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Objective The purpose of this study was to develop a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline to identify incidental thyroid nodules (ITNs) meeting criteria for sonographic follow-up and to assess both adherence rates to white paper recommendations and downstream outcomes related to these incidental findings. Methods 21583 non-contrast chest CT reports from 2017 and 2018 were retrospectively evaluated to identify reports which included either an explicit recommendation for thyroid ultrasound, a description of a nodule ≥ 1.5 cm, or description of a nodule with suspicious features. Reports from 2018 were used to train an NLP algorithm called fastText for automated identification of such reports. Algorithm performance was then evaluated on the 2017 reports. Next, any patient from 2017 with a report meeting criteria for ultrasound follow-up was further evaluated with manual chart review to determine follow-up adherence rates and nodule-related outcomes. Results NLP identified reports with ITNs meeting criteria for sonographic follow-up with an accuracy of 96.5% (95% CI 96.2-96.7) and sensitivity of 92.1% (95% CI 89.8-94.3). In 10006 chest CTs from 2017, ITN follow-up ultrasound was indicated according to white paper criteria in 81 patients (0.8%), explicitly recommended in 46.9% (38/81) of patients, and obtained in less than half of patients in which it was appropriately recommended (17/35, 48.6%). Discussion NLP accurately identified chest CT reports meeting criteria for ITN ultrasound follow-up. Radiologist adherence to white paper guidelines and subsequent referrer adherence to radiologist recommendations showed room for improvement.

Clear legal content of white papers provides certainty, stability and trust in the relations between all the participants in initial coins offering (ICO) procedures and contributes to the successfu...

In this paper, the implementation of artificial neural networks (multilayer perceptron [MLP] and radial base functions [RBF]) and the upgraded Markov chain model have been studied and performed to identify the human behavior patterns during rock, paper, and scissors game. The main motivation of this research is the design and construction of an intelligent robot with the ability to defeat a human opponent. MATLAB software has been used to implement intelligent algorithms. After implementing the algorithms, their effectiveness in detecting human behavior pattern has been investigated. To ensure the ideal performance of the implemented model, each player played with the desired algorithms in three different stages. The results showed that the percentage of winning computer with MLP and RBF neural networks and upgraded Markov model, on average in men and women is 59%, 76.66%, and 75%, respectively. Obtained results clearly indicate a very good performance of the RBF neural network and the upgraded Markov model in the mental modeling of the human opponent in the game of rock, paper, and scissors. In the end, the designed game has been employed in both hardware and software which include the Zana intelligent robot and a digital version with a graphical user interface design on the stand. To the best knowledge of the authors, the precision of novel presented method for determining human behavior patterns was the highest precision among all of the previous studies.

In this paper, we present a system for automatic evaluation of the quality of a question paper. Question paper plays a major role in educational assessment. The quality of a question paper is crucial to fulfilling the purpose of the assessment. In many education sectors, question papers are prepared manually. A prior analysis of a question paper might help in finding the errors in the question paper, and better achieving the goals of the assessment. In this experiment, we focus on higher education in the technical domain. First, we conducted a student survey to identify the key factors that affect the quality of a question paper. The top factors we identified are question relevance, question difficulty, and time requirement. We explored the strategies to handle these factors and implemented them. We employ various concepts and techniques for the implementation. The system finally assigns a numerical quality score against these factors. The system is evaluated using a set of question papers collected from various sources. The experimental results show that the proposed system is quite promising.

Paper-based microfluidic devices are popular for their ability to automate multistep assays for chemical or biological sensing at a low cost, but the design of paper microfluidic networks has largely relied on experimental trial and error. A few mathematical models of flow through paper microfluidic devices have been developed and have succeeded in explaining experimental flow behavior. However, the reverse engineering problem of designing complex paper networks guided by appropriate mathematical models is largely unsolved. In this article, we demonstrate that a two-dimensional paper network (2DPN) designed to sequentially deliver three fluids to a test zone on the device can be computationally designed and experimentally implemented without experimental trial and error. This was accomplished by three new developments in modeling flow through paper networks: (i) coupling of the Richards equation of flow through porous media to the species transport equation, (ii) modeling flow through assemblies of multiple paper materials (test membrane and wicking pad), and (iii) incorporating limited-volume fluid sources. We demonstrate the application of this model in the optimal design of a paper-based signal-enhanced immunoassay for a malaria protein, PfHRP2. This work lays the foundation for the development of a computational design toolbox to aid in the design of paper microfluidic networks. ©

Introduction: Water is essential for normal functioning of the human body. Total fluid intake assessment using fluid record method is considered to be a burden for respondents, and the development of technology is expected to contribute favourably to this issue. My Fluid Diary is a smartphone-based application developed by the researcher as a fluid intake recording tool. This study aimed to evaluate the acceptance of manual, paper-based fluid intake recording compared to using My Fluid Diary as a trial among Indonesian vocational female students. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted to explore students’ acceptance of fluid intake recording using the smartphone-based application. An exploratory case study approach involving 38 female students as key informants was used via focus group discussion and in-depth interview as a method of triangulation. Results: Based on the data, female adolescents admitted that the application was more acceptable for fluid intake than recording manually using a book, in consideration of three aspects - the benefits, the easiness, and the application display or features. Based on its benefits, My Fluid Diary was mentioned as easy to learn and use. However, in order to improve the application, there is still a need for research development. Conclusion: My Fluid Diary was an application with respectable acceptance for fluid record compared to the manual, paper-based method among female adolescents.

PurposeSynergy indicators and social network analysis (SNA), as practical tools, provide the possibility of explaining the pattern of scientific collaboration and visualization of network relations. Recognition of scientific capacities is the basis of synergy. The present study aims to measure and discover the synergistic networks of COVID-19’s top papers at the level of co-authorship, countries, journals, bibliographic couples and titles.Design/methodology/approachThe synergy indicator, co-authorship co-citation network analysis methods were applied. The research population comprises COVID-19’s top papers indexed in Essential Science Indicator and Web of Science Core Collection 2020 and 2021. Excel 2016, UCINET 6.528.0.0 2017, NetDraw, Ravar Matrix, VOSviewer version 1.6.14 and Python 3.9.5 were applied to analyze the data and visualize the networks.FindingsThe findings indicate that considering the three possible possibilities for authors, countries and journals, more redundancy and information are created and potential for further cooperation is observed. The synergy of scientific collaboration has revealed that “Wang, Y,” “USA” and “Science of the Total Environment” have the most effective capabilities and results. “Guan (2020b)” and “Zhou (2020)” are bibliographic couplings that have received the most citations. The keywords “CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (COVID-19)” were the most frequent in article titles.Originality/valueIn a circumstance that the world is suffering from a COVID-19 pandemic and all scientists are conducting various researches to discover vaccines, medicines and new treatment methods, scientometric studies, and analysis of social networks of COVID-19 publications to be able to specify the synergy rate and the scientific collaboration networks, are not only innovative and original but also of great importance and priority; SNA tools along with the synergy indicator is capable of visualizing the complicated and multifaceted pattern of scientific collaboration in COVID-19. As a result, analyses can help identify existing capacities and define a new space for using COVID-19 researchers’ capabilities.

Headline generation is a challenging subtask of abstractive text summarization, which its output should be a summary, shorter than one sentence. It would be precious to develop a dataset for the evaluation of abstractive summarization methods on this task in the Persian language. There are several datasets for headline generation in Persian, most of which are not large enough to be used by more sophisticated methods of text summarization, such as deep learning models. Moreover, all of these datasets are focused on daily news and there is no dataset for summarizing scientific Persian papers. In this article, we present “ElmNet,” a headline generation dataset of about 400,000 abstract/headline pairs of scientific papers, gathered from six major publishers for scientific articles in Persian. We, moreover, evaluate the performance of the most important deep learning-based headline generation methods, on the proposed dataset. The results prove the comparability of the performance of the state-of-the-art methods on this task, to their results on the existing English datasets.

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of nanocellulose addition on the physical–mechanical properties of the paper produced from different fiber blends, besides comparing two nanocellulose addition methods. Three different fibers were used for fiber blending (eucalyptus, sisal, and pine). Handsheets were formed based on the mixing of all possible combinations at a 45/55 ratio in 2% consistency and 60 g/m2. Handsheet reinforcements were performed by two methods: The mixture method (MT) was a mixture of nanocellulose along with pulp during paper formation in 3, 5, and 10% addition; the coating method (CT) was the superficial coating of dry formed papers in 10% addition. Nanocellulose was produced by mechanical microfibrillation of sisal pulp. Handsheets were evaluated by physical and strength properties. Nanocellulose addition increased thickness, volume, grammage, apparent density, opacity, roughness, tensile strength, tensile index, stretch, bursting index, tear index, and fold endurance by 8.7, 8.8, 10.4, 2.1, 4.1, 23.2, 45.7, 31.8, 20.1, 14.2, 21.1, and 271.6% but reduced bulk, brightness, and air permeance by 1.9, 3.4, and 71.7%, respectively. The reinforcement methods presented distinct results. In physical properties, an increasing tendency toward nanocellulose (MT) increase was observed in thickness, grammage, and apparent density despite the decreasing trend in air permeance. No tendency was observed in other physical properties. In general, CT presented higher values of thickness, grammage, bulk, and brightness but lower values of apparent density and opacity, compared to MT. The mixture method showed an increasing tendency in strength properties with the increase of nanocellulose content. CT obtained fewer strength properties compared to MT.