Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fuzzy classifiers and their relation to cluster analysis and neural networks

In this work, we examine three softcomputing methodologies, i.e. rule based fuzzy classification systems, fuzzy clustering and neural networks. Rulebased fuzzy systems can be more easily interpreted than neural networks, while neural networks can learn from data although being a black box. Fuzzy clustering methods search for similarities to combine the data into clusters. We combine them to use the advantages of each system for classification problems. This work shows that the fuzzy max-min classifier decides locally on the basis of two attributes, i.e. only a separation between classes that is parallel to n-2 coordinates can be represented. Therefore we consider systems using the Lukasiewicz-t-norm, as they can solve arbitrary piecewise linear problems. We geometrically characterize and visualize the Lukasiewicz-classifier. We can visualize results from fuzzy clustering analysis by placing a separating hyperplane between two prototypes. Using these hyperplanes we construct a fuzzy classification system that exactly reproduces the assignment to the clusters. The common method of projection used to derive fuzzy rules form fuzzy clusters often looses information. The rules derived by our method give exactly the same classification as the clusters. We also construct a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with two hidden layers from the clusters. Information derived from fuzzy clusters or from a rulebased fuzzy classification system, that is representing e.g. expert knowledge, can be used for initialising an MLP, that can be trained afterwards. Our methodology can also be used for problems with continuous output. To use MLPs for prediction of delays of arrivals at airports, we cluster weather data, construct an MLP from the clusters and further train it.
Characteristics of tachyphylaxis to inhaled histamine in anesthetized dogs.

Three consecutive dose-response curves to aerosolized histamine were obtained in 11 anesthetized dogs. All dogs showed desensitization (i.e., tachyphylaxis) to high doses of histamine. Tachyphylaxis was highly reproducible. No tachyphylaxis occurred with inhaled acetylcholine or methacholine. Beta-Adrenergic blockade with propranolol or muscarinic blockade with atropine given intravenously had no effect on the histamine tachyphylaxis. Duration of thiamylal anesthesia did not alter the histamine responsiveness. Histamine tachyphylaxis was also seen with chloralose-urethan anesthesia. Since tachyphylaxis is not observed with acetylcholine, it cannot be attributed to a general decline in muscle contractility. We conclude that histamine tachyphylaxis in vivo is not explained by effects of cholinergic reflexes, catecholamine release, duration of anesthesia, or, probably, type of anesthetic agent.
Drug-induced and drug-dependent immune thrombocytopenias.

Thrombocytopenia is a frequent comorbid condition in many in hospital patients. In some patients, drugs are the cause of low platelet counts. While cytotoxic effects of anti-tumor therapy are the most frequent cause, immune mechanisms should also be considered. This review addresses thrombocytopenias in four groups. Heparin-dependent thrombocytopenia (HIT), by far the most frequent drug-induced immune-mediated type of thrombocytopenia, has a unique pathogenesis and clinical consequences. HIT is a clinicopathological syndrome in which antibodies mostly directed against a multimolecular complex of platelet factor 4 and heparin cause paradoxical thromboembolic complications. The mechanisms through which heparin can enhance thrombin generation are discussed and treatment alternatives for affected patients are presented in detail. It is of primary importance to recognize these patients as early as possible and to substitute heparin with a compatible anticoagulatory drug, such as hirudin, danaparoid or argatroban. Patients seem to benefit from therapeutic doses of alternative treatment rather than from low-dose prophylactic doses. With the increasing use of glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa inhibitors in patients with acute coronary syndromes, thrombocytopenias are increasingly recognized as an adverse effect of these drugs. Up to 4% of treated patients are affected. Most important, pseudothrombocytopenia, a laboratory artefact, is as frequent as real drug-induced thrombocytopenia and must be excluded before changes in treatment are considered. The pathogenesis of these thrombocytopenias is still debated; an immune mechanism involving preformed antibodies is likely. However, since these antibodies are also detectable in a high percentage of normal controls and of patients not developing thrombocytopenia, their impact is still unclear. Patients with real thrombocytopenia are at an increased risk of bleeding; treatment consists of cessation of the GP IIb/IIIa inhibitor and platelet transfusions in cases of severe hemorrhage. Classic immune thrombocytopenia can be induced by some drugs, e.g. gold, which trigger anti-platelet antibodies indistinguishable from platelet autoantibodies found in autoimmune thrombocytopenia. Drug-induced and drug-dependent immune thrombocytopenia is induced by antibodies recognizing an epitope on platelet GP formed after binding of a drug to a platelet glycoprotein. Still unresolved is whether antibody binding is the consequence of a conformational change of the antigen, the antibody, or both. These antibodies typically react with monomorphic epitopes on platelet GP, but only in the presence of the drug or a metabolite. Although several platelet GP have been identified as antibody target (GPIb/IX, GPV, GP IIb/IIIa), antibodies in an individual patient are highly specific for a single GP. Clinically, these patients present with very low platelet counts and acute, sometimes severe, hemorrhage. Treatment is restricted to withdrawal of the drug and symptomatic treatment of bleeding.
Early failure of short-segment pedicle instrumentation for thoracolumbar fractures. A preliminary report.

The results after treatment of fifty-two lumbar and thoracolumbar fractures with Cotrel-Dubousset instrumentation were reviewed as part of an ongoing study. Nineteen patients (average duration of follow-up, fifteen months) had been managed with short-segment pedicle-screw instrumentation. This preliminary report outlines the complications and pitfalls identified during the initial healing phase in this subgroup of patients. There were no neurological or vascular injuries due to placement of the pedicle screws, but ten patients had some form of failure of the fixation during the early period of healing. Failure of the fixation was manifested in three ways: progressive kyphosis secondary to the bending of screws (six patients), kyphosis secondary to osseous collapse or vertebral translation without bending of the hardware (three patients), and segmental kyphosis after a caudad screw in the lumbar construct broke (one patient, who had had a combined instrumentation for multiple fractures). Untreated anterior instability, and pre-stressing of the screws when the rods were contoured in situ, resulted in a high rate of failure. The high rate of failure of the hardware associated with this fixation construct suggests that posterior screw fixation alone may not be adequate when Cotrel-Dubousset instrumentation is used for short-segment lumbar arthrodeses. Bent screws or measurable kyphosis did not always herald a clinical failure, but patients who had progressive kyphosis of more than 10 degrees had substantially more pain than did those who had little or no progression. The results reported here are preliminary, and speculation as to the importance of these findings and as to the long-term outcome in these patients would be premature. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Characterization of a Sarcocystis neurona. Isolate (SN6) from a Naturally Infected Horse from Oregon

An isolate of Sarcocystis neurona. (SN6) was obtained from the spinal cord of a horse from Oregon with neurologic signs. The parasite was isolated in cultures of bovine monocytes and equine spleen cells. The parasite divided by endopolygeny and completed at least one asexual cycle in cell cultures in three days. Two gamma interferon knockout mice inoculated with cell culture‐derived merozoites became ill 35 d later and S. neurona schizonts and merozoites were found in encephalitic lesions. The parasite in tissue sections of mice reacted with S. neurona‐specific antibodies and S. neurona was reisolated from the brain of knockout mice.
Approaches and Recent Development of Polymer Electrolyte Membranes for Fuel Cells Operating above 100 °C

The state-of-the-art of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) technology is based on perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) polymer membranes operating at a typical temperature of 80 °C. Some of the key issues and shortcomings of the PFSA-based PEMFC technology are briefly discussed. These include water management, CO poisoning, hydrogen, reformate and methanol as fuels, cooling, and heat recovery. As a means to solve these shortcomings, high-temperature polymer electrolyte membranes for operation above 100 °C are under active development. This treatise is devoted to a review of the area encompassing modified PFSA membranes, alternative sulfonated polymer and their composite membranes, and acid−base complex membranes. PFSA membranes have been modified by swelling with nonvolatile solvents and preparing composites with hydrophilic oxides and solid proton conductors. DMFC and H2/O2(air) cells based on modified PFSA membranes have been successfully operated at temperatures up to 120 °C under ambient pressure.
Evaluation of Acridine Orange Staining as a Replacement of Subcultures for BacT/ALERT-Positive, Gram Stain-Negative Blood Cultures

ABSTRACT Among 18,424 blood culture sets processed during a study period of 18 months, 85 bottles that were positive by the BacT/ALERT system were Gram stain negative. Both acridine orange staining and subcultures detected microorganisms in a total of 12 bottles. Acridine orange staining can replace subcultures of false-positive blood cultures.
Arithmetic Difficulties in Children With Visuospatial Learning Disability (VLD)

Eighteen children with visuospatial learning disability (VLD) were compared to normal control children on a series of numerical and calculation tasks. Oral and written (dictated) calculation was assessed and operations differed not only in terms of the type of number processing requirements but also in terms of their visuospatial demand. The aim was to disentangle errors due to visuospatial processing failure from those deriving from incorrect knowledge of calculation procedures. Results showed that all children had relatively good knowledge of numerical facts and there was no statistical difference between the groups. No group difference was found in the overall performance in oral calculation, but a significant difference was present when the children were required to complete the operations in writing, with the VLD group achieving poorer performance than the controls. Furthermore, VLD children had greater difficulties when operations required borrowing or carrying; this was particularly problematic in subtractions. The results indicate that VLD children do not have a generalised problem with calculation per se or number manipulation in general. Rather their problems concern dealing with some processes that govern calculation especially those loading on visuospatial abilities.
Designing a Monitoring System to Locate a Child in a Certain Closed Area Using RFID Sensor and Android Smartphone

With the emergence of many children's playground located in a closed area as Kidzania in Jakarta, and Trans Studio in Bandung, we need a system that can help parents or a nanny to know the position / location of the children when they are playing at the venue. The location that is in the closed area and consists of lots of room to play therein will have many challenges when it is developed by using the Global Positioning System (GPS). In the developed system is also necessary to know the location of the children monitored in real time. The use of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) is expected to answer the needs mentioned above. The system developed consists of RFID readers that is installed at the entrance or exit, RFID tags that is carried by the child, a database server that is used to upload data from RFID readers and also an application that is installed on a smart phone that is used to upload the registration data to the database server and download data from the database server to be displayed on the smartphone. Application that is developed to build this system is also equipped with other features such as user info and add friend. User info is used to determine the time of the last tapping did by the child. Add Friend is used to add a child that is to be monitored into the system. In this application, the number of children that can be monitored is limited to 5 children. With accuracy up to 100% at the time of tapping and mapping, systems and applications are developed is reliable to answer the needs.
Incidence and outcome of atrial fibrillation in stable symptomatic coronary disease

Objectives. Evaluate the prevalence, incidence and impact on prognosis of existing and new onset atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients with stable, symptomatic coronary artery disease. Design. Data from the 7 665 participants included in the ACTION (A Coronary disease Trial Investigating Outcome with Nifedipine GITS) trial was used. Results. Over a mean follow-up of 4.9 years, the incidence of recurrent AF in patients with AF at baseline (4.1%) was 13.5/100 patient-years and 1.64/100 patient-years for patients without baseline AF. Patients with AF at baseline had increased mortality and new overt heart failure. New onset AF was associated with increased morbidity and mortality and in particular soon after onset. [adjusted 30-day relative risk for mortality 23, 95% CI 14–36; for debilitating stroke 37, 95% CI 18–77; and for heart failure 54, 95% CI 32–93]. The incidence of AF was not affected by treatment with nifedipine GITS. Conclusion. The presence of AF in patients with stable symptomatic CAD is an independent risk factor and in particular in the first 30 days for subsequent mortality and morbidity.
Tangential Distance Fields for Mesh Silhouette Problems

We consider a tangent‐space representation of surfaces that maps each point on a surface to the tangent plane of the surface at that point. Such representations are known to facilitate the solution of several visibility problems, in particular, those involving silhouette analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of distance fields for a given surface defined by its tangent planes. At each point in space, we assign a scalar value which is a weighted sum of distances to these tangent planes. We call the resulting scalar field a ‘tangential distance field’ (TDF). When applied to triangle mesh models, the tangent planes become supporting planes of the mesh triangles. The weighting scheme used to construct a TDF for a given mesh and the way the TDF is utilized can be closely tailored to a specific application. At the same time, the TDFs are continuous, lending themselves to standard optimization techniques such as greedy local search, thus leading to efficient algorithms. In this paper, we use four applications to illustrate the benefit of using TDFs: multi‐origin silhouette extraction in Hough space, silhouette‐based view point selection, camera path planning and light source placement.
Mutual exclusion of congeneric monogenean species in a space-limited habitat

Adults of the monogenean genus Protopolystoma infecting Xenopus species occur in an extremely space-limited habitat, the urinary bladder. Xenopus wittei, from a population in Rwanda naturally infected with Protopolystoma fissilis and Protopolystoma simplicis, were exposed to reinfection in captivity (for 1–3 months post-capture) and then monitored in the laboratory for up to 5 months in transmission-free conditions. The two parasites co-occurred in individual bladders less frequently than expected if they were dispersed randomly. Distribution of bladder infections was significantly non-independent (n=157) and gravid worms of both species were never found in the same host. This pattern might be explained by interference competition between the parasites or by genetic differences in susceptibility within the host species, which is of allopolyploid origin. Other distributional data for sympatric polystomatid species pairs, including P. fissilis and P. ramulosus, show concurrent infections at frequencies consistent with random distributions (i.e. no evidence of interspecific competition or variability in species-specific susceptibility of the hosts). Interference between P. fissilis and P. simplicis (assuming host genetic factors are not involved) may therefore result from a mechanism specific to this species pair. Observations on infection turnover in captive hosts suggest that loss of adult worms may be related to the arrival of juveniles (of either species) in the urinary bladder. Ectopic infection of the host urinary ducts by adult and subadult P. fissilis was observed in some single-species infestations and may be density related. However, the use of an ectopic-site ‘refugium’ has never been observed in concurrent polystomatid infections.
Fouling of Heat Transfer Surfaces Related to β‐Lactoglobulin Denaturation During Heat Processing of Milk

Denaturation of β‐lactoglobulin during heating of milk in a plate heat exchanger has been investigated as an important factor in fouling the heat transfer surface. Using, on one hand, data on chemical composition of deposits obtained from biochemical analysis technics and, on the other hand, kinetic data of β‐Iactoglobulin denaturation, the distribution profile of deposits along the surface and the experimental fouling curves can be adequately predicted.
Approximation of general facets by regular facets with respect to anisotropic total variation energies and its application to the crystalline mean curvature flow

We show that every bounded subset of an Euclidean space can be approximated by a set that admits a certain vector field, the so-called Cahn-Hoffman vector field, that is subordinate to a given anisotropic metric and has a square-integrable divergence. More generally, we introduce a concept of facets as a kind of directed sets, and show that they can be approximated in a similar manner. We use this approximation to construct test functions necessary to prove the comparison principle for viscosity solutions of the level set formulation of the crystalline mean curvature flow that were recently introduced by the authors. As a consequence, we obtain the well-posedness of the viscosity solutions in an arbitrary dimension, which extends the validity of the result in the previous paper.
Methadone maintenance treatment remains controversial even after 23 years of experience.

THE MELROSE CLINIC, located on the tenth floor of a high-rise building in New York City's South Bronx, is an anomaly in the methadone maintenance treatment world. It is a clean, bright facility that looks "medical," like an environment conducive to recovery. One of the patients on hand is a young Hispanic woman, a married mother of three. She is petite, almost frail. Like all methadone patients, once a day she downs a small cup of orange drink containing a dissolved diskette of methadone hydrochloride—a synthetic painkiller developed in Germany during World War II—so that she won't have to plunge a needle in her arm. Exchanging Addictions? There are people who would say that she has simply exchanged addictions, from illegal heroin to sanctioned methadone, from a needle to a pill. The amount of methadone that patients usually receive at a clinic would stupefy even many addicts. In a person
Quantitation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 DNA Forms with the Second Template Switch in Peripheral Blood Cells Predicts Disease Progression Independently of Plasma RNA Load

ABSTRACT There are several forms of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) DNA in peripheral blood T cells and lymph nodes in untreated HIV-1-infected individuals and in patients whose plasma HIV-1 RNA levels are suppressed by long-term combination antiretroviral therapy. However, it remains to be established whether the concentration of HIV-1 DNA in cells predicts the clinical outcome of HIV-1 infection. In this report, we measured the concentration of HIV-1 DNA forms which has undergone the second template switch (STS DNA) and 2-long-terminal-repeat DNA circles in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) samples. To do this, we used molecular-beacon-based real-time PCR assays and studied 130 patients with hemophilia in the Multicenter Hemophilia Cohort Study. We assessed the influence of baseline HIV-1 STS DNA levels on the progression of HIV-1 disease in the absence of combination antiretroviral therapy by Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analysis. Among the patients who progressed to AIDS, the median levels (interquartile ranges) of STS HIV-1 DNA in PBMC were significantly higher than those of patients who remained AIDS free during the 16 years of follow-up (1,017 [235 to 6,059] and 286 [31 to 732] copies per 106 PBMC, respectively; P < 0.0001). Rates of progression to death and development of AIDS varied significantly (log rank P < 0.001) by quartile distribution of HIV-1 STS DNA levels. After adjustment for age at seroconversion, baseline CD4+ T-cell counts, plasma viral load, and T-cell-receptor excision circles, the relative hazards (RH) of death and AIDS were significantly increased with higher HIV-1 STS DNA levels (adjusted RH, 1.84 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 1.30 to 2.59] and 2.62 [95% CI, 1.75 to 3.93] per 10-fold increase per 106 PBMC, respectively). HIV-1 STS DNA levels in each individual remained steady in longitudinal PBMC samples during 16 years of follow-up. Our findings show that the concentration of HIV-1 STS DNA in PBMC complements the HIV-1 RNA load in plasma in predicting the clinical outcome of HIV-1 disease. This parameter may have important implications for understanding the virological response to combination antiretroviral therapy.
A multicenter interracial study of facial appearance. Part 1: A comparison of extraoral parameters.

PURPOSE This study was undertaken to compare the facial appearance of patients from six racial groups (African American, Caucasian, Chinese, Hispanic, Japanese, and Korean) for interracial and/or gender differences and to determine if "norms" existed. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 253 subjects (144 men and 109 women) ranging in age from 18 to 41 years (mean age 26.5 years) were evaluated using a standardized protocol. The data were collected and analyzed to establish reference ranges for seven frontal and six profile extraoral parameters. Mean scores were compared by race and gender using a one-way analysis of variance, followed by the Tukey-Kramer test for honestly significant difference when statistically significant differences were found (P < .05). RESULTS There were no significant differences for any of the seven frontal or six profile extraoral parameters between men and women. No significant differences were found between racial groups for five of the seven frontal and one of the six profile extraoral parameters. CONCLUSION Most of the frontal facial parameters and one profile extraoral parameter might be considered norms for male and female patients of different ethnic origins. Additional research with larger patient populations would be needed to confirm or refute these trends.