Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of pedicle-lengthening osteotomy on spinal canal volume and neural foramen size in three types of lumbar spinal stenosis

Objectives Pedicle-lengthening osteotomy is a novel surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS), which achieves substantial enlargement of the spinal canal by expansion of the bilateral pedicle osteotomy sites. Few studies have evaluated the impact of this new surgery on spinal canal volume (SCV) and neural foramen dimension (NFD) in three different types of LSS patients. Methods CT scans were performed on 36 LSS patients (12 central canal stenosis (CCS), 12 lateral recess stenosis (LRS), and 12 foraminal stenosis (FS)) at L4-L5, and on 12 normal (control) subjects. Mimics 14.01 workstation was used to reconstruct 3D models of the L4-L5 vertebrae and discs. SCV and NFD were measured after 1 mm, 2 mm, 3 mm, 4 mm, or 5 mm pedicle-lengthening osteotomies at L4 and/or L5. One-way analysis of variance was used to examine between-group differences. Results In the intact state, SVC and NFD were significantly larger in the control group compared with the LSS groups (P<0.05). After lengthening at L4, the percentage increase in SCV (per millimetre) was LRS>CCS>FS>Control. After lengthening at L5 and L4-L5, the percentage increase in SCV (per millimetre) was LRS>FS>CCS>Control. After lengthening at L4 and L4-L5, the percentage increase in NFD (per millimetre) was FS>CCS>LRS>Control. After lengthening at L5, the percentage increase in NFD (per millimetre) was CCS>LRS>control>FS. Conclusions LRS patients are the most suitable candidates for treatment with pedicle-lengthening osteotomy. Lengthening L4 pedicles produced larger percentage increases in NFD than lengthening L5 pedicles (p < 0.05). Lengthening L4 pedicles may be the most effective option for relieving foraminal compression in LSS patients. Cite this article: P. Li, L. Qian, W. D. Wu, C. F. Wu, J. Ouyang. Impact of pedicle-lengthening osteotomy on spinal canal volume and neural foramen size in three types of lumbar spinal stenosis. Bone Joint Res 2016;5:239–246. DOI: 10.1302/2046-3758.56. 2000469.
Mining Educational Data Using Classification to Decrease Dropout Rate of Students

In the last two decades, number of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) grows rapidly in India. Since most of the institutions are opened in private mode therefore, a cut throat competition rises among these institutions while attracting the student to got admission. This is the reason for institutions to focus on the strength of students not on the quality of education. This paper presents a data mining application to generate predictive models for engineering student's dropout management. Given new records of incoming students, the predictive model can produce short accurate prediction list identifying students who tend to need the support from the student dropout program most. The results show that the machine learning algorithm is able to establish effective predictive model from the existing student dropout data.
A framework for temporal data models: exploiting object-oriented technology

Most database research on modeling time has concentrated on the definition of a particular temporal model and its incorporation into a (relational or object) database management system. This has resulted in quite a large number of different temporal models, each providing a specific set of temporal features. This paper presents an object-oriented framework for temporal models which supports multiple notions of time. The framework can be used to accommodate the temporal needs of different applications and to derive existing temporal models by making a series of design decisions through subclass specialization. It can also be used to derive a series of new, more general temporal models that meet the needs of a growing number of emerging applications.
How to manage lung infiltrates in adults suffering from haematological malignancies outside allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation

Pulmonary complications affect up to 40% of patients with severe neutropenia lasting for more than 10 d. As they are frequently associated with fever and elevation of C‐reactive protein or other signs of inflammation, they are mostly handled as pneumonia. However, the differential diagnosis is broad, and a causative microbial agent remains undetected in the majority of cases. Pulmonary side effects from cytotoxic treatment or pulmonary involvement by the underlying malignancy must always be taken into account and may provide grounds for invasive diagnostic procedures in selected patients. Pneumocystis jirovecii (in patients not receiving co‐trimoxazole as prophylaxis), multi‐resistant gram‐negative bacilli, mycobacteria or respiratory viruses may be involved. High‐risk patients may be infected by filamentous fungi, such as Aspergillus spp. , but these infections are seldom proven when treatment is initiated. Microorganisms isolated from cultures of blood, bronchoalveolar lavage or respiratory secretions need careful interpretation as they may be irrelevant for determining the aetiology of pulmonary infiltrates, particularly when cultures yield coagulase‐negative staphylococci, enterococci or Candida species. Non‐culture based diagnostics for detecting Aspergillus galactomannan, beta‐D‐glucan or DNA from blood, bronchoalveolar lavage or tissue samples can facilitate the diagnosis, but must always be interpreted in the context of clinical and imaging findings. Systemic antifungal treatment with mould‐active agents, given in combination with broad‐spectrum antibiotics, improves clinical outcome when given pre‐emptively. Co‐trimoxazole remains the first‐line treatment for Pneumocystis pneumonia, while cytomegalovirus pneumonia will respond to ganciclovir or foscarnet in most cases. The clinical outcome of acute respiratory failure can also be successful with proper intensive care, when indicated.
General anesthesia with thoracic paravertebral block for modified radical mastectomy.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of single-injection paravertebral block (PVB) combined with general anesthesia on 24-hour postoperative morphine requirement in patients undergoing modified radical mastectomy (MRM). MATERIAL AND METHOD 20 patients were randomly assigned into 2 groups. Patients in the control group were given only general anesthesia. Patients in the PVB group received 0.3 ml/kg of 0.5% plain bupivacaine at T4 paravertebral space followed by general anesthesia. Both groups received intravenous morphine patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) device postoperatively. All patients were evaluated at 1 and 24 hours for pain, nausea and vomiting. Twenty-four hour morphine consumption, antiemetics requirement, and overall satisfaction were recorded. RESULTS Patients with PVB had lower incidence and severity of postoperative pain, nausea and vomiting and other serious complications. No patients were unsatisfied with anesthetic techniques. CONCLUSION PVB can reduce postoperative opioid requirement, pain, and severity of nausea and vomiting in MRM.
Polyp bailout in Pocillopora damicornis following thermal stress

Polyp bailout is an established but understudied coral stress response that involves the detachment of individual polyps from the colonial form as a means of escaping unfavourable conditions. This may influence both the mortality and asexual recruitment of coral genotypes across a range of species. It has been observed in response to numerous stressors including high salinity and low pH. Polyp expulsion in association with thermal stress has once been described in a geographically restricted, temperate species. We therefore cannot reliably apply this observation to tropical coral reefs around the world, which are increasingly under threat from thermal stress events. We present the first qualitative observation of polyp bailout following acute temperature shock in a near-natural mesocosm experiment. Detached polyps show similar characteristics to those described in previous studies, including the retention of endosymbiotic zooxanthellae and the ability to disperse across short distances. This finding strongly suggests that polyp bailout occurs in tropical coral reef environments and warrants further detailed research into the implication of this response in terms of individual survival, rapid migration into cooler micro-habitats and local recruitment within the reef environment and its coral community.
On Time Bounds, the Work-Time Scheduling Principle, and Optimality for BSR

Constant time solutions for many applications have been obtained on BSR, but some theoretical problems on BSR (broadcasting with selective reduction) that raised when BSR was proposed have not been solved. Three of them are: 1) No lower bound for any problem on BSR is known except trivial constant time, 2) is there any improvement with nonconstant BSR time but still better than the lower bound for CRCW? , and 3) how to characterize problems for which BSR achieves constant time performance. In this paper, we have solved these three problems. For Problem 1, a lower bound on BSR is shown for any computational problem with an optimal sequential solution. An efficient sorting algorithm answers the second problem. A necessary condition is given for the third problem. The work-time (WT) scheduling principle and optimality for BSR are also introduced for investigating the BSR performance when the number of processors available, p, is different from the input size, n, of problems.
Manga colorization

This paper proposes a novel colorization technique that propagates color over regions exhibiting pattern-continuity as well as intensity-continuity. The proposed method works effectively on colorizing black-and-white manga which contains intensive amount of strokes, hatching, halftoning and screening. Such fine details and discontinuities in intensity introduce many difficulties to intensity-based colorization methods. Once the user scribbles on the drawing, a local, statistical based pattern feature obtained with Gabor wavelet filters is applied to measure the pattern-continuity. The boundary is then propagated by the level set method that monitors the pattern-continuity. Regions with open boundaries or multiple disjointed regions with similar patterns can be sensibly segmented by a single scribble. With the segmented regions, various colorization techniques can be applied to replace colors, colorize with stroke preservation, or even convert pattern to shading. Several results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness and convenience of the proposed method.
Effect of Postoperative Repair Integrity on Health-Related Quality of Life After Rotator Cuff Repair

Background: Although rotator cuff repair is performed to improve health-related quality of life (HRQL) by reducing pain and improving shoulder function, it has not been clearly demonstrated that HRQL is improved in retear cases. Purpose: To compare HRQL outcomes after rotator cuff repair between patients with healed cuffs and those with retears using the Short Form–36 Health Survey (SF-36). Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: A total of 81 patients who underwent rotator cuff repair were enrolled in this study. There were 56 patients in the healed group and 25 patients in the retear group. The mean age at the time of surgery was 56 years (range, 35-73 years) in the healed group and 59.7 years (range, 45-74 years) in the retear group. The mean follow-up period was 29.7 months (range, 14-95 months) and 26.4 months (range, 13-101 months) in the healed and retear groups, respectively. Results: At final follow-up, the SF-36 scores for physical and mental component summaries (PCS and MCS, respectively) revealed significant improvement, from 36.6 to 51.2 (PCS) and 34.4 to 51.6 (MCS) in the healed group (P < .0001 in both cases) and from 34.2 to 49.4 (PCS) and 33.4 to 53.2 (MCS) in the retear group (P < .0001 in both cases). Mean scores on the SF-36 subscale for role limitations because of physical health problems (RP) were 52.3 in the healed group and 50.6 in the retear group. The RP and PCS scores were significantly higher in the healed group (P = .007 and P = .025, respectively). All domains and component summaries also had a fair to moderate correlation (range, 0.296-0.496) with the SF-36 score. Conclusion: Although clinical shoulder outcome measures (University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA] and American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons [ASES] scores) and all dimensions of the SF-36 showed significant improvement in both groups after rotator cuff repair, scores were significantly higher in the healed group on RP and PCS of the SF-36 as well as on the UCLA and ASES. There was no significant difference in MCS scores between the 2 groups. Despite similar improvements in the MCS scores, there were apparent objective differences between the groups. The values were statistically significant but clinically not significant for some of these measures.
SeqFold: Genome-scale reconstruction of RNA secondary structure integrating high-throughput sequencing data

We present an integrative approach, SeqFold, that combines high-throughput RNA structure profiling data with computational prediction for genome-scale reconstruction of RNA secondary structures. SeqFold transforms experimental RNA structure information into a structure preference profile (SPP) and uses it to select stable RNA structure candidates representing the structure ensemble. Under a high-dimensional classification framework, SeqFold efficiently matches a given SPP to the most likely cluster of structures sampled from the Boltzmann-weighted ensemble. SeqFold is able to incorporate diverse types of RNA structure profiling data, including parallel analysis of RNA structure (PARS), selective 2′-hydroxyl acylation analyzed by primer extension sequencing (SHAPE-Seq), fragmentation sequencing (FragSeq) data generated by deep sequencing, and conventional SHAPE data. Using the known structures of a wide range of mRNAs and noncoding RNAs as benchmarks, we demonstrate that SeqFold outperforms or matches existing approaches in accuracy and is more robust to noise in experimental data. Application of SeqFold to reconstruct the secondary structures of the yeast transcriptome reveals the diverse impact of RNA secondary structure on gene regulation, including translation efficiency, transcription initiation, and protein-RNA interactions. SeqFold can be easily adapted to incorporate any new types of high-throughput RNA structure profiling data and is widely applicable to analyze RNA structures in any transcriptome.
On convex relaxation of graph isomorphism

Significance Graphs are a ubiquitous mathematical abstraction used in numerous problems in science and engineering. Of particular importance is the need to find the best structure-preserving matching of graphs. Since graph matching (GM) is a computationally intractable problem, numerous heuristics exist to approximate its solution. An important class of GM heuristics is relaxation techniques based on replacing the original problem by a continuous convex program. Conditions for applicability or inapplicability of such convex relaxations are poorly understood. In this study, we propose easy to check spectral properties to characterize a wide family of graphs for which we prove equivalence of convex relaxation to the exact GM. We consider the problem of exact and inexact matching of weighted undirected graphs, in which a bijective correspondence is sought to minimize a quadratic weight disagreement. This computationally challenging problem is often relaxed as a convex quadratic program, in which the space of permutations is replaced by the space of doubly stochastic matrices. However, the applicability of such a relaxation is poorly understood. We define a broad class of friendly graphs characterized by an easily verifiable spectral property. We prove that for friendly graphs, the convex relaxation is guaranteed to find the exact isomorphism or certify its inexistence. This result is further extended to approximately isomorphic graphs, for which we develop an explicit bound on the amount of weight disagreement under which the relaxation is guaranteed to find the globally optimal approximate isomorphism. We also show that in many cases, the graph matching problem can be further harmlessly relaxed to a convex quadratic program with only n separable linear equality constraints, which is substantially more efficient than the standard relaxation involving 2n equality and n2 inequality constraints. Finally, we show that our results are still valid for unfriendly graphs if additional information in the form of seeds or attributes is allowed, with the latter satisfying an easy to verify spectral characteristic.
Influence of fast rise voltage and pressure on partial discharges in liquid embedded power electronics

Initiation of partial discharges at the highly stressed regions of an Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) can lead to degradation of the insulation and eventual total breakdown of the system. In this work, an experimental setup has been designed for the study of partial discharges (PDs) under different voltage waveforms. PD behavior of IGBT insulation was investigated using conventional and optical techniques. Influence of pressure and voltage wave shape is documented. The test environment was first characterized with point-plane geometry under sinusoidal and slow rise square voltage of up to 20 kVpeak and fast rise square voltage of up to +50 kV. The measured electrical and optical PDs showed good correlation, revealing that optical PDs can be relied on for the characterization of PD phenomena. High slew rate of the square voltage reduced the inception voltage and increased magnitude. The PD pattern from the trench shows the existence of space charges. The PDs which occurred within the triple point region are most likely attracted along the board interface and become surface discharges. Pressure suppresses the initiation and propagation of the discharge.
Distinguished properties of the gamma process, and related topics

We study fundamental properties of the gamma process and their relation to various topics such as Poisson-Dirichlet measures and stable processes. We prove the quasi-invariance of the gamma process with respect to a large group of linear transformations. We also show that it is a renormalized limit of the stable processes and has an equivalent sigma-finite measure (quasi-Lebesgue) with important invariance properties. New properties of the gamma process can be applied to the Poisson-Dirichlet measures. We also emphasize the deep similarity between the gamma process and the Brownian motion. The connection of the above topics makes more transparent some old and new facts about stable and gamma processes, and the Poisson-Dirichlet measures.
Slow molecular evolution in 18S rDNA, rbcL and nad5 genes of mosses compared with higher plants

The evolutionary potential of bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornworts) has been debated for decades. Fossil record and biogeographical distribution patterns suggest very slow morphological evolution and the retainment of several ancient traits since the split with vascular plants some 450 million years ago. Many have argued that bryophytes may evolve as rapidly as higher plants on the molecular level, but this hypothesis has not been tested so far. Here, it is shown that mosses have experienced significantly lower rates of molecular evolution than higher plants within 18S rDNA (nuclear), rbcL (chloroplast) and nad5 (mitochondrial) genes. Mosses are on an average evolving 2–3 times slower than ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms; and also green algae seem to be evolving faster than nonvascular plants. These results support the observation of a general correlation between morphological and molecular evolutionary rates in plants and also show that mosses are ‘evolutionary sphinxes’ regarding both morphological and molecular evolutionary potential.
How ubiquitination and autophagy participate in the regulation of the cell response to bacterial infection

Bacterial infection relies on the micro‐organism's ability to orchestrate the host's cell signalling such that the immune response is not activated. Conversely, the host cell has dedicated signalling pathways for coping with intrusions by pathogens. The autophagy of foreign micro‐organisms (known as xenophagy) has emerged as one of the most powerful of these pathways, although the triggering mode remains largely unknown. In the present paper, we discuss the role that certain post‐translational modifications (primarily ubiquitination) may play in the activation of xenophagy and how some bacteria have evolved mechanisms to subvert or hijack this process. In particular, we address the role played by P62/SQSTM1 (sequestosome 1). Finally, we discuss how autophagy can be subverted to eliminate bacteria‐induced danger signals.
Destruction of Sun-Grazing Comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO) Within the Low Solar Corona

Star Grazing Some comets come perilously close to the Sun. Schrijver et al. (p. 324; see the Perspective by Lisse) describe observations made by the Solar Dynamics Observatory of one such Sun-grazing comet, which penetrated into, fragmented, and completely sublimated within the solar atmosphere. More than 2000 Sun-grazing comets have been observed in the past 15 years but none could be followed into the Sun's atmosphere. By showing that comets can be observed at such small distances from the Sun, this study opens up new ways to study comets and also the solar atmosphere. The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory detected and tracked a comet as it penetrated the solar atmosphere. Observations of comets in Sun-grazing orbits that survive solar insolation long enough to penetrate into the Sun’s inner corona provide information on the solar atmosphere and magnetic field as well as on the makeup of the comet. On 6 July 2011, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the demise of comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO) within the low solar corona in five wavelength bands in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV). The comet penetrated to within 0.146 solar radius (~100,000 kilometers) of the solar surface before its EUV signal disappeared. Before that, material released into the coma—at first seen in absorption—formed a variable EUV-bright tail. During the final 10 minutes of observation by SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, ~6 × 108 to 6 × 1010 grams of total mass was lost (corresponding to an effective nucleus diameter of ~10 to 50 meters), as estimated from the tail’s deceleration due to interaction with the surrounding coronal material; the EUV absorption by the comet and the brightness of the tail suggest that the mass was at the high end of this range. These observations provide evidence that the nucleus had broken up into a family of fragments, resulting in accelerated sublimation in the Sun’s intense radiation field.
FLARING SOLAR HALE SECTOR BOUNDARIES

The sector structure that organizes the magnetic field of the solar wind into large-scale domains has a clear pattern in the photospheric magnetic field as well. The rotation rate, 27–28.5 days, implies an effectively rigid rotation originating deeper in the solar interior than the sunspots. The photospheric magnetic field is known to be concentrated near that portion (the Hale boundary) in each solar hemisphere, where the change in magnetic sector polarity matches that between the leading and following sunspot polarities in active regions in the respective hemispheres. We report here that flares and microflares also concentrate at the Hale boundaries, implying that flux emergence and the creation of free magnetic energy in the corona also have a direct cause in the deep interior.