gebhart/patrepeval huggingface dataset:
Map quality evaluation for visual localization (2017)

A variety of end-user devices involving keypoint-based mapping systems are about to hit the market e.g. as part of smartphones, cars, robotic platforms, or virtual and augmented reality applications. Thus, the generated map data requires automated evaluation procedures that do not require experienced personnel or ground truth knowledge of the underlying environment. A particularly important question enabling commercial applications is whether a given map is of sufficient quality for localization. This paper proposes a framework for predicting localization performance in the context of visual landmark-based mapping. Specifically, we propose an algorithm for predicting performance of vision-based localization systems from different poses within the map. To achieve this, a metric is defined that assigns a score to a given query pose based on the underlying map structure. The algorithm is evaluated on two challenging datasets involving indoor data generated using a handheld device and outdoor data from an autonomous fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Using these, we are able to show that the score provided by our method is highly correlated to the true localization performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the predicted map quality can be used within a belief based path planning framework in order to provide reliable trajectories through high-quality areas of the map.
Experience improves fluidized-bed combustion (1986)

Operating experience on two fluidized-bed combustion, waste-heat boilers has shown that maximum heat recovery can be obtained from hot, low-heating-value refinery process off gases while maintaining SO/sub X/, CO, NO/sub X/, and particulate emissions within acceptable limits. The two units were installed in early 1983 on Ashland's reduced crude conversion (RCC) unit at the Catlettsburg, Ky., refinery. Total operating time, through 1985, has been more than 40,000 hours.
Brain charts for the human lifespan (2022)

Over the past few decades, neuroimaging has become a ubiquitous tool in basic research and clinical studies of the human brain. However, no reference standards currently exist to quantify individual differences in neuroimaging metrics over time, in contrast to growth charts for anthropometric traits such as height and weight<sup>1</sup>. Here we assemble an interactive open resource to benchmark brain morphology derived from any current or future sample of MRI data ( http://www.brainchart.io/ ). With the goal of basing these reference charts on the largest and most inclusive dataset available, acknowledging limitations due to known biases of MRI studies relative to the diversity of the global population, we aggregated 123,984 MRI scans, across more than 100 primary studies, from 101,457 human participants between 115 days post-conception to 100 years of age. MRI metrics were quantified by centile scores, relative to non-linear trajectories<sup>2</sup> of brain structural changes, and rates of change, over the lifespan. Brain charts identified previously unreported neurodevelopmental milestones<sup>3</sup>, showed high stability of individuals across longitudinal assessments, and demonstrated robustness to technical and methodological differences between primary studies. Centile scores showed increased heritability compared with non-centiled MRI phenotypes, and provided a standardized measure of atypical brain structure that revealed patterns of neuroanatomical variation across neurological and psychiatric disorders. In summary, brain charts are an essential step towards robust quantification of individual variation benchmarked to normative trajectories in multiple, commonly used neuroimaging phenotypes.
Erosion of carbon/carbon by solar wind charged particle radiation during a solar probe mission (1991)

The possible erosion of a carbon/carbon thermal shield by solar wind-charged particle radiation is reviewed. The present knowledge of erosion data for carbon and/or graphite is surveyed, and an explanation of erosion mechanisms under different charged particle environments is discussed. The highest erosion is expected at four solar radii. Erosion rates are analytically estimated under several conservative assumptions for a normal quiet and worst case solar wind storm conditions. Mass loss analyses and comparison studies surprisingly indicate that the predicted erosion rate by solar wind could be greater than by nominal free sublimation during solar wind storm conditions at four solar radii. The predicted overall mass loss of a carbon/carbon shield material during the critical four solar radii flyby can still meet the mass loss mission requirement of less than 0.0025 g/sec.
Robust and efficient Bayesian adaptive psychometric function estimation (2017)

The efficient measurement of the threshold and slope of the psychometric function (PF) is an important objective in psychoacoustics. This paper proposes a procedure that combines a Bayesian estimate of the PF with either a look one-ahead or a look two-ahead method of selecting the next stimulus presentation. The procedure differs from previously proposed algorithms in two respects: (i) it does not require the range of possible PF parameters to be specified in advance and (ii) the sequence of probe signal-to-noise ratios optimizes the threshold and slope estimates at a performance level, ϕ, that can be chosen by the experimenter. Simulation results show that the proposed procedure is robust and that the estimates of both threshold and slope have a consistently low bias. Over a wide range of listener PF parameters, the root-mean-square errors after 50 trials were ∼1.2 dB in threshold and 0.14 in log-slope. It was found that the performance differences between the look one-ahead and look two-ahead methods were negligible and that an entropy-based criterion for selecting the next stimulus was preferred to a variance-based criterion.
The Presence of Capsule in<i>Cryptococcus neoformans</i>Influences the Gene Expression Profile in Dendritic Cells during Interaction with the Fungus (2008)

The aim of this investigation was to study the effect of polysaccharide capsule on the gene expression in dendritic cells (DC) during their interaction with Cryptococcus neoformans. To this end, we used an encapsulated virulent strain of C. neoformans and a cap59 gene-disrupted acapsular avirulent strain derived from the same genetic background. DC were exposed to encapsulated and acapsular C. neoformans strains for 4 h and 18 h, and their transcriptional profiles were analyzed using the Affymetrix mouse gene chip U74Av2. A large number of DC genes were up-regulated after treatment with the acapsular strain. In particular, we observed the up-regulation of the genes involved in DC maturation, such as cell surface receptors, cytokines, and chemokines (interleukin-12 [IL-12], IL-2, IL-1alpha, IL-1beta, IL-6, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor alpha, CCR7, CCL17, CCL22, CCL3, CCL4, CCL7, and CXCL10), membrane proteins, and the genes involved in antigen processing and presentation as well as cell cycle or apoptosis. The chemokine gene expression data were confirmed by real-time reverse transcription-PCR, while the expression of cytokine genes was correlated with their secretion. A completely different pattern of gene expression was observed for DC treated with an encapsulated strain of C. neoformans. In particular, no significant induction was observed in the expression of the genes mentioned above. Moreover, a number of genes, such as those coding for chemokines, were down-regulated. These results suggest that the polysaccharide capsule shrouding the cell wall of C. neoformans plays a fundamental role in inducing DC response, highlighting the molecular basis of the true nature of immune silencing exerted by capsular material.
Intracranial bleeding in acute promyelocytic leukemia treated with arsenic trioxide based regimens is associated with induction mortality but not with relapse (2023)

Intracranial bleeding in acute promyelocytic leukemia treated with arsenic trioxide based regimens is
Efficient Asynchronous RPC Calls for Microservices: DeathStarBench Study (2022)

Crucial in the performance of microservice applications is the efficient handling of RPC calls. We found that the asynchronous call implementation in a popular microservice benchmark suite, DeathStarBench, causes a bottleneck in thread management, reducing the peak throughput and increasing latency at high request rates. Replacing the threaded implementation with a fiber implementation increases peak throughput by up to 6x, meaning that the service can operate at a higher request rate without significantly increasing response latency.
Detection of urothelial carcinoma using plasma cell-free methylated DNA. (2020)

5046 Background: Methylation profiling of circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is a promising approach for non-invasive tumor detection due to the presence of tissue-specific epigenetic signatures that are detectable in cfDNA. Cell-free methylated DNA immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing (cfMedDIP-seq) is a sensitive, low-input, cost-effective, bisulfite-free approach to profiling cfDNA methylomes, capable of detecting and classifying various tumor types. We tested the feasibility of cfMeDIP-seq to detect urothelial carcinoma (UC) in plasma samples. Methods: We performed cfMeDIP-seq on plasma samples from 43 patients (pts): 18 metastatic UC (UC) pts, 12 pre-cystectomy non-metastatic UC pts, and 13 cancer-free controls. Six (50%) of pre-cystectomy cases were non-muscle invasive UC. cfDNA was immunoprecipitated and enriched using an antibody targeting 5-methylcytosine and PCR-amplified to create a sequence-ready library. The top differentially methylated regions (DMRs) between UC and control samples were used to train a regularized binomial generalized linear model using 80% of the samples as a training set. The 20% of withheld test samples were then assigned a probability of being UC or control. This process was repeated 100 times. Results: The average amount (standard deviation) of cfDNA isolated from 1 ml of UC plasma samples was 29.2 (27.4) ng/µL and 8.02 (3.58) ng/µL in cancer-free controls. We identified 9,826 DMRs in plasma samples at an adjusted p-value of &lt; 0.01, which partitioned UC and control samples. Iterative training and classification of held out samples using the top 300 DMRs resulted in a mean AUROC of 0.987. Conclusions: cfMeDIP-seq is an interesting new approach for non-invasive detection of UC. cfMeDIP-seq demonstrates high sensitivity to detect UC across all stages of UC, including non-muscle invasive disease.
Direct cloning of human breast cancer in soft agar culture (1982)

A human tumor cloning system has been utilized to grow human breast carcinoma. A total of 225 specimens have been placed in culture. One hundred thirty-two were from primary chest cancer specimens and 93 were from metastatic lesions. Of these, 71% of the primary breast carcinomas and 75% of metastases formed greater than or equal to 5 colonies per 500,000 cells plated. Forty-five percent of the primary breast carcinomas and 52% of the metastases formed enough colonies (greater than or equal to 30 colonies per 500,000 cells plated) to perform meaningful in vitro drug testing. Estrogen receptor status did not influence the percentage of tumors which formed colonies in vitro. Histologic and nude mouse studies provided confirmatory evidence the colonies were composed of breast cancer cells. In 176 in vitro chemotherapeutic drug tests, the anticancer agents commonly used clinically for treatment of breast cancer, i.e., Adriamycin, 5-fluorouracil, etc., showed some in vitro activity. This activity was not as dramatic as is seen in the clinic with these conventional agents. Future work should concentrate on improving the number of colonies which form from breast cancer specimens and on prospective use of the system for screening for new agents for the treatment of human breast cancer.
Peptide-based antibiotics: A potential answer to raging antimicrobial resistance (2000)

Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem worldwide. The emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria leads to treatment failure and is associated with severe outcomes: increased mortality, morbidity, and expenditure. For some of these organisms, no treatment option is available. In contrast, very few new antibiotics are currently being developed and no new classes of antibiotics which are active against Gram-negative bacilli are under investigation. During the past decade, several peptide-based antimicrobials of vertebrate origin were identified as a novel and promising class of antibiotics. Peptide-based antibiotics are attractive both to fundamental research (a novel mechanism of action) and for their potential therapeutic applications. They are relatively small molecules, their action is fast and lethal to a large spectrum of pathogens, and they seem to escape many of the drug resistance mechanisms. Compared to classical antibiotics, peptides portray a highly modular synthetic antimicrobial system. As shown for the frog peptides, dermaseptins, this system allows a multitude of simple and cost-effective chemical modifications that dramatically affect activity in terms of potency and selectivity. Unlike classical antibiotics that must penetrate the target cell to act on it, antimicrobial peptides are believed to kill target cells by destroying their membrane(s). Theoretically, this mode of action should severely reduce microbial resistance and represents, therefore, a promising alternative in the treatment of raging multidrug-resistant infectious diseases. Drug Dev. Res. 50:440–447, 2000. © 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
ChemInform Abstract: The Vinylogous Intramolecular Morita—Baylis—Hillman Reaction: Synthesis of Functionalized Cyclopentenes and Cyclohexenes with Trialkylphosphines as Nucleophilic Catalysts. (2002)

Abstract ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 100 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract of an article which was published elsewhere, please select a “Full Text” option. The original article is trackable via the “References” option.
Operation of a high frequency piezoelectric ultrasound array with an application specific integrated circuit (2009)

Integration of a piezoelectric high frequency ultrasound (HFUS) array with a microfabricated application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) performing a range of functions has several advantages for ultrasound imaging. The number of signal cables between the array/electronics and the data acquisition / imaging system can be reduced, cutting costs and increasing functionality. Electrical impedance matching is also simplified and the same approach can reduce overall system dimensions for applications such as endoscopic ultrasound. The work reported in this paper demonstrates early ASIC operation with a piezocomposite HFUS array operating at approximately 30 MHz. The array was tested in three different modes. Clear signals were seen in catch-mode, with an external transducer as a source of ultrasound, and in pitch-mode with the external transducer as a receiver. Pitch-catch mode was also tested successfully, using sequential excitation on three array elements, and viable signals were detected. However, these were relatively small and affected by interference from mixed-signal sources in the ASIC. Nevertheless, the functionality and compatibility of the two main components of an integrated HFUS - ASIC device have been demonstrated and the means of further optimization are evident.
Crystal Cored Fiber Using Organic Material And Focusing Properties Of Generated Second-Harmonic Wave (1990)

A single crystal-cored fiber using 4-(N, N-dimethylamino)-3-acetamidonitrobenzene (DAN) was fabricated. Single mode-propagation was achieved for dense flint glass cladding. The single ring-pattern of the second-harmonic wave corresponding to the singly guided fundamental mode was obtained and its conversion efficiency was 0.42% at the fundamental power of 29.3W. After collimation using an axicon lens, the second-harmonic wave from the fiber could be focused into a smaller spot than the usual light beam with a circular aperture.
Analysis of Mode Competition in Resonant Leaky-Wave Coupled Phase-Locked Arrays of Mid-IR Quantum Cascade Lasers (2019)

A numerical model is developed for a phase-locked array of quantum cascade lasers. The population density is derived from rate equations. The temperature distribution for stationary generation is produced by ohmic heating. It is shown that the results of above-threshold operation modeling by the semi-vectorial beam propagation method are in good agreement with the modal analysis provided by the vectorial-COMSOL solver supplemented with the Rigrod's model estimations. The wall-plug efficiency and the limits of the single-mode lasing are found. Thermal lensing is shown to be the main reason limiting the single-spatial-mode power under CW-operating conditions.
Tumor Cell Death and ATP Release Prime Dendritic Cells and Efficient Anticancer Immunity (2010)

By destroying tumor cells, conventional anticancer therapies may stimulate the host immune system to eliminate residual disease. Anthracyclines, oxaliplatin, and ionizing irradiation activate a type of tumor cell death that elicits efficient anticancer immune responses depending on interferon gamma (IFNgamma) and the IFNgamma receptor. Thus, dying tumor cells emit danger signals that are perceived by dendritic cells (DC), which link innate and cognate immune responses. Recently, we observed that ATP was released by tumor cells succumbing to chemotherapy. ATP activates purinergic P2RX7 receptors on DC, thus activating the NLRP3/ASC/caspase-1 inflammasome and driving the secretion of interleukin-1beta (IL-1beta). IL-1beta then is required for the adequate polarization of IFNgamma-producing CD8(+) T cells. These results imply a novel danger signal, ATP, and a novel receptor, P2RX7, in the chemotherapy-elicited anticancer immune response.
DDBJ dealing with mass data produced by the second generation sequencer (2008)

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) (http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) collected and released 2 368 110 entries or 1 415 106 598 bases in the period from July 2007 to June 2008. The releases in this period include genome scale data of Bombyx mori, Oryzas latipes, Drosophila and Lotus japonicus. In addition, from this year we collected and released trace archive data in collaboration with National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The first release contains those of O. latipes and bacterial meta genomes in human gut. To cope with the current progress of sequencing technology, we also accepted and released more than 100 million of short reads of parasitic protozoa and their hosts that were produced by using a Solexa sequencer.
Combined use of solid-state NMR spectroscopy and theoretical modelling as a method of structure determination (2017)

NMR crystallography is an area of materials research concerned with acquiring structural information by combining solid-state NMR spectroscopy with theoretical modelling of NMR parameters. The development of this research field has been facilitated by the development of highly accurate methods for calculating NMR parameters in periodic structures. In particular, calculations with the Gauge Including Projector Augmented Waves (GIPAW) 1 method routinely show a 2 ppm accuracy for 13 C spectra, 2 making them invaluable in helping assign the spectra and distinguish polymorphic structures.
Thin films in partial wetting: stability, dewetting and coarsening (2018)

A uniform nanometric thin liquid film on a solid substrate can become unstable due to the action of van der Waals (vdW) forces. The instability leads to dewetting of the uniform film and the formation of drops. To minimize the total free energy of the system, these drops coarsen over time until one single drop remains. Here, using a thermodynamically consistent framework, we derive a new model for thin films in partial wetting with a free energy that resembles the Cahn–Hilliard form with a height-dependent surface tension that leads to a generalized disjoining pressure, and revisit the dewetting problem. Using both linear stability analysis and nonlinear simulations we show that the new model predicts a slightly smaller critical instability wavelength and a significantly (up to six-fold) faster growth rate than the classical model in the spinodal regime; this faster growth rate brings the theoretical predictions closer to published experimental observations. During coarsening at intermediate times, the dynamics become self-similar and model-independent; we therefore observe the same scalings in both the classical (with and without thermal noise) and new models. Both models also lead to a mean-field Lifshitz–Slyozov–Wagner (LSW)-type droplet-size distribution at intermediate times for small drop sizes. We, however, observe a skewed drop-size distribution for larger drops in the new model; while the tail of the distribution follows a Smoluchowski equation, it is not associated with a coalescence-dominated coarsening, calling into question the association made in some earlier experiments. Our observations point to the importance of the height dependence of surface tension in the early and late stages of dewetting of nanometric films and motivate new high-resolution experimental observations to guide the development of improved models of interfacial flows at the nanoscale.
Antibody evasion by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 (2022)

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/5 have surged notably to become dominant in the United States and South Africa, respectively<sup>1,2</sup>. These new subvariants carrying further mutations in their spike proteins raise concerns that they may further evade neutralizing antibodies, thereby further compromising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutic monoclonals. We now report findings from a systematic antigenic analysis of these surging Omicron subvariants. BA.2.12.1 is only modestly (1.8-fold) more resistant to sera from vaccinated and boosted individuals than BA.2. However, BA.4/5 is substantially (4.2-fold) more resistant and thus more likely to lead to vaccine breakthrough infections. Mutation at spike residue L452 found in both BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/5 facilitates escape from some antibodies directed to the so-called class 2 and 3 regions of the receptor-binding domain<sup>3</sup>. The F486V mutation found in BA.4/5 facilitates escape from certain class 1 and 2 antibodies but compromises the spike affinity for the viral receptor. The R493Q reversion mutation, however, restores receptor affinity and consequently the fitness of BA.4/5. Among therapeutic antibodies authorized for clinical use, only bebtelovimab retains full potency against both BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/5. The Omicron lineage of SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, successively yielding subvariants that are not only more transmissible but also more evasive to antibodies.
F132 Numerical Evaluation of Flow Velocity of Natural Convection due to Heat Generation from Hemisphere (2014)

This paper describes relationship between heat transfer from hemisphere heating element and flow velocity in water. CFD calculation was applied to clarify the relationship by changing a diameter, calorific value and water temperature. As a result of the calculations, whole calorific value shows good correlation to the flow velocity. And also, Rayleigh number shows better correlation to the flow velocity. To evaluate flow velocity in actual situations, correlation equations between quantifiable value and flow velocity were proposed.