Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum prealbumin is a predictive biomarker for stroke-associated infection after an ischemic stroke

Background: Several prior studies have linked serum prealbumin (PA) as a predictor for perioperative infection. However, whether peripheral blood PA levels can be used as an indicator of stroke-associated infection (SAI) is still unclear. In this study, we attempt to find whether serum PA is a meaningful predictor in SAI after an ischemic stroke, so as to provide theoretical basis for clinical treatment. Methods: Consecutive patients with acute ischemic stroke who were admitted to our hospital were enrolled and serum PA was collected. A prospective study was conducted to observe the predictive value of PA in the SAI incident in ischemic stroke patients. Results: Of 104 patients, 29 (27.9%) developed an SAI after 7 d of follow-up. The stroke with SAI group had significantly lower PA levels than the stroke without SAI group ( p < 0.05). The optimal cutoff value for predicting SAI was PA ≤ 191 mg/L, with sensitivity and specificity of 58.62% and 81.33%, respectively. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis showed that stroke patients with low serum PA level (PA ≤ 191 mg/L) had a higher SAI rates (log-rank test, χ2 = 16.870, p < 0.001). Cox regression analysis showed that PA ≤ 191 mg/L (hazard ratio = 3.207; 95% CI, 1.430–7.190, p = 0.005) was an independent risk factor for SAI. Conclusions: Early detection of serum PA during the acute phase of ischemic stroke may help us to identify at-risk SAI patients, and hence rapidly guide the intervention to prevent SAI.
Photoprotective Effects of Topical Formulations Containing a Combination of Ginkgo biloba and Green Tea Extracts

The beneficial photoprotective effects of topical formulations containing combined extracts of Ginkgo biloba (GB) and green tea (GT) have not been investigated. The present study aims to assess the photoprotective effects of topical formulations containing GB and GT combined or not by applications on the dorsal skin of hairless mice prior to UVA/B irradiation. After 20 h, skin barrier damage (TEWL), erythema, histological alterations and sunburn cell formation were evaluated. The results showed that only extract supplemented formulations protected the skin against the UV‐induced damage. Formulations containing GB provided total protection of the skin barrier function avoiding UV radiation damage such as TEWL and erythema and were more effective than those containing GT. However, it is suggested that formulations containing combined GB and GT may provide substantial photoprotective effects since different aspects of skin damage were influenced by each extract. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Generative Models of Visually Grounded Imagination

It is easy for people to imagine what a man with pink hair looks like, even if they have never seen such a person before. We call the ability to create images of novel semantic concepts visually grounded imagination. In this paper, we show how we can modify variational auto-encoders to perform this task. Our method uses a novel training objective, and a novel product-of-experts inference network, which can handle partially specified (abstract) concepts in a principled and efficient way. We also propose a set of easy-to-compute evaluation metrics that capture our intuitive notions of what it means to have good visual imagination, namely correctness, coverage, and compositionality (the 3 C's). Finally, we perform a detailed comparison of our method with two existing joint image-attribute VAE methods (the JMVAE method of Suzuki et.al. and the BiVCCA method of Wang et.al.) by applying them to two datasets: the MNIST-with-attributes dataset (which we introduce here), and the CelebA dataset.
Understanding the Rapid Reduction of Undernutrition in Nepal, 2001–2011

South Asia has long been synonymous with unusually high rates of undernutrition. In the past decade, however, Nepal has arguably achieved the fastest recorded decline in child stunting in the world and has done so in the midst of civil war and post-conflict political instability. Given recent interest in reducing undernutrition–particularly the role of nutrition-sensitive policies–this paper aims to quantitatively understand this surprising success story by analyzing the 2001, 2006, and 2011 rounds of Nepal’s Demographic Health Surveys. To do so, we construct models of the intermediate determinants of child and maternal nutritional change and then decompose predicted changes in nutrition outcomes over time. We identify four broad drivers of change: asset accumulation, health and nutrition interventions, maternal educational gains, and improvements in sanitation. Many of these changes were clearly influenced by policy decisions, including increased public investments in health and education and community-led health and sanitation campaigns. Other factors, such as rapid growth in migration-based remittances, are more a reflection of household responses to changing political and economic circumstances.
Using BIM to integrate and achieve holistic future-proofing objectives in healthcare projects

Future-proofing (FP) as a proactive initiative for asset management is an urgent need against uncertainty, particularly in health care due to unforeseeable demographic shifts and rapid advances in medical technology. Building information modelling (BIM) is a data-driven initiative, but a rigorous analysis between them will indicate that a synergy exists. The aim of this study is to develop a classification ontology of the interactions between FP and BIM by considering the perceptions of health care construction experts. Interviews with 13 senior managers were conducted adopting the method of interpretative phenomenological analysis and an interaction matrix of BIM capabilities for implementing holistic FP objectives has been developed. The outcome is a taxonomy analysis of 30 interactions with supporting empirical evidence which was further measured quantitatively. For benefits realization in the context of BIM and FP, the industry experts recognize FP as a strategy that supports organizational and building performance. BIM drives towards life cycle operation information and data maintainability via communicating the FP strategy from a whole-life perspective and ensuring knowledge transfer across all stages. Health care Operators and construction experts should be able to benefit from this taxonomy analysis as an aid to planning for FP throughout their BIM processes.
Interference of spin states in photoemission from Sb/Ag(111) surface alloys

Using a three-dimensional spin polarimeter we have gathered evidence for the interference of spin states in photoemission from the surface alloy Sb/Ag(111). This system features a small Rashba-type spin splitting of a size comparable to the momentum broadening of the quasiparticles, thus causing an intrinsic overlap between states with orthogonal spinors. Besides a small spin polarization caused by the spin splitting, we observe a large spin polarization component in the plane normal to the quantization axis of the Rashba effect. Strongly suggestive of coherent spin rotation, this effect is largely independent of the photon energy and photon polarization.
Gated additive skip context connection for object detection

Context information plays an important role in object detection. DeepID concatenates the global context for classification, while Yolo, SSD, and Crafting use local context information for detection. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to plug the global context information into the Faster RCNN Framework, namely the Skip Context Connection (SCC). We use SCC to inject the global context into the object representation which skips the RoiPooling layer rather than drops it. Therefore, it can not only leverage the context information but also keep the location accuracy from the RCNN framework. We proposed three principles to construct the SCC blocks: effectiveness means fewer parameters, additivity means the features possess the same meaning, and selectable means soft gated addition. We also evaluate several different SCC blocks. The Gated Additive SCC(GA-SCC) which satisfy the three principles get the best performance. Our experiment results on PASCAL VOC 2007 show that GA-SCC can get the steady 1% improvement over the traditional RCNN method.
Investment-Banking Relationships: 1933-2007

We study the evolution of investment bank relationships with issuers from 1933-2007. The degree to which issuers conditioned upon prior relationship strength when selecting an investment bank declined steadily after the 1960s. The issuer's probability of selecting a bank with strong relationships with its competitors also declined after the 1970s. In contrast, issuers have placed an increasing emphasis upon the quantity and the quality of their investment bank's connections with other banks. We relate the structural changes in bank/client relationships beginning in the 1970s to technological changes that altered the institutional constraints under which security issuance occurs.
Pathologic heterogeneity of lung adenocarcinomas: A novel pathologic index predicts survival

Although the most predominant subtype of invasive lung adenocarcinoma has been reported to have clinical significance, a major limitation of this concept is that most tumors are mixed-subtype. Therefore, we aimed to determine the individual prognostic significance of each subtype and also attempted to establish a pathologic index that reflects the pathologic subtypes and overall heterogeneity of lung adenocarcinomas and evaluated its prognostic significance. The individual prognostic impact of each subtype was assessed from the development cohort using the disease-free survival (DFS) curve of a previous large-scale study. Hazard ratios (HRs) from the development cohort were 1, 1.025, 1.059, 1.495, and 1.160 for the lepidic, acinar, papillary, micropapillary, and solid pattern subtype, respectively. Based on the calculated HR of each subtype, four indices representing pathologic heterogeneity were developed. The first and second indices were defined as the sum of the proportions of each subtype multiplied by their HRs, with the addition of either entropy or Gini coefficient, respectively. The third index was calculated as the sum of all subtype percentages multiplied by their HRs. To emphasize heterogeneity, the fourth index was defined as the simple arithmetic sum of the scores of the subtypes multiplied by their HRs. Each subtype was assigned a score of 0 if the subtype was absent and a score of 1 if the subtype was present in a binary fashion. We applied these four pathologic indices to a validation group of 148 patients with comprehensive histologic subtyping for completely resected lung adenocarcinomas. DFS curves were plotted and predictive ability of each pathologic index was evaluated. Among the four pathologic indices, only pathologic index 3 enabled significant patient stratification in the validation cohort according to DFS (P = 0.004) and showed the highest Harrell's C index of 0.691 of all four pathologic indices. In conclusion, we estimated the HR of each subtype and generated four pathologic indices that reflect heterogeneity. One of these, index 3, the pathologic heterogeneity index based on the sum of all subtype percentages multiplied by their HR, possesses good prognostic ability for predicting survival in patients with lung adenocarcinoma.
Pubertal Escape From Estradiol Negative Feedback in Ewe Lambs Is Not Accounted for by Decreased ESR1 mRNA or Protein in Kisspeptin Neurons

In this study, we investigated whether decreased sensitivity to estradiol negative feedback is associated with reduced estrogen receptor α (ESR1) expression in kisspeptin neurons as ewe lambs approach puberty. Lambs were ovariectomized and received no implant (OVX) or an implant containing estradiol (OVX+E). In the middle arcuate nucleus (mARC), ESR1 messenger RNA (mRNA) was greater in OVX than OVX+E lambs but did not differ elsewhere. Post hoc analysis of luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion from OVX+E lambs revealed three patterns of LH pulsatility: low [1 to 2 pulses per 12 hours; low frequency (LF), n = 3], moderate [6 to 7 pulses per 12 hours; moderate frequency (MF), n = 6], and high [>10 pulses per 12 hours; high frequency (HF), n = 5]. The percentage of kisspeptin neurons containing ESR1 mRNA in the preoptic area did not differ among HF, MF, or LF groups. However, the percentage of kisspeptin neurons containing ESR1 mRNA in the mARC was greater in HF (57%) than in MF (36%) or LF (27%) lambs and did not differ from OVX (50%) lambs. A higher percentage of kisspeptin neurons contained ESR1 protein in all regions of the arcuate nucleus (ARC) in OVX compared with OVX+E lambs. There were no differences in ESR1 protein among the HF, MF, or LF groups in the preoptic area or ARC. Contrary to our hypothesis, increases in LH pulsatility were associated with enhanced ESR1 mRNA abundance in kisspeptin neurons in the ARC, and absence of estradiol increased the percentage of kisspeptin neurons containing ESR1 protein in the ARC. Therefore, changes in the expression of ESR1, particularly in kisspeptin neurons in the ARC, do not explain the pubertal escape from estradiol negative feedback in ewe lambs.
Defining Aging Phenotypes and Related Outcomes: Clues to Recognize Frailty in Hospitalized Older Patients

Background Because frailty is a complex phenomenon associated with poor outcomes, the identification of patient profiles with different care needs might be of greater practical help than to look for a unifying definition. This study aimed at identifying aging phenotypes and their related outcomes in order to recognize frailty in hospitalized older patients. Methods Patients aged 65 or older enrolled in internal medicine and geriatric wards participating in the REPOSI registry. Relationships among variables associated to sociodemographic, physical, cognitive, functional, and medical status were explored using a multiple correspondence analysis. The hierarchical cluster analysis was then performed to identify possible patient profiles. Multivariable logistic regression was used to verify the association between clusters and outcomes (in-hospital mortality and 3-month postdischarge mortality and rehospitalization). Results 2,841 patients were included in the statistical analyses. Four clusters were identified: the healthiest (I); those with multimorbidity (II); the functionally independent women with osteoporosis and arthritis (III); and the functionally dependent oldest old patients with cognitive impairment (IV). There was a significantly higher in-hospital mortality in Cluster II (odds ratio [OR] = 2.27, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.15-4.46) and Cluster IV (OR = 5.15, 95% CI = 2.58-10.26) and a higher 3-month mortality in Cluster II (OR = 1.66, 95% CI = 1.13-2.44) and Cluster IV (OR = 1.86, 95% CI = 1.15-3.00) than in Cluster I. Conclusions Using alternative analytical techniques among hospitalized older patients, we could distinguish different frailty phenotypes, differently associated with adverse events. The identification of different patient profiles can help defining the best care strategy according to specific patient needs.
Adiponectin protects against development of metabolic disturbances in a PCOS mouse model

Significance Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) have reduced fertility and increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Adiponectin, an adipocyte-derived hormone, together with adipocyte size, is the strongest factor associated with insulin resistance in PCOS. The potential causal relationship among adiponectin levels, infertility, and metabolic dysfunction in PCOS is, however, unknown. Exploiting mouse models, we found that adiponectin is indeed involved in PCOS-related insulin resistance, and, albeit to a much smaller extent, is also involved in the development of reproductive dysfunction. Thus, increased levels of adiponectin can prevent prepubertal androgen-induced metabolic dysfunction in dihydrotestosterone-exposed mice with PCOS-like traits. Collectively, our findings support the notion that altered adipose tissue functionality is a key mediator of metabolic dysfunction in women with PCOS. Adiponectin, together with adipocyte size, is the strongest factor associated with insulin resistance in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This study investigates the causal relationship between adiponectin levels and metabolic and reproductive functions in PCOS. Prepubertal mice overexpressing adiponectin from adipose tissue (APNtg), adiponectin knockouts (APNko), and their wild-type (WT) littermate mice were continuously exposed to placebo or dihydrotestosterone (DHT) to induce PCOS-like traits. As expected, DHT exposure led to reproductive dysfunction, as judged by continuous anestrus, smaller ovaries with a decreased number of corpus luteum, and an increased number of cystic/atretic follicles. A two-way between-groups analysis showed that there was a significant main effect for DHT exposure, but not for genotype, indicating adiponectin does not influence follicle development. Adiponectin had, however, some protective effects on ovarian function. Similar to in many women with PCOS, DHT exposure led to reduced adiponectin levels, larger adipocyte size, and reduced insulin sensitivity in WTs. APNtg mice remained metabolically healthy despite DHT exposure, while APNko-DHT mice were even more insulin resistant than their DHT-exposed littermate WTs. DHT exposure also reduced the mRNA expression of genes involved in metabolic pathways in gonadal adipose tissue of WT and APNko, but this effect of DHT was not observed in APNtg mice. Moreover, APNtg-DHT mice displayed increased pancreatic mRNA levels of insulin receptors, Pdx1 and Igf1R, suggesting adiponectin stimulates beta cell viability/hyperplasia in the context of PCOS. In conclusion, adiponectin improves metabolic health but has only minor effects on reproductive functions in this PCOS-like mouse model.
Are Risk Assessments Racially Biased?: Field Study of the SAVRY and YLS/CMI in Probation

Risk assessment instruments are widely used by juvenile probation officers (JPOs) to make case management decisions; however, few studies have investigated whether these instruments maintain their predictive validity when completed by JPOs in the field. Moreover, the validity of these instruments for use with minority groups has been called into question. This field study examined the predictive validity of both the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY; n = 383) and the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI; n = 359) for reoffending when completed by JPOs. The study also compared Black and White youth to examine the presence of test bias. The SAVRY and YLS/CMI significantly predicted reoffending at the test level, with most of the variance in reoffending accounted for by dynamic risk scales not static scales. The instruments did not differentially predict reoffending as a function of race but Black youth scored higher than White youth on the YLS/CMI scale related to official juvenile history. The implications for use of risk assessments in the field are discussed.
Comparing Modified Huddart-Bodenham Scoring System and GOSLON Yardstick to Assess Dental Arch Relationships in Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate Patients

Objective: To test the reliability of the modified Huddart-Bodenham (MHB) numerical scoring system and its agreement with the GOSLON Yardstick categorization for assessing the dental arch relationships in unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) cases. Design: A retrospective study. Setting: Faculty of Dentistry, The University of Hong Kong. Patients: Forty-one nonsyndromic UCLP consecutive patients attending the Joint Cleft Lip/Palate Clinic at Faculty of Dentistry in the University of Hong Kong were selected. Interventions: Study models at 8 to 10 years old (T1) and 10 to 12 years old (T2) were obtained from each patient. Main Outcome Measures: Models were rated with the MHB scoring system and GOSLON Yardstick index. The intra- and interexaminer reliabilities as well as correlation of both scoring systems were evaluated. Furthermore, to investigate the outcome measurements consistency, the MHB scoring system and GOSLON Yardstick were independently used to compare the dental arch relationships from T1 to T2, with the samples split into intervention and nonintervention groups. Results: The MHB scoring system presented good intra- and interexaminer agreement, which were comparable to those of the GOSLON Yardstick. The correlation between the MHB scoring system and GOSLON Yardstick scores was good. Both scoring systems showed similar results when assessing the change in the dental arch relationships from T1 to T2. Conclusions: The MHB scoring system can be used as an alternative method to the commonly used GOSLON Yardstick for assessing dental deformities in UCLP patients. Both scoring systems showed similar results in assessing the improvement in dental arch relationships.
Actigraphic Sleep Patterns of U.S. Hispanics: The Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos

Study objective: To assess the extent to which objective sleep patterns vary among U.S. Hispanics/Latinos. Methods: We assessed objective sleep patterns in 2087 participants of the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos from 6 Hispanic/Latino subgroups aged 18‐64 years who underwent 7 days of wrist actigraphy. Results: The age‐ and sex‐standardized mean (SE) sleep duration was 6.82 (0.05), 6.72 (0.07), 6.61 (0.07), 6.59 (0.06), 6.57 (0.10), and 6.44 (0.09) hr among individuals of Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, Puerto Rican, and South American heritage, respectively. Sleep maintenance efficiency ranged from 89.2 (0.2)% in Mexicans to 86.5 (0.4)% in Puerto Ricans, while the sleep fragmentation index ranged from 19.7 (0.3)% in Mexicans to 24.2 (0.7)% in Puerto Ricans. In multivariable models adjusted for age, sex, season, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, and comorbidities, these differences persisted. Conclusions: There are important differences in actigraphically measured sleep across U.S. Hispanic/Latino heritages. Individuals of Mexican heritage have longer and more consolidated sleep, while those of Puerto Rican heritage have shorter and more fragmented sleep. These differences may have clinically important effects on health outcomes.
Data-driven forecasting of high-dimensional chaotic systems with long short-term memory networks

We introduce a data-driven forecasting method for high-dimensional chaotic systems using long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. The proposed LSTM neural networks perform inference of high-dimensional dynamical systems in their reduced order space and are shown to be an effective set of nonlinear approximators of their attractor. We demonstrate the forecasting performance of the LSTM and compare it with Gaussian processes (GPs) in time series obtained from the Lorenz 96 system, the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation and a prototype climate model. The LSTM networks outperform the GPs in short-term forecasting accuracy in all applications considered. A hybrid architecture, extending the LSTM with a mean stochastic model (MSM–LSTM), is proposed to ensure convergence to the invariant measure. This novel hybrid method is fully data-driven and extends the forecasting capabilities of LSTM networks.