Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
18F-MCL-524, an 18F-Labeled Dopamine D2 and D3 Receptor Agonist Sensitive to Dopamine: A Preliminary PET Study

PET has been used to examine changes in neurotransmitter concentrations in the living brain. Pioneering PET studies on the dopamine system have used D2 and D3 receptor (D2/D3) antagonists such as 11C-raclopride. However, more recently developed agonist radioligands have shown enhanced sensitivity to endogenous dopamine. A limitation of available agonist radioligands is that they incorporate the short-lived radioisotope 11C. In the current study, we developed the 18F-labeled D2/D3 receptor agonist (R)-(−)-2-18F-fluoroethoxy-N-n-propylnorapomorphine (18F-MCL-524). Methods: In total, 10 PET measurements were conducted on 5 cynomolgus monkeys. Initially, the binding of 18F-MCL-524 was compared with that of 11C-MNPA in 3 monkeys. Second, the specificity of 18F-MCL-524 binding was examined in pretreatment studies using raclopride (1.0 mg/kg) and d-amphetamine (1.0 mg/kg). Third, a preliminary kinetic analysis was performed using the radiometabolite-corrected arterial input function of the baseline studies. Finally, 2 whole-body PET measurements were conducted to evaluate biodistribution and radiation dosimetry after intravenous injection of 18F-MCL-524. Results: 18F-MCL-524 entered the brain and provided striatum-to-cerebellum ratios suitable for reliable quantification of receptor binding using the multilinear reference tissue model. Mean striatal nondisplaceable binding potential (BPND) values were 2.0 after injection of 18F-MCL-524 and 1.4 after 11C-MNPA. The ratio of the BPND values of 18F-MCL-524 and 11C-MNPA was 1.5 across striatal subregions. After administration of raclopride and d-amphetamine, the 18F-MCL-524 BPND values were reduced by 89% and 56%, respectively. Preliminary kinetic analysis demonstrated that BPND values obtained with the 1-tissue- and 2-tissue-compartment models were similar to values obtained with the multilinear reference tissue model. Estimated radiation doses were highest for gallbladder (0.27 mSv/MBq), upper large intestine (0.19 mSv/MBq), and small intestine (0.17 mSv/MBq). The estimated effective dose was 0.035 mSv/MBq. Conclusion: The 18F-labeled agonist 18F-MCL-524 appears suitable for quantification of D2/D3 receptor binding in vivo, and the results encourage extension to human studies. The longer half-life of 18F makes 18F-MCL-524 attractive for studies on modulation of the dopamine concentration—for example, in combination with simultaneous measurement of changes in blood-oxygen-level–dependent signal using bimodal PET/functional MRI.
Analyzing Response Time in the Redundancy-d System

A common technique for improving response time in queueing systems is the use of randomization. Algorithms frequently consider a small number of randomly selected options and choose the best of these options. This concept, often referred to as the power of d choices, is used in dispatching policies such as Join-the-Shortest-Queue-d. In this paper we study the power of d choices in a new context: queueing in systems with redundant requests. In a system with redundant requests, each job that arrives to the system is copied and dispatched to multiple servers. As soon as the first copy is complete the job is considered complete, and all remaining copies are deleted. We study a theoretical model of redundancy, the Redundancy-d system, in which each job sends redundant copies to d servers chosen uniformly at random. While a great deal of empirical work has demonstrated the benefits of redundancy, there is no existing theoretical work that analyzes response time in the Redundancy-d system. We derive the first exact expressions for mean response time in Redundancy-d systems with any finite number of servers. We also find asymptotically exact expressions for the distribution of response time as the number of servers approaches infinity.
Postural Stability and Subsequent Sports Injuries during Indoor Season of Athletes

[Purpose] The aim of this study was to analyze stabilometry in athletes during an indoor season in order to determine whether injured athletes show different stabilometric values before injury than non-injured athletes in two different training periods (volume and pre-competition periods). [Subjects] The subjects were 51 athletes from Unicaja athletic club who trained regularly. [Methods] At the end of the preseason and volume periods, athletes were subjected to bipodal and monopodal stabilometry. In addition, all injuries happening in the periods after performing stabilometry (volume and pre-competition periods) were tracked. [Results] Variance analysis of bipodal stabilometric measurements taken at the end of the preseason period showed that athletes with higher values for the center-of-pressure spread variables suffered injuries during the volume period. The right-leg monopodal stabilometric measurements taken at the end of the volume period showed that athletes with higher values in the center-of-pressure position variables suffered injuries during the pre-competition period. [Conclusion] Athletes showing the worst values for center-of-pressure spread variables are more prone to sports injuries in the subsequent training period. In monopodal measurements, athletes with poorer mediolateral stability were more prone to injuries in the subsequent training period.
Deep Learning of Representations for Unsupervised and Transfer Learning

Deep learning algorithms seek to exploit the unknown structure in the input distribution in order to discover good representations, often at multiple levels, with higher-level learned features defined in terms of lower-level features. The objective is to make these higher-level representations more abstract, with their individual features more invariant to most of the variations that are typically present in the training distribution, while collectively preserving as much as possible of the information in the input. Ideally, we would like these representations to disentangle the unknown factors of variation that underlie the training distribution. Such unsupervised learning of representations can be exploited usefully under the hypothesis that the input distribution P(x) is structurally related to some task of interest, say predicting P(y/x). This paper focuses on the context of the Unsupervised and Transfer Learning Challenge, on why unsupervised pre-training of representations can be useful, and how it can be exploited in the transfer learning scenario, where we care about predictions on examples that are not from the same distribution as the training distribution.
Nomogram analysis and external validation to predict the risk of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer

Aim To identify risk factors for lymph node metastasis using a nomogram for gastric cancer patients to predict lymph node metastasis. Results The Chi-square test and the logistic regression showed that the Boarrmann type, preoperative CA199 level, T stage and N stage by CT scan were independent risk factors. The concordance index (C-index) was 0.786 in the internal validation of the Nomogram model. In the external validation, the C-index was 0.809, and the AUC was 0.894. The total accuracy of the prediction was 82.2%, and the false-negative rate was 5.4% with a cut-off value set at 0.109. Materials and Methods The study consisted of 451 patients with a histological diagnosis of gastric cancer with 0 or 1 lymph node metastasis from the Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center as the development set, and the validation set consisted of 186 gastric cancer patients from the Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University. A Chi-square test and a logistic regression analysis were used to compare the clinicopathological variables and lymph node metastasis. The C-index and ROC curve were computed for comparisons of the nomogram's predictive ability. Conclusions We developed and validated a nomogram to predict lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer before surgery. This nomogram can be broadly applied, even in general hospitals, and is useful for decisions regarding treatment programs for patients.
Aspirin injury and H pylori

The role of Helicobacter pylori in aspirin induced gastric injury Helicobacter pylori and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) cause the vast majority of peptic ulcers and their complications. However, their interaction remains extremely controversial. The study of Yoshida et al in this issue of Gut 1 aimed to address this issue by investigating the influence of experimental H pylori infection on gastric mucosal injury induced by aspirin in male Mongolian gerbils [see page 594]. The study found that aspirin caused more extensive haemorrhagic erosions associated with greater myeloperoxidase activity (an index of neutrophil accumulation), thiobarbituric acid reactive substance concentrations (an index of lipid peroxidation), and KC/GRO concentrations (a chemoattractive cytokine in rodents) in infected than in uninfected gerbils. Furthermore, the authors repeated the experiments in gerbils pretreated with antineutrophil serum which reduced circulating neutrophils by 77%. Erosion index, myeloperoxidase activity, and thiobarbituric acid reactive substance concentration (but not KC/GRO concentration) were significantly less in such neutrophil depleted gerbils exposed to H pylori plus aspirin than in similarly exposed animals treated with control serum. Inhibitory effects on mucosal damage by antineutrophil serum administration was much greater in H pylori infected gerbils (65%) than in uninfected …
Ezh2 maintains a key phase of muscle satellite cell expansion but does not regulate terminal differentiation

Summary Tissue generation and repair requires a stepwise process of cell fate restriction to ensure that adult stem cells differentiate in a timely and appropriate manner. A crucial role has been implicated for Polycomb-group (PcG) proteins and the H3K27me3 repressive histone mark in coordinating the transcriptional programmes necessary for this process, but the targets and developmental timing for this repression remain unclear. To address these questions, we generated novel genome-wide maps of H3K27me3 and H3K4me3 in freshly isolated muscle stem cells. These data, together with the analysis of two conditional Ezh2-null mouse strains, identified a critical proliferation phase in which Ezh2 activity is essential. Mice lacking Ezh2 in satellite cells exhibited decreased muscle growth, severely impaired regeneration and reduced stem cell number, due to a profound failure of the proliferative progenitor population to expand. Surprisingly, deletion of Ezh2 after the onset of terminal differentiation did not impede muscle repair or homeostasis. Using these knockout models and the RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq datasets, we show that Ezh2 does not regulate the muscle differentiation process in vivo. These results emphasise the lineage and cell-type-specific functions of Ezh2 and Polycomb repressive complex 2.
A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0?

We present SDSS J092712.65+294344.0 as the best candidate to date for a recoiling supermassive black hole (SMBH). SDSS J0927+2943 shows an exceptional optical emission-line spectrum with two sets of emission lines: one set of very narrow emission lines, and a second set of broad Balmer and broad high-ionization forbidden lines which are blueshifted by 2650 km s−1 relative to the set of narrow emission lines. This observation is most naturally explained if the SMBH was ejected from the core of the galaxy, carrying with it the broad-line gas while leaving behind the bulk of the narrow-line gas. We show that the observed properties of SDSS J0927+2943 are consistent with predictions and expectations from recent numerical relativity simulations which demonstrate that SMBHs can receive kicks up to several thousand km s−1 due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves during the coalescence of a binary. Our detection of a strong candidate for a rapidly recoiling SMBH implies that kicks large enough to remove SMBHs completely from their host galaxies do occur, with important implications for models of black hole and galaxy assembly at the epoch of structure formation, and for recoil models.
Thoracic paravertebral block versus intravenous patient-controlled analgesia for pain treatment in patients with multiple rib fractures

Objectives To assess the effect of thoracic paravertebral block (PVB) on pain management and preservation of pulmonary function compared with intravenous, patient-controlled analgesia (IVPCA) in patients with multiple rib fractures (MRFs). Methods Ninety patients with unilateral MRFs were included in this prospective study and randomly assigned to the TPVB or IVPCA group. The visual analogue scale (VAS) pain score, blood gas analysis, and bedside spirometry were measured and recorded at different time points after analgesia. Results TPVB and IVPCA provided good pain relief. VAS scores were significantly lower in the TPVB group than in the IVPCA group at rest and during coughing (P < 0.05). Patients in the TPVB group had a higher PaO2 and PaO2/FiO2 and lower P(A–a)O2 compared with the IVPCA group (P < 0.05). Moreover, patients in the TPVB group showed higher FVC, FEV1/FVC, and PEFR, and fewer complications than did the IVPCA group (P < 0.05). Conclusion TPVB is superior to IVPCA in pain relief and preservation of pulmonary function in patients with MRFs.
Are disks the dominant contributor for storage failures?: A comprehensive study of storage subsystem failure characteristics

Building reliable storage systems becomes increasingly challenging as the complexity of modern storage systems continues to grow. Understanding storage failure characteristics is crucially important for designing and building a reliable storage system. While several recent studies have been conducted on understanding storage failures, almost all of them focus on the failure characteristics of one component—disks—and do not study other storage component failures. This article analyzes the failure characteristics of storage subsystems. More specifically, we analyzed the storage logs collected from about 39,000 storage systems commercially deployed at various customer sites. The dataset covers a period of 44 months and includes about 1,800,000 disks hosted in about 155,000 storage-shelf enclosures. Our study reveals many interesting findings, providing useful guidelines for designing reliable storage systems. Some of our major findings include: (1) In addition to disk failures that contribute to 20--55% of storage subsystem failures, other components such as physical interconnects and protocol stacks also account for a significant percentage of storage subsystem failures. (2) Each individual storage subsystem failure type, and storage subsystem failure as a whole, exhibits strong self-correlations. In addition, these failures exhibit “bursty” patterns. (3) Storage subsystems configured with redundant interconnects experience 30--40% lower failure rates than those with a single interconnect. (4) Spanning disks of a RAID group across multiple shelves provides a more resilient solution for storage subsystems than within a single shelf.
A unifying construction of orthonormal bases for system identification

In this paper we develop a general and very simple construction for complete orthonormal bases for system identification. This construction provides a unifying formulation of all known orthonormal bases since the FIR, Laguerre and Kautz model structures are restrictive special cases of our construction as is another construction method based on balanced realisations of all-pass functions. However, in contrast to these special cases, the basis vectors in our unifying construction can have nearly arbitrary magnitude frequency response according to the prior information the user wishes to inject into the problem. We also provide results characterising the completeness properties of our bases. <<ETX>>
Temporal and spatial scales of variation in bacterioplankton assemblages of oligotrophic surface waters

Marine bacterioplankton dominate microbial carbon biomass in surface waters of the oligotrophic ocean, yet there have been few studies examining rates of change in bacterioplankton assemblage composition in situ over time and across water masses. Temporal changes in bacterio- plankton assemblage composition were investigated during 7 drifter studies of 24 to 360 h duration in the oligotrophic Gulf of Mexico, the North Pacific and the West Tropical Atlantic in 2001 to 2003, using an assemblage fingerprinting technique, automated rRNA intergenic-spacer analysis (ARISA). The similarity indices between assemblages collected over time in the same drifter changed on aver- age by a Sorensen index of 0.12 d -1 (comparing the presence/absence of operational taxonomic units, OTU) and a Whittaker index (comparing proportions in various OTU) of 0.17 d -1 per fingerprint, across all surface drifter studies. Fingerprints generated from 7 replicate bacterioplankton DNA sam- ples collected at each of 2 stations were remarkably similar to each other, sharing a Whittaker index >0.85. Despite this consistency over small spatial scales (<2 km), no clear relationship was observed between the separation distance of sampling locations and similarity between assemblage finger- prints in the North Pacific and Atlantic gyres over mesoscales (10 to 3000 km), oscillating around a mean of 0.38 to 0.47 for each gyre. Our results suggest that factors ultimately shaping assemblage composition are localized at spatial scales between a few kilometers and about 50 km, i.e. this is a typical horizontal 'patch size', within which communities are relatively homogenous, perhaps because physical mixing (e.g. by eddies) may dominate over biological interactions. Our results also suggest that, while similar environmental factors may cause bacterioplankton assemblages to share a small portion of OTU between different sampling locations, biological factors selecting for parti- cular bacterial types (e.g. viral lysis, grazing, antagonism, nutrition) may cause assemblage composi- tion variability over short geographic distances.
Organotin-mediated exchange diffusion of anions in human red cells

Organotin cations (R3Sn+) form electrically neutral ion pairs with monovalent anions. It is demonstrated that the tin derivatives induce exchange diffusion of chloride in red cells and resealed ghosts, without any detectable increase of membrane permeability to net movements of chloride ions. The obligatory anion exchange is believed to be due to the permeation of electroneural ion pairs, whereas the organic cation (R3Sn+) has an extremely low membrane permeability. Exchange fluxes of chloride increased with the lipophilicity of the substituting group (R3). At the same molar concentration of organotin, the relative potencies of the tin derivatives as anion carriers (with trimethyltin as a reference) were: methyl 1, ethyl 30, propyl = phenyl 1,00, and butyl 10,000. Tributyltin-mediated anion exchange was studied in detail. The organotin-induced anion transport increased through the sequence: F- less than Cl- less than Br- less than I- = SCN- less than OH-. Partitioning of tributyltin into red cell membranes was greater in iodide than in chloride media (partition coefficients 6.6 and 1.7 x 10(- 3) cm, respectively). Bicarbonate, fluoride, nitrate, phosphate, and sulphate did not exchange with chloride in the presence of tributyltin. Chloride exchange fluxes increased linearly with tributylin concentrations up to 10(-5) M, and with chloride concentrations up to at least 0.9 M. The apparent turnover number for tributyltin-mediated chloride exchange increased from 15 to 1,350 s-1 between 0 and 38 degrees C. These figures are minimum turnover numbers, because it is not known what fraction of the organotin in the membrane exists as chloride ion pairs.
The Budgeted Biomarker Discovery Problem: A Variant of Association Studies

In this paper we present the budgeted biomarker discovery problem as an alternative to the association studies traditionally used to identify biomarkers. We present several strong arguments to show why adopting this new problem will help solve issues in reproducibilty and understanding of association studies. Additionaly, we present several algorithms for this problem and show their performance on real metabolomic data and on syn-
Electromechanical and pharmacomechanical coupling in vascular smooth muscle.

The electrical events accompanying contractions of helically cut vascular strips were studied by the sucrose gap method. Mechanical responses to drugs and caffeine were also determined in depolarized preparations. The isometric contractions of umbilical vein and pulmonary artery strips elicited by external electrical stimuli were observed. Norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine gradedly depolarized rabbit main pulmonary artery smooth muscle. There was some correlation between level of depolarization and drug concentrations. Drug-induced contractions were associated with lesser depolarization than the contractile response elicited by warming from room temperature to 35°C. Drugs or warming did not elicit repetitive action potentials in the rabbit main pulmonary artery preparations. Mesenteric vein strips of rabbits and dogs developed spontaneous action potentials associated with rhythmic contractions. Norepinephrine, serotonin, histamine and angiotensin produced depolarization and increased action potential frequency in these preparations. The absolute correlation between spike frequency and tension development was limited. Caffeine reversibly eliminated both the spontaneous and drug-induced action potentials of rabbit mesenteric veins without abolishing the resting membrane potential. The contractile response to drugs persisted, although it was diminished. The inequality of maximal mechanical responses to supramaximal concentrations of epinephrine, histamine and angiotensin was observed in preparations depolarized with potassium. The contractile response of electrically stimulated human umbilical veins was frequency-dependent. Graded, external electrical stimulation elicited graded contractions of rabbit main pulmonary artery strips. Caffeine had a diphasic mechanical effect on both polarized and depolarized vascular smooth muscle. We suggest the existence of two major electrophysiologic types of vascular smooth muscle, one gradedly responsive and the other producing repetitive action potentials. The mechanical response of the latter can be dissociated, with caffeine, from electrical spikes in the polarized state. Graded concentrations of drugs appear to elicit graded contractions through: 1) variable frequency spike electrogenesis; 2) graded depolarization; and 3) graded pharmacomechanical coupling. The inhibition-relaxation coupling mechanisms are also multiple and not solely dependent on inhibition of spike electrogenesis.