LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Insulin as initial therapy in type 2 diabetes: effective, safe, and well accepted.

BACKGROUND
To achieve glycemic control in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), multiple oral agents are used in a stepwise approach, but long-term maintenance of normoglycemia is difficult to achieve, and, eventually, most patients require insulin. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of insulin with metformin for newly diagnosed, treatment-naive patients with T2DM.


METHODS
Eligible patients were started on insulin NovoLog 70/30 and metformin 1,000 mg twice daily. Biochemical evaluation was performed at baseline and at the end of the 3-month study. Patients were seen monthly to assess side effects and compliance and make insulin dose adjustments. Patient treatment satisfaction was evaluated at the end of the study.


RESULTS
Of 63 patients, 92% completed the study. The hemoglobin A(1c) (HbA(1c)) decreased from 10.8 to 5.9% (p < .0001), and 100% of subjects achieved an HbA(1)c < 7%. Weight increased from 100.0 to 101.6 kg (p = .004) but was less than expected given that patients lost an average of 7.2 kg prior to diagnosis and achieved a reduction in HbA(1c) of 5%. The rate of hypoglycemia was low (1.5 episodes/patient-month). Ninety-seven percent of the patients were satisfied with their insulin treatment, and 88% were willing to continue insulin. Compliance was 96.5% with insulin and 95.1% with metformin.


CONCLUSION
Outpatient initiation of insulin therapy at the time of diagnosis of T2DM is an effective, safe, and feasible strategy for rapidly lowering HbA(1c) levels to targets. Insulin was very well accepted by the patients, refuting the misconception of low satisfaction and acceptance of such treatment.
A Low Power Broadband Differential Low Noise Amplifier Employing Noise and IM3 Distortion Cancellation for Mobile Broadcast Receivers

A CMOS broadband differential low noise amplifier (LNA) employing noise and third order intermodulation (IM3) distortion cancellation has been designed using a 0.13 μm CMOS process for mobile TV tuners. By combining a common gate amplifier with a common source amplifier through a current mirror, a high gain due to the additional current amplification and a low noise figure (NF) due to the thermal noise cancellation can be achieved with low power consumption without degrading the input matching. To improve the linearity with low power consumption, a multiple gated transistor technique for canceling the IM3 distortion is adopted. The proposed LNA has a maximum gain of 14.5 dB, an averaged NF of 3.6 dB, an IIP3 of 3 dBm, an IIP2 of 38 dBm, and an |Sn11| lower than -9 dB in a frequency range from 72 to 850 MHz. The power consumption is 9.6 mW at a 1.2 V supply voltage and the chip area is 0.08 mm2.
Approximation Algorithms for Directed Multi-Multiway Cut and Directed Multicut Problems

In this paper, we present approximation algorithms for the directed multi-multiway cut and directed multicut problems. The so called region growing paradigm [1] is modified and used for these two cut problems on directed graphs By this paradigm, we give for each problem an approximation algorithm such that both algorithms have an approximate factor. The work previously done on these problems need to solve k linear programming, whereas our algorithms require only one linear programming for obtaining a good approximate factor.
Alzheimer disease, inflammation, and novel inflammatory marker: resistin.

BACKGROUND/AIM
Inflammation may play an important role in Alzheimer disease (AD) pathogenesis. A growing amount of evidence indicates that resistin has hallmark regulatory functions such as inflammatory states. The aim of this study was to determine whether plasma resistin levels would be useful in the diagnosis of patients with AD and to investigate the relationships between resistin and other inflammatory markers such as hs-CRP and TNF-α. Materials and methods: In this cross-sectional study, 38 AD patients and 32 control subjects with normal cognitive function aged 65 years and over were included. The diagnosis of AD was made according to DSM-IV and NINCDS-ADRDA criteria. Serum levels of resistin were measured with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method using the human resistin E50 kit. Results: The median resistin level of AD patients was significantly higher than in the control group (86.3 vs. 70.8 pg/mL, P = 0.002). Overall accuracy of resistin in determining AD was 70.66%, with sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV of 75.0%, 65.5%, 73.0%, and 67.9%, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between AD patients and control subjects with respect to hs-CRP and TNF-α levels. Conclusion: Resistin levels may be considered as a predictor of AD and it may predict activation of the immune system in AD pathophysiology.
Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the French version of the Expanded Prostate cancer Index Composite questionnaire for health-related quality of life in prostate cancer patients

BACKGROUND
Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has been positioned as one of the major endpoints in oncology. Thus, there is a need to validate cancer-site specific survey instruments. This study aimed to perform a transcultural adaptation of the 50-item Expanded Prostate cancer Index Composite (EPIC) questionnaire for HRQoL in prostate cancer patients and to validate the psychometric properties of the French-language version.


METHODS
The EPIC questionnaire measures urinary, bowel, sexual and hormonal domains. The first step, corresponding to transcultural adaptation of the original English version of the EPIC was performed according to the back translation technique. The second step, comprising the validation of the psychometric properties of the EPIC questionnaire, was performed in patients under treatment for localized prostate cancer (treatment group) and in patients cured of prostate cancer (cured group). The EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-PR25 prostate cancer module were also completed by patients to assess criterion validity. Two assessments were performed, i.e., before and at the end of treatment for the Treatment group, to assess sensitivity to change; and at 2 weeks' interval in the Cured group to assess test-retest reliability. Psychometric properties were explored according to classical test theory.


RESULTS
The first step showed overall good acceptability and understanding of the questionnaire. In the second step, 215 patients were included from January 2012 to June 2014: 125 in the Treatment group, and 90 in the Cured group. All domains exhibited good internal consistency, except the bowel domain (Cronbach's α = 0.61). No floor effect was observed. Test-retest reliability assessed in the cured group was acceptable, expect for bowel function (intraclass coefficient = 0.68). Criterion validity was good for each domain and subscale. Construct validity was not demonstrated for the hormonal and bowel domains. Sensitivity to change was exhibited for 5/8 subscales and 2/4 summary scores for patients who experienced toxicities during treatment.


CONCLUSIONS
The French EPIC questionnaire seems to have adequate psychometric properties, comparable to those exhibited by the original English-language version, except for the construct validity, which was not available in original version.
Interior-Point Methods for Full-Information and Bandit Online Learning

We study the problem of predicting individual sequences with linear loss with full and partial (or bandit) feed- back. Our main contribution is the first efficient algorithm for the problem of online linear optimization in the bandit setting which achieves the optimal Õ(√(T)) regret. In addition, for the full-information setting, we give a novel regret minimization algorithm. These results are made possible by the introduction of interior-point methods for convex optimization to online learning.
Third-Party Auditor (TPA): A Potential Solution for Securing a Cloud Environment

The confidentiality and verification of customer's data at the cloud service provider (CSP) side becomes a critical issue in terms of both reliability (i.e., the trust aspect) and efficiency (i.e., the ease of performing such verifications). As data owners no longer physically possess their data storage, traditional cryptographic primitives for the purpose of data security protection cannot be directly adopted. In such a scenario, the use of a third-party auditor (TPA) provides both efficiency, transparency, and the fairness in performing the required auditing tasks as well as it serves as a bridge between the cloud service users (CSUs) and the CSPs. Thus, for practical use, it seems more rational to equip the verification capabilities with public auditability, which is expected to play a more important role in achieving economies of scale for cloud computing. Although the use of TPA provides several advantages, the fact that TPA is an untrusted entity and it can turn into a malicious user or promote insider threats cannot be ignored. Thus, for a complete realistic security solution where CSUs achieve maximum cloud benefits at minimum computational cost, the auditing of TPA is required. In this paper, we develop an auditing method for CSUs/CSPs to ensure the integrity of the TPA and minimize the possibility of insider threats or malicious activities. The integrity of TPA will be verified using the time-released session keys and the service level agreement (SLA).
More Text Please! Understanding and Supporting the Use of Visualization for Clinical Text Overview

Clinical practice is heavily reliant on the use of unstructured text to document patient stories due to its expressive and flexible nature. However, a physician's capacity to recover information from text for clinical overview is severely affected when records get longer and time pressure increases. Data visualization strategies have been explored to aid in information retrieval by replacing text with graphical summaries, though often at the cost of omitting important text features. This causes physician mistrust and limits real-world adoption. This work presents our investigation into the role and use of text in clinical practice, and reports on efforts to assess the best of both worlds---text and visualization---to facilitate clinical overview. We report on insights garnered from a field study, and the lessons learned from an iterative design process and evaluation of a text-visualization prototype, MedStory, with 14 medical professionals. The results led to a number of grounded design recommendations to guide visualization design to support clinical text overview.
Which jump variables should be used to assess explosive leg muscle function?

PURPOSE
The main purpose of this study was to determine the relationships between countermovement jump (CMJ) variables and acceleration and maximum speed performance.


METHODS
Twenty-three elite Australian football players were tested on a CMJ, which yielded several kinematic and kinetic variables describing leg muscle function. A 40 m sprint was also conducted to assess acceleration (10 m time) and an estimate of maximum speed (flying 20 m time). Players from one Australian Football League (AFL) club were tested and Pearson correlations for CMJ variables and sprint performance were calculated.


RESULTS
Jump height, peak velocity, peak force, and peak power had less than 50% common variance, and therefore represented independent expressions of CMJ performance. Generally, the correlations between CMJ variables and sprinting performance were stronger for maximum speed (small to large effect sizes) than for acceleration (trivial to moderate sizes). The variable that produced the strongest correlation with acceleration was jump height (r = -0.430, P = .041) and with maximum speed was peak power/weight (r = -0.649, P = .001).


CONCLUSIONS
The results indicate that if an integrated system comprising a position transducer and a force platform is available for CMJ assessment, jump height and peak power/weight are useful variables to describe leg muscle explosive function for athletes who perform sprints.
Face Recognition on Drones: Issues and Limitations

Drones, as known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), are aircrafts which can perform autonomous pilot. They can easily reach locations which are too difficult to reach or dangerous for human beings and collect images from bird's-eye view through aerial photography. Enabling drones to identify people on the ground is important for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, people search, and remote monitoring. Since faces are part of inherent identities of people, how well face recognition technologies can be used by drones becomes essential for future development of the above applications.
 In this paper, we conduct empirical studies to evaluate several factors that may influence the performance of face detection and recognition techniques on drones. Our findings show that the current face recognition technologies are capable of recognizing faces on drones with some limits in distance and angle, especially when drones take pictures in high altitudes and the face image is taken from a long distance and with a large angle of depression. We also find that augmenting face models with 3D information may help to boost recognition performance in the case of large angles of depression.
Two doses of NGR-hTNF in combination with capecitabine plus oxaliplatin in colorectal cancer patients failing standard therapies

BACKGROUND
asparagine-glycine-arginine-human tumour necrosis factor (NGR-hTNF), an agent selectively damaging the tumour vasculature, showed a biphasic dose-response curve in preclinical models. Previous phase I trials of NGR-hTNF indicated 0.8 and 45 μg/m(2) as optimal biological and maximum-tolerated dose, respectively.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
Two sequential cohorts of 12 colorectal cancer (CRC) patients who had failed standard therapies received NGR-hTNF 0.8 or 45 μg/m(2) in combination with capecitabine-oxaliplatin (XELOX).


RESULTS
Median number of prior treatment lines was 3 in the low-dose and 2 in the high-dose cohort. Overall, 21 patients had been pretreated with oxaliplatin-based regimens. No grade 3-4 NGR-hTNF-related toxicities were observed. Grade 1-2 chills were reported in 43% and 40% of cycles in the low-dose and high-dose cohorts, respectively. In the low-dose cohort, one patient achieved a partial response and five had stable disease for a median of 4.6 months. In the high-dose cohort, six patients had stable disease for a median of 3.6 months. Three-month progression-free survival (PFS) rates were 50% and 33% in the low-dose and high-dose cohort, respectively. Three patients in low-dose cohort experienced PFS longer than PFS on last prior therapy.


CONCLUSIONS
Both NGR-hTNF doses were safely combined with XELOX in pretreated CRC patients. Hint of activity was apparent only with low-dose NGR-hTNF.
SPOC : A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Opportunistic Computing Framework for Mobile-Healthcare Emergency

Mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare) system has been envisioned as an important application of pervasive computing to improve health care quality and save lives, where miniaturized wearable and implantable body sensor nodes and smart phones are utilized to provide remote healthcare monitoring to people who have chronic medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. User’s personal health information (PHI) such as heart beat, blood sugar level, blood pressure and temperature and others can be first collected by BSN. Finally, they are further transmitted to the remote healthcare center via Modem. Based on these collected PHI data, medical professionals at healthcare center can continuously monitor medical users’ health conditions and as well quickly react to users’ lifethreatening situations and save their lives by dispatching ambulance and medical personnel to an emergency location. The proposed SPOC framework can help medical users to balance the high reliability of PHI process and minimizing the PHI privacy disclosure in m-Healthcare emergency.
Fast Normalized Cross-Correlation

Although it is well known that cross correlation can be efficiently implemented in the transform domain, the normalized form of cross correlation preferred for feature matching applications does not have a simple frequency domain expression. Normalized cross correlation has been computed in the spatial domain for this reason. This short paper shows that unnormalized cross correlation can be efficiently normalized using precomputing integrals of the image and image over the search window.
Efficacy of acupuncture for migraine prophylaxis: A single-blinded, double-dummy, randomized controlled trial

Insufficient clinical trial data were available to prove the efficacy of acupuncture for migraine prophylaxis. A multicenter, double-dummy, single-blinded, randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted at the outpatient departments of acupuncture at 5 hospitals in China to evaluate the effectiveness of acupuncture. A total of 140 patients with migraine without aura were recruited and assigned randomly to 2 different groups: the acupuncture group treated with verum acupuncture plus placebo and the control group treated with sham acupuncture plus flunarizine. Treated by acupuncture 3 times per week and drugs every night, patients from both groups were evaluated at week 0 (baseline), week 4, and week 16. The primary outcome was measured by the proportion of responders (defined as the proportion of patients with a reduction of migraine days by at least 50%). The secondary outcome measures included the number of migraine days, visual analogue scale (VAS, 0 to 10 cm) for pain, as well as the physical and mental component summary scores of the 36-item short-form health survey (SF-36). The patients in the acupuncture group had better responder rates and fewer migraine days compared with the control group (P<.05), whereas there were no significant differences between the 2 groups in VAS scores and SF-36 physical and mental component summary scores (P>.05). The results suggested that acupuncture was more effective than flunarizine in decreasing days of migraine attacks, whereas no significantly differences were found between acupuncture and flunarizine in reduction of pain intensity and improvement of the quality of life.
Boosted output performance of triboelectric nanogenerator via electric double layer effect

For existing triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), it is important to explore unique methods to further enhance the output power under realistic environments to speed up their commercialization. We report here a practical TENG composed of three layers, in which the key layer, an electric double layer, is inserted between a top layer, made of Al/polydimethylsiloxane, and a bottom layer, made of Al. The efficient charge separation in the middle layer, based on Volta's electrophorus, results from sequential contact configuration of the TENG and direct electrical connection of the middle layer to the earth. A sustainable and enhanced output performance of 1.22 mA and 46.8 mW cm-2 under low frequency of 3 Hz is produced, giving over 16-fold enhancement in output power and corresponding to energy conversion efficiency of 22.4%. Finally, a portable power-supplying system, which provides enough d.c. power for charging a smart watch or phone battery, is also successfully developed.
Executive leadership development in U.S. health systems.

The healthcare industry is known for constant and rapid change, highlighting the need for strong executive leadership. Within this industry, multihospital healthcare systems present particular executive leadership challenges due to their size and complexity, yet our understanding of how these executive-level health system leaders are developed has been extremely limited. The objective of this research was to study the establishment, organization, content, process, evaluation, and evolution of executive leadership development (ELD) programs in U.S. healthcare systems. Results of a national survey of health system CEOs, supplemented by interviews with multiple health system key informants, showed that ELD programs existed in around half of responding U.S. health systems and were especially prevalent among smaller systems. On average the programs were fairly new, with most having been established since 2003. ELD programs were reportedly valued by the health systems, as reflected by respondents' perceptions of program payoffs and sustained budgetary commitment. Specifically, ELD programs are believed to help further healthcare systems' strategic goals, initiate succession planning, and provide local development opportunities. In addition, the majority of program elements were reportedly worth the investment in improving executives' leadership skills and capabilities. Given the imperative to improve leadership capabilities in healthcare, ELD programs provide important opportunities to enable health systems to meet the challenges of a changing health services industry.
Bioequivalence of oral and intravenous carbamazepine formulations in adult patients with epilepsy

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the safety, tolerability, and comparative pharmacokinetics (PK) of intravenous and oral carbamazepine.


METHODS
In this phase 1, open-label study, adult patients with epilepsy on a stable oral carbamazepine dosage (400-2,000 mg/day) were converted to intravenous carbamazepine (administered at 70% of the oral dosage). A 28-day outpatient period preceded an up to 10-day inpatient period and a 30-day follow-up period. Intravenous carbamazepine was administered over 15 or 30 min every 6 h on days 1-7; some patients in the 15-min group were eligible to receive four 2- to 5-min (rapid) infusions on day 8. Patients underwent blood sampling to determine the area under the concentration-time curve (AUC) for carbamazepine and metabolite carbamazepine-10,11-epoxide following oral (day 0) and intravenous carbamazepine administration (days 1, 7, and 8). Bioequivalence was evaluated in patients with normal renal function (creatinine clearance >80 ml/min). Safety assessments were conducted through day 38.


RESULTS
Ninety-eight patients enrolled and 77 completed the PK component. The mean daily oral and intravenous carbamazepine dosage for 64 PK-evaluable patients with normal renal function was 962.5 and 675.1 mg (70% of oral dosage), respectively. Steady-state minimum concentration (C(min)) and overall exposure (AUC0-24) for intravenous carbamazepine infused over 30, 15, or 2-5 min were similar to oral carbamazepine. The 90% confidence intervals (CIs) for the ratios of the adjusted means for AUC0-24, maximum concentration (Cmax), and C(min) were within the 80%-125% bioequivalence range for 30-min intravenous infusions versus oral administration, but exceeded the upper limit for Cmax for the 15-min and rapid infusions. All intravenous carbamazepine infusions were well tolerated.


SIGNIFICANCE
Intravenous carbamazepine infusions (70% of oral daily dose) of 30-, 15-, and 2- to 5-min duration, given every 6 h, maintained patients' plasma carbamazepine concentrations. Intravenous carbamazepine 30-min infusions were bioequivalent to oral carbamazepine in patients with normal renal function; rapid infusions were well-tolerated in this study.
Multiple Forms of Value Learning and the Function of Dopamine

This chapter was originally published in the book Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.