Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Prognostic Value of Right Ventricular Deformation Imaging in Early Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the prognostic value of echocardiographic deformation imaging in arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) to optimize family screening protocols. BACKGROUND ARVC is characterized by variable disease expressivity among family members, which complicates family screening protocols. Previous reports have shown that echocardiographic deformation imaging detects abnormal right ventricular (RV) deformation in the absence of established disease expression in ARVC. METHODS First-degreerelativesofpatients withARVCwereevaluatedaccordingto2010taskforcecriteria,includingRV deformation imaging (n ¼ 128). Relatives ful ﬁ lling structural task force criteria were excluded for further analysis. At baseline,deformationpatternsofthesubtricuspidregionwerescoredastypeI(normaldeformation),typeII(delayedonset, decreased systolic peak, and post-systolic shortening), or type III (systolic stretching and large post-systolic shortening). The ﬁ nal study population comprised relatives who underwent a second evaluation during follow-up. Disease progression was de ﬁ ned as the development of a new 2010 task force criterion during follow-up that was absent at baseline. RESULTS Sixty- ﬁ ve relatives underwent a second evaluation after a mean follow-up period of 3.7 (cid:2) 2.1 years. At baseline, 28 relatives (43%)
Beating the Market? : A Mathematical Puzzle to Market Efficiency

The efficient market hypothesis is highly discussed—supported and criticized—in economic literature. In its weakest form it states that there are no price trends. When weakening the no-trending assumption only a little to arbitrary short and small and fully unknown trends, by use of control techniques it is very easy to construct trading strategies with zero initial investment and positive expected gain. Since even the trend’s sign may be unknown, a possible trader does not have to think about predictable patterns etc. Even if compared to buy-and-hold strategies and adjusted for risk, the control-based strategies are preferable. ∗The work of Michael H. Baumann is supported by a scholarship of “Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung e.V. (HSS),” funded by “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). ”
The Influenza A Virus Host Shutoff Factor PA-X Is Rapidly Turned Over in a Strain-Specific Manner

The PA-X protein from influenza A virus reduces host immune responses to infection through suppressing host gene expression, including genes encoding the antiviral response. Thus, it plays a central role in influenza A virus biology. ABSTRACT The influenza A endoribonuclease PA-X regulates virulence and transmission of the virus by reducing host gene expression and thus regulating immune responses to influenza A virus. Despite this key function in viral biology, the levels of the PA-X protein remain markedly low during infection. Previous results suggest that these low levels are not solely the result of regulation of the level of translation and RNA stability. How PA-X is regulated posttranslationally remains unknown. We now report that the PA-X protein is rapidly turned over. PA-Xs from multiple viral strains are short-lived, although the half-life of PA-X ranges from ∼30 minutes to ∼3.5 hours depending on the strain. Moreover, sequences in the variable PA-X C-terminal domain are primarily responsible for regulating PA-X half-life, although the N-terminal domain also accounts for some differences among strains. Interestingly, we find that the PA-X from the 2009 pandemic H1N1 strain has a longer half-life than the other variants we tested. This PA-X isoform has been reported to have a higher host shutoff activity, suggesting a role for protein turnover in regulating PA-X activity. Collectively, results of this study reveals a novel regulatory mechanism of PA-X protein levels that may impact host shutoff activity during influenza A virus infection. IMPORTANCE The PA-X protein from influenza A virus reduces host immune responses to infection through suppressing host gene expression, including genes encoding the antiviral response. Thus, it plays a central role in influenza A virus biology. Despite its key function, PA-X was only discovered in 2012 and much remains to be learned, including how PA-X activity is regulated to promote optimal levels of viral infection. In this study, we reveal that PA-X protein levels are very low likely because of rapid turnover. We show that instability is a conserved property among PA-X variants from different strains of influenza A virus but that the half-lives of PA-X variants differ. Moreover, the longer half-life of PA-X from the 2009 pandemic H1N1 strain correlates with its reported higher activity. Therefore, PA-X stability may be a way to regulate its activity and may contribute to the differential virulence of influenza A virus strains.
The Fossil Record on Hominids

Hominids Of the animals homo sapiens sapiens (us) have the largest brain/per body weight and the most complex behaviors. It is puzzling as to just what the big brain was for as measures of skill such as tool use show flat development during the millions of years that the brain was increasing in size. This may have happened through sexual selection, which produced a runaway growth in brain size. Genetic algorithms show that runaway affects are the rule. How did humans get large brains? This is a fundamental question that is still in the process of being answered. We visit it here because computational models are increasingly playing a role in ferreting out the answer. Figure 9.1 shows the brain weights of humans and their ancestors compared to those of living animals. The mammals are characterized by the purple lines which are substantially above the frogs and reptiles. This is because the mammals have corticies and the attendant forebrain structures. Not shown on this graph but near the top with highly developed brains are the former land mammals, dolphins and whales. Stunningly recent work suggests that dolphins have individual names that they use to identify themselves in calls. So far they are the only animals besides ourselves that have been shown to do this. How old are humans? This question can be answered by studying mirochon-drial DNA. Every cell contains chromosomes that consist of large strands of 1
A Peer-to-Peer Network Framework Utilising the Public Mobile Telephone Network

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technologies are well established and have now become accepted as a mainstream networking approach. However, the explosion of participating users has not been replicated within the mobile networking domain. Until recently the lack of suitable hardware and wireless network infrastructure to support P2P activities was perceived as contributing to the problem. This has changed with ready availability of handsets having ample processing resources utilising an almost ubiquitous mobile telephone network. Coupled with this has been a proliferation of software applications written for the more capable ‘smartphone’ handsets. P2P systems have not naturally integrated and evolved into the mobile telephone ecosystem in a way that ‘client-server’ operating techniques have. However as the number of clients for a particular mobile application increase, providing the ‘server side’ data storage infrastructure becomes more onerous. P2P systems offer mobile telephone applications a way to circumvent this data storage issue by dispersing it across a network of the participating users handsets. The main goal of this work was to produce a P2P Application Framework that supports developers in creating mobile telephone applications that use distributed storage. Effort was assigned to determining appropriate design requirements for a mobile handset based P2P system. Some of these requirements are related to the limitations of the host hardware, such as power consumption. Others relate to the network upon which the handsets operate, such as connectivity. The thesis reviews current P2P technologies to assess which was viable to form the technology foundations for the framework. The aim was not to re-invent a P2P system design, rather to adopt an existing one for mobile operation. Built upon the foundations of a prototype application, the P2P framework resulting from modifications and enhancements grants access via a simple API (Applications Programmer Interface) to a subset of Nokia ‘smartphone’ devices. Unhindered operation across all mobile telephone networks is possible through a proprietary application implementing NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal techniques. Recognising that handsets operate with limited resources, further optimisation of the P2P framework was also investigated. Energy consumption was a parameter chosen for further examination because of its impact on handset participation time. This work has proven that operating applications in conjunction with a P2P data storage framework, connected via the mobile telephone network, is technically feasible. It also shows that opportunity remains for further research to realise the full potential of this data storage technique.
The orally active and bioavailable ATR kinase inhibitor AZD6738 potentiates the anti-tumor effects of cisplatin to resolve ATM-deficient non-small cell lung cancer in vivo

ATR and ATM are DNA damage signaling kinases that phosphorylate several thousand substrates. ATR kinase activity is increased at damaged replication forks and resected DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). ATM kinase activity is increased at DSBs. ATM has been widely studied since ataxia telangiectasia individuals who express no ATM protein are the most radiosensitive patients identified. Since ATM is not an essential protein, it is widely believed that ATM kinase inhibitors will be well-tolerated in the clinic. ATR has been widely studied, but advances have been complicated by the finding that ATR is an essential protein and it is widely believed that ATR kinase inhibitors will be toxic in the clinic. We describe AZD6738, an orally active and bioavailable ATR kinase inhibitor. AZD6738 induces cell death and senescence in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cell lines. AZD6738 potentiates the cytotoxicity of cisplatin and gemcitabine in NSCLC cell lines with intact ATM kinase signaling, and potently synergizes with cisplatin in ATM-deficient NSCLC cells. In contrast to expectations, daily administration of AZD6738 and ATR kinase inhibition for 14 consecutive days is tolerated in mice and enhances the therapeutic efficacy of cisplatin in xenograft models. Remarkably, the combination of cisplatin and AZD6738 resolves ATM-deficient lung cancer xenografts.
A Methodology to Develop a Mobile Application Model to Appraise Housing Design Quality

The variety of planning and design solutions occasionally turns into an underpinning factor for the defects and maintenance issues in built forms. Defects and maintenance that emerges from deficient design indicate that the design has not been conceded in the perception of quality. Reviewing the nature of deficient designs and resulting maintenance problems in various types of built forms revealed that housing sector is most effective of this phenomenon. The reason could be set as; housing planning, design, and construction are a most practiced activity to address the living needs of the ever-growing world population. This research considered that design quality of housing is severely affected in developing countries. In this regard housing standards and bylaws plays a minor role to ensure the housing quality in developing regions. However, it is notable that, in developing regions, the majority of populations have easy access to mobile communication technology. Therefore, it is possible to use mobile technology to educate the people about quality issues of housing and to help them to evaluate the quality of proposed or existing housing. At present, the use of mobile technology has not only heightened the need for IT knowledge but also extend the capabilities of many designers/architects and builders. Hence, there is a niche to develop an integrated hub that could appraise the function of each professional involved in housing processes. This research has established a criterion that, the mobile technology can help common people to understand the quality of house/housing and to ascertain it. The results of the research have surfaced a model of mobile application that could be used later to prepare the real-time mobile application to work as a “design quality assessment tool. ”
Distance-based path relinking for the vehicle routing problem

1 Path relinking for the vehicle routing problem Path relinking is a relatively new metaheuristic technique for combinatorial optimization, proposed by Glover (see e.g. [3]). Path relinking attempts to find new good solutions by examining the solutions that are on a path from an initial (incumbent) to a final (guiding) solution. By definition, each move on the path makes the solution more different from the initiating solution and more similar to the guiding solution. Moving on the path is done by a neighbourhood operator, just like in any local search algorithm. The technical difference with ordinary local search is that the neighbourhood search strategy that decides which move to execute is not based on the quality of the resulting solution, but on the distance in the solution space between the resulting solution and the guiding solution. A move that takes the solution closer to the guiding solution will be preferred over one that takes it further away, regardless of the quality of the resulting solution. Constructing a path relinking procedure therefore requires us to select a move operator to use and a distance measure in the solution space between two solutions. The distance measure than can be used to determine whether a move brings a solution closer to the guiding solution and whether the resulting solution can be considered to be " on a path from incumbent to guiding solution ". Usually, path relinking is not used as a standalone solution method, but combined with other metaheuristics, such as tabu search or GRASP, see e. Although the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is one of the best-known combina-torial optimization problems, path relinking approaches for this problem are few and far between. This is partially due to the fact that a VRP solution is most naturally represented as a set of permutations of customers, each member of the set representing a tour. Contrary to problems that have a natural binary or vector representation, it is not immediately obvious what is meant by 744
A Quadratic Assignment Formulation of the Graph Edit Distance

Computing efficiently a robust measure of similarity or dissimilarity between graphs is a major challenge in Pattern Recognition. The Graph Edit Distance (GED) is a flexible measure of dissimilarity between graphs which arises in error-tolerant graph matching. It is defined from an optimal sequence of edit operations (edit path) transforming one graph into an other. Unfortunately, the exact computation of this measure is NP-hard. In the last decade, several approaches have been proposed to approximate the GED in polynomial time, mainly by solving linear programming problems. Among them, the bipartite GED has received much attention. It is deduced from a linear sum assignment of the nodes of the two graphs, which can be efficiently computed by Hungarian-type algorithms. However, edit operations on nodes and edges are not handled simultaneously, which limits the accuracy of the approximation. To overcome this limitation, we propose to extend the linear assignment model to a quadratic one, for directed or undirected graphs having labelized nodes and edges. This is realized through the definition of a family of edit paths induced by assignments between nodes. We formally show that the GED, restricted to the paths in this family, is equivalent to a quadratic assignment problem. Since this problem is NP-hard, we propose to compute an approximate solution by an adaptation of the Integer Projected Fixed Point method. Experiments show that the proposed approach is generally able to reach a more accurate approximation of the optimal GED than the bipartite GED, with a computational cost that is still affordable for graphs of non trivial sizes.
Multimodal Registration Using Stereo Imaging and Contact Sensing

Registration plays an important role in robot assisted minimally invasive surgeries, by localizing the tool-tip onto the preoperative model of the anatomy. Contact-based point measurements have been typically used to perform registration. However, a lot of time is spent in moving the robot tool to obtain these measurements. On the other hand, stereo imaging quickly provides thousands of point measurements, but these measurements are affected by noise in the measurements as well as artifacts such as occlusions and specular reflections. In this work, we use both stereo and contact measurements in a complementary manner to obtain fast and accurate registration estimates. We show that stereo measurements provide fast and approximate registration estimates, which can then be refined with as few as 10 contact measurements. We validate our approach with experiments performed using a daVinci surgical robot on femur bone and silicone phantom tissue. In comparison with the popular registration method iterative closest point, our approach is faster by an order of magnitude.
Improvisational goal-oriented action recommendation under incomplete knowledge base

Robots need to have knowledge of their environment to be able to successfully complete service tasks. Most knowledge inference mechanisms assume complete and correct knowledge about the environment. Real world environments are often uncertain and only partially observable. Thus, intelligent service robots may have an incomplete knowledge base which includes true positives as well as false negatives and false positives. False negatives and false positives can prevent service robots from completing their service tasks. In the field of logical inference, false positives are a more significant problem compared to false negatives. A weighted ontology and association mechanism was proposed in previous research which recommended improvisational goal-oriented actions that could be applied in the case of false negatives. However, false positives are not usually matched in the existing ontological semantic network. Consequently, the association mechanism does not work. To deal with false positives, the weighted ontology and association mechanism were extended by adding additional nodes which are associated with epistemic actions. The proposed method was successfully evaluated and verified through experiments; results show that almost all problems associated with false positives and false negatives were resolved.
Bioinformatics Original Paper Dynamic Exploration and Editing of Kegg Pathway Diagrams

Motivation: The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) Pathway database is a very valuable information resource for researchers in the fields of life sciences. It contains metabolic and regulatory processes in the form of wiring diagrams, which can be used for browsing and information retrieval as well as a base for modeling and simulation. Thus it helps in understanding biological processes and higher-order functions of biological systems. Currently the KEGG website uses semi-static visualizations for the presentation and navigation of its pathway information. While this visualization style offers a good pathway presentation and navigation, it does not provide some of the possibilities related to dynamic visual-izations, most importantly, the creation and visualization of user-specific pathways. Results: This paper presents methods for the dynamic visualization, interactive navigation and editing of KEGG pathway diagrams. These diagrams, given as KEGG Markup Language (KGML) files, can be visually explored using novel approaches combining semi-static and dynamic visualization, but also edited or even newly created and then exported into KGML files. Availability: KGML-ED, a program implementing the presented methods, is available free of charge to the scientific community at
On discretizing the exponential on-off primary radio activities in simulations

In opportunistic spectrum access (OSA), secondary radios (SRs) are allowed to access the channel whenever primary radios (PRs) are not transmitting. The PR's spectrum activities are normally assumed to be a 2-state continuous Markov on-off process which can be modeled as two independent exponential random variables. On the other hand, some simulations prefer using a 2-state discrete Markov chain. As SRs periodically sense the channel to determine its availability before transmitting, maintaining the same false alarm and missed detection probabilities is necessary but still insufficient when discretizing the continuous PR on-off process. Earlier work has shown that type II missed detection error, which is a function of spectrum sensing period, occurs because PR, which is sensed to be inactive in the last sensing duration, can become active before the next spectrum sensing is performed. Hence, it is insufficient to simply perform simulation at the time stamp of spectrum sensing period as information about the type II missed detection error will be lost. This paper looks into the context of spectrum sensing on how we should select the time stamp of the simulation, i.e., the transition probabilities of the 2-state discrete Markov chain, so as to approximate the 2-state continuous Markov process without losing any valuable information. We first derive the expression for type II missed detection error based on the discrete PR on-off model. Then we present the method to decide the time stamp of the simulation so that type II missed detection probability is kept within a given error bound. The same approach can be generalized to other probability distributions of the spectrum activities.
Low-latency approximate matrix inversion for high-throughput linear pre-coders in massive MIMO

This work presents a high-throughput and low-latency Index Terms-matrix inversion design for a linear pre-coder for massive MIMO systems. Because of the large number of Base Station (BS) antennas as well as the multiple User Terminals (UTs) served in a massive MIMO system, the channel matrix dimensions become larger. Inversions of such large matrices using direct inversion methods, such as used in linear pre-coders like Zero Forcing (ZF), would entail prohibitive complexity. For avoiding such complexity, Neumann series based approximate inversion has been suggested for linear pre-coders in massive MIMO systems. However the performance, complexity and convergence speed of the Neumann series approach depends very much on the initial approximation of the inverse used as a starting point. In this work, we present a novel initial approximation for the Neumann series which facilitates the parallel computation of the inverse and hence results in lower latency for inversion as well as better accuracy when compared to the previous approaches. A VLSI architecture of the proposed method is implemented for the inversion of a 16 × 16 matrix, in TSMC 65nm technology. A throughput of 0.54M to 15M matrix inversion per sec is achieved at a clock frequency of 460MHz with a 117K gate count.
Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States

List of Figures. Series Editor's Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Beginnings: 1848-1920. 2. Restriction, Depression, and Deportation: The 1920s and 1930s. 3. The Bracero Era: 1942-1964. 4. Illegal Immigration and Response: 1964-1990. 5. Free Trade and Homeland Security: 1990-Present. Epilogue and Conclusion.