Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FDG PET in primary effusion lymphoma (PEL) of the pericardium.

Abstract: We present the FDG PET images of a 49-year-old male AIDS patient with a history of Kaposi sarcoma who presented with increasing shortness of breath. The computed tomography (CT) scan of the chest showed a massive pericardial effusion, which was tapped. There was no other clinical or radiologic evidence (otherwise negative CT scan of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis) of lymphoma. A whole-body PET scan was performed after the intravenous administration of 11.0 mCi of F-18 FDG. The images showed physiological uptake in the myocardium, a photopenic defect around the heart corresponding to the pericardial effusion, lined by a hypermetabolic pericardium, consistent with neoplastic involvement. There was no other evidence of active neoplastic disease. Histopathologic analysis of the pericardial fluid showed findings characteristic of primary effusion lymphoma (PEL) and chemotherapy was started.
Using MCDA to evaluate the performance of the logistics process in public hospitals: the case of a Brazilian teaching hospital

The increasing complexity of hospital management indicates a greater need for scientific instruments that underlie the performance evaluations of the organizational processes in this sector. From this perspective, this work evaluates the performance of the main activities of the internal logistics process of a Brazilian public teaching hospital's supply chain. To this end, a multicriteria decision analysis approach is used as an instrument of intervention. The multicriteria model constructed serves as a decision support system to aid decision makers, allowing managers to measure logistics performance in the hospital context and to visualize the performance profile of the main logistics activities, enabling the identification of activities requiring greater attention and improvement.
Road markings feature extraction from omni-directional image

Road markings are important information of transport systems for drivers or intelligent vehicle. Efficient road markings feature extraction is pre-requisite to road markings detection, recognition and visual localization. However, most of previous lane markings feature extractors are operating on conventional images, the feature extraction methods for omnidirectional images are rarely considered in road markings detection research. In this paper, three road markings feature extractors for omni-directional images are presented based on different characteristics of road markings. Those lane markings feature extractors are evaluated on real world panoramic image dataset. Experimental results show the feature extractor combing the edge and intensity distribution perform best.
Improving the Success of Continuous Auditing Projects with a Comprehensive Implementation Framework

The major aim of this paper is to create awareness of the demand for computer-assisted audit solutions within the European research community. The cause of this demand is twofold; on the one hand, regulatory pressure is increasing through both the reform of the audit sector in the European Union regarding mandatory audit firm rotation and tightened independence requirements. On the other hand, the speed and volume of data processing requires fast and qualitative audit results. These circumstances lead to the need to shift audit processes from traditional sample selection based on historical data to permanent monitoring and assurance of accounting-relevant processes and data– Continuous Auditing (CA). However, the implementation of CA systems is a recognized challenge for researchers and practitioners. Through the review of relevant literature regarding the issues and barriers of CA projects, sixteen critical success factors (CSFs) of CA were explored. These CSFs were condensed into one framework considering three different levels of business diffusion (strategy, processes, and systems) as well as stakeholders of CA projects (enterprise, project management, audit, and external environment). In terms of the conceptual level of the proposed framework, the authors of this paper chose a fictitious scenario and conducted an informed argument to evaluate the framework.
Do Firms Replenish Executives' Incentives after Equity Sales?

After selling firm equity, executives' incentives to maximize shareholder value may decrease. How do boards respond? Theory shows boards can restore executives' incentives by shifting subsequent pay from cash toward equity. Unobservable firm-level changes that cause executives to sell equity and simultaneously reduce their need for incentives may bias estimates. I therefore compare selling and non-selling executives at the same firm. I find that boards replenish only 7% of incentives after sales, allowing some executives to accumulate substantially fewer incentives than others. I show that boards may instead focus on benchmarking annual equity grants to those of peer firms.
A new age architecture and streamlined energy sensor routing scheme using indigenously developed green energy saving algorithm

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is usually considered as a large-scale network with thousands of tiny sensors and deployed in hostile environment for military application to gather the sensitive data from the field. The crucial objective of WSNs routing protocol is to gather the sensed information in energy efficient way since the wireless sensor node is resource constrained node. The power consumption can be reduced by means of using the concept of area sectorization and green technology where we can use low power sensor node and base station. The proposed model uses originating green routing protocols which illustrate to be efficient where we consider energy efficiency as the major constraint. The proposed technique is a source of the sectorization concept where the sector partition can be done by means of using different prototype by using cell splitting concept like mobile communication to achieve connectivity as well as for energy efficient routing. The cell sectorization is a new concept in wireless sensor network which gives the limited routing information to resource constrained sensor nodes to efficiency of memory and energy consumption. In this paper, a green energy algorithm is presented.
Anthrax toxin lethal factor contains a zinc metalloprotease consensus sequence which is required for lethal toxin activity

Comparison of the anthrax toxin lethal factor (LF) amino acid sequence with sequences in the Swiss protein database revealed short regions of similarity with the consensus zinc‐binding site, HEXXH, that is characteristic of metalloproteases. Several protease inhibitors, including bestatin and captopril, prevented intoxication of macrophages by lethal toxin. LF was fully inactivated by site‐directed mutagenesis that substituted Ala for either of the residues (H‐686 and H‐690) implicated in zinc binding. Similarly, LF was inactivated by substitution of Cys for E‐687, which is thought to be an essential part of the catalytic site. In contrast, replacement of E‐720 and E‐721 with Ala had no effect on LF activity. LF bound 65Zn both in solution and on protein blots. The 65Zn binding was reduced for several of the LF mutants. These data suggest that anthrax toxin LF is a zinc metallopeptidase, the catalytic function of which is responsible for the lethal activity observed in cultured cells and in animals.
A Novel OpenFlow-Based DDoS Flooding Attack Detection and Response Mechanism in Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking SDN and OpenFlow have brought a promising architecture for the future networks. However, there are still a lot of security challenges to SDN. To protect SDN from the Distributed denial-of-service DDoS flooding attack, this paper extends the flow entry counters and adds a mark action of OpenFlow, then proposes an entropy-based distributed attack detection model, a novel IP traceback and source filtering response mechanism in SDN with OpenFlow-based Deterministic Packet Marking. It achieves detecting the attack at the destination and filtering the malicious traffic at the source and can be easily implemented in SDN controller program, software or programmable switch, such as Open vSwitch and NetFPGA. The experimental results show that this scheme can detect the attack quickly, achieve a high detection accuracy with a low false positive rate, shield the victim from attack traffic and also avoid the attacker consuming resource and bandwidth on the intermediate links.
Radiotherapy enhancement with gold nanoparticles

Gold is an excellent absorber of X‐rays. If tumours could be loaded with gold, this would lead to a higher dose to the cancerous tissue compared with the dose received by normal tissue during a radiotherapy treatment. Calculations indicate that this dose enhancement can be significant, even 200% or greater. In this paper, the physical and biological parameters affecting this enhancement are discussed. Gold nanoparticles have shown therapeutic efficacy in animal trials and these results are reviewed. Some 86% long‐term (>1 year) cures of EMT‐6 mouse mammary subcutaneous tumours was achieved with an intravenous injection of gold nanoparticles before irradiation with 250‐kVp photons, whereas only 20% were cured with radiation alone. The clinical potential of this approach is also discussed.
Beyond Profiling: Scaling Profiling Data Usage to Multiple Applications

Profiling techniques are used extensively at different parts of the computing stack to achieve many goals. One major goal is to make a piece of software execute more efficiently on a specific hardware platform, where efficiency spans criteria such as power, performance, resource requirements, etc. Researchers, both in academia and industry, have introduced many techniques to gather, and make use of, profiling data. However, one thing remains unchanged: making application A run more efficiently on machine 1. In this paper, we extend this criteria by asking: can profiling information of application A on machine 1 be used to make application B run more efficiently on machine 1? If so, then this means as machine 1 continues to execute more applications, it becomes better and more efficient. We present a generalized method for using profiling information gathered from the execution of programs from a limited corpus of applications to improve the performance of software from outside our corpus. As a proof of concept, we apply our technique to the specific problem of selecting the most efficient last-level-cache with which to execute an application. We were able to turn off an average of 19% of last-level-cache blocks for selected programs from PARSEC benchmark suite and only saw an average 2.8% increase in the rate of last-level cache misses.
Time-Indexed Formulations and the Total Weighted Tardiness Problem

Asolution approach based on the column-generation technique is presented for solving a time-indexed formulation of the total weighted tardiness problem. An acceleration strategy based on a decomposition of the time horizon into subperiods, where each subperiod is associated with a subproblem of the column-generation approach, is used to solve the linear relaxation. Branching strategies and dominance rules are also applied to find the optimal integer solution. Using this new approach, it is possible to solve to optimality 117 out of 125 open problems of the OR-Library.
Theoretical aspects to the finnish credit cycle

The paper discusses the possibility that the workings of the financial system contributed the boom-bust cycle in the Finnish credit market since the mid-1980s.We begin with a review of the most prominent theoretical arguments about the role of "financial factors". Also the main findings of a vast empirical literature are summed up.This is followed by a description of the salient features of the Finnish credit cycle and the associated banking crisis.The evolution of credit stocks and interest rates are then analyzed on a relatively high level of aggregation from the perspective of the theoretical arguments discussed.The main conclusions are: First, changes in the balance sheets of firms and households very likely contributed to both the rapid growth of credit in the late 1980s and its subsequent steep contraction.Second, the observations are also consistent with the conjecture that supply of bank credit very likely increased in the late 1980s and contracted in the early 1990 relative to other sources of credit.Third, some differences observed in the behaviour of different bank groups suggest that moral hazard related to underpriced bank liabilities may have contributed to the growth of lending in the boom period, and problems with capital adequacy may have constrained bank lending in the early 1990s.Stylized facts are consistent with these conjectures.However, to reliably infer about these moral hazard and credit crunch hypotheses, in-depth analysis of bank behaviour with micro data is required. Similarily, ascertaining the role of borrower balance sheets requires analysis of borrowers of different characteristics. Keywords: credit cycle, financial factors, lending policies, moral hazard, credit crunch
Transgenic pig expressing the enhanced green fluorescent protein produced by nuclear transfer using colchicine‐treated fibroblasts as donor cells

Fetal‐derived fibroblast cells were transduced with replication defective vectors containing the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). The transgenic cells were treated with colchicine, which theoretically would synchronize the cells into G2/M stage, and then used as donor nuclei for nuclear transfer. The donor cells were transferred into the perivitalline space of enucleated in vitro matured porcine oocytes, and fused and activated with electrical pulses. A total of 8.3% and 28.6% of reconstructed oocytes showed nuclear envelope breakdown and premature chromosome condensation 0.5 and 2 hr after activation, respectively. Percentage of pronuclear formation was 62.5, 12 hr after activation. Most (91.4%) of the 1‐cell embryos with pronuclei did not extrude a polar body. Most (77.2%) embryos on day 5 were diploid. Within 2 hr after fusion, strong fluorescence was detectable in most reconstructed oocytes (92.3%). The fluorescence in all NT embryos became weak 15 hr after fusion and disappeared when culture to 48 hr. But from day 3, cleaved embryos at the 2‐ to 4‐cell stage started to express EGFP again. On day 7, 85.8% of cleaved embryos expressed EGFP. A total of 9.4% of reconstructed embryos developed to blastocyst stage and 71.5% of the blastoctysts expressed EGFP. After 200 reconstructed 1‐cell stage embryos were transferred into four surrogate gilts, three recipients were found to be pregnant. One of them maintained to term and delivered a healthy transgenic piglet expressing EGFP. Our data suggest that the combination of transduction of somatic cells by a replication defective vector with the nuclear transfer of colchicine‐treated donors is an alternative to produce transgenic pigs. Furthermore, the tissues expressing EGFP from descendents of this pig may be very useful in future studies using pigs that require genetically marked cells. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 62: 300–306, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Frequency-reconfigurable wideband antenna with dual-notch response for cognitive radios application

A frequency-reconfigurable wideband antenna with dual-notch response for cognitive radios (CRs) application is presented. By placing stub-loaded resonators beside the feed line, two notched bands are generated. The central frequency of one notched band can be controlled by loading varactors while the other notched band remains constant. The biasing circuits for the varactors consist of Bias T and high-impedance resistors. To validate the proposed concept, an experimental antenna is designed, fabricated and measured. The simulated results including return losses and radiation characteristics as well as some measured results are presented, declaring that the proposed antennas have good impedance matching performance and radiation pattern properties.
What parents find important in the support of a child with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities.

BACKGROUND The importance of a partnership between parents and professionals in the support of children with disabilities is widely acknowledged and is one of the key elements of 'family-centred care'. To what extent family-centred principles are also applied to the support of persons with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) is not yet known. AIM The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine what parents with a child with PIMD find important in the support of their child. In addition, we examined which child or parent characteristics influence these parental opinions. METHOD In total, 100 parents completed an adapted version of the Measure of Processes of Care. Mean unweighted and weighted scale scores were computed. Non-parametric tests were used to examine differences in ratings due to child (gender, age, type and number of additional disabilities, type of services used and duration of service use) and parent characteristics (gender, involvement with support and educational level). RESULTS Parents rated situations related to 'Respectful and Supportive Care' and 'Enabling and Partnership' with averages of 7.07 and 6.87 respectively on a scale from 1 to 10. They were generally satisfied with the services provided, expressed in a mean score of 6.88 overall. The age of the child significantly affected the scores for 'Providing Specific Information about the Child'. Parents of children in the '6-12 years' age group gave significantly higher scores on this scale than did parents of children in the '≥17 years' age group (U = 288, r = -0.34). CONCLUSION This study shows that parents with children with PIMD find family-centred principles in the professional support of their children important. Although the majority of parents are satisfied with the support provided for their children, a substantial minority of the parents indicated that they did not receive the support they find important.
Research and development (R&D) portfolio management in the electric utility sector

Purpose – The electric utility industry, unlike most other technology‐intensive industries, does not spend much money or effort on research and development. Many utilities do not possess an in‐house R&D facility, nor is there an R&D line item in their budgets. Over the last several decades the rate of change in the electric utility industry has been very slow and in‐house R&D efforts have not been required. As the rate of change in the industry is beginning to change, the need to pursue R&D is increasing. The electric utility industry is responding to this increasing requirement by increasing R&D budgets, and in some cases re‐initiating the R&D process within individual utilities. The purpose of this paper is to focus on R&D portfolio management efforts of various actors from different industrial sectors, to find out the best practices by using benchmarking method.Design/methodology/approach – The paper used case study approach and on‐site interviews as research methods.Findings – The authors found that R.
Immune response of bovine sourced cross-linked collagen sponge for hemostasis

A comprehensive immunogenicity scheme is proposed to examine immune response of bovine sourced hemostasis collagen sponge to establish foundation for further researches and decrease the incidence of adverse reaction in clinical trials. Compared with negative control group without any implant, spleen and lymph nodes morphology show no apparent swelling in mice with different doses of collagen sponge implants. Immune cells population, especially lymph nodes cells population, is practically coincident with organs. However, splenic cells display slight proliferation in early phase following collagen sponge implantation. Splenic cells apoptosis also demonstrates no significant difference among all groups. T lymphocytes subsets, CD4/CD8 cells ratio, in spleen and lymph nodes are practically normal. Splenic cells Ki67 + proportions do not exhibit significant difference between collagen sponge groups and negative control group. Humoral response is determined by detection of IgG and IgM concentration in serum, not exhibiting remarkable increase with collagen sponge implantation, compared to the drastic increase in positive control group with bovine tendon implantation. Local analysis around implants by hematoxylin-eosin staining discovers slight cell infiltration around collagen sponge. Tumour necrosis factor-α immunostaining indicates slight inflammation in early phase following collagen sponge implantation, but interferon-γ immunostaining is negligible even in positive control group. Collagen sponge, especially in high dose, may have evoked benign immune response in BALB/c mice, but this response is transient. The present evaluation scheme for immune response is integrated and comprehensive, suitable for various biomaterials.
Complexity, Incongruity, Pre-Exposure and the Familiarity Effect in Visual Selection

A consistent finding in the literature concerning visual selection is that subjects spend more time viewing unfamiliar stimuli than familial stimuli. In the present investigation a procedure to measure competitive viewing times to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli was used. Results of the analyses of viewing times showed that the magnitude of the familiarity effect was a positive function of the duration of stimulus pre-exposure. In addition no differences were found in subjects' “preference” for familiar and unfamiliar stimuli as measured by “like-dislike” ratings.
Structural versus temporary factors in country and industry risk

This paper analyzes the dynamics and determinants of the relative benefits of geographical and industry diversification over the last 30 years. First, we develop a new structural regimeswitching volatility spillover model to decompose total risk into a systematic and a country (industry) specific component. Contrary to most other studies, we explicitly allow market betas and asset-specific risks to vary with both structural changes and temporary fluctuations in the economic and financial environment. In a second step, we investigate the relative benefits of geographical and industry diversification by comparing average asset-specific volatilities and model-implied correlations across countries and industries. We find a large positive (negative) effect of the structural factors on country betas (country-specific volatility), especially in Europe, while industry betas are mainly determined by temporary factors. Not taking into account the time variation in betas leads to biases in measures of industry and country-specific risk of up to one-third of total asset-specific volatility. After correcting for this bias, we find that under the influence of globalization and regional integration, the traditional dominance of geographical over industry diversification has been substantially reduced. In fact, over the last years, geographical and industry diversification roughly yield the same diversification benefits. Finally, our results indicate that the surge in industry risk at the end of the 1990s was partly (but not fully) related to the TMT bubble.