LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A prospective evaluation of the Heidelberg retina flowmeter in diagnosing ischaemia following branch retinal vein occlusion: A masked, controlled comparison with fluorescein angiography

Purpose To evaluate the use of the Heidelberg retina flowmeter (HRF) in diagnosing retinal ischaemia following macular branch retinal vein occlusion.Methods Ten patients with ischaemic macular branch retinal vein occlusion, as determined by strict fluorescein angiographic criteria, were examined with the HRF. Blood flow, blood volume and blood velocity characteristics from areas of ischaemic and non-ischaemic retina were recorded and the results between the normal and ischaemic areas of retina compared with paired t-test analysis. Ten healthy volunteers were similarly examined and acted as a control group.Results Compared with normal retina the HRF recorded a statistically significant reduction in blood flow within the ischaemic retina in 7 of the 10 study patients. In 2 patients the HRF actually recorded a statistically significant increase in blood flow in the area of ischaemic retina; there was no significant difference in the blood flow recorded in the normal and ischaemic retina in the remaining patient. HRF examination of the control group revealed a significant difference in the blood flow between two areas of apparently normal retina in 3 of the 10 volunteers.Conclusion The HRF is not a reliable tool for diagnosing retinal ischaemia following branch retinal vein occlusion. Our results may suggest that the HRF blood flow recordings are not derived from the retinal circulation alone, but represent the cumulative blood flow through the combined circulations of the retina and choriocapillaris.
Wood smoke exposure, poverty and impaired lung function in Malawian adults.

BACKGROUND
Household air pollution from burning biomass fuel is increasingly recognised as a major global health concern. Biomass smoke is associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Asian and Central American countries, but there are few data from Africa.


METHODS
We hypothesised that reported wood smoke as compared to charcoal smoke exposure would be associated with a reduction in forced expiratory volume in 1 second in Malawian adults. Volunteers from urban and rural locations performed spirometry and completed a questionnaire assessing lifestyle, including smoke exposure and symptoms.


RESULTS
In total, 374 adults were recruited; 61% were female; 160 cooked using charcoal and 174 used wood. Individuals who used wood as their main domestic fuel had significantly worse lung function than those who used charcoal. Significant factors associated with impaired lung function in the multivariate model were age, sex, height, wood smoke exposure, poverty, smoking and previous tuberculosis.


CONCLUSION
Our data suggest that wood smoke and poverty contribute to reduced lung function in rural Africans and that COPD is common in this population. The use of charcoal in rural populations may be relatively protective, and this idea merits further study. The risk factors for impaired lung function in Malawi are multiple and require more detailed characterisation to plan appropriate health interventions.
The many faces of geriatric depression.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW
Recent studies on five aspects of geriatric depression, namely subsyndromal depression, risk factors and association with chronic pain, cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment, are reviewed.


RECENT FINDINGS
Subsyndromal depression in the elderly population is not uncommon in east Asia; the prevalence is about 8-9%. Risk factors of geriatric depression include poor health, brain injury, low folate and vitamin B12 and raised plasma homocysteine levels. Depressed elderly with chronic pain are prone to suicidal ideation. Depression is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and mortality in coronary heart disease.


SUMMARY
The growing interest in research on geriatric depression could focus on early diagnosis to help doctors treat depression better at primary care level.
Lane estimation using a vehicle kinematic lateral motion model under clothoidal road constraints

Predictive virtual lane has been known that it can cope with up to several sampling period camera failure providing improved lateral control performance of lane keeping system. In this paper, we propose an improved lane estimation scheme using a vehicle kinematic lateral motion model and clothoidal road constraints to resolve a longer failure than that considered in the previous study. The lane estimation system gives virtual lane information to the lateral control system. The developed algorithm was validated via computational simulation results with CarSim and MATLAB/Simulink, and experimental results with a test vehicle equipped with an AutoBox from dSPACE.
A passive-mixer-first receiver with baseband-controlled RF impedance matching, ≪ 6dB NF, and ≫ 27dBm wideband IIP3

A software-defined radio (SDR) ideally allows all of the parameters of the radio to be programmed dynamically. SDRs so far have shown flexibility in bandwidth (BW) [1], local oscillator (LO) frequency [2-4], gain, and modulation type. However, the impedance an RF front-end presents to its antenna has proven difficult to tune [5]. Since antenna impedance can vary significantly across frequency and different environments, a software-controlled input impedance is desirable. Meanwhile, recent work suggests that connecting the antenna directly to a passive mixer without an RF LNA can provide significant benefits, such as extremely low power [6] or greatly increased tuning range and linearity [2]. This paper demonstrates a passive mixer-first SDR with an RF impedance that is controlled by baseband components whose impedance is reflected through the passive mixer to the RF port.
Cost-effectiveness of cardiac rehabilitation program delivery models in patients at varying cardiac risk, reason for referral, and sex.

BACKGROUND
Little is known about the relative cost-effectiveness of different secondary prevention cardiac rehabilitation (CR) program designs or how cost-effectiveness is influenced by patient clinical and demographic characteristics. The purpose of the study was (i) to evaluate the incremental cost-effectiveness of a standard 3-month CR program (SCR) versus a program distributed over 12 months (distributed CR, DCR); and (ii) to determine the effect of patient demographic characteristics (cardiac risk, cardiac diagnosis, sex) on incremental cost-effectiveness.


METHODS
A two group cost-effectiveness analysis was conducted alongside a randomized controlled trial. Patients with coronary artery disease (mean age=58 years, SD+/-10) were randomized to either SCR (n=196) or DCR (n=196) and followed for 24 months. Program delivery costs, cardiac healthcare use, morbidity, mortality, and quality-adjusted life years were assessed. Cost-effectiveness was evaluated with incremental cost-utility analysis.


RESULTS
In the pooled analysis, we found the probability of SCR being more cost-effective than DCR was 63-67%. The subanalysis found SCR to be the more cost-effective intervention for patients at high risk, patients with previous coronary artery bypass graft and for male patients. The DCR program was more cost-effective for patients with lower risk of disease progression and for female patients.


CONCLUSION
Differences were noted in the cost-effectiveness of CR models based on cardiac risk level, reason for referral, and demographic characteristics. Our results suggest improved cost-effectiveness may be gained by triaging patients to different CR intervention models, however, further investigation is required.
Canine Leptospirosis : Epidemiology , Pathogenesis , and Diagnosis

CE Email comments/questions to compendium@medimedia.com, fax 800-556-3288, or log on to www.VetLearn.com Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease of worldwide significance. It is caused by antigenically distinct serovars of the parasitic species Leptospira interrogans sensu lato, of which eight are most important to dogs and cats. The disease, which is caused by serovars most commonly incriminated (icterohaemorrhagiae and canicola) with cases of “classic” canine leptospirosis, has decreased greatly in prevalence with the development of commercial vaccines containing antigens from these serovars. However, reported clinical cases associated with other pathogenic serovars (particularly pomona, grippotyphosa, and bratislava) not included in these vaccines have seen a dramatic increase over the past 10 to 15 years. Serovars pomona and grippotyphosa have been associated with numerous cases of acute renal failure, and serovars bratislava, hardjo, and bataviae have been implicated in both hepatic and renal disease as well. Recent advances in diagnosing leptospirosis by using polymerase chain reaction have been described and may allow quicker, more accurate diagnosis of dogs affected with leptospirosis. are infected, they can develop severe clinical illness and shed organisms for shorter periods than the reservoir host. The most commonly incriminated serovars in canine leptospirosis have been canicola, icterohaemorrhagiae, pomona, bratislava, and grippotyphosa. Widespread use of bivalent vaccines produced in the 1980s that are serovar-specific for only canicola and icterohaemorrhagiae has resulted in a decreased prevalence of disease associated with those serovars. However, increased awareness of infections with serovars pomona, bratislava, and grippotyphosa has become apparent in the past 15 to 20 years. The predominance of disease associated with these latter serovars is likely associated with increasing exposure of unnatural hosts (e.g., dogs) to wild reservoir hosts in rural or suburCOMPENDIUM 606 August 2004 Canine Leptospirosis: Epidemiology, Pathogenesis, and Diagnosis John K. Sessions, DVM Craig E. Greene, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Internal Medicine, Neurology) University of Georgia L Now Online: Full-Text Articles and CE Testing at VetLearn.com
Neuropharmacology of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS): Focus on the Rewarding and Reinforcing Properties of Cannabimimetics and Amphetamine-Like Stimulants

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are a heterogeneous and rapidly evolving class of molecules available on the global illicit drug market (e.g smart shops, internet, "dark net") as a substitute for controlled substances. The use of NPS, mainly consumed along with other drugs of abuse and/or alcohol, has resulted in a significantly growing number of mortality and emergency admissions for overdoses, as reported by several poison centers from all over the world. The fact that the number of NPS have more than doubled over the last 10 years, is a critical challenge to governments, the scientific community, and civil society [EMCDDA (European Drug Report), 2014; UNODC, 2014b; Trends and developments]. The chemical structure (phenethylamines, piperazines, cathinones, tryptamines, synthetic cannabinoids) of NPS and their pharmacological and clinical effects (hallucinogenic, anesthetic, dissociative, depressant) help classify them into different categories. In the recent past, 50% of newly identified NPS have been classified as synthetic cannabinoids followed by new phenethylamines (17%) (UNODC, 2014b). Besides peripheral toxicological effects, many NPS seem to have addictive properties. Behavioral, neurochemical, and electrophysiological evidence can help in detecting them. This manuscript will review existing literature about the addictive and rewarding properties of the most popular NPS classes: cannabimimetics (JWH, HU, CP series) and amphetamine-like stimulants (amphetamine, methamphetamine, methcathinone, and MDMA analogs). Moreover, the review will include recent data from our lab which links JWH-018, a CB1 and CB2 agonist more potent than Δ(9)-THC, to other cannabinoids with known abuse potential, and to other classes of abused drugs that increase dopamine signaling in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) shell. Thus the neurochemical mechanisms that produce the rewarding properties of JWH-018, which most likely contributes to the greater incidence of dependence associated with "Spice" use, will be described (De Luca et al., 2015a). Considering the growing evidence of a widespread use of NPS, this review will be useful to understand the new trends in the field of drug reward and drug addiction by revealing the rewarding properties of NPS, and will be helpful to gather reliable data regarding the abuse potential of these compounds.
Design of a real time automatic speech recognition system using Modified One Against All SVM classifier

0141-9331/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.micpro.2011.06.002 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: jmanikandan.nitt@gmail.com (J. M In this paper, Texas Instruments TMS320C6713 DSP based real-time speech recognition system using Modified One Against All Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is proposed. The major contributions of this paper are: the study and evaluation of the performance of the classifier using three feature extraction techniques and proposal for minimizing the computation time for the classifier. From this study, it is found that the recognition accuracies of 93.33%, 98.67% and 96.67% are achieved for the classifier using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features, zerocrossing (ZC) and zerocrossing with peak amplitude (ZCPA) features respectively. To reduce the computation time required for the systems, two techniques – one using optimum threshold technique for the SVM classifier and another using linear assembly are proposed. The ZC based system requires the least computation time and the above techniques reduce the execution time by a factor of 6.56 and 5.95 respectively. For the purpose of comparison, the speech recognition system is also implemented using Altera Cyclone II FPGA with Nios II soft processor and custom instructions. Of the two approaches, the DSP approach requires 87.40% less number of clock cycles. Custom design of the recognition system on the FPGA without using the soft-core processor would have resulted in less computational complexity. The proposed classifier is also found to reduce the number of support vectors by a factor of 1.12–3.73 when applied to speaker identification and isolated letter recognition problems. The techniques proposed here can be adapted for various other SVM based pattern recognition systems. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language

Sentences in first-order predicate logic can be usefully interpreted as programs. In this paper the operational and fixpoint semantics of predicate logic programs are defined, and the connections with the proof theory and model theory of logic are investigated. It is concluded that operational semantics is a part of proof theory and that fixpoint semantics is a special case of model-theoretic semantics.
CNNdroid: GPU-Accelerated Execution of Trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks on Android

Many mobile applications running on smartphones and wearable devices would potentially benefit from the accuracy and scalability of deep CNN-based machine learning algorithms. However, performance and energy consumption limitations make the execution of such computationally intensive algorithms on mobile devices prohibitive. We present a GPU-accelerated library, dubbed CNNdroid [1], for execution of trained deep CNNs on Android-based mobile devices. Empirical evaluations show that CNNdroid achieves up to 60X speedup and 130X energy saving on current mobile devices. The CNNdroid open source library is available for download at https://github.com/ENCP/CNNdroid
Adoption and use of social media among public health departments

BACKGROUND
Effective communication is a critical function within any public health system. Social media has enhanced communication between individuals and organizations and has the potential to augment public health communication. However, there is a lack of reported data on social media adoption within public health settings. The purposes of this study were to assess: 1) the extent to which state public health departments (SHDs) are using social media; 2) which social media applications are used most often; and 3) how often social media is used interactively to engage audiences.


METHODS
This was a non-experimental, cross sectional study of SHD social media sites. Screen capture software Snag-It® was used to obtain screenshots of SHD social media sites across five applications. These sites were coded for social media presence, interactivity, reach, and topic.


RESULTS
Sixty percent of SHDs reported using at least one social media application. Of these, 86.7% had a Twitter account, 56% a Facebook account, and 43% a YouTube channel. There was a statistically significant difference between average population density and use of social media (p = .01). On average, SHDs made one post per day on social media sites, and this was primarily to distribute information; there was very little interaction with audiences. SHDs have few followers or friends on their social media sites. The most common topics for posts and tweets related to staying healthy and diseases and conditions. Limitations include the absence of a standard by which social media metrics measure presence, reach, or interactivity; SHDs were only included if they had an institutionally maintained account; and the study was cross sectional.


CONCLUSIONS
Social media use by public health agencies is in the early adoption stage. However, the reach of social media is limited. SHDs are using social media as a channel to distribute information rather than capitalizing on the interactivity available to create conversations and engage with the audience. If public health agencies are to effectively use social media then they must develop a strategic communication plan that incorporates best practices for expanding reach and fostering interactivity and engagement.
Glacial refugia and modern genetic diversity of 22 western North American tree species.

North American tree species, subspecies and genetic varieties have primarily evolved in a landscape of extensive continental ice and restricted temperate climate environments. Here, we reconstruct the refugial history of western North American trees since the last glacial maximum using species distribution models, validated against 3571 palaeoecological records. We investigate how modern subspecies structure and genetic diversity corresponds to modelled glacial refugia, based on a meta-analysis of allelic richness and expected heterozygosity for 473 populations of 22 tree species. We find that species with strong genetic differentiation into subspecies had widespread and large glacial refugia, whereas species with restricted refugia show no differentiation among populations and little genetic diversity, despite being common over a wide range of environments today. In addition, a strong relationship between allelic richness and the size of modelled glacial refugia (r(2) = 0.55) suggest that population bottlenecks during glacial periods had a pronounced effect on the presence of rare alleles.
Bedside ultrasound assessment of gastric content: an observational study.

PURPOSE
There is a growing interest in the use of bedside ultrasonography to assess gastric content and volume. It has been suggested that the gastric antrum in particular can be assessed reliably by sonography. The aim of this observational study was to provide a qualitative description of the sonographic characteristics of the gastric antrum when the stomach is empty and following the ingestion of clear fluid, milk, and solid content.


CLINICAL FEATURES
Six healthy volunteers were examined on four different occasions (24 scanning sessions): following a period of eight hours of fast and following ingestion of 200 mL of apple juice, 200 mL of 2% milk, and a standard solid meal (sandwich and apple juice). Examinations were performed following a standardized scanning protocol by two clinical anesthesiologists with previous experience in gastric sonography. For each type of gastric content, the sonographic characteristics of the antrum and its content are described and illustrated with figures.


CONCLUSIONS
Bedside sonography can determine the nature of gastric content (nil, clear fluid, thick fluid/solid). This qualitative information by itself may be useful to assess risk of aspiration, particularly in situations when prandial status is unknown or uncertain.
Scanning electron microscopy of Haemonchus contortus exposed to tannin-rich plants under in vivo and in vitro conditions.

The structural changes induced in adult Haemonchus contortus after in vitro and in vivo contact with a tannin-rich (TR) plant, either tzalam (Lysiloma latisiliquum) or sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia), were assessed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). All the worms used in the study were adult females. The Haemonchus adult worms were obtained from the abomasum of infected donor goats. Adult H. contortus were kept in contact with the extracts of TR plants for 24h for the in vitro assays and were compared to worms maintained in PBS (control). For the in vivo studies, the adult H. contortus parasites were obtained from artificially infected goats. All the goats were fed a tannin-free diet until D27 post-infection when infection was patent. On D28 some goats were fed fodder of one of the TR plants for seven consecutive days. Thus, their H. contortus were in contact with TR fodder within the gastrointestinal tract. The control worms were obtained from goats fed only a tannin-free diet. In the in vitro assays and in vivo studies, the SEM observations revealed structural alterations in the worms after contact with TR plants when compared to the control worms (i.e.: longitudinal and transversal folds and thicker cuticular ridges, material aggregates around the buccal capsule and/or vulva or anus). The main changes concerned the cuticle and the buccal area. The structural changes found in the worms exposed to TR plants might affect their motility and nutrition with possible consequences on their reproduction, as suggested by previous in vivo trials.