Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantification of Perfusion and Permeability in Multiple Sclerosis: Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI in 3D at 3T

Background and Purpose:The quantification of cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume (CBV), and blood-brain barrier permeability in scattered lesions in the brain is a methodological challenge. We aimed to investigate the feasibility of a 3D T1-weighted dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI acquisition in combination with a 2-compartment modeling approach for the quantification of CBF, CBV and permeability surface area product (PS) in lesions, and normal-appearing white matter (NAWM) in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Material and Methods:In all, 19 MS patients (mean age 35 years, 12 female) underwent DCE-MRI with a 3D T1-weighted spoiled gradient-echo sequence on a 3T MRI scanner. A total of 44 slices (thickness 3 mm) with an in-plane resolution of 1.7 × 1.7 mm2 (matrix size 128 × 104), providing coverage of the whole brain, were acquired every 2.1 seconds over a total measurement time of 420 s. Data postprocessing was performed using a set of 2-compartment models with automated model selection; CBF, CBV, and PS as a measure of blood-brain barrier leakage were determined in contrast-enhancing (CE) and nonenhancing lesions as well as in NAWM. Results:Perfusion quantification produced reasonable values in lesions as well as in NAWM. In CE lesions, CBF (22.9 (22.7) vs. 15.8 (6.7) mL/100 mL/min), CBV (1.18 (0.48) vs. 0.76 (0.19) mL/100 mL), and PS (0.98 (0.46) vs. 0.04 (0.03) mL/100 mL/min) were significantly (P < 0.001) higher than in NAWM. In nonenhancing lesions, a weakly (P < 0.05) significantly increased CBV of 1.00 (0.35) mL/100 mL, compared with NAWM, was observed. Conclusion:Our study demonstrates the feasibility of 3D T1-weighted DCE-MRI for the quantitative assessment of CBF, CBV, and PS in NAWM as well as in multiple MS lesions scattered throughout the brain, even without previous knowledge of their location. Quantification on the region level produced reasonable values both in lesions and in NAWM, but parameter maps would benefit from an increase in contrast-to-noise ratio. The increased values of CBF, CBV, and PS in CE lesions may reflect inflammatory activity, the heterogeneity of parameter estimates suggests a potential for lesion characterization. NAWM appears hypoperfused, this is in accordance with previous studies, but requires validation with a control group.
Habituation of attentional networks during emotion processing

Dysfunctional emotion processing is a key aspect of many neuropsychiatric disorders. This dysfunction may be due to an abnormal magnitude of neural substrate activation during emotion processing or due to an altered time course of the neural substrate response. To better understand the temporal characteristics of the neural substrate activation underlying implicit emotion processing, nine healthy female controls were repeatedly exposed to pictures of affective faces while performing a gender identification task in an fMRI. As the salience of the stimuli decreased with repeated exposure, brain areas implicated in a right hemispheric spatial attention network (including the posterior parietal cortex (BA 40) and the frontal eye fields (BA 6)) habituated while brain areas lateralized to the left hemisphere (including the angular gyrus (BA 39), posterior superior temporal gyrus (BA 39) and insula (BA 13)) sensitized. These results provide strong evidence that the time course of activation is a critical component when assessing the function of neural substrates underlying emotion processing (specifically whether habituation is altered) in neuro-psychiatric patients.
DepSky: dependable and secure storage in a cloud-of-clouds

The increasing popularity of cloud storage services has lead companies that handle critical data to think about using these services for their storage needs. Medical record databases, power system historical information and financial data are some examples of critical data that could be moved to the cloud. However, the reliability and security of data stored in the cloud still remain major concerns. In this paper we present DEPSKY, a system that improves the availability, integrity and confidentiality of information stored in the cloud through the encryption, encoding and replication of the data on diverse clouds that form a cloud-of-clouds. We deployed our system using four commercial clouds and used PlanetLab to run clients accessing the service from different countries. We observed that our protocols improved the perceived availability and, in most cases, the access latency when compared with cloud providers individually. Moreover, the monetary costs of using DEPSKY on this scenario is twice the cost of using a single cloud, which is optimal and seems to be a reasonable cost, given the benefits.
Optimal Partitions for Eigenvalues

We introduce a new numerical method for approximating partitions of a domain minimizing the sum of Dirichlet-Laplacian eigenvalues of any order. First we prove the equivalence of the original problem and a relaxed formulation based on measures. Using this result, we build a numerical algorithm to approximate optimal configurations. We describe numerical experiments aimed at studying the asymptotic behavior of optimal partitions with large numbers of cells.
Association of Subway Driver's Depressive Symptoms and Experience of Work-Related Problems

OBJECTIVES Subway drivers experience various types of work-related problems during their driving, and those experiences can act as risk factors for depressive symptoms. This study was conducted to investigate the association between work-related problems and subway driver's depressive symptoms. METHODS We recruited all of the 961 current subway drivers of a subway company located in Seoul, South Korea and conducted a survey of their socio-demographic and vocational characteristics, hospital visits as an outpatient or inpatient, and work-related problem experiences during the last year. Work-related problems included an accident resulting in death or injury, a conflict with a customer, a sudden stop from an emergency bell, or a near accident. Depressive symptoms were measured with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) instrument. The survey was performed using a self-report questionnaire from April 16 to July 13, 2007. The data of 827 drivers (86.2%) were analyzed. RESULTS Experience of a conflict with a passenger (p=0.011), a sudden stop from an emergency bell (p=0.001), or a near accident (p=0.001) increased the prevalence of depressive symptoms among subway drivers. A multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that a sudden stop from an emergency bell increased the risk of depressive symptoms significantly (OR=2.59, p=0.026). Near accidents were marginally associated with a higher risk for depressive symptoms (OR=1.62, p=0.062). CONCLUSION The experience of a sudden stop from an emergency bell increased subway driver's depressive symptoms, and near accidents may increase the risk of depressive symptoms. Therefore, interventions for the drivers who had experienced these work-related problems are needed.
Model checking action- and state-labelled Markov chains

In this paper we introduce the logic asCSL, an extension of continuous stochastic logic (CSL), which provides powerful means to characterise execution paths of action- and state-labelled Markov chains. In asCSL, path properties are characterised by regular expressions over actions and state-formulas. Thus, the executability of a path not only depends on the available actions but also on the validity of certain state formulas in intermediate states. Our main result is that the model checking problem for asCSL can be reduced to CSL model checking on a modified Markov chain, which is obtained through a product automaton construction. We provide a case study of a scalable cellular phone system which shows how the logic asCSL and the model checking procedure can be applied in practice.
Pulmonary resection in metastatic uterine and cervical malignancies.

OBJECTIVE Although thoracotomy for removal of pulmonary metastasis is well documented in a wide variety of solid tumors, data are sparse regarding management of patients with gynecologic malignancies metastatic to the lung. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the Roswell Park Cancer Institute experience between 1982 and 1999. Of 82 eligible patients with gynecologic tumors metastatic and confined to the lung, 25 underwent pulmonary resection. RESULTS There were 60 uterine and 22 cervix cancer patients with pulmonary metastases. Among patients with uterine cancer primaries undergoing pulmonary resection (n = 19) median survival was 26 months. Uterine cancer patients who underwent surgical resection for leiomyosarcomas (n = 11) had a median survival of 25 months compared to 46 months in patients with adenocarcinoma (n = 6, P = 0.02). Median survival in cervix cancer patients undergoing resection for pulmonary metastases (n = 6) was 36 months. CONCLUSIONS Pulmonary resection may provide a survival advantage for selected patients with uterine and cervical malignancies with metastases isolated to the lung.
Wiener chaos solutions of linear stochastic evolution equations

A new method is described for constructing a generalized solution of a stochastic evolution equation. Existence, uniqueness, regularity and a probabilistic representation of this Wiener Chaos solution are established for a large class of equations. As an application of the general theory, new results are obtained for several types of the passive scalar equation.
Active Learning of Multi-Index Function Models

We consider the problem of actively learning multi-index functions of the form f (x) = g(Ax) = ∑ki=1 gi(aTi x) from point evaluations of f. We assume that the function f is defined on an l2-ball in ℝd, g is twice continuously differentiable almost everywhere, and A ∈ ℝk×d is a rank k matrix, where k ≪ d. We propose a randomized, active sampling scheme for estimating such functions with uniform approximation guarantees. Our theoretical developments leverage recent techniques from low rank matrix recovery, which enables us to derive an estimator of the function f along with sample complexity bounds. We also characterize the noise robustness of the scheme, and provide empirical evidence that the high-dimensional scaling of our sample complexity bounds are quite accurate.
Generalized mel frequency cepstral coefficients for large-vocabulary speaker-independent continuous-speech recognition

The focus of a continuous speech recognition process is to match an input signal with a set of words or sentences according to some optimality criteria. The first step of this process is parameterization, whose major task is data reduction by converting the input signal into parameters while preserving virtually all of the speech signal information dealing with the text message. This contribution presents a detailed analysis of a widely used set of parameters, the mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and suggests a new parameterization approach taking into account the whole energy zone in the spectrum. Results obtained with the proposed new coefficients give a confidence interval about their use in a large-vocabulary speaker-independent continuous-speech recognition system.
Aldosterone and Pressor Responses to Angiotensin II in Primary Hyperparathyroidism

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of hypercalcaemia due to primary hyperparathyroidism on the pressor and aldosterone responses to angiotensin II (Ang II) infusion. Five patients with hyperparathyroidism were studied, before and after parathyroidectomy, and were compared with five normal subjects. After 30 min of equilibration, Asp1-Val5 Ang II was infused in all subjects at stepwise increasing dose rates of 2 and 4 ng/kg per min for 30 min each. In the hyperparathyroid patients the baseline levels of plasma parathyroid hormone and calcium were significantly higher than in the controls, and returned to normal after the parathyroidectomy; plasma aldosterone and renin activity were normal both before and after the parathyroidectomy. Two hyperparathyroid patients had high blood pressure levels, which were normalized after surgery. The increase in the aldosterone response from baseline at each time point of the Ang II infusion was greater in the hyperparathyroid patients before than after the operation (P less than 0.05), and greater than in the normals (P less than 0.05). No difference in the increased response of systolic or diastolic blood pressure was observed between the hyperparathyroid patients, either before or after the parathyroidectomy, and the normal subjects. High levels of extracellular calcium or parathyroid hormone, or both, might play a primary role in the aldosterone hyper-responsiveness to Ang II in the hyperparathyroid patients. The similar pressor response to Ang II in hyperparathyroid patients and the normal subjects suggests that hypercalcaemia does not potentiate the vasoconstrictive action of Ang II.
The effect of dendritic topology on firing patterns in model neurons

Neuronal firing patterns are influenced by both membrane properties and dendritic morphology. Distinguishing two sources of morphological variability—metrics and topology—we investigate the extent to which model neurons that have the same metrical and membrane properties can still produce different firing patterns as a result of differences in dendritic topology. Within a set of dendritic trees that have the same number of terminal segments and the same total dendritic length, we show that firing frequency strongly correlates with topology as expressed by the mean dendritic path length. The effect of dendritic topology on firing frequency is bigger for trees with equal segment diameters than for trees whose segment diameters obey Rall's 3/2 power law. If active dendritic channels are present, dendritic topology influences not only firing frequency but also type of firing (regular, bursting).
Mindfulness meditation and the immune system: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Mindfulness meditation represents a mental training framework for cultivating the state of mindful awareness in daily life. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in how mindfulness meditation improves human health and well‐being. Although studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can improve self‐reported measures of disease symptomatology, the effect that mindfulness meditation has on biological mechanisms underlying human aging and disease is less clear. To address this issue, we conducted the first comprehensive review of randomized controlled trials examining the effects of mindfulness meditation on immune system parameters, with a specific focus on five outcomes: (1) circulating and stimulated inflammatory proteins, (2) cellular transcription factors and gene expression, (3) immune cell count, (4) immune cell aging, and (5) antibody response. This analysis revealed substantial heterogeneity across studies with respect to patient population, study design, and assay procedures. The findings suggest possible effects of mindfulness meditation on specific markers of inflammation, cell‐mediated immunity, and biological aging, but these results are tentative and require further replication. On the basis of this analysis, we describe the limitations of existing work and suggest possible avenues for future research. Mindfulness meditation may be salutogenic for immune system dynamics, but additional work is needed to examine these effects.
Digoxin and reduction in mortality and hospitalization in heart failure: a comprehensive post hoc analysis of the DIG trial.

AIMS To determine the effects of digoxin on all-cause mortality and heart failure (HF) hospitalizations, regardless of ejection fraction, accounting for serum digoxin concentration (SDC). METHODS AND RESULTS This comprehensive post-hoc analysis of the randomized controlled Digitalis Investigation Group trial (n=7788) focuses on 5548 patients: 1687 with SDC, drawn randomly at 1 month, and 3861 placebo patients, alive at 1 month. Overall, 33% died and 31% had HF hospitalizations during a 40-month median follow-up. Compared with placebo, SDC 0.5-0.9 ng/mL was associated with lower mortality [29 vs. 33% placebo; adjusted hazard ratio (AHR), 0.77; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.67-0.89], all-cause hospitalizations (64 vs. 67% placebo; AHR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.78-0.92) and HF hospitalizations (23 vs. 33% placebo; AHR, 0.62; 95% CI, 0.54-0.72). SDC> or =1.0 ng/mL was associated with lower HF hospitalizations (29 vs. 33% placebo; AHR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.59-0.79), without any effect on mortality. SDC 0.5-0.9 reduced mortality in a wide spectrum of HF patients and had no interaction with ejection fraction >45% (P=0.834) or sex (P=0.917). CONCLUSIONS Digoxin at SDC 0.5-0.9 ng/mL reduces mortality and hospitalizations in all HF patients, including those with preserved systolic function. At higher SDC, digoxin reduces HF hospitalization but has no effect on mortality or all-cause hospitalizations.
Transcription factors involved in retinogenesis are co-opted by the circadian clock following photoreceptor differentiation

The circadian clock is known to regulate a wide range of physiological and cellular processes, yet remarkably little is known about its role during embryo development. Zebrafish offer a unique opportunity to explore this issue, not only because a great deal is known about key developmental events in this species, but also because the clock starts on the very first day of development. In this study, we identified numerous rhythmic genes in zebrafish larvae, including the key transcriptional regulators neurod and cdx1b, which are involved in neuronal and intestinal differentiation, respectively. Rhythmic expression of neurod and several additional transcription factors was only observed in the developing retina. Surprisingly, these rhythms in expression commenced at a stage of development after these transcription factors are known to have played their essential role in photoreceptor differentiation. Furthermore, this circadian regulation was maintained in adult retina. Thus, once mature photoreceptors are formed, multiple retinal transcription factors fall under circadian clock control, at which point they appear to play a new and important role in regulating rhythmic elements in the phototransduction pathway.
Agitated behaviours among the institutionalized elderly with dementia: validation of the Korean version of the Cohen‐Mansfield Agitation Inventory

To analyze the factor structure, the criterion validity, the internal consistency, inter–rater reliability and test–retest reliability of the Korean version of Cohen‐Mansfield Agitation Inventory, to provide data on the frequency and distribution of agitated behaviours, and to compare patterns of agitated behaviours among the institutionalized elderly with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Vascular dementia (VaD).
Comparison of physicochemical qualities of diesel and mechanic workshop polluted soils amended with cowpea chaff

Physicochemical qualities of diesel and mechanic workshop polluted soils amended with cowpea chaff were studied for 56 days. The organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus were higher in mechanic polluted soil (MPS) compared to diesel polluted soil (DPS) amended with cowpea chaff. The pH, organic matter content and moisture were higher in DPS compared to MPS. There were no significant differences in pH, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus organic matter content and moisture between OFS, DPS and MPS at 5% probability level. The result of this study shows that the physicochemical properties of diesel polluted soil amended with cowpea chaff was better than mechanic workshop soil amended with same cowpea chaff.
Use of lidocaine-prilocaine patch to decrease intramuscular injection pain does not adversely affect the antibody response to diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis-inactivated poliovirus -Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate and hepatitis B vaccines in infants from birth to six months of age

Background. Topical lidocaine-prilocaine (EMLA) effectively decreases the pain associated with minor procedures including immunization, although the effect on the antibody response to diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis-inactivated poliovirus -Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate (DTaP-IPV-Hib) and hepatitis B vaccines has not been assessed. Objective. To measure the antibody response to DTaP-IPV-Hib and hepatitis B vaccines; to measure pain reduction associated with the use of the lidocaine-prilocaine (EMLA) patch; and to assess safety by comparing adverse reactions. Participants and setting. One hundred nine healthy 6-month-old infants (Part A of study) and 56 healthy infants birth to 2 months of age (Part B of study) undergoing primary immunization with DTaP-IPV-Hib and hepatitis B vaccines in an ambulatory setting. Design and interventions. Two center, randomized, double blind, controlled trial of EMLA patch or placebo before DTaP-IPV-Hib and hepatitis B immunization. Antibody titers measured at 0 to 2, 6 and 7 months. Outcome measures. The primary outcome measure was the antibody response to diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis antigens, Haemophilus influenzae type b and hepatitis B by enzyme immunoassay; and poliovirus 1, 2 and 3 by neutralization. The secondary outcomes were pain scores by the Modified Behavioral Pain Scale and drug- and vaccine-associated adverse events collected with a parent diary and structured questionnaire. Results. There was no difference in the antibody response between the EMLA- and placebo-treated groups as assessed by geometric mean antibody titers, rates of seroconversion or the proportion of participants achieving protective or positive antibody titers postimmunization. At the 6-month visit, EMLA recipients had less pain after immunization (total pain score, 6.75 vs. 7.35;P = 0.005; pain score increase, 3.99 vs. 4.74;P = 0.004) than did placebo recipients. Skin pallor and erythema at the patch application site were more frequently reported after EMLA use. Rates of vaccine-associated adverse events were similar in the two groups. Conclusions. The EMLA patch has no adverse effect on the antibody response to the vaccine antigens, is effective in reducing pain associated with DTaP-IPV-Hib and hepatitis B immunizations and does not result in any significant or unexpected adverse reactions.