LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Clinician-Reported Barriers to Implementing Breast Cancer Chemoprevention in the UK: A Qualitative Investigation.

AIMS
The use of tamoxifen and raloxifene as preventive therapy for women at increased risk of breast cancer was approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in 2013. We undertook a qualitative investigation to investigate the factors affecting the implementation of preventive therapy within the UK.


METHODS
We recruited general practitioners (GPs) (n = 10) and clinicians working in family history or clinical genetics settings (FHCG clinicians) (n = 15) to participate in semi-structured interviews. Data were coded thematically within the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research.


RESULTS
FHCG clinicians focussed on the perceived lack of benefit of preventive therapy and difficulties interpreting the NICE guidelines. FHCG clinicians felt poorly informed about preventive therapy, and this discouraged patient discussions on the topic. GPs were unfamiliar with the concept of preventive therapy, and were not aware that they may be asked to prescribe it for high-risk women. GPs were reluctant to initiate therapy because it is not licensed, but were willing to continue a prescription if it had been started in secondary or tertiary care.


CONCLUSIONS
Barriers to implementing preventive therapy within routine clinical practice are common and could be addressed by engaging all stakeholders during the development of policy documents.
Secondary spectrum access in TV-bands with combined co-channel and adjacent channel interference constraints

The potential of VHF/UHF band as a candidate for secondary spectrum access, so called “TV white spaces”, has been intensively investigated in recent years. However, the impact of the accumulated interference from multiple secondary users on different adjacent channels has not been well studied thus far, let alone the effect of combined interference from both co-channel and adjacent channels. This paper presents a framework for assessing secondary spectrum reuse opportunities for portable and mobile devices that comply with geo-location database concepts. The opportunity is evaluated in terms of the maximal number of secondary users that can access the “TV white space” simultaneously. Particular emphasis is given to the protection of TV receiver from harmful aggregate interference originated from not only the secondary users outside the TV coverage on the same channel but also those close to the TV receivers operating on different adjacent TV channels. An optimization problem is solved to maximize the number of secondary users admitted to the available TV channels at different locations. Through in-depth analysis of the interference characteristics of the optimal solution, it is identified that the cumulative effect of adjacent channel interferences has the dominant impact on TV reception, particularly for the case of secondary devices with limited transmit power. This suggests the possibility to achieve near-optimal exploitation of TV-bands for secondary reuse without explicit coordination of co-channel interference from the secondary users deployed over a wide geographical area.
Youth Unemployment in Europe : Persistence and Macroeconomic Determinants

This paper investigates the statistical features and the macroeconomic determinants of youth unemployment in a number of European countries. First, it explores its short and long memory properties by estimating both autoregressive and fractional integration models. This type of analysis sheds light on the degree of persistence of the series, and on whether policy actions are required for highly persistent series. Second, it investigates the main determinants of youth unemployment in Europe by estimating fractional cointegration models. The evidence suggests that this series is highly persistent in all the countries examined, and that in some of them there is a statistically significant long-run equilibrium relationship linking it to macroeconomic variables such as GDP and inflation. JEL-Code: C220, C320, J640.
Effect of amlodipine, quinapril, and losartan on pulse wave velocity and plasma collagen markers in patients with mild-to-moderate arterial hypertension.

BACKGROUND
Carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) is a prognostic factor in arterial hypertension. Modification of PWV, apart from blood pressure (BP) lowering seems to be important in the evaluation of antihypertensive drugs. One of the underlying causes arterial stiffening is arterial wall fibrosis. Plasma collagen I metabolites: carboxy (PICP) and amino (PINP) propeptides are considered as a valuable approach in the assessment of arterial fibrosis. The purpose of the present study was to compare changes in BP, PWV, plasma aldosterone, and collagen metabolites after treatment with amlodipine, quinapril, and losartan.


METHODS
One hundred eighteen patients with mild-to-moderate essential arterial hypertension were randomized to treatment with 10 mg/d of amlodipine (group 1), 20 mg/d of quinapril (group 2), or 2 x 50 mg/d of losartan (group 3). At baseline, and after 3 and 6 months analysis of variance was performed to compare changes in BP, PWV, aldosterone, PICP, and PINP among subjects with adequate BP control on monotherapy (group 1, n = 38, group 2, n = 37, group 3, n = 24).


RESULTS
Blood pressure decreased equally in all groups. Among patients with comparable BP values on monotherapy, only quinapril-treated patients showed a significant decrease in PWV, aldosterone, and PICP as compared with baseline values. Multiple regression analysis showed that PWV was significantly affected by: age (beta = 0.36; P =.021), systolic BP (beta = 0.45; P =.014), and PICP (beta = 0.27; P =.038).


CONCLUSIONS
In hypertensive subjects PWV depends on age, systolic BP, and collagen synthesis. Of the three drugs with comparable BP-lowering efficacy only quinapril significantly decreases PWV, plasma aldosterone, and PICP.
Organizational issues in the implementation and adoption of health information technology innovations: An interpretative review

PURPOSE
Implementations of health information technologies are notoriously difficult, which is due to a range of inter-related technical, social and organizational factors that need to be considered. In the light of an apparent lack of empirically based integrated accounts surrounding these issues, this interpretative review aims to provide an overview and extract potentially generalizable findings across settings.


METHODS
We conducted a systematic search and critique of the empirical literature published between 1997 and 2010. In doing so, we searched a range of medical databases to identify review papers that related to the implementation and adoption of eHealth applications in organizational settings. We qualitatively synthesized this literature extracting data relating to technologies, contexts, stakeholders, and their inter-relationships.


RESULTS
From a total body of 121 systematic reviews, we identified 13 systematic reviews encompassing organizational issues surrounding health information technology implementations. By and large, the evidence indicates that there are a range of technical, social and organizational considerations that need to be deliberated when attempting to ensure that technological innovations are useful for both individuals and organizational processes. However, these dimensions are inter-related, requiring a careful balancing act of strategic implementation decisions in order to ensure that unintended consequences resulting from technology introduction do not pose a threat to patients.


CONCLUSIONS
Organizational issues surrounding technology implementations in healthcare settings are crucially important, but have as yet not received adequate research attention. This may in part be due to the subjective nature of factors, but also due to a lack of coordinated efforts toward more theoretically-informed work. Our findings may be used as the basis for the development of best practice guidelines in this area.
Can you see the real me? A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development

To address present and future leadership needs, a model of authentic leader and follower development is proposed and examined with respect to its relationship to veritable, sustainable follower performance. The developmental processes of leader and follower self-awareness and self-regulation are emphasized. The influence of the leader's and followers' personal histories and trigger events are considered as antecedents of authentic leadership and followership, as well as the reciprocal effects with an inclusive, ethical, caring and strength-based organizational climate. Positive modeling is viewed as a primary means whereby leaders develop authentic followers. Posited outcomes of authentic leaderâ€“follower relationships include heightened levels of follower trust in the leader, engagement, workplace well-being and veritable, sustainable performance. Testable propositions and directions for exploring them are presented and discussed. Purchase Export Previous article Next article Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution.
A phase I and pharmacokinetic study of liposomal vinorelbine in patients with advanced solid tumor

Purpose This phase I study was performed to determine the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) and dose-limiting toxicity (DLT) of an untargeted liposomal formulation of vinorelbine (NanoVNB®) and to characterize its plasma pharmacokinetics in patients with advanced solid tumors which were refractory to conventional treatment or without an effective treatment. Patients & methods The study incorporated an accelerated titration design. Twenty-two patients with various solid tumors were enrolled. NanoVNB® was administered intravenously at doses of 2.2–23 mg/m2 once every 14 days. Pharmacokinetic endpoints were evaluated in the first cycle. The safety profiles and anti-tumor effects of NanoVNB® were also determined. Results Skin rash was the DLT and the most common non-hematological toxicity. The MTD was 18.5 mg/m2. Drug-related grade 3–4 hematological toxicities were infrequent. Compared with intravenous free vinorelbine, NanoVNB® showed a high Cmax and low plasma clearance. Of the 11 patients completing at least 1 post-treatment tumor assessment, 5 had stable disease. No responders were noted. Conclusion NanoVNB® was well tolerated and exhibited more favorable pharmacokinetic profiles than free vinorelbine. Based on dose-limiting skin toxicity, further evaluation of NanoVNB® starting from 18.5 mg/m2 as a single agent or in combination with other chemotherapeutic agents for vinorelbine-active malignancies is warranted.
Mentoring medical students during clinical courses: a way to enhance professional development.

BACKGROUND
Mentoring is known to develop professional attributes and facilitate socialization into a profession. Only a few structured mentoring programmes for medical students have been reported in the literature.


AIM
The objective of this study was to investigate undergraduate medical students' experiences and perceptions of one-to-one mentoring and whether they felt that the mentorship promoted their personal and professional development.


METHODS
Medical students (n = 118) during their third and fourth years of their studies were offered a personal mentor for 2 years and followed up via a questionnaire when the mentoring programme was completed. Statistical software was used to compute data. Open-ended questions were analyzed by content analysis.


RESULTS
Most of the respondents experienced that the mentoring programme had facilitated their professional and personal development. The role of the mentor was experienced as being more supportive than supplying knowledge. The students appreciated talking to a faculty not connected with their courses. The few barriers to a successful mentorship were mainly related to timing logistics and 'personal chemistry'.


CONCLUSIONS
One-to-one mentoring during clinical courses seems to enhance the medical student's professional and personal development. Future studies are needed to get a deeper understanding and knowledge about factors of importance for successful mentorship.
A defect-tolerant accelerator for emerging high-performance applications

Due to the evolution of technology constraints, especially energy constraints which may lead to heterogeneous multi-cores, and the increasing number of defects, the design of defect-tolerant accelerators for heterogeneous multi-cores may become a major micro-architecture research issue.
 Most custom circuits are highly defect sensitive, a single transistor can wreck such circuits. On the contrary, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are inherently error tolerant algorithms. And the emergence of high-performance applications implementing recognition and mining tasks, for which competitive ANN-based algorithms exist, drastically expands the potential application scope of a hardware ANN accelerator.
 However, while the error tolerance of ANN algorithms is well documented, there are few in-depth attempts at demonstrating that an actual hardware ANN would be tolerant to faulty transistors. Most fault models are abstract and cannot demonstrate that the error tolerance of ANN algorithms can be translated into the defect tolerance of hardware ANN accelerators.
 In this article, we introduce a hardware ANN geared towards defect tolerance and energy efficiency, by spatially expanding the ANN. In order to precisely assess the defect tolerance capability of this hardware ANN, we introduce defects at the level of transistors, and then assess the impact of such defects on the hardware ANN functional behavior. We empirically show that the conceptual error tolerance of neural networks does translate into the defect tolerance of hardware neural networks, paving the way for their introduction in heterogeneous multi-cores as intrinsically defect-tolerant and energy-efficient accelerators.
Automatic analysis of call-center conversations

We describe a system for automating call-center analysis and monitoring. Our system integrates transcription of incoming calls with analysis of their content; for the analysis, we introduce a novel method of estimating the domain-specific importance of conversation fragments, based on divergence of corpus statistics. Combining this method with Information Retrieval approaches, we provide knowledge-mining tools both for the call-center agents and for administrators of the center.
Pastoral counter-conducts: Religious resistance in Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity

The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle ...
The short-term effects of olive oil and flaxseed oil for the treatment of constipation in hemodialysis patients.

OBJECTIVES
To evaluate the effects of olive oil and flaxseed oil compared with mineral oil for the treatment of constipation in patients undergoing hemodialysis.


METHODS
A 4-week, double-blind, randomized, and controlled trial was conducted. Fifty constipated patients (29% male, 51 ± 12 years) diagnosed by the Rome III criteria were randomly assigned to receive mineral oil (control group; n = 17), olive oil (n = 16), or flaxseed oil (n = 17). The initial oil dose was 4 mL/day, and adjustments during the follow-up could be made as needed. The impact of the intervention was assessed by the Rome III criteria scores.


RESULTS
The most frequent symptoms of constipation evaluated by the Roma III criteria at baseline were comparable among the groups and included "incomplete evacuation" (92%), "lumpy or hard stools," (72%) and "anorectal obstruction" (70%). The Rome III score improved significantly in patients receiving mineral oil (10.5 ± 5.0 to 4.1 ± 4.0; P < .01), olive oil (10.3 ± 4.2 to 3.2 ± 3.8; P = .01), and flaxseed oil (9.6 ± 4.2 to 6.0 ± 5.1; P < .01), with no significant group-by-time interaction (P = .15). The scores of 5 from 6 constipation symptoms reduced similarly in the mineral oil and olive oil groups, whereas only the frequency of evacuation and the consistency of stools improved in the flaxseed oil group.


CONCLUSIONS
We demonstrated that the daily use of olive oil or flaxseed oil was as effective as mineral oil in the treatment of constipation in patients undergoing hemodialysis.
Addition of low-dose valproic acid to saline resuscitation provides neuroprotection and improves long-term outcomes in a large animal model of combined traumatic brain injury and hemorrhagic shock.

BACKGROUND
Combined traumatic brain injury (TBI) and hemorrhagic shock (HS) is highly lethal. In a nonsurvival model of TBI + HS, addition of high-dose valproic acid (VPA) (300 mg/kg) to hetastarch reduced brain lesion size and associated swelling 6 hours after injury; whether this would have translated into better neurologic outcomes remains unknown. It is also unclear whether lower doses of VPA would be neuroprotective. We hypothesized that addition of low-dose VPA to normal saline (NS) resuscitation would result in improved long-term neurologic recovery and decreased brain lesion size.


METHODS
TBI was created in anesthetized swine (40-43 kg) by controlled cortical impact, and volume-controlled hemorrhage (40% volume) was induced concurrently. After 2 hours of shock, animals were randomized (n = 5 per group) to NS (3× shed blood) or NS + VPA (150 mg/kg). Six hours after resuscitation, packed red blood cells were transfused, and animals were recovered. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells were analyzed for acetylated histone-H3 at lysine-9. A Neurological Severity Score (NSS) was assessed daily for 30 days. Brain magnetic resonance imaging was performed on Days 3 and 10. Cognitive performance was assessed by training animals to retrieve food from color-coded boxes.


RESULTS
There was a significant increase in histone acetylation in the NS + VPA-treated animals compared with NS treatment. The NS + VPA group demonstrated significantly decreased neurologic impairment and faster speed of recovery as well as smaller brain lesion size compared with the NS group. Although the final cognitive function scores were similar between the groups, the VPA-treated animals reached the goal significantly faster than the NS controls.


CONCLUSION
In this long-term survival model of TBI + HS, addition of low-dose VPA to saline resuscitation resulted in attenuated neurologic impairment, faster neurologic recovery, smaller brain lesion size, and a quicker normalization of cognitive functions.
A SURVEY ON THE CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE JOINT ROBOTS

The robotics literature of the last two decades contains many important advances in the control of flexible joint robots. This is a survey of these advances and an assessment for future developments, concentrated mostly on the control issues of flexible joint robots.
Weak Completeness Theorem for Propositional Linear Time Temporal Logic

Summary. We prove weak (finite set of premises) completeness theorem for extended propositional linear time temporal logic with irreflexive version of until-operator. We base it on the proof of completeness for basic propositional linear time temporal logic given in [20] which roughly follows the idea of the Henkin-Hasenjaeger method for classical logic. We show that a temporal model exists for every formula which negation is not derivable (Satisfiability Theorem). The contrapositive of that theorem leads to derivability of every valid formula. We build a tree of consistent and complete PNPs which is used to construct the model.
GASSST: global alignment short sequence search tool

MOTIVATION
The rapid development of next-generation sequencing technologies able to produce huge amounts of sequence data is leading to a wide range of new applications. This triggers the need for fast and accurate alignment software. Common techniques often restrict indels in the alignment to improve speed, whereas more flexible aligners are too slow for large-scale applications. Moreover, many current aligners are becoming inefficient as generated reads grow ever larger. Our goal with our new aligner GASSST (Global Alignment Short Sequence Search Tool) is thus 2-fold-achieving high performance with no restrictions on the number of indels with a design that is still effective on long reads.


RESULTS
We propose a new efficient filtering step that discards most alignments coming from the seed phase before they are checked by the costly dynamic programming algorithm. We use a carefully designed series of filters of increasing complexity and efficiency to quickly eliminate most candidate alignments in a wide range of configurations. The main filter uses a precomputed table containing the alignment score of short four base words aligned against each other. This table is reused several times by a new algorithm designed to approximate the score of the full dynamic programming algorithm. We compare the performance of GASSST against BWA, BFAST, SSAHA2 and PASS. We found that GASSST achieves high sensitivity in a wide range of configurations and faster overall execution time than other state-of-the-art aligners.


AVAILABILITY
GASSST is distributed under the CeCILL software license at http://www.irisa.fr/symbiose/projects/gassst/


CONTACT
guillaume.rizk@irisa.fr; dominique.lavenier@irisa.fr


SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Hydrogen sulfide and polysulfides as signaling molecules

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a familiar toxic gas that smells of rotten eggs. After the identification of endogenous H2S in the mammalian brain two decades ago, studies of this molecule uncovered physiological roles in processes such as neuromodulation, vascular tone regulation, cytoprotection against oxidative stress, angiogenesis, anti-inflammation, and oxygen sensing. Enzymes that produce H2S, such as cystathionine β-synthase, cystathionine γ-lyase, and 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase have been studied intensively and well characterized. Polysulfides, which have a higher number of inner sulfur atoms than that in H2S, were recently identified as potential signaling molecules that can activate ion channels, transcription factors, and tumor suppressors with greater potency than that of H2S. This article focuses on our contribution to the discovery of these molecules and their metabolic pathways and mechanisms of action.