Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hand Vein Image Enhancement Based on Multi-Scale Top-Hat Transform

Abstract Traditional image contrast enhancement methods originally cannot improve the quality of vein images and may also import some unknown noise resulting in low recognition rate. To overcome the abovementioned disadvantages, the paper proposes an enhancement method based on the morphological filtering theory including three main procedures. Firstly, the algorithm extract the vein Region Of Interest (ROI), and then adopting the improved White Top-Hat transform (WTH) and Black Top-Hat transform (BTH) methods to get the features of vein in detail in both white and black pattern (vein information and background information); Secondly, to construct the filtering function with the self-designed controlling operator, representing the gradient changes of the vein edges, which well reflects the importance of local detail in multi-scale pattern; Finally, traditional nonlinear gray-level transformation function is imported with modality to the parameters to realize the gray normalization. We perform rigorous experiments with the proposed method and other state-of-the-art enhancement methods on the self-built dorsal vein image databases, and the experimental results illustrate that the multiscale top-hat theory-based enhancement methods improve the contrast of hand vein images with restrictions on the possibility of enhancement on existing noise information.
A CFD study of jet mixing in reduced flow areas for lower combustor emissions

The Rich-burn/Quick-mix/Lean-burn (RQL) combustor has the potential of significantly reducing NO(x) emissions in combustion chambers of High Speed Civil Transport aircraft. Previous work on RQL combustors for industrial applications suggested the benefit of necking down the mixing section. A 3-D numerical investigation was performed to study the effects of neckdown on NO(x) emissions and to develop a correlation for optimum mixing designs in terms of neckdown area ratio. The results of the study showed that jet mixing in reduced flow areas does not enhance mixing, but does decrease residence time at high flame temperatures, thus reducing NO(x) formation. By necking down the mixing flow area by 4, a potential NO(x) reduction of 16:1 is possible for annual combustors. However, there is a penalty that accompanies the mixing neckdown: reduced pressure drop across the combustor swirler. At conventional combustor loading parameters, the pressure drop penalty does not appear to be excessive.
A clinicopathological study on IgG4-related ophthalmic disease.

AIM To investigate clinicopathological features of immunoglobulin G4-related ophthalmic disease (IgG4-ROD), and analyze the recurrence rates following systemic corticosteroid administration. METHODS We retrospectively searched clinical features, laboratory and histological findings based on the medical records of 21 patients with IgG4-ROD. All the patients examined in this study underwent surgical resection in the ocular adnexal lesions and underwent histological evaluation. This study further investigated clinical and histopathological features of 15 patients who received systemic corticosteroid after the resection. RESULTS The mean age of the patients consisting of 7 males (33%) and 14 females (67%) was 61y. Fourteen patients were diagnosed as definitive, and 2 and 5 patients were probable and possible IgG4-ROD, respectively. Eyelid swelling was an initial symptom in 11 patients (52%) who did not show systemic involvements at a diagnosis. Fifteen patients received systemic corticosteroid administration, and all showed remission of inflammation. Among them, 10 patients did not recur, whereas 5 patients (33%) recurred during tapering. There were no significant difference between patients with or without recurrence in clinicopathological features. CONCLUSION In this study, female patients are more predominant in IgG4-ROD. While inflammation recurs in one-third of patients, this study do not identify factors associated with recurrence after systemic corticosteroid administration.
911 Emergency Communication Nurse Triage Reduces EMS Patient Costs and Directs Patients to High-Satisfaction Alternative Point of Care

Introduction: Recent estimates indicate that more than half of all Emergency Department (ED) visits could be avoided, reducing patient costs and increasing satisfaction with care. Since 911 is increasingly the first point of contact for many patients enter ing the health care system—even those with non-emergency conditions—one potential approach to decreasing emergency costs and ED overcrowding is to reinvent the 911 dispatch center as a clearinghouse for directing patients to alternative care providers. This study presents a cost avoidance analysis of two 911 dispatch centers that implemented such a service, the Emergency Communication Nurse System (ECNS). Objectives: The primary objectives were to determine the amount of cost avoidance realized by payers using the ECNS to send patients to alternative final points of care, and to identify the amount saved by transporting patients by alternative means an ambulance. The secondary objective was to quantify patients’ satisfaction with the service through analysis of patient follow-up survey data. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study involving two agencies employing the ECNS program in the USA. Fort Worth, Texas (MedStar) provided 9 months of 911 call data, and Louisville, Kentucky (LMEMS) contributed 34 months of 911 data. Both agencies are designated by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch (IAED) as Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) accredited “Centers of Excellence”. Certain areas affecting the study were also evaluated, including patient dispatch information, cost of care, and patient satisfaction. Results: Patient records from 3,976 cases were analyzed (n=304 for MedStar, and n=3,672 for LMEMS). Collectively, nearly $1.2 million (USD) in payments were avoided as a result of directing patients away from the ED to alternative provider points of care. Additionally, MedStar avoided 284 emergency ambulance transports, and LMEMS avoided 3,672 emergency ambulance transports resulting in a combined savings of nearly $450,000 (USD) in costs (Table 2). Overall, 91.2% of the patients were satisfied with the ECNS service. Conclusion: The study findings suggest that a 911-based service such as the ECNS is a feasible solution for reducing patient costs, using resources more efficiently, and maintaining high levels of patient satisfaction.
A Predictive Fingerstroke-Level Model for Smartwatch Interaction

The keystroke-level model (KLM) is commonly used to predict the time it will take an expert user to accomplish a task without errors when using an interactive system. The KLM was initially intended to predict interactions in conventional set-ups, i.e., mouse and keyboard interactions. However, it has since been adapted to predict interactions with smartphones, in-vehicle information systems, and natural user interfaces. The simplicity of the KLM and its extensions, along with their resource- and time-saving capabilities, has driven their adoption. In recent years, the popularity of smartwatches has grown, introducing new design challenges due to the small touch screens and bimanual interactions involved, which make current extensions to the KLM unsuitable for modelling smartwatches. Therefore, it is necessary to study these interfaces and interactions. This paper reports on three studies performed to modify the original KLM and its extensions for smartwatch interaction. First, an observational study was conducted to characterise smartwatch interactions. Second, the unit times for the observed interactions were derived through another study, in which the times required to perform the relevant physical actions were measured. Finally, a third study was carried out to validate the model for interactions with the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear S3. The results show that the new model can accurately predict the performance of smartwatch users with a percentage error of 12.07%; a value that falls below the acceptable percentage dictated by the original KLM ~21%.
Diagnostic And Prognostic Significance Of p53 Protein Expression In Squamous Cell Lesions Of The Oral Cavity

Aims: The present study evaluated the role of tumour suppressor gene protein p53 in squamous cell lesions of the oral cavity. Settings and Design: A single institutional prospective study. Methods and Material: The evaluation of p53 (by IHC using Clone DO7 monoclonal antibody, DAKO, USA) was done on 50 cases of squamous cell lesions of oral cavity. Statistical analysis used: Student's't' test was performed. Results: The p53 expression increased with increasing degree of dysplasia and grade of SCC. There was a statistically significant difference of p53 positivity between dysplasia & SCC (P< 0.001), WD-SCC & MD-SCC (P< 0.05), and WD-SCC & PD-SCC (P< 0.001). Significantly high p53 positivity (P< 0.001) was noted in cases presenting with lymph node metastasis. Conclusions: Alterations of p53 gene seem to be an early event in multistage oral carcinogenesis. Role of p53 gene even at later stages when metastasis has occurred has not been properly dealt with; taking the research a step further, our study has found a statistically significant increase in p53 expression in cases presenting with nodal metastasis thus suggesting that the mutant p53 gene continues to be important for progression and metastasis of SCC, and a higher p53 expression indicates poorer prognosis.
MTNet: A Neural Approach for Cross-Domain Recommendation with Unstructured Text

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems (RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and suffers from the data sparsity issue. One solution is to integrate the content information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to hybrid filtering methods. Another solution is to transfer knowledge from a related source domain such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge of the book domain, leading to cross-domain methods where transfer learning is a key technique. In real life, no single service can satisfy a user’s all information needs. Thus it motivates us to exploit information from both the content and across domains for RSs in this paper. We achieve this by developing approaches to capture the text content and to transfer cross-domain knowledge. We propose a novel neural model, MTNet (“M” for memory and “T” for transfer), for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end manner. MTNet can attentively extract useful content via a memory network (MNet) and can selectively transfer knowledge from across domains by a transfer network (TNet), a novel network. The principle underlying these two components is the neural attention mechanism. A shared layer of feature interactions is stacked on the top to couple the high-level representations learned from individual networks. On two real-world datasets, MTNet shows better performance in terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines, including single/cross domain, shallow/deep, and hybrid methods. We conduct thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge help the proposed model.
Study of Various Approaches for Minimizing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Network

-With the advancement in technology, the application fields of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are also increasing. Sensors are the devices that are used to detect or monitor an object or area of interest and communicate the data collected to other nodes in the network. Wireless Sensor Networks are deployed for battlefield surveillance, tracking, area, health and environmental monitoring. These applications require a network of number of sensor nodes. The nodes are battery powered, and this limited energy source becomes the major limitation for wireless sensor network because network will be operational as long as the nodes in the network are having sufficient energy for the entire process. This paper reviews different approaches that contributed towards the extended network lifetime and increased energy efficiency in WSN.
Evidence for the extended School Aged Incredible Years parent programme with parents of high-risk 8 to 16 year olds .

Judy Hutchings, Tracey Bywater, Margiad Elen Williams, Margaret Kate Shakespeare and Chris Whitaker 1. Professor Judy Hutchings, Research Director, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG 2. Dr. Tracey Bywater, Project Trials Co-ordinator, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG 3. Margiad Elen Williams, Research Assistant, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG 4. Margaret Kate Shakespeare, Research Assistant, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG 5. Chris Whitaker, Statistician, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG Correspondence: to the first author email j.hutchings@bangor.ac. uk
Body balance reduces eczema in stress-related atopic dermatitis

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic, pruritic, relapsing inflammatory skin disease that affects about two to three percent of the adult population in Sweden. It is characterized by dry, itchy skin and is aggravated by stress. This study examined if relaxation through movement and body awareness can reduce stress and eczema in patients with AD. Nine pa-tients with atopic dermatitis whose condition worsened due to stress were treated with a body balance relaxation method. Estimation of extent of skin lesions, pruritus, salivary cortisol, as an objective marker for chronic stress, and subjective stress, and DLQI, were performed. Of these parameters, the extent of skin lesions, pruritus, and the subjective stress were de-creased as well as chronic stress. This study indicated that relaxation using body balance reduced stress and eczema in patients with stress-related atopic dermatitis.
Rashid & Mohd Yakub Zulkifli bin Mohd Yusoff. 2013. Mother's Perspective Toward al Quran Education for Hearing Impaired Children in Malaysia.

An interview with parents of children with hearing impairment was carried out in the initial study since the coordinated effort of parents and children is essential in the education of children. Considering that this interview was appropriate for collecting qualitative-oriented data, it has been chosen as the knowledge elicitation method. In most families who have a hearing impaired child, mothers play a vital role regarding communication and family cohesion. In addition usually children spend more time with their mothers and they have a closer relationship with them; as a result particularly mothers are selected as respondents of this interview. The goal of the interview is to to ask parents about the Islamic education of their hearing impaired children. Four parents have been interviewed in depth. As a results, there are four concerns expressed by the mothers which are lack of family support in education, the Malay culture with regard to disabled children, dissatisfaction toward schools and lack of technology support in schools.
Exploring B/Ca as a pH proxy in bivalves: relationships between Mytilus californianus B/Ca and environmental data from the northeast Pacific

Abstract. A distinct gap in our ability to understand changes in coastal biology that may be associated with recent ocean acidification is the paucity of directly measured ocean environmental parameters at coastal sites in recent decades. Thus, many researchers have turned to sclerochronological reconstructions of water chemistry to document the historical seawater environment. In this study, we explore the relationships between B/Ca and pH to test the feasibility of B/Ca measured on the ion probe as a pH proxy in the California mussel, Mytilus californianus. Heterogeneity in a range of ion microprobe standards is assessed, leading to reproducible B/Ca ratios at the 5% level. The B/Ca data exhibit large excursions during winter months, which are particularly pronounced during the severe winters of 2004–2005 and 2005–2006. Furthermore, B/Ca ratios are offset in different parts of the skeleton that calcified at the same time. We compare the M. californianus B/Ca record to directly measured environmental data during mussel growth from the period of 1999–2009 to examine whether seawater chemistry or temperature plays a role in controlling shell B/Ca. A suite of growth rate models based on measured temperature are compared to the B/Ca data to optimise the potential fit of B/Ca to pH. Despite sampling conditions that were well-suited to testing a pH control on B/Ca, including a close proximity to an environmental record, a distinct change in pH at the sampling locale, and a growth model designed to optimise the correlations between seawater pH and shell B/Ca, we do not see a strong correlations between pH and shell B/Ca (maximum coefficient of determination, r2, of 0.207). Instead, our data indicate a strong biological control on B/Ca as observed in some other carbonate-forming organisms.
Effect of PRID-Delta devices associated with shortened estrus synchronization protocols on estrous response and fertility in dairy cows

Abstract This study evaluated the effect of a once-used progesterone (P4) intravaginal device (PRID) associated with four different shortened P4-based estrus synchronization (ES) protocols on estrous response (ER) and pregnancy per AI (P/AI) in cyclic and acyclic lactating dairy cows. Cows (n=465) were randomly assigned to one of the following protocols: 1) 2PGG, cows were given a PRID-Delta and 100 μg GnRH i.m. at PRID insertion (day 0). The PRID was left for 5 d, and 25 mg of dinoprost (PGF2α) i.m. given twice at PRID removal and 24 h later; 2) 2PGGe, same treatments as 2PGG plus 500 IU of eCG i.m. at PRID removal; 3) 2PGe, same treatments as 2PGGe, except GnRH was not given at PRID insertion; 4) PGe, same treatments as 2PGe, except PGF was only given at PRID removal. A total of 258 cows received a new PRID-Delta containing 1.55 g of P4, whereas 207 cows received a once-used PRID. Estrus was determined from P4 device removal until 96 h after using an automated heat detection system. Cows in estrus were given a second GnRH at AI and those without signs of estrus by 96 h after PRID removal were given GnRH and timed-AI (TA I). All inseminations were performed by one technician with commercially available frozen-thawed semen. Ultrasonography was performed at initiation of protocol and 28-34 days post AI to determine cyclicity and pregnancy status, respectively. Cows receiving once-used P4 devices had greater ER than cows receiving a new device (59.9 vs. 50.0; P=0.029), but P/AI did not differ between P4 devices, respectively (P>0.1; 40.6 vs 40.7%). Cyclic cows were less likely to display estrus than acyclic cows by a factor of 0.66 (P=0.036). Cows subjected to the 2PGe (2.41; P<0.01) protocol were more likely to display estrus than cows subjected to the 2PGG, whereas cows subjected to the PGe protocol did not differ (0.94; P=0.8) from those in the 2PGG group. Despite differences in ER, neither cyclicity nor estrus synchronization protocol affected P/AI (overall 40.6%). In summary, cyclic cows, those given a new P4 device and those subjected to either 2PGG or PGe protocol had reduced ER. However, all the factors examined had no significant effect on P/AI. All the estrus synchronization protocols resulted in acceptable fertility.
A PRAAT PLUGIN FOR MOMEL AND INTSINT WITH IMPROVED ALGORITHMS FOR MODELLING AND CODING INTONATION.

This paper presents a revised version of an implementation of the Momel and INTSINT algorithms for the automatic modelling and symbolic coding of intonation patterns. The algorithms are implemented as external functions which are seamlessly integrated into the Praat speech manipulation software by means of the recently proposed plugin facility for Praat. Pitch detection is carried out using a subroutine to calculate optimal values of maximum and minimum F0 automatically. The implementation of the Momel algorithm incorporates an improved treatment of the modelling of pitch contours in the vicinity of onsets and offsets of voicing. The version of the INTSINT algorithm implemented is the two parameter robust version described in recent publications.
Study of Lipid Specters and Antioxidation Activity in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Copyright: © 2017 Ghazaryan G. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In numerous works published in recent years and related to the behavior of cells in various damaging conditions (both in vitro and in vivo, including the pathological state of the organism and external influences), damage to the membrane systems of the cell occupies an essential place either as the first target to be damaged or As a system that determines in many ways the further fate of the cell.
Coding and Computational Thinking in Early Childhood: The Impact of ScratchJr in Europe

In recent years, there has been an increased effort to introduce coding and computational thinking in early childhood education. In accordance with the international trend, programming has become an increasingly growing focus in European education. With over 9.5 million iOS downloads, ScratchJr is the most popular freely available introductory programming language for young children (ages 5-7). This paper provides an overview of ScratchJr, and the powerful ideas from computer science it is designed to teach. In addition, data analytics are presented to show trends of usage in Europe and and how it compares to the rest of the world. Data reveals that countries with robust computer science initiatives such as the UK and the Nordic countries have high usage of ScratchJr.
3D Map Computation from Historical Stereo Photographs of Florence

The analysis of early photographic sources is fundamental for documenting and understanding the evolution of a city so rich in history and art as Florence. Indeed, by the 1860s several photographers used to work in town, and their images (often obtained through stereoscopic set-ups) can help us to reconstruct Florence in 3D as it was by the time of the Italian unification. The first and most delicate part of such reconstruction process is the computation of disparity maps from the historical stereo pairs. This is a very challenging task for fully-automatic computer vision algorithms, since XIX century photographs are affected by several problems—ranging from superficial damages to asynchronous acquisition—that are usually absent in modern images. In this paper we describe a semi-automatic method that, through minimal user input, allows the creation of coherent and realistic 3D maps of florentine scenes.
AN UNDERSTANDING AND APPROACH SOLUTION FOR COLD START PROBLEM ASSOCIATED WITH RECOMMENDER SYSTEM : A LITERATURE REVIEW

In the ecommerce services, there is a very important tool that will determine the success to increase number of buying and selling in the marketing target, that is how the user in finding products that are suitable to be purchased. This tool is called recommender system. Recommender system is important tool for establishing an effective communication between users and retailers in ecommerce business. Effective and enjoyable communication to find the product is considered to have a significant impact that increase of marketing achievement. Recommender system established in the mid-90s. Based on technical approach, there are four types of recommender system namely Collaborative,