Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carotid Plaque Area: A Tool for Targeting and Evaluating Vascular Preventive Therapy

Background and Purpose— Carotid plaque area measured by ultrasound (cross-sectional area of longitudinal views of all plaques seen) was studied as a way of identifying patients at increased risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, and vascular death. Methods— Patients from an atherosclerosis prevention clinic were followed up annually for up to 5 years (mean, 2.5±1.3 years) with baseline and follow-up measurements recorded. Plaque area progression (or regression) was defined as an increase (or decrease) of ≥0.05 cm2 from baseline. Results— Carotid plaque areas from 1686 patients were categorized into 4 quartile ranges: 0.00 to 0.11 cm2 (n=422), 0.12 to 0.45 cm2 (n=424), 0.46 to 1.18 cm2 (n=421), and 1.19 to 6.73 cm2 (n=419). The combined 5-year risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, and vascular death increased by quartile of plaque area: 5.6%, 10.7%, 13.9%, and 19.5%, respectively (P <0.001) after adjustment for all baseline patient characteristics. A total of 1085 patients had ≥1 annual carotid plaque area measurements: 685 (63.1%) had carotid plaque progression, 306 (28.2%) had plaque regression, and 176 (16.2%) had no change in carotid plaque area over the period of follow-up. The 5-year adjusted risk of combined outcome was 9.4%, 7.6%, and 15.7% for patients with carotid plaque area regression, no change, and progression, respectively (P =0.003). Conclusions— Carotid plaque area and progression of plaque identified high-risk patients. Plaque measurement may be useful for targeting preventive therapy and evaluating new treatments and response to therapy and may improve cost-effectiveness of secondary preventive treatment.
Minimally Invasive Lumbar Interbody Fusion in Patients Older Than 70 Years of Age: Analysis of Peri- and Postoperative Complications

BACKGROUND:The number of spine operations performed in the elderly population is rising. OBJECTIVE:To identify and describe perioperative and postoperative complications in patients 70 years and older who have undergone minimally invasive lumbar interbody spine fusion. METHODS:A retrospective analysis was performed on 66 consecutive patients aged 70 years or older who underwent a minimally invasive interbody lumbar fusion. Electronic medical records were analyzed for patient demographics, procedures, and perioperative and postoperative complications. RESULTS:Between 2000 and 2009, 66 patients with an average age of 74.9 years (range, 70-86 years) underwent 68 lumbar interbody fusions procedures. The mean follow-up was 14.7 months (range, 1.5-50 months). The minimally invasive approaches included 41 cases of extreme lateral interbody fusion and 27 minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusions. We observed 5 major (7.4%) and 17 minor (25%) complications. The 5 major complications consisted of 4 cases of interbody graft subsidence and 1 adjacent level disease. There were no intraoperative medical complications. There were no myocardial infarctions, pulmonary embolisms, hardware complications requiring removal, wound infections, major visceral, vascular, neural injuries, or death in the study period. CONCLUSION:Minimally invasive interbody fusions can be performed in the elderly (ages 70 years and older) with an overall low rate of major complications. Graft subsidence in this population when not supplemented with posterior instrumentation is a concern. Age should not be a deterrent to performing complex minimally invasive interbody fusions in the elderly.
Effects of Calcium and Cyclopiazonic Acid on the Photoresponse in the Limulus Ventral Photoreceptor

Abstract 1. Single-photon responses (bumps) and small macroscopic photocurrents were studied in ventral photoreceptors of the horseshoe crab Limulus. Lowering the calcium concentration in the bath from 10 mᴍ to 250 μᴍ led to increased bump size. Adaptation of the cells by a moderately bright conditioning flash was not impaired. 2. Pressure-injection of 1.2 mᴍ EGTA into the dark-adapted cells resulted in reduced bump size. EGTA weakened the effect of the conditioning light flash although it did not completely abolish light adaptation. 3. The microsomal calcium-ATPase inhibitor cyclopiazonic acid strongly desensitized the cells, and bumps were suppressed below detection. When the bathing saline contained 10 mᴍ calcium, macroscopic photoresponses after extracellular application of the agent had amplitudes smaller than under control conditions but normal response kinetics: The response to a light step still consisted of a fast transient photocurrent and a much smaller plateau. However, when applied in calcium-free bathing saline, cyclopiazonic acid additionally influenced the waveform of the photoresponse. The clear distinction between transient and plateau was no longer possible, and the photocurrent appeared “square”. 4. Our results support the idea that a transient elevation of the cytosolic calcium concentration is obligatory for light adaptation in the ventral photoreceptor. It is also obligatory for the generation of the so-called C2 component of the photocurrent which is represented by “standard” bumps and the fast transient phase of a prolonged response. However, a rise in cytosolic calcium appears not necessary for the initiation of a slow electrical photoresponse.
Comparison of Independent Component Analysis and Singular Value Decomposition in Word Context Analysis

In earlier studies we have been able show that Independent Component Analysis is able to extract automatically meaningful linguistic features. The emergent syntactic and semantic features are based on an analysis of the words in their contexts in a large corpus. We have also shown that there is a reasonably strong correlation between traditional features and categories defined by linguists and the emergent features. In this article, we introduce a new measure for comparing the emergent and the traditionally defined features. We apply this measure to compare the emergent features produced by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The conclusion is that the ICA-based features correspond to the human intuitions much more closely than the SVD-based features not only in a visual inspection but also in a systematic and principled comparison.
The evidence for and against astronomical impacts on climate change and mass extinctions: a review

Abstract Numerous studies over the past 30 years have suggested there is a causal connection between the motion of the Sun through the Galaxy and terrestrial mass extinctions or climate change. Proposed mechanisms include comet impacts (via perturbation of the Oort cloud), cosmic rays and supernovae, the effects of which are modulated by the passage of the Sun through the Galactic midplane or spiral arms. Supposed periodicities in the fossil record, impact cratering dates or climate proxies over the Phanerozoic (past 545 Myr) are frequently cited as evidence in support of these hypotheses. This remains a controversial subject, with many refutations and replies having been published. Here I review both the mechanisms and the evidence for and against the relevance of astronomical phenomena to climate change and evolution. This necessarily includes a critical assessment of time series analysis techniques and hypothesis testing. Some of the studies have suffered from flaws in methodology, in particular drawing incorrect conclusions based on ruling out a null hypothesis. I conclude that there is little evidence for intrinsic periodicities in biodiversity, impact cratering or climate on timescales of tens to hundreds of Myr. Although this does not rule out the mechanisms, the numerous assumptions and uncertainties involved in the interpretation of the geological data and in particular in the astronomical mechanisms suggest that Galactic midplane and spiral arm crossings have little impact on biological or climate variation above background level. Non-periodic impacts and terrestrial mechanisms (volcanism, plate tectonics, sea level changes), possibly occurring simultaneously, remain likely causes of many environmental catastrophes. Internal dynamics of the biosphere may also play a role. In contrast, there is little evidence supporting the idea that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate through cloud formation. It seems likely that more than one mechanism has contributed to biodiversity variations over the past half Gyr.
Clinical characteristics and risk factors for headache associated with non-functioning pituitary adenomas

Background Headaches associated with pituitary adenoma have been reported to be related to the structural characteristics and endocrine factors of the tumour itself. Objectives The objective of this study was to investigate the prevalence and clinical characteristics of, and the risk factors for, non-functioning pituitary adenoma (NFPA)-associated headaches in Chinese patients with normal endocrine activity. Methods Ninety-seven patients with a NFPA with normal endocrine laboratory results were prospectively enrolled in this study. The relevant clinical demographic data were collected and examined with the appropriate statistical methods. Results The pre-operative prevalence of tumour-associated headaches was 48.5%; 87.2% of these patients had migraine-like headaches. A family history of primary headache (odds ratio (OR) 3.67; p = 0.032) and a higher tumour Knosp grade (OR 1.83; p = 0.001) were identified as risk factors for the occurrence of NFPA-associated headaches. The patient’s age, sex, visual disturbances, optic chiasm compression, tumour size and tumour volume were not significantly associated with NFPA-associated headaches (p > 0.05). In addition, headache severity was significantly correlated with the Knosp grade (r = 0.339; p = 0.001). The sides of the headaches and of cavernous sinus invasion were significantly concordant (48.9% agreement; κ = 0.257; p = 0.007). Conclusions Migraine-like headaches are a common clinical manifestation in patients with NFPAs. A family history of primary headaches and cavernous sinus invasion are risk factors for NFPA-associated headaches.
Genetic epidemiology of borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe personality disorder characterized by impulsivity, affective instability, relationship problems and identity problems. BPD affects 1-2% of the general population, 10% of the patients in outpatient settings, 15-20% of the patients in inpatients settings and 30-60% of the patients diagnosed with personality disorders. BPD is most commonly assessed according to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM). In addition, assessment of BPD features on a quantitative or dimensional scale is increasingly used. BPD is more often diagnosed in women in clinical samples and in young individuals and is frequently co-morbid with other personality disorders and axis-I disorders. Most studies on BPD have attempted to clarify the etiology in terms of social and environmental determinants (e.g. physical or sexual abuse). These factors are important contributors to risk, but do not explain all variation in BPD risk. Moreover, even if the association is significant, in many instances the direction of causality is unclear. Genetic factors are additional contributors to BPD risk, and there now are some large twin and family studies that suggest significant heritability for the disorder as well as for the quantitative assessment. In this chapter, we first discuss the main symptoms of BPD and several assessment methods. Next, we consider the association between BPD and demographic characteristics, such as age and sex, and the co-morbidity with other disorders. After the * Address for correspondence: Marijn Distel, Department of Biological Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Phone: +31 20 598 8792; Fax: +31 20 598 8832; E-mail address: ma.distel@psy.vu. nl No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services. Marijn A. Distel, Timothy J. Trull and Dorret I. Boomsma 2 focus on environmental covariates, we review family and twin studies into the genetics of BPD and related traits, genetic linkage and candidate gene studies of BPD. We end with a discussion of future directions in research in which we will consider multivariate studies, the discordant MZ co-twin design, the children of twins design, genome wide association studies, and genotype-environment interaction.
Optimizing MapReduce for GPUs with effective shared memory usage

Accelerators and heterogeneous architectures in general, and GPUs in particular, have recently emerged as major players in high performance computing. For many classes of applications, MapReduce has emerged as the framework for easing parallel programming and improving programmer productivity. There have already been several efforts on implementing MapReduce on GPUs. In this paper, we propose a new implementation of MapReduce for GPUs, which is very effective in utilizing shared memory, a small programmable cache on modern GPUs. The main idea is to use a reduction-based method to execute a MapReduce application. The reduction-based method allows us to carry out reductions in shared memory. To support a general and efficient implementation, we support the following features: a memory hierarchy for maintaining the reduction object, a multi-group scheme in shared memory to trade-off space requirements and locking overheads, a general and efficient data structure for the reduction object, and an efficient swapping mechanism. We have evaluated our framework with seven commonly used MapReduce applications and compared it with the sequential implementations, MapCG, a recent MapReduce implementation on GPUs, and Ji et al.'s work, a recent MapReduce implementation that utilizes shared memory in a different way. The main observations from our experimental results are as follows. For four of the seven applications that can be considered as reduction-intensive applications, our framework has a speedup of between 5 and 200 over MapCG (for large datasets). Similarly, we achieved a speedup of between 2 and 60 over Ji et al.'s work.
Note Clustering Based on 2-D Source-Filter Modeling for Underdetermined Blind Source Separation

For blind source separation, the non-negative matrix factorization extracts single notes out of a mixture. These notes can be clustered to form the melodies played by a single instrument. A current approach for clustering utilizes a source filter model to describe the envelope over the first dimension of the spectrogram: the frequency-axis. The novelty of this paper is to extend this approach by a second source-filter model, characterizing the second dimension of a spectrogram: the time-axis. The latter one models the temporal evolution of the energy of one note: an instrument specific envelope is convolved with an activation vector, corresponding to tempo, rhythm, and amplitudes of single note instances. We introduce an unsupervised clustering framework for both models and a simple, yet effective combination strategy. Finally, we show the advantages of our separation algorithm compared with two other state-of-the-art separation frameworks: the separation quality is comparable, but our algorithm needs much less computational load, is independent from other BSS-algorithm as initialization, and works with a unique set of parameters for a wide range of
Preservation of proximity privacy in publishing numerical sensitive data

We identify proximity breach as a privacy threat specific to numerical sensitive attributes in anonymized data publication. Such breach occurs when an adversary concludes with high confidence that the sensitive value of a victim individual must fall in a short interval --- even though the adversary may have low confidence about the victim's actual value. None of the existing anonymization principles (e.g., k-anonymity, l-diversity, etc.) can effectively prevent proximity breach. We remedy the problem by introducing a novel principle called (ε, m)-anonymity. Intuitively, the principle demands that, given a QI-group G, for every sensitive value x in G, at most 1/m of the tuples in G can have sensitive values "similar" to x, where the similarity is controlled by ε. We provide a careful analytical study of the theoretical characteristics of (ε, m)-anonymity, and the corresponding generalization algorithm. Our findings are verified by experiments with real data.
Stellar dynamical evidence against a cold disc origin for stars in the Galactic Centre

Observations of massive stars within the central parsec of the Galaxy show that, while most stars orbit within a well-defined disc, a significant fraction have large eccentricities and/or inclinations with respect to the disc plane. Here, we investigate whether this dynamically hot component could have arisen via scattering from an initially cold disc – the expected initial condition if the stars formed from the fragmentation of an accretion disc. Using N-body methods, we evolve a variety of flat, cold, stellar systems, and study the effects of initial disc eccentricity, primordial binaries, very massive stars and intermediate mass black holes. We find, consistent with previous results, that a circular disc does not become eccentric enough unless there is a significant population of undetected 100–1000 M⊙ objects. However, since fragmentation of an eccentric disc can readily yield eccentric stellar orbits, the strongest constraints come from inclinations. We show that none of our initial conditions yields the observed large inclinations, regardless of the initial disc eccentricity or the presence of massive objects. These results imply that the orbits of the young massive stars in the Galactic Centre are largely primordial, and that the stars are unlikely to have formed as a dynamically cold disc.
Comparison of Conventional Direct and Enrichment Culture Methods for Erysipelothrix spp. from Experimentally and Naturally Infected Swine

The objective of the current study was to compare the diagnostic performance of a direct isolation method for Erysipelothrix spp. with a broth-based enrichment technique. Samples were obtained from three sources: 1) experimentally inoculated pigs, 2) porcine tissue samples submitted to the Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (Ames, IA), and 3) tissues from condemned carcasses at an abattoir. Culture plates from direct isolation and broth-based technique were evaluated for growth at 24 and 48 hr. Results indicated that the broth enrichment method was markedly more sensitive for the isolation of Erysipelothrix spp. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first comparison of direct culture and broth-based enrichment methods for the isolation of Erysipelothrix spp. Interestingly, in several samples, a Gram-positive bacterium with almost identical growth characteristics to Erysipelothrix spp. was detected and identified as a Vagococcus sp. through 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing. The results of this study indicate that the broth-based enrichment method should be used for the isolation of Erysipelothrix spp. from clinical samples with a history suggestive of erysipelas and that Vagococcus spp. is potentially an important differential diagnosis.
The uniqueness of the spectral flow on spaces of unbounded self--adjoint Fredholm operators

We discuss several natural metrics on spaces of unbounded self--adjoint operators and their relations, among them the Riesz and the graph metric. We show that the topologies of the spaces of Fredholm operators resp. invertible operators depend heavily on the metric. Nevertheless we prove that in all cases the spectral flow is up to a normalization the only integer invariant of non-closed paths which is path additive and stable under homotopies with endpoints varying in the space of invertible self-adjoint operators. Furthermore we show that for certain Riesz continuous paths of self--adjoint Fredholm operators the spectral flow can be expressed in terms of the index of the pair of positive spectral projections at the endpoints. Finally we review the Cordes--Labrousse theorem on the stability of the Fredholm index with respect to the graph metric in a modern language and we generalize it to the Clifford index and to the equivariant index.
A review of forest economics research in Bolivia

Economic values play a significant role in social development whether they are made explicit or just perceived by social actors. The perceived value of forest in different uses influences decisions made on forest resources and land. But a forest’s value is highly contingent on which user perspective is applied. In this chapter we introduce a comprehensive concept of resource value. Considering direct use values, indirect use values and non-use values we attempt to encompass the total value of forest resources. Taking Bolivia as an example we present a review of forest and environmental economic literature, providing an overview of the state-of-the-art of this research field in an Andean country. The largest contribution has been made in the direct use value category. Indirect use and non-use value studies are scarce. Profitability studies of timber production mainly date back to the debates over the implementation of the 1996 Forest Act. Since then conditions have changed and new legal bases of collective and communal forestry now accompany the well-known concession forestry model. More general studies of these new management forms are highly needed. The impacts of the prevalent illegal logging practices on the local and national economy have evaded scientific enquiry. The economic role of non-timber products is scarcely documented, as are environmental economic aspects of the Bolivian forest resource. An enhanced effort in addressing these issues should be based on a close inter-disciplinary collaboration between natural and social science, aiming at providing holistic and comprehensive answers useful to enterprise and policy decision-makers.
Low sensitivity of implant sonication when screening for infection in revision surgery

Background and purpose — Prosthetic-joint infection (PJI) is the most serious complication of arthroplasty, and accurate identification of a potentially responsible microorganism is essential for successful antibiotic treatment. We therefore determined the diagnostic accuracy of sonication and compared it with tissue culture as a screening tool in detecting prosthetic joint infection in revision arthroplasty. Patients and methods — 252 consecutive revision arthroplasty cases were enrolled. These cases were determined as being suspected or unsuspected of having infection according to standard criteria. Perioperatively, 6 periprosthetic interface tissue biopsies were obtained from each patient and the implants removed were sonicated. The sensitivity and specificity of periprosthetic tissue culture and sonication fluid cultures were determined. Results — Preoperatively, 75 revision cases were classified as having PJI (33 early and 42 late) and 177 were unsuspected of having infection. Compared with tissue culture, the sensitivity of the sonication fluid analysis was low: 0.47 (95% CI: 0.35–0.59) for sonication as compared to 0.68 (95% CI: 0.56–0.78) for tissue culture. The specificity of the sonication fluid analysis was higher than that for tissue culture: 0.99 (95% CI: 0.96–1.0) as compared to 0.80 (95% CI: 0.74–0.86). Interpretation — Sonication is a highly specific test for diagnosis of PJI. However, due to the low sensitivity, a negative sonication result does not rule out the presence of PJI. Thus, sonication is not of value for screening of microorganisms during revision surgery.