Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic atomoxetine treatment during adolescence does not influence decision-making on a rodent gambling task, but does modulate amphetamine’s effect on impulsive action in adulthood

In addition to the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder exhibit impaired performance on tests of real-world cost/benefit decision-making. Atomoxetine, a nonstimulant drug approved for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor administered chronically during adolescence, a time during which the frontal brain regions necessary for executive function undergo extensive maturation. This treatment protocol can affect behavior well into adulthood, but whether it produces long-term changes in complex decision-making has not been investigated. Twenty-four Long–Evans rats were administered saline or 1.0 mg/kg atomoxetine daily from postnatal day 40 to 54. Two weeks after treatment, the adult rats were trained and assessed on the rodent gambling task, in which the animals chose from four options varying in reward, punishment, and uncertainty. Impulsive action was also measured by recording the number of premature responses made. Regardless of the treatment administered during adolescence, rats learned to favor the advantageous options characterized by small, low-penalty rewards in lieu of the larger, higher-penalty reward options. Rodent gambling task performance was then assessed following acute treatment with atomoxetine (0.1–1.0 mg/kg) and amphetamine (0.3–1.5 mg/kg). Across groups, the highest dose of atomoxetine impaired decision-making and decreased premature responding at all doses tested. Amphetamine also impaired choice performance, but selectively increased impulsive action in rats that had previously received atomoxetine treatment during adolescence. These findings contribute to our understanding of the long-term effects associated with chronic adolescent atomoxetine exposure and suggest that this treatment does not alter decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty in adulthood.
Generalized Data Structure Synthesis

Data structure synthesis is the task of generating data structure implementations from high-level specifications. Recent work in this area has shown potential to save programmer time and reduce the risk of defects. Existing techniques focus on data structures for manipulating subsets of a single collection, but real-world programs often track multiple related collections and aggregate properties such as sums, counts, minimums, and maximums. This paper shows how to synthesize data structures that track subsets and aggregations of multiple related collections. Our technique decomposes the synthesis task into alternating steps of query synthesis and incrementalization. The query synthesis step implements pure operations over the data structure state by leveraging existing enumerative synthesis techniques, specialized to the data structures domain. The incrementalization step implements imperative state modifications by re-framing them as fresh queries that determine what to change, coupled with a small amount of code to apply the change. As an added benefit of this approach over previous work, the synthesized data structure is optimized for not only the queries in the specification but also the required update operations. We have evaluated our approach in four large case studies, demonstrating that these extensions are broadly applicable.
Markers of Intestinal Damage and their Relation to Cytokine Levels in Cardiac Surgery Patients

Objectives: In patients undergoing cardiac surgery, both extracorporeal circulation (ECC) and intraoperative mesenterial hypoperfusion may account for increased cytokine levels and lead to postoperative gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms. Methods: We investigated levels of the intestinal damage markers intestinal fatty acid binding protein (I-FABP in plasma [n = 72] and urine [n = 37]), citrulline (in plasma [n = 35]), and claudin-3 (in urine [n = 37]) in patients undergoing aortic or mitral valve surgery with or without coronary artery bypass grafting. Furthermore, the relationship between these markers and the surgery-induced cytokine response was explored by measuring serial plasma levels of tumor necrosis factor-&agr;, interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, and IL-10 (n = 35). Finally, the relationship between markers of intestinal damage and GI-symptoms (abdominal pain, ileus, vomiting, diarrhea, time to first defecation) was assessed. Results: Plasma and urinary I-FABP levels, and urinary claudin-3 levels peaked at the end of surgery, while citrulline levels were not influenced by surgery. ECC duration correlated with plasma I-FABP levels (r = 0.31, P = 0.007). Plasma levels of all measured cytokines increased during surgery, with peak levels observed either at the end of surgery or on the first postoperative day. While ECC duration correlated with IL-6 and IL-8 release (r = 0.43, P = 0.01 and r = 0.36, P = 0.04 respectively), there was no direct relationship between I-FABP and claudin-3 levels and cytokine concentrations. No patients developed significant GI or non-GI complications, and I-FABP and claudin-3 release appeared not to be related to postoperative GI symptoms, although the incidence of these symptoms may have limited a reliable assessment. Conclusions: Longer duration of ECC is associated with a more pronounced release of intestinal injury markers and inflammatory cytokines, but intestinal injury markers are not directly related to the observed increase in cytokine levels or GI-symptoms. These findings indicate that ECC duration contributes to the cytokine response observed in cardiac surgery patients and that intestinal injury itself is not a causative factor for this response.
MaRePhoR — An open access machine-readable phonetic dictionary for Romanian

This paper introduces a novel open access resource, the machine-readable phonetic dictionary for Romanian — MaRePhoR. It contains over 70,000 word entries, and their manually performed phonetic transcription. The paper describes the dictionary format and statistics, as well as an initial use of the phonetic transcription entries by building a grapheme to phoneme converter based on decision trees. Various training strategies were tested enabling the correct selection of a final setup for our predictor. The best results showed that using the dictionary as training data, an accuracy of over 99% can be achieved.
Predictive effects of bilirubin on response of colorectal cancer to irinotecan-based chemotherapy.

AIM To examine the predictive effects of baseline serum bilirubin levels and UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) 1A1*28 polymorphism on response of colorectal cancer to irinotecan-based chemotherapy. METHODS The present study was based on a prospective multicenter longitudinal trial of Chinese metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) patients treated with irinotecan-based chemotherapy (NCT01282658). Baseline serum bilirubin levels, including total bilirubin (TBil) and unconjugated bilirubin (UBil), were measured, and genotyping of UGT1A1*28 polymorphism was performed. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis was used to determine cutoff values of TBil and UBil. The TBil values were categorized into > 13.0 or ≤ 13.0 groups; the UBil values were categorized into > 4.1 or ≤ 4.1 groups. Combining the cutoff values of TBil and UBil, which was recorded as CoBil, patients were classified into three groups. The classifier's performance of UGT1A1*28 and CoBil for predicting treatment response was evaluated by ROC analysis. Associations between response and CoBil or UGT1A1*28 polymorphism were estimated using simple and multiple logistic regression models. RESULTS Among the 120 mCRC patients, the serum bilirubin level was significantly different between the UGT1A1*28 wild-type and mutant genotypes. Patients with the mutant genotype had an increased likelihood of a higher TBil (P = 0.018) and a higher UBil (P = 0.014) level compared with the wild-type genotype. Patients were stratified into three groups based on CoBil. Group 1 was patients with TBil > 13.0 and UBil > 4.1; Group 2 was patients with TBil ≤ 13.0 and UBil > 4.1; and Group 3 was patients with TBil ≤ 13.0 and UBil ≤ 4.1. Patients in Group 3 had more than a 10-fold higher likelihood of having a response in the simple (OR = 11.250; 95%CI: 2.286-55.367; P = 0.003) and multiple (OR = 16.001; 95%CI: 2.802 -91.371; P = 0.002) analyses compared with the Group 1 individuals. Patients carrying the UGT1A1*28 (TA)7 allele were 4-fold less likely to present with a response compared with the individuals harboring a homozygous (TA)6 genotype in the simple (OR = 0.267; 95%CI: 0.100-0.709; P = 0.008) and multiple (OR = 0.244; 95%CI: 0.088-0.678; P = 0.007) analyses. Classifier's performance of CoBil and UGT1A1*28 were comparable. CONCLUSION CoBil and UGT1A1*28 are both independent biomarkers for predicting the treatment response of mCRC patients to irinotecan-based chemotherapy. After validation, CoBil, an easily determinable index in the clinic, might be helpful in facilitating stratification of mCRC patients for individualized treatment options.
Temporal Vegetation Modelling Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks for Crop Identification from Medium-Resolution Multi-spectral Satellite Images

Land-cover classification (LCC) is one of the central problems in earth observation and was extensively investigated over recent decades. In many cases, existing approaches concentrate on single-time and multi- or hyper-spectral reflectance measurements observed by spaceborne and airborne sensors. However, land-cover classes, such as crops, change their reflective characteristics over time, thus complicating a classification at one particular observation time. Opposed to that, these characteristics change in a systematic and predictive manner, which should be utilized in a multi-temporal approach. ,,,,,,We employ long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to extract temporal characteristics from a sequence of SENTINEL 2A observations. We compared the performance of LSTM networks with other architectures and a support vector machine (SVM) baseline and show the effectiveness of dynamic temporal feature extraction. For our experiments, a large study area together with rich ground truth annotations provided by public authorities was used for training and evaluation. Our rather straightforward LSTM variant achieved state-of-the art classification performance, thus opening promising potential for further research.
Onchocerca volvulus infection and serological prevalence, ocular onchocerciasis and parasite transmission in northern and central Togo after decades of Simulium damnosum s.l. vector control and mass drug administration of ivermectin

Background Mass drug administration (MDA) of ivermectin has become the main intervention to control onchocerciasis or “river blindness”. In Togo, after many years of MDA, Onchocerca volvulus infection has declined dramatically, and elimination appears achievable, but in certain river basins the current situation remains unknown. We have conducted parasitological, serological, ophthalmological, and entomological assessments in northern and central Togo within the river basins of Ôti, Kéran and Mô. Methodology/Principal findings Examinations were completed in 1,455 participants from 11 onchocerciasis sentinel villages, and O. volvulus transmission by Simulium damnosum sensu lato (s.l.) was evaluated. In children (aged 1–10 years), the prevalence of microfilariae (Mf) was 2.3% and in adults it ranged from 5.1 to 13.3%. Positive IgG4 responses to O. volvulus adult (crude) worm antigen (OvAg) and the recombinant Ov16 antigen were in all-ages 48.7% and 34.4%, and 29.1% and 14.9% in children, respectively. In the river basin villages of Kéran, Mô and Ôti, the IgG4 seroprevalences to OvAg in children were 51.7%, 23.5% and 12.7%, respectively, and to the Ov16 antigen 33.3% (Kéran) and 5.2% (Ôti). Onchocerciasis ocular lesions (punctate keratitis, evolving iridocyclitis and chorioretinitis) were observed in children and young adults. O. volvulus-specific DNA (Ov150) was detected by poolscreen in vector samples collected from Tchitchira/Kéran(22.8%), Bouzalo/Mô(11.3%), Baghan/Mô(2.9%) and Pancerys/Ôti(4.9%); prevalences of O. volvulus infection in S. damnosum s.l. were, respectively, 1%, 0.5%, 0.1% and 0.2%. Conclusions/Significance In the northern and central river basins in Togo, interruption of O. volvulus transmission has not yet been attained. Patent O. volvulus infections, positive antibody responses, progressive ocular onchocerciasis were diagnosed, and parasite transmission by S. damnosum s.l. occurred close to the survey locations. Future interventions may require approaches selectively targeted to non-complying endemic populations, to the seasonality of parasite transmission and national onchocerciasis control programs should harmonize cross-border MDA as a coordinated intervention.
Effect of fat retention on the rachitogenic effect of rye fed to broiler chicks.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the influence of fat retention on bone mineralization and amino acid retention for broiler chicks fed rye diets containing marginal levels of vitamin D3. In Experiment 1, rye diets containing tallow were supplemented with high vitamin D3, bile salt (sodium taurocholate), or a detergent (sodium lauryl sulphate). Fat retention and tibia ash were improved (P less than .05) with bile salt addition, and tibia ash alone (P less than .05) was improved when high vitamin D3 or the detergent was added to the diet. In Experiment 2, rye diets contained tricaprylin (TC), tristearin (TS), or triolein (TO) as a fat source. Both fat retention (TS less than TO less than TC) and tibia ash (TS less than TC less than TO) showed a significant (P less than .05) treatment effect. The results of both experiments support the hypothesis that the rachitogenic effect of feeding rye may be related to inadequate fat digestion. There was no significant treatment effect on amino acid retention in either experiment. A third experiment indicated a similar bile acid pool size for chicks fed rye as opposed to wheat; however, bile acid concentration of jejunal fluid was lower (P less than .05) for chicks fed rye. A possible microbial involvement in the disturbance of bile acid metabolism was indicated by the capacity of Streptococcus organisms derived from chick small bowel to degrade sodium taurocholate.
Effects of low level chronic aflatoxicosis in broiler chickens.

A completely random design consisting of three replicates of 25 broiler chickens (Hubbard x Hubbard) at each of four treatments was used to evaluate the effects of low level, chronic aflatoxicosis on performance and various processing parameters. The treatments in Trial 1 were control, . 075, . 225, and . 675 and in Trial 2 control, . 3, . 9, and 2.7 micrograms/g toxin in feed (ppm). The chickens were maintained on these treatments from day-old to 7 weeks of age with feed and water available ad libitum. All aflatoxin dose levels in Trial 1 significantly (P less than .05) decreased live, dressed, and chilled eviscerated weight, whereas only 2.7 ppm significantly (P less than .05) decreased live and dressed weight in Trial 2, with chilled eviscerated weight being significantly (P less than .05) decreased at . 3 and 2.7 ppm in Trial 2. Parts weights and dimension measurements reflected the aflatoxin-induced decrease in dressed weight. Breast yield (%) was significantly (P less than .05) decreased by aflatoxin while back, wing, drum, and thigh yields were significantly increased by aflatoxin. No effect of aflatoxin was seen on the incidence of crooked keel, feather follicle infection, breast blisters, or conformation. A hypocarotenoidemia and hepatic hyperlipemia were clearly a result of chronic aflatoxicosis in these broiler chickens. These data demonstrate that the toxicity of aflatoxin is dependent on the environment in which broiler chickens are exposed. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Effect of intensive blood pressure control in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus over 9 years of follow‐up: A subgroup analysis of high‐risk ACCORDION trial participants

Although guidelines recommend strict blood pressure (BP) control in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and elevated cardiovascular risk, the long‐term effects of this approach are unknown. We investigated the effect of intensive BP control on clinical outcomes in patients with T2DM over 9 years of follow‐up. We included Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes ‐ Blood Pressure participants in the standard glucose control arm who had established cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, were ≥75 years of age or who had a 10‐year coronary heart risk ≥15%. Participants were randomized to either intensive (systolic BP < 120 mm Hg) or standard (systolic BP < 140 mm Hg) BP control for an average of 5 years. Observational follow‐up occurred for an average of 4 years thereafter. After an average total follow‐up of 9 years, intensive BP control reduced the composite of cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction and nonfatal stroke by 25% (hazard ratio, 0.75; 95% confidence interval, 0.60‐0.95; P = .02). The overall benefit was driven by a reduction in nonfatal myocardial infarction (P = .01). In this post‐hoc analysis, the benefits of a fixed‐duration intensive BP control intervention in patients with T2DM persisted throughout 9 years of follow‐up.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Image Hashing

Deep hashing methods have received much attention recently, which achieve promising results by taking advantage of the strong representation power of deep networks. However, most existing deep hashing methods learn a whole set of hashing functions independently, while ignore the correlations between different hashing functions that can promote the retrieval accuracy greatly. Inspired by the sequential decision ability of deep reinforcement learning, we propose a new Deep Reinforcement Learning approach for Image Hashing (DRLIH). Our proposed DRLIH approach models the hashing learning problem as a sequential decision process, which learns each hashing function by correcting the errors imposed by previous ones and promotes retrieval accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address hashing problem from deep reinforcement learning perspective. The main contributions of our proposed DRLIH approach can be summarized as follows: (1) We propose a deep reinforcement learning hashing network. In the proposed network, we utilize recurrent neural network (RNN) as agents to model the hashing functions, which take actions of projecting images into binary codes sequentially, so that the current hashing function learning can take previous hashing functions’ error into account. (2) We propose a sequential learning strategy based on proposed DRLIH. We define the state as a tuple of internal features of RNN's hidden layers and image features, which can reflect history decisions made by the agents. We also propose an action group method to enhance the correlation of hash functions in the same group. Experiments on three widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DRLIH approach.
Sensory Agreement Guides Kinetic Energy Optimization of Arm Movements during Object Manipulation

The laws of physics establish the energetic efficiency of our movements. In some cases, like locomotion, the mechanics of the body dominate in determining the energetically optimal course of action. In other tasks, such as manipulation, energetic costs depend critically upon the variable properties of objects in the environment. Can the brain identify and follow energy-optimal motions when these motions require moving along unfamiliar trajectories? What feedback information is required for such optimal behavior to occur? To answer these questions, we asked participants to move their dominant hand between different positions while holding a virtual mechanical system with complex dynamics (a planar double pendulum). In this task, trajectories of minimum kinetic energy were along curvilinear paths. Our findings demonstrate that participants were capable of finding the energy-optimal paths, but only when provided with veridical visual and haptic information pertaining to the object, lacking which the trajectories were executed along rectilinear paths.
The effect of six different C18 fatty acids on body fat and energy metabolism in mice

We studied the effects of five high-fat semi-purified diets varying at a 4 % (w/w) level in either stearic, oleic, linoleic, α-linolenic, or γ-linolenic acid on body fat and energy metabolism in BALB/c mice. A diet containing caprylic, capric, lauric, and myristic acid was used as a reference diet and a diet with 4 % conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) was used as a positive control as it is known to effectively lower body fat in mice. The diets were fed for 35 d. Body fat was significantly lower in the CLA group than in the other groups but was not significantly different among the non-CLA groups. Among the non-CLA groups, the linoleic acid group tended to have the highest and the α-linolenic acid group the lowest proportion of body fat. In energy-balance studies, the percentage of energy intake that was stored in the body was significantly lower in the CLA group compared with the other dietary groups. The percentage of energy intake eliminated in excreta was highest in the stearic acid group followed by the γ-linolenic acid group. These results were reflected in apparent fat digestibility, which was lowest in the stearic acid group. The percentage of energy intake expended as heat was highest in the CLA-fed mice. The results of the present study suggest that body fat and energy accretion in mice fed diets containing different C18 fatty acids is by far the lowest with CLA and that linoleic acid produced the highest fat intake and energy accretion.
Effects of propionic acid and of copper sulfate on the nutritional value of diets containing moldy corn for broiler chicks.

Diets containing moldy corn (in which fat levels were restored or not restored by soybean oil) were supplemented with either propionic acid (PA) or copper sulfate (CS), and their nutritional value for young broiler chicks was evaluated. The fat content of a diet containing good quality grains decreased slightly, whereas that of diets containing moldy grains decreased markedly, during the 30 days of the experiment. The PA (.3%), but not CS (600 ppm), almost completely prevented this decrease. Dietary metabolizable energy (ME), retention of dry matter and protein, and the performance of the chicks fed the diet containing the moldy corn were markedly depressed. Neither CS, nor soybean oil supplementation, nor a combination of the two, counteracted these effects. Supplementation with PA however, significantly (P less than .05) increased dietary ME, increased retention of dry matter and protein, and improved performance of chicks fed the moldy grains. The combination of PA and soybean oil supplementation yielded essentially the same results as the diet containing the good corn. It is concluded, therefore, that the nutritional value of diets containing moldy grains can be completely restored if their fat content is increased in proportion to the amount lost in the moldy grains and an efficient fungistat is used.