Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of computer vision system’s technology acceptance to improve incoming cargo receiving at Eastern European and Central Asian transportation companies’ warehouses. Mixed methods pilot study

— Transportation companies' warehouses are an integral component of the global supply chain. However, SMBs have limited technology awareness to assess the impact of digitization on certain processes. In particular, the incoming cargo receiving process at transportation companies worldwide has a substantial fraction of manual labor. In this study, we focus on the cargo dimensioning process of LTL and retail companies’ warehouses in Poland, Estonia, Belarus Republic, and Kazakhstan and identify whether computer vision dimensioning system usage has a positive effect on warehouse performance and its adoption determinants. Combining data from 20 expert interviews, literature review, and quantitative process mining experiments with computer vision dimensioning system performing daily dimensions within 6 months, we conclude that system reliability might be an additional acceptance determinant, which has an influence on Perceived Usefulness. Next, based on the process mining experiments we conclude that the computer vision system is capable to increase information flow in control conditions forty times and four times in the experiment condition. Finally, we find that increase in dimensioning speed as a result of IT system implementation could not be used to assess the impact on the material flow at LTL transportation company but could be a valuable source of data for the capacity monitoring process.
Automatic Detection of Transformer Components in Inspection Images Based on Improved Faster R-CNN

To detect the categories and positions of various transformer components in inspection images automatically, this paper proposes a transformer component detection model with high detection accuracy, based on the structure of Faster R-CNN. In consideration of the significant difference in component sizes, double feature maps are used to adapt to the size change, by adjusting two weights dynamically according to the object size. Moreover, different from the detection of ordinary objects, there is abundant useful information contained in the relative positions between components. Thus, the relative position features are defined and introduced to the refinement of the detection results. Then, the training process and detection process are proposed specifically for the improved model. Finally, an experiment is given to compare the accuracy and efficiency of the improved model and the original Faster R-CNN, along with other object detection models. Results show that the improved model has an obvious advantage in accuracy, and the efficiency is significantly higher than that of manual detection, which suggests that the model is suitable for practical engineering applications.
Identification and Regionalization of Streamflow Routing Parameters Using Machine Learning for the HLM Hydrological Model in Iowa

We present a novel approach to determine spatially distributed routing parameters for the distributed hydrological Hillslope Link Model (HLM), an ordinary differential equations‐based streamflow forecasting model implemented and tested in Iowa. We being by developing a technique to determine two model parameters that control the channel routing equation in gauged catchments draining less than 1,300 km2. Then, we implement a parameter regionalization methodology using machine learning classification techniques and a bootstrap procedure, in which we trained 400 Random Forests (RFs) using physical and geomorphological features for classification. We made a regional interpolation using an ensemble of selected RF realizations that exhibited the best performance. We used as benchmark of our results a more straightforward interpolation technique based on USGS Hydrological Units Codes. We performed simulations of the HLM over the entire state of Iowa between 2012 and 2018 using the two regionalization methods, comparing them to the operational model used by the Iowa Flood Center, which applies a single set of parameter values to the entire domain. After evaluating the results at 148 USGS stations, the Random‐Forest approach captures the value of observed peak flows more precisely without losing performance in terms of the Kling Gupta Efficiency index. The improvements obtained using our proposed strategy that uses data, hydrological modeling, and a machine learning technique to identify and regionalize routing parameters are modest, indicating that the parameters that control the rainfall‐runoff transformation dominate uncertainty in our flood forecast model.
You can’t report your feelings: The hidden labor of managing threats to safety by women in global public health fieldwork

Increasing job market demand for and availability of Canadian and U.S. global academic health programs in post-secondary education increases student demand to participate in internationally based fieldwork, while supportive resources remain weakly developed. Previous studies indicate provisions to protect the health, safety, and well-being of women students remain inadequately addressed during training, while more research to identify needs, expectations, gaps, and best practices would inform policy and practice to improve conditions for women working off-campus on global public health studies. One approach, reported here, is to document and better understand the lived experience of U.S. or Canadian women graduate students participating in global public health fieldwork. Participant in-depth phenomenological interviews and guided writing exercises aimed to capture lived experience descriptions for 25 women. A phenomenology of practice was applied throughout the research process, following Max van Manen’s qualitative methodology approach. Loss of environmental familiarity, combined with graduate students’ lack of power, created considerable hidden labor described by women in working to keep themselves safe from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) while participating in global public health fieldwork. Women shared specific experiences exemplifying how this can be both alleviated and/or intensified through a range of negotiated strategies, coping styles, and management techniques. Additionally, women recalled laboring as students to avoid or reduce instances of SGBV, that then, precluded them from having any material “of substance” to report once returned home. These findings offer new meaning structures, language for a foreign experience, or ways to describe, conceive of, and respond to global public health fieldwork that hold the potential to positively affect individuals’ experiences, institutional understanding, and thus practice, of future women students in global public health.
Mechanical circulatory support devices for elective percutaneous coronary interventions: novel insights from the Japanese nationwide J-PCI registry

Abstract Aims We examined in-hospital outcomes of patients that required mechanical circulatory support (MCS), such as intra-aortic balloon pumping (IABP), Impella®, or veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO), for elective percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs). Methods and results The J-PCI is a prospective Japanese nationwide multicentre registry sponsored by the Japanese Association of Cardiovascular Intervention and Therapeutics (CVIT) and designed to collect clinical variables and in-hospital outcome data on consecutive patients undergoing PCI. Of the 253 228 patients registered between January 2018 and December 2018, 1627 patients (0.6%) undergoing elective PCI under MCS at 551 sites were analyzed. The mean age of the patients was 74 years, and 25.2% of the patients were females. Multivessel disease and left main disease were observed in 59.0% and 19.7% of the patients, respectively. Majority of patients were treated with IABP alone (86.2%), followed by IABP plus VA-ECMO (6.0%) and Impella alone (3.9%). In-hospital mortality was reported in 134 patients (8.2%). Cardiac death was more common than non-cardiac death (6.8% vs. 1.5%). About 34.6% of the patients receiving VA-ECMO died during hospitalization, whereas 7.2% and 5.3% of patients receiving Impella and IABP died, respectively (P < 0.01). The proportion of patients with VA-ECMO or Impella who had major bleeding requiring blood transfusion was higher than that of patients with IABP (14.1% vs. 13.0% vs. 2.8%). Conclusion In the setting of elective PCI, in-hospital mortality of patients requiring MCS was considerably high. VA-ECMO or Impella was associated with a higher risk of major bleeding than IABP.
Double Cystic Duct: Preoperative use of MRCP Without Being Aware of the Anatomic Anomaly: A Case Report

Introduction A biliary anomaly is occasionally encountered, however, a double cystic duct is exceedingly rare during surgery. It is pivotal for surgeons to recognize the anatomic variations in Cholangiography which is performed under fluoroscopic guidance Intraoperatively to prevent possible complications. Case Presentation Herein, the case of a 66-year-old female patient with acute cholecystitis, in which preoperative Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatograph (MRCP) did not identify a single gallbladder with double cystic ducts, is presented. Intraoperatively we identified a double cystic duct and it was safely ligated with clips. Anatomic variability was also confirmed by Cholangiography which was performed under fluoroscopic guidance. Furthermore, the patient was symptom-free through 1 year of follow-up assessment. Conclusions In particular, when we do not identify anatomic variability based on imaging, cholangiography under fluoroscopic guidance during surgery was a powerful tool that may clearly show the anomaly of a single gallbladder with double cystic ducts.
Research on diagnostic model of diabetic retinopathy based on machine learning

Early identification of retinopathy is of great importance in reducing blindness in diabetic patients. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, automatic diagnosis technology of diabetic retinopathy appears. Based on the opened image data of clinical patients with diabetic retinopathy, this article establishes feature engineering through feature selection, and derives an automatic diagnosis model of retinopathy by using three machine learning algorithms: GBDT, KNN and SVM. The model is verified by real data, while the accuracy and AUC value are used to evaluate the models established by the three algorithms. Both the accuracy from ten-fold cross-validation and AUC value of GBDT are the highest, which are 0.827 and 0.803 respectively. The results show that the automatic diagnosis model of retinopathy based on GBDT algorithm has the best performance and can be an invaluable aid to the clinical diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy.
Prolonged Isolated Soluble Dietary Fibre Supplementation in Overweight and Obese Patients: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials

The prevalence of overweight and obesity is rising rapidly, currently affecting 1.9 billion adults worldwide. Prebiotic dietary fibre supplementation is a promising approach to improve weight loss and reduce metabolic complications in overweight and obese subjects due to modifications of the microbiota composition and function. Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses addressing similar questions revealed discordant evidence and/or are outdated. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, Google Scholar, and forward and backward citations for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with isolated soluble dietary fibre supplementation for at least 12 weeks in overweight and obese patients measuring body weight, published through April 2022. We expressed the results as mean differences (MDs) using the random-effects model of the metafor package in R and assessed risk of bias using the Cochrane RoB2 tool. We conducted the study according to the PRISMA guidelines and registered the protocol on PROSPERO (CRD42022295246). The participants with dietary fibre supplementation showed a significantly higher reduction in body weight (MD −1.25 kg, 95% CI −2.24, −0.25; 27 RCTs; 1428 participants) accompanied by a significant decrease in BMI, waist circumference, fasting blood insulin, and HOMA-IR compared to the control group. Certainty of evidence was high, paving the way for the implementation of isolated soluble dietary fibre supplementation into clinical practice.
Better Bioactivity, Cerebral Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics of Natural Medicine and Its Advanced Version

Currently, many people are afflicted by cerebral diseases that cause dysfunction in the brain and perturb normal daily life of people. Cerebral diseases are greatly affected by cerebral metabolism, including the anabolism and catabolism of neurotransmitters, hormones, neurotrophic molecules and other brain-specific chemicals. Natural medicines (NMs) have the advantages of low cost and low toxicity. NMs are potential treatments for cerebral diseases due to their ability to regulate cerebral metabolism. However, most NMs have low bioavailability due to their low solubility/permeability. The study is to summarize the better bioactivity, cerebral metabolism and pharmacokinetics of NMs and its advanced version. This study sums up research articles on the NMs to treat brain diseases. NMs affect cerebral metabolism and the related mechanisms are revealed. Nanotechnologies are applied to deliver NMs. Appropriate delivery systems (exosomes, nanoparticles, liposomes, lipid polymer hybrid nanoparticles, nanoemulsions, protein conjugation and nanosuspensions, etc.) provide better pharmacological and pharmacokinetic characteristics of NMs. The structure-based metabolic reactions and enzyme-modulated catalytic reactions related to advanced versions of NMs alter the pharmacological activities of NMs.
Clustering de métrique et clustering de graphe

Ce papier s'interesse aux liens entre deux concepts : d'une part le clustering de graphes, mesure par la modularite de Newman, et d'autre part le clustering d'un espace metrique, mesure par la somme des carres des distances au barycentre des clusters. Nous montrons qu'en passant de l'espace a un graphe de facon ''naturelle'' (par boules unitaires) et en appliquant un algorithme ''naturel'' de clustering (par r-net), on obtient un clustering de modularite bornee inferieurement (en fonction de la dimension de grille de l'espace et pour certains rayons de r-net). Quelques simulations en espace euclidien viennent illustrer le propos en comparant deux algorithmes pour les deux mesures de qualite.
A Series-Connected 24-Pulse Rectifier Using Passive Voltage Harmonic Injection Method at DC-Link

In this paper, a voltage harmonic injection method at the dc-link is proposed to reduce input current harmonics of the series-connected 12-pulse rectifier. The proposed method uses an auxiliary circuit to generate the voltage harmonics and injects the voltage harmonics into the dc link of the series-connected 12-pulse rectifier so that the input voltages of the 12-pulse rectifier can be shaped as 24 steps. The formation processes of the input voltage are analyzed based on the switching functions; and the turn ratio of injection transformer is optimally designed from the perspective of minimizing the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the input voltage. After using this method, experimental results show that the input voltages of the isolated transformer are 24-step waves with an experimental THD of around 3.34%; the input line currents of the proposed rectifier are close to sinusoidal waveforms with an experimental THD of around 2.65%. More importantly, the kVA rating of the injection transformer is only about 2.3% of the load power, which means that the cost of harmonic reduction is very low.
Fuzzy identification of the state of IT corporation

The methods and approaches to solving the problem of corporate governance are analyzed. Economic, social-psychological, administrative methods of corporate management are considered. Situational, systemic, situational fuzzy approaches to corporate management are considered. It was decided to apply a situational fuzzy approach to solving the research problem. It is proposed to use the k -means clustering algorithm in order to distribute fuzzy situations by classes. Clustering problem is solved. The task of identifying the state of IT corporation. An example has been calculated with which you can conduct a comprehensive study of the state of the object, which allows you to get a full understanding of the estimated IT corporation not only at the time of the assessment, but also in the retrospective and forecast periods.
Zwitterionic Polypeptoids: A Promising Class of Antifouling Bioinspired Materials

Biofouling caused by protein adsorption and microbial colonization remains a great challenge in many applications. In this work, we synthesized a new type of zwitterionic polypeptoid containing carboxybetaine (CB) moieties (PeptoidCB) through thiol–ene chemistry of poly(N-allylglycine) (PNAG). The zwitterionic antifouling hydrogel was subsequently prepared by co-mixing PeptoidCB with agarose, which exhibited excellent resistance to non-specific protein adsorption and bacterial adhesion. Further, PeptoidCB-modified block copolypeptoids with amphiphilic structure were synthesized to form nanoparticles in an aqueous solution with neglected protein adsorption. The ability of PeptoidCB to resist non-specific protein adsorption and bacterial adhesion makes it a promising candidate for biomedical and industrial applications.
Inhibition of Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Reduces Infarct Size Matrix Metalloproteinase Expression Increases After Cerebral Focal Ischemia in Rats :

Anne M. Romanic, Raymond F. White, Anthony J. Arleth, Eliot H. Ohlstein and Frank C. Inhibition of Matrix Metalloproteinase-9 Reduces Infarct Size Matrix Metalloproteinase Expression Increases After Cerebral Focal Ischemia in Rats : Print ISSN: 0039-2499. Online ISSN: 1524-4628 Copyright © 1998 American Heart Association, Inc. All rights reserved. is published by the American Heart Association, 7272 Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX 75231 Stroke doi: 10.1161/01.STR. 29.5. 102
Low-Power Frequency-Locked Loop Circuit with Short Settling Time

A phase-locked loop (PLL) is an important and commonly used electronic circuit in various electronic systems. Its main drawback is the use of an RC low-pass filter which takes up the majority of the PLL area on the chip. The RC low-pass filter is necessary to ensure the PLL stability. To mitigate this issue, a frequency-locked loop (FLL) is used because the stability of an FLL system depends on the Miller capacitance inside of the operational amplifier, which drastically reduces the capacitor size and thus the chip area. This paper presents the design of a fully integrated FLL based on a frequency-to-voltage converter (FVC). FVC is optimised so that it stabilises in just three clock cycles, which reduces the settling time of the entire FLL circuit. The voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is optimised for low power in all corners and for a wide input signal range. The circuit is implemented in a 180-nm CMOS process. Simulations show that the FLL circuit is functional in all voltage, temperature and technology corners. It has a short settling time while using a small amount of power and chip area compared to the conventional PLL designs.
TRPV1 Protects Against Pressure Overload-Induced Cardiac Hypertrophy by Promoting Mitochondria-Associated Endoplasmic Reticulum Membranes.

ABSTRACT Transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (TRPV1) is a non-selective cation channel that mediates the relationship between mitochondrial function and pathological myocardial hypertrophy. However, its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether TRPV1 activation improves the morphology and function of intracellular mitochondria to protect cardiomyocytes after pressure overload-induced myocardial hypertrophy. The myocardial hypertrophy model was established by performing transverse aortic constriction (TAC) surgery in C57BL/6J male mice. The data revealed that TRPV1 activation significantly reduced myocardial hypertrophy, promoted ejection fraction (EF) % and fractional shortening (FS) %, and decreased the left ventricular internal diameter in end-diastole (LVIDd) and left ventricular internal diameter in end-systole (LVIDs) after TAC. Moreover, in vitro experiments revealed that TRPV1 reduces cardiomyocyte area and improves mitochondrial function by promoting mitochondria-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes (MAMs) formation in a phenylephrine (PE)-treated cardiomyocyte hypertrophy model. TRPV1 up-regulates the phosphorylation levels of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and expression of mitofusin2 (MFN2). TRPV1 function is blocked by single-stranded RNA interfering with silent interfering MFN2. And activation of TRPV1 reduced mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) caused by PE, while disruption of MAMs by siMFN2 abolished TRPV1-mediated mitochondrial protection. Our findings suggest that TRPV1 effectively protects against pressure overload-induced cardiac hypertrophy by promoting MAM formation and conserved mitochondrial function via the AMPK/MFN2 pathway in cardiomyocytes.
Modal Response of Hydraulic Turbine Runners

The mechanical design of hydraulic turbines is conditioned by the dynamic response of the runner that is usually estimated by a computational model. Nevertheless, the runner has complex boundary conditions that are difficult to include in the computational model. One of these boundary conditions is the water in which the runner is submerged. The effect of the added mass and damping of water can modify considerably the natural frequencies of the runner. In order to analyze this effect on a Francis turbine runner, an experimental and a numerical investigation in a reduced scale model was carried out. The experimental investigation was based on modal analysis. Several impact tests with the runner in air and in water were done. The response was measured with accelerometers located in different positions of the runner. Special attention was taken to determine the most suitable positions of measurements and impacts. From the modal analysis, the natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes were determined. The simulation of the same runner was also carried out using a FEM method. First, some tests including a sensitivity analysis were done to check the accuracy of the numerical results. Second, the runner was simulated and the frequencies and mode shapes were calculated both in air and in water like in the experiment. The simulation was compared with the experimental results to determine its accuracy especially regarding the added mass effects. Similar mode shapes and frequency reduction ratios were obtained so the simulation gave rather good results. In the paper, the frequencies, damping and mode shapes obtained in air and in water both from experiment and simulation are indicated. The same mode shapes obtained in air were 23 IAHR Symposium Yokohama October 2006 2 (9) obtained in water but with lower natural frequencies and higher damping ratios. The difference in the natural frequencies is shown to be dependent basically on the added mass effect of the water and not on its added damping. This difference also depends on the geometry of the mode presenting different values for different mode shapes. Using nondimensional values, the reduction in the natural frequencies can be extrapolated to other Francis runners presenting similar geometrical characteristics.