Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sparse Decomposition of Heart Rate Using a Bernoulli-Gaussian Model: Application to Sleep Apnoea Detection

In this paper, we propose a sparse decomposition of the heart rate during sleep with an application to apnoea–RERA detection. We observed that the tachycardia following an apnoea event has a quasi-deterministic shape with a random amplitude. Accordingly, we model the apnoea-perturbed heart rate as a Bernoulli–Gaussian (BG) process convolved with a deterministic reference signal that allows the identification of tachycardia and bradycardia events. The problem of determining the BG series indicating the presence or absence of an event and estimating its amplitude is a deconvolution problem for which sparsity is imposed. This allows an almost syntactic representation of the heart rate on which simple detection algorithms are applied.
Bilateral Upper Extremity Tremors in West Nile Encephalitis

West Nile encephalitis is a rare complication of infection from the West Nile virus (WNv). Viral encephalitis can mimic manifestations of other neurologic diseases. The purpose of this article is to report a case of a 60-year-old female who developed bilateral upper extremity tremors with West Nile encephalitis. She presented to a hospital in Southern Louisiana with persistent high fevers and new onset confusion. She soon developed tremors which persisted throughout her hospitalization. Computerized tomography (CT) of the head revealed no abnormalities. Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) was remarkable for WNv IgM, and supportive care was pursued. After nearly three weeks, she was transferred to a skilled nursing facility for further care. The presentation of movement disorder with confusion usually raises concern for injury to the brain or spinal cord or other neurologic illnesses. Despite the presentation of movement disorders or other neurologic manifestations, viral etiologies should remain high on the differential when the patient has additional symptoms, such as fever and elevated white blood cell (WBC) count, to limit inappropriate diagnostic testing and treatment.
Cognitive Avoidance Is Associated with Decreased Brain Responsiveness to Threat Distractors under High Perceptual Load

Cognitive coping strategies to deal with anxiety-provoking events have an impact on mental and physical health. Dispositional vigilance is characterized by an increased analysis of the threatening environment, whereas cognitive avoidance comprises strategies to inhibit threat processing. To date, functional neuroimaging studies on the neural underpinnings of these coping styles are scarce and have revealed discrepant findings. In the present study, we examined automatic brain responsiveness as a function of coping styles using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We administered a perceptual load paradigm with contemptuous and fearful faces as distractor stimuli in a sample of N = 43 healthy participants. The Mainz Coping Inventory was used to assess cognitive avoidance and vigilance. An association of cognitive avoidance with reduced contempt and fear processing under high perceptual load was observed in a widespread network including the amygdala, thalamus, cingulate gyrus, insula, and frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital areas. Our findings indicate that the dispositional tendency to divert one’s attention away from distressing stimuli is a valuable predictor of diminished automatic neural responses to threat in several cortical and subcortical areas. A reduced processing in brain regions involved in emotion perception and attention might indicate a potential threat resilience associated with cognitive avoidance.
Trajectories of Allopregnanolone and Allopregnanolone to Progesterone Ratio across the Six Subphases of Menstrual Cycle

Background: Allopregnanolone is one of the most studied neuroactive steroids; yet, despite its relevance to neuropsychiatric research, it is not known how it, as well as its ratio to progesterone, varies across all six subphases of the menstrual cycle. Two enzymes—5α-dihydroprogesterone and 5α-reductase—convert progesterone to allopregnanolone, and, based on immunohistochemical studies in rodents, the activity of 5α-reductase is considered the rate-limiting step in the formation of allopregnanolone. It is not clear, however, whether the same phenomenon is observed across to the menstrual cycle, and, if so, at what point this takes place. Methods: Thirty-seven women completed the study during which they attended eight clinic visits across one menstrual cycle. We analyzed their allopregnanolone and progesterone serum concentrations using ultraperformance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, and we implemented a validated method to realign the data from the original eight clinic study visits, following which we imputed the missing data. Hence, we characterized allopregnanolone concentrations, and the ratio of allopregnanolone:progesterone at six menstrual cycle subphases: (1) early follicular, (2) mid-follicular, (3) periovulatory, (4) early luteal, (5) mid-luteal, and (6) late luteal. Results: There were significant differences in allopregnanolone levels between (1) early follicular and early luteal, (2) early follicular and mid-luteal, (3) mid-follicular and mid-luteal, (4) periovulatory and mid-luteal, and (5) mid-luteal and late luteal. We detected a sharp drop in allopregnanolone:progesterone ratio in the early luteal subphase. Within the luteal subphase, the ratio was the lowest in the mid-luteal subphase. Conclusions: Allopregnanolone concentrations are the most distinct, relative to the other subphases, in the mid-luteal subphase. The shape of the allopregnanolone trajectory across the cycle is similar to that of progesterone; however, the proportion of the two neuroactive steroid hormones is drastically different due to enzymatic saturation, which takes place at the start of the early luteal subphase, but continuing through, and peaking, in the mid-luteal subphase. Hence, the estimated activity of 5α-reductase decreases, but does not cease, at any point across the menstrual cycle.
Point of Interest Recommendation Method Based on Bidirectional Matrix and Deep Belief Network

Point‐of‐interest (POI) recommendation has always faced serious data sparsity problem. Most of the existing POI recommendation methods do not consider the bidirectional relationship between the user‐preference for locations and the location‐ attractiveness to users in the original dataset when solving the sparsity. For this problem, a point‐of‐interest recommendation method based on bidirectional matrix and deep belief network (POI_DBNBM) is proposed in this paper. Specially, from the perspectives of users and locations, we first construct two different matrices with bidirectional relationship by mapping the original dataset, and we use deep belief network (DBN) with strong learning ability to predict the two matrices. Then, a local–global weight optimization method is developed to weight and fuse the two result matrices obtained by DBN, so as to achieve the more precise user's rating prediction matrix for locations. The abundant experimental studies and evaluations are conducted on FourSquare dataset. Results are encouraging and better than those previously reported on the dataset. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.
Efeitos do Treinamento Intervalado de Alta Intensidade sobre a Pressão Arterial Central: Uma Revisão Sistemática e Metanálise

Resumo A pressão arterial central (PAc) é considerada um preditor independente de lesão de órgão, eventos cardiovasculares e mortalidade por todas as causas. Evidências mostram que o treino intervalado de alta intensidade (HIIT) é superior ao treino contínuo de intensidade moderada (MICT) na melhoria da aptidão cardiorrespiratória e da função vascular. No entanto, os efeitos dessas modalidades de treino aeróbico sobre a PAc não foram propriamente revisados. Esta metanálise tem como objetivo investigar os efeitos do HIIT versus MICT sobre a PAc.Conduzimos uma metanálise de ensaios controlados randomizados que compararam HIIT versus MICT sobre a PAc. Os desfechos primários foram Pressão Arterial Sistólica (PAS) central (PASc) e Pressão Arterial Diastólica central (PADc). A PAS periférica (PASp), a PAD periférica (PADp), a Velocidade de Onda de Pulso (VOP) e a captação máxima de oxigênio (VO2max) foram analisadas como desfechos secundários. A metanálise das diferenças médias (DM) foi conduzida usando modelos de efeitos aleatórios. Nosso estudo incluiu 163 pacientes recrutados em seis ensaios. Encontramos que HIIT foi superior ao MICT em reduzir PASc (DM = -3,12 mmHg, IC95% -4,75 – 1,50, p = 0,0002) e PAS (DM = -2,67 mmHg, IC95% -5,18 – -0,16, p = 0,04) e aumentar VO2max (DM = 2,49 mL/Kg/min, IC95% 1,25 – 3,73, p = 0,001). No entanto, não foram relatadas diferenças quanto à PADc, PAD ou VOP. O HIIT foi superior ao MICT em reduzir PASc, sugerindo seu potencial papel como uma terapia não farmacológica para a pressão arterial elevada.
Inertial and magnetic sensing of human motion

Movement and posture tracking of the human body is of great interest in many different disciplines such as monitoring of activities of daily living, assessment of working load in ergonomics studies, measurement of neurological disorders, computer animation, and virtual reality applications. This thesis deals with ambulatory position and orientation measurements of human body segments. Using inertial and magnetic sensing and actuation on the body, motion analysis can be performed anywhere, without the need for an expensive lab.
Review: Verification Process of Academic Certificates Using Blockchain Technology.

The rapid advances in Blockchain technology have impacted various areas, including financial, healthcare, and supply chain systems. Due to its unique characteristics, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, and security, this technology has recently been used in education, particularly in the verification of academic certificates. A certificate from an academic institution is a crucial document that could give someone access to new prospects. It frequently serves as a great starting point for choosing candidates during the recruitment process. Due to the lack of an effective anti-forging mechanism, academic certificates are vulnerable to fraud, forgery, and imitation. To combat this trend, educational institutions have implemented methods that often entail a third party verifying the legitimacy of academic certificates. A review of reference studies was conducted for this purpose. Many databases and papers that focused on blockchain in academic certificate verification and made important contributions rather than just making general statements about the topic were chosen. This paper investigates the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology in academic certificate verification. In the results obtained, it has been suggested that while blockchain
Stability and controllability of nonautonomous neutral system with two delays

This article investigates the exact and approximate controllability, finite time stability, and B$$ \mathcal{B} $$ –Hyers–Ulam–Rassias stability of a neutral impulsive system of differential equations with two delays. Fixed point theory is associated in the analysis of controllability of the system. The stability analysis is carried out with the help of Grönwall type inequality.
Design and Modeling of Fabric-Shelled Pneumatic Bending Soft Actuators

In recent years, the use of fabric to manufacture and integrate soft actuators and sensors into wearable robots elucidates the benefits of soft robotic technology, closing the gap between humans and machines. However, many limitations in terms of ease of manufacturing, customization, modeling, output force and control remain unsolved and reduce the number of practical applications of fabric-based soft robotic systems. To address these limitations, we propose the use of laser-cut fabric shells laminated onto thermoplastic polyurethane as a pneumatic bending soft actuator. In this letter the design, fabrication, modeling, and control of a fabric shelled bending actuator is presented. Our experiments suggest that the fabric-shelled actuators are highly tunable and usable for high force applications. Moreover, the finite element model developed can predict the behavior of different fabric shelled actuator designs. Finally, we show how precise control of the actuators can be achieved by the implementation of a feedback curvature control system.
Learning Graph Dynamics With External Contact for Deformable Linear Objects Shape Control

This letter focuses on the shape control manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLO) with a dual-arm robotic system. One significant challenge of DLO shape control is the underactuated control system, which means that finite robotic manipulators can not fully control DLO's shape due to the lack of sufficient constraints on DLO. We propose a novel DLO shape control framework aiming to stably control DLO's shape in a wide deformation range, which innovatively provides additional constraints on DLO via external contact. The proposed framework consists of a learning module named Learning Graph Dynamics with External Contact for deformable linear objects (LG-DEC) and an action generation module. The LG-DEC uses a graph convolution network to approximate the dynamics between DLO and contactable objects based on keypoint-based representation. In the action generation module, the learned graph dynamics is used to predict whether the randomly sampled actions can drive DLO closer to the desired shape and output the best action for DLO shape control. In simulation, the proposed framework accomplishes the DLO shape control task with external contact in six scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed framework can be well applied to a physical robotic system for the shape control on different types of DLO.
Theory of Statistical Inference

Statistical inference is about figuring out what data are telling us about the world. We gather data related to some question of interest and construct a model of how the data could have been generated. The model is incomplete, being formulated in terms of parameters whose values are unknown (or perhaps having some other unknown component). Knowing the values of these unknowns would tell us something useful about the world. The theory of statistical inference addresses how we can use data to make inferences about the values of the unknowns. Since models and data are central to this enterprise, we should start with some examples.
The structure of mental well-being and its relationship with generativity in middle adulthood and the beginning of late adulthood

Previous studies have linked higher generativity with better mental well-being. However, most of these studies investigated the predictive role of generativity in well-being, while the converse relation, that is, how mental well-being contributes to generativity, has been ignored. This study first investigated the structure and stability of multidimensional mental well-being, that is, emotional (including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive and negative mood), psychological, and social well-being and the absence of depressive feelings, from age 42 to 61. Second, longitudinal associations between mental well-being and generativity were examined. The data (n = 301) utilized in this study were drawn from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development and were collected using self-report questionnaires and psychological interviews at the ages of 42, 50, and 61. Using structural equation modeling, the multidimensional structure of mental well-being showed partial strong factorial invariance and high stability from age 42 to 61. The associations between mental well-being (both the multidimensional factor and the single indicators) and generativity were tested using the random intercept cross-lagged panel model. Stable, trait-like associations were found between multidimensional, emotional, and psychological well-being and generativity. The longitudinal results showed that social well-being at age 42 predicted generativity at age 50. To conclude, multidimensional mental well-being seemed to remain stable from middle adulthood to the beginning of late adulthood. Furthermore, mental well-being and generativity may be linked at both the between- and within-person levels. In particular, social well-being appeared to be a resource through which individuals could increase their generativity.
The multivariate skew-normal distribution

SUMMARY The paper extends earlier work on the so-called skew-normal distribution, a family of distributions including the normal, but with an extra parameter to regulate skewness. The present work introduces a multivariate parametric family such that the marginal densities are scalar skew-normal, and studies its properties, with special emphasis on the bivariate case.
Tunable superconducting microstrip resonators

We report on a simple yet versatile design for a tunable superconducting microstrip resonator. Niobium nitride is employed as the superconducting material and aluminum oxide, produced by atomic layer deposition, as the dielectric layer. We show that the high quality of the dielectric material allows to reach the internal quality factors in the order of Qi∼104 in the single photon regime. Qi rapidly increases with the number of photons in the resonator N and exceeds 105 for N∼10−50. A straightforward modification of the basic microstrip design allows to pass a current bias through the strip and to control its kinetic inductance. We achieve a frequency tuning δf=62 MHz around f0=2.4 GHz for a fundamental mode and δf=164 MHz for a third harmonic. This translates into a tuning parameter Qiδf/f0=150. The presented design can be incorporated into essentially any superconducting circuitry operating at temperatures below 2.5 K.
Exploring Chemotherapeutic Agents as Countermeasures against Respiratory Viruses: Antiviral Potential of Sugar Alcohols

The emergence of respiratory viruses has been attracting considerable interest due to their potential to cause pandemics, such as the 1918 Spanish flu, the 2019 Coronavirus disease, and recently the Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in pediatric populations. There is a critical need to identify potential agents that can be included as part of the countermeasures to aid in the preparedness for a rapid public health response in case of a pandemic. This study aimed to explore the antiviral potential of sugar alcohols against respiratory viruses with pandemic potential. Methods: The antiviral activity of three sugar alcohols commonly utilized in the food and pharmaceutical industry, namely sorbitol, erythritol, and xylitol, were evaluated against Influenza (H1N1), RSV (A2), and SARS-CoV-2 (B.1.617.2; Delta) via a highly differentiated, three-dimensional, in vitro model of normal, intact, human-derived tracheal/bronchial epithelial cells. The sugar alcohol solutions were tested at a 5% concentration in duplicate inserts of the three-dimensional tissue models of the human airway. Results: Antiviral activity was measured in virus yield reduction assays by calculating the log reduction value defined as the average reduction of virus compared to the average virus control on day 3 (Influenza), day (RSV), and day 6 (SARS-CoV-2) after infection. Antiviral agents utilized as comparators were Ribavirin (Influenza, RSV) and Remdesivir (SARS-CoV-2). Erythritol displayed antiviral efficacy against Influenza with a log reduction value of 3.17. RSV was effectively inactivated by both sorbitol and xylitol with 2.49 and 2.65 log reduction values, respectively. All tested sugar alcohols inactivated SARS-CoV-2 Delta with a median log reduction value of 3.50. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that alone or in combination, sugar alcohols can inactivate respiratory viruses known to have pandemic potential. Additional research is needed to advance the development of sugar alcohols as chemotherapeutic countermeasures against other pandemic respiratory viruses.
Microbial Persistence, Replacement and Local Antimicrobial Therapy in Recurrent Bone and Joint Infection

We report microbiological results from a cohort of recurrent bone and joint infection to define the contributions of microbial persistence or replacement. We also investigated for any association between local antibiotic treatment and emerging antimicrobial resistance. Microbiological cultures and antibiotic treatments were reviewed for 125 individuals with recurrent infection (prosthetic joint infection, fracture-related infection, and osteomyelitis) at two UK centres between 2007 and 2021. At re-operation, 48/125 (38.4%) individuals had an organism from the same bacterial species as at their initial operation for infection. In 49/125 (39.2%), only new species were isolated in culture. In 28/125 (22.4%), re-operative cultures were negative. The most commonly persistent species were Staphylococcus aureus (46.3%), coagulase-negative Staphylococci (50.0%), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (50.0%). Gentamicin non-susceptible organisms were common, identified at index procedure in 51/125 (40.8%) and at re-operation in 40/125 (32%). Gentamicin non-susceptibility at re-operation was not associated with previous local aminoglycoside treatment (21/71 (29.8%) vs. 19/54 (35.2%); p = 0.6). Emergence of new aminoglycoside resistance at recurrence was uncommon and did not differ significantly between those with and without local aminoglycoside treatment (3/71 (4.2%) vs. 4/54 (7.4%); p = 0.7). Culture-based diagnostics identified microbial persistence and replacement at similar rates in patients who re-presented with infection. Treatment for orthopaedic infection with local antibiotics was not associated with the emergence of specific antimicrobial resistance.
SmartIndex: Learning to Index Caches to Improve Performance

Modern computers rely heavily on caches to achieve higher performance. Unfortunately, a cache indexing scheme can often cause an uneven distribution of addresses across cache sets resulting in many evictions of useful cache blocks. To address this issue, we propose SmartIndex, a self-optimized indexing scheme that leverages machine learning to actively learn the memory access pattern and dynamically adjust indexes to evenly distribute the cache lines across all sets in the cache, thereby reducing cache misses. Experimental results on a set of 26 memory-intensive applications show that for non-uniform applications, SmartIndex can reduce the misses per kilo instructions (MPKI) of a direct mapped cache by up to 39%, translating into an IPC speedup of 7.23% compared to the conventional power-of-two indexing scheme. Our experiments also show that SmartIndex can work with any cache associativity.
Observations and description of a rare escape mechanism in a snake: Cartwheeling in Pseudorabdion longiceps (Cantor, 1847) (Squamata, Colubridea)

We report an observation of cartwheeling behavior to escape predators employed by the Dwarf Reed Snake (Pseudorabdion longiceps). This rolling motion is a rare escape mechanism which has not been formally documented in detail for any other species of snake or reptile. This finding also extends our knowledge on the kinetic abilities in snakes.