LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Bone effect of adjuvant tamoxifen, letrozole or letrozole plus zoledronic acid in early-stage breast cancer: the randomized phase 3 HOBOE study.

BACKGROUND
To measure bone mineral density (BMD) reduction produced by letrozole as compared with tamoxifen and the benefit of the addition of zoledronic acid.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
A phase 3 trial comparing tamoxifen, letrozole or letrozole+zoledronic acid in patients with hormone receptor-positive early breast cancer was conducted; triptorelin was given to premenopausal patients. Two comparisons were planned: letrozole versus tamoxifen and letrozole+zoledronic acid versus letrozole. Primary end point was the difference in 1-year change of T-score at lumbar spine (LTS) measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry scan.


RESULTS
Out of 483 patients enrolled, 459 were available for primary analyses. Median age was 50 (range 28-80). The estimated mean difference (95% confidence interval [CI]) in 1-year change of LTS was equal to -0.30 (95% CI -0.44 to -0.17) in the letrozole versus tamoxifen comparison (P<0.0001) and to +0.60 (95% CI +0.46 to +0.77) in the letrozole+zoledronic acid versus letrozole comparison (P<0.0001). Bone damage by letrozole decreased with increasing baseline body mass index in premenopausal, but not postmenopausal, patients (interaction test P=0.004 and 0.47, respectively).


CONCLUSIONS
In the HOBOE (HOrmonal BOne Effects) trial, the positive effect of zoledronic acid on BMD largely counteracts damage produced by letrozole as compared with tamoxifen. Letrozole effect is lower among overweight/obese premenopausal patients.
Communicating with parents in neonatal intensive care units: The impact on parental stress.

OBJECTIVE
To analyse stress in parents whose infants with very low birth weight have just concluded high-level care in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). More specifically, we aimed 1) to identify groups of parents in the NICU who are particularly at risk of experiencing stress, and 2) to explore the effects of clinical staffś communication on parental stress.


METHODS
Our multi-center-study evaluated views from 1277 parents about care for 923 infants in 66 German NICUs. Answers were linked with separately evaluated medical outcomes of the infants. Separate generalised mixed models estimated the influence of personal, medical and communication-related characteristics on specific parental stress.


RESULTS
Parents of a younger age and those of infants with severe prognoses were more likely to experience stress. While empathetic communication as one aspect of staffś communication was shown as appropriate in reducing parental stress, an initial introduction and the quantity of information were only slightly associated with lower levels of stress.


CONCLUSION
Results provide evidence for the need to involve parents empathetically from the beginning of their child's stay in the NICU.


PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
Staff in the NICU should communicate empathetically and help to reduce stress in parents particularly at risk.
Privacy Aware Learning

We study statistical risk minimization problems under a privacy model in which the data is kept confidential even from the learner. In this local privacy framework, we establish sharp upper and lower bounds on the convergence rates of statistical estimation procedures. As a consequence, we exhibit a precise tradeoff between the amount of privacy the data preserves and the utility, as measured by convergence rate, of any statistical estimator or learning procedure.
A Service-Oriented Negotiation Model between Autonomous Agents

We present a formal model of negotiation between autonomous agents. The purpose of the negotiation is to reach an agreement about the provision of a service by one agent for another. The model defines a range of strategies and tactics that agents can employ to generate initial offers, evaluate proposals and offer counter proposals. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions and is demonstrated in the domain of business process management. Initial proofs about the convergence of negotiation are also presented.
Effect of intrathecal tramadol administration on postoperative pain after transurethral resection of prostate.

BACKGROUND
Tramadol administered epidurally has been demonstrated to decrease postoperative analgesic requirements. However, its effect on postoperative analgesia after intrathecal administration has not yet been studied. In this double-blind, placebo-controlled study, the effect of intrathecal tramadol administration on pain control after transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) was studied.


METHODS
Sixty-four patients undergoing TURP were randomized to receive bupivacaine 0.5% 3 ml intrathecally premixed with either tramadol 25 mg or saline 0.5 ml. After operation, morphine 5 mg i.m. every 3 h was administered as needed for analgesia. Postoperative morphine requirements, visual analogue scale for pain at rest (VAS) and sedation scores, times to first analgesic and hospital lengths of stay were recorded by a blinded observer.


RESULTS
There were no differences between the groups with regard to postoperative morphine requirements (mean (SD): 10.6 (7.9) vs 9.1 (5.5) mg, P=0.38), VAS (1.6 (1.2) vs 1.2 (0.8), P=0.18) and sedation scores (1.2 (0.3) vs 1.2 (0.2), P=0.89). Times to first analgesic (6.3 (6.3) vs 7.6 (6.2) h, P=0.42) and length of hospital stay (4.7 (2.8) vs 4.4 (2.2) days, P=0.66) were similar in the two groups.


CONCLUSION
Intrathecal tramadol was not different from saline in its effect on postoperative morphine requirements after TURP.
I Live Out in the Countryside. Exploring Extreme Processes of Individualization in Rural Spain

Abstract The objective of this paper is to study in depth the perspective of the individual in rural geographic studies, specifically relationships between the position of the individual in the community and the physical space they inhabit. The focus of the study is individuals living alone in Spain, in the middle of the countryside in depopulated nuclei, with space but almost without a community. The analysis is based on a quantitative study of individuals who live alone in a village, from a geographical perspective and, also, the testimonies of various individuals who live alone, presented ethnographically. The conclusions show the temporary nature of the phenomenon, its wide distribution at a municipal level, a clear male predominance, the value of the absence of a community, the appreciation of values of the surroundings and the disappearance of the limits of the community in terms of spatial continuity.
Stabilometric assessment of context dependent balance recovery in persons with multiple sclerosis: a randomized controlled study

Balance control relies on accurate perception of visual, somatosensory and vestibular cues. Sensory flow is impaired in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and little is known about the ability of the sensory systems to adapt after neurological lesions reducing sensory impairment. The aims of the present study were to verify whether: 1. Balance rehabilitation administered in a challenging sensory conditions would improve stability in upright posture. 2. The improvement in a treated sensory condition would transfer to a non treated sensory condition. Balance rehabilitation administered in a challenging sensory conditions would improve stability in upright posture. The improvement in a treated sensory condition would transfer to a non treated sensory condition. Fifty three persons with MS, median (min-max) EDSS score of 5 (2.5-6.5), participated in a RCT and were randomly assigned to two groups. The Experimental group received balance rehabilitation aimed at improving motor and sensory strategies. The Control group received rehabilitation treatment which did not include training of sensory strategies. Persons with MS were blindly assessed by means of a stabilometric platform with eyes open, eyes closed and dome, on both firm surface and foam. Anterior-posterior and medio-lateral sway, velocity of sway and the length of Center of Pressure (CoP) trajectory were calculated in the six sensory conditions. Experimental group showed statistically significant improvement (P < 0.05) in stability in upright posture in eyes closed condition on firm surface, and in eyes open, closed, and dome conditions on foam. No differences were observed between groups in the eyes open condition on firm surface nor in the sensory condition not addressed during the treatment. After rehabilitation people with MS can recover from sensory impairments thus improving upright balance. Further, the improvement seems to be context-dependent and present just in the treated sensory conditions. ClinicalTrials NCT02131285
Osteochondroma of the femoral neck: a rare cause of sciatic nerve compression.

A 39-year-old man presented with weakness and a nonmobile mass in the buttock of 5 months' duration. Hip flexion was limited to 70 degrees. Strength was diminished for both ankle/foot plantar and dorsiflexion. Sensation was decreased on the plantar and dorsal foot. A pedunculated osseous mass measuring 6x4 cm on the posterior femoral neck was seen on plain radiographs and magnetic resonance imaging. Electromyography showed moderate sciatic neuropathy of the peroneal and tibial branches. The patient underwent excision of the tumor through a posterior approach. Due to the risk of weakening the neck, two 7.3-mm cannulated screws were passed percutaneously into the head with fluoroscopic guidance. The final pathological report indicated the tumor was an osteochondroma. At 22-month follow-up, he had full resolution of the neurologic findings. Postoperatively, the patient reported improvement in numbness and tingling in the leg but continued to have moderate buttock pain. Left hip flexion increased to 115 degrees at last follow-up.The importance of protecting the medial femoral circumflex artery during approaches to the hip is paramount. In this case, the tumor arose from the central aspect of the quadratus femoris, with the superior muscle protecting the medial femoral circumflex artery from harm. Although osteochondromas are a rare cause of mass effect, they should be considered in the differential diagnosis of sciatic nerve compression in this anatomical location.
Laboratory Testing for Prescription Opioids

Opioid analgesic misuse has risen significantly over the past two decades, and these drugs now represent the most commonly abused class of prescription medications. They are a major cause of poisoning deaths in the USA exceeding heroin and cocaine. Laboratory testing plays a role in the detection of opioid misuse and the evaluation of patients with opioid intoxication. Laboratories use both immunoassay and chromatographic methods (e.g., liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry detection), often in combination, to yield high detection sensitivity and drug specificity. Testing methods for opioids originated in the workplace-testing arena and focused on detection of illicit heroin use. Analysis for a wide range of opioids is now required in the context of the prescription opioid epidemic. Testing methods have also been primarily based upon urine screening; however, methods for analyzing alternative samples such as saliva, sweat, and hair are available. Application of testing to monitor prescription opioid drug therapy is an increasingly important use of drug testing, and this area of testing introduces new interpretative challenges. In particular, drug metabolism may transform one clinically available opioid into another. The sensitivity of testing methods also varies considerably across the spectrum of opioid drugs. An understanding of opioid metabolism and method sensitivity towards different opioid drugs is therefore essential to effective use of these tests. Improved testing algorithms and more research into the effective use of drug testing in the clinical setting, particularly in pain medicine and substance abuse, are needed.
Bayesian Methods for Neural Networks and Related Models

Models such as feed-forward neural networks and certain other structures investigated in the computer science literature are not amenable to closed-form Bayesian analysis. The paper reviews the various approaches taken to overcome this difficulty, involving the use of Gaussian approximations, Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation routines and a class of non-Gaussian but “deterministic” approximations called variational approximations.
Histology of symptomatic gastroesophageal reflux disease: is it predictive of response to proton pump inhibitors?

BACKGROUND AND AIM
To examine the differences in esophageal histopathology between non-erosive reflux disease (NERD) and reflux esophagitis (RE), and to investigate whether baseline esophageal histopathology can predict the therapeutic response to proton pump inhibitors (PPIs).


METHOD
The subjects comprised 94 patients with NERD (n = 71) or mild RE (n = 23). Tissue was biopsied from 5 cm above the squamo-columnar junction (SCJ), and the degree or presence of nine histopathological markers was assessed. The patients were treated with rabeprazole (RPZ) 10 mg once daily for 4 weeks. If complete heartburn relief was not achieved, RPZ was increased to 10 mg twice daily for another 2 weeks, and then to 20 mg twice daily for another 2 weeks if heartburn remained.


RESULTS
Features of esophageal histopathology 5 cm above the SCJ differed between NERD and RE patients. The esophageal histopathology in patients unresponsive to RPZ was characterized by Protein Gene Product (PGP) 9.5 negativity in those with NERD, and intraepithelial bleeding in those with RE. In addition, the combination of dilated intercellular spaces (DIS) (+)/PGP 9.5 (-) was indicative of strong resistance to PPI therapy in NERD patients.


CONCLUSION
The therapeutic efficacy of PPI can be predicted from the features of biopsied esophageal tissue. Factors predictive of resistance to treatment with PPI are negativity for PGP 9.5 in NERD patients and intraepithelial bleeding in RE patients.
Automatic Enumeration of Regular Objects

We describe a framework for systematic enumeration of families combinatorial structures that possess a certain regularity. More precisely, we describe how to obtain the differential equations satisfied by their generating series. These differential equations are then used to determine the initial terms in the counting sequence and for asymptotic analysis. The key tool is the scalar product for symmetric functions.
[Evaluation of effect of therapy of somatic diseases and cognitive impairment in geriatric patients].

INTRODUCTION
Human aging is characterized by progressive decrease of the homeostatic reserves of every organ system with a possible impairment of cognitive functions. The study was aimed at examining and proving the correlations between cognitive failure and somatic diseases in patients belonging to geriatric population as well as at following the efficiency of treatment of somatic diseases by Mini mental examination test score.


MATERIAL AND METHODS
A group of 100 geriatric patients did Mini mental examination test at the beginning of hospitalisation and after three weeks of treatment of different.somatic diseases. The patients underwent many examination tests-biochemical analyses of blood and urin, ultrasound examination, X-ray examination of lungs and heart, hormones of thyroid gland, concentrations of B12 vitamin, folan acid.


RESULTS
The statistical study showed that there was a significant correlation between the recovery of somatic diseases and the score of cognitive functions of patients. MMSE score was significantly increased after three weeks of successful treatment of somatic diseases in hospital.


CONCLUSION
The highest statistical significance in the difference of M'ISE score at the beginning and after three weeks of hospital treatment was found in the group of patients with successful results of the treatment of their somatic diseases such as cardiomyopathies and disorders of respiratory system, such as pneumonia. MMSE score did not increase in patients chronic disease with malignant diseases of lungs or liver and chronic disease with frequent exacerbations. It was a group of patients without significant change in their somatic state.
A Single-center Analysis on the Learning Curve of Male-to-Female Penoscrotal Vaginoplasty by Multiple Surgical Measures.

OBJECTIVE
To asses and quantify the learning curve (LC) of the penoscrotal inversion flap vaginoplasty (PSV).


PATIENTS AND METHODS
We retrospectively reviewed clinical records of 69 patients who underwent PSV from January 2005 to January 2015. Two validated methods were used: a scatterplot representation and a splitting group. We selected as primary outcomes the operative time and vaginal depth. Surgical outcomes including blood losses, hospital stay, and postoperative complications such as vaginal stenosis or atresia or urethral meatus stenosis were also evaluated.


RESULTS
The overall median operative time was 245 minutes. Severe intraoperative complications were not reported. The overall incidence of postoperative major complications was 21.7 %, most of them being urethral issues. The splitting group analysis revealed a statistically remarkable difference between groups for the operative time (P < .01), the vaginal depth (P = .01), the hospital stay (P < .01), and the intraoperative complication rate (P = .01). On the contrary, no differences were evidenced between the cohorts for the amount of blood loss (P = .08). The scatterplot logarithmic analysis demonstrated a clear visible LC for most parameters. The operative time showed a sharp decrease within the first 20-30 cases, reaching a plateau after 40 cases. Considering the analysis of the vaginal depth, the logarithmic scatterplot curve evidenced a slight increase within the first 10 cases, reaching a clear stabilization after nearly 30-40 cases.


CONCLUSION
An evident LC for PSV is detectable, consisting of at least 40 cases needed to the surgical team to develop adequate skills to guarantee a safe and high-quality procedure.
Motivated Rejection of Science

Some scientifically well-established results—such as the fact that emission of greenhouse gases produces global warming—are rejected by sizable proportions of the population in the United States and other countries. Rejection of scientific findings is mostly driven by motivated cognition: People tend to reject findings that threaten their core beliefs or worldview. At present, rejection of scientific findings by the U.S. public is more prevalent on the political right than the left. Yet the cognitive mechanisms driving rejection of science, such as the superficial processing of evidence toward the desired interpretation, are found regardless of political orientation. General education and scientific literacy do not mitigate rejection of science but, rather, increase the polarization of opinions along partisan lines. In contrast, specific knowledge about the mechanisms underlying a scientific result—such as human-made climate change—can increase the acceptance of that result.
A Script-Independent Methodology For Optical Character Recognition

We present a methodology for OCR that exhibits the following properties: script-independent feature extraction, training, and recognition components; no separate segmentation at the character and word levels; and the training is performed automatically on data that is also not presegmented. The methodology is adapted to OCR from continuous speech recognition, which has developed a mature and successful technology based on Hidden Markov Models. The script independence of the methodology is demonstrated using omnifont experiments on the DARPA Arabic OCR Corpus and the University of Washington English Document Image Database I. ( 1998 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Optical character recognition Speech recognition Hidden Markov models Segmentation-free recognition Script independence Arabic OCR
Low Resolution Face Recognition in Surveillance Systems

In surveillance systems, the captured facial images are often very small and different from the low-resolution images down-sampled from high-resolution facial images. They generally lead to low performance in face recognition. In this paper, we study specific scenarios of face recognition with surveillance cameras. Three important factors that influence face recognition performance are investigated: type of cameras, distance between the object and camera, and the resolution of the captured face images. Each factor is numerically investigated and analyzed in this paper. Based on these observations, a new approach is proposed for face recognition in real surveillance environment. For a raw video sequence captured by a surveillance camera, image pre-processing techniques are employed to remove the illumination variations for the enhancement of image quality. The face images are further improved through a novel face image super-resolution method. The proposed approach is proven to significantly improve the performance of face recognition as demonstrated by experiments.
Template-based synthesis of instruction-level abstractions for SoC verification

Contemporary integrated circuits are complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs consisting of programmable cores along with accelerators and peripherals controlled by firmware running on the cores. The functionality of the SoC is implemented by a combination of firmware and hardware components. As a result, verifying these two components separately can miss bugs while attempting to formally verify the full SoC design considering both firmware and hardware is not scalable. An abstraction that can be used instead of the cycle-accurate and bit-precise hardware implementation can be helpful in scalably verifying system-level properties of SoCs. However, constructing such an abstraction to capture all the required details and interactions is error-prone, tedious and time-consuming. Another challenge is ensuring correctness of the abstraction so that properties proven using it are valid. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for SoC verification. We synthesize an instruction-level abstraction (ILA) that precisely captures updates to all firmware-accessible states spanning the cores, accelerators and peripherals. The synthesis algorithm uses a blackbox simulator to synthesize the ILA from a template specification. A "golden-model" generated from the ILA is used to verify whether the hardware implementation matches the ILA. We demonstrate the methodology using a small SoC design consisting of the 8051 microcontroller and two cryptographic accelerators. The methodology uncovered 14 bugs.