Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Orodispersible Films with Rupatadine Fumarate Enclosed in Ethylcellulose Microparticles as Drug Delivery Platform with Taste-Masking Effect

Orally disintegrating (orodispersible) films provide a versatile tool for drug administration, especially in the pediatric and geriatric population, since they reduce the risk of choking and do not necessitate drinking water during application. By considering their direct contact with the taste buds, palatability is an influential aspect related to patient compliance. The microparticles based on taste-masking polymers containing drugs enclosed inside effectively mask the unpleasant taste of medicines. Ethylcellulose is a hydrophobic polymer widely used as a taste-masking material. Rupatadine fumarate, a second-generation antihistamine drug, is characterised by an intense bitter taste; therefore, it is crucial to achieve a tolerable taste whilst developing orodispersible formulations with its content. The objective of this study was to develop orally disintegrating films with rupatadine fumarate in the form of ethylcellulose-based microparticles obtained from aqueous dispersions of ethylcellulose—Surelease® or Aquacoat® ECD. It was a technological challenge to achieve homogenous drug content per dosage unit and sufficient mechanical properties for film operating due to the necessity to suspend the microparticles in the casting solution. Although the process of obtaining films consisted of several steps (mixing, pouring, drying), the particles were homogeneously dispersed, and each film of the desired size contained the proper dose of the drug. The taste-masking effect was also maintained. This parameter was confirmed by three independent methods: in vivo by healthy volunteers, an electronic tongue and a dissolution test. The applied taste-evaluation techniques showed that the films containing Aquacoat® ECD microparticles have the highest degree of bitter taste reduction, which confirms the results obtained in our previous studies.
Application of the Fractional Riccati Equation for Mathematical Modeling of Dynamic Processes with Saturation and Memory Effect

In this study, the model Riccati equation with variable coefficients as functions, as well as a derivative of a fractional variable order (VO) of the Gerasimov-Caputo type, is used to approximate the data for some physical processes with saturation. In particular, the proposed model is applied to the description of solar activity (SA), namely the number of sunspots observed over the past 25 years. It is also used to describe data from Johns Hopkins University on coronavirus infection COVID-19, in particular data on the Russian Federation and the Republic of Uzbekistan. Finally, it is used to study issues related to seismic activity, in particular, the description of data on the volumetric activity of Radon (RVA). The Riccati equation used in the mathematical model was numerically solved by constructing an implicit finite difference scheme (IFDS) and its implementation by the modified Newton method (MNM). The calculated curves obtained in the study are compared with known experimental data. It is shown that if the model parameters are chosen appropriately, the model curves will give results that correlate well with real experimental data. Moreover, with other parameters of the model, it is possible to make some prediction about the possible course of the considered processes.
SIGW Based MIMO Antenna for Satellite Down-Link Applications

In this paper, a 4-port multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antenna based on substrate integrated gap wave guide (SIGW) is presented for down-link satellite applications. The proposed MIMO antenna consists of four rectangular-shaped radiating slots, which are fed via SIGW to minimize dispersion and insertion loss. Firstly, single antenna element (reference antenna) is designed to have impedance matching and stable radiation pattern over the bandwidth 13.4–13.65 GHz. Afterward, different antenna configurations are studied to combine four identical elements of the reference one for the sake of minimizing mutual coupling between them. In this work, the edge-to-edge separation between the antenna elements for orthogonal and opposite orientations are 9.3mm and 17.3mm, respectively. The mutual coupling between antenna elements is suppressed by etching the upper ground in the region between the antenna elements. Moreover, further optimization is carried out by changing the dimensions of the etched slot to reach higher isolation between radiating slots for better MIMO diversity performance. With this approach, the realized gain is increased by 3-dBi and the maximum mutual coupling achieved at 13.5 GHz between port (1,2) and port (1,3) are −63 dB and −78 dB, respectively with isolation enhancement of 38 dB between port (1,2) and 48 dB between port (1,3). Both simulated and measured results indicate that the proposed antenna has a bandwidth of 13.3–13.8 GHz, with a high isolation greater than 40 dB. Furthermore, the realized antenna gain is around 9-dBi with radiation efficiency of 86%. In addition, the designed MIMO antenna offers excellent radiation characteristics and stable gain over the whole operating band. To explore the diversity of the MIMO system the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), multiplexing efficiency (ME), diversity gain (DG), channel capacity loss (CCL) and total active reflection coefficient (TARC) are studied. Finally, good consistency between simulation and measured outcomes is obtained confirming the validity of the MIMO antenna for real life satellite application systems.
Saliency-enhanced two-stream convolutional network for no-reference image quality assessment

Abstract. We propose a saliency-enhanced two-stream convolutional network (SETNet) for no-reference image quality assessment. The proposed SETNet contains two subnetworks of image stream and saliency stream. The image stream focuses on the whole image content, while the saliency stream explicitly guides the network to learn spatial salient features that are more attractive to humans. In addition, the spatial attention module and dilated convolution-based channel attention module are employed to refine multiple levels features in spatial and channel dimensions. Finally, the image stream and saliency stream features fusion strategy is proposed to integrate features at the corresponding layer, and the final quality scores are predicted by using multiple levels of integrated features and weighting strategy. The experimental results of the proposed method and several representative methods on four synthetic distortion datasets and two real distortion datasets show that our SETNet has higher prediction accuracy and generalization ability.
Tumor-Mediated Neutrophil Polarization and Therapeutic Implications

Neutrophils are immune cells with reported phenotypic and functional plasticity. Tumor-associated neutrophils display many roles during cancer progression. Several tumor microenvironment (TME)-derived factors orchestrate neutrophil release from the bone marrow, recruitment and functional polarization, while simultaneously neutrophils are active stimulators of the TME by secreting factors that affect immune interactions and subsequently tumor progression. Successful immunotherapies for many cancer types and stages depend on the targeting of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. Neutrophils impact the success of immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint blockade therapies, by displaying lymphocyte suppressive properties. The identification and characterization of distinct neutrophil subpopulations or polarization states with pro- and antitumor phenotypes and the identification of the major TME-derived factors of neutrophil polarization would allow us to harness the full potential of neutrophils as complementary targets in anticancer precision therapies.
StreamDFP: A General Stream Mining Framework for Adaptive Disk Failure Prediction

We explore machine learning for accurately predicting imminent disk failures and hence providing proactive fault tolerance for modern large-scale storage systems. Current disk failure prediction approaches are mostly offline and assume that the disk logs required for training learning models are available a priori. However, disk logs are often continuously generated as an evolving data stream, in which the statistical patterns vary over time (also known as concept drift). Such a challenge motivates the need of online techniques that perform training and prediction on the incoming stream of disk logs in real time, while being adaptive to concept drift. We first measure and demonstrate the existence of concept drift on various disk models in production. Motivated by our study, we design StreamDFP, a general stream mining framework for disk failure prediction with concept-drift adaptation based on three key techniques, namely online labeling, concept-drift-aware training, and general prediction, with a primary objective of supporting various machine learning algorithms. We extend StreamDFP to support online transfer learning for minority disk models with concept-drift adaptation. Our evaluation shows that StreamDFP improves the prediction accuracy significantly compared to without concept-drift adaptation under various settings, and achieves reasonably high stream processing performance.
Rethinking warning compliance and complacency by examining how people manage risk and vulnerability during real-world tornado threats

The weather community has a keen interest in whether or not people comply with tornado warnings by taking shelter when a tornado threatens. When people do not seek shelter, a commonly attributed reason is that they are complacent due to over-warning, false alarms, routine exposure and experience with tornadoes and warnings, or time between damaging events. Yet, there is a lack of research that focuses on whether people are actually complacent, i.e., whether they ignore or are unwilling to prepare for the threat. We explore whether people exhibit these indicators of complacency by examining how people assessed their risk and responded during real-world tornado threats and how vulnerability influenced these processes. Our analysis is based on in-person interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly EF3 tornadoes that occurred approximately 50 miles apart and within 12 hours of each other. Contrary to a threat-disbelieving, threat-ignoring, non-preparing and thus complacent public, we instead found that people actively managed their risk from the tornadoes, meaning they actively attended to, evaluated, and responded to the tornado risk as it evolved in space and time. We further found, however, that many people felt limited or lack of efficacy to respond due to static and situational factors that resulted in them having no safe place to seek protection from the threat. Based on this rich, nuanced analysis, we provide recommendations about important ways that the weather community and its partners can mitigate the risks people face from tornadoes, now and in the long-term.
Trends in Streamflow in Relation to Water Retention Structures: A Case Study in Bharathpuzha River Basin, India

Lack of availability of land, water and other natural resources along with climate change has caused a major threat for increasing the agricultural production on par with the increasing population. Bharathapuzha river is considered as the cradle of civilization in Kerala state, India. The river flow is highly affected by increased water use and reduced recharge caused due to increasing population, urbanization and unscientific management practices. Even though, watershed development activities in river basins help in conserving water in the upstream areas for agricultural, domestic and other uses, very few research have been done to understand its effect on the flow regime in the lower reaches. A number of dams, check dams and other conservation structures have been constructed in Bharathapuzha catchment area during the past and hence its effect on the downstream flow need to be studied. The calibrated and validated SWAT model was applied to Bharathapuzha river basin for studying the impact of watershed interventions on the water balance of the area. The simulated monthly streamflow was analyzed during 2007 to 2011 after addition of Water Retention Structures (WRS) @ 0.05%, 0.1% and 0.2% of the land area. The results indicated that even though the total annual flow decreased, the flow during the summer months (baseflow) increased due to the addition of the conservation structures. The increase in river flow was highest during the period January to April when the river had lean flow. It was found that SWAT model can be used as an effective tool to study the impact of water retention structures in a watershed. The conservation structures help to store water in the upper reaches for irrigation and domestic purpose, and at the same time it helps in increasing the summer flow. This helps to maintain a better environmental flow regime. Hence while planning the conservation measures in a watershed so as to meet the demand of the upstream users, care should be taken to avoid the negative impact that can happen in the downstream.
The effects of immune checkpoint modulators on the clinical course of patients with resectable hepatocellular carcinoma

Background/Aim Immune checkpoint proteins regulating T-cell mediated anti-tumor immunity have been reported to affect clinical outcomes in multiple malignancies. This study aimed to investigate the prognostic effect of histological expression of immune checkpoint proteins in patients with resected hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods A total of 221 patients with HCC who underwent curative resection were included. Expression of programmed-cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1) in tumor cells (tPD-L1) and tumor infiltrating mononuclear cells (TIMCs) (iPD-L1), programmed-cell death-1 in TIMCs (iPD-1), and cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 in TIMCs (iCTLA-4) were measured immunohistochemically. Results Histo-positivity for iCTLA-4, iPD-1, iPD-L1, and tPD-L1 was 32.1%, 42.5%, 35.3%, and 14.9%, respectively. Multivariate logistic analyses revealed that male sex and tumor >5 cm were variables related to iCTLA-4 positivity (odds ratio [OR], 0.46 and 1.94, respectively; P<0.05). Poor differentiation was related to PD-L1 expression in both tumor cells and TIMCs (OR, 2.88 and 3.46, respectively; P<0.05). Microvascular invasion was significantly associated only with iPD-L1 (OR, 2.24; P<0.05). In time-dependent outcome analyses, expression of immune checkpoint proteins in TIMCs (i.e., iCTLA-4, iPD-1, and iPD-L1) was significantly related to longer overall survival and non-cancer-related survival (all P<0.05), but not to time-to-recurrence or cancer-specific deaths. Concurrent activation of the PD-1:PD-L1 and CTLA-4 pathways predicted improved outcomes in terms of overall survival and non-cancer related survival (P=0.06 and P=0.03, respectively). Conclusions Immune checkpoint proteins upregulated in TIMCs in HCC tissues have individual and additive effects in prolonging the survival of patients, specifically in terms of survival not related to cancer recurrence.
SENSOR FAULT TOLERANT CONTROL DESIGN APPLIED TO A WINDING MACHINE

This paper describes an Active Fault Tolerant Control System based on a Linear Time Varying (LTV) model for a winding machine. It shows that, according to an experimental identification approach, a LTV model is ideally suited to improve the control of web tension. Moreover, based on this model, a sensor fault detection, isolation and estimation module is developed. This estimation is of paramount importance to compensate for this fault using sensor masking principles and to preserve the system performances. The effectiveness and performances of the strategy are illustrated via real tests.
Decreased Intrathecal Concentrations of Free Light Chains Kappa in Multiple Sclerosis Patients Taking Very High Effective Disease-Modifying Treatment

Free light chains kappa (FLCκ) in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are a part of the intrathecal immune response. This observational study was conducted to investigate the effects of different disease-modifying therapies (DMT) on the humoral intrathecal immune response in the CSF of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). FLCκ were analyzed in CSF and serum samples from MS patients taking DMT (n = 60) and those in a control cohort of treatment-naïve MS patients (n = 90). DMT was classified as moderately effective (including INFß-1a, INFß-1b, glatiramer acetate, dimethyl fumarate, teriflunomide, triamcinolone); highly effective (including fingolimod, daclizumab) and very highly effective (alemtuzumab, natalizumab, rituximab/ocrelizumab, mitoxantrone). FLCκ were measured using a nephelometric FLCκ kit. Intrathecal FLCκ and IgG concentrations were assessed in relation to the hyperbolic reference range in quotient diagrams. Intrathecal FLCκ concentrations and IgG concentrations were significantly lower in samples from the cohort of MS patients taking very highly effective DMT than in samples from the cohort of MS patients taking highly effective DMT and in the treatment-naïve cohort (FLCκ: p = 0.004, p < 0.0001 respectively/IgG: p = 0.013; p = 0.021). The reduction in FLCκ could contribute to an anti-inflammatory effect in the CNS through this mechanism. There was no difference in the appearance of CSF-specific oligoclonal bands (p = 0.830). Longitudinal analyses are required to confirm these results.
A Consistency Model for Identifying the Effects of n-3 and n-6 Fatty Acids on Lipoproteins in Dialysis Patients

Numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses have assessed the effects of supplemental dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) on levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and the LDL/HDL ratio in patients receiving renal replacement therapy (RRT). However, results are ambiguous due to mixed reports of various nutrients used in the intervention group. We performed a network meta-analysis of RCTs to assess the effects of PUFAs on lipid profiles in patients undergoing RRT. RCTs performed before November 2021 were gathered from three databases. The means, standard deviations and the number of cases for each arm were independently extracted by two authors to form a network meta-analysis of LDL and HDL levels and the LDL/HDL ratio in a random effects model. Twenty-eight RCTs (n = 2017 subjects) were included in this study. The pooled results revealed that the combination of omega-3 fatty acids (n-3) and omega-6 fatty acids (n-6) produced significantly lower LDL (standardized mean difference (SMD) = −1.43, 95% confidence interval: −2.28 to −0.57) than the placebo. Both n-3 fatty acids (SMD = 0.78) and the combination of n-3 + n-6 (SMD = 1.09) benefited HDL significantly compared with placebo. Moreover, n-3 alone also exhibited a significantly lower LDL/HDL ratio than placebo. Collectively, PUFAs seem to be adequate nutrients for controlling lipoproteins in patients undergoing RRT. Specifically, n-3 + n-6 supplementation improved LDL levels, while n-3 improved HDL levels and the LDL/HDL ratio. However, our data provide limited information on specific dosages of PUFAs to form a concrete recommendation.
Experimenting hybrid reality in cultural heritage reconstruction. The Peasant Civilisation Park and the ‘Vicinato a Pozzo’ museum of Matera (Italy)

ABSTRACT Hybrid reality (HR) in cultural heritage is mainly conceptual, and its exploitation in cultural heritage and museums remains an under-investigated topic. This research aims to shed light on the experimenting role of HR as an alternative soft-technological approach in cultural heritage virtual reconstruction, which enhance visitors’ experience and satisfaction. A quantitative survey methodology was employed to analyse the ‘Peasant Civilization Park’, a project based on HR invisible projections installed in the Vicinato a Pozzo Museum, in the thousand-year-old city Matera (Italy) – European Capital of Culture 2019. Findings and conclusions open up innovative scenarios on the HR in cultural heritage, driving the identification of alternative museum business models and new museum immersive experiences. Managerial implications suggest how HR improves heritage exhibition management, rethinking experiential value proposition and visitors’ satisfaction.
A Combination Analysis of IVIM-DWI Biomarkers and T2WI-Based Texture Features for Tumor Differentiation Grade of Cervical Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Purpose To explore the value of intravoxel incoherent motion diffusion-weighted imaging (IVIM-DWI) and texture analysis on T2-weighted imaging (T2WI) for evaluating pathological differentiation of cervical squamous cell carcinoma. Method This retrospective study included a total of 138 patients with pathologically confirmed poor/moderate/well-differentiated (71/49/18) who underwent conventional MRI and IVIM-DWI scans. The values of ADC, D, D∗, and f and 58 T2WI-based texture features (18 histogram features, 24 gray-level co-occurrence matrix features, and 16 gray-level run length matrix features) were obtained. Multiple comparison, correlation, and regression analyses were used. Results For IVIM-DWI, the ADC, D, D∗, and f were significantly different among the three groups (p < 0.05). ADC, D, and D∗ were positively correlated with pathological differentiation (r = 0.262, 0.401, 0.401; p < 0.05), while the correlation was negative for f (r = −0.221; p < 0.05). The comparison of 52 parameters of texture analysis on T2WI reached statistically significant levels (p < 0.05). Multivariate logistic regression analysis incorporated significant IVIM-DWI, and texture features on T2WI showed good diagnostic performance both in the four differentiation groups (poorly vs. moderately, area under the curve(AUC) = 0.797; moderately vs. well, AUC = 0.954; poorly vs. moderately and well, AUC = 0.795; and well vs. moderately and poorly, AUC = 0.952). The AUCs of each parameters alone were smaller than that of each regression model (0.503∼0.684, 0.547∼0.805, 0.511∼0.712, and 0.636∼0.792, respectively; pairwise comparison of ROC curves between regression model and individual variables, p < 0.05). Conclusions IVIM-DWI biomarkers and T2WI-based texture features had potential to evaluate the pathological differentiation of cervical squamous cell carcinoma. The combination of IVIM-DWI with texture analysis improved the predictive performance.
Mechanical And Thermal Characteristics Of Polypropylene Reinforced With Spheri-glass-3000 Produced By Twin Screw Extruder

The use of polymer reinforced with fillers has increased in recent years as their properties have improved. The thermoplastic matrix chosen for this study was Polypropylene (PP) and reinforcement as Spheri-glass-3000 (SGS). The melt mixing method was used to produce PP/SGS nanocomposites with the aid of twin-screw-extruder. Test samples was manufactured by injection-molding-machine. The mechanical and thermal properties of the PP/SGS nanocomposites produced have been investigated. Field-emission-scanning- electron-microscope was employed to examine SGS dispersion in the PP matrix. When SGS was added at 2.5 wt. % there was an increase in mechanical characteristics and tvhermal characteristics improved at 7.5 wt. % addition of SGS in PP matrix.