Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cost-effectiveness of mechanical thrombectomy using stent retriever after intravenous tissue plasminogen activator compared with intravenous tissue plasminogen activator alone in the treatment of acute ischaemic stroke due to large vessel occlusion in Spain

Introduction To assess the cost-effectiveness of stent-retriever mechanical thrombectomy and intravenous tissue plasminogen activator compared with intravenous tissue plasminogen activator alone in patients with acute ischaemic stroke due to large vessel occlusions in Spain. Materials and methods Clinical data were taken from the SWIFT PRIME clinical trial. A lifetime Markov state transition model defined by the modified Rankin Scale score was developed to estimate costs and health outcomes (life years gained and quality adjusted life years). A Spanish National Health System perspective (direct medical costs) was considered. Resource utilisation and utilities were obtained from available published data and endorsed by an expert panel. Costs (€, 2016) were obtained from various Spanish sources. Deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were performed. Results Stent-retriever thrombectomy after intravenous tissue plasminogen activator was associated with better outcomes (1.17 life years gained and 2.51 quality adjusted life years) and savings of €44,378, resulting in a dominant therapy over intravenous tissue plasminogen activator alone. A net monetary benefit of €119,744 was obtained considering a willingness-to-pay threshold of €30,000/quality adjusted life year gained. The combined therapy was also dominant in all sensitivity analyses, deterministic and probabilistic. Discussion The results were consistent with a previously published cost-effectiveness analysis and reinforce the likeliness of the selection of stent-retriever mechanical thrombectomy plus intravenous tissue plasminogen activator over intravenous tissue plasminogen activator alone. Conclusion Stent-retriever thrombectomy after intravenous tissue plasminogen activator is a dominant alternative over intravenous tissue plasminogen activator alone (more effective and less costly) for the treatment of acute ischaemic stroke patients with large vessel occlusions in the Spanish setting.
The impact of ΔmtDNA4977 mutation on ulcerative colitis

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an inflammatory bowel disorder characterized by continuous colonic mucosal inflammation that extends proximally from the rectum. The pathogenic mechanisms underlying UC remain unknown. Free-radical-elicited oxidative damage to macromolecules has been established as a contributory factor in UC. It is well known that the mitochondrial genome is more susceptible to increased oxidative damage than nuclear DNA. One of the best-described mtDNA mutations is the ΔmtDNA4977 (mtDNA 4977 bp) or common deletion. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between ΔmtDNA4977 and UC. We studied the ΔmtDNA4977 150 patients with UC (64 men, 86 women; mean age, 36.7 ± 11.6 years) and 250 disease-free controls (137 men, 113 women; mean age, 35 ± 12.1 years) in northern Iran. After DNA extraction from colon biopsies, gap polymerase chain reaction (Gap-PCR) was performed. The frequency of ΔmtDNA4977 was significantly different between the UC patients and the control group (78.7% vs. 16.8%, P<0.001). We found that ΔmtDNA4977 was more likely to be present in the patients of younger age (≤ 50 years, P=0.021). The mtDNA deletion was also significantly associated with the increased risk of an extensive form of colitis. Our study indicates that the ΔmtDNA4977 may play a role in the pathogenesis of UC. However, the findings need to be verified in large population-based prospective studies for more rigorous analyses of subgroups.
GAMETERAPIA NA COORDENAÇÃO MOTORA E INTEGRAÇÃO VISO-MOTORA EM PESSOAS COM SÍNDROME DE DOWN

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of game therapy in the motor coordination and visual-motor integration in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). Four people with DS participated in the study. The Test of Body Coordination for Children (Korperkoordinationstest Fur Kinder – KTK) and the Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI) were applied. The participants performed 12 sessions of game therapy, lasting 20 minutes each, with games of the Nintendo Wii console. The participants did KTK and VMI tests before and after the game therapy program. All participants improved their scores in the KTK and VMI tests, two participants increased the final score in the two parts of the test. The results suggest that game therapy changes variables related to motor coordination and components involving perception in individuals with DS.
HIV / AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.

The Armenian Demographic and Health Survey 2000 collected information from women and men on HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis gonorrhea and chlamydia which are known to be important predisposing factors for HIV epidemics. This chapter summarizes information on knowledge perceptions and behaviors at the national level and within geographic and socioeconomic subgroups of the population. (excerpt)
Combined Oral Contraceptive Use at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Port Harcourt, Southern Nigeria: A-20 Year Review

Background: While the combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP) is one of the most commonly used methods of birth control especially in the developed countries, robust and current information on the pill use in developing countries including Nigeria is at best lacking. Objectives: The study was conducted to determine the prevalence rate, efficacy and side effects of COCP at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), Port Harcourt, Southern Nigeria. Methods: It was a retrospective analysis of all clients who used the COCP between 1st January 1997 and 31st December, 2016, at the family planning clinic of UPTH Port Harcourt. Data on sociodemographic profile, side effects and source of information were extracted from the clients’ case notes coded and fed into Excel spread sheet and analysed. Results: Of the 8310 new acceptors of modern contraceptive methods in UPTH, 399 clients used the COCP, giving a prevalence rate of 4.8%. The mean age of the acceptors was 26.42 ± 4.27 years while the mean parity was 1.90 ± 0.36. Menstrual disruption was the most common complications with 78 episodes constituting 47.0% of all the complications. One unintended pregnancy occurred during the period of observation, giving a Pearl index of 0.01. Conclusion: The study showed that although COCP is very effective, readily available, safe and reliable method of fertility control, the acceptance rate is very low and the patronage rapidly declining and may therefore go into extinction as a family planning method in Port Harcourt, Southern, Nigeria.
Original Contribution Antioxidant enzyme activity is up-regulated after unilateral resistance exercise training in older adults

Cellular antioxidant capacity and oxidative stress are postulated to be critical factors in the aging process. The effects of resistance exercise training on the level of skeletal muscle oxidative stress and antioxidant capacity have not previously been examined in older adults. Muscle biopsies from both legs were obtained from the vastus lateralis muscle of 12 men 71 T 7 years of age. Subjects then engaged in a progressive resistance exercise-training program with only one leg for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, the nontraining leg underwent an acute bout of exercise (exercise session identical to that of the trained leg at the same relative intensity) at the same time as the last bout of exercise in the training leg. Muscle biopsies were collected from the vastus lateralis of both legs 48 h after the final exercise bout. Electron transport chain enzyme activity was unaffected by resistance training and acute resistance exercise (p< 0.05). Training resulted in a significant increase in CuZnSOD (pre—7.2 T 4.2, post—12.6 T 5.6 UImg protein 1 ; p = 0.02) and catalase (pre—8.2 T 2.3, post—14.9 T 7.6 AmolImin 1 Img protein 1 ; p = 0.02) but not MnSOD activity, whereas acute exercise had no effect on the aforementioned antioxidant enzyme activities. Furthermore, basal muscle total protein carbonyl content did not change as a result of exercise training or acute exercise. In conclusion, unilateral resistance exercise training is effective in enhancing the skeletal muscle cellular antioxidant capacity in older adults. The potential long-term benefits of these adaptations remain to be evaluated.
Augmented Reality with Multi-view Merging for Robot Teleoperation

This paper proposes a user-friendly teleoperation interface for manipulation. We provide the user with a view of the scene augmented with depth information from local cameras to provide visibility in occluded areas during manipulation tasks. This gives an improved sense of the 3D environment which results in better task performance. Further, we monitor the pose of the robot's end effector in real-time so that we are able to superimpose a virtual representation into the scene when parts are occluded. The integration of these features enables the user to perform difficult manipulation tasks when the action environment is normally occluded in the main camera view. We performed preliminary studies with this new setup and users provided positive feedback regarding the proposed augmented reality (AR) system.
Impression Evaluation of Presentation by a Communication Robot in an Actual Exhibition

In exhibitions by companies, there are many opportunities to conduct presentations to visitors using graphic slides. However, these presentations are hard work for the exhibitors because they must repeat the same presentation several times a day to inform as many visitors as possible. This paper introduces a presentation system that uses a robot rather than a human presenter. A case study is conducted in which the proposed system is experienced by 78 visitors in an actual exhibition; the goal is to consider whether the proposed system could be the possibility of an alternative to human presenters. The results indicate that presentations by real-world robots with appropriate non-verbal behaviors are more effective in terms of acceptability and understandability than alternatives.
Autonomous Dialogue Technologies in Symbiotic Human-robot Interaction

The aim of this workshop is to discuss autonomous dialogue technologies in "Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction. " In order to inspire participants and encourage the discussion, we will introduce our research activities and have invited talks by experts in human-robot interaction and dialogue systems. We also publicly invite poster presentations to share state-of-the-art technologies in this research area. Finally, we clarify the key challenges required to develop companions living together with us through the panel discussion.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Thermal and RGB-D Cameras for Human-Robot Interaction

Human emotion detection is an important aspect in social robotics and in human-robot interaction (HRI). In this paper, we propose a vision-based multimodal emotion recognition method based on gait data and facial thermal images designed for social robots. Our method can detect four human emotional states (i.e., neutral, happiness, anger, and sadness). We gathered data from 25 participants in order to build-up an emotion database for training and testing our classification models. We implemented and tested several approaches such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF). These were trained and tested in order to compare the emotion recognition ability and to find the best approach. We designed a hybrid model with both the gait and the thermal data and the accuracy of our system shows an improvement of 10% over the other models based on our emotion database. This is a promising approach to be explored in a real-time human-robot interaction scenario.
Generation and Evaluation of Audio-Visual Anger Emotional Expression for Android Robot

Recent studies in human-human interaction (HHI) have revealed the propensity of negative emotional expression to initiate affiliating functions that are beneficial to the expresser and also help to foster cordiality and closeness amongst interlocutors. However, efforts in human-robot interaction (HRI) have not attempted to investigate the consequences of expression of negative emotion by robots on HRI. Thus, the background of this study as a first step is to furnish humanoid robots with natural audio-visual anger expression for HRI. Based on the analysis results from a multimodal HHI corpus, we implemented different types of gestures related to anger expressions for humanoid robots and carried-out subjective evaluation of the generated anger expressions. Findings from this study revealed that the semantic context and functional content of anger-based utterances play a significant role in the choice of gesture to accompany such utterance. Our current result shows that "Pointing" gesture is adjudged more appropriate for utterances with "you" and anger-based "questioning" utterances; while "both arms spread" and "both arm swing" gestures were evaluated more appropriated for "declarative" and "disagreement" utterances respectively.
From Psychological Intention Recognition Theories to Adaptive Theory of Mind for Robots: Computational Models

Progress in robots' application to everyday scenarios has increased the interest in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. However, robots' limited social skills are associated with decreased humans' positive attitude during HRI. Here, we put forward the idea of developing adaptive Theory of Mind (ToM) model-based systems for social robotics, able to deal with new situations and interact with different users in new tasks. Therefore, we grouped current research from developmental psychology debating the computational processes underlying ToM for HRI strategy development. Defining a model describing adaptive ToM processes may in fact aid the development of adaptive robotic architectures for more flexible and successful HRI. Finally, we hope with this report to both further promote the cross-talk between the fields of developmental psychology and robotics and inspire future investigations in this direction.
Body Language in Affective Human-Robot Interaction

Social human--robot interaction is concerned with exploring the ways in which social interaction can be achieved between a human and a sociable robot. Affect has an important role in interaction as it helps interactants coordinate and indicate the success of the communication. Designing socially intelligent robots requires competence in communication, which includes exchanges of both verbal and non--verbal cues. This project will focus on non--verbal communication, more specifically body movements, postures and gestures as means of conveying socially affective information. Using the affective grounding perspective, which conceptualizes emotion as a coordination mechanism, together with honest signals as a measurement of the dynamics of the interaction, and the robot Pepper, we aim to develop a system that would be able to communicate affect, with the goal to enhance affective human--robot interaction.
A Dose Relationship Between Brain Functional Connectivity and Cumulative Head Impact Exposure in Collegiate Water Polo Players

A growing body of evidence suggests that chronic, sport-related head impact exposure can impair brain functional integration and brain structure and function. Evidence of a robust inverse relationship between the frequency and magnitude of repeated head impacts and disturbed brain network function is needed to strengthen an argument for causality. In pursuing such a relationship, we used cap-worn inertial sensors to measure the frequency and magnitude of head impacts sustained by eighteen intercollegiate water polo athletes monitored over a single season of play. Participants were evaluated before and after the season using computerized cognitive tests of inhibitory control and resting electroencephalography. Greater head impact exposure was associated with increased phase synchrony [r(16) > 0.626, p < 0.03 corrected], global efficiency [r(16) > 0.601, p < 0.04 corrected], and mean clustering coefficient [r(16) > 0.625, p < 0.03 corrected] in the functional networks formed by slow-wave (delta, theta) oscillations. Head impact exposure was not associated with changes in performance on the inhibitory control tasks. However, those with the greatest impact exposure showed an association between changes in resting-state connectivity and a dissociation between performance on the tasks after the season [r(16) = 0.481, p = 0.043] that could also be attributed to increased slow-wave synchrony [F(4, 135) = 113.546, p < 0.001]. Collectively, our results suggest that athletes sustaining the greatest head impact exposure exhibited changes in whole-brain functional connectivity that were associated with altered information processing and inhibitory control.
The Unexpected Daily Situations (UDS) Dataset: A New Benchmark for Socially-Aware Assistive Robots

This article presents the progress in building a new dataset of 'unexpected daily situations' (like someone tripping on a box, while carrying a tray to the kitchen, or someone burning him/herself with hot water and dropping a mug). Each of the situations involve one or two humans in a familiar, structured environment (eg, a kitchen, a living room) with rich semantics. Correctly interpreting the situation (including recognising an error, undesired effect or incongruity when it occurs, as well as selecting the best repair action) requires beyond-state-of-art spatio-temporal, semantic and socio-cognitive modelling. As such, the aim of the dataset is to offer (i) a realistic source of data to train and test such novel algorithms and (ii) provide a new benchmark against which algorithms can be demonstrated.
Creating Robot Personality: Effects of Mixing Speech and Semantic Free Utterances

Personality is a vital factor in understanding acceptance, trust or emotional attachment to a robot. From R2D2 to WALL-E, there is a rich history of robots in films using semantic free utterances (SFUs) sounds (such as squeaks, clicks and tones) as audio gestures to communicate and convey emotion and personality. However, unlike in a film where an actor can pretend to understand non-verbal noises, in a practical application synthesised speech is often used to communicate information, intention and status. Here we present a pilot study exploring the impact of mixing speech synthesis with SFUs on perceived personality. In a listening test, subjects were presented with synthesised short utterances with and without SFUs, together with a picture of the agent as a tabletop social robot or a young man. Both picture and SFUs had an impact on perceived personality. However, no interaction was seen between SFUs and picture suggesting the listeners failed to fuse the perceptions of the two audio elements, perceiving the SFUs as background noises rather than audio gestures generated by the agent.
Cytoplasmic dynein-2 at a glance

ABSTRACT Cytoplasmic dynein-2 is a motor protein complex that drives the movement of cargoes along microtubules within cilia, facilitating the assembly of these organelles on the surface of nearly all mammalian cells. Dynein-2 is crucial for ciliary function, as evidenced by deleterious mutations in patients with skeletal abnormalities. Long-standing questions include how the dynein-2 complex is assembled, regulated, and switched between active and inactive states. A combination of model organisms, in vitro cell biology, live-cell imaging, structural biology and biochemistry has advanced our understanding of the dynein-2 motor. In this Cell Science at a Glance article and the accompanying poster, we discuss the current understanding of dynein-2 and its roles in ciliary assembly and function. Summary: We discuss current understanding of the cytoplasmic dynein-2 microtubule motor, and its roles in cilia assembly and function.
Accelerating Maximal-Exact-Match Seeding with Enumerated Radix Trees

Motivation Read alignment is a time-consuming step in genome sequence analysis. In the read alignment software BWA-MEM and the recently published faster version BWA-MEM2, the seeding step is a major bottleneck, for instance, contributing 38% to the overall execution time in BWA-MEM2 when aligning single-end whole human genome reads from the Platinum Genomes dataset. This is because both BWA-MEM and BWA-MEM2 use a compressed index structure called the FMD-Index, which results in high memory bandwidth requirements for seeding, primarily due to its character-by-character processing of reads. Results We propose a memory bandwidth-aware data structure for maximal-exact-match seeding called Enumerated Radix Tree (ERT). ERT trades off memory capacity to improve seeding performance (∼60 GB index for human genome). Together with optimizations to the seeding algorithm and mate-rescue step, ERT when integrated into BWA-MEM2 speeds up overall read alignment by 1.28× and provides up to 2.1× higher seeding performance while guaranteeing identical output to the original software. Furthermore, we prototype an FPGA implementation of ERT on Amazon EC2 F1 cloud and observe 1.6× higher seeding throughput over a 48-thread optimized CPU-ERT implementation. Availability and implementation https://github.com/arun-sub/bwa-mem2 Contact arunsub@umich.edu, reetudas@umich.edu
Do Shy Children Behave Differently than Non-shy Children in a Long-term Child-robot Interaction?: An Analysis of Positive and Negative Expressions of Shyness in Kindergarten Children

Social robots offer versatile possibilities to engage children in social interaction and are increasingly implemented in educational contexts. However, how children enter into social interaction with an interlocutor is substantially influenced by their temperament. In this paper, we present preliminary findings of a long-term study on child-robot interaction for language learning, in which we focused on children's positive and negative expressions of shyness within the interaction over multiple sessions with the robot. We found that shy children initially displayed significantly fewer positive signals. However, in the long term, shy children seem to be able to overcome their restrained behavior in interaction with the robot.
Quantitative Results of Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with Autism, ADHD and Delayed Speech Development

This paper presents an ongoing work that aims to provide a quantitative analysis of a large clinical study that was conducted with 21 children aged 4-8 years old. Children were diagnosed with various forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Delayed Speech Development (DSD) with autistic traits. Each child participated in four to six Robot-Assisted Therapy (RPT) sessions that lasted for fifteen minutes each. We manually video-coded the videos from the sessions to find behavioral patterns, engagement and valence scores, and we are now in the process of statistical data analysis to understand whether children's exposure to a robot had a significant effect over time.
Please Listen to Me: How to Make Passersby Stop by a Humanoid Robot in a Shopping Mall

In this study, we investigated robot behaviors in a shopping mall that can make passersby stop in front of the robot. This is the first step to develop a social robot for advertising. The three types of robot behavior: Greeting, Troubling, and Dancing were implemented into the robot. The result by 65000+ passersby shows that Troubling motion can make passersby stop more and stay longer.