Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Osteoarthritis Knee & Low Level Laser Therapy-Evidence from Northeast India

Although joint pain can be controlled with various modalities which includes the use of acetaminophen, NSAIDs and corticosteroid injections. It has been found that LLLT is an effective non invasive therapy to control inflammation and tissue degeneration and thus to relieve pain with subsequent quality of life improvement in various inflammatory & painful joint problems. Material & Methods: A retrospective analysis was done from the data on osteoarthritis knee patients (n=30) with chronic knee pain, treated with low level laser therapy applied at the knee joint line area over medial & lateral tibiofemoral condyles region. The various parameters like NRS; daily activities, work & leisure, anxiety & depression, social interaction (4 components of DALLAS pain questionnaire as found relevant for these patients to assess quality of life) were studied and analysed using appropriate statistical tools. Results: The majority patients were female (n=17) as against males (n=13). The paired t test revealed that there was significant difference in NRS score before and after laser therapy. The paired t test revealed that there was significant difference with positive improvement in daily activities, work & leisure, Anxiety & depression and social interaction scores before and after laser therapy. Conclusion: LLLT like Helium Neon (He-Le) laser has the potential to be used with efficacy in patients of chronic knee pain due to osteoarthritis irrespective of age and sex, especially in Kellgren lawrence OA grade 1, 2 & 3.
Comparing Objective Functions for Segmentation and Detection of Microaneurysms in Retinal Images

Retinal microaneurysms (MAs) are the earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy (DR) which is the leading cause of blindness among the working aged population in the western world. Detection of MAs present a particular challenge as MA pixels account for less than 0.5% of the retinal image. In deep neural networks the learning process can be adversely aﬀected by imbalance which introduces a bias towards the most well represented class. Recently, a number of objective functions have been proposed as alternatives to the standard Crossen-tropy (CE) loss in eﬀorts to combat this problem. In this work we investigate the inﬂuence of the network objective during optimization by comparing Residual U-nets trained for segmentation of MAs in retinal images using six diﬀerent objective functions; weighted and unweighted CE, Dice loss, weighted and unweighted Focal loss and Focal Tversky loss. We also perform test with the CE objective using a more complex model. Three networks with diﬀerent seeds are trained for each objective function using optimized hyper-parameter settings on a dataset of 382 images with pixel level annotations for MAs. Instance level MA detection performance is evaluated with the average free response receiver operator characteristic (FROC) score calculated as the mean sensitivity at seven average false positives per image thresholds on 80 test images. The image level MA detection performance and detection of low levels of DR is evaluated with bootstrapped AUC scores on the same images and a separate test set of 1287 images. Signiﬁcance test for image level detection accuracy ( α = 0.05) is performed using Cochran’s Q and McNemar’s test. Segmentation performance is evaluated with the average pixel precision (AP) score. For instance level detection and pixel segmentation we perform repeated measures ANOVA with Post-Hoc tests. Results: Losses based on the CE index perform signiﬁcantly better than the Dice and Focal Tversky loss for instance level detection and pixel segmentation. The highest FROC score of 0.5448 ( ± 0.0096) and AP of 0.4888 ( ± 0.0196) is achieved using weighted CE. For all objectives excluding the Focal Tversky loss (AUC = 0.5) there is no signiﬁcant diﬀerence for image level detection accuracy on the 80 image test set. The highest AUC of 0.993 (95% CI: 0.980 - 1.0) is achieved using the Focal loss. For detection of mild DR on the set of 1287 images there is a signiﬁcant diﬀerence between model objectives ( p = 2 . 87 e − 12 ). An AUC of 0.730 (95% CI: 0.683 - 0.745 is achieved using the complex model with CE. Using the Focal Tversky objective we fail to detect any MAs on both instance and image level. Conclusion: Our results suggest that it is important to benchmark new losses against the CE and Focal loss functions, as we achieve similar or better results in our test using these objectives.
The Influence of Non-Monetary Factors on Employee’s Satisfaction and Retention in Nigeria Organisations

Worldwide, retention of skilled employees has been of serious concern to managers in the face of ever increasing high rate of employee turnover. Excessively high and low turnover rates, both have a negative consequence on the success and productivity of the sector. The focus of the study is to investigate the influence of non-monetary factors on employee‟s satisfaction and retention in Nigeria organizations. A survey of 60 fulltime employees selected through stratified sampling techniques in Edo and Taraba state reveals that age of the firm, autonomy in work place; training, internal career opportunity, reward and recognition have positive significant relationship with employee‟s retention. However, the study recommends that organizations should emphasize on the extrinsic factors like attractive salary package and also should give additional benefit for the good performances of the employees. Finally, organizations should adopt adequate and competitive monetary policy strategies that will discourage employee turnover.
Universal scaling law for COVID-19 propagation in urban centers

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a high demand for Susceptible-Infective-Recovered (SIR) models to adjust and predict the number of cases in urban areas. Forecasting, however, is a difficult task, because the change in people’s behavior reflects in a continuous change in the parameters of the model. An important question is what we can use from one city to another; if what happened in Madrid could have been applied to New York and then, if what we have learned from this city would be useful for São Paulo. To answer this question, we present an analysis of the transmission rate of COVID-19 as a function of population density and population size for US counties, cities of Brazil, German, and Portugal. Contrary to the common hypothesis in epidemics modeling, we observe a higher disease transmissibility for higher city’s population density/size –with the latter showing more predicting power. We present a contact rate scaling theory that explain the results, predicting that the basic reproductive number R0 of epidemics scales as the logarithm of the city size.
Extraskeletal Myxoid Chondrosarcoma of Leg in A 35 Years Old Female: Report of A Rare Malignant Tumor of Uncertain Differentiation

Extraskeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma is a rare malignant soft tissue tumor of uncertain differentiation, constituting less than 3% of all soft tissue sarcomas. This low grade malignant tumor with high recurrence and metastatic potential, occurs predominantly in proximal extremities and limb girdles of males with thigh being the most common location. Here we present a case in a 35 years old female, who presented with pain and large swelling of around 8cm in lateral side of left leg since five months. Wide local excision of the tumor was done and on histopathology a diagnosis of Extraskeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma was rendered. On Immunohistochemistry the tumor cells showed reactivity for Vimentin, S100 and NSE and was non-reactive for CK. Thus our histopathological diagnosis was reconfirmed by immunohistochemistry. Despite high incidence of local recurrence and metastasis, ESMC has an excellent overall survival rate.
The Role of Reproductive Assurance in the Arctic: a Comparative Study of a Homostylous and Distylous Species Pair

ABSTRACT Pollinator-dependent reproductive systems are predicted to be disadvantageous in the Arctic due to the unreliability of pollinator services. Observations in northwestern Alaska appear to support this prediction, where the common Primula eximia possesses reproductive assurance through homostyly and is outpacing the reproduction of its rare, distylous, and pollinator-dependent congener, P. tschuktschorum. We examined the reproductive ecology of these two taxa to determine if P. tschuktschorum is fully distylous with self and intramorph incompatibility, if P. eximia is homostylous with an advantage in fecundity over the rare species, and if there are reproductive interactions between the species. Our results indicate that while P. tschuktschorum is morphologically distylous, it displays only weak incompatibility reactions, but nonetheless has significant reproductive limitations relative to the fecundity of P. eximia, especially in the face of herbivory, which reduces the pool of compatible mates. Some hybridization is occurring between the species. These results support previous suggestions that reproductive assurance may be an important factor limiting the distribution of distyly where pollinator service is unreliable. Homostylous species are likely to be more successful and outcompete distylous progenitors, and selection pressures for reproductive assurance may lessen strong self and intramorph incompatibility reactions in distylous species.
On the errors of a predictor which is calibrated to its random environment

Let X and X be two binary Markov chains that are randomly drawn according to a stationary Markov environment. We are interested in the following question: given X, how non-random can the sequence of errors that are made when predicting X be and how is it influenced by the complexity of a predictor? To answer this, we consider a predictor which is ‘calibrated’ to the environment based on a sample X, that is, it minimizes an upper bound (based on X) on the probability of making a prediction error. We define a test of randomness for the sequence of errors made by this predictor in predicting the other sample X. The test is based on the difference between the average number of errors made on X and on X. We derive a bound on the possible range of this difference and show how the complexity of a predictor influences how atypically random the error sequence can be.
Fast hash-based additive accumulators

Cryptographic accumulators allow to succinctly represent a large set of values by providing a membership witness that can be used to verify that the element was indeed part of a committed set. Accu-mulators could be used in a public blockchain to create accountable protocols, in which a party could prove to a smart contract that certain events have happened without having to store an expensive audit log. In this work we introduce the ﬁrst append-only hash-based ac-cumulators with sub-logarithmic insertion cost and poly-logarithmic witness size.
PCR Detection of Herpes Simplex -2 Virus in Human Placenta in Patients with Spontaneous Abortion

Background: HSV-2 is thought to account the majority of cases of neonatal herpes, which may cause severe complications in infected newborns. Objective: This study was carried out to investigate the rate of HSV-2 infection in placental tissue of women with spontaneous abortion by conventional polymerase chain reaction technique (PCR). Materials and methods: Placental tissue samples were collected from 100 pregnant women with spontaneous abortion. Twenty five gram of the placental tissue was homogenized, the homogenate centrifuged for about 15 min. at 5000 rpm and (2-8) °C. The supernatant used for DNA extraction using DNA isolation kit ((DNA-sorb-B (Sacace)/ Italy) Kit). Results: The results showed that, this gene was present in 19 (19%) out of 100 placental tissue PCR product of this gene was 120 bp, the highest rate was observed in age group (30-39) years. The highest fetal losses in studied group were occurred in the first trimester, there was a statistical significant (P<0.006) association between number of pregnancy compared to infection with HSV-2 and highly significant differences (P<0.001) with pregnancy outcome. Conclusions: Herpes Simplex -2 Virus may play a significant role in pregnancy loss and can be delivery outcome-related factor. Its detection by sensitive molecular techniques would allow prompt therapeutic intervention in order to increase the possibility of a successful future pregnancy.
Evaluation of the Effect of Mycotoxins in Naturally Contaminated Feed on the Efficacy of Preventive Vaccine against Coccidiosis in Broiler Chickens

Department of poultry diseases, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt Department of Pathology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Kafr el-sheikh University, Egypt *Corresponding author’s Email: anwaar.elnabarawy@gmail.com; ORCID: 0000-0003-1618-6842 Received: 18 Feb. 2020 Accepted: 29 Mar. 2020 ABSTRACT
Effects of Chitosan and Aloe Vera Gel Coatings on the Preservation Characteristics of Cucumber Samples

This study evaluated the effect of Chitosan and Aloe vera gel coatings on the preservation of selected cucumber samples. Chitosan was produced from orange-crab shells with 76% degree of deacetylation while homogenized Aloe vera gel extracted from the plants was thermally pre-treated at 70 °C for 30 minutes. Coatings were applied using dipping techniques and air-dried before storage in discrete plots under ambient conditions. The study estimated physicochemical, nutritional and microbiological qualities of the coated and uncoated samples for a period of 4 weeks using standard procedures. Chitosan and Aloe vera gel had antimicrobial effect on the cucumber samples at week three while Chitosan- Aloe vera mix had more antimicrobial effect on the cucumber samples at week four of storage period. Eight bacterial and seven fungal isolates were obtained from the chitosan and Aloe vera coatings on the cucumber samples namely Aeromonas, Bacillus, Pseudomonas, Escherichia, Proteus, Klebsiella, Serratia, Enterobacter, Aspergillus, Penicillium, Fusarium, Rhizopus and, Saccharomyces; with Bacillus subtilis and Aspergillus niger as most occurring bacterial and fungal species respectively. Chitosan, Aloe vera and Chitosan-aloe vera mix coated samples had moisture content, protein content and carbohydrate retention of 95.09±0.01 %, 1.31±0.09 % and 0.46±0.14 %; 94.67±0.14 %, 0.65±0.03 % and 1.61±0.44 % ; 93.76±0.09 %, 1.27±0.66 %, and 0.69±0.51 % respectively. It can be concluded that Chitosan and Aloe vera gel coatings are effective in preservation of cucumbers with significant retention of nutrients and reduction in microbial contamination.
Online MPI Process Mapping for Coordinating Locality and Memory Congestion on NUMA Systems

Mapping MPI processes to processor cores, called process mapping, is crucial to achieving the scalable performance on multi-core processors. By analyzing the communication behavior among MPI processes, process mapping can improve the communication locality, and thus reduce the overall communication cost. However, on modern non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems, the memory congestion problem could degrade performance more severely than the locality problem because heavy congestion on shared caches and memory controllers could cause long latencies. Most of the existing work focus only on improving the locality or rely on offline profiling to analyze the communication behavior. We propose a process mapping method that dynamically performs the process mapping for adapting to communication behaviors while coordinating the locality and memory congestion. Our method works online during the execution of an MPI application. It does not require modifications to the application, previous knowledge of the communication behavior, or changes to the hardware and operating system. Experimental results show that our method can achieve performance and energy efficiency close to the best static mapping method with low overhead to the application execution. In experiments with the NAS parallel benchmarks on a NUMA system, the performance and total energy improvements are up to 34% (18.5% on average) and 28.9% (13.6% on average), respectively. In experiments with two GROMACS applications on a larger NUMA system, the average improvements in performance and total energy consumption are 21.6% and 12.6%, respectively.
Photobiomodulator therapy in the glycemic stabilization of diabetes mellitus carrier type 2 patient

Odontologist; Research Coordinator of Oncology Hospital Ribeirão Preto;Specialist in Hospital Dentistry; Master's Degree in Intensive Care by IMBES, Brazil Physiotherapist; Specialist in Traditional Chinese Medicine; Master's degree in Biophotonics by Uninove, Brazil 3Doctor, Oncologist at Cancer Hospital of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil Pediatric Endocrinologist at Hospital São Lucas in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
Color Image Optimization of Face for an Ocular Inspection

요 약 고령화 및 저출산 사회가 대두되면서 예방을 통해 건강을 지키고자 하는 노력이 증가되고 있으며, 비 침습, 무자각의 한방 진단 기술에 대한 관심이 증대되고 있다. 그러나, 기존의 한방 진단 분야에서 가 지고 있는 임상의의 직관에 의한 진단 결과의 시각화에 따른 문제를 해결하지 않고서는 신뢰도를 얻 을 수 없다. 따라서, 본 논문에서는 한방의 진단 분야 중 가장 중요한 망진(望診) 분야의 시각화, 객관 화를 위해 입력 영상의 분석을 위한 최적화에 관한 연구를 하고자 한다. 이를 위해 입력 영상에 대한 색상 보정과 반사 보정을 통해 보다 정확한 색상값을 구하기 위한 연구를 진행한다. 또한, 컬러 영상 의 최적화를 통한 보정 후의 결과 영상을 이용하여 망진에 필요한 얼굴 영역 추출을 나타내었다. 끝으 로 실험을 통해 보정 전/후의 결과를 비교 평가하였다.
1.55 Å-resolution structure of ent-copalyl diphosphate synthase and exploration of general acid function by site-directed mutagenesis

Background—The diterpene cyclase ent-copalyl diphosphate synthase (CPS) catalyzes the first committed step in the biosynthesis of gibberellins. The previously reported 2.25 Å resolution crystal structure of CPS complexed with (S)-15-aza-14,15-dihydrogeranylgeranyl thiolodiphosphate (1) established the αβγ domain architecture, but ambiguities regarding substrate analog binding remained. Method—Use of crystallization additives yielded CPS crystals diffracting to 1.55 Å resolution. Additionally, active site residues that hydrogen bond with D379, either directly or through hydrogen bonded water molecules, were probed by mutagenesis. Results—This work clarifies structure-function relationships that were ambiguous in the lower resolution structure. Well-defined positions for the diphosphate group and tertiary ammonium cation of 1 as well as extensive solvent structure, are observed. Conclusions—Two channels involving hydrogen bonded solvent and protein residues lead to the active site, forming hydrogen bonded "proton wires" that link general acid D379 with bulk solvent. These proton wires may facilitate proton transfer with the general acid during catalysis. Activity measurements made with mutant enzymes indicate that N425, which donates a hydrogen bond directly to D379, and T421, which hydrogen bonds with D379 through an intervening solvent molecule, help orient D379 for catalysis. Residues involved in hydrogen bonds with the proton wire, R340 and D503, are also important. Finally, conserved residue E211, which is located near the diphosphate group of 1 is proposed to be a ligand to Mg2+ required for optimal catalytic activity. General Significance—This work establishes structure-function relationships for class II terpenoid cyclases.
What Have We Learned About Fatty Acid Digestibility in Dairy Cattle?

Fats may be supplemented to cows to increase energy density of the diet, improve milk components, improve milk yield, and/or maintain or gain body condition. In order for a fat supplement to be able to accomplish all of those things in a dairy cow, the fat has to be digested. There is increased recognition that individual fatty acids (FA) have different bioactive properties, and not all FA or fat supplements are going to respond similarly in a cow. For instance, some FA more often increase milk fat production while others are a better FA to use for gaining body condition. A considerable amount of research has been conducted that increases our understanding of individual FA digestibility because of the specific roles that those FA play in the dairy cow. Understanding what factors impact FA digestibility will allow models to more accurately predict the energy and specific outcomes from fats. Currently, most ration balancing software treats FA as energy sources but does not necessarily discount their energy value based on differences in FA composition and differences in FA digestibility. We will discuss some of the fundamental information regarding FA digestibility as well as more recent research studies reporting individual FA digestibility. Work in this area has increased our understanding of how individual FA digestibility differs and also how individual FA interact with one another to impact digestibility.
ASSESSING TEACHER SELF-EFFICACY AND JOB SATISFACTION: MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the self-efficacy and job satisfaction of middle school teachers. Teaching profession is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. Schools have experienced having shortages of quality teachers with strong skills in the areas of student engagement, instructional practices, and classroom management. The participants of the study included 208 middle school teachers in USA. The study employed a non-random sampling design. The data were collected by the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS). The TSES included 24 items with three subscales including efficacy in student engagement, efficacy in instructional strategies, and efficacy in classroom management. The JSS included 36 items with 9 subscales including pay, promotion, supervision, fringe benefits, contingent rewards, operating, coworkers, nature of work, and communication. The study results indicated non-significant and negative correlation between teacher self-efficacy and job satisfaction.
Locality Analysis for Characterizing Applications Based on Sparse Matrices

- We propose an adaptability judging method applied to sparse matrices and the target cache memory using two metrics based on spatial locality and temporal locality. For indirect access sequences of sparse matrix-vector multiplications, one metric is the number of valid data within a cache line, and another metric is average reference interval. We also develop a set of analysis tools to generate the above performance metrics, histograms of reference intervals and theoretical cache hit rates. As an experimental result, a cache memory behavior which was difficult to explain from the view point of spatial locality becomes explicable from that of temporal locality. Outputs of the tool show that return on investment is too thin to increase the cache memory capacity unless all the elements of a column vector with the same size as the number of columns of the sparse matrix are stored in the cache memory.
Descriptions of Immature Stages of Three Species of Laccocorinae (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Naucoridae) from India

ABSTRACT Adults and first through fifth instars of three species of Naucoridae in the subfamily Laccocorinae were collected from localities in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states in southern India. Specifically, Heleocoris indicus (Montandon) and Heleocoris vicinus (Montandon) were collected from the vegetated margins of streams that contained no congeners. Pogonocaudina indica Sites & Zettel was collected from vertical rock surfaces at the type locality. All instars of these three species are described here. First instars of both species of Heleocoris are immaculate, whereas subsequent instars are densely punctate. The first instar of P. indica has pronounced dorsal tubercles with stout spines, whereas subsequent instars lack these structures. All instars of P. indica have a deep terminal cleft and dense fringe of hairs on the perimeter of the posterior abdominal segments. Second through fifth instars of these three species can be distinguished based on relative length of the mesonotal wing pad compared with the exposed part of the metanotal lateral margin.