Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional morphology of the gonoduct of the viviparous teleost Poeciliopsis gracilis (Heckel, 1848) (Poeciliidae)

Female teleosts do not develop Müllerian ducts; consequently, the ovary of teleosts contains two zones: germinal and gonoduct. The gonoduct lacks germinal cells, but has relevant functions in the reproductive process. We describe the functional morphology of the gonoduct in the viviparous teleost Poeciliopsis gracilis during nongestation and gestation stages. This study tests the hypothesis that the gonoduct functions as a barrier between the germinal zone and the exterior. By providing information about morphology and function of the gonoduct we show that this part of the ovary has an essential role in the reproduction of teleosts. The ovaries were processed by histological technique and stained with hematoxylin‐eosin (H‐E), Masson's trichrome, toluidine blue and periodic acid‐Schiff (PAS). The gonoduct is divided into three regions: cephalic, middle, and caudal. In the cephalic and middle regions there are mucosal folds that extend into the gonoductal lumen, forming structures similar to a cervix. The caudal region has two portions: the anterior contains a dorsal invagination and exocrine glands among columnar cells; the posterior has a ventral flexion and stratified epithelium with apical secretory cells. The morphology of this epithelium indicates two functions: (a) secretory by the apical columnar cells, and (b) protection through the stratification. Another peculiarity of the caudal region is that both ducts, reproductive and digestive, converge in a common cavity at their caudal ends, forming a cloacal region. The histology of the gonoduct indicates relevant functions including: (1) the control of the luminal diameter by the muscle and the presence of mucosal folds, like a cervix; (2) the relationship with the spermatozoa during insemination and storing them in mucosal folds; (3) the support of immunological processes; (4) secretory activities; (5) forming the duct during birth; and (6) possibly, acts as a barrier against parasite infestations.
Mixed Frames and Risky Decision-Making

By applying unitive vocabulary, “die” or “save,” to respective frames of the Asian disease problem, Tversky and Kahneman were able to define framing effect. In this study, we preliminarily explored the effect of mixed frames, which are characterized by the use of different vocabulary in one frame. In study 1, we found that only the sure option description had significant effect on decision-making, while the effects of risky option descriptions were not significant, nor were interactions between descriptions. In study 2, the results suggested that after controlling the effects of the hedonic tone of the sure options, risky option description did not significantly predict decision-making. In study 3, we found that neither the sure-to-risky option presentation order nor presentation order within risky options had significant effect on decision-making. We thus concluded that sure option description can serve as the decision-making foundation (reference point) for decision-makers in mixed frames.
Effects of epinephrine in local dental anesthesia in patients with coronary artery disease.

BACKGROUND The use of vasoconstrictors for local anesthesia in patients with coronary heart disease is controversial in the literature, and there is concern regarding risk of cardiac decompensation. OBJECTIVE To evaluate electrocardiographic and blood pressure parameters during restorative dental procedure under local anesthesia with and without a vasoconstrictor in patients with coronary artery disease. METHODS Sixty-two patients were included in the study, ages ranging from 39 to 80 (mean 58.7 +/- 8.8), 51 (83.2%) of whom were male. Thirty patients were randomly assigned to receive 2% lidocaine with epinephrine (epinephrine group), and the remaining patients, 2% lidocaine without epinephrine (non-epinephrine group) for local anesthesia. All patients underwent 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and dynamic electrocardiography. Three periods were considered in the study: 1) baseline--recordings obtained during the 60 minutes prior to the procedure; 2) procedure--recordings obtained from the beginning of anesthesia to the end of the procedure and 3) 24 hours. RESULTS There was an increase in blood pressure in both groups during the procedure, compared with baseline values; but when the two groups were compared no significant difference was detected between them. Heart rate remained unchanged in both groups. No ST-segment depression > 1 mm occurred either at baseline or during the procedure. Seven patients (12.5%) experienced more than ten arrhythmia episodes per hour during the procedure, four (13.8%) in the non-epinephrine group and three (11.1%) in the epinephrine group. CONCLUSION No difference was observed in blood pressure, heart rate, or evidence of ischemia and arrhythmias in either group. The use of vasoconstrictor has proved to be safe within the range of the present study.
The elite player performance plan: the impact of a new national youth development strategy on injury characteristics in a premier league football academy

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to investigate the injury incidence and patterns in elite youth football at a category 1 Premier League Academy before and after the introduction of a new development strategy, the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). A prospective study was performed over six consecutive seasons encompassing three years before and after the introduction of the EPPP. The findings revealed a most likely moderate increase in total exposure per player per season when the post-EPPP football exposure (640.86 ± 83.25 hours per player per year) was compared with the pre-EPPP football exposure (539.08 ± 71.59). The total injury incidence pre-EPPP was 3.0/1000 hours compared to 2.1/1000 hours post-EPPP (rate ratio 1.43). 6% of all injuries were re-injuries (20.24 ± 33.43 days) but did not result in a substantially longer absence (16.56 ± 15.77 days). The injury burden decreased for the U12-U15 from pre- to post-EPPP, whereas the injury burden increased for the U16-U18 (respectively 125 and 47% higher). These findings suggest that following the introduction of the EPPP there has been a reduction in injuries in the younger age groups U12-U15 but in the older age groups U16-U18 there has been an increase in the severity of the injuries sustained at this club.
Biases introduced by filtering electronic health records for patients with “complete data”

Objective One promise of nationwide adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) is the availability of data for large-scale clinical research studies. However, because the same patient could be treated at multiple health care institutions, data from only a single site might not contain the complete medical history for that patient, meaning that critical events could be missing. In this study, we evaluate how simple heuristic checks for data "completeness" affect the number of patients in the resulting cohort and introduce potential biases. Materials and Methods We began with a set of 16 filters that check for the presence of demographics, laboratory tests, and other types of data, and then systematically applied all 216 possible combinations of these filters to the EHR data for 12 million patients at 7 health care systems and a separate payor claims database of 7 million members. Results EHR data showed considerable variability in data completeness across sites and high correlation between data types. For example, the fraction of patients with diagnoses increased from 35.0% in all patients to 90.9% in those with at least 1 medication. An unrelated claims dataset independently showed that most filters select members who are older and more likely female and can eliminate large portions of the population whose data are actually complete. Discussion and Conclusion As investigators design studies, they need to balance their confidence in the completeness of the data with the effects of placing requirements on the data on the resulting patient cohort.
Cutaneous Papilloma and Squamous Cell Carcinoma Therapy Utilizing Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Fields (nsPEF)

Nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEF) induce apoptotic pathways in human cancer cells. The potential therapeutic effective of nsPEF has been reported in cell lines and in xenograft animal tumor model. The present study investigated the ability of nsPEF to cause cancer cell death in vivo using carcinogen-induced animal tumor model, and the pulse duration of nsPEF was only 7 and 14 nano second (ns). An nsPEF generator as a prototype medical device was used in our studies, which is capable of delivering 7–30 nanosecond pulses at various programmable amplitudes and frequencies. Seven cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma cell lines and five other types of cancer cell lines were used to detect the effect of nsPEF in vitro. Rate of cell death in these 12 different cancer cell lines was dependent on nsPEF voltage and pulse number. To examine the effect of nsPEF in vivo, carcinogen-induced cutaneous papillomas and squamous cell carcinomas in mice were exposed to nsPEF with three pulse numbers (50, 200, and 400 pulses), two nominal electric fields (40 KV/cm and 31 KV/cm), and two pulse durations (7 ns and 14 ns). Carcinogen-induced cutaneous papillomas and squamous carcinomas were eliminated efficiently using one treatment of nsPEF with 14 ns duration pulses (33/39 = 85%), and all remaining lesions were eliminated after a 2nd treatment (6/39 = 15%). 13.5% of carcinogen-induced tumors (5 of 37) were eliminated using 7 ns duration pulses after one treatment of nsPEF. Associated with tumor lysis, expression of the anti-apoptotic proteins Bcl-xl and Bcl-2 were markedly reduced and apoptosis increased (TUNEL assay) after nsPEF treatment. nsPEF efficiently causes cell death in vitro and removes papillomas and squamous cell carcinoma in vivo from skin of mice. nsPEF has the therapeutic potential to remove human squamous carcinoma.
Interlaboratory Evaluation of Ultraviolet Radiation Emissions from Compact Fluorescent Lamps

There have been many recent reports regarding the potential risks of UV emissions from compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). In some of these reports, the robustness of the measurements was difficult to discern. We conducted round‐robin measurements, involving three lamp manufacturers and two government research laboratories to gather reliable data on the UV emissions from commercially available CFLs. The initial sample of lamps consisted of 71 spiral‐shaped CFLs purchased from local retailers. From the initial sample, 14 “high UV emitting” CFLs were chosen for further evaluation. We compared the UV emissions at a distance of 20 cm with the UV exposure limits (ELs) published by the International Commission on Non‐ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). We found that the allowable exposure time for measured lamps ranged from 21 to 415 h. This indicates that the emissions would not exceed the short‐term ELs that have been established by the ICNIRP for healthy individuals. We also evaluated the potential long‐term risk and found it to be insignificant. There was a large variation in the UV emissions found, even for lamps from a single package, indicating that it is impossible to predict the UV output of a CFL based on its physical appearance and model designation.
Analysis and optimization of interleave-division multiple-access communication systems

In this paper, we focus on the analysis and optimization of the interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) system. The spectral efficiencies of the coded IDMA system are analyzed. Optimal power allocation among users in IDMA, to maximize the spectral efficiency with a finite-alphabet constellation, is also considered. Differential evolution is adopted to solve the power profile optimization problem.
Oxidative Stress, Synaptic Dysfunction, and Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder without a cure. Most AD cases are sporadic where age represents the greatest risk factor. Lack of understanding of the disease mechanism hinders the development of efficacious therapeutic approaches. The loss of synapses in the affected brain regions correlates best with cognitive impairment in AD patients and has been considered as the early mechanism that precedes neuronal loss. Oxidative stress has been recognized as a contributing factor in aging and in the progression of multiple neurodegenerative diseases including AD. Increased production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) associated with age- and disease-dependent loss of mitochondrial function, altered metal homeostasis, and reduced antioxidant defense directly affect synaptic activity and neurotransmission in neurons leading to cognitive dysfunction. In addition, molecular targets affected by ROS include nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, lipids, proteins, calcium homeostasis, mitochondrial dynamics and function, cellular architecture, receptor trafficking and endocytosis, and energy homeostasis. Abnormal cellular metabolism in turn could affect the production and accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) and hyperphosphorylated Tau protein, which independently could exacerbate mitochondrial dysfunction and ROS production, thereby contributing to a vicious cycle. While mounting evidence implicates ROS in the AD etiology, clinical trials with antioxidant therapies have not produced consistent results. In this review, we will discuss the role of oxidative stress in synaptic dysfunction in AD, innovative therapeutic strategies evolved based on a better understanding of the complexity of molecular mechanisms of AD, and the dual role ROS play in health and disease.
Kronecker-factored Curvature Approximations for Recurrent Neural Networks

Kronecker-factor Approximate Curvature (Martens & Grosse, 2015) (K-FAC) is a 2nd-order optimization method which has been shown to give state-of-the-art performance on large-scale neural network optimization tasks (Ba et al., 2017). It is based on an approximation to the Fisher information matrix (FIM) that makes assumptions about the particular structure of the network and the way it is parameterized. The original K-FAC method was applicable only to fully-connected networks, although it has been recently extended by Grosse & Martens (2016) to handle convolutional networks as well. In this work we extend the method to handle RNNs by introducing a novel approximation to the FIM for RNNs. This approximation works by modelling the statistical structure between the gradient contributions at different time-steps using a chain-structured linear Gaussian graphical model, summing the various cross-moments, and computing the inverse in closed form. We demonstrate in experiments that our method significantly outperforms general purpose state-of-the-art optimizers like SGD with momentum and Adam on several challenging RNN training tasks.
Evaluation of a domain independent approach to natural language processing for game-like user interfaces

Many researchers that develop full software applications in the broad field of natural language processing (NLP) typically implement their single system's components from scratch. While there is nothing wrong with such a methodology from an operational perspective, it typically results in a waste of time. Furthermore, it leads to a substantial diversion of the researchers' efforts from more conceptual and theoretical aspects that could be geared towards the advancement of the state-of-the-art in the field. These main drawbacks call for an implementation approach allowing components' reusability across domains and applications. In that respect, this paper presents an evaluation of a domain independent approach to natural language understanding (NLU) that we have been implementing over the last several years. We have successfully tested and used our approach in three different natural language interfaces to game-like applications, each with its own conversational domains.
Sensitive detection of the 4977-bp deletion in human mitochondrial DNA of young individuals.

Specific deletions in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are present at high levels in skeletal muscle and other tissues (7). It has been suggested that an accumulation of these somatic deletions could be caused by oxidative damage that increases with age (2). In recent years, more than 20 different types of deletions have been identified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques (16). The most frequently observed deletion is 4977-bp long and occurs at a presumed deletion “hot spot” involving two 13-base direct repeats beginning at positions 8469 and 13 447 in the mitochondrial genome sequence (4). This deletion shows a marked correlation to age (6,11) and has also been found in human brain tissue of patients with Parkinson’s disease (8), in heartmuscle tissue of patients with cardiomyopathy (12), in skeletal muscle of patients with Kearns-Sayre syndrome (17) and in several other degenerative diseases (13). The undeleted mtDNA and the basal level of the 4977-bp deletion can be detected under specific PCR conditions (4,9). In the past few years, the amplification products were detected on agarose gels followed by ethidium bromide staining (9). Unfortunately, this technique does not detect very small quantities of DNA, and the signal is not permanent (15). Highly sensitive detection of nucleic acids in the picogram range has been achieved by the specific chemical reduction of silver ions (5). Our former study showed that the smaller the deletion-specific fragments, the better the detection threshold (unpublished observations), because smaller fragments have a higher amplification efficiency (14). For this reason, we chose new primer sequences that were located nearer to the deletion breakpoints, so that smaller fragments could be amplified from the deleted mitochondrial genome (Figure 1). The use of these new primers and the detection on ultrathin polyacrylamide gels (PAG) led to an improved detection threshold and to the detection of the 4977-bp deletion in subjects younger than 20 years without any mitochondrial diseases, which has not yet been described by others. Autopsy tissues were obtained from individuals representing a wide range of ages. Total DNA was isolated from 100 mg of skeletal muscle (musculus iliopsoas) using the Super QUIKGENE SQG1 Kit (Immucor, Rödermark, Germany) following the manufacturer’s instructions. The amount of DNA was quantified by the Human DNA Quantitation System (Life Technologies, Gaithersburg, MD, USA). This slot-blot method is specific for human nuclear DNA and is very sensitive, with a detection limit of 20 pg DNA. In contrast to photometric quantitation, it makes possible the determination of the concentration of highly degraded DNA. Unfortunately this method does not detect mtDNA. Currently, to our knowledge, there is no mtDNA-specific slot blot for a routine analysis available. Assuming that nearly 1% of total extracted DNA is mtDNA, we used the nuclear-specific slot blot to get an ap-
The Expression Patterns of p53 and p16 and an Analysis of a Possible Role of HPV in Primary Adenocarcinoma of the Urinary Bladder

Background Primary adenocarcinoma of the urinary bladder is rare. The molecular and cellular events leading to its pathogenesis are not well delineated. The goal of this study was to investigate p53 and p16 expression, as well as HPV status, in a relatively large series of primary bladder adenocarcinomas. Materials and Methods Thirty six cases of urinary bladder adenocarcinoma were chosen from participating institutions. The diagnosis and available clinical history were reviewed in each case. Immunostains for p53, p16 and HPV and high-risk and low-risk HPV-ISH were performed on all tumors. Results Patients had an average age of 61 years with a male predominance (1.5∶1 male∶female ratio). The average tumor size in cystectomy specimens was 4.3 cm. Of the cases managed by transurethral resection, 40% were pT2 at the time of diagnosis. In cystectomy specimens, 77% were either pT3 or pT4. Strong nuclear p16 expression was seen in 67% of all cases and p53 expression was present in 58% of the cases. Expression of both markers was seen in 33% of cases. Expression of p16 or p53 alone was present in 12 (33%) and 9 (25%) cases, respectively. Neither marker was expressed in only 3 (8%) of the tumors. No significant correlation between clinical variables and any of the markers we studied was identified. No HPV infection was detected in any case. Conclusions Expression of p53 and/or p16 is very common in urinary bladder adenocarcinoma. These findings implicate a high likelihood that alterations in these cell cycle proteins contribute to the pathogenesis of these tumors. Despite frequent immunohistochemical labeling for p16, no evidence of HPV infection was found.
Predisposing Factors for Fibroids and Outcome of Laparoscopic Myomectomy in Infertility

Introduction: Fibroids are very common tumors affecting women for centuries, however surprising that no significant data is still available as to what could be the cause of fibroid? What could be the predisposing or risk factors? Does it has any impact on fertility? Outcomes of Laparoscopic myomectomy in infertility? Setting: Advanced Tertiary Gynecologic endoscopic unit. Aims and Objectives: 1) What are the predisposing factors to develop fibroids? 2) Do fibroids lead to infertility? 3) What are the indications for removal of fibroids in infertility? 4) Is laparoscopic surgery better than open surgery? 5) Is the risk of rupture uterus more after laparoscopic myomectomy? 6) What is the success in terms of pregnancy rate after myomectomy? 7) What are the chances of abortions with or without myomectomy? Materials and Methods: A retrospective research study was carried out on 2540 women at the National Institute of Laser and Endoscopic Surgery and Aakar IVF Centre, Mumbai, a referral centre in India. This study was done over a period of 14 years. Women varied in age from 23 to 51 years and infertility of at least more than three years. The woman had fibroids from one to seventeen in number and two centimeters to eighteen centimeters in size which were either submucous, intramural, serosal, cervical or broad ligament. The women requiring hysteroscopic myoma resection were excluded in this study and Laparoscopic myomectomy done in woman other than infertility are also excluded from the study. Results: During the course of our study we found that the diet, weight, hypertension, habits had a bearing on incidence of fibroid. In one of the most promising research fact we found that fibroids itself produce prolactin and due to three times high level of aromatase had higher level of estradiol locally compared to normal myometrium. This was detrimental to fertility. A mild elevation of blood levels of prolactin usually in the range of 40 – 60 ng/ml was noticed in nearly 42% of the cases. Fibroids with infertility as a major complaint along with excessive vaginal bleeding in 33%, pain abdomen and dysmenorhea 10%, pressure symptoms in 3%, accidental finding of a large mass in 5% were the major indications for laparoscopic myomectomy. The pregnancy rate after removal of fibroids with active fertility treatment was 42 % and in donor oocyte IVF was 50%, abortion rate was 5%, 64% LSCS, 31% vaginal deliveries. There was no scar rupture in all pregnancies post laparoscopic myomectomy. Conclusion: Presence of fibroids in first degree female relative, predominantly red meat eating women, excess weight and high Blood pressure increased incidence of fibroids. Pregnancies & oral contraceptives decreased chances of fibroids. In infertile patient fibroids of significant size, multiple, had high local prolactin & aromatase level affecting fertility. Laparoscopic removal of fibroids increased pregnancy rate to 37.2% & 50% in donor oocyte IVF.