LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
BMI is superior to symptoms in predicting response to proton pump inhibitor: randomised trial in patients with upper gastrointestinal symptoms and normal endoscopy.

OBJECTIVES
In most patients undergoing endoscopy for upper gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in the Western world, no macroscopic abnormality or evidence of Helicobacter pylori infection is identified. Following this negative investigation, proton pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy is usually prescribed. The aim of this study was to assess the value of such treatment compared with placebo and to identify predictors of response.


DESIGN
Prospective parallel randomised study.


SETTING
Dyspepsia Research Clinic.


PARTICIPANT
105 patients (49 men, median age 44 years, IQR 22) with normal endoscopy and H pylori negative with ongoing upper GI symptoms following 2-week run-in period. Intervention Full demographic symptom severity and characteristics were assessed and 24 h oesophageal pH metry and oesophageal manometry were performed prior to randomisation to 2 weeks of treatment with lansoprazole 30 mg/day or placebo (2:1), with reassessment of symptom severity during the second week of treatment.


PRIMARY OUTCOME
50% reduction in Glasgow Dyspepsia Severity Score (GDSS).


RESULTS
According to intention to treat analysis, the response was 35.7% for the active group and 5.7% for the placebo group (p < 0001). The only non-invasive independent predictor of response to PPI in multivariable analysis was the patient's body mass index (BMI) (p = 0.003). The association of BMI with response to PPI was apparent across the full range of quartiles (p values for trend=0.01). BMI had a similar predictive value to either 24 h oesophageal pH metry or manometry. Predominant symptom and symptom subgroups were unhelpful in predicting the response to PPI. Including all pretreatment assessments, only BMI (p < 0.05) and lower oesophageal sphincter pressure (p < 0.05) were independent predictors of response.


CONCLUSION
The response to PPI therapy is likely to be related to underlying acid reflux. The strong predictive value of BMI is probably due to its association with underlying reflux disease and the fact that it is a more objective and reproducible measure than symptom characteristics. It is recommended that BMI should be measured in patients with upper GI symptoms. Trial Registration Number ISRCTN 32863375.
Using sensitivity analysis and visualization techniques to open black box data mining models

0020-0255/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Inc http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2012.10.039 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: pcortez@dsi.uminho.pt (P. Cor In this paper, we propose a new visualization approach based on a Sensitivity Analysis (SA) to extract human understandable knowledge from supervised learning black box data mining models, such as Neural Networks (NNs), Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and ensembles, including Random Forests (RFs). Five SA methods (three of which are purely new) and four measures of input importance (one novel) are presented. Also, the SA approach is adapted to handle discrete variables and to aggregate multiple sensitivity responses. Moreover, several visualizations for the SA results are introduced, such as input pair importance color matrix and variable effect characteristic surface. A wide range of experiments was performed in order to test the SA methods and measures by fitting four well-known models (NN, SVM, RF and decision trees) to synthetic datasets (five regression and five classification tasks). In addition, the visualization capabilities of the SA are demonstrated using four real-world datasets (e.g., bank direct marketing and white wine quality). 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Prototype of fault adaptive embedded software for large-scale real-time systems

This paper describes a comprehensive prototype of large-scale fault adaptive embedded software developed for the proposed Fermilab BTeV high energy physics experiment. Lightweight self-optimizing agents embedded within Level 1 of the prototype are responsible for proactive and reactive monitoring and mitigation based on specified layers of competence. The agents are self-protecting, detecting cascading failures using a distributed approach. Adaptive, reconfigurable, and mobile objects for reliablility are designed to be self-configuring to adapt automatically to dynamically changing environments. These objects provide a self-healing layer with the ability to discover, diagnose, and react to discontinuities in real-time processing. A generic modeling environment was developed to facilitate design and implementation of hardware resource specifications, application data flow, and failure mitigation strategies. Level 1 of the planned BTeV trigger system alone will consist of 2500 DSPs, so the number of components and intractable fault scenarios involved make it impossible to design an ‘expert system’ that applies traditional centralized mitigative strategies based on rules capturing every possible system state. Instead, a distributed reactive approach is implemented using the tools and methodologies developed by the Real-Time Embedded Systems group.
Intra-articular corticosteroids are effective in osteoarthritis but there are no clinical predictors of response.

OBJECTIVES
To show whether intra-articular steroid injections are effective in osteoarthritis; to determine factors that predict response; and to determine whether injection has a beneficial effect on muscle strength.


METHODS
Double blind, placebo controlled, crossover study in 59 patients with symptomatic osteoarthritis of the knee. Outcome measure-Primary outcome measure: change in visual analogue score for pain at three weeks. Predictors of response analysed using logistic regression with a 15% decrease in pain score at three weeks defining response.


RESULTS
Intra-articular methyl prednisolone acetate produced a significant reduction in visual analogue pain score at three weeks compared to both baseline (median change -2.0 mm, interquartile range -16.25 to 4.0) and placebo (median 0.0 mm, interquartile range -9.0 to 6.25). No clinical predictors of response could be identified. Muscle strength was not significantly improved in the short term by intra-articular injection.


CONCLUSIONS
Intra-articular corticosteroids are effective for short term relief of pain in osteoarthritis but predicting responders is not possible. There may be a place for their more widespread use.
Expanding H. A. Wheeler's legacy: Wheeler's work as a graduate teaching tool

H.A. Wheeler's body of work in antennas is discussed as a tool for graduate education.
Leading Indicators of Currency Crises '

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning “signal” that a currency crises may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include: exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices. JEL Classification Numbers: F31, F47
AN UWB CIRCULAR PATCH ANTENNA WITH SLOTTED GROUND PLANE FOR BODY-CENTRIC COMMUNICATION

The performance of a circular patch antenna with slotted ground plane for body centric communication mainly in the health care monitoring systems for Onbody application is researched. The CP antenna is intended for utilization in UWB, body centric communication applications i.e. in between 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. The proposed antenna is CP antenna of (30 x 30 x 1.6) mm. It is simulated via CST microwave studio suite. This CP antenna covers the entire ultra wide frequency range (3.9174-13.519) GHz (9.6016) GHz with the VSWR of (3.818 GHz13.268 GHz). Antenna’s group delay is to be observed as 3.5 ns. The simulated results of antenna are given in terms of , VSWR, group delay and radiation pattern. Keywords— UWB, Body Worn Antenna, BodyCentric Communication.
Monitoring urban growth and land use change detection with GIS and remote sensing techniques in Daqahlia governorate Egypt

Urban growth is a worldwide phenomenon but the rate of urbanization is very fast in developing country like Egypt. It is mainly driven by unorganized expansion, increased immigration, rapidly increasing population. In this context, land use and land cover change are considered one of the central components in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. In Egypt, urban growth has brought serious losses of agricultural land and water bodies. Urban growth is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. Egypt possessed a number of fast growing cities. Mansoura and Talkha cities in Daqahlia governorate are expanding rapidly with varying growth rates and patterns. In this context, geospatial technologies and remote sensing methodology provide essential tools which can be applied in the analysis of land use change detection. This paper is an attempt to assess the land use change detection by using GIS in Mansoura and Talkha from 1985 to 2010. Change detection analysis shows that built-up area has been increased from 28 to 255 km by more than 30% and agricultural land reduced by 33%. Future prediction is done by using the Markov chain analysis. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city. 2015 The Gulf Organisation for Research and Development. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Vascular endothelial growth factor in systemic capillary leak syndrome.

Systemic capillary leak syndrome is a rare disorder charcterized by acute attacks of severe vascular hyperpermebility causing hypotension and shock. All patients have paraproteinemia. There is a rarer variant of this syndome in which the same symptoms appear in a chronic orm. The diagnosis is made by exclusion of other causes. he cause has not been elucidated, and no treatment has een shown effective. Patient 1, a 42-year-old woman, had classic episodic ystemic capillary leak syndrome associated with monolonal gammopathy of unknown significance, immunolobulin (Ig)-G lambda. During an episode of severe apillary leak necessitating intensive care unit admission, erial samples of plasma were obtained. Vascular endohelial growth factor concentrations were elevated at the nitial presentation of symptoms and quickly decreased, orrelating with the remission of the capillary leak Figure A). Patient 2, a 66-year-old man, presented with generalized dema refractory to diuretics. A cardiac, renal, infectious, nflammatory, or malignant cause could not be identified fter extensive diagnostic procedures, including autoimune serology, echocardiography, coronary angiography, omputed tomography scanning of the thorax and abdomen, one marrow biopsy, thoracoscopic examination of the hest wall, and pleural biopsies. There was a monoclonal araproteinemia of IgA, without evidence of multiple yeloma. We concluded that the patient had the chronic orm of capillary leak syndrome. To confirm the presence of systemic hyperpermeability, e measured the transcapillary escape rate of radioactive
Avogadro: an advanced semantic chemical editor, visualization, and analysis platform

UNLABELLED



BACKGROUND
The Avogadro project has developed an advanced molecule editor and visualizer designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible, high quality rendering, and a powerful plugin architecture. Typical uses include building molecular structures, formatting input files, and analyzing output of a wide variety of computational chemistry packages. By using the CML file format as its native document type, Avogadro seeks to enhance the semantic accessibility of chemical data types.


RESULTS
The work presented here details the Avogadro library, which is a framework providing a code library and application programming interface (API) with three-dimensional visualization capabilities; and has direct applications to research and education in the fields of chemistry, physics, materials science, and biology. The Avogadro application provides a rich graphical interface using dynamically loaded plugins through the library itself. The application and library can each be extended by implementing a plugin module in C++ or Python to explore different visualization techniques, build/manipulate molecular structures, and interact with other programs. We describe some example extensions, one which uses a genetic algorithm to find stable crystal structures, and one which interfaces with the PackMol program to create packed, solvated structures for molecular dynamics simulations. The 1.0 release series of Avogadro is the main focus of the results discussed here.


CONCLUSIONS
Avogadro offers a semantic chemical builder and platform for visualization and analysis. For users, it offers an easy-to-use builder, integrated support for downloading from common databases such as PubChem and the Protein Data Bank, extracting chemical data from a wide variety of formats, including computational chemistry output, and native, semantic support for the CML file format. For developers, it can be easily extended via a powerful plugin mechanism to support new features in organic chemistry, inorganic complexes, drug design, materials, biomolecules, and simulations. Avogadro is freely available under an open-source license from http://avogadro.openmolecules.net.
Isolating neural components of threat bias in pediatric anxiety.

BACKGROUND
  Attention biases toward threat are often detected in individuals with anxiety disorders. Threat biases can be measured experimentally through dot-probe paradigms, in which individuals detect a probe following a stimulus pair including a threat. On these tasks, individuals with anxiety tend to detect probes that occur in a location previously occupied by a threat (i.e., congruent) faster than when opposite threats (i.e., incongruent). In pediatric anxiety disorders, dot-probe paradigms detect abnormal attention biases toward threat and abnormal ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) function. However, it remains unclear if this aberrant vlPFC activation occurs while subjects process threats (e.g., angry faces) or, alternatively, while they process and respond to probes. This magnetoencephalography (MEG) study was designed to answer this question.


METHODS
  Adolescents with either generalized anxiety disorder (GAD, n = 17) or no psychiatric diagnosis (n = 25) performed a dot-probe task involving angry and neutral faces while MEG data were collected. Synthetic Aperture Magnetometry (SAM) beamformer technique was used to determine whether there were group differences in power ratios while subjects processed threats (i.e., angry vs. neutral faces) or when subjects responded to incongruent versus. congruent probes.


RESULTS
  Group differences in vlPFC activation during the response period emerged with a 1-30 Hz frequency band. No group differences in vlPFC activation were detected in response to angry-face cues.


CONCLUSIONS
  In the dot-probe task, anxiety-related perturbations in vlPFC activation reflect abnormal attention control when responding to behaviorally relevant probes, but not to angry faces. Given that motor responses to these probes are used to calculate threat bias, this study provides insight into the pathophysiology reflected in this commonly used marker of anxiety. In addition, this finding may inform the development of novel anxiety-disorder treatments targeting the vlPFC to enhance attention control to task-relevant demands.
Dynamics of BCR-ABL mutated clones prior to hematologic or cytogenetic resistance to imatinib.

UNLABELLED
background: Mutations of the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase domain constitute a major cause of resistance to tyrosine kinase inhibitors in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. We sought to improve the diagnostic armamentarium by screening and to analyze the dynamics of mutated clones in chronic myeloid leukemia patients who experienced hematologic or cytogenetic relapse.


DESIGN AND METHODS
Ninety-five patients who relapsed during imatinib therapy were screened for BCR-ABL kinase domain mutations using sensitive denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (D-HPLC) and direct sequencing. To investigate the dynamics of mutated clones D-HPLC was applied to 453 cDNA samples tracking back from relapse towards the start of imatinib therapy.


RESULTS
Twenty-two different point mutations affecting 18 amino acids were detectable in 46/79 (58%) and in 7/16 patients (44%) with hematologic or cytogenetic relapse, respectively. A deletion of 81 nucleotides (del248-274) of ABL exon 4 was observed in two patients. Three patients had exclusively single nucleotide polymorphisms (K247R, T315T, E499E, n=1 each) within the BCR-ABL kinase domain. In patients harboring mutations, hematologic relapse occurred after a median of 12.9 months (range, 0.9-44.2), and BCR-ABL mutations first became detectable at a median of 5.8 months (range, 0-30.5) after starting imatinib therapy (p<0.0001). Nine patients showed evidence of BCR-ABL mutations prior to imatinib therapy (T315I, n=4; M351T, n=3; M244V and Y253H, n=1 each).


CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that: (i) D-HPLC is a sensitive method for screening for BCR-ABL mutations before and during therapy with tyrosine kinase inhibitors; (ii) the occurrence of BCR-ABL mutations during imatinib therapy is predictive of relapse; (iii) mutations may be detectable several months before relapse, and (iv) the sensitive detection of small numbers of mutated clones could provide clinical benefit by triggering early therapeutic interventions.
Allergen immunotherapy: what can and cannot be mixed?

Allergen immunotherapy is performed with allergenic products derived from a wide variety of sources in differing formulations, dilutions, and expressed potencies. The use of standardized allergen products is leading to more uniform potency designations with these products, but only a few products have been standardized. Increased information regarding allergen crossreactivity and the stability of allergens is becoming available, but the scientific knowledge is still incomplete. Despite these problems and the lack of a standardized approach to immunotherapy, a growing body of knowledge is becoming available to move toward uniform formulation practices. The selection, total number, and proportions of allergen components that are included in therapeutic mixtures are critical aspects of formulating allergen immunotherapy. From a practical perspective, it is tempting to include all relevant allergens into a single vial in equal proportions. This approach can eliminate the need for multiple injections and potentially reduce cost and time. However, this potential gain can be at the expense of clinical efficacy. Based on current evidence for effective doses for allergen immunotherapy, the total number of allergenic extracts that theoretically can be added to a therapeutic mixture is between 7 and 15, depending on the potency of stock allergen extracts used and the volume administered to the patient. The incremental additions of allergenic extracts could reduce the final concentrations of the individual components in the mixture and thus reduce their clinical effect. The preparation of allergen immunotherapy vaccines with an increasing number of extracts creates a potential for interactive effects that can change their allergenic and immunogenic properties. Of particular importance is the contribution of proteolytic enzymes in some fungal and whole-body insect allergenic extracts. For these reasons, guidelines are needed to reduce the number of extracts to include in allergen immunotherapy mixtures.
Polynomial harmonic GMDH learning networks for time series modeling

This paper presents a constructive approach to neural network modeling of polynomial harmonic functions. This is an approach to growing higher-order networks like these build by the multilayer GMDH algorithm using activation polynomials. Two contributions for enhancement of the neural network learning are offered: (1) extending the expressive power of the network representation with another compositional scheme for combining polynomial terms and harmonics obtained analytically from the data; (2) space improving the higher-order network performance with a backpropagation algorithm for further gradient descent learning of the weights, initialized by least squares fitting during the growing phase. Empirical results show that the polynomial harmonic version phGMDH outperforms the previous GMDH, a Neurofuzzy GMDH and traditional MLP neural networks on time series modeling tasks. Applying next backpropagation training helps to achieve superior polynomial network performances.
Ethiopian sign language recognition using Artificial Neural Network

Pattern recognition is very challenging multidisciplinary research area attracting researchers and practitioners. Gesture recognition is a specialized pattern recognition task with the goal of interpreting human gestures via mathematical models. One of the usages of gesture recognition is the sign language recognition which is the basic communication method between deaf people. Since there is lack of proficient sign language teachers at schools for the deaf, the teaching and learning process is remaining affected. A system is therefore required to overcome communication barriers facing the deaf community. So, in this paper, a hand gesture detection and recognition system for Ethiopian Sign Language (ESL) has been proposed. Gabor Filter (GF) together with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been used for extracting features from the digital images of hand gestures while Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used for recognizing the ESL from extracted features and to translate into Amharic voice. The experimental results show that the system has produced recognition rate of 98.53%.
Parenting a child with a cochlear implant: a critical incident study.

This study aimed to describe and categorize the attributes that parents of young children with cochlear implants (CIs) consider as facilitating their parental coping experience. I interviewed 15 hearing mothers and 13 hearing fathers (including 12 married couples) whose children had CIs, using the critical incident technique that asked parents to describe significant incidents (observable behaviors, thoughts, feelings) that facilitated their parenting experience. A total of 430 critical incidents were documented and sorted into 20 categories. Further analyses supported the suggested categorical system's validity and reliability. Results indicated various sources of influence on parents' coping experience, associated with social contextual aspects (e.g., professionals' support, sharing experience with others, family's/friends' consistent involvement, intervention services), with the parent himself or herself (e.g., taking action, personal resources, incorporating deafness into daily life), and with the child (e.g., child characteristics, identifying progress and success). The current research substantiates the soundness of implementing early intervention models such as the developmental system model (Guralnick, 2001) and the support approach to early intervention (McWilliam & Scott, 2001), which coincide with ecological theory and recognize that families need various combinations of resources, social support, information, and services to help them address the stressors associated with parenting in general and parenting a child with special needs in particular.