nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Robotic lobectomy can be taught while maintaining quality patient outcomes.
Venue: The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery

The objective is to report our outcomes of teaching and performing minimally invasive robotic lobectomy.  Robotic lobectomy was divided into 19 specific sequential technical maneuvers. The number of steps residents could perform in a set period of time was recorded. Video review by the attending surgeon and coaching were used to improve what residents could safely perform. Outcomes compared were percentage of maneuvers that general surgical or cardiothoracic residents (fellows) completed, operative times, and Society of Thoracic Surgeons defined metrics of patient outcomes.  There were 520 consecutive robotic lobectomies over 5 years. The various maneuvers completed by general surgical residents (N 35) and cardiothoracic residents (N 7) increased over time, for example, steps 1 to 5 increased 20% and 70% compared with 80% and 90% (P .001) step 8 increased 0% and 50% compared with 90% and 100% (P .0001) and step 19 increased 30% and 50% compared with 90% and 100% (P .001) respectively. Operative outcomes, including intraoperative blood loss, median number of lymph nodes, median length of stay, major morbidity, and 30 day and 90 day mortality, were no different. Operative time initially increased and then decreased over time. Conversion to thoracotomy (15% to 2.5% P .042) and major vascular injury (3% to 0% P .018) decreased.  Robotic lobectomy can be safely taught to residents without compromising patient outcomes by dividing it into a series of surgical maneuvers. Recording outcomes for each step and using video review and coaching techniques may help increase the percent of maneuvers residents can complete in a set time.
Coaching of patients with an isolated minimally displaced fracture of the radial head immediately increases range of motion.
Venue: Journal of hand therapy official journal of the American Society of Hand Therapists

Prospective cohort.  Elbow stiffness is the most common adverse event after isolated radial head fractures.  To assess the effect of coaching on elbow motion during the same office visit in patients with such fractures.  We enrolled 49 adult patients with minimally displaced radial head fractures, within 14 days of injury. After diagnosis, we measured demographics, catastrophic thinking, health anxiety, symptoms of depression, upper extremity specific symptoms and disability, pain, and elbow and wrist motion. The patient was taught to apply an effective stretch in spite of the pain to limit stiffness, and elbow motion was measured again.  With the exception of radial deviation and pronation, motion measures improved slightly but significantly on average immediately after coaching. Elbow flexion improved from 79% (110deg 22deg) of the uninjured side to 88% (122deg 18deg) after coaching (P .001) elbow extension improved from 71% (29deg 14deg) to 78% (22deg 15deg) (P .0012) DISCUSSION Instruction that stretching exercises are healthy even when painful resulted in immediate improvements in motion. Prospective studies comparing different strategies for coaching patients regarding painful stretches might help clarify the optimal approach.
Droplet condensation on superhydrophobic surfaces with enhanced dewetting under a tangential AC electric field

In this Letter, the dewetting behavior of superhydrophobic condensing surfaces under a tangential AC electric field is reported. The surface coverage of condensed droplets only exhibits a negligible increase with time. The jumping frequency of droplets is enhanced. The AC electric field motivates the dynamic transition of droplets from stretch to recoil, resulting in the counterforce propelling droplet jumping. The considerable horizontal component of jumping velocity facilitates droplet departure from superhydrophobic surfaces. Both the amplitude and frequency of AC voltage are important factors for droplet departure and dewetting effect. Thereby, the tangential electric field provides a unique and easily implementable approach to enhance droplet removal from superhydrophobic condensing surfaces.
Cancer Statistics in Korea: Incidence, Mortality, Survival, and Prevalence in 2013
Venue: Cancer research and treatment official journal of Korean Cancer Association

This study described the 2013 nationwide cancer statistics in Korea, including cancer incidence, survival, prevalence, and mortality.  Cancer incidence data from 1999 2013 were obtained from Korea National Cancer Incidence Database and followed until December 31, 2014. Mortality data from 1983 2013 were obtained from Statistics Korea. The prevalence was defined as the number of cancer patients alive on January 1, 2014 among all cancer patients diagnosed since 1999. Crude, and age standardized and 5 year relative survival rates were also calculated.  In 2013, a total of 225,343 and 75,334 Koreans were newly diagnosed and died from cancer, respectively. The age standardized rates for cancer incidence and mortality in 2013 were 290.5 and 87.9 per 100,000, respectively. The age standardized cancer incidence rate increased 3.1% annually between 1999 and 2013. However, the overall cancer incidence rates have decreased slightly in recent years (2011 to 2013) The age standardized rate for all cancer mortality has decreased 2.7% annually since 2002. Overall, the 5 year relative survival rate for people diagnosed with cancer between 2009 and 2013 was 69.4% which represents an improved survival rate as compared with 41.2% for people diagnosed between 1993 and 1995.  Age standardized cancer incidence rates have decreased between 2011 and 2013; mortality rates have also declined since 2002, while 5 year survival rates have improved remarkably from 1993 1995 to 2009 2013 in Korea.
Extraction of manganese by alkyl monocarboxylic acid in a mixed extractant from a leaching solution of spent lithium ion battery ternary cathodic material

We investigate the separation of manganese by an antagonistic effect from a leaching solution of ternary cathodic material of spent lithium ion batteries that contain 11,400 mg L 1 Co, 11,700 mg L 1 Mn, 12,200 mg L 1 Ni, and 5300 mg L 1 Li using a mixture of alkyl monocarboxylic acid and di (2 ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid extractants. pH isotherm, distribution coefficient, separation factor, McCabe Thiele diagram, selective scrubbing, and countercurrent extraction tests are carried out to prove an antagonistic effect and to recover manganese using alkyl monocarboxylic in the mixed extractant. Slope analysis is used to determine the extraction mechanism between a mixture of extractants and valuable metals. An increasing concentration of alkyl monocarboxylic acid in the mixture of extractants results in a decrease in distribution coefficient of cobalt and manganese, however, the separation factor value (b (Mn/Co) increases at pH 4.5. This is caused by slope analysis where alkyl monocarboxylic acid disrupts the extraction mechanism between di (2 ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid and cobalt. Finally, continuous countercurrent extraction in a mini plant test demonstrate the feasibility of manganese recovery from cobalt, nickel, and lithium.
Iteratively reconstructing 4D light fields from focal stacks.
Venue: Applied optics

Acquiring and representing the 4D space of rays in the world (the light field) is important for many computer vision and graphics applications. In this paper, we propose an iterative method to acquire the 4D light field from a focal stack. First, a discrete refocusing equation is derived from integral imaging principles. With this equation, a linear projection system is formulated to model the focal stack imaging process. Then we reconstruct the 4D light field from the focal stack through solving the inverse problem with a filtering based iterative method. The experimental results show that our approach is effective and outperforms state of the art methods in reconstruction accuracy, reduced sampling, and occluded boundaries.
Intrinsic image decomposition using focal stacks
Venue: ICVGIP '16

In this paper, we presents a novel method (RGBF IID) for intrinsic image decomposition of a wild scene without any restrictions on the complexity, illumination or scale of the image. We use focal stacks of the scene as input. A focal stack captures a scene at varying focal distances. Since focus depends on distance to the object, this representation has information beyond an RGB image towards an RGBD image with depth. We call our representation an RGBF image to highlight this. We use a robust focus measure and generalized random walk algorithm to compute dense probability maps across the stack. These maps are used to define sparse local and global pixel neighbourhoods, adhering to the structure of the underlying 3D scene. We use these neighbourhood correspondences with standard chromaticity assumptions as constraints in an optimization system. We present our results on both indoor and outdoor scenes using manually captured stacks of random objects under natural as well as artificial lighting conditions. We also test our system on a larger dataset of synthetically generated focal stacks from NYUv2 and MPI Sintel datasets and show competitive performance against current state of the art IID methods that use RGBD images. Our method provides a strong evidence for the potential of RGBF modality in place of RGBD in computer vision.
Optimizing Intersection Over Union in Deep Neural Networks for Image Segmentation
Venue: ISVC

We consider the problem of learning deep neural networks (DNNs) for object category segmentation, where the goal is to label each pixel in an image as being part of a given object (foreground) or not (background) Deep neural networks are usually trained with simple loss functions (e.g. softmax loss) These loss functions are appropriate for standard classification problems where the performance is measured by the overall classification accuracy. For object category segmentation, the two classes (foreground and background) are very imbalanced. The intersection over union (IoU) is usually used to measure the performance of any object category segmentation method. In this paper, we propose an approach for directly optimizing this IoU measure in deep neural networks. Our experimental results on two object category segmentation datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms DNNs trained with standard softmax loss.
Protective Effect of Trichosanthes Dioica Extract Against Gentamicin Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats

Nephropathy is one of the progressive complications prevailed all around the world that is observed which arises due to detrimental effects of metabolites created due to various metabolic and physiological reactions. Gentamicin is one of the drug that may cause nephrotoxicity.  Phytoremedies are being considered as to play deterrent role in the treatment of disease. T. dioica is widely distributed in Asian subcontinent and consumed as food. The present work is aimed to study nephroprotective activity of T. dioica.  Dried T. dioica fruits were extracted with methanol and the extract was subjected to phytochemical analysis. Acute toxicity was determined as per OECD guidelines. Gentamicin (80 mg/Kg) was used to induce nephrotoxicity. The extract was given orally. Kidney weight was determined and estimation of blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine, uric acid, catalase, superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, lipid peroxidation, urinary electrolytes was performed.  Decrement in serum urea and creatinine along with reduction in uric acid was observed. Similarly, restoration of antioxidant enzymes and normalization of urinary electrolytes and kidney weight was observed. Observations from present study divulged that T. dioica, which is a good source of antioxidant phytochemicals, is accountable for nephroprotective activity.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS EFFECT ON ATTITUDES AMONG MILLENNIALS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Online interpersonal interaction and communication has become an important aspect of social activities, especially among Millennials (young adults) However, the African continent has the lowest Internet access across the globe, but the development and rapid adoption of mobile technology has led to a major increase in the usage of Internet and new online Information and Communications Technology (ICT) channels, which are collectively referred to as social media. Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life and marketing communications via these digital channels has become one of the latest trends in South Africa (SA) The most commonly used social medium in the world is Facebook, whereas Mxit is the largest locally established online ICT conduit. However, not much is known about Millennials' attitudes towards social media as an advertising medium. Therefore, several surveys were used to investigate the effect of social media (Facebook and Mxit) marketing communications have on each of the hierarchy response model attitude stages among Millennials in SA. The results confirm that social media marketing communications have a significant influence on all of the hierarchy response model attitude stages, but on a declining degree as South African Millennials progress to the higher stages. Furthermore, the findings also reveal that several online usage and demographic characteristics have a significant influence on attitudes towards these new interactive ICT conduits.
Social media marketing communications effects on attitudes among millennials in South Africa

Online interpersonal interaction and communication has become an important aspect of social activities, especially among Millennials (young adults) However, the African continent has the lowest Internet access across the globe, but the development and rapid adoption of mobile technology has led to a major increase in the usage of Internet and new online Information and Communications Technology (ICT) channels, which are collectively referred to as social media. Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life and marketing communications via these digital channels has become one of the latest trends in South Africa (SA) The most commonly used social medium in the world is Facebook, whereas Mxit is the largest locally established online ICT conduit. However, not much is known about Millennials' attitudes towards social media as an advertising medium. Therefore, several surveys were used to investigate the effect of social media (Facebook and Mxit) marketing communications have on each of the hierarchy response model attitude stages among Millennials in SA. The results confirm that social media marketing communications have a significant influence on all of the hierarchy response model attitude stages, but on a declining degree as South African Millennials progress to the higher stages. Furthermore, the findings also reveal that several online usage and demographic characteristics have a significant influence on attitudes towards these new interactive ICT conduits.
Husky: Towards a More Efficient and Expressive Distributed Computing Framework
Venue: Proc. VLDB Endow.

Finding efficient, expressive and yet intuitive programming models for data parallel computing system is an important and open problem. Systems like Hadoop and Spark have been widely adopted for massive data processing, as coarse grained primitives like map and reduce are succinct and easy to master. However, sometimes over simplified API hinders programmers from more fine grained control and designing more efficient algorithms. Developers may have to resort to sophisticated domain specific languages (DSLs) or even low level layers like MPI, but this raises development cost learning many mutually exclusive systems prolongs the development schedule, and the use of low level tools may result in bugprone programming.This motivated us to start the Husky open source project, which is an attempt to strike a better balance between high performance and low development cost. Husky is developed mainly for in memory large scale data mining, and also serves as a general research platform for designing efficient distributed algorithms. We show that many existing frameworks can be easily implemented and bridged together inside Husky, and Husky is able to achieve similar or even better performance compared with domain specific systems.
Distributed computing over encrypted data
Venue: 2016 54th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton)

We present a new theme for performing computations directly on encrypted data: the concept of homomorphic encryption, i.e. cryptosystems that allow a user to manipulate encrypted information even without knowing the secret key. In an attempt to alleviate the gap between cryptography which naturally operates on rings, groups, and fields, and signal processing which typically operates on real(complex) valued data, we set the stage for distributed operations on encrypted data. We leverage advances in homomorphic encryption (such as the RSA, Paillier and Gentry cryptosystems) and in quantized signal processing and consensus to devise encryption friendly distributed computing primitives. In specific, we show how to perform encrypted average consensus with finite time convergence, using modular multiplication and exponentiation on encrypted information. We present the architecture for secure cloud computing and discuss its advantages and applicability to a wide range of data mining, signal processing and control operations over the cloud.
TriviA and uTriviA: two fast and secure authenticated encryption schemes
Venue: Journal of Cryptographic Engineering

In this paper, we propose two hardware optimized authenticated encryption schemes: TriviA v2 and uTriviA. Both TriviA v2, an efficient hardware optimization of TriviA 0 v1, and uTriviA are based on (i) a stream cipher for generating keys for the ciphertext and the tag, and (ii) a pairwise independent hash to compute the tag. We have adopted one of the ISO standardized stream ciphers for lightweight cryptography, namely Trivium, to obtain our underlying stream cipher. The main structure of TriviA v2 remains same as TriviA 0 v1, except some changes in the internal functions. The stream cipher used both in TriviA v2 and uTriviA has a 384 bit state, slightly larger than Trivium, and can accommodate a 128 bit secret key and IV. TriviA v2 uses a pairwise independent hash which is an adaptation of the EHC or "Encode Hash Combine" hash that requires the optimum number of field multiplications and hence requires small hardware footprint. uTriviA uses a pairwise independent hash which is an adaptation of the HC or "Hash Combine" hash which is close to EHC but does not use any encode function. We prove that TriviA v2 construction has at least 128 bit security for privacy and 124 bit security of authenticity under the assumption that the underlying stream cipher produces a pseudorandom bit stream. The uTriviA construction achieves at least 128 bit security for privacy and 93 bit security of authenticity under the same assumption. We have implemented the designs in synthesizable RTL. Pre layout synthesis using 65 nm standard cell technology reveals that TriviA v2 is able to achieve a high throughput of 65.9 Gbps for an area of 21.2 KGE, whereas TriviA 0 v1 achieved a much higher hardware area. The uTriviA design achieves a hardware area of only 16.74 KGE, which is lowest among all the TriviA variants but with a lower throughput of 36.76 Gbps. Finally, we provide a brief comparison between the three constructions TriviA 0 v1, TriviA v2 and uTriviA and the other standard implementations in terms of hardware area efficiency metric.
Efficient Beyond Birthday Bound Secure Deterministic Authenticated Encryption with Minimal Stretch
Venue: ACISP

Block cipher based authenticated encryption has obtained considerable attention from the ongoing CAESAR competition. While the focus of CAESAR resides primarily on nonce based authenticated encryption, Deterministic Authenticated Encryption DAE is used in domains such as key wrap, where the available message entropy motivates to omit the overhead for nonces. Since the highest possible security is desirable when protecting keys, beyond birthday bound BBB security is a valuable goal for DAE. In the past, significant efforts had to be invested into designing BBB secure AE schemes from conventional block ciphers, with the consequences of losing efficiency and sophisticating security proofs. This work proposes Deterministic Counter in Tweak DCT, a BBB secure DAE scheme inspired by the Counter in Tweak encryption scheme by Peyrin and Seurin. Our design combines a fast \epsilon almost XOR universal family of hash functions, for \epsilon close to $2^ 2n} with a single call to a 2n bit SPRP, and a BBB secure encryption scheme. First, we describe our construction generically with three independent keys, one for each component. Next, we present an efficient instantiation which 1 requires only a single key, 2 provides software efficiency by encrypting at less than two cycles per byte on current x64 processors, and 3 produces only the minimal \tau bit stretch for \tau bit authenticity. We leave open two minor aspects for future work: our current generic construction is defined for messages of at least $2n \tau bits, and the verification algorithm requires the inverse of the used 2n bit SPRP and the encryption scheme.
Adsorptive Removal of Erythrosin B Dye onto Terminalia Catappa Endocarp Prepared Activated Carbon: Kinetics, Isotherm and Thermodynamics Studies

The effectiveness of activated carbon prepared from Terminalia catappa (almond) endocarp via thermal and chemical activation for the adsorption of Erythrosin B (EB) dye was investigated. The thermally activated sample was impregnated with 60% by weight phosphoric acid (H 3 PO 4 in 1:2 weight basis of activating agent to Terminalia catappa (almond) endocarp. Physico chemical analyses results revealed the potential suitability of the prepared acid activated almond endocarp (AAAE) as an adsorbent. Further results obtained show that particle size, adsorbent dosage, pH, time, ion concentration and temperature had significant effect on the percentage of EB dye adsorbed. Freundlich model best fitted the experimental data compared to the results obtained for Langmuir and Dubnin Radushkevich isotherm models. The adsorption kinetic data was modelled using the pseudo first order, pseudo second order and Elovich kinetic models. The kinetics of the adsorption process best followed the Elovich model. Thermodynamic parameters: Gibb's free energy DG enthalpy change DH and entropy change DS were determined to evaluate the feasibility of the process and the effect of temperature on the system. The negative free energy obtained confirms the feasibility of the adsorption process. The adsorption of EB on the acid activated almond endocarp was found to be exothermic.  Adsorption; Almond endocarp; Erythrosin B; Isotherm; Kinetics; Adsorption thermodynamics