Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Relationship of Age-Related Hearing Loss with Cognitive Decline and Dementia in a Sinitic Language-Speaking Adult Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract Background and Objectives Substantial evidence supports the association between untreated hearing loss, cognitive decline, and dementia in the non-tonal language-speaking population. Whether a similar association between hearing loss and cognitive decline and dementia exists in Sinitic tonal language-speaking people is yet to be elucidated. We aimed to systematically review the current evidence on the association between hearing loss and cognitive impairment/decline, and dementia in older adults who speak a Sinitic tonal language. Research Design and Methods This systematic review considered peer-reviewed articles that employed objective or subjective hearing measurement and cognitive function, cognitive impairment, or diagnosis of dementia. All articles written in English and Chinese and published before March 2022 were included. Databases including Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, PsycINFO and Google Scholar, SinoMed, and CBM were utilized using MeSH terms and keywords. Results Thirty-five articles met our inclusion criteria. Of these, 29 unique studies with an estimated 372,154 participants were included in the meta-analyses. Among all included studies, the effect size of cognitive function with hearing loss, the regression coefficient was −0.26 (95% confidence interval [CI], −0.45 to −0.07). Among cross-sectional and cohort studies, a significant association was found between hearing loss and cognitive impairment and dementia, with odds ratios of 1.85 (95% CI, 1.59–2.17) and 1.89 (95% CI, 1.50–2.38), respectively. Discussion and Implications Most of the studies included in this systematic review observed a significant association between hearing loss and cognitive impairment and dementia. There was no significant difference to the findings in non-tonal language populations.
MITF Contributes to the Body Color Differentiation of Sea Cucumbers Apostichopus japonicus through Expression Differences and Regulation of Downstream Genes

Simple Summary The sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus is an ecologically significant echinoderm with considerable nutritional and therapeutic value. Color variation of A. japonicus is one of its most important cultivation traits, as color affects its bioactive compounds, taste, and market price. Microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) is one of the most critical genes in melanocyte development and melanin synthesis pathways. However, how MITF regulates body color and differentiation in sea cucumbers is poorly understood. Here, we analyzed the expression level and location of MITF in white, purple, and green sea cucumbers and identified the genes regulated by MITF using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing. Our findings suggested that MITF contributed to the body color differentiation of green, purple, and white sea cucumbers A. japonicus through expression differences and regulation of downstream genes. These findings give researchers a foundation for further research into the processes that underlie the development of body color in sea cucumbers and provide light on how genes are regulated. The results will also provide support for sea cucumber breeding and a useful theoretical basis in order to contribute to the development of the sea cucumber industry. Abstract Melanin, which is a pigment produced in melanocytes, is an important contributor to sea cucumber body color. MITF is one of the most critical genes in melanocyte development and melanin synthesis pathways. However, how MITF regulates body color and differentiation in sea cucumbers is poorly understood. In this study, we analyzed the expression level and location of MITF in white, purple, and green sea cucumbers and identified the genes regulated by MITF using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing. The mRNA and protein expression levels of MITF were all highest in purple morphs and lowest in white morphs. In situ hybridization indicated that MITF mRNA were mainly expressed in the epidermis. We also identified 984, 732, and 1191 peaks of MITF binding in green, purple, and white sea cucumbers, which were associated with 727, 557, and 887 genes, respectively. Our findings suggested that MITF contributed to the body color differentiation of green, purple, and white sea cucumbers through expression differences and regulation of downstream genes. These results provided a basis for future studies to determine the mechanisms underlying body color formation and provided insights into gene regulation in sea cucumbers.
Vers une définition de l’approche intégrée du français

Préconiser une approche intégrée du français est souhaitée depuis de nombreuses années. Un grand nombre d’études ont démontré des liens existants entre les différentes compétences langagières. Articulées les unes aux autres, elles s’enrichissent mutuellement. Mais que savons-nous exactement de cette approche ? Peu d’écrits tentent de la définir réellement. Cet article met en relation différentes caractéristiques de l’approche intégrée du français afin d’en proposer une définition opérationnelle.
A New Hematocrit Measurement Method Using a Chemiluminescence Biosensor and Its Application in a Chemiluminescence Immunoassay Platform for Myocardial Markers Detection with Whole Blood Samples

The accuracy and precision of analyte concentrations measured in whole blood by chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) have been significantly affected by erythrocytes, which leads to poor application of whole blood CLIA in clinical practice. In this work, a chemiluminescence biosensing optical platform for blood hematocrit (HCT) analysis using MAGICL 6000 (Getein Biotechnology, Nanjing, China) was designed, implemented, and fully characterized. The developed method was successfully applied to determine various HCT levels of human blood from 0% to 65%, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9885 compared with the conventional method (Sysmex XE 5000, Kobe, Japan). A mathematical model was developed to quantitatively evaluate the impact of HCT on the results of two sample types (whole blood vs. plasma). Combining the established HCT method and mathematical model with CLIA on MAGICL 6000, the precision was significantly improved by almost 20%. Comparison studies using whole blood samples and corresponding plasma samples showed that the square of the correlation coefficients of troponin I (cTnI), myoglobin (MYO), creatine kinase MB (CK-MB), and N-terminal pro-hormone brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) were increased to 0.9992, 0.9997, 0.9996, and 0.9994, respectively, showing a great potential for clinical application.
Zavod za kliničku psihijatriju: jučer, danas i sutra

Zavod za kliničku psihijatriju pruža sveobuhvatnu skrb osobama oboljelima od poremećaja iz kruga shizofrenije, poremećaja raspoloženja i kognitivnih poremećaja. Ona uključuje akutno liječenje na intenzivnoj njezi, liječenje na otvorenom dijelu odjela, boravak u Dnevnoj bolnici te ambulantno liječenje. Poseban naglasak je na optimalnoj primjeni psihofarmakoterapije, mjerenju koncentracije psihofarmaka, korištenju različitih psihometrijskih mjernih instrumenata, primjeni ostalih bioloških metoda: elektrokonvulzivne terapije (EKT), repetitivne transkranijske magnetske stimulacije (rTMS) te fototerapije, kao i na oporavku bolesnika i njihovoj integraciji u društvo. Jedna od bitnih aktivnosti Zavoda je i nastavni i znanstveni rad. Ovaj tekst je napisan na temelju radova njegovih bivših (2,3) i sadašnjih djelatnika (sve ostale reference). INTRODUCTION
Predicting Underestimation of Invasive Cancer in Patients with Core-Needle-Biopsy-Diagnosed Ductal Carcinoma In Situ Using Deep Learning Algorithms

The prediction of an occult invasive component in ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) before surgery is of clinical importance because the treatment strategies are different between pure DCIS without invasive component and upgraded DCIS. We demonstrated the potential of using deep learning models for differentiating between upgraded versus pure DCIS in DCIS diagnosed by core-needle biopsy. Preoperative axial dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from 352 lesions were used to train, validate, and test three different types of deep learning models. The highest performance was achieved by Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network using Regions of Interest (ROIs) with an accuracy of 75.0% and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.796. Our results suggest that the deep learning approach may provide an assisting tool to predict the histologic upgrade of DCIS and provide personalized treatment strategies to patients with underestimated invasive disease.
Enhancing target shadows in SAR images

A method called fixed focus shadow enhancement is proposed. The purpose is to sharpen target shadows in synthetic aperture radar images. The method applies a fixed focus range to a given target, resulting in a sharp target image and a sharp target shadow. Other parts of the radar image, including the background against which the shadow is seen, are smeared
Vancomycin Resistance in Enterococcus and Staphylococcus aureus

Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium and Staphylococcus aureus are both common commensals and major opportunistic human pathogens. In recent decades, these bacteria have acquired broad resistance to several major classes of antibiotics, including commonly employed glycopeptides. Exemplified by resistance to vancomycin, glycopeptide resistance is mediated through intrinsic gene mutations, and/or transferrable van resistance gene cassette-carrying mobile genetic elements. Here, this review will discuss the epidemiology of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus and S. aureus in healthcare, community, and agricultural settings, explore vancomycin resistance in the context of van and non-van mediated resistance development and provide insights into alternative therapeutic approaches aimed at treating drug-resistant Enterococcus and S. aureus infections.
MOSA method: a tool for solving multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems

The success of modern heuristics (Simulated Annealing (S.A.), Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithms, …) in solving classical combinatorial optimization problems has drawn the attention of the research community in multicriteria methods. In fact, for large-scale problems, the simultaneous difficulties of -hard complexity and of multiobjective framework make most Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO) problems intractable for exact methods. This paper develops the so-called MOSA (Multiobjective Simulated Annealing) method to approximate the set of efficient solutions of a MOCO problem. Different options for the implementation are illustrated and extensive experiments prove the efficiency of the approach. Its results are compared to exact methods on bi-objective knapsack problems. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
"Adhatoda Vasica: A Critical Review and Assessment of Its Future in Herbal Medicine"

Medicinal plants have been used to heal a vast range of human ailments and even to preventdiseases over thousands of years. The contribution of such natural elements also promotesthe development of a declining slope in terms of epidemiological records for a particular.Adhatoda vasica is a very important medicinal plant that is extensively used in the Ayurvedicmedical system. It has been used to treat bronchodilator problems for centuries. The biologicalproperties of this plant are due to the active chemicals produced by it. The observations arequite encouraging, indicating that this plant should be further investigated and revealed in orderto acquire some medicinal benefits.
The Cystic Fibrosis Learning Network: A mixed methods evaluation of program goals, attributes, and impact

The Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation sponsored the design, pilot testing, and implementation of the CF Learning Network (CFLN) to explore how the Foundation's Care Center Network (CCN) could become a learning health system. Six years after the design, the Foundation commissioned a formative mixed methods evaluation of the CFLN to assess: CFLN participants' understanding of program goals, attributes, and perceptions of current and future impact.
Characteristics of Internal Gear Pump

Concerning the involute profile internal gear pump, the author calculated the ideal delivery, its pulsation factor and the variation of the trapped volume. And these characteristics were verified by his experiment. As a result of this research it was found clearly that the internal gear pumps are more excellent than the conventional external gear pumps in the following points, (1) the pulsations of the delivery and the delivery pressure are small, (2) the variation of the trapped volume is small, and there is no extreme pressure rise nor decrease in this space with no relief groove.
Finite-Time Suboptimal Control Design for Aerobatic Maneuver of Variable-Pitch Quadrotor

The variable-pitch quadrotors can perform aggressive maneuvers such as aerobatic flip by varying the thrust in both positive and negative vertical directions via the blade pitch, which can provide an additional degree of freedom as opposed to the fixed-pitch quadrotor that only changes the rotational rate of motors. However, an inevitable challenge exists when designing an operative controller for the aerobatic flip due to the resultant singularity of the rotation matrix. In this article, a finite-time suboptimal control design strategy, named finite-time <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\theta -D$</tex-math></inline-formula> algorithm, combined with the geometric control technique is proposed for the aerobatic maneuver control of the variable-pitch quadrotor. Based on this scheme, the singularity issue can be circumvented. The <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\theta -D$</tex-math></inline-formula> control design provides a closed-form suboptimal control law by offline solving a differential Riccati equation and a set of linear Lyapunov equations analytically, which does not require complex online numerical and iterative solutions compared with the similar finite-time state-dependent Riccati equation technique. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed geometric finite-time <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\theta -D$</tex-math></inline-formula> method provides an effective and efficient control of the variable-pitch quadrotor.
Pengaruh Corporate Governance dan Intellectual Capital Terhadap Nilai Perusahaan

Mechanism of corporate governance, independent commissioners and institutional ownership with intellectual capital as independent variables in this study examines positive influence on firm value. Using a research sample of cyclical sector companies on the IDX in 2017-2020 with a total of 352 data observations. The test instrument is multiple linear regression analysis processed using the SPSS 26 application. The results found that independent commissioners have a negative effect on firm value, institutional ownership has an effect on firm value and intellectual capital has a negative effect on firm value in cyclical sector companies on the IDX in 2017- 2020.
High-temporal-resolution event-based vehicle detection and tracking

Abstract. Event-based vision has been rapidly growing in recent years justified by the unique characteristics, such as its high temporal resolutions (∼1 μs), high dynamic range (>120 dB), and output latency of only a few microseconds. Our work further explores a hybrid, multimodal approach for object detection and tracking that leverages state-of-the-art frame-based detectors complemented by hand-crafted event-based methods to improve the overall tracking performance with minimal computational overhead. The methods presented include event-based bounding box (BB) refinement that improves the precision of the resulting BBs, as well as a continuous event-based object detection method, to recover missed detections and generate interframe detections that enable a high-temporal-resolution tracking output. The advantages of these methods are quantitatively verified by an ablation study using the higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) metric. Results show significant performance gains resembled by an improvement in the HOTA from 56.6%, using only frames, to 64.1% and 64.9%, for the event and edge-based mask configurations combined with the two methods proposed, at the baseline frame rate of 24 Hz. Likewise, incorporating these methods with the same configurations has improved HOTA from 52.5% to 63.1% and from 51.3% to 60.2% at the high-temporal-resolution tracking rate of 384 Hz. Finally, a validation experiment is conducted to analyze the real-world single-object tracking performance using high-speed LiDAR. Empirical evidence shows that our approaches provide significant advantages compared to using frame-based object detectors at the baseline frame rate of 24 Hz and higher tracking rates of up to 500 Hz.
Perirenal adipose tissues as a human elastin source, and optimize the extraction process

Elastin is very rarely repaired extracellular matrix (ECM) in physiological condition. The commercial human elastin for exogenous medical treatment is very expensive, and has a potential for disease transmission. Animal-origin elastin is relatively low price, but has concerns for xenogeneic immune responses. Considering cost and safety, we focused on the perirenal adipose tissue, donated from healthy young people via donor nephrectomy. Until now, all of the perirenal adipose tissues are discarded as a medical waste after kidney transplantation. In the present study, we applied perirenal adipose tissues as the source of human elastin, and optimized the extraction process to get high purified and quantified elastin. Through pre-processing step, the delipidated and decellularized ECM was prepared. Next, with four different elastin extraction process (acidic solvents, neutral salt, organic solvents or hot alkali method), elastin was extracted, and the concentration of amino acid between each product was compared, and bright-field/electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and cytotoxicity analysis were also performed. As controls, bovine neck ligament-derived and human skin-derived elastin were used. Among the elastin extraction methods, the hot alkali insoluble product showed (1) relatively high positive area of Verhoeff’s and low Masson’s trichrome stain, (2) 64.24% purity, 159.29 mg/g quantity, and ∼6.37% yield in amino acid analysis, (3) β-sheet second structure, and (4) thin fiber composed mesh-like sheet structure in SEM image. These values were higher than those of the commercial human skin elastin. When comparing hydrolyzed forms, α-elastin from hot alkali insoluble product showed enhanced cell proliferation and maintained cell properties compared to the κ-elastin. Therefore, we confirmed that the perirenal adipose tissue is an ideal source of human elastin with safety assurance, and the hot alkali process combined with pre-process seems to be the optimal method for elastin extraction with high purity and quantity.
Study of Dual Stopbands UWB Antenna with U-slot and V-slot DGS

A peach-like ultra-wideband (UWB) planar monopole antenna (PMA) with dual stopband characteristic is presented in this paper. It is designed to work on a substrate Rogers RT5880 that has a thickness of 1 mm and relative permittivity of 2.65. The proposed antenna is fed by microstrip line; the U-slot is used to reject the frequency band (3.3–4.2 GHz) limited by IEEE 802.11a or HIPERLAN/2. Another rejection band (5.15–5.825 GHz) limited by IEEE 802.11b and C-band satellite communication systems is obtained by using the V-slot defected ground structure (DGS). The size of the antenna is 33 mm × 35 mm. Effects of varying the interior degree of the V-slot DGS and the length of the U-slot on antenna performance have also been studied. Measured result shows the designed antenna with an impedance bandwidth covering at least 3.11 to 15 GHz assuming a 10 dB return loss, except 5.04–6.42 GHz and 3.35–4.24 GHz band. Also the simulated results show that the antenna has omnidirectional radiation patterns in the x-z plane and good gain flatness.
Guided replication of random chain: a new Monte Carlo method

The authors introduce a new Monte Carlo method to study random chains. The method uses (i) a link by link growth procedure of the chain, (ii) a chain replication procedure based on Boltzmann weights. They apply it to various cases in two and three dimensions (pure self-avoiding walk, repulsion between nearest-neighbour links and attraction between the chain extremities, etc.). When the competition (or frustration) between the different interaction terms increases, the chain may get trapped in local minima: to overcome this problem, they introduce a guiding field (or potential) ( phi i(r)). Step (ii) is now performed in the presence of this guiding field, which makes the chain population temporarily non-Boltzmannian. However, when the chain is completed, the final population obeys again the Boltzmann law. They study simple cases, where ( phi i(r)) may be chosen on physical grounds.
USING MARKOV CHAIN ON ONLINE LEARNING HISTORY DATA TO DEVELOP LEARNER MODEL FOR MEASURING STRENGTH OF LEARNING HABITS

A learner model reflects learning patterns and characteristics of a learner. A learner model with learning history and its effectiveness plays a significant role in supporting a learner’s understanding of their strengths and weaknesses of their way of learning in order to make proper adjustments for improvement. Nowadays, learners have been engaging in online learning frequently and intensely, leaving behind tremendous learning history data that contain informative insights about the learners’ learning patterns. This paper proposed a method for developing learner models by applying the Markov chain to learning history data. Our method transforms individual learners’ resource use data in a learning course into a large amount of resource use sequences, then develops a Markov learner model, and generates the resource use steady state for each learner. The resource use density, the resource steady state, and the assessment scores of individual learners tell their learning patterns and the effectiveness of the learning patterns. From the Markov learner model, we generate a learner profile for describing learning patterns and an index for measuring the strength of learning habits of the learner. We verified our method by applying it to each course in the OULAD dataset to predict the learning performance using the index. The preliminary results gain up to 97% accuracy on the pass/fail prediction problem.
Partial Fourier-transform approach to tunnel ionization: Atomic systems

We present physically transparent and computationally simple method for calculating tunnel ionization rates for arbitrary bound states and arbitrary potentials in three dimensions. Here, we verify applicability of the method analytically by demonstrating that it reproduces all known analytical results for tunnel ionization from arbitrary atomic states in a single-center Coulomb potential in the presence of a constant electric field.
Protein adsorption kinetics in different surface potentials

We have studied the adsorption kinetics of the protein amylase at solid/liquid interfaces. Offering substrates with tailored properties, we are able to separate the impact of short- and long-range interactions. By means of a colloidal Monte Carlo approach including conformational changes of the adsorbed proteins induced by density fluctuations, we develop a scenario that is consistent with the experimentally observed three-step kinetics on specific substrates. Our observations show that not only the surface chemistry determines the properties of an adsorbed protein layer but also the van der Waals contributions of a composite substrate may lead to non-negligible effects.