ahmedabdelwahed/Medical_papers_title_and_abstract_NLP_dataset huggingface dataset:
Robust metric learning based on subspace learning with l(p) - norm

Distance metric learning has been an important technique in machine learning field recently due to its high effectiveness in improving the performance of distance related methods. In order to take advantages of both subspace learning and metric learning to overcome the limitations of metric learning, in this work we intend to learn a robust discriminative subspace and a distance metric simultaneously by maximizing the ratio of inter-class covariance to inner-class covariance using l(p) - norm (0 < p <= 2), where the l(p) - norm is used to enhance the robustness. The proposed model is a more general framework compared to the state-of-art algorithms. Moreover, a modified gradient ascending algorithm is designed to optimize the problem, and the convergence of the algorithm and complexity are analyzed. To verify the proposed method, we carry out numerical experiments on artificial data sets and benchmark data sets. Under different evaluation criterions, experiment results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-art algorithms in most cases. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Long noncoding RNA SNHG5 promotes podocyte injury via the microRNA-26a-5p/TRPC6 pathway in diabetic nephropathy

Podocyte injury is a characteristic pathological hallmark of diabetic nephropathy (DN). However, the exact mechanism of podocyte injury in DN is incompletely understood. This study was conducted using db/db mice and immortalized mouse podocytes. High-throughput sequencing was used to identify the differentially expressed long noncoding RNAs in kidney of db/db mice. The lentiviral shRNA directed against long noncoding RNA small nucleolar RNA host gene 5 (SNHG5) or microRNA-26a-5p (miR-26a-5p) agomir was used to treat db/db mice to regulate the SNHG5/miR-26a-5p pathway. Here, we found that the expression of transient receptor potential canonical type 6 (TRPC6) was significantly increased in injured podocytes under the condition of DN, which was associated with markedly decreased miR-26a-5p. We determined that miR-26a-5p overexpression ameliorated podocyte injury in DN via binding to 3'-UTR of Trpc6, as evidenced by the markedly reduced activity of luciferase reporters by miR-26a-5p mimic. Then, the upregulated SNHG5 in podocytes and kidney in DN was identified, and it was proved to sponge to miR-26a-5p directly using luciferase activity, RNA immunoprecipitation, and RNA pull-down assay. Knockdown of SNHG5 attenuated podocyte injury in vitro, accompanied by an increased expression of miR-26a-5p and decreased expression of TRPC6, demonstrating that SNHG5 promoted podocyte injury by controlling the miR-26a-5p/TRPC6 pathway. Moreover, knockdown of SNHG5 protects against podocyte injury and progression of DN in vivo. In conclusion, SNHG5 promotes podocyte injury via the miR-26a-5p/TRPC6 pathway in DN. Our findings provide novel insights into the pathophysiology of podocyte injury and a potential new therapeutic strategy for DN.
Carrageenan functional film integrated with Pickering Emulsion of Oregano Oil Stabilized by Cationic Nanocellulose for Active Packaging

Consumers are worried about potential contaminants, especially during any pandemic event, and are demanding more biodegradable food packaging with little to no chemical preservatives. This study aims to prepare carrageenan film containing essential oil with antibacterial properties. Oregano essential oil is successfully added into the carrageenan-based film using the Pickering emulsion method with cationic nanocellulose as stabilizer. The positive charge of nanocellulose enhances the stability of emulsion through strong electrostatic interaction with the Oregano Oil. FTIR spectra and SEM micrographs show the Oregano Pickering emulsion (OrePE) well dispersed in the polymer matrix and good compatibility with carrageenan film. The mechanical and thermal properties of carrageenan film were only slightly affected by the addition of OrePE. The tensile strength of films significantly decreased, whereas the elongation break increased following the addition of OrePE. Moreover, the addition of OrePE to the carageen film provides inhibitory effects on gram-positive (S. aureus) and gram negative (E. coli) bacteria. This innovative incorporation of essential oil into biopolymer films by Pickering emulsion technology may have implications for extending the shelf life of food products which is indicates that the material has the potential to be used in active packaging.
Higher sirt1 is associated with a better body composition in master sprinters and untrained peers

HighlightsLower levels of Sirt1 are associated with higher body fat.Master athlete lifestyle seems to promote higher Sirt1 Levels.
Modelling and solving a cost-oriented resource-constrained multi-model assembly line balancing problem

A line balancing problem considers the assignment of operations to workstations in an assembly line. While assembly lines are usually associated to mass production of standardised goods, their advantages have led to their widespread use whenever a product-oriented production system is applicable and the benefits of the labour division and specialisation are significant, even when some of its characteristics may deviate from classical assembly lines. In this work, we study a line balancing problem found in the textile industry in which the line must be balanced for multiple types of goods taking into account resource requirements. In order to solve the problem, a hybrid method that combines classical methods for line balancing with an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm is proposed. Computational experiments show that the new procedure improves upon the state of the art when compared using a benchmark set derived from the literature, as well as when compared using data from the manufacturer that originated this research work.
Efficacy increase of lipid nanoparticles in vivo by inclusion of bis(monoacylglycerol)phosphate

Aim: To investigate the effect of incorporating bis(monoacylglycerol)phosphate (BMP) lipid into a lipid nanoparticle and the functional transport of mRNA by the formulated nanoparticles in vivo. Materials & methods: The nanoparticles were prepared from ionizable lipid, 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycerol-3-phosphocholine, cholesterol, 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycerol PEG 2000, BMP and formulated mRNA encoding human erythropoietin. We measured the effect of BMP on physicochemical properties and impact on functional efficacy to transport mRNA to its target cells/tissue as measured by protein expression both in vitro and in vivo. Results: Lipid nanoparticles composed of BMP displayed increased endosomal membrane fusion and improved mRNA delivery to the cytosol. Conclusion: The results establish the foundation for future development of these nanoparticulated entities by designing new BMP derivatives and correlating structures to enhanced pharmacokinetic profiles.
Evaluation System of CG Art Communication Platform Based on User Experience

With the rapid development of computer technology in recent years, CG art has gradually entered the ranks of mainstream visual art and received more attention. CG art refers to digital visual technology works created by computer, graphic design software, digital photography technology and computer-aided drawing software. The communication platform of CG art is mainly online, while the research on relevant online platforms mainly focuses on the content and form of art works. There is still a gap between the research on the platform user experience. From the perspective of user experience, this research uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to study the evaluation of user emotional experience of CG art communication platform. Through grounded theory qualitative research methods, this research summarizes the evaluation system indicators of CG art communication platform user experience. The Delphi method and analytic hierarchy process are used to obtain the weight of relevant indicators of the evaluation system. Then take three CG art communication platforms as samples. Using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to compare and verify the user evaluation system constructed. The results show that the evaluation system can effectively evaluate the user experience level of CG art platform. And provide a basis of the construction of CG art communication platform and the optimization of user experience.
Corneal Endothelial Cell Segmentation by Classifier-Driven Merging of Oversegmented Images

Corneal endothelium images obtained by in vivo specular microscopy provide important information to assess the health status of the cornea. Estimation of clinical parameters, such as cell density, polymegethism, and pleomorphism, requires accurate cell segmentation. State-of-the-art techniques to automatically segment the endothelium are error-prone when applied to images with low contrast and/or large variation in cell size. Here, we propose an automatic method to segment the endothelium. Starting with an oversegmented image comprised of superpixels obtained from a stochastic watershed segmentation, the proposed method uses intensity and shape information of the superpixels to identify and merge those that constitute a cell, using support vector machines. We evaluated the automatic segmentation on a data set of in vivo specular microscopy images (Topcon SP-1P), obtaining 95.8% correctly merged cells and 2.0% undersegmented cells. We also evaluated the parameter estimation against the results of the vendor's built-in software, obtaining a statistically significant better precision in all parameters and a similar or better accuracy. The parameter estimation was also evaluated on three other data sets from different imaging modalities (confocal microscopy, phase-contrast microscopy, and fluorescence confocal microscopy) and tissue types (ex vivo corneal endothelium and retinal pigment epithelium). In comparison with the estimates of the data sets' authors, we achieved statistically significant better accuracy and precision in all parameters except pleomorphism, where a similar accuracy and precisionwere obtained.
Toward Fog-Based Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: State of the Art and Opportunities

MCS is an emerging paradigm that leverages the pervasiveness of mobile, wearable, and vehicle-mounted devices to collect data from urban environments for ubiquitous service provisioning. In order to manage MCS application data streams efficiently, a scalable computing infrastructure hosting heterogeneous and distributed resources is critical. FC, as a geo-distributed computing paradigm, is a key enabler for this requirement as it bridges cloud servers and smart mobile devices. Research on the integration of MCS with FC has recently started to be explored, recognizing the requirements of MCS and their coexistence with cyber-physical systems. In this article, we analyze the state of the art of FC solutions in MCS systems. After a brief overview of MCS, we emphasize the link between MCS and FC. We then investigate the existing fog-based MCS architectures in detail by focusing on their building blocks, as well as the challenges that remain unaddressed. Our detailed review on the subject results in a taxonomy of FC solutions in MCS systems. In particular, we highlight the node structures, the information exchanged, the resource and service management, and the type of solutions adopted concerning privacy and security. Moreover, we provide a thorough discussion on the open issues and challenges by reporting useful insights for researchers in MCS and FC.
Local approach for face verification in polar frequency domain

We present a face verification system inspired by known properties of the human visual system. In the proposed algorithm the face is normalized for geometry and luminance, and Fourier-Bessel (FB) descriptors are extracted from three locations in the eyes region (local analysis). The resulting representations are embedded in a dissimilarity space, where each image is represented by its distance to all the other images, and a Pseudo-Fisher discriminator is built. Using the FERET database, we submitted the system to a battery of tests under a wide variation of imaging conditions, including expression, age, and illumination variations. Results showed that the system outperformed previous state-of-the-art methods in most testing conditions. To deal with partial occlusions, we implemented an occluded region detector that resulted in low performance loss under up to 50% occlusion level. Finally, we automated the registration step by implementing face and eye detection algorithms. We also showed that the local-FB analysis outperforms the global-FB version of the system and an alternative polar frequency representation. In conclusion, the intermediate-scale local analysis approach used in the proposed system resulted in state-of-the-art face verification performance and high robustness to common problems such as expression, age, and illumination variations and to strong occlusions. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Engineering nanostructured Ag doped α-MnO2 electrocatalyst for highly efficient rechargeable zinc-air batteries

Engineering of highly active, and non-precious electrocatalysts are vital to enhance the air-electrodes of rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs). We report a facile co-precipitation technique to develop Ag doped α-MnO2 nanoparticles (NPs) and investigate their application as cathode materials for ZABs. The electrochemical and physical characteristics of α-MnO2 and Ag doped α-MnO2 NPs were compared and examined via CP, CV, TGA/DTA, FT-IR, EIS, and XRD analysis. CV result displayed higher potential and current for ORR in Ag doped α-MnO2 NPs than α-MnO2; but, ORR performance decreased when the Ag doping was raised from 7.5 to10 mmol. Moreover, α-MnO2 and Ag doped α-MnO2 NPs showed 2.1 and 3.8 electron transfer pathway, respectively, showing Ag doped α-MnO2 performance to act as an active ORR electrocatalyst for ZABs. The EIS investigation exhibited that charge-transfer resistance for Ag doped α-MnO2 was extremely lower associated to the MnO2 demonstrating that the successful loading of Ag in α-MnO2. A homemade ZAB based on Ag-MnO2-7.5 showed a high open circuit potential, low ohmic resistances, and excellent discharge profile at a constant current density of 1 mA/g. Moreover, Ag-MnO2-7.5 show a specific capacity of 795 mA h g-1 with corresponding high energy density ∼875 Wh kg-1 at 1 mA cm-2 discharging conditions.
MALS-Net: A Multi-Head Attention-Based LSTM Sequence-to-Sequence Network for Socio-Temporal Interaction Modelling and Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is an essential task in autonomous driving, especially in a highway setting, where minor deviations in motion can cause serious road accidents. The future trajectory prediction is often not only based on historical trajectories but also on a representation of the interaction between neighbouring vehicles. Current state-of-the-art methods have extensively utilized RNNs, CNNs and GNNs to model this interaction and predict future trajectories, relying on a very popular dataset known as NGSIM, which, however, has been criticized for being noisy and prone to overfitting issues. Moreover, transformers, which gained popularity from their benchmark performance in various NLP tasks, have hardly been explored in this problem, presumably due to the accumulative errors in their autoregressive decoding nature of time-series forecasting. Therefore, we propose MALS-Net, a Multi-Head Attention-based LSTM Sequence-to-Sequence model that makes use of the transformer's mechanism without suffering from accumulative errors by utilizing an attention-based LSTM encoder-decoder architecture. The proposed model was then evaluated in BLVD, a more practical dataset without the overfitting issue of NGSIM. Compared to other relevant approaches, our model exhibits state-of-the-art performance for both short and long-term prediction.
Design of narrow transition band variable bandwidth digital filter

This study presents a novel implementation technique for linear phase variable bandwidth finite impulse response (FIR) filters with a noticeable reduction in transition bandwidth as well as hardware complexity. In this proposition, concept of Farrow structure based design technique is effectively utilised; whereas the fixed sub-filters are constructed from a generalised interpolated bandpass method based low-pass FIR filter by means of different techniques such as interpolation, up-sampling and masking. Simulation results have shown the frequency response characteristics of several variable bandwidth FIR filters, designed with the help of the proposed architecture. Simulation results have shown a drastic reduction of transition bandwidth resulting from the proposed variable bandwidth FIR filters of up to similar to 70-80%, when compared with other state-of-the-art filtering techniques, with a significant reduction in hardware complexity of up to similar to 50%.
Implications of Non-Uniform Deadline Scaling to Quality of Service Under Single Errors

Fault-tolerant real-time systems for emerging critical applications like wearable electronic healthcare monitors, consumer-grade unmanned aerial vehicles, or environmental monitoring have to tolerate errors during operation. If they fail, the consequences are dire. But often their budgets for error mitigation capabilities are low, which requires to limit mitigation capabilities to the most critical functions of a system. Still, less critical functions of a system should operate as long as possible, but current state-of-the-art scheduling approaches either ignore them or suffer from low acceptance rates. Our fully static and verification friendly mixed-criticality approach guarantees mentioned systems that the most critical system functions are always available, and maximizes the time where less critical system functions are operational: We prove that our approach is feasible, and extends the system operation time while providing full service by a factor of 1.93 with a probability of 0.92. With 1.56 higher acceptance rates compared to similar state-of-the-art approaches, the integration of functionalities of different criticality in one fault-tolerant system succeeds more and more often, which especially benefits emerging critical applications with limited budgets for error mitigation.
Rare Diagnostic and Clinical Manifestations in an Acute Hepatitis A Infection: A Case Report

The hepatitis A virus (HAV) is a common cause of infectious hepatitis worldwide. In adults, clinical manifestations typically involve fever, nausea/vomiting, fatigue, abdominal pain, and jaundice, although rarer manifestations may be observed. Acute hepatitis A infection is detected via anti-HAV IgM antibodies, which are present in almost all patients at symptom onset. In this case, we present a patient who not only tested negative for acute HAV infection at symptom onset, but also presented with uncommon, extrahepatic manifestations including maculopapular skin rash and polyarthralgia. Wariness of such a presentation can facilitate the timely diagnosis of atypical cases of HAV infection. We report the case of a 51-year-old man who presented with fever, abdominal pain, headaches, and diarrhea for one week with elevated liver enzymes and leukocytosis. Workup consisting of viral hepatitis panels, various infectious studies, and rheumatologic antibody titers did not initially reveal an etiology for the patient's presentation. Computed tomography (CT) abdomen and pelvis, abdominal ultrasound, magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP), and hepatobiliary iminodiacetic acid (HIDA) scan did not reveal acute pathology. The patient's symptoms worsened over the following days, and he additionally developed bilateral wrist pain, digital arthralgias, paraspinal back pain, diffuse muscular weakness, and a pruritic maculopapular rash affecting the flanks and extremities. Eventually, viral hepatitis studies were repeated which revealed elevated levels of anti-HAV IgM antibodies, indicating acute hepatitis A infection. The patient was treated supportively while hospitalized with subsequent improvement of symptoms and lab abnormalities. Since discharge, the patient had not experienced persistent sequelae of the disease. This case of acute viral hepatitis A infection is notable for two reasons: (1) the patient experienced uncommon, delayed, extrahepatic manifestations of disease, and (2) the initial viral hepatitis studies revealed undetectable anti-HAV IgM levels despite having experienced symptoms of illness for several days. This case suggests that repeat viral hepatitis testing may be warranted in patients who continue to experience manifestations of the infection after initially testing negative. It also emphasizes the importance of recognizing potential atypical manifestations of acute hepatitis A infection.
The challenge of o-phenylphenol detection in coffee: How "OPP-conjugates" hide their presence in green and roasted samples

o-Phenylphenol (OPP) is not a commonly used pesticide in the coffee production chain. Although it has only been detected in roasted coffee, it is unlikely that OPP can be formed during roasting. Its acidic nature may lead to the formation of conjugates with natural matrix components. The objective of this study is to optimize an analytical method to discover how these conjugates may mask the presence of OPP in coffee. Sample extraction with hexane followed by basic hydrolysis and then a QuEChERS method allows the presence of OPP to be quantitatively detected via UPLC-MS/MS. The optimized method was applied to the same Arabica coffee (Brazil), and the quantification of comparable amounts of OPP was observed in both green and roasted samples (34.8 vs 32.2 μg/kg). The optimized procedure detected twice the amount of OPP in roasted samples, compared to the QuEChERS method, suggesting that roasting causes the partial hydrolysis of OPP conjugates.
Peptide vaccine from cancer-testis antigen ODF2 can potentiate the cytotoxic T lymphocyte infiltration through IL-15 in non-MSI-H colorectal cancer

About 85% of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) have the non-microsatellite instability-high (non-MSI-H) subtype, and many cannot benefit from immune checkpoint blockade. A potential reason for this is that most non-MSI-H colorectal cancers are immunologically "cold" due to poor CD8+ T cell infiltration. In the present study, we screened for potential cancer-testis antigens (CTAs) by comparing the bioinformatics of CD8+ T effector memory (Tem) cell infiltration between MSI-H and non-MSI-H CRC. Two ODF2-derived epitope peptides, P433 and P609, displayed immunogenicity and increased the proportion of CD8+ T effector memory (Tem) cells in vitro and in vivo. The adoptive transfer of peptide pool-induced CTLs inhibited tumor growth and enhanced CD8+ T cell infiltration in tumor-bearing NOD/SCID mice. The mechanistic study showed that knockdown of ODF2 in CRC cells promoted interleukin-15 expression, which facilitated CD8+ T cell proliferation. In conclusion, ODF2, a CTA, was negatively correlated with CD8+ T cell infiltration in "cold" non-MSI-H CRC and was selected based on the results of bioinformatics analyses. The corresponding HLA-A2 restricted epitope peptide induced antigen-specific CTLs. Immunotherapy targeting ODF2 could improve CTA infiltration via upregulating IL-15 in non-MSI-H CRC. This tumor antigen screening strategy could be exploited to develop therapeutic vaccines targeting non-MSI-H CRC.