Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Emerging trends of scrub typhus disease in southern Rajasthan, India: A neglected public health problem

Scrub typhus is the oldest known vector-borne zoonotic infectious disease in the world which is life-threatening for all age groups as it presents acute febrile illness along with multi-organ involvements and spread with the biting of infectious ‘Trombiculid mite’ (chigger mite). The pathogen of this disease is an obligatory coccobacillus gram-negative rickettsial bacteria Orientia tsutsugamushi. Scrub typhus disease was previously confined geographically only to the Asia Pacific region (tsutsugamushi triangle), but in recent years it has crossed its limit and has spread in other countries beyond the tsutsugamushi triangle and has become more hazardous for the community. The objective of this study is to explore the scrub typhus disease outbreak trends with existing information in southern Rajasthan state, India. This study concluded that scrub typhus disease is being re-emerged again and again in various Indian geographical regions with new species of vectors. The disease has been raised in tremendous amounts in Rajasthan within the last five years especially in the hilly zone and has led to major public health problems with other zoonotic diseases.
Multiscale Feature Aggregation Capsule Neural Network for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification

Models based on capsule neural network (CapsNet), a novel deep learning method, have recently made great achievements in hyperspectral remote sensing image (HSI) classification due to their excellent ability to implicitly model the spatial relationship knowledge embedded in HSIs. However, the number of labeled samples is a common bottleneck in HSI classification, limiting the performance of these deep learning models. To alleviate the problem of limited labeled samples and further explore the potential of CapsNet in the HSI classification field, this study proposes a multiscale feature aggregation capsule neural network (MS-CapsNet) based on CapsNet via the implementation of two branches that simultaneously extract spectral, local spatial, and global spatial features to integrate multiscale features and improve model robustness. Furthermore, because deep features are generally more discriminative than shallow features, two kinds of capsule residual (CapsRES) blocks based on 3D convolutional capsule (3D-ConvCaps) layers and residual connections are proposed to increase the depth of the network and solve the limited labeled sample problem in HSI classification. Moreover, a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) block is introduced in the shallow layers of MS-CapsNet to enhance its feature extraction ability. In addition, a reasonable initialization strategy that transfers parameters from two well-designed, pretrained deep convolutional capsule networks is introduced to help the model find a good set of initializing weight parameters and further improve the HSI classification accuracy of MS-CapsNet. Experimental results on four widely used HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can provide results comparable to those of state-of-the-art methods.
Design and analysis of squid-like jet propeller actuated by piezoelectric pumps

In this paper, a squid-like jet propeller actuated by piezoelectric pumps is designed, which can realize underwater pulsedjet process. The squid-like jet propeller comprises a bionic mantle and a rigid framework. The bionic mantle is a sealedflexible cavity, and a plurality of piezoelectric pumps are embedded on the bionic mantle to continuously absorbwaterinto the cavity. When the piezoelectric pump works, water is sucked into the flexible cavity, when the pressure inthecavity reaches a certain value, the jet is ejected through the nozzle. Firstly, this paper studies the structural designof thebionic mantle, then studies the influence of the number and the water absorption performance of piezoelectric pumpsaswell as water absorption time on the propulsion performance of the squid-like jet propeller, and then studies thestructural deformation of the bionic mantle and the variation of the parameters of the jet propeller during the pulsedjet process. The squid-like jet propeller can control the pulsed jet cycle and other propulsion performance.
Contrast source inversion on experimental data: initial results

Quantitative images showing the speed of sound profile of the breast may be obtained by employing full-waveform inversion (FWI) methods on the measured data. These reconstruction methods work well for both dense and normal breasts. Contrast source inversion (CSI) is a frequency domain FWI method. In literature, many examples of successful application of CSI for breast imaging can be found. However, all these works are based on simulated data. In this work, we will present our first results obtained with employing CSI on experimental data. CSI was developed by Delft University of Technology and the experimental data was provided by FUJIFILM Healthcare Corporation. The experimental data is obtained using a ring-shaped transducer which scans a breast-mimicking gelatine phantom. Our initial results obtained with CSI look promising; all inclusions within the phantom are accurately reconstructed.
Eco-Friendly Incorporation of Crumb Rubber and Waste Bagasse Ash in Bituminous Concrete Mix

The consumption of waste materials in the construction sector is a sustainable approach that helps in reducing the environmental pollution and decreases the construction cost. The present research work emphasizes the mechanical properties of bituminous concrete mix prepared with crumb rubber (CR) and waste sugarcane bagasse ash (SCBA). For the preparation of bituminous concrete mix specimens with CR and SCBA, the effective bitumen content was determined using the Marshall Mix design method. A total of 15 bituminous concrete mix specimens with 4%, 4.5%, 5%, 5.5% and 6% of bitumen content were prepared, and the effective bitumen content turned out to be 4.7%. The effect of five different CR samples of 2%, 4%, 6%, 8% and 10% by weight of total mix and SCBA samples of 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% by weight of filler were investigated on the performance of bituminous concrete. A total of 180 samples with different percentages of CR and SCBA were tested for indirect tensile strength (ITS) and Marshall Stability, and the results were compared with conventional bituminous concrete mix. It was observed that the stability values rose with an increase in CR percentage up to 6%, while the flow values rose as the percentage of SCBA increased in the mix. Maximum ITS results were observed at 4% CR and 25% SCBA replacement levels. However, a decrease in stability and ITS result was observed as the percentages of CR and SCBA increased beyond 4% and 25%, respectively. We concluded that the optimum CR and SCBA content of 4% and 25%, respectively, can be effectively used as a sustainable alternative in bituminous concrete mix.
Adaptive Remodeling of the Neuromuscular Junction with Aging

Aging is associated with gradual degeneration, in mass and function, of the neuromuscular system. This process, referred to as “sarcopenia”, is considered a disease by itself, and it has been linked to a number of other serious maladies such as type II diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia. While the molecular causes of sarcopenia remain to be fully elucidated, recent findings have implicated the neuromuscular junction (NMJ) as being an important locus in the development and progression of that malady. This synapse, which connects motor neurons to the muscle fibers that they innervate, has been found to degenerate with age, contributing both to senescent-related declines in muscle mass and function. The NMJ also shows plasticity in response to a number of neuromuscular diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS). Here, the structural and functional degradation of the NMJ associated with aging and disease is described, along with the measures that might be taken to effectively mitigate, if not fully prevent, that degeneration.
Pose Estimation and Segmentation for Rehabilitation

The global population is getting older and the aging demographic is increasing demands on health-care industry. This will drive the demand for post stroke, joint replacement, and chronic disease management rehabilitation. Currently physiotherapists rely on mostly subjective and observational tools for patient assessment and progress tracking. This thesis proposes methods to enable the use of non-intrusive, small, wearable, wireless sensors to estimate the pose of the lower body during rehabilitation and extract objective performance measures useful for therapists. Two different kinematic models of the human lower body are introduced. The first approach expresses the body position and orientation in the world frame using three prismatic and revolute joints, while the second switches the model's base between the right and the left ankle during gait. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is set up to estimate the joint angles, velocities, and accelerations of the models using measurements from inertial measurement units. The state update model assumes constant joint acceleration and is linear. Measurement prediction, relating the joint positions, velocities and accelerations to the measured angular velocity and linear acceleration at each IMU, is done using forward kinematics, using one of the two proposed kinematic models. The approach is validated on healthy participant gait using motion capture studio data for ground truth comparison. The prismatic and revolute model achieves better Cartesian position accuracy in the swing leg due to a shorter kinematic chain, while the switching base model improves the stance leg Cartesian estimate and does not allow measurement noise to accumulate as drift in global position, knee joint angle root mean squared errors (RMSE) of 6.1 and 5.6 degrees are attained respectively by the models. Next the Rhythmic Extended Kalman Filter (R-EKF) algorithm is developed to improve pose estimation. It learns a model of rhythmic movement over time based on harmonic Fourier series and removes the constant acceleration assumption. The estimated phase and frequency of the motion also allow the proposed approach to segment the motion into repetitions and extract useful features such as gait symmetry, step length, and mean joint movement and variance. The algorithm is shown to outperform the EKF in simulation, on healthy participant data, and stroke patient monthly assessments. For the healthy participant marching dataset, the R-EKF improves joint acceleration and velocity estimates over regular EKF by 40% and 37% respectively, estimates joint angles with 2.4 degree RMSE, and segments the motion into repetitions with 96% accuracy. While the proposed R-EKF effectively segments rhythmic rehabilitation movement such as gait, not all rehabilitation motions are rhythmic or may have uneven delays between repetitions by regimen design or due to fatigue. For such motions a time-series segmentation as data point classification algorithm is proposed. Common dimensionality reduction and classification…
Experimental study on a rotor system with rub-impact at fixed limiter based on HHT

Based on the demand of engineering,the motion characteristics and time-frequency properties of a rotor system with rub-impact at fixed limiter were studied by using experiments.Three typical cases with different rotating speeds were chosen in experiments.On the basis of traditional amplitude spectrum and shaft center orbit,Hilbert-Huang transformation was applied to the fault signals analysis.Fault features were characterized completely and accurately with Hilbert spectrum.It was shown that there are typical characteristics of periodic motion and the corresponding time-frequency (instantaneous frequency)-amplitude /energy representations in the rotor system with rub-impact at fixed limiter.
Fermented Food in Asthma and Respiratory Allergies—Chance or Failure?

In the last few decades, a dramatic increase in the global prevalence of allergic diseases and asthma was observed. It was hypothesized that diet may be an important immunomodulatory factor influencing susceptibility to allergic diseases. Fermented food, a natural source of living microorganisms and bioactive compounds, has been demonstrated to possess health-promoting potentials and seems to be a promising strategy to reduce the risk of various immune-related diseases, such as allergic diseases and asthma. The exact mechanisms by which allergic diseases and asthma can be alleviated or prevented by fermented food are not well understood; however, its potential to exert an effect through modulating the immune response and influencing the gut microbiota has been recently studied. In this review, we provide the current knowledge on the role of diet, including fermented foods, in preventing or treating allergic diseases and asthma.
Targeting Cardiovascular Diseases by Flavonols: An Update

Flavonols are one of the most plentiful flavonoid subclasses found in natural products and are extensively used as dietary supplements. Numerous in vitro and in vivo studies have shown the cardioprotective properties of flavonols, especially quercetin. This group of substances exerts positive impacts primarily due to their antiatherogenic, antithrombotic, and antioxidant activities. The potential of flavonols to promote vasodilation and regulation of apoptotic processes in the endothelium are other beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system. Despite promising experimental findings, randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses have yielded inconsistent results on the influence of these substances on human cardiovascular parameters. Thus, this review aims to summarize the most recent clinical data on the intake of these substances and their effects on the cardiovascular system. The present study will help clinicians and other healthcare workers understand the value of flavonol supplementation in both subjects at risk for cardiovascular disease and patients with cardiovascular diseases.
Altitude and attitude active disturbance rejection controller design of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

This paper presents a new active disturbance rejection controller to solve the altitude and attitude control problem for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The proposed method requires only the output information of the system. Using the pitch subsystem as an example, the proposed controller is designed by using dynamic surface control strategy incorporated with tracking differentiator, and extended state observer, which is used to estimate the uncertain disturbance. The estimate states of extended state observer are used to design the dynamic surface control law for altitude and attitude tracking problem of the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The stability analysis proves that a sufficient condition of the asymptotic stability of the extended state observer is achieved, the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed, and the tracking feedback error can made arbitrarily small by adjusting the controller parameters. Several simulation results are presented to corroborate that the proposed control method has better effectiveness and robustness.
Effect of Respiration Training-Assisted Western Medicine Therapy on Activity Tolerance, Pulmonary Function, and Quality of Life of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Patients in the Stable Phase

Objective To explore the effect of respiration training-assisted western medicine therapy on activity tolerance, pulmonary function, and quality of life (QOL) of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients in the stable phase. Methods The medical data of 90 COPD patients in the stable phase treated in the respiratory medicine of our hospital (November 2020–November 2021) were chosen for the retrospective analysis, and the patients were split into group A (n = 45, respiration training-assisted western medicine therapy) and group B (n = 45, western medicine therapy) according to the clinical reception order, so as to record and compare the activity tolerance, lung function, and QOL between the groups after intervention. Results Compared with group B after intervention, group A showed greatly longer mean 6-min walking distance, significantly lower St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) score, significantly higher specific airway conductance (sGAW) and level values of various lung function indicators, and significantly lower level values of airway resistance (RAW) and specific airway resistance (sRAW) (p all<0.001); the total effective rate was significantly higher in group A (p < 0.05). Conclusion Respiration training-assisted western medicine therapy is a dependable way to improve the activity tolerance of COPD patients in the stable phase, and such strategy largely improves patients' lung function and QOL. Deeper studies will be helpful to establish a preferable solution for such patients.
Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy: Procedure, Complications and Management

Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) is considered in patients with insufficient oral intake who need enteral feeding or therapeutic gastric decompression. PEG tube feeding is generally superior to nasogastric tube feeding in terms of patients’ comfort, long-term use, and feeding efficiency. Patient selection for PEG, the proper endoscopic insertion technique, early recognition of complications, and appropriate management are important for patient care. During preparation, adequate management of anticoagulation and antithrombotic agents are important to prevent bleeding, and prophylactic antibiotics prevent wound infection. Most complications are minor; however, major complications that require surgical correction or are life-threatening may occur, such as wound infection, bleeding, buried bumper syndrome, colocutaneous fistula, perforation, volvulus, and injuries to other organs. This review presents practical guidelines for the selection and preparation of patients, endoscopic insertion methods, and complication management strategies.
Fault Immune Pico-Hydro Powered Base Station of Remote Telecommunication Tower

This paper presents the dynamic excitation control of a siphon-turbine coupled pico-hydro powered cage rotor induction generator and load matching for off-grid electricity generation. Through the proposed dual-role of the current-controlled voltage source converter (VSC), acting as static synchronous compensator and load controller, real and reactive power are dynamically controlled in a decoupled manner with a self supported DC-bus. The proposed scheme entails minimal computation for ensuring the rated (set) capacity of real power. The scheme also exhibits fault immunity for protection, thus enabling the effective handling of constant power electrical loads presented by base telecom station towers in remote locations. The performance of the system is evaluated under MATLAB/Simulink and is experimented through a developed hardware prototype. Simulation and experimental results show close conformity and validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
River Basin Scale Analysis on the Return Ratio of Diverted Water from Irrigated Paddy Areas

Water flows in irrigated paddy areas are complicated not only by the substantial volumes involved but also by repeated cycles of diversion and return flow. A spatially explicit hydrological model that simulates water diversion and return processes in irrigated paddy areas was used to evaluate the return ratio of diverted water to river basin. Assuming complete mixing of the rainfall and irrigated water over the entire irrigation period, the time‐averaged return flow was calculated using the simulated net drainage from the irrigated areas. The return ratio, which is defined as the fraction of the total return flow volume to the total diverted water volume, was 48.5% (ranging from 42.3 to 52.1%) in our case study. These values suggest that most of the water diverted to the irrigated paddies will be discharged except that which is lost through evapotranspiration, because we consider the return ratio during a sufficiently long period and for large irrigation areas. While the largest and smallest return ratios were obtained in the driest and wettest years, respectively, the correlation between rainfall amount and return ratio was not significant, suggesting the need for a more appropriate averaging period that accounts for the short‐term variabilities in return flow processes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
EliScholar - A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale

We explore the extent to which the huge race gap in wealth can be explained with properly constructed income and demographic variables. In some instances we explain the entire wealth gap with income and demographics provided that we estimate the wealth model on a sample of whites. However, we typically explain a much smaller fraction when we estimate the wealth model on a black sample. Using sibling comparisons to control for intergenerational transfers and the effects of adverse history, we find that differences in income and demographics are not likely to account for the lower explanatory power of the black wealth models. Our analysis of growth models of wealth suggests that differences in savings behavior and/or rates of return play an important role.
Cytokine Profile and Anti-Inflammatory Activity of a Standardized Conditioned Medium Obtained by Coculture of Monocytes and Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (PRS CK STORM)

Intercellular communication between monocytes/macrophages and cells involved in tissue regeneration, such as mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) and primary tissue cells, is essential for tissue regeneration and recovery of homeostasis. Typically, in the final phase of the inflammation-resolving process, this intercellular communication drives an anti-inflammatory immunomodulatory response. To obtain a safe and effective treatment to counteract the cytokine storm associated with a disproportionate immune response to severe infections, including that associated with COVID-19, by means of naturally balanced immunomodulation, our group has standardized the production under GMP-like conditions of a secretome by coculture of macrophages and MSCs. To characterize this proteome, we determined the expression of molecules related to cellular immune response and tissue regeneration, as well as its possible toxicity and anti-inflammatory potency. The results show a specific molecular pattern of interaction between the two cell types studied, with an anti-inflammatory and regenerative profile. In addition, the secretome is not toxic by itself on human PBMC or on THP-1 monocytes and prevents lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced growth effects on those cell types. Finally, PRS CK STORM prevents LPS-induced TNF-A and IL-1Β secretion from PBMC and from THP-1 cells at the same level as hydrocortisone, demonstrating its anti-inflammatory potency.