LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
The PROFI study (Prevention of Cerebral Embolization by Proximal Balloon Occlusion Compared to Filter Protection During Carotid Artery Stenting): a prospective randomized trial.

OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study was to compare the cerebral embolic load of filter-protected versus proximal balloon-protected carotid artery stenting (CAS).


BACKGROUND
Randomized trials comparing filter-protected CAS with carotid endarterectomy revealed a higher periprocedural stroke rate after CAS. Proximal balloon occlusion may be more effective in preventing cerebral embolization during CAS than filters.


METHODS
Patients undergoing CAS with cerebral embolic protection for internal carotid artery stenosis were randomly assigned to proximal balloon occlusion or filter protection. The primary endpoint was the incidence of new cerebral ischemic lesions assessed by diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Secondary endpoints were the number and volume of new ischemic lesions and major adverse cardiovascular and cerebral events (MACCE).


RESULTS
Sixty-two consecutive patients (mean age: 71.7 years, 76.4% male) were randomized. Compared with filter protection (n = 31), proximal balloon occlusion (n = 31) resulted in a significant reduction in the incidence of new cerebral ischemic lesions (45.2% vs. 87.1%, p = 0.001). The number (median [range]: 2 [0 to 13] vs. 0 [0 to 4], p = 0.0001) and the volume (0.47 [0 to 2.4] cm(3) vs. 0 [0 to 0.84] cm(3), p = 0.0001) of new cerebral ischemic lesions were significantly reduced by proximal balloon occlusion. Lesions in the contralateral hemisphere were found in 29.0% and 6.5% of patients (filter vs. balloon occlusion, respectively, p = 0.047). The 30-day MACCE rate was 3.2% and 0% for filter versus balloon occlusion, respectively (p = NS).


CONCLUSIONS
In this randomized trial of patients undergoing CAS, proximal balloon occlusion as compared with filter protection significantly reduced the embolic load to the brain.
The Blink Frequency Relationship between Reading from a Computer Screen and Reading from a Printed Page

One of the components of what has become known as Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a complaint of dry eyes which is not present in other near work situations. The etiology of the dryness is believed to be decreased blink rate and/or a wide palpebral aperture while viewing a computer monitor. This study examined the first theory only, although if the first theory is disproven the second one gains more credence. Methods: There were 31 subjects enrolled in this study. All initially filled out a questionnaire of symptomatology and underwent a series of refractive and ocular examinations in order to exclude those subjects with clinical dry eye or other related ocular conditions. In the second phase each subject read a selection for 10 minutes once from a computer screen and once from a printed page. This experimental phase was conducted in a standard classroom with standard lighting, without internal air conditioning or heating. The order of reading and selected tests was performed randomly during morning hours on consecutive days. The text and angle of gaze was uniform for both sessions, with each condition (computer screen or paper) having its own specific working distance and angle of gaze. The performance was filmed with an internet camera and later the amount of blinking was scored manually. Results: The number of blinks per minute while reading from a computer screen was greater, on average (1.73 ±0.43) than reading from a printed page. However, this difference was only significant at the p=0.22 level. 18 subjects had a higher blink rate with computer work while 13 had a higher blink rate with a printed page. The subjects with the higher blink rate reading from a computer screen had a higher differential between the two scores. Conclusions: No significant difference in blink rate was found between the blink rate when reading from computer screen as opposed to a printed page. Even the mildly significant result indicated the opposite. This would indicate that the theory that dry eye associated with computer work is not caused by excessive “staring” and lower blink rate. This gives indirect support to the theory that the height of the computer screen is a more important variable.
Linguistic validation of a disease-specific quality of life measure for children and teenagers with cardiac disease.

INTRODUCTION
To anglicise an American--that is, English language--disease-specific health-related quality of life measure, using the Paediatric Cardiac Quality of Life Inventory, for children in the age group of 8-12 years and adolescents in the age group of 13-18 years with cardiac disease, and to assess conceptual equivalence of the American and British versions.


METHODS
A process of forward and backward translation of the measure was undertaken before focus groups and individual interviews with 40 participants--that is, 20 children/adolescents with cardiac disease and 20 parents of children/adolescents with cardiac disease--to determine their understanding of the meaning of the questions.


RESULTS
Interviews established that participants understood the meaning of the questions, although some found it difficult to explain the meaning of questions in which the language was explicit and wanted instead to answer the individual questions as they applied to them/their child. There was agreement that all versions of the questionnaire were relevant and comprehensive, and that the length of the questionnaires was acceptable and practical.


CONCLUSIONS
The anglicised version of the Paediatric Cardiac Quality of Life Inventory appears to be a linguistically valid measure of health-related quality of life for children and adolescents with cardiac disease. The psychometric properties of the anglicised Paediatric Cardiac Quality of Life Inventory are now being tested in a multi-centre study in the United Kingdom.
The agile approach in an undergraduate software engineering course project

1 Thomas Reichlmayr, Software Engineering Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, tjrese@rit.edu Abstract The rise in popularity of agile software development methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal, DSDM and Feature-Driven Development has opened an opportunity for the software engineering education community. How can one capitalize on the strengths of agile development models while still appealing to established software engineering practices? The typical introductory software engineering course makes use of a team-based project to reinforce software process activities. The project normally runs for one academic term during which students are led through life-cycle activities using a modified waterfall approach to software development. While useful in teaching software engineering process concepts, this approach limits the team’s ability to utilize feedback from downstream process activities. It also limits the students’ opportunity to understand process improvement from their own experiences. The ability to respond to project change is also dampened by the fact that teams do not have the time or resources in this format to modify, or refactor the design of a project component let alone incorporate a new or modified customer requirement. Agile methodologies promote an evolutionary approach to development using short incremental release cycles. We report on the experiences of conducting a team project in an introductory software engineering course using agile development techniques at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Teams have the opportunity to experience multiple iterations of the software engineering life cycle and evolve a product design that allows for discoveries made during implementation and through the introduction of changing customer requirements. The project integrates the concept of testdriven development. This agile technique addresses testing early in the development process and reinforces the value of unit testing. The incorporation of agile techniques is not only useful for students in an introductory course, but may also be applied to upper division software engineering courses.
Methods and management of the healthy brain study: a large multisite qualitative research project.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
To describe processes used in the Healthy Brain project to manage data collection, coding, and data distribution in a large qualitative project, conducted by researchers at 9 universities in 9 states.


DESIGN AND METHODS
Project management protocols included: (a) managing audiotapes and surveys to ensure data confidentiality, data tracking and distribution; (b) managing qualitative data to ensure the accuracy and confidentiality of transcription; (c) training in qualitative methods and use of qualitative software; and (d) managing participant survey data and analysis.


RESULTS
The project team coded and managed qualitative and survey data for 69 focus groups with more than 500 participants. Multiple interactive training sessions in qualitative data analysis and use of qualitative software (ATLAS.ti) were conducted. To develop a codebook, 2 teams used an open-coding process to identify codes and develop definitions; 2 team members integrated and conceptually organized these results into an initial codebook. For the audio-recordings from each research site, 2 or 3 team members hand coded 1 transcript and calculated interrater agreement (.80 or higher).


IMPLICATIONS
Using clear protocols, participatory training sessions, team-based coding, and frequent communication among team members via e-mail and regular in-person meetings promotes effective management of large-scale qualitative research projects.
Managing native and legume-fixed nitrogen in lowland rice-based cropping systems

Lowlands comprise 87% of the 145 M ha of world rice area. Lowland rice-based cropping systems are characterized by soil flooding during most of the rice growing season. Rainfall distribution, availability of irrigation water and prevailing temperatures determine when rice or other crops are grown. Nitrogen is the most required nutrient in lowland rice-based cropping systems. Reducing fertilizer N use in these cropping systems, while maintaining or enhancing crop output, is desirable from both environmental and economic perspectives. This may be possible by producing N on the land through legume biological nitrogen fixation (BNF), minimizing soil N losses, and by improved recycling of N through plant residues. At the end of a flooded rice crop, organic- and NH4-N dominate in the soil, with negligible amounts of NO3. Subsequent drying of the soil favors aerobic N transformations. Organic N mineralizes to NH4, which is rapidly nitrified into NO3. As a result, NO3 accumulates in soil during the aerobic phase. Recent evidence indicates that large amounts of accumulated soil NO3 may be lost from rice lowlands upon the flooding of aerobic soil for rice production. Plant uptake during the aerobic phase can conserve soil NO3 from potential loss. Legumes grown during the aerobic phase additionally capture atmospheric N through BNF. The length of the nonflooded season, water availability, soil properties, and prevailing temperatures determine when and where legumes are, or can be, grown. The amount of N derived by legumes through BNF depends on the interaction of microbial, plant, and environmental determinants. Suitable legumes for lowland rice soils are those that can deplete soil NO3 while deriving large amounts of N through BNF. Reducing soil N supply to the legume by suitable soil and crop management can increase BNF. Much of the N in legume biomass might be removed from the land in an economic crop produce. As biomass is removed, the likelihood of obtaining a positive soil N balance diminishes. Nonetheless, use of legumes rather than non-legumes is likely to contribute higher quantities of N to a subsequent rice crop. A whole-system approach to N management will be necessary to capture and effectively use soil and atmospheric sources of N in the lowland rice ecosystem.
Nisin ZP, a Bacteriocin and Food Preservative, Inhibits Head and Neck Cancer Tumorigenesis and Prolongs Survival

The use of small antimicrobial peptides or bacteriocins, like nisin, to treat cancer is a new approach that holds great promise. Nisin exemplifies this new approach because it has been used safely in humans for many years as a food preservative, and recent laboratory studies support its anti-tumor potential in head and neck cancer. Previously, we showed that nisin (2.5%, low content) has antitumor potential in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) in vitro and in vivo. The current studies explored a naturally occurring variant of nisin (nisin ZP; 95%, high content) for its antitumor effects in vitro and in vivo. Nisin ZP induced the greatest level of apoptosis in HNSCC cells compared to low content nisin. HNSCC cells treated with increasing concentrations of nisin ZP exhibited increasing levels of apoptosis and decreasing levels of cell proliferation, clonogenic capacity, and sphere formation. Nisin ZP induced apoptosis through a calpain-dependent pathway in HNSCC cells but not in human oral keratinocytes. Nisin ZP also induced apoptosis dose-dependently in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) with concomitant decreases in vascular sprout formation in vitro and reduced intratumoral microvessel density in vivo. Nisin ZP reduced tumorigenesis in vivo and long-term treatment with nisin ZP extended survival. In addition, nisin treated mice exhibited normal organ histology with no evidence of inflammation, fibrosis or necrosis. In summary, nisin ZP exhibits greater antitumor effects than low content nisin, and thus has the potential to serve as a novel therapeutic for HNSCC.
Binlie ! ic Inactivation of the APC Gene in Hepatoblastoma 1

Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) is an inherited disorder caused by germline mutation of the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene. Increased risk of hepatoblastoma (HBL) in FAP kindreds has been re ported. To determine whether inactivation of the APC gene plays a role in development of HBL, 13 sporadic infantile hepatic tumors were analyzed for genetic alterations in the APC gene. A PCR-mediated RNase protec tion analysis was performed to detect subtle genetic alterations in the mutation cluster region and in exons 3 and 4 of the APC gene. The results showed that a G to T transversion at the splice acceptor site of the intron 3-exon 4 junction had occurred in one HBL. Sequence analysis of normal tissue of the patient proved the mutation to be germinal. Southern blot analysis at the APC locus revealed that the tumor had lost the opposite alÃ-eleand was isodisomic at this locus. KNA analysis indicated that the tumor contained only the small APC transcript, from which exon 4 was entirely absent. Since abnormal splicing causes termination due to frameshift, it was hypothesized that only the truncated APC protein was ex pressed in this tumor. These findings suggest that inactivation of the APC gene is closely related to tumorigenesis of HBLs in FAP patients.
An Evaluation of Internet Banking in New Zealand

This paper examines how New Zealand banks enhance their retail banking services through the Internet. Seven NZ online banks were studied in terms of their web sites’ effectiveness, functionalities and Internet strategies. The functionality was examined by evaluating banks’ web sites using a tailored electronic commerce model. The effectiveness was surveyed utilising a judgment sample of actual and potential retail Internet banking customers. Main factors that inhibit the adoption of I-banking in NZ are security, doubt about the complication of Internet banking and the ability to bank using other facilities. Other important factors that customers use to judge the performance of retail I-banking services are response time, services free from technical problems and up-todate information. NZ banks perform extremely well in providing up-todate information. However, further improvements on security, download time, response time and the ability to provide services free from technical problems should be considered in order to satisfy customers’ requirements.
BCYCLIC: A parallel block tridiagonal matrix cyclic solver

A block tridiagonal matrix is factored with minimal fill-in using a cyclic reduction algorithm that is easily parallelized. Storage of the factored blocks allows the application of the inverse to multiple right-hand sides which may not be known at factorization time. Scalability with the number of block rows is achieved with cyclic reduction, while scalability with the block size is achieved using multithreaded routines (OpenMP, GotoBLAS) for block matrix manipulation. This dual scalability is a noteworthy feature of this new solver, as well as its ability to efficiently handle arbitrary (non-powers-of-2) block row and processor numbers. Comparison with a state-of-the art parallel sparse solver is presented. It is expected that this new solver will allow many physical applications to optimally use the parallel resources on current supercomputers. Example usage of the solver in magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD), three-dimensional equilibrium solvers for high-temperature fusion plasmas is cited. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Distributed LDA-based Topic Modeling and Topic Agglomeration in a Latent Space

We describe the methodology that we followed to automatically extract topics corresponding to known events provided by the SNOW 2014 challenge in the context of the SocialSensor project. A data crawling tool and selected filtering terms were provided to all the teams. The crawled data was to be divided in 96 (15-minute) timeslots spanning a 24 hour period and participants were asked to produce a fixed number of topics for the selected timeslots. Our preliminary results are obtained using a methodology that pulls strengths from several machine learning techniques, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) for automated hashtag annotation and for mapping the topics into a latent space where they become less fragmented and can be better related with one another. In addition, we obtain improved topic quality when Copyright c © by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. In: S. Papadopoulos, D. Corney, L. Aiello (eds.): Proceedings of the SNOW 2014 Data Challenge, Seoul, Korea, 08-04-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org sentiment detection is performed to partition the tweets based on polarity, prior to topic modeling.
Clinico-epidemiological profile and predictors of severe illness in young infants (0-59 days) in Ghana.

BACKGROUND
Young infant mortality has remained high and relatively unchanged compared with deaths of older infants. Strategies to reduce infant mortality, however, are mostly targeted at the older child.


OBJECTIVES
To describe the clinical profile of sick young infants presenting to a hospital and to define important signs and symptoms that will enable health workers to detect young infants with severe illness requiring hospital admission.


METHODS
Young infants aged 0-59 days presenting to a paediatric out-patient clinic were evaluated by a nurse using a standardised list of signs and symptoms. A paediatrician independently evaluated these children and decided whether they needed hospitalisation.


RESULTS
A total of 685 young infants were enrolled, 22% of whom were <7 days of age. The commonest reasons for seeking care were jaundice in the 0-6-day group, skin problems in the 7-27-day group and cough in the 28-59-day group. The primary clinical diagnoses for admissions were sepsis in the 0-6- and 7-27-day groups and pneumonia in the 28-59-day group. Clinical signs and symptoms predicting severe illness requiring admission were general (history of fever, difficult feeding, not feeding well and temperature >37.5 degrees C) and respiratory (respiratory rate > or =60/min, severe chest in-drawing).


CONCLUSION
General and respiratory signs are important predictors for severe illness in young infants. Training peripheral health workers to recognise these signs and to refer to hospital for further assessment and management might have a significant impact on young infant mortality.
Statistical analysis plan for the POLAR-RCT: The Prophylactic hypOthermia trial to Lessen trAumatic bRain injury-Randomised Controlled Trial

BACKGROUND
The Prophylactic hypOthermia to Lessen trAumatic bRain injury-Randomised Controlled Trial (POLAR-RCT) will evaluate whether early and sustained prophylactic hypothermia delivered to patients with severe traumatic brain injury improves patient-centred outcomes.


METHODS
The POLAR-RCT is a multicentre, randomised, parallel group, phase III trial of early, prophylactic cooling in critically ill patients with severe traumatic brain injury, conducted in Australia, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. A total of 511 patients aged 18-60 years have been enrolled with severe acute traumatic brain injury. The trial intervention of early and sustained prophylactic hypothermia to 33 °C for 72 h will be compared to standard normothermia maintained at a core temperature of 37 °C. The primary outcome is the proportion of favourable neurological outcomes, comprising good recovery or moderate disability, observed at six months following randomisation utilising a midpoint dichotomisation of the Extended Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOSE). Secondary outcomes, also assessed at six months following randomisation, include the probability of an equal or greater GOSE level, mortality, the proportions of patients with haemorrhage or infection, as well as assessment of quality of life and health economic outcomes. The planned sample size will allow 80% power to detect a 30% relative risk increase from 50% to 65% (equivalent to a 15% absolute risk increase) in favourable neurological outcome at a two-sided alpha of 0.05.


DISCUSSION
Consistent with international guidelines, a detailed and prospective analysis plan has been developed for the POLAR-RCT. This plan specifies the statistical models for evaluation of primary and secondary outcomes, as well as defining covariates for adjusted analyses and methods for exploratory analyses. Application of this statistical analysis plan to the forthcoming POLAR-RCT trial will facilitate unbiased analyses of these important clinical data.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00987688 (first posted 1 October 2009); Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12609000764235 . Registered on 3 September 2009.
[Validation of geriatric depression scale in a general outpatient clinic].

OBJECTIVE
The Geriatric Depression Scale for screening depressive symptoms in the elderly has not been assessed in elderly outpatients who seek primary health care in Brazil. The objective was to determine the validity of the Short Scale for Major Depressive Episode or Dysthymia (GDS-15) in elderly outpatients.


METHODS
The scale was applied in 302 subjects with 65 years and older and then examined by an independent geriatrician, blinded to the results. Major depression and dysthymia were diagnosed using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV criteria. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated at several cutoff values and a Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was plotted.


RESULTS
The best equilibrium was at the cutoff value of 5/6 showing 81% sensitivity and 71% specificity; the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was 0.85 (95% CI: 0.79-0.91).


CONCLUSIONS
The GDS-15 can be used for screening depressive symptoms in Brazilian elderly outpatients. The previously suggested cutoff value of 5/6 is adequate.