Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Fiber Optic Probe Design to Measure Depth- Limited Optical Properties In-vivo with Low- Coherence Enhanced Backscattering (lebs) Spectroscopy References and Links

Low-coherence enhanced backscattering (LEBS) spectroscopy is an angular resolved backscattering technique that is sensitive to sub-diffusion light transport length scales in which information about scattering phase function is preserved. Our group has shown the ability to measure the spatial backscattering impulse response function along with depth-selective optical properties in tissue ex-vivo using LEBS. Here we report the design and implementation of a lens-free fiber optic LEBS probe capable of providing depth-limited measurements of the reduced scattering coefficient in-vivo. Experimental measurements combined with Monte Carlo simulation of scattering phantoms consisting of polystyrene microspheres in water are used to validate the performance of the probe. Additionally, depth-limited capabilities are demonstrated using Monte Carlo modeling and experimental measurements from a two-layered phantom. In vivo fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging for oncological applications, " Photochem. Morphological and morphometric measurements in colorectal mucosa of subjects at increased risk for colonic neoplasia, " Cancer Lett. Nonscalar elastic light scattering from continuous random media in the Born approximation, " Opt. Measurement of optical scattering properties with low-coherence enhanced backscattering spectroscopy, " J. Association between rectal optical signatures and colonic neoplasia: potential applications for screening, " Cancer Res. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy with a self-calibrating fiber optic probe, " Opt. Effects of fiber-optic probe design and probe-to-target distance on diffuse reflectance measurements of turbid media: an experimental and computational study at 337 nm, " Appl. Ball lens coupled fiber-optic probe for depth-resolved spectroscopy of epithelial tissue, " Opt. In vivo measurement of the local optical properties of tissue by use of differential path-length spectroscopy, " Opt. Elastic scattering spectroscopy for the diagnosis of colonic lesions: initial results of a novel optical biopsy technique, " Gastrointest. Measurement of tissue optical properties by the use of oblique-incidence optical fiber reflectometry, " Appl. Multiple scattering model for the penetration depth of low-coherence enhanced backscattering, " J. formulation of enhanced backscattering as phase conjugation and diffraction: derivation and experimental observation, " Opt. enhanced backscattering spectroscopy for characterization of biological tissues at sub-diffusion length-scales, " IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. (to be published). Characterization of light transport in scattering media at sub-diffusion length scales with Low-coherence Enhanced Backscattering, " IEEE J. Sel. Top.
IN-SITU ASPHALT MASTER CURVE CONSTRUCTION USING NON- DESTRUCTIVE TESTING TECHNIQUES

For in-situ asphalt concrete characterization, the MEDPG recommends using the falling weight deflectometer (FWD) to determine the dynamic modulus in combination with the construction of the master curve using the predictive equation. If there is adequate asphalt concrete thickness, asphalt cores may be tested using AASHTO TP 62 to determine the dynamic modulus and construct the master curve, however these cores may not be representative of the actual pavement condition since they may be extracted from select areas showing minimum damage. Both the predictive equation and AASHTO TP 62 require destructive core extraction and can be too costly for many transportation agencies. Recently, the Multichannel Analysis of Surface Waves (MASW) technique has shown to provide accurate non-destructive estimates of the in-situ asphalt concrete dynamic modulus, which may complement the FWD backcalculation process, however the values only constitute the upper two thirds of the master curve, while FWD determined moduli values generally constitute the lower portion of the curve. Therefore, it is a requirement to correct surface wave measured moduli to a standard design frequency using the master curve. To date, the master curves utilized in correcting seismic measured moduli have been constructed using conventional methods and have not incorporated the seismic data into the construction process. There is currently no in-situ non-destructive test method available to measure the dynamic moduli at the range of frequencies required to construct the master curve and researchers have not attempted to construct the master curve in-situ ultimately making the master curve more accessible for asphalt concrete characterization. This research demonstrates the construction of an in-situ non-destructive master curve using a combination of MASW and FWD data collected over a range of temperatures, which then provides a technique to correct the MASW data for enhancing the FWD backcalculation process or to seed the AC modulus directly. Additionally, for MASW moduli correction, the addition of the surface wave data into the master curve construction process is extremely important for providing the most accurate results when used in design.
On effectiveness of conditional admission control for IP QoS network services with REM scheme

Future IP QoS networks are aiming at differentiating transfer quality of packets belonging to different flows. For this purpose, a set of network services (NS) with different QoS objectives is defined and implemented in the network. To a NS a certain amount of network resources, i.e. dedicated link capacity with associated buffer size, is allocated. Moreover, the resources dedicated for one NS are not available for other NSs. Traditional approach for admission control algorithm corresponding to given NS takes into account current traffic conditions inside considered NS. This can lead to the situation, due to traffic fluctuations, that temporary overloaded NS cannot use the spare bandwidth from underloaded in this time other NSs. This paper describes a conditional admission control algorithm (C-AC), allowing us to admit new packet flow conditionally in the case where no available capacity inside a given NS. For conditionally accepted flow currently unused capacity, dedicated to other NS, is allocated. This can be done only in the case when QoS requirements for both the conditionally accepted flow and the flows in progress are satisfied. The conditions for effective using of C-AC algorithm are discussed in the paper, like characteristics of NS borrowing and lending capacity and their current traffic load. To show potential benefits of the approach, exemplary numerical results are included, corresponding to hypothetical NSs using REM (Rate Envelope Multiplexing) scheme.
Building iterativity into positioning analysis: A practice-based approach to small stories and self

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the ongoing debate within interactional approaches to positioning in narrative regarding the ways in which we can analytically tap into aspects of teller’s self that can be seen as stable or continuous. Bamberg’s level 3 positioning which answers the question of ‘Who am I? ” has inspired a lot of those discussion and it forms a productive point of departure here too. I attempt to systematize the exploration of Level 3 with a practice-based approach to narrative that: (a) affords ethnographically grounded understandings of who people are in specific contexts, (b) places narrative analysis within a multi-method that ensures access to the participants’ moments of reflexivity on themselves and their stories. I pose ways of telling, sites and tellers as the main constituent elements of such an approach and argue that iterativity is the key-element in the exploration of all three and ultimately in the uncovery of aspects of self that are presented as relatively stable. I base my discussion on data from a study of pupils in a London senior (sic high) school and single out breaking news about the participants’ new media engagements as a significant narrative activity for positioning.
Hypoxia inducible factor (HIF-1a and HIF-2a) expression in early esophageal cancer and response to photodynamic therapy and radiotherapy.

Hypoxia inducible factor 1a and 2a (HIF-1a and HIF-2a) are key proteins regulating cellular response to hypoxia. Because the efficacy of photodynamic therapy (PDT) is dependent on the presence of oxygen, the assessment of HIF-1a and HIF-2a expression may be of value in predicting clinical response to PDT. Using recently produced MoAbs, we examined the expression of HIF1a and HIF2a in a series of 37 early-stage esophageal cancers treated with PDT and with additional radiotherapy in case of incomplete response after PDT. Strong expression of the HIF1a and of HIF2a proteins in all optical fields examined was noted in 51% and in 13% of cases, respectively. High expression was associated with a low complete response (CR) rate and with the absence of bcl-2 protein expression. On the contrary, bcl-2 expression was associated with a high CR rate. Combined analysis of HIF1a and bcl-2 protein expression revealed that of 16 cases with high HIF1a expression and the absence of bcl-2 reactivity, only 1 (7%) responded completely to PDT (P = 0.007). Bivariate analysis showed that HIF1a expression was independently related to response to PDT (P = 0.04; t ratio = 2.8), whereas bcl-2 approached significance (P = 0.07; t-ratio = 1.8). The final response to radiotherapy was high (70%) and independent of the HIF and bcl-2 status, which may be a result of reoxygenation after cellular depletion mediated by PDT. The present study suggests that assessment of HIF and of bcl-2 expression are important predictors of in vivo sensitivity to PDT. Modulation of PDT response with bioreductive drugs and/or drugs targeting bcl-2 (i.e., taxanes) may prove of significant therapeutic importance in a subgroup of patients with high HIF expression.
International Journal of Multidisciplinary and Current Research Comparative Analysis of Routing Protocols in Wimax Environment

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a technology that bridges the gap between fixed and mobile access and offer the same subscriber experience for fixed and mobile user. Demand for such type of mobile broadband services and applications are growing rapidly as it provides freedom to the subscribers to be online wherever they are at a competitive price and other significant facilities such as increasing amounts of bandwidth, using a variety of mobile and roaming devices. The earliest version of WiMAX is based on IEEE 802.16 and is optimized for fixed and roaming access, which is further extended to support portability and mobility based on IEEE 802.16e, also known as Mobile WiMAX. However, frequent topology changes caused by node mobility make routing in Mobile WiMAX networks a challenging problem. The selection of an appropriate routing protocol is a key issue when designing a scalable and efficient wireless networks. Various routing protocols have been used in wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate different routing protocols and evaluate their performances on 802.16 WiMAX networks. Using simulation, two different routing protocols DSDV and OLSR have been tested. The performance of these routing protocols is evaluated with respect to throughput, end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio. Results show that DSDV in general performs better than other routing protocols.
Human evolution in the Middle Pleistocene: The role of Homo heidelbergensis

For paleoanthropologists working in the Middle Pleistocene, these are interesting times. New discoveries of artifacts and human fossils have been reported from western Europe, so that it now looks as though this continent was populated 800,000 years ago, if not earlier. One of the fossils, from Ceprano in Italy, is described as Homo erectus. Whether this ancient species ever reached Europe has been repeatedly questioned, but the Ceprano cranium is complete enough to provide some hard evidence. Other finds from Spain are even more spectacular. The Sima de los Huesos (‘‘Pit of Bones’’) in the Sierra de Atapuerca has yielded a wealth of skeletons that are best interpreted as early Neanderthals, perhaps close to 300,000 years in age. Older but unfortunately more fragmentary remains, also from Atapuerca, display no Neanderthal features and are claimed as representatives of a new species. Homo antecessor will require close study. These European discoveries focus fresh attention on the evidence accumulating from Africa and Asia. Human bones are known from the earlier Middle Pleistocene of Africa at localities such as Bodo in Ethiopia and Broken Hill in Zambia. The crania show anatomical features that distinguish them from Homo erectus. In the Far East, the people at Dali and other sites are also more advanced than Homo erectus, but their affinities to groups in the West are uncertain. This Middle Pleistocene record, still sparse but increasingly well dated, raises important questions. One concerns the fate of Homo erectus in different regions of the Old World. Another is how many distinct species should be recognized among the descendants of this ancient lineage. It is apparent that the traditional approach of lumping diverse humans together as ‘‘archaic’’ Homo sapiens will no longer work. The picture is highly complex, and several taxa probably are needed to accommodate the fossils. Evolutionary relationships among these populations must be clarified, but pose some major problems. I will address only a subset of these topics pertaining mainly to earlier Middle Pleistocene hominids.
Optimal Engine Operation in a Multi-Mode CVT Wheel Loader

Throughout the vehicular industry there is a drive for increased fuel efficiency. This is the case also for heavy equipment like wheel loaders. The operation of such machines is characterized by its highly transient nature, the episodes of high tractive effort at low speed and that power is used by both the transmission and the working hydraulics. The present transmission is well suited for this operation, though the efficiency is low in some modes of operation. Both operational advantages and efficiency drawbacks are highly related to the use of a torque converter. Continuously variable transmissions (CVTs) may hold a potential for achieving similar operability with reduced fuel consumption, though such devices increase the demand for, and importance of, active control.Common wheel loader operation is readily described in a framework of loading cycles. The general loading cycle is described, and a transmission oriented cycle description is introduced, in deterministic and stochastic forms, and a description is made on how such cycles are created from measurements. A loading cycle identifier is used for detecting cycles in a set of measured data, and a stochastic cycle is formed from statistics on the detected cycles.CVTs increase the possibility for active control, since a degree of freedom is introduced in the engine operating point. Optimal operating point trajectories are derived, using dynamic programming (DP), for naturally aspirated (NA) and turbocharged (TC) engines. The NA-engine solution is analyzed with Pontryagin’s maximum principle (PMP). This analysis is used for deriving PMP based methods for finding the optimal solutions for both engines. Experience show that these methods are 100 times faster than DP, but since the restrictions on the applicable load cases are severe, the main contribution from these is in the pedagogic visualization of optimization. Methods for deriving suboptimal operating point trajectories for both the NA and the TC engines are also developed, based on the optimization results. The methods are a factor >1000 faster than DP while producing feasible trajectories with less than 5% increase in fuel consumption compared to the optimal.Multi-mode CVTs provide the possibility of even higher efficiency than single mode devices. At the same time, the added complexity makes control development increasingly time consuming and costly, while the quality of the control is decisive for the success of the system. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate the potential of transmission concepts before control development commence. Stochastic dynamic programming is used and evaluated as a tool for control independent comparing of the present transmission and a hydrostatic multi-mode CVT concept. The introduction of a stochastic load complicates the optimization, especially in the feasible choice of states for the optimization. The results show that the multi-mode CVT has at least 15% lower minimum fuel consumption than the present transmission, and that this difference is not sensitive to prediction uncertainties.
GPs’ views and perspectives on patient non-adherence to treatment in primary care prior to suicide

Abstract Background: Individuals who do not adhere to their treatment regimens may be at greater risk of suicide but these issues are relatively unexplored in primary care services. Aim: To explore GPs’ views and perspectives on the reasons why patients who were in contact with mental health services in the year prior to suicide was non-adherent to treatment prior to their death. Method: In total, 198 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with GPs of people who had died by suicide. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a thematic approach. Results: The following themes were conceptualized from GP interviews: (i) “Lack of insight or denial? ” relates to what GPs perceived as their patients lack of insight into their psychiatric illness; (ii) “Lack of treatment choices” discusses GPs’ understanding of patient treatment choices; (iii) “Services for comorbidity and dual diagnosis” refers to treatment availability for suicidal patients with two or more mental health diagnoses. Conclusions: For suicide prevention, it is crucial for health professionals to assess patients and manage the possible causes of non-adherence. Policies for increasing treatment adherence, improving services for dual diagnosis, or providing alternative treatments to meet individual patient needs may help to achieve the best health outcomes and could potentially prevent suicide.
Near‐optimal dynamic priority scheduling strategy for instance‐intensive business workflows in cloud computing

Utilization of cloud computing resources has made a fast growth in e‐business. Business and government agencies often need to handle large volume of service requests, the so‐called instance‐intensive business processes in a constrained period. On‐time completion for instance‐intensive business processes within the constrained time is a very important issue. In the past few years, traditional optimal task scheduling has been well researched and proven to be a nondeterministic polynomial (NP) time–complete problem. So many heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms are put forward to solve the issue with near‐optimal solutions. However, most of them just treat a single workflow instance as a multistep task without considering that steps within a task can be different types of activities. To explain multistep features of business workflows, a typical motivating instance‐intensive business example of security exchange and a multistep scheduling model for business workflows are introduced in this paper. Then our near‐optimal dynamic priority scheduling (DPS) strategy is proposed on the basis of the idea of Min‐Min heuristic algorithm and greedy philosophy. Compared to the first come first served and constrained Min‐Min by makespan and standard deviation, DPS can make a more optimized choice in each round of scheduling towards overall outcome. To show the effectiveness of DPS, theoretical minimum execution time (METtheory) is used as a benchmark for evaluation based on simulation. The results show that the ratios between METtheory and DPS are more than 98.5% by scheduling different orders of magnitude tasks from 1000 to 1 000 000. In particular, the ratio between METtheory and DPS is nearly 99.9% with 1 000 000 tasks, which means that our DPS can get the near‐optimal result when scheduling large number of tasks.
Dissecting genetic susceptibility to gluten sensitivity: HLA-linked risk factors in coeliac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis

7 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE . 9 Human Immunology and HLA . 9 Intestinal mucosal immunology . 9 Human leucocyte antigen, HLA . 10 Disease associations. 17 Genetics of multifactorial (‘complex’) diseases . 18 Complex diseases . 18 Genetic studies . 19 Coeliac disease, gluten sensitive enteropathy . 23 Clinical picture . 23 Diagnosis . 25 Prevalence . 25 Dermatitis herpetiformis . 26 Pathogenesis . 27 Genetics . 29 Finnish studies on coeliac disease . 32 AIMS OF THE STUDIES. 34 STUDY SUBJECTS AND ETHICAL PERMISSIONS . 35 Coeliac disease patients . 35 Multiplex families . 35 Simplex families . 35 Monozygotic twin pairs . 35 Hungarian coeliac disease patients . 36 Coeliac disease patients from European Genetics Cluster . 36 Samples in study I . 36
Botulinum Toxin Therapy for Cervical Dystonia: The Science of Dosing

The first-line treatment for cervical dystonia (CD) is botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A), which has been established as a highly effective and well-tolerated therapy. However, this treatment is also complex and challenging to apply in clinical practice. Approximately 20% of patients discontinue therapy due to treatment failure, adverse effects, and other reasons. In addition, expert consensus recommendations are lacking to guide physicians in the optimal use of BoNT-A for CD. Among the issues still to be clarified is the optimal dosing frequency. The generally accepted standard for intervals between BoNT-A injections is ≥12 weeks; however, this standard is based primarily on the methodology of pivotal trials for the BoNT-A products, rather than on evidence that it is optimal in comparison to other intervals. While some retrospective, observational studies of BoNT-A used in clinical practice appear to support the use of ≥12-week dosing intervals, it is often unclear in these studies how the need for reinjection was determined. In contrast, a prospective dose-ranging trial in which patients were allowed to request reinjection as early as 8 weeks showed that about half of patients receiving abobotulinumtoxinA, at the currently recommended initial dose of 500 U, requested reinjection at 8 weeks. Moreover, results from an open-label, 68-week extension phase of the pivotal trial of incobotulinumtoxinA showed that 47.1% of patients had received reinjection at ≤12 weeks. Ongoing studies, such as the Cervical Dystonia Patient Registry for Observation of BOTOX® Efficacy (CD PROBE), may help clarify this question of optimal dosing intervals for BoNT-A in CD.