Browsing by Author "Chiu Y.-P."

Background We investigated the impact of serum cholesterol levels on 30-day mortality after ischemic stroke in dialysis patients. Methods From the Taiwan Stroke Registry data, we identified 46,770 ischemic stroke cases, including 1101 dialysis patients and 45,669 nondialysis patients from 2006 to 2013. Results Overall, the 30-day mortality was 1.46-fold greater in the dialysis group than in the nondialysis group (1.75 versus 1.20 per 1000 person-days). The mortality rates were 1.64, .62, 2.82, and 2.23 per 1000 person-days in dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of?<120?mg/dL, 120-159?mg/dL, 160-199?mg/dL, and ?200?mg/dL, respectively. Compared to dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of 120-159?mg/dL, the corresponding adjusted hazard ratios of mortality were 4.20 (95% confidence interval [CI]?=?1.01-17.4), 8.06 (95% CI?=?2.02-32.2), and 6.89 (95% CI?=?1.59-29.8) for those with cholesterol levels of?<120?mg/dL, 160-199?mg/dL, and??200?mg/dL, respectively. Conclusions Dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of??160?mg/dL or?<120?mg/dL on admission are at an elevated hazard of 30-day mortality after ischemic stroke. ? 2017 National Stroke Association

Words to express relations in natural language (NL) statements may be different from those to represent properties in knowledge bases (KB). The vocabulary gap becomes barriers for knowledge base construction and retrieval. With the demo system called NL2KB in this paper, users can browse which properties in KB side may be mapped to for a given relational pattern in NL side. Besides, they can retrieve the sets of relational patterns in NL side for a given property in KB side. We describe how the mapping is established in detail. Although the mined patterns are used for Chinese knowledge base applications, the methodology can be extended to other languages. ? COLING 2016 - 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of COLING 2016: System Demonstrations.

This paper presents the NTUNLP systems in the long track and the short track of the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge 2014. We first create a dictionary that contains the possible surface forms of Freebase Ids, then scan the given text from left to right with the longest match strategy to detect the mentions, and eliminate the unwanted surface forms based on a stop word list. Methods to link to the most relevant entities and select the best candidate are proposed for these two tracks, respectively. The outside resources such as DBpedia Spotlight and TAGME are integrated to our basic NTUNLP systems. Various experimental setups are presented and discussed with the development set. In the formal run, one NTUNLP system wins the first prize in the short track and another NTUNLP system gets the fourth place in the long track. Copyright 2014 ACM.

In this paper, we present a question-answering (QA) system as a virtual tutor for students in the 5th and 6th grades. Students ask questions and the QA system gives answers to their questions based on a knowledge base. Teaching materials for history and geography are considered as a knowledge source. Because question log is not available in developing QA systems, multiple choice questions (MCQs) in the learning and testing materials are regarded as a training corpus to learn question types, answer types and keywords for retrieval, where an MCQ consists of a stem and a set of options. Options from the same MCQ are grouped into a cluster. Clusters with common elements are merged into a larger cluster. A cluster is labelled with a nominal element selected from the corresponding stems. We also mine question patterns from the stems for question type analysis in the QA system. Because the questions created by instructors in MCQs and the questions asked by students may be different, we develop a procedure to collect possible questions from students in the 6th grade. In the experiments, we first evaluate the question type classification systems using the MCQ corpus and the student corpus with 5-fold cross validation, respectively. Then we train question type classifiers with the complete MCQ corpus, and test them on the student corpus. The student's and the instructor's questions are compared and analyzed.

Background and aims: Renal dysfunction is a potent risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, including stroke. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of admission estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) levels on short-term (1-month) and long-term (1-year) mortality in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Methods: From the Taiwan Stroke Registry data, we classified ischemic stroke patients, identified from April 2006 to December 2015, into 5 groups by eGFR at admission: ? 90, 60–89, 30–59, 15–29, and <15 mL/min/1.73 m2 or on dialysis. Risks of 1-month mortality and 1-year mortality after ischemic stroke were investigated by the eGFR level. Results: Among 52,732 ischemic stroke patients, 1480 died within one month. The 1-month mortality rate was over 5-fold greater in patients with eGFR <15 mL/min/1.73 m2 or dialysis than in patients with eGFR ?90 mL/min/1.73 m2 (2.88 versus 0.56 per 1000 person-days). The adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of 1-month mortality increased from 1.31 (95% CI = 1.08–1.59) for patients with eGFR 60–89 mL/min/1.73 m2 to 2.33 (95% CI = 1.80–3.02) for patients with eGFR < 15 mL/min/1.73 m2 or on dialysis. 3226 patients died within one year. The adjusted HR of mortality increased from 1.38 (95% CI = 1.21–1.59) for patients with eGFR 60–89 mL/min/1.73 m2 to 2.60 (95% CI 2.18–3.10) for patients with eGFR < 15 mL/min/1.73 m2 or on dialysis, compared to patients with eGFR ? 90 mL/min/1.73 m2. Conclusions: After acute ischemic stroke, patients with reduced eGFR are at elevated risks of short-term and long-term deaths in a graded relationship. ? 2017 Elsevier B.V.

A novel atomic stacking transporting layer (ASTL) based on 2D atomic sheets of titania (Ti1−δO2) is demonstrated in organic–inorganic lead halide perovskite solar cells. The atomically thin ASTL of 2D titania, which is fabricated using a solution-processed self-assembly atomic layer-by-layer deposition technique, exhibits the unique features of high UV transparency and negligible (or very low) oxygen vacancies, making it a promising electron transporting material in the development of stable and high-performance perovskite solar cells. In particular, the solution-processable atomically thin ASTL of 2D titania atomic sheets shows superior inhibition of UV degradation of perovskite solar cell devices, compared to the conventional high-temperature sintered TiO2 counterpart, which usually causes the notorious instability of devices under UV irradiation. The discovery opens up a new dimension to utilize the 2D layered materials with a great variety of homostructrual or heterostructural atomic stacking architectures to be integrated with the fabrication of large-area photovoltaic or optoelectronic devices based on the solution processes. © 2017 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Two contradictory plate-kinematic models, (1) collision extrusion and (2) mid- to lower-crustal-level flow, have been proposed for inducing crustal deformation surrounding the eastern Tibetan Plateau in response to the Cenozoic collision of India-Eurasia. A hybrid tectonic model indicating extrusion followed by crustal flow is established by new structural, petrological, and geochronological data obtained from the Gaoligong shear zone in western Yunnan, China. The 40Ar/39Ar ages for muscovite (34-31 Ma), biotite (23 Ma), and K-feldspar (33-21 Ma) mineral separates from the Gaoligong group, and a matrix crosscutting quartzofeldspathic dike produce a cooling path. By interlinking the synkinematic metamorphic conditions with the reconstructed cooling path, we find that the temperature dropped from 550 ¢XC around ca. 34 Ma to 350 ¢XC at ca. 32 Ma, and dropped again to 275 ¢XC around ca. 22 Ma. The timing and kinematic mechanism of four ductile deformation events, followed by brittle deformation, is deciphered. The earliest D1 event deformed the Early Cretaceous granite (zircon U-Pb ages of 118-78 Ma), forming WNW-ESE-striking upright folds during the closure of the Neo-Tethyan ocean. The D2 event was associated with large-scale eastward thrusting and folding with top-to-the- N/NE sense of shear under upper-amphibolite- facies conditions between 50 and 35 Ma due to India-Eurasia continent-continent collision. D3 formed moderate NE-dipping, NW-SE-striking, left-lateral shear zones that accommodated the southeastward extrusion of Indochina around 35-28 Ma. The sinistral sense of shear S/C fabrics defined by muscovite folia with foliation-bounded myrmekite indicates that deformation occurred under middle- to lower-amphibolite-facies metamorphic conditions. The 28 Ma to 15 Ma steep N-S-trending, right-lateral Gaoligong shear belt (D4) is the dominant structural feature in this region. Chloritization of biotite and boudinaged sillimanite along S/C2 fabrics indicate that the crystalline rocks retrograded from amphibolite-facies into greenschist- facies conditions. This coincided with clockwise cataclastic flow around the Eastern Himalaya syntaxis due to gravitational collapse after delamination of the thickened Tibetan Plateau. ? 2018 Geological Society of America.