processing technique on a prototype coffee machine based on the speech recognition system. This study aims to detect the requested coffee colour spoken by users which are black, middle and light . The sensor used in this research is a digital PC camera and the applied method is Multilevel Colour Thresholding . Of all experiments conducted, the image processing technique can work perfectly as the camera is able to identify the requested colour of the coffee solution. Furthermore, the system might be developed by improving the multilevel colour thresholding technique as well as advancing the hardware design in order to establish more robust coffee machine based on the requested colour
İnsan Serum Paraoksonaz-1 (PON1) Üzerine Zoledronik Asit’in İn Vitro İnhibisyon Etkisi

Zoledronik asit azot iceren bir bisfosfonattir. Guclu bir kemik rezorpsiyon inhibitorudur. Osteoklast aktiviteyi inhibe eder. PON1 organofosfatlarin, aril esterlerin ve laktonlarin hidrolizini katalize eder. PON1, ateroskleroz dahil olmak uzere bircok vaskuler hastalikla iliskili oldugu bilinen Dusuk Yogunluklu Lipoprotein (LDH) ve Yuksek Yogunluklu Lipoprotein'i (HDL), oksidatif strese karsi koruyarak bir antioksidan enzim olarak gorev yapar. Aslinda, daha yuksek PON1 aktivitesi aterosklerozun onlenmesinde onemli bir rol oynar. Epidemiyolojik calismalar dusuk PON1 aktivitesinin artmis kardiyovaskuler olay riski ve kardiyovaskuler hastalik riski ile iliskili oldugunu gostermektedir. Bu makalede, in vitro kosullarda insan serumunda PON1 enzim aktivitesi uzerine zoledronik asit kemoterapik ilacinin inhibisyon etkisini arastirdik.
Community acquired pneumonia due to Panton-Valentine leukocidin producing methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus in Greece

Community acquired pneumonia due to methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is an uncommon but severe infection that affects predominantly young healthy subjects and confers a high mortality risk. Most community acquired MRSA isolates produce the Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) which plays a major role in their pathogenecity. In Greece, an increasing percentage of community acquired Staphylococci are methicillin resistant. A single clone, SCCmec IV ST80, has emerged as dominant, expanding in the community, infiltrating the hospital setting and replacing older clones. It is almost universally PVL positive while demonstrating significant rates of resistance to several first line antibiotics. As a country with intense population mobility due to tourism and immigration, the possible export of such problematic strains is worrisome. Review of eight published case reports of community acquired MRSA pneumonia in Greece display the dramatic morbidity and mortality associated with this infection and underline the need for early and appropriate antibiotic treatment as well as ICU support. Key-words: Staphylococcus aureus, Community acquired pneumonia, Methicillin resistant, Greece REVIEW ARTICLE Papanikolaou et al. Medical Research Archives vol 6 issue 7. July 2018 issue 7 Page 2 of 10 Copyright 2018 KEI Journals. All Rights Reserved http://journals.ke-i.org/index.php/mra
THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AS THE BASIS FOR A NEW QUALITY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

Annotation. The concept of sustainable growth emerged in response to challenges, threats and negative trends in the global economy. Instability of political processes, national macroeconomic imbalances, economic inequality, and social problems are key issues that require new approaches. In Ukraine, as in the rest of the world, a thorough study is required to correct the existing model of economic growth in order to more effectively address the problems of structural imbalances, social, gender, economic inequality and environmental issues. For the purpose of scientific analysis and formation of a holistic understanding of inclusiveness as a key priority creating the foundations for a new quality of economic growth in Ukraine the article analyzes the main directions of formation and implementation of the concept of sustainable development; identified key areas of economic growth in accordance with Global sustainable development Objectives; summarizes the stages of introduction and implementation of sustainable development Goals in the framework of the UN development Programme in Ukraine as a prerequisite for achieving the goals of inclusive development; the article substantiates the goal of sustainable development, which has the greatest potential for forming an inclusive society in Ukraine.
Cognitive Correlates of Anxiety: A Study on Attentional Bias for Mild/High Threat and Neurocognitive Functioning

The current study extended investigations on anxiety-related cognitive processes. There were two testing phases: an online study, and a laboratory session. Emotional attentional bias was assessed on both counts using an extended dot probe task. A neurocognitive test battery was administered in the laboratory session with the end goal of examining whether neurocognitive impairments would mediate the association between attentional bias and anxiety. Results showed attentional bias was associated with anxiety only when indexed based on sadness(mild threat) but not fear-related (high threat) scenes. However, this selective association was apparent only in online data. As further contraindication against pursuing mediation analyses, laboratory-based neurocognitive performance did not correlate with anxiety. Implications for the measurement of anxiety-related cognitive processes are discussed.
Dysphagia in patients with head and neck tumors

Nádory hlavy a krku, stejně tak jejich terapie, vedou k orofarygeální dysfagii (OFD) u poloviny pacientů. Možnost perorálního příjmu stravy a tekutin je pro onkologického pacienta velmi důležitá. Tíži postižení polykání lze ovlivnit již při plánování modality terapie. V současnosti je možné OFD objektivizovat a terapií polykání modulovat. V rámci kvality života je OFD vnímána jako významný společenský a sociální faktor. Hlavním aspektem diagnostiky a terapie dysfagie je bezpečnost perorálního příjmu bez rizik. Terapie OFD není možná bez multidisciplinárního přístupu zahrnujícího specializovanou péči klinického logopeda a fyzioterapeuta. Diagnosticko-terapeutické sledování pacientů je po onkologické léčbě vhodné po dobu 2–3 let od skončení onkologické terapie, obzvlášť při využití radioterapie. Klíčová slova: orofaryngeální dysfagie, objektivní vyšetření polykání, terapie polykání.
A study of DCT specimen in the verification of the influence of the geometric variation in the stress intensity factor

The objective of this work is to verify the influence of the stress intensity factor in the linear elastic fracture mechanics model. The model consists in a Disk-shaped Compact Tension specimen (DCT) of concrete material. The methodology considers a comparative study of an analytical approach from the literature and numerical simulations. These numerical simulations are performed in ANSYS Workbench program by the use of the Finite Element Method (FEM). The results show that the solutions obtained are satisfactory for the comparative study.
The Effect of Smartphone Usage at Bedtime and its Relationship with Insomnia and Academic Performance among Majmaah University Students

Introduction: Smartphone surely has become an indispensable technical companion for the humans, nowadays most of the routine activities are highly dependent upon using the smartphones, especially the educational activities. Smartphone owns most of our time due to fast and ease of access that it offers. Unfortunately, uncontrolled use of these devises may reflect passively on human and student’s health. Objective: The purpose of this study was to find out whether smartphone usage at bedtime effects the sleep quality and academic performance of Majmaah university students. Methodology: This analytical cross-sectional study was conducted among the students of Majmaah University, Saudi Arabia studying in the various colleges from February – April 2020. The data was collected by a self-prepared questionnaire from 373 participants using consecutive sampling method. Results: We found that 96.5% of the participants were using smartphones at bedtime, 45% of those using smartphones at bedtime had poor sleep quality, and the top purpose of using the smartphone was for social interaction, followed by study purpose, then the games, and finally for watching films. Also, 80% of those with a GPA below 2.5 were having difficulty in initiation the sleep, and 47.5% of those who had difficulty in initiation the sleep found that this difficulty is affecting their academic performance. Conclusion: Our study found that the usage of smartphone at bedtime is highly prevalent among the students of Majmaah university, Using the smartphone at bedtime has affected the sleep of the students and increased the chances of getting insomnia and poor sleep quality which is affecting their academic performance. This relationship is attributed to the blue light coming from smartphone primary as well as other factors such as thinking about what is going on in the social media or video games arena.
Differentiable and Robust Optimization Algorithms

Differentiable and Robust Optimization Algorithms Thomas Powers Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Les E. Atlas Electrical and Computer Engineering Imposing appropriate structure or constraints onto optimization problems is often the key to deriving guarantees or improving generalization of performance aspects like generalization or interpretability. The main contribution of this dissertation is developing algorithms that can leverage underlying submodular or sparse structure to do robust optimization: unfolded discrete and continuous optimization algorithms and robust submodular optimization. While deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to advance the state-of-the-art for many tasks in fields such as speech and audio processing, natural language processing, and computer vision over traditional statistical generative models, many of the most popular architectures are difficult to analyze and require large amounts of data to achieve such good performance. The choice between DNN and generative model need not be binary, however. Using a technique called deep unfolding, inference algorithms for generative models can be turned into DNNs and trained discriminatively. Such models can also leverage sparisty, submodularity, or other regularization frameworks while still being able to make use of domain knowledge integrated into the underlying model. Subset selection problems are important for many applications in machine learning such as feature and data selection, dictionary learning, compression, and sparse recovery. While these problems are generally NP-hard, if the objective function is submodular (or in some cases has submodular structure), a near-optimal solution can be found in polynomial-time. Deep learning and subset selection have overlap when sparse models are used. For DNNs and other continuous models, sparsity is typically induced via penalty function such as the `1 norm, whereas sparsity is induced via a hard cardinality constraint for subset selection algorithms. This dissertation explores algorithms around the intersection of subset selection and deep learning. Broadly, there are two sets of algorithms presented in this dissertation. In the first, algorithms are designed to approximately solve both submodular and non-submodular optimization problems. These algorithms are applied to sensor scheduling and placement problems. In the second, deep unfolding is used to turn inference algorithms into DNNs. These unfolded models have a number of advantages over conventional DNN models, and are shown to have competitive or improved performance on a variety of tasks, can have principled initializations, and tend to need less data compared to conventional network architectures.
Nasal Colonization of Pigs and Farm attendants by Staphylococcus aureus and Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Kebbi, Northwestern Nigeria

Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a leading cause of nosocomial, community and livestockassociated colonization and infection worldwide. This study aimed at investigating the nasal colonization of pigs and farm attendants by S. aureus and MRSA in Kebbi, North-Western Nigeria. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Kebbi Northwestern Nigeria using simple random sampling. A total of 212 nasal swabs were collected from two farms consisting of 100 samples each from pigs and 12 samples from farm attendants. A well-structured questionnaire was administered for risk factor analysis. Nasal swabs were examined using routine bacteriological culture and identification. Presumptive MRSA was confirmed by PCR assay. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) profiles of MRSA isolates were evaluated using the disk diffusion method. Among the 212 samples examined, 19.4 % (41/212) of pigs tested positive for MRSA and 1.4% (3/212) of farm attendants were MRSA positive. All the isolates were susceptible to vancomycin, with an AMR index ˃0.3. The findings of this study indicated nasal colonization of pigs and humans by S. aureus and MRSA, thus suggesting that individuals in close contact with animals are at risk of being colonized.
Breast Cancer Screening Program in Lithuania: Trends in Breast Cancer Mortality Before and During the Introduction of the Mammography Screening Program

Abstract. Background. Breast cancer is the most frequent oncological disease as well as the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide. Decline in mortality in economically strong countries is observed. This decline is mostly related to early diagnosis (an improvement in breast cancer awareness and the mammography screening program (MSP)) and a more effective treatment. In the end of 2005, MSP started in Lithuania. The main aim of this article is to evaluate the breast cancer mortality during 22 years in Lithuania, as well as changes before the start of the MSP and during its implementation, in order to assess the influence of the MSP on mortality. Materials and methods. Analysis is based on data from the population-based Lithuanian Cancer Registry. Analysis of changes in mortality includes the period from 1998 to 2019. Age standardized mortality rates are calculated for assessment of changes. Joinpoint regression analysis is used. Results. Applying the segmental regression model, it was found that during the study period mortality was statistically significantly decreasing by -1.1% each year. Mortality among women under the age of 50 decreased both before and during the implementation of MSP. Mortality in the target population also was already decreasing until the implementation of the program, but a significant reduction in mortality was observed in this group since 2006. Conclusions. Overall breast cancer mortality is decreasing in Lithuania. After the implementation of MSP the largest reduction in mortality was observed in the target population, however, it is not as pronounced as it could be with the well-organized MSP.
10-15 Shin.fm

Riboflavin is a water-soluble vitamin, which serves as a precursor to flavin mononucleotide and flavin adenine dinucleotide. This study aimed to develop a simple and rapid liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis for the quantification of riboflavin in the Beagle dog plasma. This method utilized simple protein precipitation with acetonitrile and 13C4, 15N2-riboflavin was used as an internal standard (IS). For chromatographic separation, a hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) column was used with gradient elution. The mobile phase consisted of 0.1% (v/v) aqueous formic acid with 10 mM ammonium formate and acetonitrile with 0.1% (v/v) formic acid. Since riboflavin is an endogenous compound, 4% bovine serum albumin in phosphate buffered saline was used as a surrogate matrix to prepare the calibration curve. The quantification limit for riboflavin in the Beagle dog plasma was 5 ng/mL. The method was fully validated for its specificity, sensitivity, accuracy and precision, recovery, and stability according to the US FDA guidance. The developed LCMS/MS method may be useful for the in vivo pharmacokinetic studies of riboflavin.
Size Dependent Lymphatic Short Term Clearance of Amosite Fibres in the Lung

Abstract The appearance of neutron activated amosite fibres in lymph from right lymph duct and thoracic duct was measured in dogs following administration by intrabronchial instillation. Transfer was quantified using the associated radioactivity and in addition samples of lymph and of thoracic lymph nodes were examined by SEM 24 hours after administration. This showed that there was a fast translocation of fibres from the airspaces of the lung to the lymph nodes and even into postnodal lymph. Analysis of the fibres collected in lymph showed that both the structures of the peripheral lung and the lymph node itself act like size selective filters, permitting only the fine fibre fraction to penetrate. Fibres below about 9 μm in length and below about 0.5 μm in diameter can be cleared into the postnodal lymph and thus can reach any organ of the body. A model of size dependent fibrous particle clearance in the lung is described incorporating lymphatic as well as other pathways.
Evaluating the Use of Flowchart-based RAPTOR Programming in CS0

The Introduction to Computer Science, or CS0, course can be challenging to teach effectively. The purposes and pedagogical methods used in this course vary significantly. At Loras, it is a required foundational course for Computer Science and Management Information Systems majors, as well as a requirement for many majors in the Business program. This paper looks at enhancing students’ learning experience by analyzing different pedagogical methods and challenges in teaching this course. The primary focus of this study involves comparing the teaching of a flowchart-based programming environment (RAPTOR) with teaching general problem-solving techniques without using specific programming concepts or languages. The results suggest that using flowchart-based programming can be beneficial to students’ problem-solving abilities and their ability to learn basic spreadsheet and database concepts with Microsoft Office.