Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discrepancy-Based Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Comparative Study

Domain Adaptation (DA) exploits labeled data and models from similar domains in order to alleviate the annotation burden when learning a model in a new domain. Our contribution to the field is three-fold. First, we propose a new dataset, LandMarkDA, to study the adaptation between landmark place recognition models trained with different artistic image styles, such as photos, paintings and drawings. The new LandMarkDA proposes new adaptation challenges, where current deep architectures show their limits. Second, we propose an experimental study of recent shallow and deep adaptation networks, based on using Maximum Mean Discrepancy to bridge the domain gap. We study different design choices for these models by varying the network architectures and evaluate them on OFF31 and the new LandMarkDA collections. We show that shallow networks can still be competitive under an appropriate feature extraction. Finally, we also benchmark a new DA method that successfully combines the artistic image style-transfer with deep discrepancy-based networks.
Risk of Hemorrhage Attributed to Underlying Chronic Diseases and Uninterrupted Aspirin Therapy of Patients Undergoing Minor Oral Surgical Procedures: A Retrospective Cohort Study

Objectives This study aimed to estimate the risk of bleeding following minor oral surgical procedures and uninterrupted aspirin therapy in high-risk patients or patients with existing chronic diseases compared to patients who did not use aspirin during minor oral surgery at a public hospital. Methods This retrospective cohort study analyzed the data of 2912 patients, aged 20 years or older, who underwent 5251 minor oral surgical procedures at a district hospital in Thailand. The aspirin group was comprised of patients continuing aspirin therapy during oral surgery. The non-aspirin group (reference) included all those who did not use aspirin during surgery. Immediate and late-onset bleeding was evaluated in each procedure. The risk ratio of bleeding was estimated using a multilevel Poisson regression. Results The overall cumulative incidence of immediate bleeding was 1.3% of total procedures. No late-onset bleeding was found. A significantly greater incidence of bleeding was found in the aspirin group (5.8% of procedures, p<0.001). After adjusting for covariates, a multilevel Poisson regression model estimated that the bleeding risk in the aspirin group was 4.5 times higher than that of the non-aspirin group (95% confidence interval, 2.0 to 10.0; p<0.001). However, all bleeding events were controlled by simple hemostatic measures. Conclusions High-risk patients or patients with existing chronic diseases who continued aspirin therapy following minor oral surgery were at a higher risk of hemorrhage than general patients who had not used aspirin. Nonetheless, bleeding complications were not life-threatening and could be promptly managed by simple hemostatic measures. The procedures could therefore be provided with an awareness of increased bleeding risk, prepared hemostatic measures, and postoperative monitoring, without the need for discontinuing aspirin, which could lead to more serious complications.
Systemic treatment for sarcoidosis was needed for 16% of 1810 Caucasian patients

Sarcoidosis is a systemic granulomatous disease predominantly affecting the lungs, although granulomas can also involve all other organs. Fortunately, it is often a self‐limiting disease and aggressive treatment is not indicated in majority of cases. However, treatment is recommended when critical organs are affected or the disease is progressive. So far, there is lack of reliable information regarding the frequency of treatment in Caucasian population or data are discordant. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of systemic immune‐modulating treatment in a large cohort of sarcoidosis patients.
Serum heparanase levels are associated with endothelial dysfunction in patients with obstructive sleep apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is well‐known to be associated with high risk for cardiovascular (CV) diseases. Heparanase has been recently shown to be related to increased inflammation and vulnerability of the atherosclerotic plaques. Herein we aimed to investigate the relationships between OSAS, heparanase and endothelial dysfunction.
Impact of timing from blood sampling to pharmacodynamic assessment on measures of platelet reactivity in patients treated with P2Y12 receptor inhibitors

Summary Several platelet function tests (PFT) are available to assess the pharmacodynamic (PD) effects of P2Y12 inhibitors. However, there are technical variances between PFT, and P2Y12 inhibitors differ in pharmacological properties. Manufactures of PFT recommend a time-frame within which assessments needs to be executed. However, if the timing from blood sampling to processing affects PD results is unknown. We conducted a prospective study assessing the impact of timing from blood sampling to processing on PD measures using three different PFT. We studied 60 aspirin-treated patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) on maintenance P2Y12 inhibiting therapy [clopidogrel 75 mg/day (n=20), prasugrel 10 mg/day (n=20) and ticagrelor 90 mg bid (n=20)]. PD assessments (trough levels) were performed by VerifyNow P2Y12 (VN), light transmittance aggregometry (LTA) and vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP) at 30 minutes, 2 and 4 hours post-sampling; VASP was also performed at 24 hours. P2Y12 reaction units (PRU) by VN significantly decreased over time with all P2Y12 inhibitors (clopidogrel p<0.001; prasugrel p=0.016; ticagrelor p<0.001). PRU at 30 minutes and 2 hours were similar, but decreased at 4 hours. LTA showed consistent findings with VN. Conversely, PD measures as assessed by VASP were stable over time (p>0.1 for all P2Y12 inhibitors). In conclusion, in CAD patients on maintenance therapy with P2Y12 inhibitors, timing from blood sampling to processing significantly influences PD measures as assessed by VN and LTA, but not by VASP.
Nanoscale imaging of restricted cell membrane receptor diffusion

In the work presented, a novel imaging technique (TNIM Thermal Noise Imaging Microscopy) was developed for the purpose of studying nanoscale diffusive motion in heterogeneous media. TNI-Microscopy was specifically used to investigate if the mobility of cell membrane receptors is influenced by lateral membrane nanostructures. The direct investigation of these two-dimensional ultrastructures in living cells was up to now hampered because of lacking microscopy techniques. In TNI-Microscopy, the diffusive motion of a nanoparticle is limited to a small volume, making it possible to observe constraints on the particle’s motion. Thus, the particle can be used to sample nanostructures. Concomitant, it is also recorded how the dynamics of the particle’s motion are influenced by hydrodynamic coupling to the sampled structures. To realise TNI-Microscopy, a microscope was built that employs an optical trap to limit the diffusive motion of a probe particle to a submicroscopic volume. Within this volume, the particle position fluctuations are tracked with nanometer spatial precision and microsecond temporal resolution using an interferometric position detector. Initially, experiments on rigid three-dimensional structures were conducted, demonstrating that objects such as the filaments of a polymer network can be clearly seen in histograms of the particle’s position fluctuations. From these histograms the position of objects could be determined with a precision of about 10 nm in three dimensions. These experiments were of fundamental significance as they confirmed that diffusive motion of a probe particle can indeed be used to image nanoscopic objects. In subsequent experiments it could be shown that it is simultaneously possible to capture the dynamics of the three-dimensional particle position fluctuations. Existing hydrodynamic theories that describe the mobility of a sphere (probe particle) at different distances to a rigid interface could be validated from the nanometer to the micrometer scale. Thus, the fundamental concepts of TNI-Microscopy were established and could be used to study how the mobility of cell membrane receptors is influenced by membrane lateral nanostructures. To achieve this, nanoparticles were bound specifically to the cell membrane epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor. In this case, the particle served to make the lateral motion of the EGF-receptors observable and to limit its motion to a submicroscopic membrane area. Thus, the motion of EGF-receptors could be observed in a small membrane area for any length of time. In strong contrast to the measurements on rigid objects, the lateral membrane structure appeared highly dynamic. Inaccessible nanoscopic membrane areas restricted the diffusive motion of the receptor. The comparison with a lipid anchored protein showed that the characteristics of these areas depended on the observed protein. Furthermore, it was possible to observe these areas changing shape and position on the second time scale. A consequence
Predicting drug resistance evolution: insights from antimicrobial peptides and antibiotics

Antibiotic resistance constitutes one of the most pressing public health concerns. Antimicrobial peptides of multicellular organisms are considered part of a solution to this problem, and AMPs produced by bacteria such as colistin are last resort drugs. Importantly, antimicrobial peptides differ from many antibiotics in their pharmacodynamic characteristics. Here we implement these differences within a theoretical framework to predict the evolution of resistance against antimicrobial peptides and compare it to antibiotic resistance. Our analysis of resistance evolution finds that pharmacodynamic differences all combine to produce a much lower probability that resistance will evolve against antimicrobial peptides. The finding can be generalized to all drugs with pharmacodynamics similar to AMPs. Pharmacodynamic concepts are familiar to most practitioners of medical microbiology, and data can be easily obtained for any drug or drug combination. Our theoretical and conceptual framework is therefore widely applicable and can help avoid resistance evolution if implemented in antibiotic stewardship schemes or the rational choice of new drug candidates.
Psychological and metabolic stress: A recipe for accelerated cellular aging?

Chronic stress can affect human health through a myriad of behavioral and biochemical pathways. This review focuses on some key hormonal and metabolic pathways that appear important today. In modern society, we are faced with excessive psychological stress, as well as an epidemic of overeating, and the two together appear to have synergistic effects. Chronic stress can lead to overeating, co-elevation of cortisol and insulin, and suppression of certain anabolic hormones. This state of metabolic stress in turn promotes abdominal adiposity. Both the direct stress response and the accumulation of visceral fat can promote a milieu of systemic inflammation and oxidative stress. This biochemical environment appears to be conducive to several cell aging mechanisms, mainly dampening telomerase and leading to telomere length (TL) shortening and cell senescence. Immune cell telomere shortness is linked with many chronic disease states and earlier mortality. In this way, chronic stress may influence a variety of diseases through a biochemical cascade leading to immune cell senescence. Certain psychological temperaments at high risk of this stress cascade (mainly anxiety prone), gene-environment interactions, and potential interventions for interrupting the stress-aging cascade are discussed.
Neural Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has been an active research field for the last two decades. However, most research to date has considered SLR as a naive gesture recognition problem. SLR seeks to recognize a sequence of continuous signs but neglects the underlying rich grammatical and linguistic structures of sign language that differ from spoken language. In contrast, we introduce the Sign Language Translation (SLT) problem. Here, the objective is to generate spoken language translations from sign language videos, taking into account the different word orders and grammar. We formalize SLT in the framework of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for both end-to-end and pretrained settings (using expert knowledge). This allows us to jointly learn the spatial representations, the underlying language model, and the mapping between sign and spoken language. To evaluate the performance of Neural SLT, we collected the first publicly available Continuous SLT dataset, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T1. It provides spoken language translations and gloss level annotations for German Sign Language videos of weather broadcasts. Our dataset contains over . 95M frames with >67K signs from a sign vocabulary of >1K and >99K words from a German vocabulary of >2.8K. We report quantitative and qualitative results for various SLT setups to underpin future research in this newly established field. The upper bound for translation performance is calculated at 19.26 BLEU-4, while our end-to-end frame-level and gloss-level tokenization networks were able to achieve 9.58 and 18.13 respectively.
Impact of iron fortification on the geospatial patterns of malaria and non-malaria infection risk among young children: a secondary spatial analysis of clinical trial data from Ghana

Objectives Patterns of infection among children with varying levels of iron status in a malaria endemic area may vary spatially in ways requiring integrated infection and iron deficiency control programmes. The objective of this secondary analysis was to determine the geospatial factors associated with malaria and non-malaria infection status among young Ghanaian children at the end of a 5-month iron intervention trial. Design Cluster-randomised controlled trial. Setting Rural Ghana Participants 1943 children (6–35 months of age) with geocoded compounds. Interventions Point-of-use fortification with micronutrient powders containing vitamins and minerals with or without iron. Primary and secondary outcome measures Generalised linear geostatistical models with a Matern spatial correlation function were used to analyse four infection response variables, defined using different combinations of inflammation (C-reactive protein, CRP >5 mg/L) and malaria parasitaemia. Analyses were also stratified by treatment group to assess the independent effects of the iron intervention. Results The by-group and combined-group analyses both showed that baseline infection status was the most consistent predictor of endline infection risk, particularly when infection was defined using parasitaemia. In the No-iron group, age above 24 months and weight-for-length z-score at baseline were associated with high CRP at endline. Higher asset score was associated with a 12% decreased odds of endline infection, defined as CRP >5 mg/L and/or parasitaemia (OR 0.88, 95% credible interval 0.78 to 0.98), regardless of group. Maps of the predicted risk and spatial random effects showed a defined low-risk area around the District centre, regardless of how infection was defined. Conclusion In a clinical trial setting of iron fortification, where all children receive treated bed nets and access to malaria treatment, there may be geographical variation in the risk of infection with distinct high-risk and low-risk areas, particularly around municipal centres. Trial registration number clinicaltrials.gov, NCT01001871.
A Learning Analytics Approach to Investigating Factors Affecting EFL Students' Oral Performance in a Flipped Classroom

Flipped classrooms have been widely adopted and discussed by school teachers and researchers in the past decade. However, few studies have been conducted to formally evaluate the effectiveness of flipped classrooms in terms of improving EFL students’ English oral presentation, not to mention investigating factors affecting their flipped learning outcomes. In this study, an online community-based flipped learning approach was proposed for an EFL oral presentation course; moreover, a learning analytics approach was used to analyze factors affecting the students’ oral presentation outcomes. An 18-week research design was implemented with the online community-based flipped classroom using Facebook as the platform for facilitating and recording peer-to-peer interactions during the flipped learning process. In addition, the students’ learning performance and perceptions were collected in 3 learning stages during the 18 weeks. The experimental results reveal positive effects of the online community-based flipped instruction over the conventional video-based instruction. That is, first, the online community-based flipped instruction using mobile devices can enhance students’ English oral performance. Moreover, it was found that the high improvers had a significantly higher frequency of online participation, as well as more interactive behaviors and greater satisfaction with the flipped classroom than the low improvers. These results imply that the online community flipped classroom could not only provide learning materials and out-of-class learning for students, but could also help them become more responsible and autonomous in their learning and communication. These findings could be valuable references for those who intend to conduct effective flipped classrooms with an online community to facilitate students’ before-class learning participation and to improve their in-class learning performance.
Inducing Expectations for Health: Effects of Verbal Suggestion and Imagery on Pain, Itch, and Fatigue as Indicators of Physical Sensitivity

Research into placebo effects has convincingly shown that inducing positive outcome expectations can reduce pain and other physical sensations. However, the comparative effects of different expectation inductions, such as verbal suggestion or mental imagery, and their generic effects on physical sensitivity, to different sensations such as pain, itch, and fatigue, are still largely unknown. In the current study, we assessed the individual and combined effects of verbal suggestion and imagery on pain, itch, and fatigue as indicators of physical sensitivity in a randomized study design. Healthy participants (n = 116) were given an inert (placebo) capsule that was said to be effective for reducing physical sensitivity in either the majority (positive verbal suggestion) or the minority (control verbal suggestion) of users. Subsequently, they imagined either their best possible health (positive imagery) or a typical day (control imagery). Sensitivity to pain, itch, and fatigue was tested using a cold pressor test, histamine iontophoresis, and a bicycle test, respectively. Heart rate and skin conductance were recorded continuously. Results showed that positive verbal suggestion and imagery successfully induced positive expectations, but they did not affect physical sensitivity, as indicated by sensitivity to pain, itch, or fatigue, or concurrent physiological responses. These results could indicate that the specificity and concreteness of expectation inductions might be important for their applicability in the treatment of physical symptoms. Trial Registration Nederlands Trial Register NTR3641
Improvement of insulin sensitivity in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus after oral administration of alpha-lipoic acid.

BACKGROUND Amelioration of insulin resistance could improve both glycaemic control and cardiovascular risk factors in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Alpha-lipoic acid has been shown to improve insulin action after parenteral administration. OBJECTIVE the aim of the study was to assess the effect of oral administration of alpha-lipoic acid on insulin sensitivity in patients with type 2 diabetes. DESIGN twelve patients (mean+/-sD; age 52.9+/-9.9 yrs; body mass index 33.9+/-7.4 kg/m(2)) were treated with oral alpha-lipoic acid, 600 mg twice daily over a period of 4 weeks. twelve subjects with normal glucose tolerance served as a control group in terms of insulin sensitivity (Is). Is was measured by a 2h manual hyperinsulinaemic (insulin infusion rate-40 mU/m(2 )body surface area/min) euglycaemic (blood glucose kept at 5 mmol/l) clamp technique and expressed as a glucose disposal rate (M) and insulin sensitivity index (IsI). RESULTS At the end of the treatment period, Is of diabetic patients was significantly increased: M from 3.202+/-1.898 to 5.951+/-2.705 mg/kg/min (mean+/-sD), p<0.01; and IsI from 4.706+/-2.666 to 7.673+/-3.559 mg/kg/min per mIU/l x 100 (mean+/-sD), p<0.05. the difference was not statistically significant between the Is of diabetic patients after alpha-lipoic acid therapy and control subjects. CONCLUSION short-term oral alpha-lipoic acid treatment increases peripheral insulin sensitivity in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.
The neglected bee trees: European beech forests as a home for feral honey bee colonies

It is a common belief that feral honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera L.) were eradicated in Europe through the loss of habitats, domestication by man and spread of pathogens and parasites. Interestingly, no scientific data are available, neither about the past nor the present status of naturally nesting honeybee colonies. We expected near-natural beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forests to provide enough suitable nest sites to be a home for feral honey bee colonies in Europe. Here, we made a first assessment of their occurrence and density in two German woodland areas based on two methods, the tracing of nest sites based on forager flight routes (beelining technique), and the direct inspection of potential cavity trees. Further, we established experimental swarms at forest edges and decoded dances for nest sites performed by scout bees in order to study how far swarms from beekeeper-managed hives would potentially move into a forest. We found that feral honey bee colonies regularly inhabit tree cavities in near-natural beech forests at densities of at least 0.11–0.14 colonies/km2. Colonies were not confined to the forest edges; they were also living deep inside the forests. We estimated a median distance of 2,600 m from the bee trees to the next apiaries, while scout bees in experimental swarms communicated nest sites in close distances (median: 470 m). We extrapolate that there are several thousand feral honey bee colonies in German woodlands. These have to be taken in account when assessing the role of forest areas in providing pollination services to the surrounding land, and their occurrence has implications for the species’ perception among researchers, beekeepers and conservationists. This study provides a starting point for investigating the life-histories and the ecological interactions of honey bees in temperate European forest environments.
Retrospective analysis of 56 soft tissue defects treated with one‐stage reconstruction using dermal skin substitutes

The closure of wounds associated with soft tissue defects is surgically challenging, frequently requiring extensive plastic surgery and free flaps. The combination of dermal skin substitutes and split‐thickness skin grafting is an innovative method used to cover such wounds. We incorporated this technique into the standard therapeutic armamentarium for complex injuries to the extremities. Clinical results of 56 patients thus treated are presented.