LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Cross-over study of influence of oral vitamin C supplementation on inflammatory status in maintenance hemodialysis patients

BACKGROUND
Both vitamin C deficiency and inflammation are prevalent in maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients. In this study, we aimed to elucidate the effect of oral vitamin C supplementation on inflammatory status in MHD patients with low vitamin C level and high hypersensitive C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) level.


METHODS
A total of 128 patients were recruited in our present study. Patients were divided into two groups. In group 1 (n = 67), patients were orally administered with 200 mg/day vitamin C in the first 3 months, and then the vitamin C supplementation was withdrawn in the next 3 months. In group 2 (n = 61), patients were not given vitamin C in the first 3 months, and then they were orally administered with 200 mg/day in the next 3 months. Levels of hs-CRP, prealbumin, albumin and hemoglobin as well as the EPO resistance index (ERI) were determined at the baseline and every 3 months throughout the study. Plasma vitamin C level was determined by high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection.


RESULTS
Among the 128 patients, 28 of them dropped out of the study before completion. Consequently, a total of 100 patients (group 1: n = 48; group 2: n = 52) were included in the final analysis. At the baseline, the plasma vitamin C level of all patients was less than 4 μg/mL. However, this proportion was decreased to 20% after the vitamin C supplementation for 3 months. Compared with patients without the vitamin C supplementation, a decreased level of hs-CRP and an increased level of prealbumin were induced by the vitamin C supplementation for 3 months in both groups. However, levels of these biomarkers returned to their original state after the supplementation was withdrawn. Same beneficial effects on plasma albumin, hemoglobin and ERI response to vitamin C supplementation were observed in the two groups without statistical significance.


CONCLUSIONS
The inflammatory status in MHD patients with plasma vitamin C deficiency and high levels of inflammatory markers could be partially improved by long-term oral administration of small doses of vitamin C.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
The clinical trial number: NCT01356433.
Structure and Performance of Fine-Grain Parallelism in Genetic Search

Within the parallel genetic algorithm framework, there currently exists a growing dichotomy between coarse-pain and fine-grain parallel architectures. This paper attempts to characterize the need for fine-grain parallelism. and to introduce and compare three models of fine-grain parallel genetic algorithms (GAS). The performance of the three models is examined on seventeen test problems and is compared to the performance of a coarse-grain parailel GA. Preliminary results indicate that the massive distribution of the fine-grain parallel GA and the modified population topology yield improvements in speed and in the number of evaluations required to find global optima.
Midwife-led versus other models of care for childbearing women.

BACKGROUND
Midwives are primary providers of care for childbearing women around the world. However, there is a lack of synthesised information to establish whether there are differences in morbidity and mortality, effectiveness and psychosocial outcomes between midwife-led and other models of care.


OBJECTIVES
To compare midwife-led models of care with other models of care for childbearing women and their infants.


SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group's Trials Register (January 2008), Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group's Trials Register (January 2008), Current Contents (1994 to January 2008), CINAHL (1982 to August 2006), Web of Science, BIOSIS Previews, ISI Proceedings, (1990 to 2008), and the WHO Reproductive Health Library, No. 9.


SELECTION CRITERIA
All published and unpublished trials in which pregnant women are randomly allocated to midwife-led or other models of care during pregnancy, and where care is provided during the ante- and intrapartum period in the midwife-led model.


DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
All authors evaluated methodological quality. Two authors independently checked the data extraction.


MAIN RESULTS
We included 11 trials (12,276 women). Women who had midwife-led models of care were less likely to experience antenatal hospitalisation, risk ratio (RR) 0.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.81 to 0.99), the use of regional analgesia (RR 0.81, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.91), episiotomy (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.77 to 0.88), and instrumental delivery (RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.78 to 0.96) and were more likely to experience no intrapartum analgesia/anaesthesia (RR 1.16, 95% CI 1.05 to 1.29), spontaneous vaginal birth (RR 1.04, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.06), to feel in control during labour and childbirth (RR 1.74, 95% CI 1.32 to 2.30), attendance at birth by a known midwife (RR 7.84, 95% CI 4.15 to 14.81) and initiate breastfeeding (RR 1.35, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.76). In addition, women who were randomised to receive midwife-led care were less likely to experience fetal loss before 24 weeks' gestation (RR 0.79, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.97), and their babies were more likely to have a shorter length of hospital stay (mean difference -2.00, 95% CI -2.15 to -1.85). There were no statistically significant differences between groups for overall fetal loss/neonatal death (RR 0.83, 95% CI 0.70 to 1.00), or fetal loss/neonatal death of at least 24 weeks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.67 to 1.53).


AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
All women should be offered midwife-led models of care and women should be encouraged to ask for this option.
A Phantom-Go Program

This paper presents a Phantom Go program. It is based on a MonteCarlo approach. The program plays Phantom Go at an intermediate level.
20 Fouling of Heat Transfer Surfaces

Fouling is generally defined as the accumulation and formation of unwanted materials on the surfaces of processing equipment, which can seriously deteriorate the capacity of the surface to transfer heat under the temperature difference conditions for which it was designed. Fouling of heat transfer surfaces is one of the most important problems in heat transfer equipment. Fouling is an extremely complex phenomenon. Fundamentally, fouling may be characterized as a combined, unsteady state, momentum, mass and heat transfer problem with chemical, solubility, corrosion and biological processes may also taking place. It has been described as the major unresolved problem in heat transfer1. According to many [1-3], fouling can occur on any fluid-solid surface and have other adverse effects besides reduction of heat transfer. It has been recognized as a nearly universal problem in design and operation, and it affects the operation of equipment in two ways: Firstly, the fouling layer has a low thermal conductivity. This increases the resistance to heat transfer and reduces the effectiveness of heat exchangers. Secondly, as deposition occurs, the cross sectional area is reduced, which causes an increase in pressure drop across the apparatus. In industry, fouling of heat transfer surfaces has always been a recognized phenomenon, although poorly understood. Fouling of heat transfer surfaces occurs in most chemical and process industries, including oil refineries, pulp and paper manufacturing, polymer and fiber production, desalination, food processing, dairy industries, power generation and energy recovery. By many, fouling is considered the single most unknown factor in the design of heat exchangers. This situation exists despite the wealth of operating experience accumulated over the years and accumulation of the fouling literature. This lake of understanding almost reflects the complex nature of the phenomena by which fouling occurs in industrial equipment. The wide range of the process streams and operating conditions present in industry tends to make most fouling situations unique, thus rendering a general analysis of the problem difficult. In general, the ability to transfer heat efficiently remains a central feature of many industrial processes. As a consequence much attention has been paid to improving the understanding of heat transfer mechanisms and the development of suitable correlations and techniques that may be applied to the design of heat exchangers. On the other hand relatively little consideration has been given to the problem of surface fouling in heat exchangers. The
Neural repetition suppression in ventral occipito-temporal cortex occurs during conscious and unconscious processing of frequent stimuli

Stimulus repetition can produce neural response attenuation in stimulus-category selective networks within the occipito-temporal lobe. It is hypothesized that this neural suppression reflects the functional sharpening of local neuronal assemblies which boosts information processing efficiency. This neural suppression phenomenon has been mainly reported during conditions of conscious stimulus perception. The question remains whether frequent stimuli processed in the absence of conscious perception also induce repetition suppression in those specialized networks. Using rare intracranial EEG recordings in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) of human epileptic patients we investigated neural repetition suppression in conditions of conscious and unconscious visual processing of words. To this end, we used an orthogonal design manipulating respectively stimulus repetition (frequent vs. unique stimuli) and conscious perception (masked vs. unmasked stimuli). By measuring the temporal dynamics of high-frequency broadband gamma activity in VOTC and testing for main and interaction effects, we report that early processing of words in word-form selective networks exhibits a temporal cascade of modulations by stimulus repetition and masking: neuronal attenuation initially is observed in response to repeated words (irrespective of consciousness), that is followed by a second modulation contingent upon word reportability (irrespective of stimulus repetition). Later on (>300ms post-stimulus), a significant effect of conscious perception on the extent of repetition suppression was observed. The temporal dynamics of consciousness, the recognition memory processes and their interaction revealed in this study advance our understanding of their contributions to the neural mechanisms of word processing in VOTC.
Three-year results of the VIBRANT trial of VIABAHN endoprosthesis versus bare nitinol stent implantation for complex superficial femoral artery occlusive disease.

OBJECTIVE
The predominant mode of bare nitinol stent failure is diffuse in-stent restenosis, and failure rates correlate to the length and complexity of the treated lesion. Addition of an expanded polytetrafluoroethylene lining to a nitinol stent frame, as found in the VIABAHN endoprosthesis, mitigates the ingrowth of intimal hyperplasia. We compared the long-term outcomes of complex superficial femoral artery disease intervention using the VIABAHN endoprosthesis to those obtained with bare nitinol stent implantation.


METHODS
One hundred forty-eight patients with symptomatic complex superficial femoral artery disease (TransAtlantic Inter-Society Consensus I class C and D lesions, accompanied by intermittent claudication or ischemic rest pain) were randomized to endovascular intervention using either bare nitinol stent implantation (76 patients) or nonheparin-bonded VIABAHN endoprosthesis deployment (72 patients). Patency, limb hemodynamics, and quality of life were evaluated at 1, 6, 12, 24, and 36 months following intervention.


RESULTS
The average treated lesion measured 18 ± 8 cm in length, and 58.8% of lesions displayed segmental or complete occlusion. At 3 years, primary patency rates (defined by peak systolic velocity ratio ≤ 2.0 and no target lesion revascularization) did not significantly differ between patients treated with the VIABAHN stent graft and those who received a bare nitinol stent (24.2% vs 25.9%; P = .392). Stent fractures were significantly more common in bare nitinol stents (50.0%) than in the VIABAHN endoprostheses (2.6%). Primary-assisted patency rates were higher in those receiving bare nitinol stents than the VIABAHN stent graft (88.8% vs 69.8%; P = .04), although secondary patency rates did not differ between bare nitinol stent and stent graft recipients (89.3% vs 79.5%; P = .304). There were no instances of procedure-related mortality or amputation. The hemodynamic improvement and quality measures improved equally in both groups.


CONCLUSIONS
The long-term outcomes of complex superficial femoral artery disease intervention using the VIABAHN endograft and bare nitinol stents are similar. Although primary patency rates are low in both study arms, excellent primary-assisted and secondary patency rates were achieved, with sustained augmentation of limb perfusion and quality-of-life measures. Patency rates diminish most rapidly in the first year after device implantation.
Solid Waste Disposal in Ghana: A Study of The WA Municipality

Many cities in Ghana have no controlled system for waste disposal. Waste is burned in pits, dumped in random locations, or disposed of in uncontrolled dumps without any further management. All these actions harm public health and the environment. The objective of the study is to assess solid waste disposal practices in relation to sex, age and educational level in the Wa Municipality. The research instruments used for the study were questionnaire, interview and personal observation. Simple correlation analysis was employed to determine among others the combined effect of age, sex and educational level on the solid waste disposal methods of households in the study area. Statistical tests of significance were performed to determine the models reliability at predicting future outcomes. Graphs, percentages and tables were used for analysis of the findings. The study revealed that sex, age and educational level negatively correlated with the solid waste disposal methods in the Wa Municipality. The study also revealed that, open dumping of solid waste is a common practice in the Wa municipality. While some employ the service of drains to transport their solid wastes out of their sight, some directly dump their solid wastes by the road sides. The study thus, recommends that the Wa Municipal Authorities should stop the use of the open dumping site and construct an engineered landfill for the disposal of solid waste in the Wa Municipality.
Metadata for object-relational data warehouse

For developing data warehouse (DW) and OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems, the dominant relational database reaches its limitations. On the way of the development, object-relational (O-R) database is preferred to get over those ones. This paper introduces metadata for data warehouse system on O-R database and specifies new kind of metadata for mapping from object-oriented environment to relational environment. We also present the storage structure for repository this new kind of metadata in O-R database.
VM provisioning policies to improve the profit of cloud infrastructure service providers

Cloud computing is an emerging technology in the IT world. Some features of cloud, such as low cost, scalability, robustness and availability are attracting large-scale industries as well as small business towards cloud. A virtual machine (VM) can be defined as a software that can run its own operating systems and applications like an operating system in physical computer. As the number of users increases, allocation of resources and scheduling become a complex task. The optimization of VM provisioning policies offer improvement like increasing provider's profit, energy savings and load balancing in large data centres. In cloud computing when resource requirement of user's requests exceed resources limits of cloud provider, to fulfil the requests the cloud provider outsources to other cloud providers resources, this concept is known as cloud federation. In this paper we propose an algorithm for VM provisioning in federated cloud environment. The approach tries to improve the cloud providers profit. We have used the CloudSim to find-out the results and result show that how Cloud federation help to Cloud providers in order to improve its profit.
Performance Evaluation of Single and Multiple-Gaussian Models for Skin Color Modeling

We present an experimental setup to evaluate the relative peiformance of single gaussian and mixture of gaussians models for skin color modeling. Firstly, a sample set of J, J 20, 000 skin pixels from a number of ethnic groups is selected and represented in the chromaticity space. In the following, parameter estimation for both the single gaussian and seven (with 2 to 8 gaussian components) gaussian mixture models is peiformed. For the mixture models, learning is carried out via the expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm. In order to compare peiformances achieved by the 8 different models, we apply to each model a test set of 800 images -none from the training set. 1rue skin regions, representing the ground truth, are manually selected, and false positive and true positive rates are computed for each value of a specific threshold. Finally, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves are plotted for each model, which make it possible to analyze and compare their relative performances. Results obtained show that, for medium to high true positive rates, mixture models (with 2 to 8 components) outpeiform the single gaussian model. Nevertheless. for low false positive rates, all the models behave similarly. kernel to represent the skin cluster in some color space ( e.g. [2, 5, 6]). An alternative to the single-gaussian model is presented in [I], where the skin color distribution is modelled with a mixture of bivariate gaussian components. A comparative study between the single-gaussian (SG) and the double-gaussian models has been presented there, but a more detailed analysis is lacking to understand how the model behaves when a higher number of gaussian clusters is used in the mixture. This work proposes a performance evaluation technique to analyse the behaviour of models with respect to the number of gaussians. The analysis took into consideration models ranging from I to 8 gaussian components, which lead to two main conclusions. Firstly, skin color mixture models clearly outperform the single gaussian model for medium to high true positive rates. In this case, however, no major differences are noticed among the performances of the 7 mixture models. Secondly, when low false-positive rates are required, all the 8 models tested perform quite similarly. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the feature space for representing the human skin color and the sample set used to train the models are presented. In section 3, the standard SG model is described. In s"ection 4, we review our GM model approach as an alternative for SG. Section 5 reports the experiments applied to a test set; with models ranging from one to eight gaussian components. Finally, in section 7 we draw the conclusions and outline future work.
Using ontology-based semantic similarity to facilitate the article screening process for systematic reviews

OBJECTIVE
Systematic Reviews (SRs) are utilized to summarize evidence from high quality studies and are considered the preferred source of evidence-based practice (EBP). However, conducting SRs can be time and labor intensive due to the high cost of article screening. In previous studies, we demonstrated utilizing established (lexical) article relationships to facilitate the identification of relevant articles in an efficient and effective manner. Here we propose to enhance article relationships with background semantic knowledge derived from Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts and ontologies.


METHODS
We developed a pipelined semantic concepts representation process to represent articles from an SR into an optimized and enriched semantic space of UMLS concepts. Throughout the process, we leveraged concepts and concept relations encoded in biomedical ontologies (SNOMED-CT and MeSH) within the UMLS framework to prompt concept features of each article. Article relationships (similarities) were established and represented as a semantic article network, which was readily applied to assist with the article screening process. We incorporated the concept of active learning to simulate an interactive article recommendation process, and evaluated the performance on 15 completed SRs. We used work saved over sampling at 95% recall (WSS95) as the performance measure.


RESULTS
We compared the WSS95 performance of our ontology-based semantic approach to existing lexical feature approaches and corpus-based semantic approaches, and found that we had better WSS95 in most SRs. We also had the highest average WSS95 of 43.81% and the highest total WSS95 of 657.18%.


CONCLUSION
We demonstrated using ontology-based semantics to facilitate the identification of relevant articles for SRs. Effective concepts and concept relations derived from UMLS ontologies can be utilized to establish article semantic relationships. Our approach provided a promising performance and can easily apply to any SR topics in the biomedical domain with generalizability.
Toward Identifying the Next Generation of Superfund and Hazardous Waste Site Contaminants

BACKGROUND
This commentary evolved from a workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences titled "Superfund Contaminants: The Next Generation" held in Tucson, Arizona, in August 2009. All the authors were workshop participants.


OBJECTIVES
Our aim was to initiate a dynamic, adaptable process for identifying contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) that are likely to be found in future hazardous waste sites, and to identify the gaps in primary research that cause uncertainty in determining future hazardous waste site contaminants.


DISCUSSION
Superfund-relevant CECs can be characterized by specific attributes: They are persistent, bioaccumulative, toxic, occur in large quantities, and have localized accumulation with a likelihood of exposure. Although still under development and incompletely applied, methods to quantify these attributes can assist in winnowing down the list of candidates from the universe of potential CECs. Unfortunately, significant research gaps exist in detection and quantification, environmental fate and transport, health and risk assessment, and site exploration and remediation for CECs. Addressing these gaps is prerequisite to a preventive approach to generating and managing hazardous waste sites.


CONCLUSIONS
A need exists for a carefully considered and orchestrated expansion of programmatic and research efforts to identify, evaluate, and manage CECs of hazardous waste site relevance, including developing an evolving list of priority CECs, intensifying the identification and monitoring of likely sites of present or future accumulation of CECs, and implementing efforts that focus on a holistic approach to prevention.
Detecting DoS attacks on SIP systems

As VoIP technology becomes more widely deployed due to its economical advantage over traditional PSTN services, VoIP servers and clients will become attractive targets of denial of service (DoS) attacks. This paper proposes a method to detect DoS attacks that involve flooding SIP entities with illegitimate SIP messages. We modify the original finite-state machines for SIP transactions in such a way that transaction anomalies can be detected in a stateful manner. We also propose to use four threshold parameters to confirm an attack.