bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Prenatal management of congenital infantile fibrosarcoma: unexpected outcome
Authors: Dumont C. , Monforte M. , Flandrin A. , Couture A. , Tichit R. , Boulot P. 
Published: November 2010

AbstractWe report the case of a large leg tumor in a fetus at 36 weeks of gestation. The tumor's location, ultrasound characteristics and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings enabled a prenatal diagnosis of congenital fibrosarcoma and allowed us to establish the prognosis. After multidisciplinary discussion, it was decided that the pregnancy should continue to 38 weeks, with surgery or neo‐adjuvant chemotherapy scheduled after delivery. Unfortunately, the tumor unexpectedly burst in utero and the newborn died of the consequences of hemorrhagic shock, despite rapid amputation. Histological examination confirmed the nature of the tumor. The prognosis of congenital fibrosarcoma is generally good when there are no metastases. MRI is key to establishing a prenatal diagnosis. However, rupture of the tumor can result in fatal hemorrhaging and the pregnancy should be monitored closely before scheduled delivery. Copyright © 2011 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Non‐invasive pulsed cavitational ultrasound for fetal tissue ablation: feasibility study in a fetal sheep model
Authors: Kim Y. , Gelehrter S. K. , Fifer C. G. , Lu J. C. , Owens G. E. , Berman D. R. , Williams J. , Wilkinson J. E. , Ives K. A. , Xu Z. 
Published: November 2010

AbstractObjectivesCurrently available fetal intervention techniques rely on invasive procedures that carry inherent risks. A non‐invasive technique for fetal intervention could potentially reduce the risk of fetal and obstetric complications. Pulsed cavitational ultrasound therapy (histotripsy) is an ablation technique that mechanically fractionates tissue at the focal region using extracorporeal ultrasound. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using histotripsy as a non‐invasive approach to fetal intervention in a sheep model.MethodsThe experiments involved 11 gravid sheep at 102–129 days of gestation. Fetal kidney, liver, lung and heart were exposed to ultrasound pulses (< 10 µs) delivered by an external 1‐MHz focused ultrasound transducer at a 0.2–1‐kHz pulse‐repetition rate and 10–16 MPa peak negative pressure. Procedures were monitored and guided by real‐time ultrasound imaging. Treated organs were examined by gross and histological inspection for location and degree of tissue injury.ResultsHyperechoic, cavitating bubble clouds were successfully generated in 19/31 (61%) treatment attempts in 27 fetal organs beneath up to 8 cm of overlying tissue and fetal bones. Histological assessment confirmed lesion locations and sizes corresponding to regions where cavitation was monitored, with no lesions found when cavitation was absent. Inability to generate cavitation was primarily associated with increased depth to target and obstructing structures such as fetal limbs.ConclusionExtracorporeal histotripsy therapy successfully created targeted lesions in fetal sheep organs without significant damage to overlying structures. With further improvements, histotripsy may evolve into a viable technique for non‐invasive fetal intervention procedures. Copyright © 2011 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Clinical implications of intra‐ and interobserver reproducibility of transvaginal sonographic measurement of gestational sac and crown–rump length at 6–9 weeks' gestation
Authors: Pexsters A. , Luts J. , Van Schoubroeck D. , Bottomley C. , Van Calster B. , Van Huffel S. , Abdallah Y. , D'Hooghe T. , Lees C. , Timmerman D. , Bourne T. 
Published: November 2010

AbstractObjectivesTo assess intra‐ and interobserver agreement of routinely performed measurements—crown–rump length (CRL) and mean gestational sac diameter (MSD)—for assessing the likelihood of miscarriage in the first trimester of pregnancy using transvaginal sonography.MethodsA cross‐sectional study of CRL and gestational sac measurements in first‐trimester pregnancies was conducted in a fetal medicine referral center with a predominantly Caucasian population. Gestational age ranged from 6 to 9 weeks. All patients underwent a transvaginal ultrasound examination using a high‐resolution ultrasound machine. Two measurements of CRL and measurements of three diameters of the gestational sac were obtained by two observers. Agreement within and between observers for CRL and between observers for MSD was analyzed using 95% prediction intervals, Bland–Altman plots with 95% limits of agreement and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC).ResultsIn total 54 patients were included in the study, with measurements obtained by both observers in 44 of these. Intra‐ and interobserver ICCs were high for CRL measurements, with values of 0.992 and 0.993 for intraobserver agreement and 0.993 for interobserver agreement. For the MSD, the interobserver ICC was 0.952. Limits of agreement were ± 8.91 and ± 11.37% for intraobserver agreement of CRL and ± 14.64% for interobserver agreement of CRL. For MSD, the interobserver limits of agreement were ± 18.78%. For an MSD measurement of 20 mm by the first observer, the prediction interval for the second observer was 16.8–24.5 mm. For a CRL measurement of 6 mm, the prediction interval for the second observer was 5.4–6.7 mm.ConclusionFor dating purposes, there is reasonable reproducibility of CRL measurements using transvaginal ultrasonography at 6–9 weeks' gestation. When diagnosing miscarriage based on measurements of CRL care must be taken for values close to any decision boundary. The higher interobserver variability that we observed for MSD has implications for the diagnosis of miscarriage based on this measurement in the absence of a visible embryo or yolk sac. Copyright © 2011 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Plan B: Boxes for networked resources
Authors: Ballesteros Francisco J. , Muzquiz Gorka Guardiola , Algara Katia Leal , Soriano Enrique , de las Heras Quirós Pedro , Castro Eva M. , Leonardo Andres , Arévalo Sergio 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
Nowadays computing environments are made of heterogeneous networked resources, but unlike environments used a decade ago, the current environments are highly dynamic. During a computing session, new resources are likely to appear and some are likely to go online or to move to some other place. The operating system is supposed to hide most of the complexity of such environments and make it easy to write applications using them. However, that is not the case with our current operating systems. Plan B is a new operating system that attempts to allow the applications and their programmers select and use whatever resources are available without forcing them to deal with the problems created by their dynamic distributed and heterogeneous environments. It does so by using constraints along with a new abstraction used to replace the traditional le abstraction.
Structuring reflective middleware using meta-informationmanagement: The Meta-ORB approach and prototypes
Authors: Costa Fábio M. , Santos Bruno da Silva 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
Reflection is now an established technique for achieving dynamic adaptability of middleware platforms. It provides a clean and comprehensive way to access the internals of a platform implementation, allowing its customisation in order to achieve the best performance and adequacy under given operation environments and user requirements. In addition, the use of a runtime component model for the design of the internal platform structure facilitates the identification of the elements to be adapted, as all platform aspects are built in terms of components. The major limitation of this approach, however, is related to the multitude of aspects that make up a middleware platform, together with the requirement of keeping platform consistency after adaptations take place. This paper presents the results of ongoing research contributing to reduce this limitation. The approach is based on the use of a common meta-model, together with meta-information techniques to provide a uniform way to specify and manipulate platform configurations. Both platform configuration and runtime adaptation are always specified using a small number of building blocks defined in the meta-model. The paper also describes the overall architecture of the Meta-ORB platform, which demonstrates this approach, and presents its two implementations: a proof-of-concept prototype written in Python, and a Java-based implementation aimed at supporting mobile devices. The results are also evaluated from a quantitative perspective, according to the requirements of multimedia applications, one of the major areas of application of reflective middleware.
Assessing agile methods: An empirical study
Authors: Sampaio Américo , Vasconcelos Alexandre , Sampaio Pedro R. Falcone 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
Agile software processes emerged to address the issue of building software on time and within the planned budget. To adopt an agile process, it is imperative to analyze and evaluate its effectiveness in supporting high quality software development while complying with stringent time constraints. In this paper we describe an agile method for Web-based application development (XWebProcess) and an experiment conducted with a group of forty senior undergraduate students to assess the quality/speed effectiveness of the proposed method vis-à-vis the effectiveness of Extreme Programming (XP). The results have shown that the process proposed is equally agile when compared to XP, moreover, surveys conducted as part of the experiment pointed out that XWebProcess is more suitable to Web development in dimensions such as requirements gathering, user interface and navigation design, and software testing, therefore leading to better quality software.
Application of a formal testing methodology to wireless telephony networks
Authors: Cavalli Ana , Mederreg Amel , Zaidi Fatiha 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
This paper presents the application of a formal testing methodology to protocols and services for wireless telephony networks. The methodology provides a complete and integrated coverage of all phases of the testing procedure: specification, test generation, and test execution on a given architecture. It permits to perform conformance and interoperability testing detecting different kinds of implementation faults, as for instance output and transmission faults. The test execution is performed in the framework of a set of architectures capable to deal with different environments.
Telecommunication systems and mobility are the main focus of the application presented in this paper. Two case studies illustrates the application of the methodology to a wireless telephone network: conformance and interoperability testing of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) protocols and services based on the subscriber location.
Local DNA sequence alignment in a cluster of workstations: Algorithms and tools
Authors: Melo Alba Cristina M. A. , Walter Maria Emilia M. T. , Melo Renata Cristina F. , Santana Marcelo N. P. , Batista Rodolfo B. 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
Distributed Shared Memory systems allow the use of the shared memory programming paradigm in distributed architectures where no physically shared memory exist. Scope consistent software DSMs provide a relaxed memory model that reduces the coherence overhead by ensuring consistency only at synchronization operations, on a per-lock basis. Much of the work in DSM systems is validated by benchmarks and there are only a few examples of real parallel applications running on DSM systems. Sequence comparison is a basic operation in DNA sequencing projects, and most of sequence comparison methods used are based on heuristics, that are faster but do not produce optimal alignments. Recently, many organisms had their DNA entirely sequenced, and this reality presents the need for comparing long DNA sequences, which is a challenging task due to its high demands for computational power and memory. In this article, we present and evaluate a parallelization strategy for implementing a sequence alignment algorithm for long sequences. This strategy was implemented in JIAJIA, a scope consistent software DSM system. Our results on an eight-machine cluster presented good speedups, showing that our parallelization strategy and programming support were appropriate.
Efficient and robust adaptive consensus services based on oracles
Authors: Sampaio Lívia , Brasileiro Francisco , Nunes Raul Ceretta , Jansch-Pôrto Ingrid 
Published: November 2010

AbstractDue to their fundamental role in the design of fault-tolerant distributed systems, consensus protocols have been widely studied. Most of the research in this area has focused on providing ways for circumventing the impossibility of reaching consensus on a purely asynchronous system subject to failures. Of particular interest are the indulgent consensus protocols based upon weak failure detection oracles. Following the first works that were more concerned with the correctness of such protocols, performance issues related to them are now a topic that has gained considerable attention. In particular, a few studies have been conducted to analyze the impact that the quality of service of the underlying failure detection oracle has on the performance of consensus protocols. To achieve better performance, adaptive failure detectors have been proposed. Also, slowness oracles have been proposed to allow consensus protocols to adapt themselves to the changing conditions of the environment, enhancing their performance when there are substantial changes on the load to which the system is exposed. In this paper we further investigate the use of these oracles to design efficient consensus services. In particular, we provide efficient and robust implementations of slowness oracles based on techniques that have been previously used to implement adaptive failure detection oracles. Our experiments on a wide-area distributed system show that by using a slowness oracle that is well matched with a failure detection oracle, one can achieve performance as much as 53.5% better than the alternative that does not use a slowness oracle.
A modeling methodology for hierarchical control system and its aplication
Authors: Lollini Paolo , Bondavalli Andrea , Giandomenico Felicita Di 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
Current and future computerized systems and infrastructures are going to be based on the layering of different systems, designed at different times, with different technologies and components and difficult to integrate. Control systems and resource management systems are increasingly employed in such large and heterogeneous environment as a parallel infrastructure to allow an efficient, dependable and scalable usage of the system components. System complexity comes out to be a paramount challenge to solve from a number of different viewpoints, including dependability modeling and evaluation. Key directions to deal with system complexity are abstraction and hierarchical structuring of the system functionalities. This paper addresses the issue of an efficient dependability evaluation by a model-based approach of hierarchical control and resource management systems. We exploited the characteristics of this specific, but important, class of systems and derived a modeling methodology that is not only directed to build models in a compositional way, but it also includes some capabilities to reduce their solution complexity. The modeling methodology and the resolution technique are then applied to a case study consisting of a resource management system developed in the context of the ongoing European project CAUTION++. The results obtained are useful to understand the impact of several system component factors on the dependability of the overall system instance.
Automatic formation and analysis of multi-agent virtual organization
Authors: Zheng Qinhe , Zhang Xiaoqin 
Published: November 2010

AbstractVirtual organization refers to the temporary teaming of enterprises. By sharing physical, human and knowledge resources via information technologies, a virtual organization enables member enterprises to share skills, costs, access to one another’s markets and, at the same time decrease the risk of investments. To realize this new generation of business model, the ability to form and operate virtual enterprise is very important. The paper describes our experience gained by implementing a multiagent system that simulates an artificial marketplace, for which we have derived several decision-making mechanisms in various stages of a virtual organization. We presented a negotiation protocol and a bid selection algorithm for agents to form a virtual organization. We adopted the Motivational Quantities framework to support the agent’s local reasoning process. In order to better understand the organizational problem, we adapted a statistical model that predicts the expected rewards of individual agents and the performance of the virtual organization. The comparison and analysis of the results from both the simulation and the model prediction are also presented in this paper.
On the design of ontology-driven workflow flexibilization mechanisms
Authors: Vieira Tatiana A. S. C. , Casanova Marco A. , Ferrão Luis G. 
Published: November 2010

AbstractWorkflow management systems usually interpret a workflow definition rigidly. However, there are real life situations where users should be allowed to deviate from the prescribed static workflow definition for various reasons, including lack of information and unavailability of the required resources. To flexibilize workflow execution, this paper first proposes mechanisms that allow execution to proceed in the presence of incomplete information, by adopting presuppositions, and in the presence of negative information, by suggesting execution alternatives. Then, the paper presents an architecture for a workflow system, driven by ontologies that capture semantic relationships between workflows and resources. The architecture includes a component which uses matching techniques to find alternatives for workflows and resources.
Ecolingua: a Formal ontology for data in ecology
Authors: Brilhante Virgínia 
Published: November 2010

Abstract

Ecolingua is an ontology for ecological quantitative data, which has been designed through reuse of a conceptualisation of quantities and their physical dimensions provided by theEngMath family of ontologies. A hierarchy of ecological quantity classes is presented together with their definition axioms in first-order logic. An implementation-level application of the ontology is discussed, by way of which conceptual ecological models are synthesised from data annotations inEcolingua through reuse of existing model structures.
Using a Functional Ontology Of Reputation to interoperate different agent reputation models
Authors: Casare Sara , Sichman Jaime Simão 
Published: November 2010

Abstract
This paper presents a Functional Ontology of Reputation that could be used as a common shared reputation knowledge by agents. Although there is a huge work on agent reputation, each research defines its own basic concepts. Sometimes different meanings are associated to the same term and in other occasions the same meaning is related to different terms. We claim that the reputation knowledge structured as an ontology could be used to enable the semantic integration level involved in the interoperation of software agents using different reputation models. We have illustrated this idea by showing a semantic mapping for the reputation concepts used in three distinct reputation models. That mapping shows how this ontology could act as a common global ontology that supports the semantic integration among these models.
On synthesizing test cases in symbolic real-time testing
Authors: Khoumsi Ahmed 
Published: November 2010

AbstractTest synthesis (or test generation) can be described as follows: from a formal specification of an implementation under test (IUT), and from a test purpose describing behaviors to be tested, the aim is to synthesize test cases to be executed in order to check whether theIUTconforms to its formal specification, while trying to control theIUTso that it satisfies the test purpose. In this paper, we study the synthesis of test cases for symbolic real-time systems. By symbolic, we mean that the specification of theIUTcontains variables and parameters. And by realtime, we mean that the specification of theIUTcontains timing constraints. Our method combines and generalizes two testing methods presented in previous work, namely: 1) a method for synthesizing test cases for (non-symbolic) real-time systems, and 2) a method for synthesizing test cases for (non-real-time) symbolic systems.
Effect of Diacylglycerol Supplementation on Fasting Serum Triacylglycerol Concentration: a Meta‐Analysis
Authors: Wang Wenliang , Xu Tongcheng , Li Xia , Zhu Qingjun , Cheng Anwei , Du Fangling , Li Duo 
Published: November 2010

AbstractDiacylglycerol (DAG) supplementation has been shown to be associated with the reduction of fasting serum triacylglycerol (TAG) concentration, although the extent of the association is uncertain. We quantitatively examined the effect of dietary DAG on fasting serum TAG concentration by conducting a meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials. Potential papers were searched from electronic databases of Medline, Embase and Cochrane Library. Information was extracted and the net change of fasting serum TAG concentration was used as the primary outcome to examine the effect of DAG in Review Manager 4.2. Six papers with seven independent studies (298 subjects) were included into the statistic pooling. Meta‐analysis with random effect model showed that DAG did not reduce the fasting serum TAG concentration (WMD: −0.07 mmol/L; 95% CI: −0.21 to 0.08 mmol/L; P = 0.37). Sensitivity analysis indicated the robustness of overall results. Fail‐safe number analysis indicated that 18 studies with positive effect were necessary to reverse the reported non‐significant efficacy of DAG. Weight estimation analysis indicated that the effect of DAG was influenced to some extent by the initial fasting serum TAG concentration. In conclusion, DAG supplementation did not reduce the fasting serum TAG concentration significantly compared with TAG, but some effects were suggested in diabetic patients with hypertriglyceridemia.
Selectively Hydrogenated Soybean Oil Exerts Strong Anti‐Prostate Cancer Activities
Authors: Jung Mun Yhung , Choi Nak Jin , Oh Chan Ho , Shin Hyun Kyung , Yoon Suk Hoo 
Published: November 2010

AbstractProstate cancer is the second leading cause of male deaths due to cancer in the United States. Hydrogenated vegetable oils have been suspected of inducing adverse health effects, including atherosclerosis and cancer. Here we report that a selectively hydrogenated soybean oil (SHSO) containing a high quantity of conjugated linoleic acids showed remarkably strong anticarcinogenic activity against prostate cancer in the rat model (Copenhagen rats with MAT‐LyLu syngeneic rat prostate cancer cells) study in vivo and human prostate carcinoma cell lines studies in vitro, as compared with native soybean oil. A 5% dietary supplementation with SHSO inhibited the growth of prostate cancer by 80% in vivo. The TUNEL method and immunohistochemical staining assays of bax, bcl‐2, and survivin clearly showed that SHSO induced prostate cancer cell apoptosis in the tested rats. DNA fragmentation analysis in vitro further confirmed the apoptotic activity of SHSO on the MAT‐LyLu prostate cancer cells. The SHSO also showed strong cytotoxicity on human prostate cancer cells (DU145 and PC3). This represents the first report demonstrating the significant anticancer activities of hydrogenated vegetable oils at low levels of dietary supplementation.