LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Treatment of refractory anterior knee pain using botulinum toxin type A (Dysport) injection to the distal vastus lateralis muscle: a randomised placebo controlled crossover trial

OBJECTIVES
This randomised controlled crossover trial examined the efficacy of botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A) injection, plus an exercise programme, to remediate chronic anterior knee pain (AKP) associated with quadriceps muscle imbalance.


METHODS
24 individuals with refractory AKP received either BoNT-A (500 U Dysport) or the same volume saline injection to the vastus lateralis (VL) muscle and performed home exercises focusing on re-training the vastus medialis (VM) muscle. All subjects were offered open-label injection at 12 weeks. Knee-related disability (anterior knee pain scale; AKPS) and activity-induced pain (10 cm visual analogue scale) at 12 weeks were the primary outcomes. Peak isometric extensor force was recorded and normalised VL:VM ratios were derived from simultaneous surface electromyography. Self-reported pain and disability measures were collected at six time points to a mean of 20±8 months.


RESULTS
14 subjects received BoNT-A and 10 placebo injection. Improvement at 12 weeks was significantly greater for BoNT-A compared with placebo-injected subjects for the AKPS (p<0.03), pain on kneeling (p<0.004), squatting (p<0.02) and level walking (p<0.04). At week 12, five placebo subjects crossed over to open-label injection. At 24 weeks, 16 of 19 BoNT-A-injected and two of the remaining five placebo-injected subjects were either satisfied or very satisfied with treatment outcomes. Improvements were maintained in 11 of 14 BoNT-A-injected and two of five placebo subjects available at longer-term follow-up.


CONCLUSION
BoNT-A injection produced a greater reduction in pain and disability than placebo injection in carefully selected patients with chronic AKP related to quadriceps muscle imbalance.
Clinical diagnostic accuracy and magnetic resonance imaging of patients referred by physical therapists, orthopaedic surgeons, and nonorthopaedic providers.

STUDY DESIGN
Nonexperimental, retrospective design.


OBJECTIVES
This study was designed to compare clinical diagnostic accuracy (CDA) between physical therapists (PTs), orthopaedic surgeons (OSs), and nonorthopaedic providers (NOPs) at Keller Army Community Hospital on patients with musculoskeletal injuries (MSI) referred for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).


BACKGROUND
US Army PTs are frequently the first credentialed providers privileged to examine and diagnose patients with musculoskeletal injuries. Physical therapists assigned at Keller Army Community Hospital have also been credentialed with privileges to order MRI studies for several years.


METHODS AND MEASURES
To reduce provider bias, a retrospective analysis was performed on 560 patients referred for MRI over an 18-month period. An electronic review of each patient's radiological profile was performed to assess agreement between clinical diagnosis and MRI findings. Data analyses were performed through descriptive statistics and contingency tables.


RESULTS
Analysis on agreement between clinical diagnosis and MRI findings produced a CDA of 74.5% (108/145) for PTs, 80.8% (139/172) for OSs, and 35.4% (86/243) for NOPs. There was a significant difference in CDA between PTs and NOPs (P<.001), and between OSs and NOPs (P<.001). There was no difference in CDA between PTs and OSs (P>.05).


CONCLUSIONS
Clinical diagnostic accuracy by PTs and OSs on patients with musculoskeletal injuries was significantly greater than for NOPs, with no difference noted between PTs and OSs.
Research on Binarization of QR Code Image

In this paper, a new QR code binarization method is presented according to the QR code characteristic to improve the accuracy of QR code decoding in mobile image processing. The Sauvola's thresholding algorithm is modified to solve QR code image binarization which is the threshold decision in the uneven light condition. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has better correctness of recognition compared with others.
Cost-effectiveness of orlistat for the treatment of overweight and obese patients in Ireland

OBJECTIVE:To assess the cost-effectiveness of orlistat plus a calorie-controlled diet compared with a calorie-controlled diet alone for the treatment of overweight and obese patients in Ireland.DESIGN:Economic modelling techniques using published international efficacy data and Irish cost data were used to estimate the cost-effectiveness of orlistat in obese patients when only responders to treatment (ie achieve 5% weight loss after 3 months of treatment) continue orlistat after 3 months. The model incorporated known relationships between weight loss and quality of life (utility) gain, and weight loss and reduction in risk of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) to predict the impact of weight loss on quality-adjusted-life-years (QALYs) gained and on the onset of T2DM. The costs associated with each treatment arm included the acquisition cost of orlistat, cost of a calorie-controlled dietary programme and monitoring and treatment costs associated with T2DM. An Irish health-care perspective was taken for the analysis, based on 2003 costs.SUBJECTS:Weight loss data on 1386 patients from five pivotal orlistat clinical trials with at least 12 months duration were pooled (two American and three primarily European studies). All the studies were randomized, placebo-controlled, multicentre trials with a similar design. The inclusion criteria were BMI ≥28 kg / m2, age ≥18 y, no diagnosed T2DM and the ability to lose 2.5 kg in weight during the introductory period.MEASUREMENTS:Cost effectiveness was modelled from these data and presented as incremental cost per QALY.RESULTS:When orlistat treatment plus a calorie-controlled diet was compared with a calorie-controlled diet alone, the incremental cost per year was [euro ]478. The number needed to treat (NNT) to gain one QALY was estimated to be 35. The incremental cost per QALY gained was within the range considered cost-effective at [euro ]16 954. Sensitivity analysis demonstrated an incremental cost per QALY of [euro ]11 000–35 000 under a variety of assumptions.CONCLUSIONS:Our model suggests that orlistat is effective and cost-effective in obese patients, if after 3 months of treatment, only treatment responders continue treatment.
Mentoring and Beginning Teachers' Workplace Learning

Mentoring has been the focus of much attention in the recent literature on initial teacher education and induction and as such has become a ‘foundation stone’ of collaborative endeavours between universities and schools in the facilitation of teacher development. In 1998 some 220 beginning teachers and 245 supervisors and mentors in New South Wales government schools were surveyed and beginning teachers’ professional learning observed closely in six case study schools in different settings across the state. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) indicated the relevance of internship to initial teacher education programs and established the importance of mentoring support in beginning teachers’ professional learning in the induction year. The case studies also identi ed key practices, conditions and professional interactions that sustained transmission, transactional and transformational approaches to teacher learning. The complementary qualitative and quantitative methodology provided strong evidence of the importance of the mentoring strategy.
Face it: The Impact of Gender on Social Media Images

Social websites like Facebook enable users to upload self-created digital images; it is therefore of interest to see how gender is performed in this domain. A panel used a literature review of pictorial features associated with gender traits, and a sample of Facebook pictures to assess gender stereotypes present in Facebook images. Traits emerging in greater prominence in pictures of males included active, dominant, and independent. Those prominent with female users included attractive and dependent. These findings generally conform to gender stereotypes found in prior research and extend the research regarding stereotypical gender traits displayed in professional media depictions to self-selected social media displays. They also extend the research on gender differences in impression management generally, in both interpersonal communication and social media, to include gender-specific traits that are part of young mens and women’s impression management.
litewi: A combined term extraction and entity linking method for eliciting educational ontologies from textbooks

Major efforts have been conducted on ontology learning, that is, semiautomatic processes for the construction of domain ontologies from diverse sources of information. In the past few years, a research trend has focused on the construction of educational ontologies, that is, ontologies to be used for educational purposes. The identification of the terminology is crucial to build ontologies. Term extraction techniques allow the identification of the domain-related terms from electronic resources. This paper presents LiTeWi, a novel method that combines current unsupervised term extraction approaches for creating educational ontologies for technology supported learning systems from electronic textbooks. LiTeWi uses Wikipedia as an additional information source. Wikipedia contains more than 30 million articles covering the terminology of nearly every domain in 288 languages, which makes it an appropriate generic corpus for term extraction. Furthermore, given that its content is available in several languages, it promotes both domain and language independence. LiTeWi is aimed at being used by teachers, who usually develop their didactic material from textbooks. To evaluate its performance, LiTeWi was tuned up using a textbook on object oriented programming and then tested with two textbooks of different domains—astronomy and molecular biology. Introduction
Robot arm control exploiting natural dynamics

This thesis presents an approach to robot arm control exploiting natural dynamics. The approach consists of using a compliant arm whose joints are controlled with simple non-linear oscillators. The arm has special actuators which makes it robust to collisions and gives it a smooth compliant, motion. The oscillators produce rhythmic commands of the joints of the arm, and feedback of the joint motions is used to modify the oscillator behavior. The oscillators enable the resonant properties of the arm to be exploited to perform a variety of rhythmic and discrete tasks. These tasks include tuning into the resonant frequencies of the arm itself, juggling, turning cranks, playing with a Slinky toy, sawing wood, throwing balls, hammering nails and drumming. For most of these tasks, the controllers at each joint are completely independent, being coupled by mechanical coupling through the physical arm of the robot. The thesis shows that this mechanical coupling allows the oscillators to automatically adjust their commands to be appropriate for the arm dynamics and the task. This coordination is robust to large changes in the oscillator parameters, and large changes in the dynamic properties of the arm. As well as providing a wealth of experimental data to support this approach, the thesis also provides a range of analysis tools, both approximate and exact. These can be used to understand and predict the behavior of current implementations, and design new ones. These analysis techniques improve the value of oscillator solutions. The results in the thesis suggest that the general approach of exploiting natural dynamics is a powerful method for obtaining coordinated dynamic behavior of robot arms. Thesis Supervisor: Rodney A. Brooks Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT 5.4. CASE (C): MODIFYING THE NATURAL DYNAMICS 95
Sentiment identification by incorporating syntax, semantics and context information

This paper proposes a method based on conditional random fields to incorporate sentence structure (syntax and semantics) and context information to identify sentiments of sentences within a document. It also proposes and evaluates two different active learning strategies for labeling sentiment data. The experiments with the proposed approach demonstrate a 5-15% improvement in accuracy on Amazon customer reviews compared to existing supervised learning and rule-based methods.
Analytical solutions to one-dimensional advection–diffusion equation with variable coefficients in semi-infinite media

0022-1694/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.11.008 * Corresponding author. Address: P-12, New Med 221005, India. Tel.: +91 9450541328. E-mail addresses: nks_1953@yahoo.co.in, naveen@ In the present study one-dimensional advection–diffusion equation with variable coefficients is solved for three dispersion problems: (i) solute dispersion along steady flow through an inhomogeneous medium, (ii) temporally dependent solute dispersion along uniform flow through homogeneous medium and (iii) solute dispersion along temporally dependent flow through inhomogeneous medium. Continuous point sources of uniform and increasing nature are considered in an initially solute free semi-infinite medium. Analytical solutions are obtained using Laplace transformation technique. The inhomogeneity of the medium is expressed by spatially dependent flow. Its velocity is defined by a function interpolated linearly in a finite domain in which concentration values are to be evaluated. The dispersion is considered proportional to square of the spatially dependent velocity. The solutions of the third problem may help understand the concentration dispersion pattern along a sinusoidally varying unsteady flow through an inhomogeneous medium. New independent variables are introduced through separate transformations, in terms of which the advection–diffusion equation in each problem is reduced into the one with the constant coefficients. The effects of spatial and temporal dependence on the concentration dispersion are studied with the help of respective parameters and are shown graphically. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Erythromycin as an alternative to reduce interfering extra-cardiac activity in myocardial perfusion imaging

OBJECTIVES
We sought to determine whether taking oral erythromycin prior to SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging with Tc99m-sestamibi would reduce the amount of interfering extra-cardiac activity and improve the image quality.


METHODS
A total of 96 patients who were routinely referred for myocardial perfusion imaging were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Patients in group A received 500 mg of non-enterically coated erythromycin orally one hour prior to image acquisition (45 patients). Patients in group B received diluted lemon juice which comprises the current standard of care in our department (51 patients). A two-day protocol was followed and study participants received the same intervention on both days. Planar images of both the stress and rest images were assessed visually by three experienced nuclear medicine physicians for the presence of interfering extracardiac activity. Physicians were blinded to the detail of the protocol and independently assessed the images.


RESULTS
The qualitative results favoured lemon juice in reducing the amount of interfering extra-cardiac activity. The overall incidence of interfering extra-cardiac activity was 46.15% in the lemon juice group vs 55.56% in the erythromycin group. However, this difference was not found to be statistically significant (p = 0.36). The use of a MYO:EXT ratio similar to the one described by Peace and Lloyd,11 appeared promising in quantifying interfering extra-cardiac activity.


CONCLUSION
The difference between the effect of erythromycin and lemon juice on interfering extra-cardiac activity appears statistically insignificant and erythromycin could therefore be considered as a suitable alternative to lemon juice.
A modified Gabor filter design method for fingerprint image enhancement

Fingerprint image enhancement is an essential preprocessing step in fingerprint recognition applications. In this paper, we propose a novel filter design method for fingerprint image enhancement, primarily inspired from the traditional Gabor filter (TGF). The previous fingerprint image enhancement methods based on TGF banks have some drawbacks in their image-dependent parameter selection strategy, which leads to artifacts in some cases. To address this issue, we develop an improved version of the TGF, called the modified Gabor filter (MGF). Its parameter selection scheme is image-independent. The remarkable advantages of our MGF over the TGF consist in preserving fingerprint image structure and achieving image enhancement consistency. Experimental results indicate that the proposed MGF enhancement algorithm can reduce the FRR of a fingerprint matcher by approximately 2% at a FAR of 0.01%. 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
A multicenter, phase I, dose-escalation study to assess the safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of etirinotecan pegol in patients with refractory solid tumors.

PURPOSE
This study was designed to establish the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) and to evaluate tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and antitumor activity of etirinotecan pegol.


EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
Patients with refractory solid malignancies were enrolled and assigned to escalating-dose cohorts. Patients received 1 infusion of etirinotecan pegol weekly 3 times every 4 weeks (w × 3q4w), or every 14 days (q14d), or every 21 days (q21d), with MTD as the primary end point using a standard 3 + 3 design.


RESULTS
Seventy-six patients were entered onto 3 dosing schedules (58-245 mg/m(2)). The MTD was 115 mg/m(2) for the w × 3q4w schedule and 145 mg/m(2) for both the q14d and q21d schedules. Most adverse events related to study drug were gastrointestinal disorders and were more frequent at higher doses of etirinotecan pegol. Late onset diarrhea was observed in some patients, the frequency of which generally correlated with dose density. Cholinergic diarrhea commonly seen with irinotecan treatment did not occur in patients treated with etirinotecan pegol. Etirinotecan pegol administration resulted in sustained and controlled systemic exposure to SN-38, which had a mean half-life of approximately 50 days. Overall, the pharmacokinetics of etirinotecan pegol are predictable and do not require complex dosing adjustments. Confirmed partial responses were observed in 8 patients with breast, colon, lung (small and squamous cell), bladder, cervical, and neuroendocrine cancer.


CONCLUSION
Etirinotecan pegol showed substantial antitumor activity in patients with various solid tumors and a somewhat different safety profile compared with the irinotecan historical profile. The MTD recommended for phase II clinical trials is 145 mg/m(2) q14d or q21d.
ADOPTING AN EXTERNAL FOCUS OF ATTENTION FACILITATES MOTOR LEARNING IN CHILDREN WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER

The purpose of the present study was to investigate if children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) would show enhanced motor skill learning with instructions to adopt an external focus of attention (i.e. on the movement effect) rather than an internal focus (i.e. on the movements themselves). The task involved throwing tennis balls with the dominant arm at a circular target that was placed on the floor at a distance of three meters. Twenty children with ADHD, ranging in age from 8 to 11 years, were randomly assigned to either an external or internal focus group. Participants performed 180 practice trials with focus instructions and reminders before each block of 30 trials. Learning was assessed 48 hours after practice. The external focus group demonstrated more effective learning than the internal focus group. This finding has implications for applied settings that involve sports or physical activity with children who have ADHD.
Sequential Pattern Mining : Survey and Current Research Challenges

185 Abstract— The concept of sequence Data Mining was first introduced by Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant in the year 1995. The problem was first introduced in the context of market analysis. It aimed to retrieve frequent patterns in the sequences of products purchased by customers through time ordered transactions. Later on its application was extended to complex applications like telecommunication, network detection, DNA research, etc. Several algorithms were proposed. The very first was Apriori algorithm, which was put forward by the founders themselves. Later more scalable algorithms for complex applications were developed. E.g. GSP, Spade, PrefixSpan etc. The area underwent considerable advancements since its introduction in a short span. In this paper, a systematic survey of the sequential pattern mining algorithms is performed. This paper investigates these algorithms by classifying study of sequential pattern-mining algorithms into two broad categories. First, on the basis of algorithms which are designed to increase efficiency of mining and second, on the basis of various extensions of sequential pattern mining designed for certain application. At the end, comparative analysis is done on the basis of important key features supported by various algorithms and current research challenges are discussed in this field of data mining.
Synergistic Effect of Silver Nanoparticles with Neomycin or Gentamicin Antibiotics on Mastitis-Causing Staphylococcus aureus

Objective: Mastitis is one of the most costly diseases in dairy cows, which greatly decreases milk production. Use of antibiotics in cattle leads to antibiotic-resistance of mastitis-causing bacteria. The present study aimed to investigate synergistic effect of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with neomycin or gentamicin antibiotic on mastitis-causing Staphylococcus aureus. Materials and Methods: In this study, 46 samples of milk were taken from the cows with clinical and subclinical mastitis during the august-October 2015 sampling period. In addition to biochemical tests, nuc gene amplification by PCR was used to identify strains of Staphylococcus aureus. Disk diffusion test and microdilution were performed to determine minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC). Fractional Inhibitory Concentration (FIC) index was calculated to determine the interaction between a combination of AgNPs and each one of the antibiotics. Results: Twenty strains of Staphylococcus aureus were isolated from 46 milk samples and were confirmed by PCR. Based on disk diffusion test, 35%, 10% and 55% of the strains were respectively susceptible, moderately susceptible and resistant to gentamicin. In addition, 35%, 15% and 50% of the strains were respectively susceptible, moderately susceptible and resistant to neomycin. According to FIC index, gentamicin antibiotic and AgNPs had synergistic effects in 50% of the strains. Furthermore, neomycin antibiotic and AgNPs had synergistic effects in 45% of the strains. Conclusion: It could be concluded that a combination of AgNPs with either gentamicin or neomycin showed synergistic antibacterial properties in Staphylococcus aureus isolates from mastitis. In addition, some hypotheses were proposed to explain antimicrobial mechanism of the combination.
San Francisco Crime Classification

San Francisco Crime Classification is an online competition administered by Kaggle Inc. The competition aims at predicting the future crimes based on a given set of geographical and time-based features. In this paper, I achieved a an accuracy that ranks at top %18, as of May 19th, 2016. I will explore the data, and explain in details the tools I used to achieve that result.