LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A patient adaptable ECG beat classifier based on neural networks

A novel supervised neural network-based algorithm is designed to reliably distinguish in electrocardiographic (ECG) records between normal and ischemic beats of the same patient. The basic idea behind this paper is to consider an ECG digital recording of two consecutive R-wave segments (RRR interval) as a noisy sample of an underlying function to be approximated by a fixed number of Radial Basis Functions (RBF). The linear expansion coefficients of the RRR interval represent the input signal of a feed-forward neural network which classifies a single beat as normal or ischemic. The system has been evaluated using several patient records taken from the European ST-T database. Experimental results show that the proposed beat classifier is very reliable, and that it may be a useful practical tool for the automatic detection of ischemic episodes. The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a graphic recording of the electrical activities in human heart and provides diagnostically significant information. Its shape, size and duration reflect the heart rhythm over time. The waves related to electrical impulses occurring at each beat of the heart are shown in Fig. 1. The P-wave represents the beginning of the cardiac cycle and is followed by the QRS complex, which is generally the most recognizable feature of an ECG waveform. At the end of the cardiac cycle is the T-wave. The varied sources of heart diseases provide a wide range of alterations in the shape of the electrocar-diogram. For instance, inverted T waves (Fig. 2) are seen during the evolution of myocardial infarction, while ST-segment depression (Fig. 3) can be caused by ischemia. In recent years, many researches concerning automated processing of ECG signals have been conducted A difficult problem in computer-aided ECG analysis is related to the large variation in the morphology of ECG waveforms, not only among different patients, but even within the same patient. This makes the detection of ECG features (ST-segment, T-wave, QRS-area) a tough task. The aim of the present work is to design an ECG beat recognition method to distinguish normal and ischemic patterns of the same patient without requiring the extraction of ECG features. The method is a supervised neural network-based algorithm , and hence its applicability requires the availability of recordings of both normal beats and annotated ischemic episodes. Once trained, the system should be capable of detecting new ischemic beats similar to those previously observed in the patient. This objective is relevant because of …
A comparative study of Artificial Bee Colony algorithm

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most recently introduced swarm-based algorithms. ABC simulates the intelligent foraging behaviour of a honeybee swarm. In this work, ABC is used for optimizing a large set of numerical test functions and the results produced by ABC algorithm are compared with the results obtained by genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization algorithm, differential evolution algorithm and evolution strategies. Results show that the performance of the ABC is better than or similar to those of other population-based algorithms with the advantage of employing fewer control parameters. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Remission in rheumatoid arthritis: physician and patient perspectives.

OBJECTIVE
To examine the prevalence of remission in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as determined by physicians and patients independently, and to determine the degree of agreement among methods, the strength of predictor variables of remission, and the length of remission.


METHODS
Eight hundred patients with RA completed a remission questionnaire on the day of their rheumatologist visit and their rheumatologists completed a separate questionnaire the same day. The question(s) were: "Given all your experience with disease activity in RA, are you [is your patient] currently in remission?". Patients also completed 0-10 visual analog scales for RA activity, pain, and functional limitation.


RESULTS
The percentage of patients in remission by physician and patient assessment was 34.8% [95% confidence interval (CI) 31.4-38.2] and 30.9% (95% CI 27.7-34.20), respectively. The percentage of patients classified concordantly (full agreement) was 78.6%, and the associated kappa statistic was 0.54 (95% CI 0.45-0.58). The median duration of remission was 2.0 years. The median RA activity, pain, and functional scores were 1.0, 1.5, and 1.25 for patient-determined remission and 1.5, 1.5, and 1.5 for physician-determined remission.


CONCLUSION
Physician and patient estimates of remission in RA are similar (34.8% to 30.9%), and agreement was 78.6% (kappa 0.53). Based on previous data and the observed presence of disease activity, this definition of remission appears to be a measure of minimal disease activity rather than true remission. The problem of remission rates will not be solved until a consensus definition that has relevance in research and the clinic is developed.
ChatCoder : Toward the Tracking and Categorization of Internet Predators

We describe the preliminary results from a new research project which studies the communicative strategies of online sexual predators. These pedophiles approach children via Internet technologies, such as instant messaging or chat rooms. This article presents the software we used to facilitate analysis of chat log transcripts and the development of a communicative theory of online predation. This software is used to label and analyze chat transcripts. Our preliminary experimental results show that we can distinquish between predator and victim communication, but not as reliably as we would like to. We can, however, confidently distinquish between predatory and nonpredatory discussion. In a second set of experiments, we used k-means clustering to discover that there are four types of online predation communication.
Long-term Results of a Randomized Double-blinded Prospective Trial of a Lightweight (Ultrapro) Versus a Heavyweight Mesh (Prolene) in Laparoscopic Total Extraperitoneal Inguinal Hernia Repair (TULP-trial).

OBJECTIVE
The aim of the randomized clinical trial was to compare the 2 years of clinical outcomes of a lightweight (Ultrapro) vs a heavyweight (Prolene) mesh for laparoscopic total extraperitoneal (TEP) inguinal hernia repair.


BACKGROUND
Lightweight meshes reduce postoperative pain and stiffness in open anterior inguinal hernia repair. The discussion about a similar benefit for laparoscopic repair is ongoing, but concerns exist about higher recurrence rates.


METHODS
Between March 2010 and October 2012, male patients who presented with a primary, reducible unilateral inguinal hernia who underwent day-case TEP repair were eligible. Outcome parameters included chronic pain, recurrence, foreign body feeling, and quality of life scores.


RESULTS
During the study period, 950 patients were included. One year postoperatively the presence of relevant pain (Numeric Rating Score 4-10) was significantly higher in the lightweight mesh group (2.9%) compared with the heavyweight mesh group (0.7%) (P = 0.01), and after 2 years this difference remained significant (P = 0.03). There were 4 (0.8%) recurrent hernias in the heavyweight mesh group and 13 (2.7%) in the lightweight group (P = 0.03). No differences in foreign body feeling or quality of life scores were detected.


CONCLUSIONS
In TEP hernia surgery, there was no benefit of lightweight over heavyweight meshes observed 2 years postoperatively.
Phase II study of elsamitrucin (BMY-28090) for the treatment of patients with refractory/relapsed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

Purpose: To determine the response rate of patients withrefractory/relapsed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to treatment with elsamitrucin and to further characterize the toxic effects of elsamitrucin in this group of patients. Patients and methods: Eligibility required pathologically verified relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin's lymphoma with no more than two prior chemotherapy regimens for patients with tumors classified by the International Working Formulation (IWF) as A-C and no more than one prior chemotherapy for those with IWF grades D-G. Patients were entered with either normal or impaired bone marrow function, but normal liver function tests were required unless clearly related to lymphomatous involvement of the liver. Elsamitrucin 25 mg/m2 was administered intravenously over 5–10 minutes weekly. Results: Thirty-one patients entered the study and were treated for a median of six weeks (range 1–42). All patients were évaluable for toxicity and 30 for response. Mild nausea and/or vomiting and asthenia were the most frequently reported adverse events. Four (13%, 95% CI 4.4–31.6%) partial responses were seen along with two (7%) minor responses while 9 (30%) patients had stable disease. Conclusion: Elsamitrucin showed modest activity in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Toxicity was relatively mild, consisted mainly of asthenia, nausea and vomiting and did not include myelosuppression. The activity of elsamitrucin in this group of patients and its lack of myelosuppression suggest utility in this disease especially when combined with other proven agents.
Effects of environmental changes in a stair climbing intervention: generalization to stair descent.

PURPOSE
Visual improvements have been shown to encourage stair use in worksites independently of written prompts. This study examined whether visual modifications alone can influence behavior in a shopping mall. Climbing one flight of stairs, however, will not confer health benefits. Therefore, this study also assessed whether exposure to the intervention encouraged subsequent stair use.


DESIGN
Interrupted time-series design.


SETTINGS
Escalators flanked by a staircase on either side.


SUBJECTS
Ascending and descending pedestrians (N = 81,948).


INTERVENTIONS
Following baseline monitoring, a colorful design was introduced on the stair risers of one staircase (the target staircase). A health promotion message was superimposed later on top. The intervention was visible only to ascending pedestrians. Thus, any rise in descending stair use would indicate increased intention to use stairs, which endured after initial exposure to the intervention.


MEASURES
Observers inconspicuously coded pedestrians' means of ascent/descent and demographic characteristics.


RESULTS
The design alone had no meaningful impact. Addition of the message, however, increased stair climbing at the target and nontarget staircases by 190% and 52%, respectively. The message also produced a modest increase in stair descent at the target (25%) and nontarget (9%) staircases.


CONCLUSIONS
In public venues, a message component is critical to the success of interventions. In addition, it appears that exposure to an intervention can encourage pedestrians to use stairs on a subsequent occasion.
Tissue characteristics and anatomic distribution of cardiac metastases among patients with advanced systemic cancer assessed by cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR)

Methods The population comprised consecutive adults (≥18 yo) with metastatic systemic neoplasms who underwent contrast-enhanced CMR between 1/2012 8/2015. Patients with primary cardiac neoplasms were excluded. CMR was performed using 1.5T (88%) and 3T (12%) clinical (GE) scanners. A standard contrast-enhanced CMR protocol was applied: Cine-CMR (SSFP) was used to assess cardiac structure and morphology. DE-CMR (IR-GRE, TI 250-350 msec, 0.2 mmol/kg gadolinium) was used for tissue characterization; long TI (600 msec) DE-CMR was employed to confirm tissue properties of visualized masses. CMET was defined using established criteria as a discrete, irregularly contoured mass with discrete borders independent of cardiac chambers, myocardium, or central catheters. CMET was further categorized based on enhancement pattern (absent, diffuse, heterogeneous enhancement with patchy hypoenhancement). Transthoracic echocardiography (echo), if performed clinically within 30 days of CMR, was used to test conventional imaging for CMET. Results 115 patients (57 ± 15 yo, 54% male) with metastatic extra-cardiac primary neoplasms were studied; 29% (n=33) had CMET on CMR. Sarcoma (21% [n=7]) and melanoma (12% [n=4]) were the two leading primary cancer etiologies; atypical primaries also occurred (n=3 pancreatic, n=1 gastrointestinal stromal, n=1 CNS). CMET location markedly varied (45% RV | 27% LV | 18% RA | 12% LA | 27% pericardial); 21% of cases involved multiple cardiac locations. 76% were due to hematogenous or lymphatic spread; 24% were due to direct invasion. DE-CMR demonstrated CMET enhancement in 83% of cases; enhancement pattern was variable (54% heterogeneous, 46% diffuse). CMET often occurred in absence of pericardial (27%) or pleural (48%) effusions. 67% of the population underwent echo within 30 (6.7 ± 8.0) days of CMR, including 61% (n=20) of patients with CMET by CMR. As shown (Table 1), echo provided limited diagnostic sensitivity for CMET, whether assessed on a per-patient (75%) or per-location (74%) basis, despite excellent specificity (≥98%). Echo performance varied based on CMET morphology and location; CMET detected by CMR but missed by echo were either intra-myocardial (n=2) or in locations suboptimally evaluated via transthoracic ultrasound (n=2 posterior LA | n=1 RV outflow tract).
Impact of cilostazol on restenosis after percutaneous coronary balloon angioplasty.

BACKGROUND
Restenosis after percutaneous transluminal coronary (balloon) angioplasty (PTCA) remains a major drawback of the procedure. We previously reported that cilostazol, a platelet aggregation inhibitor, inhibited intimal proliferation after directional coronary atherectomy and reduced the restenosis rate in humans. The present study aimed to determine the effect of cilostazol on restenosis after PTCA.


METHODS AND RESULTS
Two hundred eleven patients with 273 lesions who underwent successful PTCA were randomly assigned to the cilostazol (200 mg/d) group or the aspirin (250 mg/d) control group. Administration of cilostazol was initiated immediately after PTCA and continued for 3 months of follow-up. Quantitative coronary angiography was performed before PTCA and after PTCA and at follow-up. Reference diameter, minimal lumen diameter, and percent diameter stenosis (DS) were measured by quantitative coronary angiography. Angiographic restenosis was defined as DS at follow-up >50%. Eligible follow-up angiography was performed in 94 patients with 123 lesions in the cilostazol group and in 99 patients with 129 lesions in the control group. The baseline characteristics and results of PTCA showed no significant difference between the 2 groups. However, minimal lumen diameter at follow-up was significantly larger (1.65+/-0.55 vs 1.37+/-0.58 mm; P<0.0001) and DS was significantly lower (34.1+/-17.8% vs 45.6+/-19. 3%; P<0.0001) in the cilostazol group. Restenosis and target lesion revascularization rates were also significantly lower in the cilostazol group (17.9% vs 39.5%; P<0.001 and 11.4% vs 28.7%; P<0. 001).


CONCLUSIONS
Cilostazol significantly reduces restenosis and target lesion revascularization rates after successful PTCA.
Can hysterosalpingo-contrast sonography replace hysterosalpingography in confirming tubal blockage after hysteroscopic sterilization and in the evaluation of the uterus and tubes in infertile patients?

OBJECTIVE
The objective of the study was to assess the accuracy of hysterosalpingo-contrast sonography (HyCoSy) in establishing tubal patency or blockage and evaluating the uterine cavity by comparing it with hysteroscopy laparoscopy (HLC) or hysterosalpingography (HSG).


STUDY DESIGN
This study was a chart review evaluating infertility patients and patients who had undergone hysteroscopic sterilization who underwent both HyCoSy and HLC or HyCoSy and HSG at private offices associated with university hospitals. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of HyCoSy were calculated.


RESULTS
HyCoSy compared with HLC had a sensitivity of 97% and specificity of 82%, and HyCoSy compared with HSG was 100% concordant. Uterine cavities evaluated by sonohysterography and hysteroscopy were 100% concordant.


CONCLUSION
HyCoSy is accurate in determining tubal patency and evaluating the uterine cavity, suggesting it could supplant HSG not only as the first-line diagnostic test in an infertility workup but also in confirming tubal blockage after hysteroscopic sterilization.
Spice-compatible modeling of high injection and propagation of minority carriers in the substrate of Smart Power ICs

Classical substrate noise analysis considers the silicon resistivity of an integrated circuit only as doping dependent besides neglecting diffusion currents as well. In power circuits minority carriers are injected into the substrate and propagate by drift–diffusion. In this case the conductivity of the substrate is spatially modulated and this effect is particularly important in high injection regime. In this work a description of the coupling between majority and minority drift–diffusion currents is presented. A distributed model of the substrate is then proposed to take into account the conductivity modulation and its feedback on diffusion processes. The model is expressed in terms of equivalent circuits in order to be fully compatible with circuit simulators. The simulation results are then discussed for diodes and bipolar transistors and compared to the ones obtained from physical device simulations and measurements. 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Liposomes in drug delivery: Progress and limitations

Liposomes are microparticulate lipoidal vesicles which are under extensive investigation as drug carriers for improving the delivery of therapeutic agents. Due to new developments in liposome technology, several liposomebased drug formulations are currently in clinical trial, and recently some of them have been approved for clinical use. Reformulation of drugs in liposomes has provided an opportunity to enhance the therapeutic indices of various agents mainly through alteration in their biodistribution. This review discusses the potential applications of liposomes in drug delivery with examples of formulations approved for clinical use, and the problems associated with further exploitation of this drug delivery system. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.
Carrier Frequency Offset Compensation with Successive Cancellation in Uplink OFDMA Systems

Similar to OFDM systems, OFDMA systems also suffer from frequency mismatches between the receiver and the transmitter. However, the fact that each uplink user has a different frequency offset makes the compensation more challenging than that of OFDM systems. This letter proposes successive interference cancellation (SIC) for compensating the frequency offset in the uplink OFDMA systems. A decorrelator is used to remove the inter-carrier interference (ICI) within a user's signal and successive cancellation is applied to mitigate the multi access interference (MAI) arising due to the frequency difference among uplink users. The proposed algorithm is shown to eliminate the interference and has a manageable complexity.
A Comparative Study on Steganography Digital Images: A Case Study of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Images Formats

Today image steganography plays a key role for exchanging a secret data through the internet. However, the optimal choice of images formats for processing steganography is still an open issue; therefore, this research comes into a table. This research conducts a comparative study between Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) image format and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format. As results show, SVG image format is more efficient than PNG image format in terms of capacity and scalability before and after processing steganography. As well, SVG image format helps to increase simplicity and performance for processing steganography, since it is an XML text file. Our comparative study provides significant results between SVG and PNG images, which have not been seen in the previous related studies. Keywords—Image steganography; data hiding; raster and vector images; Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images format
Plastic surgeon compliance with national safety initiatives: clinical outcomes and "never events".

BACKGROUND
Venous thromboembolism and surgical-site infection have been identified as preventable complications that are addressed by the National Quality Forum and the Surgical Care Improvement Project. The authors examined compliance of faculty with venous thromboembolism and surgical-site infection prophylaxis and incidence of adverse outcomes in patients at risk.


METHODS
The authors performed retrospective chart reviews on 243 patients who underwent abdominoplasty or panniculectomy from 2000 to 2007 and documented demographics and adverse outcomes. Analysis was completed using Pearson's chi-square and Fisher's exact test for categorical variables. Significance was set at p < 0.05. Obesity was defined as body mass index more than 30 and morbid obesity was defined as body mass index more than 40.


RESULTS
Of 243 patients, 144 (59 percent) were obese. Seventeen patients (7 percent) suffered complications. All 243 patients received at least one form of venous thromboembolism prophylaxis. One patient had a deep venous thrombosis, and two had pulmonary embolism. These three patients were morbidly obese. Seventy-four percent of patients received appropriate antibiotics. Thirteen patients (5.3 percent) developed significant postoperative infection requiring hospitalization, 12 (92 percent) of whom received appropriate antibiotics. Eleven of these 13 patients (85 percent) were obese, and seven (54 percent) were morbidly obese. Obesity proved to be the only significant risk factor (p > 0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
Despite very good compliance with safe practice initiatives, significant adverse outcomes occurred. Obesity was the only pervasive risk factor. This study highlights the potential need for compliance with quality measures and demonstrates that adverse outcomes may result despite adherence to best surgical practices.