Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prediction of RNA 3D Structure

— RNA structures are generally organized hierarchically organized. Prediction of RNA structure is a big challenge for the researchers. Many prediction algorithms have been develop for RNA secondary structure prediction. But prediction of tertiary structure is still a big area of research. Approaches for RNA tertiary structure prediction are broadly categorized into two methods viz. de novo methods and template-based prediction method. The De novo are useful only for the small sequences of the nucleotides. For the sequences with large number of nucleotides template based modelling technique is more useful. These template based method are very common in protein structure prediction but it is not explored in RNA tertiary structure prediction. This paper presents a novel methodology for prediction of RNA tertiary structure using the bank ok known structure (template). First, the RNA secondary structure is analysed on the basis of free nucleotides available region wise which may contribute in the prediction of tertiary structure. Next similar region structure templates are searched in PDB metadata. These templates are then used to for the tertiary structure. As all the templates stored in PDB are predicted structures with minimum negative energy, the resultant tertiary structure is also consequently has minimum negative energy. The proposed method is able to predict even large ribosomal RNA structures. The experimental results have shown for the predicted structures on the basis of percentage similarity as well as time required for prediction.
Medical Transcriptionist’s Experience with Speech Recognition Medical Transcriptionist’s Experience with Speech Recognition Technology Technology

The medical transcription industry is rapidly evolving in terms of services and revenues for the last decade. This ITES contributed the largest employment growth rate in IT-BPO in 2013. The success of this industry was assisted by recent technology like Speech Recognition Technology (SRT). Because such technologies depend on people, there is a need to study on the experiences of the people behind those achievements. This paper addresses this gap by exploring Medical Transcriptionist’s (MTs) experiences using SRT. Findings revealed at least five themes prevalent to the experiences of MTs including audio file classification, valuable characteristics, negative observations, technostress coping, and highest quality orientation. This paper suggests that by looking at the experiences of MTs, current and future employers can gain insights in improving and enriching these outsourcing services. Furthermore, the presence of common themes indicates the possibility of performing a grounded theory based on substantive area of medical transcription.
Genetic Variations of the DPYD Gene and Its Relationship with Ancestry Proportions in Different Ecuadorian Trihybrid Populations

Dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase is one of the main pharmacological metabolizers of fluoropyrimidines, a group of drugs widely used in clinical oncology. Around 20 to 30% of patients treated with fluoropyrimidines experience severe toxicity caused by a partial or total decrease in enzymatic activity. This decrease is due to molecular variants in the DPYD gene. Their prevalence and allelic frequencies vary considerably worldwide, so their description in heterogeneous groups such as the Ecuadorian population will allow for the description of pharmacogenetic variants and proper characterization of this population. Thus, we genotyped all the molecular variants with a predictive value for DPYD in a total of 410 Ecuadorian individuals belonging to Mestizo, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Indigenous ethnic groups. Moreover, we developed a genetic ancestry analysis using 46 autosomal ancestry informative markers. We determined 20 genetic variations in 5 amplified regions, including 3 novel single nucleotide variants. The allele frequencies for DPYD variants c.1627G>A (*5, rs1801159), c.1129-15T>C (rs56293913), c.1218G>A (rs61622928), rs1337752, rs141050810, rs2786783, rs2811178, and g.97450142G>A (chr1, GRCh38.p13) are significantly related to Native American and African ancestry proportions. In addition, the FST calculated from these variants demonstrates the closeness between Indigenous and Mestizo populations, and evidences genetic divergence between Afro-Ecuadorian groups when compared with Mestizo and Indigenous ethnic groups. In conclusion, the genetic variability in the DPYD gene is related to the genetic component of ancestral populations in different Ecuadorian ethnic groups. The absence and low frequency of variants with predictive value for fluoropyrimidine toxicity such as DPYD *2A, HapB3, and c.2846A>T (prevalent in populations with European ancestry) is consistent with the genetic background found.
Antiviral Activity and Mechanisms of Seaweeds Bioactive Compounds on Enveloped Viruses—A Review

In the last decades, the interest in seaweed has significantly increased. Bioactive compounds from seaweed’s currently receive major attention from pharmaceutical companies as they express several interesting biological activities which are beneficial for humans. The structural diversity of seaweed metabolites provides diverse biological activities which are expressed through diverse mechanisms of actions. This review mainly focuses on the antiviral activity of seaweed’s extracts, highlighting the mechanisms of actions of some seaweed molecules against infection caused by different types of enveloped viruses: influenza, Lentivirus (HIV-1), Herpes viruses, and coronaviruses. Seaweed metabolites with antiviral properties can act trough different pathways by increasing the host’s defense system or through targeting and blocking virus replication before it enters host cells. Several studies have already established the large antiviral spectrum of seaweed’s bioactive compounds. Throughout this review, antiviral mechanisms and medical applications of seaweed’s bioactive compounds are analyzed, suggesting seaweed’s potential source of antiviral compounds for the formulation of novel and natural antiviral drugs.
Deep Learning-Based Medical Diagnostic Services: A Secure, Lightweight, and Accurate Realization

In this paper, we propose CryptMed, a system framework that enables medical service providers to offer secure, lightweight, and accurate medical diagnostic service to their customers via an execution of neural network inference in the ciphertext domain. CryptMed ensures the privacy of both parties with cryptographic guarantees. Our technical contributions include: 1) presenting a secret sharing based inference protocol that can well cope with the commonly-used linear and non-linear NN layers; 2) devising optimized secure comparison function that can efficiently support comparison-based activation functions in NN architectures; 3) constructing a suite of secure smooth functions built on precise approximation approaches for accurate medical diagnoses. We evaluate CryptMed on 6 neural network architectures across a wide range of non-linear activation functions over two benchmark and four real-world medical datasets. We comprehensively compare our system with prior art in terms of end-to-end service workload and prediction accuracy. Our empirical results demonstrate that CryptMed achieves up to respectively 413 ×, 19 ×, and 43 × bandwidth savings for MNIST, CIFAR-10, and medical applications compared with prior art. For the smooth activation based inference, the best choice of our proposed approximations preserve the precision of original functions, with less than 1.2% accuracy loss and could enhance the precision due to the newly introduced activation function family.
Automated Detection of Left Bundle Branch Block from ECG Signal Utilizing the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform with ANFIS

Left bundle branch block (LBBB) is a common disorder in the heart’s electrical conduction system that leads to the ventricles’ uncoordinated contraction. The complete LBBB is usually associated with underlying heart failure and other cardiac diseases. Therefore, early automated detection is vital. This work aimed to detect the LBBB through the QRS electrocardiogram (ECG) complex segments taken from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The used data contain 2655 LBBB (abnormal) and 1470 normal signals (i.e., 4125 total signals). The proposed method was employed in the following steps: (i) QRS segmentation and filtration, (ii) application of the Maximal Overlapped Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) on the ECG R wave, (iii) selection of the detailed coefficients of the MODWT (D2, D3, D4), kurtosis, and skewness as extracted features to be fed into the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) classifier. The obtained results proved that the proposed method performed well based on the achieved sensitivity, specificity, and classification accuracies of 99.81%, 100%, and 99.88%, respectively (F-Score is equal to 0.9990). Our results showed that the proposed method was robust and effective and could be used in real clinical situations.
Lumbar L3 marrow fat content in older Italian women is not apparently higher than in older Chinese women

© Annals of Translational Medicine. All rights reserved. Ann Transl Med 2022;10(11):648 | https://dx.doi. org/10.21037/atm-22-808 It has recently been shown that older Hong Kong Chinese women have a much lower prevalence and severity of osteoporotic vertebral fracture (OVF) than age-matched Rome Caucasian women (1-3). In one study, we compared spine radiographs (T4–L5) from two epidemiological studies conducted in Hong Kong [MsOS(Hong Kong) n=200] and in Rome (Roman Osteoporosis Prevention Project, n=200, age-matched subjects with both mean age: 74.1 years and range: 65–87 years). The results show Chinese community subjects had ECF (endplate and/ or cortex fracture) in 26% cases involving 3.54% of the vertebrae, while Rome Caucasian community subjects had ECF in 47% cases involving 8.21% of the vertebrae. Radiographic OVF with ≥40% vertebral height loss was recorded among 9.5% of the Chinese subjects, while among 26% of the Italian subjects. Radiographic OVF in Italian subjects tended to be more severe, more likely to be multiple. It has been noted that osteoporotic subjects have increased bone marrow fat (BMF) content and higher lumbar BMF can be associated with prevalent vertebral fracture even after adjustment for bone marrow density (BMD), and increased bone fat content itself can be a contributor to diminished structural bone integrity (4-12). For these reasons, we hypothesize that older Italian Caucasian women might have a higher lumbar BMF than older Chinese women. We conducted a preliminary study to see whether this is indeed the case. The study was carried out complying with the World Medical Associations Declaration of Helsinki-Ethical Principles for Medical Research involving Human Subjects (as revised in 2013). The study was approved by the institutional Ethics Committees board of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Sapienza University of Rome, and written informed consent was obtained from all subjects. The study participants information is illustrated in Figure 1. In this study, we recruited 16 communitybased Caucasian female volunteers (range: 67–84 years) in Rome, Italy. None of the volunteers had notable spine disease and recent back pain history. In addition, there were consecutive 61 Rome Caucasian female patients with low back pain seeking MR examination. During data analysis, to match the age of Italian volunteers (one case aged 84 years excluded), a subgroup of Italian patients was defined which had an age distribution of 68–74 years. The Chinese subjects were from the MsOS(Hong Kong) study, which was an epidemiological research to study bone health among community dwelling Hong Kong Chinese women aged ≥65 years. The recruitment plan was designed so that the participants would represent the general elderly population in Hong Kong (3). At baseline all Hong Kong subjects were required to be able to walk without assistance, without bilateral hip replacement, and have the potential to survive the duration of primary study for at least 4 years as judged by their pre-existing medical status. 103 Letter to the Editor
IET Renewable Power Generation Special Issue: Coordinated Control and Protection of Offshore Wind Power and Combined AC/DC Grid Bi-level decentralised active power control for large-scale wind farm cluster

This study presents a bi-level decentralised active power control (DAPC) for a large-scale wind farm cluster (WFC), consisting of several wind farms for better active power dispatch. In the upper level, a distributed active power control scheme based on the distributed consensus is designed to achieve fair active power sharing among multiple wind farms, which generates the power reference for each wind farm. A distributed estimator is used to estimate the total available power of all wind farms. In the lower level, a centralised control scheme based on the model predictive control is proposed to regulate active power outputs of all wind turbines (WTs) within a wind farm, which reduces the fatigue loads of WTs while tracking the power reference obtained from the upper-level control. A WFC with 8 wind farms and totally 160 WTs, was used to test the control performance of the proposed DAPC scheme.
Exploring the Origin and Physiological Significance of DNA Double Strand Breaks in the Developing Neuroretina

Genetic mosaicism is an intriguing physiological feature of the mammalian brain that generates altered genetic information and provides cellular, and prospectively functional, diversity in a manner similar to that of the immune system. However, both its origin and its physiological significance remain poorly characterized. Most, if not all, cases of somatic mosaicism require prior generation and repair of DNA double strand breaks (DSBs). The relationship between DSB generation, neurogenesis, and early neuronal cell death revealed by our studies in the developing retina provides new perspectives on the different mechanisms that contribute to DNA rearrangements in the developing brain. Here, we speculate on the physiological significance of these findings.
Recent Studies on Hydrogels Based on H2O2-Responsive Moieties: Mechanism, Preparation and Application

H2O2 is essential for cellular processes and plays a vital role in the regulation of cell signaling pathways, which can be viewed as a warning signal for many kinds of disease including cancer, cardiovascular disease, reproductive abnormalities, diabetes, and renal failure. A H2O2-responsive hydrogel (H2O2-Gel) is a promising candidate for biomedical applications because of its good biocompatibility, similarity to soft biological tissues, ease of preparation, and its ability to respond to H2O2. In this study, the H2O2-responsive moieties used to fabricate H2O2-Gels were reviewed, including thioethers, disulfide bonds, selenides, diselenium bonds, diketones, boronic, and others. Next, the preparation method of H2O2-Gel was divided into two major categories according to their reaction mechanisms: either self-crosslinking or mechanisms entailing the addition of difunctional crosslinkers. Last, the applications of H2O2-Gels were emphasized, which have been viewed as desirable candidates in the fields of drug delivery, the detection of H2O2, glucose-responsive systems, ROS scavengers, tissue engineering, and cell-encapsulation.
Inkjet-Printing of Carbon Nano Onions for Sensor Applications in Flexible Printed Electronics

Flexible and printed electronics can profit from novel 2D- and nano-materials for specific chemical, mechanical and electrical functionality. Here, carbon nano onions (CNO) are deposited on flexible polymer substrates using piezoelectric drop-on-demand inkjet printing. First, the drop generation conditions for the low-viscosity (~1.2 cP) ethanol-based CNO suspensions are optimized for best resolution and line continuity. The CNO material can be deposited in multiple printing passes without requiring intermediate curing between layers and without degradation of the resolution. The printed structures are inspected by optical microscopy and profilometry. Electrical characterization is performed to obtain the electrical resistivity of the inkjet-printed CNO material (593 ± 79 Ω.m), the temperature coefficient of resistance (-0.896 ±0.238 % ºC-1) and the relative humidity dependency. The printed CNO devices are suitable for temperature compensation, humidity sensing, gas sensing, and possibly other applications.
Characterization and modeling of low-frequency noise in Hf-based high -kappa dielectrics for future cmos applications

CHARACTERIZATION AND MODELING OF LOW-FREQUENCY NOISE IN Hf-BASED HIGH-K DIELECTRICS FOR FUTURE CMOS APPLICATIONS by Purushothaman Srinivasan The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors outlines the need for high-K dielectric based gate-oxide Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors for sub-45 nm technology nodes. Gate oxides of hafnium seem to be the nearest and best alternative for silicon dioxide, when material, thermal and structural properties are considered_ Usage of poly-Si as a gate electrode material degrades the performance of the device and hence gate stacks based on metal gate electrodes are gaining high interest. Though a substantial improvement in the performance has been achieved with these changes, reliability issues are a cause of concern. For analog and mixed-signal applications, low-frequency WO noise is a major reliability factor_ Also in recent years, low frequency noise diagnostics has become a powerful tool for device performance and reliability characterization. This dissertation work demonstrates the necessity of gate stack engineering for achieving a low 1/f noise performance. Changes in the material and process parameters of the devices, impact the 1/f noise behavior. The impact of 1/f noise on gate technology and processing parameters were identified and investigated. The thickness and the quality of the interfacial oxide, the nitridation effects of the layers, high-K oxide, bulk properties of the high-K layer, percentage of hafnium content in the high-K, post deposition anneal (PDA) treatments, effects of gate electrode material (poly-silicon, fully silicided or metal). gate electrode processing are investigated in detail. The role of additional interfaces and bulk layers of the gate stack is understood. The dependence of low-frequency noise on high and low temperatures was also investigated. A systematic and a deeper understanding of these parameters on 1/f noise behavior are deduced which also forms the basis for improved physics-based 1/f noise modeling. The model considers the effect of the interfacial layer and also temperature, based on tunneling, based thermally activated model. The simulation results of improved drain-current noise model agree well with the experimentally calculated values. CHARACTERIZATION AND MODELING OF LOW-FREQUENCY NOISE IN Hf-BASED HIGH-K DIELECTRICS FOR FUTURE CMOS APPLICATIONS by Purushothaman Srinivasan A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Design of a High-Performance Ultra-Wideband Monocycle Pulse Generator

A high-performance ultra-wideband (UWB) monocycle pulse generator is described in this paper. The pulse generator circuit is mainly composed of avalanche transistor, step recovery diode (SRD), Schottky diode (SD) and microstrip lines. The proposed circuit solution utilizes the avalanche effect of avalanche transistor to produce driver pulses with high amplitude and sharp edges, which can drive the SRD included in a universal microstrip pulse forming circuit effectively to produce high-amplitude Gaussian pulses. Monocycle pulses are then generated by an additional pulse forming network. The circuit, simulated in the radiofrequency software ADS, can generate monocycle pulse whose pulse full width is 600ps, pulse amplitude is 6.3V peak-to-peak and pulse repetition rate is 10MHz with a ringing level of -24dB and good symmetry. With the features such as high pulse amplitude and stable performance this pulse generator is applicable to UWB system.
Know Your Limits

Process safety professionals continue the elusive search for effective leading indicators. The search is for the one indicator to prevent process safety incidents. API RP 754 has already defined Tier 3 leading indicators as challenges to safety systems. Challenges include safe operating limit (SOL) excursions as well as demands on safety systems. If chosen correctly, SOLs can be successful leading indicators for incident prevention. In fact, SOLs can be a leading indicator to other safety system challenges, including pressure relief devices and safety instrumented system activations.
Towards Safer and Smarter Design for Lithium-Ion-Battery-Powered Electric Vehicles: A Comprehensive Review on Control Strategy Architecture of Battery Management System

As the battery provides the entire propulsion power in electric vehicles (EVs), the utmost importance should be ascribed to the battery management system (BMS) which controls all the activities associated with the battery. This review article seeks to provide readers with an overview of prominent BMS subsystems and their influence on vehicle performance, along with their architectures. Moreover, it collates many recent research activities and critically reviews various control strategies and execution topologies implied in different aspects of BMSs, including battery modeling, states estimation, cell-balancing, and thermal management. The internal architecture of a BMS, along with the architectures of the control modules, is examined to demonstrate the working of an entire BMS control module. Moreover, a critical review of different battery models, control approaches for state estimation, cell-balancing, and thermal management is presented in terms of their salient features and merits and demerits allowing readers to analyze and understand them. The review also throws light on modern technologies implied in BMS, such as IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud-based BMS, to address issues of battery safety. Towards the end of the review, some challenges associated with the design and development of efficient BMSs for E-mobility applications are discussed and the article concludes with recommendations to tackle these challenges.