Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulation lifetimes and tumor accumulation of liposomal drug delivery systems

One of the greatest benefits of liposomal encapsulation of therapeutic drugs is the tendency for these carriers to accumulate in sites of disease. In the case of a solid tumor model employed here, it was the goal of this thesis to maximize the drug delivery to this site. This requires an understanding of the major factors governing tumor delivery. Of central importance to liposomal delivery to solid tumors is the circulation lifetime of the carrier. In the first section of experiments, factors influencing the use of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-lipids to increase the circulation lifetime of liposomes was examined. Second, the observation that drug loaded liposomes last significantly longer in the circulation was more fully examined. And finally, the delivery of drug to a murine solid tumor was assessed and the influence of PEG-lipids in the drug carrier and the effect of entrapped drug has on its delivery determined. PEG-lipid anchor conjugates can prolong the circulation lifetimes of liposomes following intravenous injection, but this can depend upon the nature of the lipid anchor and the chemical link between the PEG and lipid moieties. Incorporation of various PEG-lipids into large unilamellar vesicles (LUVs) composed of distearoylphosphatidylcholine (DSPC) and cholesterol (chol) (DSPC/chol/PEG-lipid, 50:45:5 mol/mol) results in differing liposomal circulation lifetimes in mice. This is shown to be due to differential removal of the hydrophilic coating in vivo that arises from exchange of the entire PEG-lipid conjugate from the liposomal membrane, although chemical breakdown of the PEG-lipid conjugate is also possible. This work establishes that DSPE is a considerably more effective anchor for PEG 2000 than POPE and that the chemical stability of PEG-PE conjugates is sensitive to the nature of the linkage and exchangeability of the PEG-PE complex. It is suggested here that retention of the PEG coating is of paramount importance for prolonged circulation lifetimes.
Clinical aspects of Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy

ABSTRACT Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy (EDMD), clinically characterized by scapulo-humero-peroneal muscle atrophy and weakness, multi-joint contractures with spine rigidity and cardiomyopathy with conduction defects, is associated with structural/functional defect of genes that encode the proteins of nuclear envelope, including lamin A and several lamin-interacting proteins. This paper presents clinical aspects of EDMD in context to causative genes, genotype-phenotype correlation and its emplacement within phenotypic spectrum of skeletal muscle diseases associated with envelopathies.
Calcifications in prostate cancer: An active phenomenon mediated by epithelial cells with osteoblast‐phenotype

The main aim of this study was to investigate putative correlation between the formation of prostate calcifications and the presence of cancer cells showing the ultrastructural and morphological aspects of osteoblasts. To this end, 40 prostate biopsies of prostate cancer were enrolled and investigated from histological, immunohistochemical, and ultrastructural point of view. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to propose a new cell type related to the ectopic calcifications in prostate tissue, the prostate osteoblast‐like cells (POLCs). Although our data require further investigations about the molecular mechanisms of both POLCs Cells generation and calcification formation, this study can open new and interesting prospective in the management of prostate cancer patients. In fact, if our data will be validated in large‐cohort studies, the presence of POLCs Cells and/or prostate calcifications could become a poor negative prognostic marker for cancer occurrence due to the correlation between the presence of POLCs Cells and epithelial to mesenchymal transition phenomenon.
Prediction of outcomes of extremely low gestational age newborns in Australia and New Zealand

Objective To determine the accuracy of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) calculator in predicting death and neurodevelopmental impairment in Australian and New Zealand infants. Design Population-based cohort study. Setting Australia and New Zealand. Patients Preterm infants 22–25 completed weeks gestation. Interventions Comparison of NICHD calculator predicted rates of death and death or neurodevelopmental impairment, with actual rates recorded in the Australian and New Zealand Neonatal Network cohort. Main outcome measures Infant death and death or neurodevelopmental impairment rates. Results A total of 714 infants were included in the study. Of these infants, 100 (14.0%) were <24 weeks, 389 (54.5%) male, 529 (74.1%) were singletons, 42 (5.9%) had intrauterine growth restriction, 563 (78.9%) received antenatal steroids and 625 (87.5 %) were born in a tertiary hospital. There were 288 deaths (40.3%), 75 infants (10.5%) with neurodevelopment impairment and 363 (50.8%) with death or neurodevelopmental impairment. The area under the curve (AUC) for prediction of death and the composite death or neurodevelopmental impairment by the NICHD calculator in our population was 0.65(95% CI 0.61 to 0.69) and 0.65 (95% CI 0.61 to 0.69), respectively. When stratified and compared with gestational age outcomes, the AUC did not change substantially for the outcomes investigated. The calculator was less accurate with outcome predictions at the extreme categories of predicted outcomes—underestimation of outcomes for those predicted to have the lowest risk (<20%) and overestimation for those in the highest risk category (>80%). Conclusion In our recent cohort of extremely preterm infants, the NICHD model does not accurately predict outcomes and is marginally better than gestational age based outcomes.
Visual acuity, endothelial cell density and polymegathism after iris-fixated lens implantation

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the visual acuity as well as endothelial cell density (ECD) and polymegathism after iris-fixated lens (Artiflex® AC 401) implantation for correction of moderate to high myopia. Patients and methods In this retrospective cross-sectional study, 55 eyes from 29 patients undergoing iris-fixated lens implantation for correction of myopia (−5.00 to −15.00 D) from 2007 to 2014 were evaluated. Uncorrected visual acuity, best spectacle-corrected visual acuity, refraction, ECD and polymegathism (coefficient of variation [CV] in the sizes of endothelial cells) were measured preoperatively and 6 months postoperatively. Results In the sixth month of follow-up, the uncorrected vision acuity was 20/25 or better in 81.5% of the eyes. The best-corrected visual acuity was 20/30 or better in 96.3% of the eyes, and more than 92% of the eyes had a refraction score of ±1 D from the target refraction. The mean corneal ECD of patients before surgery was 2,803±339 cells/mm2, which changed to 2,744±369 cells/mm2 six months after surgery (p=0.142). CV in the sizes of endothelial cells before the surgery was 25.7%±7.1% and six months after surgery it was 25.9%±5.4% (p=0.857). Conclusion Artiflex iris-fixated lens implantation is a suitable and predictable method for correction of moderate to high myopia. There was no statistically significant change in ECD and polymegathism (CV in the sizes of endothelial cells) after 6 months of follow-up.
Dynamic Influence of Emotional States on Novel Word Learning

Many researchers realize that it's unrealistic to isolate language learning and processing from emotions. However, few studies on language learning have taken emotions into consideration so far, so that the probable influences of emotions on language learning are unclear. The current study thereby aimed to examine the effects of emotional states on novel word learning and their dynamic changes with learning continuing and task varying. Positive, negative or neutral pictures were employed to induce a given emotional state, and then participants learned the novel words through association with line-drawing pictures in four successive learning phases. At the end of each learning phase, participants were instructed to fulfill a semantic category judgment task (in Experiment 1) or a word-picture semantic consistency judgment task (in Experiment 2) to explore the effects of emotional states on different depths of word learning. Converging results demonstrated that negative emotional state led to worse performance compared with neutral condition; however, how positive emotional state affected learning varied with learning task. Specifically, a facilitative role of positive emotional state in semantic category learning was observed but disappeared in word specific meaning learning. Moreover, the emotional modulation on novel word learning was quite dynamic and changeable with learning continuing, and the final attainment of the learned words tended to be similar under different emotional states. The findings suggest that the impact of emotion can be offset when novel words became more and more familiar and a part of existent lexicon.
Investigation on Interface of AZ-1 Modified Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polytriazole Composites

Interface modification effect and mechanism of novel polytriazole-matrix composites with the treatment of carbon fiber by aziridine were studied.The carbon fibers were modified by nitric acid oxidation followed with introduction of the coupling agent AZ-1 containing aziridine ring.The results showed that the interlaminar shear strength(ILSS) of treated carbon fiber/polytriazole composites was improved almost by 86% compared with untreated composites.AFM,SEM and contact angles characterizations suggested chemical modification could enhance surface roughness and polarity,and improve ILSS of carbon fiber/polytriazole composites.XPS results further indicated that acidic groups were introduced onto surface after nitric acid oxidation,then the aziridine ring of AZ-1 would be opened to create amine compounds onto the surface of oxidized carbon fiber at room temperature,which improved effects of the interface between polytriazole and carbon fiber.
Outcomes of Interventional-MRI Versus Microelectrode Recording-Guided Subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation

In deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) for Parkinson’s disease (PD), there is debate concerning the use of neuroimaging alone to confirm correct anatomic placement of the DBS lead into the STN, versus the use of microelectrode recording (MER) to confirm functional placement. We performed a retrospective study of a contemporaneous cohort of 45 consecutive patients who underwent either interventional-MRI (iMRI) or MER-guided DBS lead implantation. We compared radial lead error, motor and sensory side effect, and clinical benefit programming thresholds, and pre- and post-operative unified PD rating scale scores, and levodopa equivalent dosages. MER-guided surgery was associated with greater radial error compared to the intended target. In general, side effect thresholds during initial programming were slightly lower in the MER group, but clinical benefit thresholds were similar. No significant difference in the reduction of clinical symptoms or medication dosage was observed. In summary, iMRI lead implantation occurred with greater anatomic accuracy, in locations demonstrated to be the appropriate functional region of the STN, based on the observation of similar programming side effect and benefit thresholds obtained with MER. The production of equivalent clinical outcomes suggests that surgeon and patient preference can be used to guide the decision of whether to recommend iMRI or MER-guided DBS lead implantation to appropriate patients with PD.
White Matter Hyperintensities and Cognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease: A Domain-Specific Meta-Analysis.

BACKGROUND White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are related to cognitive dysfunction in the general population. The clinical relevance of WMHs in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is, however, unclear. OBJECTIVE This meta-analysis aimed to quantify the association of WMHs and specific cognitive domains in patients with MCI or AD. METHODS PubMed (January 1990-January 2017) was searched for studies that used MRI to quantify WMHs, and measured cognitive functioning (≥1 predefined cognitive domain with ≥1 test) in a well-defined population of persons diagnosed with MCI or AD. Fischer's Z was used as the common metric for effect size. Modifying effects of demographics, MMSE, and WMH location were examined. RESULTS Twelve cross-sectional studies on AD (total n = 1,370, median age 75 years) and 10 studies on MCI (9 cross-sectional, 1 longitudinal; total n = 2,286, median age 73 years) were included. The association between WMHs and overall cognition was significantly stronger for MCI (-0.25, -0.36 to -0.14) than for AD (-0.11, -0.14 to -0.08; QM = 10.7, p < 0.05). For both groups, largest effect sizes were found in attention and executive functions (-0.26, -0.36 to -0.15) and processing speed (-0.21, -0.35 to -0.12). No significant modifying effects of age and gender were found. CONCLUSION WMHs have a medium-sized association with different cognitive functions in patients with MCI and a small, but statistically significant, association with cognition in AD. These result underscore the role of co-occurring vascular brain damage in MCI and AD.
Top-k Selection based on Adaptive Sampling of Noisy Preferences

We consider the problem of reliably selecting an optimal subset of fixed size from a given set of choice alternatives, based on noisy information about the quality of these alternatives. Problems of similar kind have been tackled by means of adaptive sampling schemes called racing algorithms. However, in contrast to existing approaches, we do not assume that each alternative is characterized by a real-valued random variable, and that samples are taken from the corresponding distributions. Instead, we only assume that alternatives can be compared in terms of pairwise preferences. We propose and formally analyze a general preference-based racing algorithm that we instantiate with three specific ranking procedures and corresponding sampling schemes. Experiments with real and synthetic data are presented to show the efficiency of our approach.
Learning Longer-term Dependencies in RNNs with Auxiliary Losses

Despite recent advances in training recurrent neural networks (RNNs), capturing long-term dependencies in sequences remains a fundamental challenge. Most approaches use backpropagation through time (BPTT), which is difficult to scale to very long sequences. This paper proposes a simple method that improves the ability to capture long term dependencies in RNNs by adding an unsupervised auxiliary loss to the original objective. This auxiliary loss forces RNNs to either reconstruct previous events or predict next events in a sequence, making truncated backpropagation feasible for long sequences and also improving full BPTT. We evaluate our method on a variety of settings, including pixel-by-pixel image classification with sequence lengths up to 16\,000, and a real document classification benchmark. Our results highlight good performance and resource efficiency of this approach over competitive baselines, including other recurrent models and a comparable sized Transformer. Further analyses reveal beneficial effects of the auxiliary loss on optimization and regularization, as well as extreme cases where there is little to no backpropagation.
Recent Advances in Medical Science

The diagnosis of oesophageal diseases, apart from the ordinary simpl6 and malignant stricture, is often a matter of no little difficulty, and f? r this reason a short review of some recent papers on diseases of the organ may not he without practical interest. Dilatation of the oesophagus without stenosis of the cardia is dealt with in a paper by Kelling (Arch. f. Verdauungskr., Berlin, 1903, Bdix. Heft 3.) The subject of the article was a woman, set. 69, who had always been in the habit of eating quickly and swallowing food in large
Question Answering over Freebase via Attentive RNN with Similarity Matrix based CNN

With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs), question answering over knowledge base, a.k. a. KBQA has drawn huge attention in recent years. Most of the existing KBQA methods follow so called encoder-compare framework. They map the question and the KB facts to a common embedding space, in which the similarity between the question vector and the fact vectors can be conveniently computed. This, however, inevitably loses original words interaction information. To preserve more original information, we propose an attentive recurrent neural network with similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (AR-SMCNN) model, which is able to capture comprehensive hierarchical information utilizing the advantages of both RNN and CNN. We use RNN to capture semantic-level correlation by its sequential modeling nature, and use an attention mechanism to keep track of the entities and relations simultaneously. Meanwhile, we use a similarity matrix based CNN with two-directions pooling to extract literal-level words interaction matching utilizing CNNs strength of modeling spatial correlation among data. Moreover, we have developed a new heuristic extension method for entity detection, which significantly decreases the effect of noise. Our method has outperformed the state-of-the-arts on SimpleQuestion benchmark in both accuracy and efficiency.
¡ ects on di ¡ using capacity and ventilation ^ perfusion relationships of budesonide inhalations for 2 months in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( COPD )

Forced expiratory volumes are reduced in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), mainly as a result of in£ammatory andmorphological changes in the small airways (with a diameter52mm) and in the alveoli. However, it is di⁄cult to detect minor changes in small airways by spirometrymeasurements.To study the e¡ects on small airways of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS),19 stable COPD patients were investigated; 15 were evaluated by ventilation^ perfusion (VA/Q) relationships, assessed by the multiple inert gas elimination technique, and by di¡using capacity for carbonmonoxide (DLCO), assessed by the single breath technique.Measurementswere repeated after 2 months of budesonideinhalations (800 mg) twice daily.Before ICStreatment: meanforcedexpiratory volumein1sec (FEV1) as apercentage ofpredicted (% P)was 40? 1 (+16? 0)%,DLCO%Pwas 45? 7 (+25? 0)% and 6? 0 (+6? 4)% oftheventilationwasdirected athighVA/Qareas.ThemeanoftheVA/Q ratio for ventilation (V-mean) was 2? 7 timeshigher thannormal. After 2 months of ICS: themeanof DLCO% Pincreasedby 8? 6 (+19? 4)%, and FEV1/vital capacitydecreasedby 6? 9 (+11? 3)%. Basalmorningand ACTH-stimulated S-cortisollevelswere signi¢cantlyreduced.AlltheVA/Q relationshipsremainedunchanged.In conclusion, a signi¢cant increase in di¡usion capacity for carbon monoxide levels after treatment with corticosteroid inhalations for 2 monthswas shown, but no signi¢cant improvementswere found in forced expiratory air£ow, lung volumes, orVA/Q relationships. c 2001Harcourt Publishers Ltd doi:10.1053/rmed.2001. 1124, available online athttp://www.idealibrary. comon
The Strength and Hydrothermal Stability of Y-TZP Ceramics for Dental Applications

Effects of dental grinding, sandblasting, fatigue, and aging on the biaxial flexural strength of yttria partially stabilized tetragonal zirconia ceramics were evaluated. Grinding lowers the mean strength and reliability under static and cyclic loading. In contrast, sandblasting provides a powerful tool for surface strengthening; it also hinders the propagation of the diffusion-controlled transformation during exposure to aqueous environments. By introducing moderate porosity, a reasonable compromise between the mechanical strength and the elastic modulus has been achieved. Such biscuit-sintered specimens also exhibited full hydrothermal stability. Novel experimental dental root posts were designed that exhibit certain advantages over the zirconia posts already in clinical use.
Dental caries and weight among children in Nuuk, Greenland, at school entry

ABSTRACT Objective: To explore the possible association between weight class and prevalence of caries among children born 2005-2007, living in Nuuk, Greenland, at time of school entry. Design: A cross-sectional register study based on data from electronic medical records(EMR) and oral health data from public health and dental care facilities. Methods: Data from routine examinations of children at time of primary school entry, including height and weight, were obtained from the EMRs. Dental charts recording oral health and caries were collected from public dental healthcare service. The prevalence of caries was calculated as the proportion of included children with dft score (decayed and/or filled non-permanent teeth) ≥1. Results: 55%(373/681) had relevant data recorded in EMRs and dental charts, and could be included in the study. The prevalence of dental caries was 57.1%(213/373). The prevalence of caries increased with higher weight class,but no statistically significant trend was observed(p=0.063). Conclusions: Increasing prevalence of caries with increasing weight class was observed in this study. A linear trend could not be confirmed statistically. The high prevalence of caries and overweight indicate the need for continued focus on preventative initiatives and monitoring. A combined strategy targeting both caries and overweight may be considered.
Neocortical Chandelier Cells Developmentally Shape Axonal Arbors through Reorganization but Establish Subcellular Synapse Specificity without Refinement

Visual Abstract Diverse types of cortical interneurons (INs) mediate various kinds of inhibitory control mechanisms to balance and shape network activity. Distinct IN subtypes develop uniquely organized axonal arbors that innervate different subcellular compartments of excitatory principal neurons (PNs), which critically contribute to determining their output properties. However, it remains poorly understood how they establish this peculiar axonal organization and synaptic connectivity during development. Here, taking advantage of genetic labeling of IN progenitors, we examined developmental processes of axonal arbors and synaptic connections formed by murine chandelier cells (ChCs), which innervate axon initial segments (AISs) of PNs and thus powerfully regulate their spike generation. Our quantitative analysis by light microscopy revealed that ChCs overgrow and subsequently refine axonal branches as well as varicosities. Interestingly, we found that although a significant number of axonal varicosities are formed off AISs in addition to on AISs, presynaptic markers are predominantly colocalized with those on AISs throughout development. Immunoelectron microscopic (IEM) analysis also demonstrated that only varicosities apposed to AISs contain presynaptic profiles. These results suggest that subcellular synapse specificity of ChCs is genetically predetermined while axonal geometry is shaped through remodeling. Molecular cues localized at AISs may regulate target recognition and synapse formation by ChCs.