LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Neurological sequelae in twins born after assisted conception: controlled national cohort study.

OBJECTIVE
To compare neurological sequelae in twins born after assisted conception with singletons after assisted conception and naturally conceived twins and to assess neurological sequelae in children conceived after in vitro fertilisation (IVF) compared with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).


DESIGN
Controlled, national register based, cohort study.


PARTICIPANTS
Twins (n = 3393) and singletons (n = 5130) conceived by using assisted reproductive technologies and naturally conceived twins (n = 10 239) born in Denmark between 1995 and 2000. The children's age at time of follow up was 2-7 years.


DATA SOURCES
Children were identified by cross linkage of the national medical birth registry and the national registry for in vitro fertilisation. Neurological and psychiatric diagnoses were retrieved from the national patients' registry and the Danish psychiatric central registry.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Neurological sequelae, defined as cerebral palsy, mental retardation, severe mental developmental disturbances, and retarded psychomotor development. Further we made separate analyses on the specific cerebral palsy diagnosis.


RESULTS
The crude prevalence rates per 1000 of neurological sequelae in twins and singletons after assisted conception and in naturally conceived twins were 8.8, 8.2, and 9.6, and of cerebral palsy 3.2, 2.5, and 4.0, respectively. In twins after assisted conception compared with control twins, the odds ratios of neurological sequelae and specifically of cerebral palsy, adjusted for child sex and year of birth, were 0.9 (95% confidence interval 0.6 to 1.4) and 0.8 (0.4 to 1.6), respectively. The corresponding odds ratios for twins after assisted conception compared with singletons after assisted conception were 1.1 (0.7 to 1.7) for neurological sequelae and 1.3 (0.6 to 2.9) for cerebral palsy. The odds ratio of neurological sequelae in children conceived by ICSI was 0.9 (0.5 to 1.7) nu children conceived by IVF.


CONCLUSIONS
Twins from assisted conception have a similar risk of neurological sequelae as their naturally conceived peers and singletons from assisted conception. Children born after ICSI have the same risk of neurological sequelae as children born after IVF.
Land slide disaster in eastern Uganda: rapid assessment of water, sanitation and hygiene situation in Bulucheke camp, Bududa district

BACKGROUND
On 1st March 2010, a major landslide occurred on Mt. Elgon in Eastern Uganda. This was triggered by heavy rains that lasted over three months. The landslide buried three villages in Bududa district, killing over 400 and displacing an estimate of 5,000 people. A comprehensive assessment of water, sanitation and hygiene was urgently needed to inform interventions by the Ministries of Health, and Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees, Uganda.


METHODS
This was a cross-sectional study where both qualitative and quantitative data were collected two weeks after the disaster. Quantitative interviews involved 397 heads of households and qualitative methods comprised of 27 Key Informant interviews, four focus group discussions and observations. The survey quantified water safety (collection, treatment, storage) and hygiene practices. This was supplemented and triangulated with qualitative data that focused on community perceptions and beliefs regarding water and sanitation needs and practices. Quantitative data was entered in Epi-Info Version 3.2.2 software and then exported to SPSS Version 12 for analysis. Summary statistics and proportions were generated and bi-variable analysis performed for selected variables. Associations were assessed using odds ratios at 95% confidence intervals. Qualitative data was analyzed using content analysis.


RESULTS
Qualitative results showed that there were strong traditional beliefs governing water use and human excreta disposal. The use of river Manafwa water for household consumption was observed to potentially lead to disease outbreaks. Water from this river was reported tastier and the community culturally saw no need to boil drinking water. Latrines were few (23 for 5000 people), shallow, dirty (70% reported flies, 60% fecal littering), not separated by sex and had limited privacy and no light at night. This affected their use. Males were 3 times more likely to wash hands with soap after latrine use than females (OR = 3.584, 95%CI: 1.658-7.748). Of the 90% respondents who indicated that they always washed hands after latrine use, 76% said they used water and soap. Observations showed that water and soap were inconsistently available at the hand washing facilities. This situation influenced people's sanitation and hygiene behaviours. Nearly half (48%) indicated that at least a member of their household had fallen sick at least once since arrival at the camp.


CONCLUSION
There was inadequate access to safe water in the camp. Pit-latrines were inadequate, poorly maintained and not user-friendly for most people. Responsible authorities should design means of increasing and sustaining access to safe water, increase sanitation facilities and continuously educate the public on the need to observe good hygiene practices.
Influence of hypertension on early carotid artery remodeling.

OBJECTIVE
We aimed to analyze the influence of hypertension on early large artery remodeling.


METHODS AND RESULTS
Carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and diameter were measured ultrasonographically in 394 normotensive subjects and 327 untreated and 528 treated hypertensive patients. IMT and diameter were increased in hypertensive groups, treated or untreated, compared with the normotensive group (P<0.001). Positive association existed between diameter and IMT in the overall study population (P<0.001), and this association interacted with the category of clinical groups (P<0.01). The slope of the diameter-IMT relationship was different between normotensive, untreated hypertensive, and treated hypertensive groups (P<0.01), with higher value in the treated hypertensive group than in untreated hypertensive and normotensive groups (P<0.05, P<0.01). Adjustment for blood pressure, lipid-lowering therapy, or multiple covariates (age, sex, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, body mass index, lipid-lowering therapy, smoking, and previous cardiovascular disease) did not abolish the diameter-IMT slope difference between clinical groups (P<0.01).


CONCLUSIONS
The sensitivity of carotid artery enlargement in response to increase in wall thickness was unchanged in untreated hypertension but altered by antihypertensive therapy compared with the normotensive condition.
A cluster centers initialization method for clustering categorical data

Keywords: The k-modes algorithm Initialization method Initial cluster centers Density Distance a b s t r a c t The leading partitional clustering technique, k-modes, is one of the most computationally efficient clustering methods for categorical data. However, the performance of the k-modes clustering algorithm which converges to numerous local minima strongly depends on initial cluster centers. Currently, most methods of initialization cluster centers are mainly for numerical data. Due to lack of geometry for the categorical data, these methods used in cluster centers initialization for numerical data are not applicable to categorical data. This paper proposes a novel initialization method for categorical data which is implemented to the k-modes algorithm. The method integrates the distance and the density together to select initial cluster centers and overcomes shortcomings of the existing initialization methods for categorical data. Experimental results illustrate the proposed initialization method is effective and can be applied to large data sets for its linear time complexity with respect to the number of data objects. Clustering is a process of grouping a set of objects into clusters so that the objects in the same cluster have high similarity but are very dissimilar with objects in other clusters. Various types of clustering methods have been proposed and developed, see, for instance (Jain & Dubes, 1988). Clustering algorithms in the literature can generally be classified into two types: hierarchical clustering and partitional clustering. Hierarchical clustering algorithms, essentially heuristic procedures, produce a hierarchy of partitions of the set of observations according to an agglomerative strategy or to a divisive one. Partitional clustering algorithms, in general, assume a given number of clusters and, essentially, seek the optimization of an objective function measuring the homogeneity within the clusters and/or the separation between the clusters. is a well known partitional clustering algorithm which is widely used in real world applications such as marketing research and data mining to cluster very large data sets due to their efficiency. extended the k-means algorithm to propose the k-modes algorithm whose extensions have removed the numeric-only limitation of the k-means algorithm and enable the k-means clustering process to be used to efficiently cluster large categorical data sets from real world databases. Since first published, the k-modes algorithm has become a popular technique in solving categorical data clustering problems in different application domains (Andreopoulos, An, & Wang, 2005). The k-means algorithm and the k-modes algorithm use alternating minimization methods to …
How do nurse case managers care for older women with breast cancer?

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES
To describe how nurse case managers care for older women with breast cancer.


DESIGN
A randomized, prospective trial.


SETTING
Thirteen community hospitals and two public hospitals in southeastern Texas.


SAMPLE
335 older women aged 60-89 years newly diagnosed with breast cancer and being cared for by 60 surgeons. Most participants were Caucasian. A total of 166 women were in the control group, and 159 were in the intervention nurse case management group.


METHODS
The nurses implemented multiple nursing interventions in each nursing process phase over a period of 12 months.


MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES
Independent variables were participants' demographic characteristics, depressive symptomatology, and cognitive impairment. Nurse case management contact was a dependent variable.


FINDINGS
In each nursing phase, a greater number of nurse case management contacts were made in the first quarter. Bivariate analysis illustrated statistical differences among race, income, education, and living alone with respect to the mean amount of nurse case management. Multivariate analysis revealed that age, income, living alone, and stage of cancer predicted more nurse case management contact.


CONCLUSIONS
Nurse case managers may play a role in helping older women with breast cancer achieve positive health outcomes.


IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING
Based on the findings of this study, nurses can develop specific nursing interventions to meet the needs of older women with breast cancer. Nurses can use the Model of Nurse Case Management to plan and manage care for older women with breast cancer.
Interferon and ribavirin versus interferon and amantadine in interferon nonresponders with chronic hepatitis C

OBJECTIVE:The aim of this study was to compare the potential efficacy and safety of a combination of interferon and ribavirin with that of interferon and amantadine in patients who had previously failed to respond to interferon monotherapy.METHODS:A total of 29 patients were randomized to 3 million units of α-interferon three times weekly with 1000 mg of ribavirin daily (group A, n = 14) or an identical dose of α-interferon and amantadine hydrochloride given in a dose of 200 mg daily (group B, n = 15). Patients were treated for 24 wk and observed for 24 wk posttreatment.RESULTS:The treatment groups were evenly matched with respect to gender, frequency of genotype 1, presence of fibrosis, as well as baseline alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and HCV RNA levels. At the end of therapy, five of 14 or 36% of patients in group A versus 0 of 15 in group B had both normal serum ALT and nondetectable HCV RNA by polymerase chain reaction (p = 0.017). A complete response was sustained, however, in only two of 13 patients (15%) in group A who completed 24 wk of observation posttreatment.CONCLUSIONS:A substantial proportion of interferon nonresponders have an end-of-treatment biochemical and virological response to a combination of interferon and ribavirin, and sustained responses are possible. The addition of amantadine to interferon, in contrast, does not seem to enhance the antiviral effectiveness of interferon in patients who have previously failed to respond.
The Class Imbalance Problem: Significance and Strategies

Although the majority of concept-learning systems previously designed usually assume that their training sets are well-balanced, this assumption is not necessarily correct. Indeed, there exist many domains for which one class is represented by a large number of examples while the other is represented by only a few. The purpose of this paper is 1) to demonstrate experimentally that, at least in the case of connectionist systems, class imbalances hinder the performance of standard clas-siiers and 2) to compare the performance of several approaches previously proposed to deal with the problem.
Achievements in Space Robotics Expanding the Horizons of Service and Exploration BY

O uter space is an ultimate field for the application of robotics technology. As outer space is a harsh environment with extreme temperatures, vacuum, radiation, gravity, and great distances, human access is very difficult and hazardous and is therefore limited. To assist human activities in space for constructing and maintaining space modules and structures, robotic manipulators have been playing essential roles in orbital operations. Moreover, expanding the horizons of exploration beyond the areas of human access, robots that land and travel on planetary surfaces have been greatly contributing to our knowledge of the solar system. New challenges are expected in the future. This article consists of three parts. In the first part, the achievements of orbital robotics technology in the last decade are reviewed, highlighting the Engineering Test Satellite (ETS-VII) and Orbital Express flight demonstrations. In the second part, some of the selected topics of planetary robotics from the field robotics research point of view are described. Recent achievements in the author’s laboratory are added as an illustrative example. Finally, technological challenges to asteroid robotics are discussed. When designing a robot to explore the surface of an asteroid, microgravity raises an interesting problem of how to stick and move on the surface. Some ideas to address these questions are introduced. Orbital Robotics Ideas to assemble space structures by a flying robot in orbit or to conduct servicing missions to existing satellites have been discussed since the 1980s. Figure 1 is an illustration describing the robotic assembling of a space structure, which was published in a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report in 1983 [1]. One attractive scenario was to build a space station using teleoperated or autonomous free-flying robots. In reality, the current International Space Station (ISS) has not been constructed by such free-flying robots but by many hours of human extravehicular activities (EVA) with the assistance of Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS, Canadarm) and Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS, Canadarm2). Another important scenario for an orbital free-flying space robot is to retrieve and dock with an existing satellite in orbit and then conduct servicing tasks. Such tasks include replacing components, resupplying expendables, refueling propellants and repairing, rescuing, and reorbiting the satellite. These servicing scenarios have been receiving the researcher’s attention because of their potential for flexible operation of satellites, including the extension of mission life and the orbital transfer at the end of life.
Validity of the DISABKIDS® - Cystic Fibrosis Module for
Brazilian children and adolescents
1



OBJECTIVES
To validate the health-related quality of life measuring instrument DISABKIDS®-Cystic Fibrosis Module (self version) for Brazilian children and adolescents.


METHOD
Methodological study in which a sample of 113 participants (54 girls and 59 boys; mean age 11.91 years and SD=2.79) was considered, from four Brazilian states, São Paulo, Paraná, Minas Gerais and the Federal District, 51 of whom participated in the pilot study and 62 in the field study. The answers to the questionnaire were analyzed, considering the frequency distributions with regard to the floor and ceiling effects, Cronbach's Alpha statistics, Pearson's Linear Correlation Coefficient, Mulitrait-Multimethod analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis according to Structural Equations Modeling.


RESULTS
The instrument showed a high internal consistency coefficient (verified using Cronbach's Alpha) and construct validity, according to the Multitrait-Multimethod analysis. The DISABKIDS®-Cystic Fibrosis Module, self version, maintained the same factorial structure as in the originally proposed model.


CONCLUSION
The instrument validation has been finished and indicates that the self version is validated for use in Brazil and can be included into the monitoring routine of this population.
Enriching ontology mappings with semantic relations

There is a large number of tools to match or align corresponding concepts between ontologies. Most tools are restricted to equality correspondences, although many concepts may be related differently, e.g. according to an is-a or part-of relationship. Supporting such additional semantic correspondences can greatly improve the expressiveness of ontology mappings and their usefulness for tasks such as ontology merging and ontology evolution. We present a new approach called STROMA (SemanTic Refinement of Ontology MAppings) to determine semantic ontology mappings. In contrast to previous approaches, it follows a so-called enrichment strategy that refines the mappings determined with a state-of-the-art match tool. The enrichment strategy employs several techniques including the use of background knowledge and linguistic approaches to identify the additional kinds of correspondences. We evaluate the approach in detail using several real-life benchmark tests. A comparison with different tools for semantic ontology matching confirms the viability of the proposed enrichment strategy.
An integration method combining Rough Set Theory with formal concept analysis for personal investment portfolios

The classical Rough Set Theory (RST) always generates too many rules, making it difficult for decision makers to choose a suitable rule. In this study, we use two processes (pre process and post process) to select suitable rules and to explore the relationship among attributes. In pre process, we propose a pruning process to select suitable rules by setting up a threshold on the support object of decision rules, to thereby solve the problem of too many rules. The post process used the formal concept analysis from these suitable rules to explore the attribute relationship and the most important factors affecting decision making for choosing behaviours of personal investment portfolios. In this study, we explored the main concepts (characteristics) for the conservative portfolio: the stable job, less than 4 working years, and the gender is male; the moderate portfolio: high school education, the monthly salary between NT$30,001 (US$1000) and NT$80,000 (US$2667), the gender is male; and the aggressive portfolio: the monthly salary between NT$30,001 (US$1000) and NT$80,000 (US$2667), less than 4 working years, and a stable job. The study result successfully explored the most important factors affecting the personal investment portfolios and the suitable rules that can help decision makers. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Obstacle Detection for Visually Impaired Using Raspberry Pi and Ultrasonic Sensors

This paper proposes to develop an electronic device for obstacle detection in the path of visually impaired people. This device assists a user to walk without colliding with any obstacles in their path. It is a wearable device in the form of a waist belt that has ultrasonic sensors and raspberry pi installed on it. This device detects obstacles around the user up to 500cm in three directions i.e. front, left and right using a network of ultrasonic sensors. These ultrasonic sensors are connected to raspberry pi that receives data signals from these sensors for further data processing. The algorithm running in raspberry pi computes the distance from the obstacle and converts it into text message, which is then converted into speech and conveyed to the user through earphones/speakers. This design is benefitial in terms of it’s portability, low-cost, low power consumption and the fact that neither the user nor the device requires initial training. Keywords—embedded systems; raspberry pi; speech feedback; ultrasonic sensor; visually impaired;
Early Yield Prediction Using Image Analysis of Apple Fruit and Tree Canopy Features with Neural Networks

(1) Background: Since early yield prediction is relevant for resource requirements of harvesting and marketing in the whole fruit industry, this paper presents a new approach of using image analysis and tree canopy features to predict early yield with artificial neural networks (ANN); (2) Methods: Two back propagation neural network (BPNN) models were developed for the early period after natural fruit drop in June and the ripening period, respectively. Within the same periods, images of apple cv. “Gala” trees were captured from an orchard near Bonn, Germany. Two sample sets were developed to train and test models; each set included 150 samples from the 2009 and 2010 growing season. For each sample (each canopy image), pixels were segmented into fruit, foliage, and background using image segmentation. The four features extracted from the data set for the canopy were: total cross-sectional area of fruits, fruit number, total cross-section area of small fruits, and cross-sectional area of foliage, and were used as inputs. With the actual weighted yield per tree as a target, BPNN was employed to learn their mutual relationship as a prerequisite to develop the prediction; (3) Results: For the developed BPNN model of the early period after June drop, correlation coefficients (R2) between the estimated and the actual weighted yield, mean forecast error (MFE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean square error (RMSE) were 0.81, −0.05, 10.7%, 2.34 kg/tree, respectively. For the model of the ripening period, these measures were 0.83, −0.03, 8.9%, 2.3 kg/tree, respectively. In 2011, the two previously developed models were used to predict apple yield. The RMSE and R2 values between the estimated and harvested apple yield were 2.6 kg/tree and 0.62 for the early period (small, green fruit) and improved near harvest (red, large fruit) to 2.5 kg/tree and 0.75 for a tree with ca. 18 kg yield per tree. For further method verification, the cv. “Pinova” apple trees were used as another variety in 2012 to develop the BPNN prediction model for the early period after June drop. The model was used in 2013, which gave similar results as those found with cv. “Gala”; (4) Conclusion: Overall, the results showed in this research that the proposed estimation models performed accurately using canopy and fruit features using image analysis algorithms.
Chapter 2 Carbon Nanotube : Properties and Applications

Abstract This chapter presents the unique atomic structure and properties of carbon nanotube (CNT). The electronic band structure of carbon nanotube along with their small size and low dimension are responsible for their unique electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties. This chapter summarizes the electronic band structure of one-dimensional CNTs, various transport properties, and their real-world applications. Additionally, a brief about the production and purification of CNTs is also presented in this chapter.