Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LASSO-based screening for potential prognostic biomarkers associated with glioblastoma

Background Glioblastoma is the most common malignancy of the neuroepithelium, yet existing research on this tumor is limited. LASSO is an algorithm of selected feature coefficients by which genes associated with glioblastoma prognosis can be obtained. Methods Glioblastoma-related data were selected from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and information was obtained for 158 samples, including 153 cancer samples and five samples of paracancerous tissue. In addition, 2,642 normal samples were selected from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) database. Whole-gene bulk survival analysis and differential expression analysis were performed on glioblastoma genes, and their intersections were taken. Finally, we determined which genes are associated with glioma prognosis. The STRING database was used to analyze the interaction network between genes, and the MCODE plugin under Cytoscape was used to identify the highest-scoring clusters. LASSO prognostic analysis was performed to identify the key genes. Gene expression validation allowed us to obtain genes with significant expression differences in glioblastoma cancer samples and paracancer samples, and glioblastoma independent prognostic factors could be derived by univariate and multivariate Cox analyses. GO functional enrichment analysis was performed, and the expression of the screened genes was detected using qRT-PCR. Results Whole-gene bulk survival analysis of glioblastoma genes yielded 607 genes associated with glioblastoma prognosis, differential expression analysis yielded 8,801 genes, and the intersection of prognostic genes with differentially expressed genes (DEG) yielded 323 intersecting genes. PPI analysis of the intersecting genes revealed that the genes were significantly enriched in functions such as the formation of a pool of free 40S subunits and placenta development, and the highest-scoring clusters were obtained using the MCODE plug-in. Eight genes associated with glioblastoma prognosis were identified based on LASSO analysis: RPS10, RPS11, RPS19, RSL24D1, RPL39L, EIF3E, NUDT5, and RPF1. All eight genes were found to be highly expressed in the tumor by gene expression verification, and univariate and multivariate Cox analyses were performed on these eight genes to identify RPL39L and NUDT5 as two independent prognostic factors associated with glioblastoma. Both RPL39L and NUDT5 were highly expressed in glioblastoma cells. Conclusion Two independent prognostic factors in glioblastoma, RPL39L and NUDT5, were identified.
Virtual reality-based monitoring test for MCI: A multicenter feasibility study

Objectives As the significance of the early diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has emerged, it is necessary to develop corresponding screening tools with high ecological validity and feasible biomarkers. Virtual reality (VR)-based cognitive assessment program, which is close to the daily life of the older adults, can be suitable screening tools for MCI with ecological validity and accessibility. Meanwhile, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) has been observed at a low concentration in the older adults with dementia or cognitive decline, indicating its potential as a biomarker of MCI. This study aimed to determine the efficacy and usability of a VR cognitive assessment program and salivary DHEA for screening MCI. Methods The VR cognitive assessment program and the traditional Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) test were performed on 12 patients with MCI and 108 healthy older adults. The VR program operates in a situation of caring for a grandchild, and evaluates the memory, attention, visuospatial, and executive functions. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), a partial correlation analysis, and receiving operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis were conducted for statistical analysis. Results According to the ANCOVA, no significant difference in MOCA scores was found between the normal and MCI groups (F = 2.36, p = 0.127). However, the VR total score of the MCI group was significantly lower than that of the normal group (F = 8.674, p = 0.004). There was a significant correlation between the MOCA and VR scores in the total and matched subdomain scores. The ROC curve analysis also showed a larger area under the curve (AUC) for the VR test (0.765) than for the MOCA test (0.598), and the sensitivity and specificity of the VR program were 0.833 and 0.722, respectively. Salivary DHEA was correlated with VR total (R2 = 0.082, p = 0.01) and attention scores (R2 = 0.086, p = 0.009). Conclusion The VR cognitive test was as effective as the traditional MOCA test in the MCI classification and safe enough for older adults to perform, indicating its potential as a diagnostic tool. It has also been shown that salivary DHEA can be used as a biomarker for MCI.
Manipulation of metabolic pathways to promote stem-like and memory T cell phenotypes for immunotherapy

Utilizing the immune system’s capacity to recognize and kill tumor cells has revolutionized cancer therapy in recent decades. Phenotypic study of antitumor T cells supports the principle that superior tumor control is achieved by cells with more long-lived memory or stem-like properties as compared to terminally differentiated effector cells. In this Mini-Review, we explore recent advances in profiling the different metabolic programs that both generate and define subsets of memory T cells. We additionally discuss new experimental approaches that aim to maximize the durability and sustained antitumor response associated with memory T cells within the unique immunosuppressive conditions of the tumor microenvironment, such as engineered attempts to overcome hypoxia-induced changes in mitochondrial function, the inhibitory effects of tumor metabolites, and exploitation of more recently-defined metabolic pathways controlling T cell memory fate such as glycogen metabolism.
Perspective on the potential of tandem-ion mobility/mass spectrometry methods for structural proteomics applications

Cellular processes are usually carried out collectively by the entirety of all proteins present in a biological cell, i.e., the proteome. Mass spectrometry-based methods have proven particularly successful in identifying and quantifying the constituent proteins of proteomes, including different molecular forms of a protein. Nevertheless, protein sequences alone do not reveal the function or dysfunction of the identified proteins. A straightforward way to assign function or dysfunction to proteins is characterization of their structures and dynamics. However, a method capable to characterize detailed structures of proteins and protein complexes in a large-scale, systematic manner within the context of cellular processes does not yet exist. Here, we discuss the potential of tandem-ion mobility/mass spectrometry (tandem-IM/MS) methods to provide such ability. We highlight the capability of these methods using two case studies on the protein systems ubiquitin and avidin using the tandem-TIMS/MS technology developed in our laboratory and discuss these results in the context of other developments in the broader field of tandem-IM/MS.
Societal dangers of migrant crisis narratives with a special focus on Belarussian and Ukrainian borders with Poland

Society in the 21st century has experienced a variety of crises, from the fiscal crisis and the migration crisis to the pandemic and the inflation crisis. This paper aims to explore societal dangers of migrant crises narratives. This paper forms part of the Horizon 2020 MIMY research projects with an expert stakeholder Delphi study from seven European countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Luxembourg, Sweden and the UK. It takes also into account contextual international and national public opinion surveys. We formulated a number of societal dangers related to the migrant crisis narrative, which are not sharp and exclusive but invite further consideration: (1) Societal fatigue, which relates to a rapid change in societal moods, usually from a positive to a negative attitude toward migrants, but above all this danger is connected with an aid burnout in a civil society; (2) Othering, which includes normativity, the labeling of migrants, double or multiple standards in the treatment of migrants and refugees from various origins; the societal danger of othering contributes to societal divisions, polarizations, tensions and conflicts based on ethnicity, religion, race and gender; (3) Political functionality, whereby migration as a political construct serves as a “whipping boy” for politicians to divert public opinion from recurrent problems; it also involves the creation of piecemeal, reactionary, ad hoc public policies, and the overuse of a protocol of a state of emergency in order to bring about a centralization of political power.
Determination of Synchronous Generator Parameters from Time-variant Analytical Load-rejection Curve Fitting

Abstract In this article, the decoupled property of the recently developed so-called hybrid model is used to derive time-variant analytical waveforms of the phase voltage and the field current following the load-rejection test. In the proposed identification approach, these time-variant responses are fitted to actual data using the asymptotic weighted least squares estimator along with a Newton-type optimization algorithm to compute the 4-pole 1.5-kVA, 208-V, 60-Hz laboratory synchronous generator parameters. In order to assess the robustness of the proposed identification scheme more thoroughly, the synchronous generator estimated parameters were successfully applied at the cross-validation stage using the symmetrical three-phase short-circuits test data.
Object detection and classification using few-shot learning in smart agriculture: A scoping mini review

Smart agriculture is the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) to agriculture, leading to what we might call a third green revolution. These include object detection and classification such as plants, leaves, weeds, fruits as well as animals and pests in the agricultural domain. Object detection, one of the most fundamental and difficult issues in computer vision has attracted a lot of attention lately. Its evolution over the previous two decades can be seen as the pinnacle of computer vision advancement. The detection of objects can be done via digital image processing. Machine learning has achieved significant advances in the field of digital image processing in current years, significantly outperforming previous techniques. One of the techniques that is popular is Few-Shot Learning (FSL). FSL is a type of meta-learning in which a learner is given practice on several related tasks during the meta-training phase to be able to generalize successfully to new but related activities with a limited number of instances during the meta-testing phase. Here, the application of FSL in smart agriculture, with particular in the detection and classification is reported. The aim is to review the state of the art of currently available FSL models, networks, classifications, and offer some insights into possible future avenues of research. It is found that FSL shows a higher accuracy of 99.48% in vegetable disease recognition on a limited dataset. It is also shown that FSL is reliable to use with very few instances and less training time.
Editorial: Dynamic functioning of resting state networks in physiological and pathological conditions, volume II

COPYRIGHT © 2023 Esposito, Cera, Barbosa and Cieri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Editorial: Dynamic functioning of resting state networks in physiological and pathological conditions, volume II
A model of sequential relations in expository test

The paper is a contribution towards a theory of sequentiality in expository text, aimed at developing a model for describing the linear segmentation of discourse. The model suggested employs two sequential strategies (shift and continuity) accomplished through a number ofsequential techniques (framing, introduction, closure, continuation). The function of the techniques results in a periodic alteration of transition and continuation spans, related to one another by sequential relations. The identification of spans relies on signals, whose function in text is hierarchical and synergistic. To illustrate the application of the model, an editorial is analyzed. It is argued that sequential relations are interactive with but independent from ideational, interpersonal and other text relations, as well as from considerations of discourse topic. It is also claimed that sequentiality expresses a crucial aspect of discourse topic, if not being identical with its articulation. This view of sequential relations has significant implications for the theory of topic, as well as for discourse analysis, language processing and language pedagogy, which have to be re-oriented to take account of the non-propositional aspects of text.
Technology-compatible hot carrier solar cell with energy selective hot carrier absorber and carrier-selective contacts

We propose a hot carrier solar cell based on epitaxial growth of a quantum well superlattice and adjacent contact barriers. The concept fulfills required electronic, optical, and several phononic criteria. The first superlattice miniband determines the absorption threshold. The second miniband with appropriate energy width and position provides energy selectivity in situ; contacts are optimized for carrier selectivity exclusively. Electronic transport properties were investigated including elastic random electron–electron scattering, random layer thickness deviation, and illumination as differential absorption per quantum well using a Monte-Carlo code. Carrier extraction probability and energy selectivity strongly suggest a practical implementation of the proposed concept.
Essential laminations in 3-manifolds

It is a well-established principle in manifold topology that by studying codimension-1 objects and their complementary pieces one obtains a great deal of topological and geometric information about the manifold itself. This is particularly true for 3-dimensional manifolds. Using incompressible surfaces a great many advances have been made during the last 30 years; the most spectacular results were obtained by Haken [Ha], Waldhausen [W] and Thurston [T1]. More recently, work [T2], [G14] using taut foliations in 3-manifolds has proven fruitful. Unfortunately (in some sense) most closed 3-manifolds do not contain incompressible surfaces and it is currently not known exactly which 3-manifolds have taut foliations. The purpose of this paper is to study another codimension-1 object, the essential lamination, which is a generalization of the incompressible surface as well as the taut foliation. We will show that the existence of an essential lamination in a 3-manifold M implies that M has useful properties similar to those of manifolds having either an incompressible surface or a taut foliation. We will also show that the universal cover of a manifold containing an essential lamination is R3. Precise definitions of terms used in the following theorem will be given in Section 1. Here we give only a rough idea. We begin with two alternative approximate definitions of "essential lamination. " (I) An essential lamination in a 3-manifold M is a lamination satisfying four conditions: The inclusion of leaves of the lamination into M should induce an injection on sTJ, the complement of the lamination should be irreducible, no leaf should be a sphere, and the lamination should be "end-incompressible. " To say that a lamination is end-incompressible means, roughly, that a "folded" leaf can be straightened using an isotopy; there are no infinite folds. (II) Alternatively
Metatarsal II osteohistology of Xixianykus zhangi (Theropoda: Alvarezsauria) and its implications for the development of the arctometatarsalian pes

The late-branching alvarezsaurian Xixianykus zhangi is among the smallest known non-avialan theropods. With great similarity to its close relatives, it is highly cursorial as indicated by proportionally long lower segments of the hindlimbs and the presence of an arctometatarsalian pes– a highly modified structure that has been suggested to improve cursorial capability in theropods. Here we describe the osteohistology of the metatarsal II of the holotype of X. zhangi (XMDFEC V 0011). Two rarely reported histological features, radial vascular canals and Sharpey’s fibers, are presented in this study. We suggest that both features are related to the development of the arctometatarsalian pes; however, further investigations of metatarsal osteohistology in theropods are required for the validation of our interpretation.
Vision-Based Robust Lane Detection and Tracking in Challenging Conditions

Lane marking detection is fundamental for both advanced driving assistance systems and traffic surveillance systems. However, detecting lane is highly challenging when the visibility of a road lane marking is low, obscured or often invisible due to real-life challenging environment and adverse weather. Most of the lane detection methods suffer from four types of challenges: (i) light effects i.e. shadow, glare of light, reflection etc. created by different light sources like streetlamp, tunnel-light, sun, wet road etc.; (ii) Obscured visibility of eroded, blurred, dashed, colored and cracked lane caused by natural disasters and adverse weather (rain, snow etc.); (iii) lane marking occlusion by different objects from surroundings (wiper, vehicles etc.); and (iv) presence of confusing lane like lines inside the lane view e.g., guardrails, pavement marking, road divider etc. In this paper, we proposed a simple, real-time, and robust lane detection and tracking method to detect lane marking considering the abovementioned challenging conditions. In this method, we introduced three key technologies. First, we introduce a comprehensive intensity threshold range (CITR) to improve the performance of the canny operator in detecting different types of lane edges e.g., clear, low intensity, cracked, colored, eroded, or blurred lane edges. Second, we propose a two-step lane verification technique, the angle-based geometric constraint (AGC) and length-based geometric constraint (LGC) followed by Hough Transform, to verify the characteristics of lane marking and to prevent incorrect lane detection. Finally, we propose a novel lane tracking technique, to predict the lane position of the next frame by defining a range of horizontal lane position (RHLP) along the x axis which will be updated with respect to the lane position of previous frame. It can keep track of the lane position when either left or right or both lane markings are partially and fully invisible. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method we used the DSDLDE (Lee and Moon, 2018) and SLD (Borkar et al., 2009) dataset with $1080\times 1920$ and $480\times 720$ resolutions at 24 and 25 frames/sec respectively where the video frames containing different challenging scenarios. Experimental results show that the average detection rate is 97.55%, and the average processing time is 22.33 msec/frame, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method.
A fast and accurate imaging algorithm in optical/diffusion tomography

An n-dimensional (n = 2,3) inverse problem for the parabolic/diffusion equation , , , is considered. The problem consists of determining the function a(x) inside of a bounded domain given the values of the solution u(x,t) for a single source location on a set of detectors , where is the boundary of . A novel numerical method is derived and tested. Numerical tests are conducted for n = 2 and for ranges of parameters which are realistic for applications to early breast cancer diagnosis and the search for mines in murky shallow water using ultrafast laser pulses. The main innovation of this method lies in a new approach for a novel linearized problem (LP). Such a LP is derived and reduced to a well-posed boundary-value problem for a coupled system of elliptic partial differential equations. A principal advantage of this technique is in its speed and accuracy, since it leads to the factorization of well conditioned, sparse matrices with non-zero entries clustered in a narrow band near the diagonal. The authors call this approach the elliptic systems method (ESM). The ESM can be extended to other imaging modalities.
Ultrasound-guided Versus Computed Tomography Fluoroscopy-assisted Cervical Transforaminal Steroid Injection for the Treatment of Radicular Pain in the Lower Cervical Spine

Object: To estimate the contrast dispersion short-term clinical efficacy and safety of ultrasound (US)-guided transforaminal steroid injection (TFSI) compared with computed tomography (CT) guidance for the treatment of cervical radicular pain. Method: A total of 430 patients with cervical radicular pain from cervical herniated disk or cervical spondylosis were recruited in the randomized, single-blind, controlled, noninferiority trial. The patients were randomly assigned to receive either the US-guided or CT-guided TFSI for 1 affected cervical nerve. The dispersion pattern of contrast was monitored at the time of TFSI in both groups, using CT. Patients were assessed for pain intensity by numeric rating scale (NrS) and functional disability by Neck Disability Index (NDI) at baseline, 1 and 3 months after the intervention. Complications were also recorded. Results: The satisfactory rate of contrast distribution was respectively 92.1% in US group and 95.8% in CT group. Pain reduction and functional improvement were showed in both groups during follow-up. Statistical difference was not observed in the decrease in NRS pain scores and NDI scores between 2 groups with F=1.050, P=0.306 at 1 month and F=0.103, P=0.749 at 3 months after intervention. No permanent and severe complications were observed. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that US provided a noninferior injectate spread pattern and similar improvement of radicular pain and functional status when compared with CT-guided TFSI. US may be advantageous during this procedure because it allows visualization of critical vessels and avoids radiation exposure.
The Local Distribution of NA i Interstellar Gas

We present high-resolution absorption measurements (lambda/Delta lambda approximately 75,000) of the interstellar Na I D lines at 5890 A toward 80 southern hemisphere early-type stars located in the local interstellar medium (LISM). Combining these results with other sodium measurements taken from the literature, we produce galactic maps of the distribution of neutral sodium column density for a total of 293 stars generally lying within approximately 250 pc of the Sun. These maps reveal the approximate shape of the mid-plane contours of the rarefied region of interstellar space termed the Local Bubble. Its shape is seen as highly asymmetric, with a radius ranging from 30 to 300 pc, and with an average radius of 60 pc. Similar plots of the Galactic mid-plane distribution of sources emitting extreme ultraviolet radiation show that they also trace out similar contours of the Local Bubble derived from Na I absorption measurements. We conclude that the Local Bubble absorption interface can be represented by a hydrogen column density, Nu(sub ETA) = 2 x 10(exp 19) cm(exp -2), which explains both the local distribution of Na I absorption and the observed galactic distribution of extreme ultraviolet sources. The derived mid-plane contours of the Bubble generally reproduce the large-scale features carved out in the interstellar medium by several nearby galactic shell structures.