Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comprehensive Investigation of the Resolver’s Eccentricity Effect on the Field-Oriented Control of PMSM

Accurate position feedback from a resolver is highly critical for high-performance field-oriented control (FOC) drives, and eccentricity in resolvers negatively affects the drive performance. The current unbalance intensity (CUI) of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) is a known criterion to evaluate drive stability and can be caused by position feedback error. In this article, the eccentric resolver operation is comprehensively investigated, and the corresponding CUI is analytically evaluated. Accordingly, the error limit is defined for an acceptable operation under eccentricity without derating the motor control. For this purpose, the relationship between the: 1) resolver’s physical geometry; 2) magnitude and the angle of the stator current; and 3) resolver accuracy are presented through surrogate modeling. Using the proposed analytical current model, the resolver geometry is updated in order to improve the eccentricity tolerance and accuracy and lower the CUI. An optimized rotor design is built, and its accuracy and effect on CUI mitigation are experimentally verified.
Systolic Indices of Cardiac Contractility: Modeling and Analysis using Pressure-Volume Loop

Modeling cardiac contractility in pre-clinical catheterization laboratory settings remains an important task to collect results under controlled hemodynamic conditions, while providing an assessment of systolic and diastolic indices. Diligent hemodynamic monitoring with acute-based pressure-volume modeling uncovers early indicators of heart failure (HF). In this article, basic procedural assessments are outlined, while deeper dive into systolic index of contractility, the end systolic elastance is provided with references to older, while comparing it to novel approaches. Transient preload reduction using inferior vena cava occlusion (IVCO) is the current standardized maneuver used in hemodynamic protocols to provide an assessment of contractile responsiveness. In this article an example of standard measures from a single catheterization lab were depicted using tables and figures, giving background to transient preload reduction to assess the values of systolic cardiac contractility. Additionally, novel twists on other possible index(ices) coming from capturing ES point may well present future opportunities to collect systolic cardiac contractility. In this instance, both single beat systolic PPESPVR and IVCO using ES points present unique opportunities in this niche area of research. Final two sections of this article are dedicated to procedural steps and how to standardize execution of IVCO. Final section is reserved for analytical steps of how to visually compare systolic indices post-IVCO in case of linear and quadratic relationship.
The Embrace Magnetometer Network for South America: First Scientific Results

The present work is the second of a two‐part paper on the Embrace Magnetometer Network. In this part, we provide some of the first scientific findings that we have already achieved with this network. We identified the diurnal and the seasonal natural variations of the H component. We provided the precise determination of sudden storm commencements and sudden impulse. We showed that the ΔH amplitudes derived from the Embrace MagNet during intense magnetic storm are in very good agreement with the Dst index. We showed that it is possible to investigate the effects on the solar quiet ionospheric current systems as a response to the X‐class solar flares occurring during daytime under magnetically quiet conditions.
Developing a National-Scale Exposure Index for Combined Environmental Hazards and Social Stressors and Applications to the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Cohort

Tools for assessing multiple exposures across several domains (e.g., physical, chemical, and social) are of growing importance in social and environmental epidemiology because of their value in uncovering disparities and their impact on health outcomes. Here we describe work done within the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)-wide Cohort Study to build a combined exposure index. Our index considered both environmental hazards and social stressors simultaneously with national coverage for a 10-year period. Our goal was to build this index and demonstrate its utility for assessing differences in exposure for pregnancies enrolled in the ECHO-wide Cohort Study. Our unitless combined exposure index, which collapses census-tract level data into a single relative measure of exposure ranging from 0–1 (where higher values indicate higher exposure to hazards), includes indicators for major air pollutants and air toxics, features of the built environment, traffic exposures, and social determinants of health (e.g., lower educational attainment) drawn from existing data sources. We observed temporal and geographic variations in index values, with exposures being highest among participants living in the West and Northeast regions. Pregnant people who identified as Black or Hispanic (of any race) were at higher risk of living in a “high” exposure census tract (defined as an index value above 0.5) relative to those who identified as White or non-Hispanic. Index values were also higher for pregnant people with lower educational attainment. Several recommendations follow from our work, including that environmental and social stressor datasets with higher spatial and temporal resolutions are needed to ensure index-based tools fully capture the total environmental context.
Improving Pathways to Care for Patients at High Psychosis Risk in Switzerland: PsyYoung Study Protocol

Aims: Psychotic disorders are one of the main causes of chronic disability in young people. An at-risk mental state (ARMS) is represented by subclinical symptoms that precede the first episode of psychosis (FEP). The PsyYoung project aims to optimize the detection of an ARMS while reducing unnecessary psychiatric treatments. It investigates the effects of service changes on the referrals and outcomes of young people with ARMS or a FEP. Methods: Six psychiatric outpatient clinics in three cantons (Basel-Stadt, Vaud, and Geneva) participated in the project. They passed through an implementation phase including service changes and the adaptation of a standardized stepped care model for diagnosis and assessment, in addition to measures for increasing the awareness, networking and training of local professionals. Preliminary results: All participating cantons had entered the implementation phase. By March 2023, there were 619 referrals to participating sites. A total of 163 patients (37% FEP and 31% ARMS) and 15 close relatives had participated in individual longitudinal assessments, and 26 patients participated in qualitative interviews. Conclusion: This national collaborative project addresses the issue of early intervention for emerging psychoses, and creates spaces for fruitful reflections and collaboration in Switzerland. The ultimate aim of PsyYoung is to harmonize clinical practices in early intervention of psychosis on a national level.
Polar codes and polar lattices for efficient communication and source quantization

In the past several decays, lattice codes played an important role in coding theory and information theory [1]. Lattice codes with good performance in communication and source compression have attracted considerable interest. A typical method of constructing good lattice codes is to use existing linear codes. For instance, the famous Barnes-Wall lattices are generated by Reed-Muller (RM) codes, and more recently, the emerging low density Construction-A (LDA) lattices are resulted from low density parity check (LDPC) codes. In this thesis, we develop a new class of lattices, called polar lattices, based on polar codes. The invention of polar codes is considered to be one of the major breakthroughs in coding theory for the past ten years. We show that polar lattices provide explicit solutions for many interesting problems in information theory. For channel coding, we prove that polar lattices are capable of achieving the capacity of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. For the dual side, i.e., source compression, polar lattices can also achieve the rate-distortion bound for the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian source. Moreover, a combining design of polar lattices for both channel coding and source coding gives us explicit solutions to the Gaussian version of the Wyner-Ziv and Gelfand-Pinsker problems. For physical layer security, we prove that polar lattices are able to approach the secrecy capacity of the Gaussian wiretap channel under the strong secrecy criterion. Two more applications of polar lattices are achieving the capacity of the i.i. d. fading channel and extracting the common information of two joint Gaussian sources. The explicit construction of polar lattices provides us better insights on the study of lattice coding. Many interesting problems of lattice coding, such as AWGN-
A Graph-Incorporated Latent Factor Analysis Model for High-Dimensional and Sparse Data

A High-dimensional and <underline>s</underline>parse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in Big Data-related applications such as e-commerce systems or wireless sensor networks. It is of great significance to perform highly accurate representation learning on an HiDS matrix due to the great desires of extracting latent knowledge from it. <underline>L</underline>atent <underline>f</underline>actor <underline>a</underline>nalysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models directly perform such embeddings on an HiDS matrix without exploiting its hidden graph structures, resulting in accuracy loss. To aid this issue, this paper proposes a <underline>g</underline>raph-incorporated <underline>l</underline>atent <underline>f</underline>actor <underline>a</underline>nalysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden <underline>h</underline>igh-<underline>o</underline>rder <underline>i</underline>nteraction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representation learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.
Sclerotinia sclerotiorum Agglutinin Modulates Sclerotial Development, Pathogenicity and Response to Abiotic and Biotic Stresses in Different Manners

Sclerotinia sclerotiorum is an important plant pathogenic fungus of many crops. Our previous study identified the S. sclerotiorum agglutinin (SSA) that can be partially degraded by the serine protease CmSp1 from the mycoparasite Coniothyrium minitans. However, the biological functions of SSA in the pathogenicity of S. sclerotiorum and in its response to infection by C. minitans, as well as to environmental stresses, remain unknown. In this study, SSA disruption and complementary mutants were generated for characterization of its biological functions. Both the wild-type (WT) of S. sclerotiorum and the mutants were compared for growth and sclerotial formation on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and autoclaved carrot slices (ACS), for pathogenicity on oilseed rape, as well as for susceptibility to chemical stresses (NaCl, KCl, CaCl2, sorbitol, mannitol, sucrose, sodium dodecyl sulfate, H2O2) and to the mycoparasitism of C. minitans. The disruption mutants (ΔSSA-175, ΔSSA-178, ΔSSA-225) did not differ from the WT and the complementary mutant ΔSSA-178C in mycelial growth. However, compared to the WT and ΔSSA-178C, the disruption mutants formed immature sclerotia on PDA, and produced less but larger sclerotia on ACS; they became less sensitive to the eight investigated chemical stresses, but more aggressive in infecting leaves of oilseed rape, and more susceptible to mycoparasitism by C. minitans. These results suggest that SSA positively regulates sclerotial development and resistance to C. minitans mycoparasitism, but negatively regulates pathogenicity and resistance to chemical stresses.
CATNet: A Cascaded and Aggregated Transformer Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection (SOD) is an important preprocessing operation for various computer vision tasks. Most of existing RGB-D SOD models employ additive or connected strategies to directly aggregate and decode multi-scale features to predict salient maps. However, due to the large differences between the features of different scales, these aggregation strategies adopted may lead to information loss or redundancy, and few methods explicitly consider how to establish connections between features at different scales in the decoding process, which consequently deteriorates the detection performance of the models. To this end, we propose a cascaded and aggregated Transformer Network (CATNet) which consists of three key modules, i.e., attention feature enhancement module (AFEM), cross-modal fusion module (CMFM) and cascaded correction decoder (CCD). Specifically, the AFEM is designed on the basis of atrous spatial pyramid pooling to obtain multi-scale semantic information and global context information in high-level features through dilated convolution and multi-head self-attention mechanism, enhancing high-level features. The role of the CMFM is to enhance and thereafter fuse the RGB features and depth features, alleviating the problem of poor-quality depth maps. The CCD is composed of two subdecoders in a cascading fashion. It is designed to suppress noise in low-level features and mitigate the differences between features at different scales. Moreover, the CCD uses a feedback mechanism to correct and repair the output of the subdecoder by exploiting supervised features, so that the problem of information loss caused by the upsampling operation during the multi-scale features aggregation process can be mitigated. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CATNet achieves superior performance over 14 state-of-the-art RGB-D methods on 7 challenging benchmarks.
Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI) and Controlling Nutritional Status (CONUT) score for predicting outcomes of breast cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective: To assess prognostic nutritional index (PNI) and controlling nutritional status (CONUT) score could predict overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) in patients with breast cancer. Methods: PubMed, Embase, ScienceDirect, CENTRAL, and Google Scholar were searched from 1st January 2000 to 10th October 2021 for studies assessing the association between PNI or CONUT and outcomes of breast cancer by following the PRISMA guidelines. Keywords used were “Prognostic nutritional index”, “Controlling nutritional status”, “CONUT”, and “Breast cancer”. Results: Nine studies were included. On pooled analysis, we noted a statistically significant improved OS in patients with high PNI as compared to low PNI. Meta-analysis revealed no significant difference in DFS between patients with high PNI and low PNI. However, on the exclusion of one study, we noted that high PNI was associated with significantly improved DFS as compared to low PNI. On pooled analysis, we also noted that a high CONUT score was associated with significantly reduced OS in breast cancer patients. Conclusion: Our results indicate that PNI is an important prognostic factor for patients with breast cancer. Pre-treatment low PNI is associated with worse OS and DFS. Scarce data also indicates that a high CONUT score is predictive of poor OS in breast cancer.
Antimicrobial Agent against Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Biofilm Monitored Using Raman Spectroscopy

The prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria has become a major challenge worldwide. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)—a leading cause of infections—forms biofilms on polymeric medical devices and implants, increasing their resistance to antibiotics. Antibiotic administration before biofilm formation is crucial. Raman spectroscopy was used to assess MRSA biofilm development on solid culture media from 0 to 48 h. Biofilm formation was monitored by measuring DNA/RNA-associated Raman peaks and protein/lipid-associated peaks. The search for an antimicrobial agent against MRSA biofilm revealed that Eugenol was a promising candidate as it showed significant potential for breaking down biofilm. Eugenol was applied at different times to test the optimal time for inhibiting MRSA biofilms, and the Raman spectrum showed that the first 5 h of biofilm formation was the most antibiotic-sensitive time. This study investigated the performance of Raman spectroscopy coupled with principal component analysis (PCA) to identify planktonic bacteria from biofilm conglomerates. Raman analysis, microscopic observation, and quantification of the biofilm growth curve indicated early adhesion from 5 to 10 h of the incubation time. Therefore, Raman spectroscopy can help in monitoring biofilm formation on a solid culture medium and performing rapid antibiofilm assessments with new antibiotics during the early stages of the procedure.
Lithium-Induced Arginine Vasopressin Resistance (AVP-R): A Case of Chronic Exposure to Lithium

Lithium salts (lithium) is a psychotropic drug widely used as a pharmacological option in managing bipolar disorder. Regular monitoring of serum levels is necessary due to the narrow therapeutic range of lithium. Typically, the diagnosis of lithium intoxication is based on the presence of elevated plasma levels. Nevertheless, poisoning can ensue from either acute ingestion or chronic use, even in patients with normal plasma levels. The utilization of lithium has been decreasing due to its potential for multiorgan toxicity. Lithium accumulation in renal distal tubular cells is a prevalent cause of acquired arginine vasopressin resistance (AVP-R), previously known as nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (DI). Some patients might also experience neurologic persistent symptoms after plasma level normalization, a condition known as the syndrome of irreversible lithium-effectuated neurotoxicity (SILENT). We present a case report of acquired AVP-R following prolonged lithium use. This case report aims to increase awareness, particularly among those who may be unfamiliar with the use of lithium and its associated adverse reactions. In addition, it seeks to highlight the dissociation between clinical manifestations and lithium plasma levels, emphasizing the need for careful evaluation in patients receiving lithium treatment.
Videogames and the representation of men and women: an international perspective

In the last few decades, videogames have become a mass phenomenon and have progressively carved out an important space in society and culture. Today, they have growing capabilities to reproduce realistic scenarios, and are increasingly used as an artistic medium with significant narrative potential. In this context, players also need to confront with the representation of aspects of the Self, moving and interacting within video games’ parallel worlds. How these aspects are represented in media can be an important influence on a psychological, cultural and social level. Gender representation can be argued to be almost universal in media and reflects real-world beliefs and attitudes. Despite areas of progress, videogames often feature sexist, prejudiced or biased representations of men and women, both from an aesthetical and narrative point of view. This contribution will discuss the role of gender representation in videogames, aiming to summarize the main features and specificities of different portrayals. Specifically, men characters were over represented compared to women characters as a lead both in the narrative and in promotional material, although recent improvements were observed. Portrayals of womenappeared to feature lean-ideal body idealization, sexualization, objectification, as well as reduced agency. Moreover, portrayals of men appeared to feature muscular-ideal body idealization, restrictive emotionality, and the overuse of aggressiveness and assertiveness. These restrictive representations can have harmful consequences in the users’ reality, such as fostering sexist attitudes and beliefs, promoting restrictive gender roles and ideals of appearance, as well as increasing tolerance of violent behaviors. This analysis suggests that reducing stereotypical and sexist representations, promoting diverse and nuanced representations, and efforts for critical engagement with media portrayals may help reduce these negative effects.
Linear-time encoding and decoding of low-density parity-check codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes had a renaissance when they were rediscovered in the 1990’s. Since then LDPC codes have been an important part of the eld of error-correcting codes, and have been shown to be able to approach the Shannon capacity, the limit at which we can reliably transmit information over noisy channels. Following this, many modern communications standards have adopted LDPC codes. Error-correction is equally important in protecting data from corruption on a harddrive as it is in deep-space communications. It is most commonly used for example for reliable wireless transmission of data to mobile devices. For practical purposes, both encoding and decoding need to be of low complexity to achieve high throughput and low power consumption. This thesis provides a literature review of the current state-of-the-art in encoding and decoding of LDPC codes. Message-passing decoders are still capable of achieving the best error-correcting performance, while more recently considered bitipping decoders are providing a low-complexity alternative, albeit with some loss in errorcorrecting performance. An implementation of a low-complexity stochastic bitipping decoder is also presented. It is implemented for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in a parallel fashion, providing a peak throughput of 1.2 Gb/s, which is signi cantly higher than previous decoder implementations on GPUs. The error-correcting performance of a range of decoders has also been tested, showing that the stochastic bitipping decoder provides relatively good error-correcting performance with low complexity. Finally, a brief comparison of encoding complexities for two code ensembles is also presented.
Retention and Predictors of Attrition Among People Living With HIV on Antiretroviral Therapy in Guinea: A 13-Year Historical Cohort Study in Nine Large-Volume Sites

Objectives: The objective of this study was to estimate the retention rate of patients in an ART program and identify the predictors of attrition. Methods: This was a historical cohort study of HIV patients who started ART between September 2007 and April 2020, and were followed up on for at least 6 months in nine large-volume sites. Kaplan Meier techniques were used to estimate cumulative retention and attrition probabilities. Cox proportional hazards models were used to identify predictors of attrition. Results: The cumulative probability of retention at 12 and 24 months was 76.2% and 70.2%, respectively. The attrition rate after a median follow-up time of 3.1 years was 35.2%, or an incidence of 11.4 per 100 person-years. Having initiated ART between 2012 and 2015; unmarried status; having initiated ART with CD4 count <100 cells/μL; and having initiated ART at an advanced clinical stage were factors significantly associated with attrition. Conclusion: The retention rate in our study is much lower than the proposed national target (90%). Studies to understand the reasons for loss to follow-up are needed.