Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laparoscopic Castration Using Bipolar Forceps vs. Orchiectomy in Dogs: A Comparison of Two Techniques

Simple Summary Castration of dogs is one of the most often performed surgeries in veterinary medicine. Minimally invasive techniques used in human medicine are now being used in animals. We compared the feasibility and effects on pain and inflammation of a new laparoscopic technique with the classical castration technique. The animals in which the new technique was applied showed less pain and inflammation then the other group. Our results suggest that this is a feasible alternative to classical castration. Abstract This paper aimed to study the feasibility of a new laparoscopic castration technique in male dogs, evaluate the pain associated with it, and compare it with the classical orchiectomy. Surgical times, pain scores, blood and salivary cortisol, and CRP were recorded and compared between the two groups. The use of high-frequency bipolar forceps allowed quick and uneventful laparoscopic procedures. The laparoscopic group had significantly lower pain scores, cortisol, and PCR values than the orchiectomy group. No complications were seen in any group. Our results suggest that this laparoscopic castration is a safe and beneficial surgical alternative to traditional orchiectomy in dogs.
Detection of Dental Apical Lesions Using CNNs on Periapical Radiograph

Apical lesions, the general term for chronic infectious diseases, are very common dental diseases in modern life, and are caused by various factors. The current prevailing endodontic treatment makes use of X-ray photography taken from patients where the lesion area is marked manually, which is therefore time consuming. Additionally, for some images the significant details might not be recognizable due to the different shooting angles or doses. To make the diagnosis process shorter and efficient, repetitive tasks should be performed automatically to allow the dentists to focus more on the technical and medical diagnosis, such as treatment, tooth cleaning, or medical communication. To realize the automatic diagnosis, this article proposes and establishes a lesion area analysis model based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). For establishing a standardized database for clinical application, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) with application number 202002030B0 has been approved with the database established by dentists who provided the practical clinical data. In this study, the image data is preprocessed by a Gaussian high-pass filter. Then, an iterative thresholding is applied to slice the X-ray image into several individual tooth sample images. The collection of individual tooth images that comprises the image database are used as input into the CNN migration learning model for training. Seventy percent (70%) of the image database is used for training and validating the model while the remaining 30% is used for testing and estimating the accuracy of the model. The practical diagnosis accuracy of the proposed CNN model is 92.5%. The proposed model successfully facilitated the automatic diagnosis of the apical lesion.
Influence of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Extraction Conditions on Extraction Yield and Composition of Nigella sativa L. Seed Oil—Modelling, Optimization and Extraction Kinetics regarding Fatty Acid and Thymoquinone Content

Nigella sativa L. is cultivated in many regions and its seeds have found use in variety of foods, but also in traditional medicine due to high content of biologically active essential oils. In this work optimization of supercritical carbon dioxide extraction from N. sativa seeds was performed using response surface methodology to describe the influence of extraction conditions on oil yield. Kinetics of oil and thymoquinone extraction were analyzed as well. It was demonstrated that in order to collect thymoquinone-rich N. sativa oil fraction, appropriate for health-related applications, the extraction should be carried out at 40 °C and 10–15 MPa. Following application of higher pressure of 35 MPa enables effective extraction of remaining oil rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids suitable for use in food industry. Thymoquinone-dependent antibacterial activity of the N. sativa seed oil was observed against bacterial pathogens: Haemophilus influenzae, Staphylococcus haemolyticus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Enterococcus faecalis and Escherichia coli.
Effects of Soy Isoflavones, Resistant Starch and Antibiotics on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS)-Like Features in Letrozole-Treated Rats

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder in reproductive-aged women. Recently, various dietary interventions have been used extensively as a novel therapy against PCOS. In the present study, we show that soy isoflavone metabolites and resistant starch, together with gut microbiota modulations, were successful in decreasing the severity of PCOS-like reproductive features while increasing the expression of gut barrier markers and butyric acid in the gut. In the letrozole-induced PCOS model rats, the intake of both 0.05% soy isoflavones and 11% resistant starch, even with letrozole treatment, reduced the severity of menstrual irregularity and polycystic ovaries with a high concentration of soy isoflavones and equol in plasma. Antibiotic cocktail treatment suppressed soy isoflavone metabolism in the gut and showed no considerable effects on reducing the PCOS-like symptoms. The mRNA expression level of occludin significantly increased with soy isoflavone and resistant starch combined treatment. Bacterial genera such as Blautia, Dorea and Clostridium were positively correlated with menstrual irregularity under resistant starch intake. Moreover, the concentration of butyric acid was elevated by resistant starch intake. In conclusion, we propose that both dietary interventions and gut microbiota modulations could be effectively used in reducing the severity of PCOS reproductive features.
Research on Text Generation Based on LSTM

Text generation is an important direction in the field of natural language processing (NLP). In the era of pre-training model, transformer improved pre-training text generation model still can not achieve relatively ideal results, and at the same time, there is no efficient language model to automatically evaluate the quality of generated text. As an improved variant of cyclic neural network (RNN), long-term memory network (LSTM) is characterized by its long-term dependence, and it performs very well in the task of processing long sequences. The LSTM has many improved variants for different tasks, including the gated loop unit (GRU) and the LSTM with a peephole connection, all of which have better performance than the LSTM in specific tasks. However, it is not clear whether these improved variants have better performance in the field of text generation. Therefore, an exploratory text generation experiment is conducted to solve this problem. By comparing the generated text quality of standard LSTM with LSTM's improved variant GRU and LSTM model with visual hole connection, the evaluation results of LSTM model in long text field are obviously better than those of the other two models through three evaluation indexes: confusion degree, BERT score and BLEURT. Finally, we draw a conclusion and research direction that the native LSTM in the field of long text still has very superior performance. In the future, we can design a pre-training model based on LSTM for text generation. Future language models can be designed to guide the optimization and improvement of language models through large-scale evaluation using automated evaluation indicators such as BERT score and BLEURT, which are close to manual evaluation, so as to design language models that can generate higher quality text.
A Adaptação de Áreas-Chave de Processo do SW-CMM ao Processo de Reengenharia Orientada a Objetos

A reengenharia orientada a objetos de sistemas legados procedimentais pode ser realizada de diversas formas com o auxilio de diversos métodos e processos. Um deles é através de linguagem ou família de padrões. A preocupação com a qualidade do processo de desenvolvimento é constante nas empresas, porém o mesmo não ocorre com o processo de reengenharia. Nesse sentido, este artigo apresenta cinco padrões de processo que cuidam do planejamento e do acompanhamento de um processo de reengenharia orientada a objetos de sistemas legados desenvolvidos sem essas características. Esses padrões foram desenvolvidos com base na adaptação das áreas-chave de processo para alcance do nível 2 de maturidade do SW-CMM e incluídos no PRE/OO (Processo de Reengenharia Orientada a Objetos) que agrupa, além desses, outros quinze padrões relacionados à condução do processo de reengenharia. O PRE/OO é composto de sete clusters de padrões sendo que os relacionados à qualidade de processo visam trazer para o processo de reengenharia as diretrizes já utilizadas no processo de desenvolvimento de software. Um estudo de caso com sistema Delphi sem características orientadas a objetos é utilizado para exemplificar o processo sendo o sistema alvo re-implementado na mesma linguagem com características orientadas a objetos.
Experiential and Cognitive Predictors of Sight-Singing Performance in Music Higher Education

Sight-singing is prevalent in aural skill classes, where learners differ in experience and cognitive abilities. In this research, we investigated whether musical experience, level of study, and working memory capacity (WMC) can predict sight-singing performance and if there is a correlation between WMC and performance among some subgroups of participants. We hypothesized that more experienced students and those with a higher WMC might sight-sing better than those with less experience and lesser WMC. We also hypothesized that the relationship between WMC and sight-singing performance would be more salient for less experienced and less proficient sight-singers. We surveyed 56 subjects about their experience with music, assessed their WMC, and evaluated their performance on a short sight-singing task. The results showed that the age when students began learning music could predict sight-singing performance independently from the number of years of experience and the educational level, suggesting a possible developmental component to sight-singing skill. We also found a negative relationship between WMC and pitch score in the low-performing group and between rhythm and pitch score, suggesting that pitch and rhythm are processed differently. Teachers should be aware of how students’ backgrounds might be related to performance and encourage them to develop strong automated skills, such as reading music or singing basic tonal patterns.
An IMUs-Based Extended Kalman Filter to Estimate Gait Lower Limb Sagittal Kinematics for the Control of Wearable Robotic Devices

Inertial sensors have gained relevance as wearable sensors to acquire the kinematics of human limbs through fusion sensor algorithms and biomechanical models. However, there are some limitations to the use of Inertial Measurement Units in the control of wearable robotic devices: 1) Some approaches use magnetometer readings to estimate the orientation of the sensor, and, as a result, they are prone to errors due to electromagnetic interferences; 2) Biomechanical model-based approaches require complex and time-consuming calibration procedures. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes an Extended Kalman Filter to estimate sagittal lower limb kinematics during gait, based on gyroscopes and accelerometers and without requiring any calibration or sensor alignment process. As magnetometer measurements are not involved, this method is not affected by electromagnetic disturbances. Our approach calculates the knee rotation axis in real-time, and it estimates hip and ankle sagittal axes considering that the movements in that plane occur around parallel axes. We carried out an experimental validation with eight healthy subjects walking on a treadmill at different velocities. We obtained waveform RMS errors about 3.8°, 3.6°, and 4.8° for hip, knee, and ankle in the sagittal plane. We also assessed the performance of this method as a tool for controlling lower-limb robotic exoskeletons by detecting gait events or estimating the phase and frequency of the gait in real-time through an Adaptive Frequency Oscillator. The average RMS delay in the detection of gait events was lower than 60 ms, and the RMSE in the estimation of the gait phase was about 3% of the gait cycle. We conclude that the described method could be used as a controller for wearable robotic devices.
CodeMI - Source Code as XML Metadata Interchange Uma Representação de Código-fonte para Coleta de Métricas

Representações de software baseadas em XML possuem nível de abstração adequado para o processamento, análise e manipulação de código fonte por ferramentas. Estas representações fornecem detalhes expressivos sobre a estrutura do código-fonte. A alta verbosidade de algumas representações e a exposição de detalhes do código-fonte em excesso dificultam a realização de estudos de evolução de softwares industriais. Neste artigo, apresentamos CodeMI, uma representação de código-fonte baseadaem XML que utiliza a extensão do formato XMI para definir elementos, com ênfase na estrutura do código-fonte, que viabilizem a coleta de métricas sem revelar a dinâmica de execução do software.
Designing Hybrid Energy Source System for Long Endurance Electric UAV

The article presents the conceptual design of Hybrid Energy Source System (HESS) for Long Endurance Electric UAV. During the design, the MBD method was used to analyze energy consumption during various UAV operational states as well as the entire mission for different HESS concepts. Such analysis at an early stage of the concept allows you to choose the optimal HESS set for a given UAV and expected mission parameters. The design method is based on a simulation computer model of subsystems and flight phenomena affecting the energy consumption during the flight. The modular construction of the simulation model allows the use of various details of simulation models for different stages of project development. The use of the HESS solution as well as the method of its design makes it possible to overcome the basic inconvenience of using electric drives in all types of vehicles, ie reconciling sufficient temporary operational parameters of the drive and long-term operation. In addition to the description of the method itself and the details of the simulation model, the article also presents a case study for the popular UAV class.
Energy Optimization for Smart Housing Systems

Smart home is an emerging technology which is growing continuously now. It integrates many of the new technologies with the help of home networking for improving human’s quality and standard of living, so there are many projects which are researching in diverse technologies in order to apply them to the smart home system. As the technology evolves it comforts mankind with some additional ease and advancement. At the time the evolution calls upon all the daily routine devices to operate over internet and this project is based on the idea to make these devices accessible to the owner anytime anywhere. Particularly for now we intend to connect electrical appliances in any house to a kind of a local area network so that it can be operated by the respective authorities so as to minimize the electricity wastage. Further these devices along with sensors can be made to operate on their own, intelligently and accurately. The excellency of the project can be utilized in hostels and classrooms as well where most of the times we find electrical appliances operational even when not necessary. The idea is to turn a house into a smart house. The project utilizes the current technology such as wifi and low cost electronic modules to meet the requirements of IOT and gives it a web as well as an app interface for an ease of access. The technologies which we are using include - Wifi module, Relay module, Raspberry pi, Sensors for automatic support and feedback to user. The project can be extended to cloud also for data storage and providing access to authorized user.
Design and Implementation of a New Cuk-Based Step-Up DC–DC Converter

This study proposes a novel modified Cuk converter. The proposed converter attempts to resolve the limitations of the conventional converters, such as voltage gain limitations of a canonical Cuk converter. Therefore, the mentioned improvement has made the proposed converters more compatible for renewable energy applications. Moreover, the increase of the voltage gain in the proposed converter has not impacted the efficiency or the voltage stress of the switches, which is common in other voltage boosting techniques, such as cascading methods. Furthermore, the advantages of a Cuk converter, such as continuity of the input current, have been maintained. The average voltage/current stresses of the semiconductor devices and various types of power losses have been calculated and compared with the existing topologies. Moreover, the non-ideal voltage gain of the proposed converters was compared with the other high step-up topologies. Eventually, the simulation results with PLECS, along with the experiments on an 120 W prototype, have been presented for validation.
Efficacy of Precocene I from Desmosstachya bipinnata as an Effective Bioactive Molecules against the Spodoptera litura Fab. and Its Impact on Eisenia fetida Savigny

The sustainability of agroecosystems are maintained with agro-chemicals. However, after more than 80 years of intensive use, many pests and pathogens have developed resistance to the currently used chemistries. Thus, we explored the isolation and bioactivity of a chemical compound, Precocene I, isolated from the perennial grass, Desmosstachya bipinnata (L.) Stapf. Fractions produced from chloroform extractions showed suppressive activity on larvae of Spodoptera litura (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), the Oriental armyworm. Column chromatography analyses identified Precocene I confirmed using FTIR, HPLC and NMR techniques. The bioactivity of the plant-extracted Dp-Precocene I was compared to a commercially produced Precocene I standard. The percentage of mortality observed in insects fed on plant tissue treated with 60 ppm Db-Precocene I was 97, 87 and 81, respectively, for the second, third and fourth instar larvae. The LC50 value of third instars was 23.2 ppm. The percentages of survival, pupation, fecundity and egg hatch were altered at sub-lethal concentrations of Db-Precocene I (2, 4, 6 and 8 ppm, sprays on castor leaves). The observed effects were negatively correlated with concentration, with a decrease in effects as concentrations increased. Distinct changes in feeding activity and damage to gut tissues were observed upon histological examination of S. litura larvae after the ingestion of Db-Precocene I treatments. Comparative analyses of mortality on a non-target organism, the earthworm, Eisenia fetida, at equal concentrations of Precocene I and two chemical pesticides (cypermethrin and monocrotophos) produced mortality only with the chemical pesticide treatments. These results of Db-Precocene I as a highly active bioactive compound support further research to develop production from the grass D. bipinnata as an affordable resource for Precocene-I-based insecticides.
uDALES 1.0.0: a large-eddy-simulation model for urban environments

Abstract. Urban environments increasingly move to the fore of climate and air quality research due to their central role in the population’s health and well-being. Tools to model the local environmental conditions, urban morphology and interaction with the atmospheric boundary layer play an important role for sustainable urban planning and policy-making. uDALES is a high-resolution, building-resolving large-eddy simulation code for urban microclimate and air quality. uDALES solves a surface energy balance for each urban facet and models multi-refection shortwave radiation, longwave radiation, heat storage and conductance, as well as turbulent latent and sensible heat fluxes. Vegetated surfaces and their effect on outdoor temperatures and energy demand can be studied. Furthermore a scheme to simulate emissions and transport of aerosols and some reactive gas species is present. The energy balance has been tested against idealized cases and the particle dispersion against field measurements, yielding satisfying results. uDALES can be used to study the effect of specific new constructions and building measures on the local micro-climate; or to gain new insight about the general effect of urban morphology on local climate, ventilation and dispersion. uDALES is available online under GNU General Public License and remains under maintenance and development.
A Novel Multi-Ingredient Supplement Activates a Browning Program in White Adipose Tissue and Mitigates Weight Gain in High-Fat Diet-Fed Mice

We investigated the effects of a novel multi-ingredient supplement comprised of polyphenol antioxidants and compounds known to facilitate mitochondrial function and metabolic enhancement (ME) in a mouse model of obesity. In this study, 6-week-old male C57/BL6J mice were placed on a high-fat diet (HFD; ~60% fat) for 6 weeks, with subsequent allocation into experimentalgroups for 4 weeks: HFD control, HFD + ME10 (10 components), HFD + ME7 (7 components), HFD + ME10 + EX, HFD + EX (where ‘+EX’ animals exercised 3 days/week), and chow-fed control. After the intervention, HFD control animals had significantly greater body weight and fat mass. Despite the continuation of HFD, animals supplemented with multi-ingredient ME or who performed exercise training showed an attenuation of fat mass and preservation of lean body mass, which was further enhanced when combined (ME+EX). ME supplementation stimulated the upregulation of white and brown adipose tissue mRNA transcripts associated with mitochondrial biogenesis, browning, fatty acid transport, and fat metabolism. In WAT depots, this was mirrored by mitochodrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) protein expression, and increased in vivo fat oxidation measured via CLAMS. ME supplementation also decreased systemic and local inflammation markers. Herein, we demonstrated that novel multi-ingredient nutritional supplements induced significant fat loss independent of physical activity while preserving muscle mass in obese mice. Mechanistically, these MEs appear to act by inducing a browning program in white adipose tissue and decreasing other pathophysiological impairments associated with obesity, including mitochondrial respiration alterations induced by HFD.
SIECRIM: Um Sistema para Geração Automática de Relatórios em Segurança Pública

Este trabalho apresenta o Sistema Estatístico Criminal (SIECRIM), cujo objetivo é automatizar a geração de relatórios estatísticos que auxiliam a análise criminal e ações estratégicas. Outra característica peculiar deste sistema é a possibilidade de integração das diferentes bases de dados daSecretaria de Segurança Pública do Estado do Pará.
Dual Mutation: The Save the Mutants Approach

Mutation testing is a fault based testing criterion that has been widely used and studied. It has been shown an eective fault revealing criterion and its characteristics allow its use in a large range of entities like regular programs and behavioral specications of real time systems. To evaluate the adequacy of a test set T in the test of a program P, mutation testing uses a set of alternative implementations of P called mutants. The adequacy of T is assessed by its ability on demonstrate that the mutants produce dierent results of P. In this paper we present the idea of Dual Mutation Testing (DMT). DMT uses the same mutants as mutation testing but requires test cases that show that the mutants can produce the same results of P. In a case study we apply Dual Mutation Testing and compare it to traditional mutation testing.