LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Phase stability and biological property evaluation of plasma sprayed hydroxyapatite coatings for orthopedic and dental applications.

In this work we have investigated the effects of strontium (Sr) dopant on in vitro protein release kinetics and in vivo osteogenic properties of plasma sprayed hydroxyapatite (HA) coatings, along with their dissolution behavior. Plasma sprayed HA coatings are widely used in load-bearing implants. Apart from osseointegration, the new generation of HA coating is expected to deliver biomolecules and/or drugs that can induce osteoinduction. This paper reports the preparation of crystalline and amorphous HA coatings on commercially pure titanium (Cp-Ti) using inductively coupled radio frequency (RF) plasma spray, and their stability at different solution pH. Coatings prepared at 110 mm working distance from the nozzle showed an average Ca ion release of 18 and 90 ppm in neutral and acidic environments, respectively. Decreasing the working distance to 90 mm resulted in the formation of a coating with less crystalline HA and phases with higher solubility products, and consequently higher dissolution over 32 days. A 92% release of a model protein bovine serum albumin (BSA) in phosphate buffer with pH of 7.4 was measured for Sr-doped HA (Sr-HA) coating, while only a 72% release could be measured for pure HA coating. Distortion of BSA during adsorption on coatings revealed a strong interaction between the protein and the coating, with an increase in α-helix content. Osteoid formation was found on Sr-HA implants as early as 7 weeks post implantation compared to HA coated and uncoated Ti implants. After 12 weeks post implantation, osteoid new bone was formed on HA implants; whereas, bone mineralization started on Sr-HA samples. While no osteoid was formed on bare Ti surfaces, bone was completely mineralized on HA and Sr-HA coatings after 16 weeks post implantation. Our results show that both phase stability and chemistry can have a significant influence toward in vitro and in vivo response of HA coatings on Ti implants.
Use of virtual reality for adjunctive treatment of adult burn pain during physical therapy: a controlled study.

OBJECTIVE
The pain experienced by burn patients during physical therapy range of motion exercises can be extreme and can discourage patients from complying with their physical therapy. We explored the novel use of immersive virtual reality (VR) to distract patients from pain during physical therapy.


SETTING
This study was conducted at the burn care unit of a regional trauma center.


PATIENTS
Twelve patients aged 19 to 47 years (average of 21% total body surface area burned) performed range of motion exercises of their injured extremity under an occupational therapist's direction.


INTERVENTION
Each patient spent 3 minutes of physical therapy with no distraction and 3 minutes of physical therapy in VR (condition order randomized and counter-balanced).


OUTCOME MEASURES
Five visual analogue scale pain scores for each treatment condition served as the dependent variables.


RESULTS
All patients reported less pain when distracted with VR, and the magnitude of pain reduction by VR was statistically significant (e.g., time spent thinking about pain during physical therapy dropped from 60 to 14 mm on a 100-mm scale). The results of this study may be examined in more detail at www.hitL.washington.edu/projects/burn/.


CONCLUSIONS
Results provided preliminary evidence that VR can function as a strong nonpharmacologic pain reduction technique for adult burn patients during physical therapy and potentially for other painful procedures or pain populations.
Computer security: Art and science [Book Review]

M any security faculty members and practitioners bemoan the lack of good books in the field. Those of us who teach often find ourselves forced to rely on collections of papers to fortify our courses. In the last few years, however, we've started to see the appearance of some high-quality books to support our endeavors. Matt Bishop's book—Com-puter Security: Art and Science—is definitely hefty and packed with lots of information. It's a large book (with more than 1,000 pages), and it covers most any computer security topic that might be of interest. section discusses basic security issues at the definitional level. The Policy section addresses the relationship between policy and security, examining several types of policies in the process. Implementation I covers cryptography and its role in security. Implementation II describes how to apply policy requirements in systems. The Assurance section, which Elisabeth Sullivan wrote, introduces assurance basics and formal methods. The Special Topics section discusses malicious logic, vulnerability analysis , auditing, and intrusion detection. Finally, the Practicum ties all the previously discussed material to real-world examples. A ninth additional section, called End Matter, discusses miscellaneous supporting mathematical topics and concludes with an example. At a publisher's list price of US$74.99, you'll want to know why you should consider buying such an expensive book. Several things set it apart from other, similar, offerings. Most importantly , the book provides numerous examples and, refreshingly, definitions. A vertical bar alongside the examples distinguishes them from other text, so picking them out is easy. The book also includes a bibliography of over 1,000 references. Additionally, each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, research issues, and practice exercises. The format and layout are good, and the fonts are readable. The book is aimed at several audiences , and the preface describes many roadmaps, one of which discusses dependencies among the various chapters. Instructors can use it at the advanced undergraduate level or for introductory graduate-level computer-security courses. The preface also includes a mapping of suggested topics for undergraduate and graduate courses, presuming a certain amount of math and theoretical computer-science background as prerequisites. Practitioners can use the book as a resource for information on specific topics; the examples in the Practicum are ideally suited for them. So, what's the final verdict? Practitioners will want to consider this book as a reference to add to their bookshelves. Teachers of advanced undergraduate or introductory …
The Effect of Kinesio Taping on Anterior Knee Pain Consistent With Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome: A Critically Appraised Topic.

CLINICAL SCENARIO
Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) occurs in 25% of adolescents and adults and is the leading cause of knee pain in runners. Pain is commonly felt when ascending or descending stairs, deep squatting, kneeling, or running. There is no consensus on the etiology of this condition, but insufficient hip strength, malalignment of the lower extremity, hyperpronation of the foot, and patellar incongruence have been suggested. Common treatments of PFPS include strengthening of quadriceps and hip muscles, McConnell taping, electrical stimulation, and foot orthotics, but effectiveness of these treatments is inconclusive. Kinesio Taping is an alternative taping technique for musculoskeletal injuries including PFPS. Although research suggests that Kinesio Taping decreases pain and improves range of motion for some musculoskeletal injuries, its effectiveness in decreasing pain in patients with PFPS in unknown. Furthermore, Kinesio Taping has not been compared with other taping techniques including McConnell taping. Focused Clinical Question: For patients with anterior knee pain consistent with PFPS, does treatment with Kinesio Taping decrease pain more than McConnell taping or no tape at all?
Prediction with Multilayer Perceptron , FIR and Elman Neural Networks

Multilayer perceptron network (MLP), FIR neural network and Elman neural network were compared in four different time series prediction tasks. Time series include load in an electric network series, fluctuations in a far-infrared laser series, numerically generated series and behaviour of sunspots series. FIR neural network was trained with temporal backpropagation learning algorithm. Results show that the efficiency of the learning algorithm is more important factor than the network model used. Elman network models load in an electric network series better than MLP network and in other prediction tasks it performs similar to MLP network. FIR network performs adequately but not as good as Elman network.
A fuzzy k-modes algorithm for clustering categorical data

This correspondence describes extensions to the fuzzy k-means algorithm for clustering categorical data. By using a simple matching dissimilarity measure for categorical objects and modes instead of means for clusters, a new approach is developed, which allows the use of thek-means paradigm to efficiently cluster large categorical data sets. A fuzzyk-modes algorithm is presented and the effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated with experimental results.
Drug prescribing during the last year of life in very old people with diabetes

Objective
To evaluate primary care drug utilisation during the last year of life, focusing on antidiabetic and cardiovascular drugs, in patients of advanced age with diabetes.


Design
Population-based cohort study.


Setting
Primary care database in the UK.


Subjects
Patients with type 2 diabetes who died at over 80 years of age between 2011 and 13.


Methods
Main outcome measures included proportions of patients prescribed different classes of drugs, comparing the first (Q1) and the fourth quarters (Q4) of the last year of life.


Results
The study included 5,324 patients, with the median age 86 years and 50% female. Three-fourths of the patients received five or more drugs, and the total number of drugs prescribed was almost stable at 6.2 ± 3.1 (mean ± SD) during the last year of life. Substantial proportions of patients were treated with antidiabetic drugs (78%), antihypertensive drugs (76%), statins (62%) and low-dose aspirin (46%) in Q1. Prescribing of these drugs slightly decreased by 3–8% in Q4. There were increases in prescribing of anti-infectives (35% in Q1 to 50% in Q4), drugs for nervous system (63% to 73%), drugs for respiratory system (24% to 33%) and systemic hormonal drugs (22% to 27%).


Conclusion
Patients of advanced age with type 2 diabetes were often treated with antidiabetic and cardiovascular drugs even when approaching death. More research is needed to generate evidence to guide optimal drug utilisation for older people with a limited life expectancy.
Stability of Recommendation Algorithms

The article explores stability as a new measure of recommender systems performance. Stability is defined to measure the extent to which a recommendation algorithm provides predictions that are consistent with each other. Specifically, for a stable algorithm, adding some of the algorithm’s own predictions to the algorithm’s training data (for example, if these predictions were confirmed as accurate by users) would not invalidate or change the other predictions. While stability is an interesting theoretical property that can provide additional understanding about recommendation algorithms, we believe stability to be a desired practical property for recommender systems designers as well, because unstable recommendations can potentially decrease users’ trust in recommender systems and, as a result, reduce users’ acceptance of recommendations. In this article, we also provide an extensive empirical evaluation of stability for six popular recommendation algorithms on four real-world datasets. Our results suggest that stability performance of individual recommendation algorithms is consistent across a variety of datasets and settings. In particular, we find that model-based recommendation algorithms consistently demonstrate higher stability than neighborhood-based collaborative filtering techniques. In addition, we perform a comprehensive empirical analysis of many important factors (e.g., the sparsity of original rating data, normalization of input data, the number of new incoming ratings, the distribution of incoming ratings, the distribution of evaluation data, etc.) and report the impact they have on recommendation stability.
Job satisfaction and motivation of health workers in public and private sectors: cross-sectional analysis from two Indian states

BACKGROUND
Ensuring health worker job satisfaction and motivation are important if health workers are to be retained and effectively deliver health services in many developing countries, whether they work in the public or private sector. The objectives of the paper are to identify important aspects of health worker satisfaction and motivation in two Indian states working in public and private sectors.


METHODS
Cross-sectional surveys of 1916 public and private sector health workers in Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, India, were conducted using a standardized instrument to identify health workers' satisfaction with key work factors related to motivation. Ratings were compared with how important health workers consider these factors.


RESULTS
There was high variability in the ratings for areas of satisfaction and motivation across the different practice settings, but there were also commonalities. Four groups of factors were identified, with those relating to job content and work environment viewed as the most important characteristics of the ideal job, and rated higher than a good income. In both states, public sector health workers rated "good employment benefits" as significantly more important than private sector workers, as well as a "superior who recognizes work". There were large differences in whether these factors were considered present on the job, particularly between public and private sector health workers in Uttar Pradesh, where the public sector fared consistently lower (P < 0.01). Discordance between what motivational factors health workers considered important and their perceptions of actual presence of these factors were also highest in Uttar Pradesh in the public sector, where all 17 items had greater discordance for public sector workers than for workers in the private sector (P < 0.001).


CONCLUSION
There are common areas of health worker motivation that should be considered by managers and policy makers, particularly the importance of non-financial motivators such as working environment and skill development opportunities. But managers also need to focus on the importance of locally assessing conditions and managing incentives to ensure health workers are motivated in their work.
Non-Invasive Evaluation of Cystic Fibrosis Related Liver Disease in Adults with ARFI, Transient Elastography and Different Fibrosis Scores

BACKGROUND
Cystic fibrosis-related liver disease (CFLD) is present in up to 30% of cystic fibrosis patients and can result in progressive liver failure. Diagnosis of CFLD is challenging. Non-invasive methods for staging of liver fibrosis display an interesting diagnostic approach for CFLD detection.


AIM
We evaluated transient elastography (TE), acoustic radiation force impulse imaging (ARFI), and fibrosis indices for CFLD detection.


METHODS
TE and ARFI were performed in 55 adult CF patients. In addition, AST/Platelets-Ratio-Index (APRI), and Forns' score were calculated. Healthy probands and patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis served as controls.


RESULTS
Fourteen CF patients met CFLD criteria, six had liver cirrhosis. Elastography acquisition was successful in >89% of cases. Non-cirrhotic CFLD individuals showed elastography values similar to CF patients without liver involvement. Cases with liver cirrhosis differed significantly from other CFLD patients (ARFI: 1.49 vs. 1.13 m/s; p = 0.031; TE: 7.95 vs. 4.16 kPa; p = 0.020) and had significantly lower results than individuals with alcoholic liver cirrhosis (ARFI: 1.49 vs. 2.99 m/s; p = 0.002). APRI showed the best diagnostic performance for CFLD detection (AUROC 0.815; sensitivity 85.7%, specificity 70.7%).


CONCLUSIONS
ARFI, TE, and laboratory based fibrosis indices correlate with each other and reliably detect CFLD related liver cirrhosis in adult CF patients. CF specific cut-off values for cirrhosis in adults are lower than in alcoholic cirrhosis.
Five-Year Clinical Outcome of Asymptomatic vs. Symptomatic Severe Aortic Stenosis After Aortic Valve Replacement.

BACKGROUND
There is discordance regarding the effect of symptom status before aortic valve replacement (AVR) on long-term outcome after AVR in severe aortic stenosis (AS).Methods and Results:The CURRENT AS registry is a multicenter retrospective registry enrolling 3,815 consecutive patients with severe AS. Among 1,196 patients managed with the initial AVR strategy, long-term clinical outcomes were compared between the symptomatic patients (n=905), and asymptomatic patients (n=291). Median follow-up interval was 1337 days with a 91% follow-up rate at 2 years. AVR was performed in 886 patients (98%) in the symptomatic group and in 287 patients (99%) in the asymptomatic group. Symptomatic patients were older and more often had comorbidities than asymptomatic patients with similar echocardiographic AS severity. The cumulative 5-year incidences of all-cause death and heart failure (HF) hospitalization were significantly higher in symptomatic patients than in asymptomatic patients (25.6% vs. 15.4%, P=0.001, and 14.2% vs. 3.8%, P<0.001, respectively). On landmark analysis at 30 days after AVR, the differences in mortality and HF hospitalization between the 2 groups were mainly observed beyond 30 days.


CONCLUSIONS
When managed with the initial AVR strategy, the long-term outcomes of symptomatic severe AS were worse than those of asymptomatic severe AS. Early AVR strategy might be recommended in some selected asymptomatic severe AS patients with reasonable operative risk.
Long-term results of hypofractionated radiation therapy for breast cancer.

BACKGROUND
The optimal fractionation schedule for whole-breast irradiation after breast-conserving surgery is unknown.


METHODS
We conducted a study to determine whether a hypofractionated 3-week schedule of whole-breast irradiation is as effective as a 5-week schedule. Women with invasive breast cancer who had undergone breast-conserving surgery and in whom resection margins were clear and axillary lymph nodes were negative were randomly assigned to receive whole-breast irradiation either at a standard dose of 50.0 Gy in 25 fractions over a period of 35 days (the control group) or at a dose of 42.5 Gy in 16 fractions over a period of 22 days (the hypofractionated-radiation group).


RESULTS
The risk of local recurrence at 10 years was 6.7% among the 612 women assigned to standard irradiation as compared with 6.2% among the 622 women assigned to the hypofractionated regimen (absolute difference, 0.5 percentage points; 95% confidence interval [CI], -2.5 to 3.5). At 10 years, 71.3% of women in the control group as compared with 69.8% of the women in the hypofractionated-radiation group had a good or excellent cosmetic outcome (absolute difference, 1.5 percentage points; 95% CI, -6.9 to 9.8).


CONCLUSIONS
Ten years after treatment, accelerated, hypofractionated whole-breast irradiation was not inferior to standard radiation treatment in women who had undergone breast-conserving surgery for invasive breast cancer with clear surgical margins and negative axillary nodes. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00156052.)
Gaining and sustaining competitive advantage with activity based cost management system

In the era of competitive global environment and technologybased organizations managers are, more than ever, pressured to find ways to maintain their competitive advantage. In order to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage, managers must examine the internal processes of their companies. The firm produces products or provide services by performing a set of activities that create value. Increasing the value of these activities can increase the competitive advantage of a firm. There are several methods that have been developed for adding value to the core activities in the firm. One method that is gaining popularity among companies is activity-based cost management (ABCM). ABCM as a system can provide managers with a strategic view of the activities that are essential to the competitive nature of the enterprise.
Cross-layer optimized routing in wireless sensor networks with duty cycle and energy harvesting

In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimized geographic node-disjoint multipath routing algorithm, that is, twophase geographic greedy forwarding plus. To optimize the system as a whole, our algorithm is designed on the basis of multiple layers’ interactions, taking into account the following. First is the physical layer, where sensor nodes are developed to scavenge the energy from environment, that is, node rechargeable operation (a kind of idle charging process to nodes). Each node can adjust its transmission power depending on its current energy level (the main object for nodes with energy harvesting is to avoid the routing hole when implementing the routing algorithm). Second is the sleep scheduling layer, where an energy-balanced sleep scheduling scheme, that is, duty cycle (a kind of node sleep schedule that aims at putting the idle listening nodes in the network into sleep state such that the nodes will be awake only when they are needed), and energy-consumption-based connected k-neighborhood is applied to allow sensor nodes to have enough time to recharge energy, which takes nodes’ current energy level as the parameter to dynamically schedule nodes to be active or asleep. Third is the routing layer, in which a forwarding node chooses the next-hop node based on 2-hop neighbor information rather than 1-hop. Performance of two-phase geographic greedy forwarding plus algorithm is evaluated under three different forwarding policies, to meet different application requirements. Our extensive simulations show that by cross-layer optimization, more shorter paths are found, resulting in shorter average path length, yet without causing much energy consumption. On top of these, a considerable increase of the network sleep rate is achieved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Multiple harmonic source detection and equipment identification with cascade correlation network

This paper presents the design of a harmonic source detection system with a cascade correlation network (CCN). Current-injection-based harmonic power flow was used to calculate bus voltages and total harmonic distortion (THD). THD of voltages is used as indices for meter placement in the power network. At metering buses, it shows that the harmonic components of voltages under various loads would form particular patterns in the frequency domain, and can be used to create training examples for CCN. Good meter planning is helpful to reduce the number of meters and training examples. With an IEEE 14-bus power system, computer simulations were conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed system.