bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Spring distribution of ringed seals (Pusa hispida) in Eclipse Sound and Milne Inlet, Nunavut: implications for potential ice-breaking activities
Authors: Yurkowski David J. , Young Brent G. , Dunn J. Blair , Ferguson Steven H.
Published: October 2018

Resource development in Arctic waters is proceeding rapidly leading to increased interactions with Arctic wildlife. As sea ice extent decreases, the demand for shipping and ice-breaking operations will expand into winter and spring with greater impact on ice-dependent pinnipeds. However, knowledge of the distribution of these species, such as ringed seals (Pusa hispida (Schreber, 1775)), during spring within areas of resource development is lacking. Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation’s Mary River iron ore port in southern Milne Inlet, Nunavut opened in 2015 with proposed ice-breaking activities in spring — an important period in ringed seal seasonal life-history. We conducted infrared and photographic aerial surveys in June 2016 and 2017 to overlay the proposed ice-breaking route with ringed seal hotspots (i.e., areas of higher density). We identified four areas of overlap where proposed ice-breaking would traverse through ringed seal hotspots: eastern and western Eclipse Sound (a ringed seal pupping ground identified by local knowledge), the middle of Milne Inlet, and southern Milne Inlet. We identified potential negative implications of spring ice-breaking operations on ringed seals such as displacement, separation of mothers and pups, destruction of resting and birth lairs, and vessel–seal collisions. Results are relevant to policy decision-makers who can develop mitigation strategies in the rapidly melting and developing Arctic.
Therapeutic potency of heat-shock protein-70 in the pathogenesis of colorectal cancer: current status and perspectives
Authors: Soleimani Atena , Zahiri Elnaz , Ehtiati Sajad , Norouzi Mahtab , Rahmani Farzad , Fiuji Hamid , Avan Amir , Ferns Gordon A. , Khazaei Majid , Hashemy Seyed Isaac , Hassanian Seyed Mahdi
Published: October 2018

Heat-shock protein-70 (HSP70) is critical to the folding, stability, and activity of several client proteins including many responsible for cancer cell proliferation, apoptosis, drug toxicity, and metastasis. Up-regulation of HSP70 is positively associated with increased tumorigenicity as well as poor survival in colon cancer patients, supporting the diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic potencies of HSP70 in colorectal cancer. The administration of specific pharmacological inhibitors or gene knock-down for HSP70 suppresses tumor progression and enhances tumor cell chemosensitivity. This review summarizes the different tumorigenic properties of HSP70 and the potential therapeutic potency of HSP70 inhibitors in terms of a novel strategy for colorectal cancer therapy, for a better understanding, and hence better management of this disease.
What is “usable” knowledge? Perceived barriers for integrating new knowledge into management of an iconic Canadian fishery
Authors: Nguyen Vivian M. , Young Nathan , Corriveau Marianne , Hinch Scott G. , Cooke Steven J.
Published: October 2018

Understanding the perspectives of knowledge users and the demands of their decision-making environment would benefit researchers looking to enhance the utility of the knowledge they generate. Using the Fraser River Pacific salmon fishery as a case study, we investigate the views of 49 government employees and stakeholders regarding the barriers to incorporating new knowledge into fisheries management. Our study uses analysis of qualitative data structured by a knowledge–action framework, which revealed that 90% of respondents perceived the contextual dimension (e.g., institutional structures and norms) as a barrier for incorporating new knowledge, followed by barriers related to the characteristics of knowledge actors (52% of respondents), characteristics of the knowledge (27%), time and timing (27%), knowledge transfer strategies (17%), and relational dimension (8%). The identified barriers have indirect–direct relationship with knowledge producers and appear hierarchical in nature. We note that informal relationships can enable conditions whereby knowledge users can access new knowledge, and knowledge producers can gain insights on users’ needs. We discuss lessons learned from the case, which we believe can be applied more beyond fisheries.
Thermal fluctuations and correlations among hairs of a stable quantum black hole: Some examples
Authors: Sinha Aloke Kumar
Published: October 2018

We have already derived the criteria for thermal stability of charged rotating quantum black holes, for horizon areas that are large relative to the Planck area. The derivation is done by using results of loop quantum gravity and equilibrium statistical mechanics of the grand canonical ensemble. We have also showed that in four-dimensional spacetime, quantum AdS Kerr–Newman black hole and asymptotically AdS dyonic black hole with electric and magnetic charge are thermally stable within certain range of its parameters. In this paper, the expectation values of fluctuations and correlations among horizon area, electric charge and angular momentum (magnetic charge) of these black holes are calculated within their range of stability. Interestingly, it is found that leading order fluctuations of electric charge and angular momentum (magnetic charge), in large horizon area limit, are independent of the values of electric charge and angular momentum (magnetic charge) at equilibrium.
The Classification of EEG Signals with Multi-Domain Fusion Based on D-S Evidence Theory
Authors: Ge Rongxiang , Hu Jianzhong
Published: October 2018

The classification of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is a key technique of brain–computer interface (BCI) system. In view of the complexity of EEG signals and the low accuracy in EEG signals recognition, a motor imagery EEG signals classification method with multi-domain fusion based on Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory is presented in this paper. Firstly, time domain statistics (TDS), autoregressive (AR) model and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are used to extract features from EEG signals, respectively, and three probabilistic output support vector machine (SVM) classification models are trained based on these three feature sets. Secondly, using the output of each SVM, we construct basic probability assignment (BPA) function and get fusion BPA through D-S evidence theory. Finally, determining the class of test samples based on decision rules. Four databases from BCI competition are employed to evaluate the proposed approach, and the highest classification accuracy reaches 92.83%. Results show that this method acquires higher accuracy and has strong individual adaptability.
Conformal symmetry and the cosmological constant problem
Authors: Lucat Stefano , Prokopec Tomislav , Świeżewska Bogumiła
Published: October 2018

We argue that when a theory of gravity and matter is endowed with (classical) conformal symmetry, the fine tuning required to obtain the cosmological constant at its observed value can be significantly reduced. Once tuned, the cosmological constant is stable under a change of the scale at which it is measured.
EEMD and bidimensional RLS to suppress physiological interference for heterogeneous distribution in fNIRS study
Authors: Zhang Yan , Liu Dan , Wang Qisong , Liu Xin , Yang Chunling , Sun Jinwei , Lu Jingyang , Rolfe Peter
Published: October 2018

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can provide the hemodynamics information based on the hemoglobin concentration representing the blood oxygen metabolism of the cerebral cortical, which can be deployed for the cerebral function study. However, NIRS-based cerebral function detection accuracy can be significantly influenced by the physiological activities such as cardic cycle, respiration, spontaneous low-frequency oscillation and ultra-low frequency oscillation. The distribution difference of the capillary, artery and vein leads to the heterogeneity feature of the cerebral tissues. In the case that the heterogeneity is not serious, good detection accuracy and stable performance can be achieved through the regression analysis as the reference signal can well represent the interference in the measurement signal when conducting the multi-distance measurement approach. The direct use of the reference signal to estimate the interference is not able to achieve good performance in the case that the heterogeneity is serious. In this study, the cerebral function activity signal is extracted using recursive least square (RLS) method based on the multi-distance measurement method in which the reference signal is processed by ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. The temporal and dimensional correlation of the neighboring sampling values are applied to estimate the interference in the measurement signal. Monte Carlo simulation based on a heterogeneous model is adopted here to investigate the effectiveness of this methodology. The results show that this methodology can effectively suppress the physiological interference and improve the detection accuracy of cerebral activity signal.
The Odd Log-Logistic Log-Normal Distribution with Theory and Applications
Authors: Ozel Gamze , Altun Emrah , Alizadeh Morad , Mozafari Mahdieh
Published: October 2018

In this paper, a new heavy-tailed distribution is used to model data with a strong right tail, as often occuring in practical situations. The proposed distribution is derived from the log-normal distribution, by using odd log-logistic distribution. Statistical properties of this distribution, including hazard function, moments, quantile function, and asymptotics, are derived. The unknown parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation procedure. For different parameter settings and sample sizes, a simulation study is performed and the performance of the new distribution is compared to beta log-normal. The new lifetime model can be very useful and its superiority is illustrated by means of two real data sets.
Exploring Traditional Chinese Medicine in Alberta: Challenges and opportunities
Authors: Nguyen Vesna , Leung Janice , Lewanczuk Richard , Vohra Sunita , Amrhein Carl
Published: October 2018

Integrative medicine is commonplace across the world, but in North America, it is considered a complement, rather than a mainstay of health care delivery. In Canada, where conventional Western medicine dominates modern health practices, we explore the progress, challenges, and opportunities of complementary medical practices, in particular Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the province of Alberta. We provide a TCM policy framework and maturity model as tools to assess the overall state of TCM practices and apply them in an Albertan context. While Alberta has made significant progress in developing capacity, competence, and accountability within TCM practices, the maturity of its practices may be considered to be in their infancy compared to more developed Chinese jurisdictions and some other Canadian provinces. We highlight significant gaps and barriers that limit the potential for complementary medicine to become part of mainstream health care as safe, effective, and quality health care choices, and discuss possible next steps.
Simple Mechanisms for a Subadditive Buyer and Applications to Revenue Monotonicity
Authors: Rubinstein Aviad , Weinberg S. Matthew
Published: October 2018

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller withnheterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distributionD. We show that ifDis a distribution over subadditive valuations with independent items, then the better of pricing each item separately or pricing only the grand bundle achieves a constant-factor approximation to the revenue of the optimal mechanism. This includes buyers who arek-demand, additive up to a matroid constraint, or additive up to constraints of any downward-closed set system (and whose values for the individual items are sampled independently), as well as buyers who are fractionally subadditive with item multipliers drawn independently. Our proof makes use of the core-tail decomposition framework developed in prior work showing similar results for the significantly simpler class of additive buyers.

In the second part of the article, we develop a connection between approximately optimal simple mechanisms and approximate revenue monotonicity with respect to buyers’ valuations. Revenue non-monotonicity is the phenomenon that sometimes strictlyincreasingbuyers’ values for every set can strictlydecreasethe revenue of the optimal mechanism. Using our main result, we derive a bound on how bad this degradation can be (and dub such a bound a proof ofapproximaterevenue monotonicity); we further show that better bounds on approximate monotonicity imply a better analysis of our simple mechanisms.
Revisiting the Risks of Bitcoin Currency Exchange Closure
Authors: Moore Tyler , Christin Nicolas , Szurdi Janos
Published: October 2018

Bitcoin has enjoyed wider adoption than any previous cryptocurrency; yet its success has also attracted the attention of fraudsters who have taken advantage of operational insecurity and transaction irreversibility. We study the risk that investors face from the closure of Bitcoin exchanges, which convert between Bitcoins and hard currency. We examine the track record of 80 Bitcoin exchanges established between 2010 and 2015. We find that nearly half (38) have since closed, with customer account balances sometimes wiped out. Fraudsters are sometimes to blame, but not always. Twenty-five exchanges suffered security breaches, 15 of which subsequently closed. We present logistic regressions using longitudinal data on Bitcoin exchanges aggregated quarterly. We find that experiencing a breach is correlated with a 13 times greater odds that an exchange will close in that same quarter. We find that higher-volume exchanges are less likely to close (each doubling in trade volume corresponds to a 12% decrease in the odds of closure). We also find that exchanges that derive most of their business from trading less popular (fiat) currencies, which are offered by at most one competitor, are less likely to close.
Assisted Shifting of Electricity Use
Authors: Jensen Rikke Hagensby , Kjeldskov Jesper , Skov Mikael B.
Published: October 2018

Shifting is an energy-conserving interaction strategy for moving energy consumption to times where it is sustainably favorable. This interaction strategy is attracting increasing interest within sustainable HCI studies. While most of these consider how interactive technology can change household behavior, only a few report on how shifting is experienced in everyday life when assisted by automation. In this study, we investigate an interactive technology that assists households to shift electricity consumption to times when electricity is cheap or more sustainable. Our study was conducted as a long-term field deployment for 6--18 months with eight households, each living with an interactive prototype that shifts running times for a heat pump within user-defined boundaries. Our findings show that managing heat pumps toward assisted shifting was well-received by all households because it was a convenient way to shift electricity consumption. Shifting electricity use facilitated price savings of 6.8–16.9%. Nevertheless, our findings also reveal a conflict between the system design, and how householders actually interact with their heating system and experience assisted shifting. Based on the eight households’ experiences, we present three overall themes of
convenience, control,
and
complexity
that each describes different aspects of long-term real-life use of automatic technology assisting households to shift electricity use. We discuss the broader implications of these findings and the role of design and future sustainability technology in everyday life.
Verifiable Graph Processing
Authors: Zhang Yupeng , Papamanthou Charalampos , Katz Jonathan
Published: October 2018

We consider a scenario in which a data owner outsources storage of a large graph to an untrusted server; the server performs computations on this graph in response to queries from a client (whether the data owner or others), and the goal is to ensure
verifiability
of the returned results. Applying generic verifiable computation (VC) would involve compiling each graph computation to a circuit or a RAM program and would incur large overhead, especially in the proof-computation time.

In this work, we address the above by designing, building, and evaluating A
litheia
, a VC system tailored for graph queries such as computing shortest paths, longest paths, and maximum flows. The underlying principle of A
litheia
 is to minimize the use of generic VC techniques by leveraging various algorithmic approaches specific for graphs. This leads to both theoretical and practical improvements. Asymptotically, it improves the complexity of proof computation by at least a logarithmic factor. On the practical side, our system achieves significant performance improvements over current state-of-the-art VC systems (up to a 10-orders-of-magnitude improvement in proof-computation time, and a 99.9% reduction in server storage), while scaling to 200,000-node graphs.
Social Support, Reciprocity, and Anonymity in Responses to Sexual Abuse Disclosures on Social Media
Authors: Andalibi Nazanin , Haimson Oliver L. , Choudhury Munmun De , Forte Andrea
Published: October 2018

Seeking and providing support is challenging. When people disclose sensitive information, audience responses can substantially impact the discloser's wellbeing. We use mixed methods to understandresponses toonline sexual abuse-related disclosures on Reddit. We characterize disclosure responses, then investigate relationships between post content, comment content, and anonymity. We illustrate what types of support sought and provided in posts and comments co-occur. We find that posts seeking support receive more comments, and comments from “throwaway” (i.e., anonymous) accounts are more likely on posts also from throwaway accounts. Anonymous commenting enables commenters to share intimate content such as reciprocal disclosures and supportive messages, and commenter anonymity is not associated with aggressive or unsupportive comments. We argue that anonymity is an essential factor in designing social technologies that facilitate support seekingandprovision in socially stigmatized contexts, and provide implications for social media site design. CAUTION: This article includes content about sexual abuse.
Estimating Measurement Uncertainty for Information Retrieval Effectiveness Metrics
Authors: Moffat Alistair , Scholer Falk , Yang Ziying
Published: October 2018

One typical way of building test collections for offline measurement of information retrieval systems is to pool the ranked outputs of different systems down to some chosen depth
d
and then form relevance judgments for those documents only. Non-pooled documents—ones that did not appear in the top-
d
sets of any of the contributing systems—are then deemed to be non-relevant for the purposes of evaluating the relative behavior of the systems. In this article, we use RBP-derived residuals to re-examine the reliability of that process. By fitting the RBP parameter ϕ to maximize similarity between AP- and NDCG-induced system rankings, on the one hand, and RBP-induced rankings, on the other, an estimate can be made as to the potential score uncertainty associated with those two recall-based metrics. We then consider the effect that residual size—as an indicator of possible measurement uncertainty in utility-based metrics—has in connection with recall-based metrics by computing the effect of increasing pool sizes and examining the trends that arise in terms of both metric score and system separability using standard statistical tests. The experimental results show that the confidence levels expressed via the
p
-values generated by statistical tests are only weakly connected to the size of the residual and to the degree of measurement uncertainty caused by the presence of unjudged documents. Statistical confidence estimates are, however, largely consistent as pooling depths are altered. We therefore recommend that all such experimental results should report, in addition to the outcomes of statistical significance tests, the residual measurements generated by a suitably matched weighted-precision metric, to give a clear indication of measurement uncertainty that arises due to the presence of unjudged documents in test collections with finite pooled judgments.
A Reconfiguration-Based Fault-Tolerant Anti-Lock Brake-by-Wire System
Authors: Sababha Belal H. , Alqudah Yazan A.
Published: October 2018

Anti-Lock Braking Systems (ABS) and Brake-by-Wire Systems (BBW) are safety-critical applications by nature. Such systems are required to demonstrate high degrees of dependability. Fault-tolerance is the primary means to achieve dependability at runtime and has been an active research area for decades. Fault-tolerance is usually achieved in traditional embedded computing systems through redundancy and voting methods. In such systems, hardware units, actuators, sensors, and communication networks are replicated where special voters vote against faulty units. In addition to traditional hardware and software redundancy, hybrid and reconfiguration-based approaches to fault-tolerance are evolving. In this article, we present a reconfiguration-based fault-tolerant approach to achieve high dependability in ABS BBW braking systems. The proposed architecture makes use of other components of less safety-critical systems to maintain high dependability in the more safety-critical systems. This is achieved by migrating safety-critical software tasks from embedded computer hardware that runs into a malfunction to other embedded computing hardware running less-critical software tasks. Or by using a different configuration in terms of the used speed sensors and type of ABS. The proposed architecture is on average 20% more reliable than conventional ABS architectures assuming equal reliabilities of different components.
Equitable Rent Division
Authors: Velez Rodrigo A.
Published: October 2018

How should a group of roommates allocate the rooms and contributions to rent in the house they lease? Economists have provided partial answers to this question in a literature that spans the last 40 years. Unfortunately, these results were developed in a non-linear fashion, which obscures them to the non-specialist. Recently, computer scientists have developed an interest in this problem, advancing from an algorithmic complexity perspective. With this new interest gaining traction, there is an evident need for a coherent development of the results in economics literature. This article does so. In particular, we build connections among results that were seemingly unrelated and considerably simplify their development, fill in non-trivial gaps, and identify open questions. Our focus is on incentives issues, the area in which we believe economists have more to contribute in this discussion.
Integrating Market Makers, Limit Orders, and Continuous Trade in Prediction Markets
Authors: Heidari Hoda , Lahaie Sébastien , Pennock David M. , Vaughan Jennifer Wortman
Published: October 2018

We provide the first concrete algorithm for combining market makers and limit orders in a prediction market with continuous trade. Our mechanism is general enough to handle both bundle orders and arbitrary securities defined over combinatorial outcome spaces. We define the notion of an ε-fair trading path, a path in security space along which no order executes at a price more than ε above its limit, and every order executes when its market price falls more than ε below its limit. We show that, under a certain supermodularity condition, a fair trading path exists for which the endpoint is efficient, but that under general conditions reaching an efficient endpoint via an ε-fair trading path is not possible. We develop an algorithm for operating a continuous market maker with limit orders that respects the ε-fairness conditions in the general case. We conduct simulations of our algorithm using real combinatorial predictions made during the 2008 US presidential election and evaluate it against a natural baseline according to trading volume, social welfare, and violations of the two fairness conditions.
Revenue Maximization and Ex-Post Budget Constraints
Authors: Daskalakis Constantinos , Devanur Nikhil R. , Weinberg S. Matthew
Published: October 2018

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with
m
items for sale to
n
additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be correlated across items and budgets of the same bidder, but is assumed independent across bidders. We target mechanisms that are Bayesian incentive compatible, but that are
ex-post
individually rational and
ex-post
budget respecting. Virtually no such mechanisms are known that satisfy all these conditions and guarantee any revenue approximation, even with just a single item. We provide a computationally efficient mechanism that is a 3-approximation with respect to all BIC, ex-post IR, and ex-post budget respecting mechanisms. Note that the problem is NP-hard to approximate better than a factor of 16/15, even in the case where the prior is a point mass. We further characterize the optimal mechanism in this setting, showing that it can be interpreted as a
distribution over virtual welfare maximizers.

We prove our results by making use of a black-box reduction from mechanism to algorithm design developed by Cai et al. Our main technical contribution is a computationally efficient 3-approximation algorithm for the algorithmic problem that results from an application of their framework to this problem. The algorithmic problem has a mixed-sign objective and is NP-hard to optimize exactly, so it is surprising that a computationally efficient approximation is possible at all. In the case of a single item (
m
=1), the algorithmic problem can be solved exactly via exhaustive search, leading to a computationally efficient exact algorithm and a stronger characterization of the optimal mechanism as a distribution over virtual value maximizers.
Factors Associated with Psychiatric Comorbidity in Depression Patients in Primary Health Care in Chile
Authors: Cancino Alfredo , Leiva-Bianchi Marcelo , Serrano Carlos , Ballesteros-Teuber Soledad , Cáceres Cristian , Vitriol Verónica
Published: October 2018

Objective. To identify the clinical and psychosocial factors associated with psychiatric comorbidity in patients consulting for depression in Primary Health Care (PHC) in Chile. Methods. 394 patients with a diagnosis of major depression being treated in a Chilean PHC were evaluated using a sociodemographic and clinical interview, the mini-international neuropsychiatric interview (MINI), a childhood trauma events (CTEs) screening, the intimate partner violence (IPV) scale, the Life Experiences Survey (LES), and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS). Results. Positive correlations were established between higher number of psychiatric comorbidities and severity of depressive symptoms (r = 0.358), frequency of CTEs (r = 0.228), frequency of IPV events (r = 0.218), frequency of recent stressful life events (r = 0.188), number of previous depressive episodes (r = 0.340), and duration of these (r = 0.120). Inverse correlations were determined with age at the time of the first consultation (r = -0.168), age of onset of depression (r = -0.320), and number of medical comorbidities (r = -0.140). Of all associated factors, early age of the first depressive episode, CTEs antecedents, and recent stressful life events explain 13.6% of total variability in psychiatric comorbidities. Conclusions. A higher prevalence of psychiatric comorbidity among subjects seeking help for depression in Chilean PHCs is associated with early onset of depression, clinical severity, chronicity, and interpersonal adversity experienced since childhood.
Optimization of Stope Structural Parameters Based on Mathews Stability Graph Probability Model
Authors: Zhang Long , Hu Jian-hua , Wang Xue-liang , Zhao Lei
Published: October 2018

Strip mining with subsequent filling is one of the main mining methods for gently inclined thin ore bodies. The production process of excavating alternate strips is beneficial to the safety of mining. Reasonable stope structural parameters are key to achieving safe and efficient mining. The Tiaoshuihe phosphate mine of Sanning Mining is taken as an example in this study. Based on precision finite element modeling and simulation, a reasonable width range and the interval value of the strip are determined. A reliable and efficient strip width is calculated by using the probability model of the improved Mathews stability graph method. The results show the following. Firstly, under the geological conditions and backfill environment of the Tiaoshuihe phosphate mine, the reasonable and safe strip width interval is 7–9 m. Secondly, the probabilities of open stope stability with strip widths of 7, 8, and 9 m are 88.55%, 86.76%, and 84.94%, respectively. The reasonable probabilities of stope stability with strip widths of 7 and 8 m are higher than 85%. Thirdly, combining this with the drilling equipment operation parameters, it is suggested that the best strip width is 7 m without increasing the strength of the backfill.
Identifying the Best Marker Combination in CEA, CA125, CY211, NSE, and SCC for Lung Cancer Screening by Combining ROC Curve and Logistic Regression Analyses: Is It Feasible?
Authors: Yang Qixian , Zhang Ping , Wu Rongqiang , Lu Kefeng , Zhou Hongxing
Published: October 2018

The detection of serum biomarkers can aid in the diagnosis of lung cancer. In recent years, an increasing number of lung cancer markers have been identified, and these markers have been reported to have varying diagnostic values. A method to compare the diagnostic value of different combinations of biomarkers needs to be established to identify the best combination. In this study, automatic chemiluminescence analyzers were employed to detect the serum concentrations of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), carbohydrate antigen 125 (CA125), cytokeratin 19 fragment (CY211), neuron-specific enolase (NSE), and squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCC) in 780 healthy subjects, 650 patients with pneumonia, and 633 patients with lung cancer. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and logistic regression analyses were also used to evaluate the diagnostic value of single and multiple markers of lung cancer. The sensitivities of the five markers alone were lower than 65% for lung cancer screening in healthy subjects and pneumonia patients. SCC was of little value in screening lung cancer. After combining two or more markers, the areas under the curves (AUCs) did not increase with the increase in the number of markers. For healthy subjects, the best marker for lung cancer screening was the combination CEA + CA125, and the positive cutoff range was 0.577 CEA + 0.035 CA125 > 2.084. Additionally, for patients with pneumonia, the best screening markers displayed differences in terms of sex but not age. The best screening marker for male patients with pneumonia was the combination CEA + CY211 with a positive cutoff range of 0.008 CEA + 0.068 CY211 > 0.237, while that for female patients with pneumonia was CEA > 2.73 ng/mL, which could be regarded as positive. These results showed that a two-marker combination is more suitable than a multimarker combination for the serological screening of tumors. Combined ROC curve and logistic regression analyses are effective for identifying the best markers for lung cancer screening.
Growth of Soot Volume Fraction and Aggregate Size in 1D Premixed C2H4/Air Flames Studied by Laser-Induced Incandescence and Angle-Dependent Light Scattering
Authors: Langenkamp P. N. , van Oijen J. A. , Levinsky H. B. , Mokhov A. V.
Published: October 2018

The growth of soot volume fraction and aggregate size was studied in burner-stabilized premixed C2H4/air flames with equivalence ratios between 2.0 and 2.35 as function of height above the burner using laser-induced incandescence (LII) to measure soot volume fractions and angle-dependent light scattering (ADLS) to measure corresponding aggregate sizes. Flame temperatures were varied at fixed equivalence ratio by changing the exit velocity of the unburned gas mixture. Temperatures were measured using spontaneous Raman scattering in flames with equivalence ratios up to ϕ = 2.1, with results showing good correspondence (within 50 K) with temperatures calculated using the San Diego mechanism. Both the soot volume fraction and radius of gyration strongly increase in richer flames. Furthermore, both show a nonmonotonic dependence on flame temperature, with a maximum occurring at ~1675 K for the volume fraction and ~1700 K for the radius of gyration. The measurement results were compared with calculations using two different semiempirical two-equation models of soot formation. Numerical calculations using both mechanisms substantially overpredict the measured soot volume fractions, although the models do better in richer flames. The model accounting for particle coagulation overpredicts the measured radii of gyration substantially for all equivalence ratios, although the calculated values improve at ϕ = 2.35.
Mechanical Performances of Pressure Arch in Thick Bedrock during Shallow Coal Mining
Authors: Wang Shuren , Wu Xiaogang , Zhao Yanhai , Hagan Paul
Published: October 2018

Due to the periodicity of mine pressure, it can easily lead to a wide-range damage of the overburden rock under shallow coal mining conditions, and the falling of the overburden rock is usually a serious threat to the mining safety. Based on the monitoring data of mine pressure in a typical shallow coal mine in northern China, the mechanical model of the surrounding rock in the mining field was built and the identification indicators of the pressure arch after coal mining was defined. Then, the arching mechanism, the stress distribution characteristics in different positions, and the bearing capacity of the pressure arch were analysed, and the evolution characteristics of the pressure arch under shallow horizontal coal mining were verified by numerical simulation and physical experiment. Results show that there is a core-bearing zone in the pressure arch, and the width of the core zone determines the bearing capacity of the pressure arch. The evolution of the pressure arch affects the formation and development of the caving arch of the loose zone in the mining field. The conclusions obtained in the study are of important theoretical value to direct the similar engineering practice.
The Falciform Ligament for Mesenteric and Portal Vein Reconstruction in Local Advanced Pancreatic Tumor: A Surgical Guide and Single-Center Experience
Authors: Malinka T. , Klein F. , Denecke T. , Pelzer U. , Pratschke J. , Bahra M.
Published: October 2018

Background. Since local tumor infiltration to the mesenteric-portal axis might represent a challenging assignment for curative intended resectability during pancreatic surgery, appropriate techniques for venous reconstruction are essential. In this study, we acknowledge the falciform ligament as a feasible and convenient substitute for mesenteric and portal vein reconstruction with high reliability and patency for local advanced pancreatic tumor. Methods. A retrospective single-center analysis. Between June 2017 and January 2018, a total of eleven consecutive patients underwent pancreatic resections with venous reconstruction using falciform ligament. Among them, venous resection was performed in nine cases by wedge and in two cases by full segment. Patency rates and perioperative details were reviewed. Results. Mean clamping time of the mesenteric-portal blood flow was 34 min, while perioperative mortality rate was 0%. By means of Duplex ultrasonography, nine patients were shown to be patent on the day of discharge, while two cases revealed an entire occlusion of the mesenteric-portal axis. Orthograde flow demonstrated a mean value of 34 cm/s. All patent grafts on discharge revealed persistent patency within various follow-up assessments. Conclusion. The falciform ligament appears to be a feasible and reliable autologous tissue for venous blood flow reconstruction with high postoperative patency. Especially the possibility of customizing graft dimensions to the individual needs based on local findings allows an optimal size matching of the conduit. The risk of stenosis and/or segmental occlusion may thus be further reduced.
Long Noncoding RNA LOC441178 Reduces the Invasion and Migration of Squamous Carcinoma Cells by Targeting ROCK1
Authors: Xu Kai , Tian Hurong , Zhao Shouyong , Yuan Daoying , Jiang Licheng , Liu Xianbin , Zou Bo , Zhang Jin
Published: October 2018

In recent years, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported to have significant regulating effect in human cancer development. Previous studies suggested that dysregulation of lncRNA 441178 (LOC441178) is possibly associated with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). The postoperative survival time was significantly prolonged in the high-grade OSCC patients with high LOC441178 expression compared with those with low LOC441178 expression, which indicated that LOC441178 may act as a prognostic marker and as a potential tumor suppressor for OSCC. However, the biological molecular mechanisms behind these phenomena remain almost unknown. Here, our studies revealed that LOC441178 suppressed the invasion and migration of squamous carcinoma cells (SCCs). Furthermore, we found that rho-associated, coiled-coil-containing protein kinase 1 (ROCK1) is one of the functionally relevant targets of LOC441178 in squamous cells, which is negatively correlated with LOC441178 in tumor tissues from OSCC patients. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated the inhibition effect of LOC441178 on tumor in OSCC and might have potential implications for OSCC gene therapy. In conclusion, these results suggest that LOC441178 could represent a prognostic indicator for OSCC and be a new target for the diagnosis and treatment of OSCC.
A New Algebraic Approach to Decision Making in a Railway Interlocking System Based on Preprocess
Authors: Hernando Antonio , Maestre Roberto , Roanes-Lozano Eugenio
Published: October 2018

The safety of railway networks is a very important issue. Roughly speaking, it can be split into safety along lines and safety of railway facilities such as stations, junctions, yards, etc. In modern networks the safety along lines is controlled by automatic block systems that do not give clearance to trains to enter a section (block) until the latter is detected to be unoccupied. Meanwhile, the safety within railway facilities is supervised by railway interlocking systems. Decision making in a railway interlocking is a very important issue which is considered to be very labour-intensive. Decision-making in both automatic block systems and railway interlocking systems, unlike road traffic light systems, is not based on time (they are not scheduling problems) but in space. Basically, two different trains should never be allowed to access the same section (whatever time has passed). There are many different approaches to automate decision-making in railway interlocking systems. The classic approaches are offline: only certain routes are allowed and their compatibility is decided in advance. Meanwhile, modern approaches make decisions in real time and are independent from the topology of the railway network, but can be applied only to small or medium size railway networks. Nevertheless, these last approaches have the following drawbacks: the performances are very dependent on the number of trains in the railway network; and are unsuitable to large networks since they take long time to be run. On the other hand, algebraic approaches based on computer algebra concepts have been used in artificial intelligence for implementing expert systems. In this paper we present a completely new algebraic model, based on these concepts of computer algebra that overcomes these drawbacks: the performance of our approach is independent of the number of trains in the railway network and also is suitable for large railway networks.
An Evacuation Route Model of Crowd Based on Emotion and Geodesic
Authors: Liu Bangquan , Liu Zhen , Sun Dechao , Bi Chunyue
Published: October 2018

Making unconventional emergent plan for dense crowd is one of the critical issues of evacuation simulations. In order to make the behavior of crowd more believable, we present a real-time evacuation route approach based on emotion and geodesic under the influence of individual emotion and multi-hazard circumstances. The proposed emotion model can reflect the dynamic process of individual in group on three factors: individual emotion, perilous field, and crowd emotion. Specifically, we first convert the evacuation scene to Delaunay triangulation representations. Then, we use the optimization-driven geodesic approach to calculate the best evacuation path with user-specified geometric constraints, such as crowd density, obstacle information, and perilous field. Finally, the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics method is used for local avoidance of collisions with nearby agents in real-time simulation. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm is efficient and well suited for real-time simulations of crowd evacuation.
Identification of Sources of Resistance for Peanut Aspergillus flavus Colonization and Aflatoxin Contamination
Authors: Dieme Richard Moise Alansou , Faye Issa , Zoclanclounon Yedomon Ange Bovys , Fonceka Daniel , Ndoye Ousmane , Diedhiou Papa Madiallacke
Published: October 2018

Peanut aflatoxin contamination caused by Aspergillus flavus is a serious constraint for food safety and human health in Senegal. The present study aimed to identify sources of resistance for A. flavus colonization and aflatoxin contamination. Thus, seeds from 67 peanut genotypes were tested under laboratory conditions. Aqueous conidial suspension of an aflatoxinogenic strain of A. flavus was used for inoculation in Petri dishes containing ten seeds of each genotype, and data on incidence and severity were recorded. Total aflatoxin concentration in seeds was determined on 15th day after inoculation using mReader® method. Results showed a significant (p<0.001) variation of aflatoxin, incidence and severity among the tested peanut genotypes. Incidence ranged from 0 to 70% with a mean of 20.36 ± 0.8%. Out of the 67 genotypes, eight showed incidence less than 10%. Severity ranged from 0 to 44% with a mean value of 8.82 ± 0.45%. The genotype 12CS_104 showed aflatoxin concentration level in conformity with the European standard (4 ppb). Out of three clusters revealed by hierarchical classification based on disease incidence and severity, the cluster 1 contained 33 genotypes characterised by low incidence and severity values. These genotypes can be tested under field conditions to confirm their resistance to A flavus.
Prevalence and Temporal Distribution of Extrasystoles in Septic ICU Patients: The Feasibility of Predicting Fluid Responsiveness Using Extrasystoles
Authors: Enevoldsen Johannes , Potes Cristhian , Xu-Wilson Minnan , Vistisen Simon T.
Published: October 2018

Background. Extrasystoles may be useful for predicting the response to fluid therapy in hemodynamically unstable patients but their prevalence is unknown. The aim of this study was to estimate the availability of extrasystoles in intensive care unit patients diagnosed with sepsis. The study aim was not to validate the fluid responsiveness prediction ability of extrasystoles. Methods. Twenty-four-hour ECG recordings from a convenience sample of 50 patients diagnosed with sepsis were extracted from the MIMIC-II waveform database, and ECGs were visually examined for correct QRS complex detection. Custom-made algorithms identified potential extrasystoles based on RR intervals. Two raters visually confirmed or rejected the potential extrasystoles and then classified them as ventricular, supraventricular, or unknown origin. Extrasystole availability was calculated as extrasystolic coverage for each 24 h ECG recording, that is, the percentage of the 24 h recording where an extrasystole had occurred in the preceding 30 minutes. Results. Mean extrasystolic coverage was 53.3% (confidence interval: [42.8; 63.6]%) and ventricular extrasystolic coverage was 21.4 [13.5; 29.8]%. Interrater reliability was strong for confirming/rejecting extrasystoles. Conclusions. Extrasystoles are available for fluid responsiveness prediction in septic patients in about half of the time. With this extrasystolic availability, we believe the method to be considered for clinical use, provided that future studies validate the method’s fluid responsiveness prediction ability.
The Dosimetric Impact of Shifts in Patient Positioning during Boron Neutron Capture Therapy for Brain Tumors
Authors: Lee Jia-Cheng , Chen Yi-Wei , Chuang Keh-Shih , Hsu Fang-Yuh , Chou Fong-In , Hsu Shih-Ming , Yen Sang-Hue , Wu Yuan-Hung
Published: October 2018

Unlike conventional photon radiotherapy, sophisticated patient positioning tools are not available for boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT). Thus, BNCT remains vulnerable to setup errors and intra-fractional patient motion. The aim of this study was to estimate the impact of deviations in positioning on the dose administered by BNCT for brain tumors at the Tsing Hua open-pool reactor (THOR). For these studies, a simulated head model was generated based on computed tomography (CT) images of a patient with a brain tumor. A cylindrical brain tumor 3 cm in diameter and 5 cm in length was modeled at distances of 6.5 cm and 2.5 cm from the posterior scalp of this head model (T6.5 cm and T2.5 cm, respectively). Radiation doses associated with positioning errors were evaluated for each distance, including left and right shifts, superior and inferior shifts, shifts from the central axis of the beam aperture, and outward shifts from the surface of the beam aperture. Rotational and tilting effects were also evaluated. The dose prescription was 20 Gray-equivalent (Gy-Eq) to 80 % of the tumor. The treatment planning system, NCTPlan, was used to perform dose calculations. The average decreases in mean tumor dose for T6.5 cm for the 1 cm, 2 cm, and 3 cm lateral shifts composed by left, right, superior, and inferior sides, were approximately 1 %, 6 %, and 11 %, respectively, compared to the dose administered to the initial tumor position. The decreases in mean tumor dose for T6.5 cm were approximately 5 %, 11 %, and 15 % for the 1 cm, 2 cm, and 3 cm outward shifts, respectively. For a superficial tumor at T2.5cm, no significant decrease in average mean tumor dose was observed following lateral shifts of 1 cm. Rotational and tilting up to 15° did not result in significant difference to the tumor dose. Dose differences to the normal tissues as a result of the shifts in positioning were also minimal. Taken together, these data demonstrate that the mean dose administered to tumors at greater depths is potentially more vulnerable to deviations in positioning, and greater shift distances resulted in reduced mean tumor doses at the THOR. Moreover, these data provide an estimation of dose differences that are caused by setup error or intra-fractional motion during BNCT, and these may facilitate more accurate predictions of actual patient dose in future treatments.