LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of dermatophytosis among primary school children in Oke-Oyi community of Kwara state.

BACKGROUND
Dermatophytic infections have been known to impact negatively on health and well-being of children. This study was undertaken to determine the prevalence, clinical types as well as the etiologic organisms of dermatophyte infection among primary school children aged 5-16 years in Oke-Oyi community in Kwara state.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
A 4-months descriptive cross-sectional survey was carried out among 602 children aged 5-16 years in Oke-Oyi community, in Kwara state.


RESULTS
The prevalence of clinically suspected dermatophytoses lesion was 29.9% (180/602). Dermatophyte accounted for 5.0% (30/602) on Sabouraud dextrose agar culture, while non-dermatophyte molds represent majority of isolate i.e., 15.4% (93/602). Tinea capitis is the commonest clinical type, followed by Tinea coporis and then Tinea pedis. Multiple infections are noted in nine respondents. Three species of dermatophytes belonging to only two of the three genera of dermatophytes were responsible for human infection in the area studied, of which Trichophyton mentagrophyte is the commonest, followed by Microsporum audouinii and Trichophyton verucossum. Among the non-dermatophytes, Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida albicans predominate.


CONCLUSION
This study demonstrates that the prevalence of dermatophytoses in the school studied was significant. Control efforts should target this vulnerable group to reduce its prevalence.
Platelet-activating factor, PAF acetylhydrolase, and severe anaphylaxis.

BACKGROUND
Platelet-activating factor (PAF) is an important mediator of anaphylaxis in animals, and interventions that block PAF prevent fatal anaphylaxis. The roles of PAF and PAF acetylhydrolase, the enzyme that inactivates PAF, in anaphylaxis in humans have not been reported.


METHODS
We measured serum PAF levels and PAF acetylhydrolase activity in 41 patients with anaphylaxis and in 23 control patients. Serum PAF acetylhydrolase activity was also measured in 9 patients with peanut allergy who had fatal anaphylaxis and compared with that in 26 nonallergic pediatric control patients, 49 nonallergic adult control patients, 63 children with mild peanut allergy, 24 patients with nonfatal anaphylaxis, 10 children who died of nonanaphylactic causes, 15 children with life-threatening asthma, and 19 children with non-life-threatening asthma.


RESULTS
Mean (+/-SD) serum PAF levels were significantly higher in patients with anaphylaxis (805+/-595 pg per milliliter) than in patients in the control groups (127+/-104 pg per milliliter, P<0.001 after log transformation) and were correlated with the severity of anaphylaxis. The proportion of subjects with elevated PAF levels increased from 4% in the control groups to 20% in the group with grade 1 anaphylaxis, 71% in the group with grade 2 anaphylaxis, and 100% in the group with grade 3 anaphylaxis (P<0.001). There was an inverse correlation between PAF levels and PAF acetylhydrolase activity (P<0.001). The proportion of patients with low PAF acetylhydrolase values increased with the severity of anaphylaxis (P<0.001 for all comparisons). Serum PAF acetylhydrolase activity was significantly lower in patients with fatal peanut anaphylaxis than in control patients (P values <0.001 for all comparisons).


CONCLUSIONS
Serum PAF levels were directly correlated and serum PAF acetylhydrolase activity was inversely correlated with the severity of anaphylaxis. PAF acetylhydrolase activity was significantly lower in patients with fatal anaphylactic reactions to peanuts than in patients in any of the control groups. Failure of PAF acetylhydrolase to inactivate PAF may contribute to the severity of anaphylaxis.
Cultural competence in outpatient substance abuse treatment: measurement and relationship to wait time and retention.

BACKGROUND
Culturally competent practice is broadly acknowledged to be an important strategy to increase the quality of services for racial/ethnic minorities in substance abuse treatment. However, few empirically derived measures of organizational cultural competence exist, and relatively little is known about how these measures affect treatment outcomes.


METHOD
Using a nationally representative sample of outpatient substance abuse treatment (OSAT) programs, this study used item response theory to create two measures of cultural competence-organizational practices and managers' culturally sensitive beliefs-and examined their relationship to client wait time and retention using Poisson regression modeling.


RESULTS
The most common and precisely measured organizational practices reported by OSAT managers included matching providers and clients based on language/dialect; offering cross-cultural training; and fostering connections with community and faith-based organizations connected to racial and ethnic minority groups. The most culturally sensitive belief among OSAT managers was support for language/dialect matching for racial and ethnic minority clients. Results of regression modeling indicate that organizational practices were not related to either outcome. However, managers' culturally sensitive beliefs were negatively associated with average wait time (p<0.05), and positively associated with average retention (p<0.01).


CONCLUSIONS
Managers' culturally sensitive beliefs-considered to be influential for effective implementation of culturally competent practices-may be particularly relevant in influencing wait time and retention in OSAT organizations that treat Latinos and African American clients.
STUDY OF QUALITY OF WORK LIFE (QWL)

A high quality of work life (QWL) is essential for organizations to continue to attract and retain employees. QWL is a comprehensive program designated to improve employee satisfaction. This research aimed to provide insights into the positive and negative attitudes of Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) Hospitals’ employees from their quality of life. A crosssectional, descriptive and analytical study was conducted among 908 TUMS hospitals’ employees by questionnaire at 15 studied hospitals. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select respondents as nursing, supportive and paramedical groups. The results showed that the majority of employees were dissatisfied with occupational health and safety, intermediate and senior managers , their income, balance between the time they spent working and with family and also indicated that their work was not interesting and satisfying. TUMS hospitals’ employees responding to this survey have a poor quality of work life. We suggest more training and educations for TUMS hospitals’ managers on QWL issues are planned.
Effects of systematic oral care in critically ill patients: a multicenter study.

BACKGROUND
No standard oral assessment tools are available for determining frequency of oral care in critical care patients, and the method of providing oral care is controversial.


OBJECTIVES
To examine the effects of a systematic program of oral care on oral assessment scores in critically ill intubated and nonintubated, patients.


METHODS
Clinical data were collected 3 times during critical care admissions before and after institution of a systematic program of oral care in 3 different medical centers. The oral care education program consisted of instruction from a dentist or dental hygienist and a clear procedure outlining systematic oral care. The Beck Oral Assessment Scale and the mucosal-plaque score were used to assess the oral cavity. Data were analyzed by using linear mixed modeling with controls for severity of illness.


RESULTS
Scores on the Beck Scale differed significantly (F = 4.79, P = .01) in the pattern of scores across the 3 days and between the control group (before oral education) and the systematic oral care group. Unlike the control group, the treatment group had decreasing scores on the Beck Scale from day 1 to day 5. The mucosal-plaque score and the Beck Scale scores had strong correlations throughout the study; the highest correlation was on day 5 (r = 0.798, P < .001, n = 43).


CONCLUSIONS
Oral assessment scores improved after nurses implemented a protocol for systematic oral care. Use of the Beck Scale and the mucosal-plaque score could standardize oral assessment and guide nurses in providing oral interventions.
Multiscale characterization of microstructures and mechanical properties of Inconel 718 fabricated by selective laser melting

Abstract A multiscale investigation of the microstructures and mechanical properties of Inconel 718 fabricated by selective laser melting (SLM) was performed on the as-SLM and heat-treated (HT) samples at various build locations. The microstructures were characterized by optical microscopy, high-resolution scanning electron microscopy, and electron backscatter diffraction over a wide range of length-scales. The as-SLM samples exhibited unique multi-scale microstructure features, including a few hundred-micrometer melt pools and columnar cube-textured grains, micrometer-sized dendritic and cellular sub-grain structures from chemical segregation and precipitates. Upon heat treatment, recrystallization occurred in the sample, replacing the unique SLM microstructures with homogenized grains, annealing twins, and nano-scale precipitates. Dry sliding wear tests, Vickers hardness tests, and force modulation microscopy in the atomic force microscopy were conducted to characterize the mechanical properties of the SLM parts. It was found that the wear resistance of the as-SLM sample was sensitive to the grain-level structures, exhibiting a relatively large spatial variation (∼11%) at different build locations. In contrast, the Vickers hardness barely changed ( −4 to 5.83 × 10 −4 mm 3 /Nm and enhanced the hardness from 320 to 458 HV, resulting from the precipitation of nanoscale strengthening phases resolved from force modulation microscopy. Finally, the correlations of the mechanical properties with the hierarchical SLM microstructures were discussed, implying the importance of multi-scale conditions on tuning the SLM part performance.
Lifetime-Sensitive Modulo Scheduling in a Production Environment

ÐThis paper presents a novel software pipelining approach, which is called Swing Modulo Scheduling (SMS). It generates schedules that are near optimal in terms of initiation interval, register requirements, and stage count. Swing Modulo Scheduling is a heuristic approach that has a low computational cost. This paper first describes the technique and evaluates it for the Perfect Club benchmark suite on a generic VLIW architecture. SMS is compared with other heuristic methods, showing that it outperforms them in terms of the quality of the obtained schedules and compilation time. To further explore the effectiveness of SMS, the experience of incorporating it into a production quality compiler for the Equator MAP1000 processor is described; implementation issues are discussed, as well as modifications and improvements to the original algorithm. Finally, experimental results from using a set of industrial multimedia applications are presented. Index TermsÐFine grain parallelism, instruction scheduling, loop scheduling, software pipelining, register requirements, VLIW, superscalar architectures.
Raising the returns to venture finance

Most new ventures fail and do not make a positivereturn, which makes it difficult for would-be entrepreneurs to obtainfinancing. This paper proposes a method whereby investors can increase returnson their portfolios, thus increasing the availability of venture capital toentrepreneurs. The central idea is that the venture investor can take advantage ofpotentially valuable asymmetric information about the firms in which they haveinvested to make third-party investments correlated to their initialinvestments. The process outlined assumes new businesses that could disrupt competitorsin established markets and so reduce the value of established firms. Shortlybefore the innovator firm disrupts the markets of the established firms, theventure financier purchases put options (or similar derivatives) on the stockof these rival firms. When the innovative, disrupting firm announces its newproduct or process, or sufficient market penetration has occurred, the reducedfuture profits of the established firms are apparent and the rival's stock willfall. The investor can exercise the options or cash in the derivatives at aprofit. Also considered are the ethical questions of the proposed method, regulatoryand institutional issues, transaction costs, impact of stock-price volatility,and issues of timing. Also shown is that relying on active capital markets canprovide a mechanism for improving financing of new ventures. (TNM)
Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity

Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games, though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach focuses on a relevant subset of serious games labelled as scenario-based games. At the conceptual level, it identifies the basic elements that make up the static game configuration; it also describes the game dynamics, i.e. the state changes of the various game components in the course of time. At the technical level, it presents a basic system architecture, which comprises various building tools. Various building tools will be explained and illustrated with technical implementations that are part of the Emergo toolkit for scenario-based game development. At the practical level, a set of design principles are presented for controlling and reducing game design complexity. The principles cover the topics of game structure, feedback and game representation, respectively. Practical application of the framework and the associated toolkit is briefly reported and evaluated.
Adult immunization--pneumococcal vaccine.

Case study: JS is a 54-year-old white woman who comes to your office to establish herself as a patient. During a review of her medical history, several active medical problems come to light, including type 2 diabetes mellitus (formerly known as non–insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus) for 15 years, hypothyroidism and coronary artery disease with myocardial infarction 10 years earlier.
Incorporating water table dynamics in climate modeling: 1. Water table observations and equilibrium water table simulations: WATER TABLE OBSERVATIONS

[1] Soil moisture is a key participant in land-atmosphere interactions and an important determinant of terrestrial climate. In regions where the water table is shallow, soil moisture is coupled to the water table. This paper is the first of a two-part study to quantify this coupling and explore its implications in the context of climate modeling. We examine the observed water table depth in the lower 48 states of the United States in search of salient spatial and temporal features that are relevant to climate dynamics. As a means to interpolate and synthesize the scattered observations, we use a simple two-dimensional groundwater flow model to construct an equilibrium water table as a result of long-term climatic and geologic forcing. Model simulations suggest that the water table depth exhibits spatial organization at watershed, regional, and continental scales, which may have implications for the spatial organization of soil moisture at similar scales. The observations suggest that water table depth varies at diurnal, event, seasonal, and interannual scales, which may have implications for soil moisture memory at these scales.
Salient Structure Detection by Context-Guided Visual Search

Visual search is necessary for rapid scene analysis because information processing in the visual system is limited to one or a few regions at one time [3]. To select potential regions or objects of interest rapidly with a task-independent manner, the so-called "visual saliency", is important for reducing the complexity of scenes. From the perspective of engineering, modeling visual saliency usually facilitates subsequent higher visual processing, such as image re-targeting [10], image compression [12], object recognition [16], etc. Visual attention model is deeply studied in recent decades. Most of existing models are built on the biologically-inspired architecture based on the famous Feature Integration Theory (FIT) [19, 20]. For instance, Itti et al. proposed a famous saliency model which computes the saliency map with local contrast in multiple feature dimensions, such as color, orientation, etc. [15] [23]. However, FIT-based methods perhaps risk being immersed in local saliency (e.g., object boundaries), because they employ local contrast of features in limited regions and ignore the global information. Visual attention models usually provide location information of the potential objects, but miss some object-related information (e.g., object surfaces) that is necessary for further object detection and recognition. Distinguished from FIT, Guided Search Theory (GST) [3] [24] provides a mechanism to search the regions of interest (ROI) or objects with the guidance from scene layout or top-down sources. The recent version of GST claims that the visual system searches objects of interest along two parallel pathways, i.e., the non-selective pathway and the selective pathway [3]. This new visual search strategy allows observers to extract spatial layout (or gist) information rapidly from entire scene via non-selective pathway. Then, this context information of scene acts as top-down modulation to guide the salient object search along the selective pathway. This two-pathway-based search strategy provides a parallel processing of global and local information for rapid visual search. Referring to the GST, we assume that the non-selective pathway provides "where" information and prior of multiple objects for visual search, a counterpart to visual selective saliency, and we use certain simple and fast fixation prediction method to provide an initial estimate of where the objects present. At the same time, the bottom-up visual selective pathway extracts fine image features in multiple cue channels, which could be regarded as a counterpart to the "what" pathway in visual system for object recognition. When these bottom-up features meet "where" information of objects, the visual system …
The Pharmacokinetics and Local Tolerability of a Novel Sublingual Formulation of Buprenorphine.

Aim
The principal study objective was to investigate the pharmacokinetic characteristics and determine the absolute bioavailability and tolerability of a new sublingual (SL) buprenorphine wafer.


Methods
The study was of open label, two-way randomized crossover design in 14 fasted healthy male and female volunteers. Each participant, under naltrexone block, received either a single intravenous dose of 300 mcg of buprenorphine as a constant infusion over five minutes or a sublingual dose of 800 mcg of buprenorphine in two treatment periods separated by a seven-day washout period. Blood sampling for plasma drug assay was taken on 16 occasions throughout a 48-hour period (predose and at 10, 20, 30, and 45 minutes, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 and 48 hours postdose). The pharmacokinetic parameters were determined by noncompartmental analyses of the buprenorphine plasma concentration-time profiles. Local tolerability was assessed using modified Likert scales.


Results
The absolute bioavailability of SL buprenorphine was 45.4% (95% confidence interval = 37.8-54.3%). The median times to peak plasma concentration were 10 minutes and 60 minutes after IV and SL administration, respectively. The peak plasma concentration was 2.65 ng/mL and 0.74 ng/mL after IV and SL administration, respectively. The half-lives were 9.1 hours and 11.2 hours after IV and SL administration, respectively. The wafer had very good local tolerability.


Conclusions
This novel sublingual buprenorphine wafer has high bioavailability and reduced Tmax compared with other SL tablet formulations of buprenorphine. The wafer displayed very good local tolerability. The results suggest that this novel buprenorphine wafer may provide enhanced clinical utility in the management of both acute and chronic pain.


Background
Buprenorphine is approved for use in pain management and opioid addiction. Sublingual administration of buprenorphine is a simple and noninvasive route of administration and has been available for many years. Improved sublingual formulations may lead to increased utilization of this useful drug for acute and chronic pain management.
MetaMorph II: an agent-based architecture for distributed intelligent design and manufacturing

Agent technology derived from Distributed Arti®cial Intelligence is increasingly being considered for next generation computer-integrated manufacturing systems, to satisfy new requirements for increased integrability, con®gurability, adaptability, extendibility, agility, and reliability. This paper reviews our previous research on the application of the agent-based technology to intelligent design and manufacturing and describes the current research project MetaMorph II (an agent-based architecture for distributed intelligent design and manufacturing).
Novel capacitor-isolated power converter

This paper presented a novel power conversion method of realizing the galvanic isolation by dual safety capacitors (Y-cap) instead of conventional transformer. With limited capacitance of the Y capacitor, series resonant is proposed to achieve the power transfer. The basic concept is to control the power path impedance, which blocks the dominant low-frequency part of touch current and let the high-frequency power flow freely. Conceptual analysis, simulation and design considerations are mentioned in this paper. An 85W AC/AC prototype is designed and verified to substitute the isolation transformer of a CCFL LCD TV backlight system. Compared with the conventional transformer isolation, the new method is proved to meet the function and safety requirements of its specification while has higher efficiency and smaller size.
Verylow frequency variability in arterial blood pressure and blood volume pulse

Several parameters of the cardiovascular system fluctuate spontaenously owing to the activity of the autonomic nervous system. In the study, the simultaneous very low frequency (VLF) fluctuations of the arterial blood pressure, the tissue blood content and the tissue blood volume pulse are investigated. The latter two parameters are derived from the baseline BL and the amplitude AM of the photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal, measured on the fingertips of 20 healthy male subjects: the changes in the PPG parameters AM and BV, defined by BV=const.-BL, are related to the change in the tissue blood volume pulse and the total tissue blood volume, respectively. The VLF fluctuations in BV and AM are directly correlated, those of AM preceding those of BV by 4–13 heart-beats. The VLF fluctuations in the systolic (SBP) and the diastolic (DBP) blood pressure are inversely correlated to those of AM and BV, those of AM preceding those of SBP and lagging behing those of DBP by about one heart-beat. For most subjects, the period P of the PPG pulse, which is equal to the cardiac cycle period, directly correlates with AM and BV and inversely correlates with DBP and SBP. On average, the fluctuations fluctuations in tissue blood volume, systolic blood volume pulse, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, and heart period, together with their interrelationship, can provide a better understanding of the autonomic nervous control of the peripheral circulation and a potential tool for the evaluation of its function.