Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of small bowel capsule endoscopy in iron deficiency anaemia: low impact on outcome in the medium term despite high diagnostic yield

Introduction Small bowel capsule endoscopy (SBCE) is a useful diagnostic modality in small bowel disorders. Iron deficiency anaemia (IDA) is one of the most common indications for SBCE. However, there are limited data on the diagnostic yield for IDA alone, and little is known about the clinical impact and long-term outcome of patients following SBCE. Aim To determine the diagnostic yield of SBCE in IDA and to examine outcome. Materials and methods A retrospective review of a tertiary referral centre’s database over a 21-month time period was carried out. Information on follow-up and management was obtained through chart review. Results In all, 309 SBCEs were identified, 30% (n=93) for anaemia and in 70% (n=65), follow-up data were available. The small bowel diagnostic yield for IDA was 53% (n=35), including angiodysplasia 49% (n=17), nonspecific inflammation 34% (n=12), active bleeding 11% (n=4) and Crohn’s disease 6% (n=2). In addition, 16% (n=10) had abnormalities (gastritis, gastric antral vascular ectasia, duodenitis) outside the small bowel. In all, 42% (n=27) were persistently anaemic after a mean follow-up of 9.3 months. Of these, 52% (n=14) and 48% (n=13) had positive and negative SBCEs, respectively. In total, SBCE led to a change in treatment in 28 patients (44%), of whom 17 (61%) remained anaemic. Conclusion This study shows a high overall diagnostic yield for SBCE in IDA 71% (n=45). Despite the majority, 53% (n=24), of patients with positive tests receiving specific treatment, 61% (n=17) remained anaemic in the long term. SBCE results were not predictive of long-term outcome even when stratified for a change in management.
Discrete Input Signaling for MISO Visible Light Communication Channels

In this paper, we study the achievable secrecy rate of visible light communication (VLC) links for discrete input distributions. We consider single user single eavesdropper multiple-input single-output (MISO) links. In addition, both beamforming and robust beamforming are considered. In the former case, the location of the eavesdropper is assumed to be known, whereas in the latter case, the location of the eavesdropper is unknown. We compare the obtained results with those achieved by some continuous distributions including the truncated generalized normal (TGN) distribution and the uniform distribution. We numerically show that the secrecy rate achieved by the discrete input distribution with a finite support is significantly improved as compared to those achieved by the TGN and the uniform distributions.
Information encoding in short firing rate epochs by single neurons in the primate temporal visual cortex

The information available about face identity from the firing rate and from temporal encoding in the spike train of single neurons recorded in the temporal lobe visual cortical areas of rhesus macaques was analysed using principal component and information theory analyses of smoothed spike trains. The neurons analysed had responses selective for faces. The stimulus set consisted of 20 different faces. The first principal component provided by a considerable extent the most information (57%) available in principal components 1–5, with the second adding 18%, the third 16%, and the fourth and fifth adding 9%. For each image, the weighting on the first principal component was highly correlated with the mean firing rate of the neuron to that image. The information available from the firing rate of the neuron was very close to that available in the first principal component. Information theory analysis showed that in short epochs (e.g. 50 msec) the information available from the firing rate can be as high, on average, as 65% of that available from the firing rate calculated over 400 msec, and 38% of that available from principal components 1–3 in the 400-msec period. It was also found that 30% of the information calculated from the first three principal components is available in the firing rates calculated over epochs as short as 20 msec. More information was available near the start of the neuronal response, and the information available from short epochs became less later in the neuronal response. Taken together, these analyses provide evidence that a short period of firing taken close to the start of the neuronal response provides a reasonable proportion of the total information that would be available if a long period of neuronal firing (e.g. 400 msec) were utilized to extract it, even if temporal encoding were used. The implications of these and related findings are that at least for rapid object recognition, each cortical stage provides information to the next in a short period of 20–50 msec, does not rely on temporal encoding, and completes sufficient computation to provide an output to the next stage in this same 20- to 50-msec period.
Phosphorylation of Akt (Ser473) Predicts Poor Clinical Outcome in Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Cancer

Background: Several lines of laboratory evidence support a role of persistent activation of Akt pathway in oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) progression. Loss of phosphatase PTEN is one of the proposed mechanisms of Akt activation. We sought to determine the prognostic significance of Akt activation in a cohort of patients with OSCC as well as the association between phosphorylated (activated) Akt and PTEN levels. Methods: Using a novel system of in situ quantitative protein expression analysis (AQUA), we studied the protein expression levels of phosphorylated Akt (p-Akt) and PTEN on a tissue microarray. The array included 79 OSCCs with a mean follow-up of 36 months. Results: Patients with tumors expressing low tumor p-Akt levels had lower 5-year local recurrence rates (5% versus 38%). Additionally, these patients had improved 5-year overall survival rates (45% versus 27%). This survival effect was likely due to disease recurrence, as there was no difference in death without recurrence between low- and high-expressing groups. In adjusted analysis, tumor p-Akt expression was a strong predictor of local recurrence. A significant inverse relationship was found between nuclear p-Akt and nuclear PTEN: Tumors with high nuclear p-Akt had low nuclear PTEN and vice versa. Conclusions: Akt activation in OSCC is associated with adverse patient outcome, indicating that Akt is a promising molecular target in OSCC. PTEN loss may be one of the mechanisms of Akt activation in OSCC. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(3):553–8)
EFFECTIVITY OF FRESHLY PREPARED OR REFRESHED SOLUTIONS FOR HEART PRESERVATION VERSUS COMMERCIAL EUROCOLLINS, BRETSCHNEIDER'S HTK, OR UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SOLUTION

Rat hearts were preserved for 18 hr under totally ischemic storage conditions at 0–1°C with the commercially supplied EuroCollins, Bretschneider's HTK, and University of Wisconsin (UW) preservation solutions compared with our new preservation solution, EuroFlush-glutathione solution, and a “refreshed” UW solution (UWG) with 3 mmol/L reduced glutathione added before use. Recovery of the organs was measured during 30 min of parabiotic reperfusion with whole blood of a host rat of the same inbred LEW strain, following an initial warm reflush for 5 min. Functional measurements were performed using a latex balloon in the left ventricle. The metabolic recovery was determined from the myocardium freezeclamped at the end of reperfusion. The left ventricular pressure (LVP) amplitude during pacing to a heart rate of 300/min, as well as +dp/dtmax, —dp/dtmax, isotonic stroke volume, coronary flow, ATP, and ECP values, recovered significantly better after storage in Euro-Flush-glutathione solution (LVP: 63% of controls on average) compared with when the commercially available solutions were used (EuroCollins: 20%, HTK: 42% of controls in LVP). Hearts preserved in UW solution ViaSpan did not recover during the reperfusion period, when unfiltered solution was used. Filtered ViaSpan resulted in LVP recoveries of 38% of controls, while addition of reduced glutathione immediately before use (UWG) improved the effectivity of this solution significantly (LVP 63% of controls). Similar improvements were found for all other functional and metabolic parameters. Thus, the effectivity of UW solution ViaSpan depends upon extraction of the typical particles by a filtering procedure. Effectivity can be improved by a refreshment procedure with reduced glutathione immediately before use.
EXPERIMENTAL INFECTION WITH MYCOPLASMA PNEUMONIAE (EATON'S AGENT)

The pathogenesis of Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection was studied in the Syrian hamster with qualitative and quantitative culture methods and special histopathologic techniques. The animals were readily infected with the mycoplasma, which multiplied throughout the respiratory tract. Sensitivity of this experimental host to infection was indicated by the 50 per cent infective dose, which was 10 colony-forming units of the organism. Inoculation consistently resulted in the production of peribronchial pneumonitis which was induced by the mycoplasma. The organisms were visualized in a superficial location in the mucosa of involved bronchi, by means of indirect fluorescent antibody staining and by a modification of the Brown and Brenn technique. The data indicate applicability of the hamster to the study of problems concerned with M. pneumoniae disease which are impractical or impossible to resolve in the human host.
Exploratory treatment trials in multiple sclerosis using MRI: sample size calculations for relapsing-remitting and secondary progressive subgroups using placebo controlled parallel groups

OBJECTIVES Serial brain MRI is widely used in pilot studies of new agents to monitor treatment efficacy in relapsing-remitting (RR) and secondary progressive (SP) multiple sclerosis (MS). For pilot trials, sample size calculations for the RR subgroup are based on the data from small numbers of patients and separate calculations for the SP subgroup have not been performed. The present study considers these issues. METHODS The sample size calculations were based on data from six months of monthly T2 weighted and gadolinium enhanced MRI in 31 RR and 28 SP untreated patients undergoing natural history studies or in the placebo arm of a therapeutic trial. The calculations were for a placebo controlled, parallel groups design lasting six months. The sample sizes were based on bootstrap analysis with an 80% likelihood of showing a given treatment effect. RESULTS With a single pretreatment scan, demonstration of a 70% reduction in newly active lesions required 2×30 RR and 2×50 SP patients. With an extra run-in scan one month before treatment, the sample sizes were 2×20 for RR and 2×30 for SP patients. CONCLUSIONS The sample sizes required for RR patients were comparable with previous smaller studies. Larger sample sizes were needed for the SP group, but the extra run in scan resulted in a reduction in both groups. The larger sample sizes in the SPMS group were probably due to the combination of a higher proportion of patients with low MRI activity (⩽2 active MRI lesions in 50% of SP and 32% RR patients), as well as a few patients who displayed extremely high activity, thus increasing interpatient variability. These data should be considered in planning pilot MRI outcome trials.
Molecular and clinical characteristics of myotonic dystrophy type 1 in koreans.

BACKGROUND Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is an autosomal-dominant muscular dystrophy caused by expansion of cytosine-thymine-guanine (CTG) trinucleotide repeats in the myotonic dystrophy protein kinase (DMPK) gene. The clinical features of DM1 are multisystemic and highly variable, and the unstable nature of CTG expansion causes wide genotypic and phenotypic presentations. The aim of this study was to characterize the molecular and clinical spectra of DM1 in Koreans. METHODS The CTG repeats of 283 Korean individuals were tested by PCR fragment analysis and Southern blot. The following characteristics were assessed retrospectively: spectrum of CTG expansions, clinical findings, genotype-phenotype correlation, anticipation, and genetic instability. RESULTS One-hundred twenty-four patients were confirmed as DM1 by molecular tests, and the CTG expansions ranged from 50 to 2,770 repeats (median 480 repeats). The most frequent clinical features were myotonia, muscular weakness, and family history. Patients with muscular weakness or dysfunction of the central nervous system harbored larger CTG expansions than those without each symptom (P<0.05). The age of onset was inversely correlated with the size of the CTG expansion (gamma=-0.422, P<0.001). The instability of CTG expansion representing as the maximum difference between sibships was observed from 50 to 700 repeats in nine families. Clinical anticipation and the increase in CTG repeat were significantly higher in maternally transmitted alleles (P=0.002). CONCLUSIONS Molecular genetic tests are not only essential for diagnosis, but also helpful for suggesting the spectrum and relationship between genotype and phenotype in Korean DM1 patients.
A Survey on Intrusion Detection Systems for Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud Computing is a newly emerged technology. It is getting popularity day by day due to its amazing services. The applications and services based on the cloud are emerging day by day. Due to networked nature of the cloud, resources, data and applications are vulnerable to the attack in cloud environment. So Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are employed in the cloud to detect malicious behaviour in the network and in the host. IDS monitors network or host system activities by collecting network information, and analyzes this information for malicious activities and generate alarms, if intrusion takes place. In this paper we surveyed various types of Intrusion Detection Systems proposed over the years for Cloud Computing environment.
Genome-Wide Association Study of Lp-PLA 2 Activity and Mass in the Framingham Heart Study

Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2) is an emerging risk factor and therapeutic target for cardiovascular disease. The activity and mass of this enzyme are heritable traits, but major genetic determinants have not been explored in a systematic, genome-wide fashion. We carried out a genome-wide association study of Lp-PLA2 activity and mass in 6,668 Caucasian subjects from the population-based Framingham Heart Study. Clinical data and genotypes from the Affymetrix 550K SNP array were obtained from the open-access Framingham SHARe project. Each polymorphism that passed quality control was tested for associations with Lp-PLA2 activity and mass using linear mixed models implemented in the R statistical package, accounting for familial correlations, and controlling for age, sex, smoking, lipid-lowering-medication use, and cohort. For Lp-PLA2 activity, polymorphisms at four independent loci reached genome-wide significance, including the APOE/APOC1 region on chromosome 19 (p = 6610); CELSR2/PSRC1 on chromosome 1 (p = 3610); SCARB1 on chromosome 12 (p = 1610) and ZNF259/BUD13 in the APOA5/APOA1 gene region on chromosome 11 (p = 4610). All of these remained significant after accounting for associations with LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, or triglycerides. For LpPLA2 mass, 12 SNPs achieved genome-wide significance, all clustering in a region on chromosome 6p12.3 near the PLA2G7 gene. Our analyses demonstrate that genetic polymorphisms may contribute to inter-individual variation in Lp-PLA2 activity and mass. Citation: Suchindran S, Rivedal D, Guyton JR, Milledge T, Gao X, et al. (2010) Genome-Wide Association Study of Lp-PLA2 Activity and Mass in the Framingham Heart Study. PLoS Genet 6(4): e1000928. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen. 1000928 Editor: Mark I. McCarthy, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Received December 3, 2009; Accepted March 29, 2010; Published April 29, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Suchindran et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study was supported in part by grant RO1 HL085191-01 from the NHLBI (P.I. McCarthy). AB is supported by National Institutes of Health Training Grant T32 GM071340 (P.I. Donald). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: jeanette.mccarthy@duke.edu
Substitutive skeleton fusion for human action recognition

Advancement of RGB-D cameras that are capable of tracking human body movement in the form of a skeleton has contributed to growing interest in skeleton-based human action recognition. However, the tracking performance of a single camera is prone to occlusion and is view dependent. In this study, we use fusion skeletal data obtained from two views for recognizing human action. We perform a substitutive fusion based on joint tracking status and build a view-invariant action recognition system. The resulting fusion skeletal data are transformed into histogram of cubes as a frame level feature. Clustering is applied to build a dictionary of frame representatives, and actions are encoded as sequences of frame representatives. Finally, recognition is performed as a sequence matching task by using Dynamic Time Warping with K-nearest neighbor. Experimental results show that fusion skeletal data consistently give better recognition performance than their single view counterpart.
Determinants of trust in food safety information

In den vergangenen Jahren erschütterten verschiedene Lebensmittelskandale die Europäische Union. Diese verstärkten die Informationsasymmetrie zwischen Anbietern und Konsumenten und führten zu Vertrauensund letztlich Nachfrageeinbußen. Um entsprechende Auswirkungen darstellen zu können, sind zunächst die Elemente Information und Vertrauen in ein neoklassisches Nachfragemodell zu integrieren. Anhand einer europaweiten Umfrage wird sodann das Vertrauen der Konsumenten in verschiede Marktakteure sowie dessen Variabilität bei einem hypothetischen Lebensmittelskandal untersucht. Schlagworte: Informationsasymmetrie, Konsumentenverhalten, Risikowahrnehmung, Vertrauen
Different patterns of attentional bias in antenatal and postpartum depression

Biased information processing in attention, memory, and interpretation is proposed to be central cognitive alterations in patients with major depressive disorder, but studies in women with peripartum depression are scarce. Because of the many similarities with depression in nonperipartum states as regards symptom profile and risk factors, we hypothesized that women with antenatal and postpartum depression would display attentional bias to negatively and positively valenced words.
IMPACT OF AEROSOL DIRECT AND INDIRECT EFFECTS ON EAST ASIAN AIR QUALITY DURING EAST-AIRE CAMPAIGN PERIOD

Title of Dissertation: IMPACT OF AEROSOL DIRECT AND INDIRECT EFFECTS ON EAST ASIAN AIR QUALITY DURING EAST-AIRE CAMPAIGN PERIOD Jing Wang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Dale J. Allen, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science WRF-Chem simulations were performed for the March 2005 East Asian Studies of Tropospheric Aerosols: an International Regional Experiment (EAST-AIRE) Intensive Observation Campaign (IOC) to investigate the effects of aerosols on surface radiation and air quality. Domain-wide, WRF-Chem showed a decrease of 20 W/m in surface shortwave (SW) radiation due to the aerosol direct effect (ADE), consistent with observational studies. The ADE reduced mixing and caused 24-hr surface PM2.5 concentrations to increase in eastern China (4.4%), southern China (10%), western China (2.3%), and the Sichuan Basin (9.6%), due to a thinner planetary boundary layer (PBL) and increased stability. Conversely, surface 1-hour maximum ozone was reduced by 2.3% domain-wide and up to 12% in eastern China because less radiation reached the surface. Studies of the impact of reducing SO2 and black carbon (BC) emissions by 80% on aerosol amounts were performed via two sensitivity simulations. Reducing SO2 decreased surface PM2.5 concentrations in the Sichuan Basin and southern China by 5.4% and decreased ozone by up to 6 ppbv in the Sichuan Basin and Southern China. Reducing BC emissions decreased PM2.5 by 3% in eastern China and the Sichuan Basin but increased surface ozone by up to 3.6 ppbv in eastern China and the Sichuan Basin. This result indicates that the benefits of reducing PM2.5 associated with reducing absorbing aerosols may be partially offset by increases in ozone at least for a scenario when NOx and VOC emissions are unchanged. The relative importance of direct and indirect effects in altering the atmospheric composition was then studied with two case studies of periods that featured strong synoptic systems. The case studies demonstrated that changes in primary aerosol (i.e., dust, OC) and chemically stable trace gas concentrations (i.e., CO) were mainly driven by changes in meteorological conditions due to the direct and indirect effects with the direct effect showing a stronger impact over highly polluted and dry regions and the indirect effect dominating over humid areas. Secondary aerosols (i.e., sulfate, nitrate) were affected by both changes in meteorological and chemical processes The variation of ozone due to the indirect effect was found to be associated with changes in the NO2 photolysis rate due to changes in actinic flux driven by changes in AOD and/or COD. IMPACT OF AEROSOL DIRECT AND INDIRECT EFFECTS ON EAST ASIAN AIR QUALITY DURING EAST-AIRE CAMPAIGN PERIOD
Deep Multitask Architecture for Integrated 2D and 3D Human Sensing

We propose a deep multitask architecture for fully automatic 2d and 3d human sensing (DMHS), including recognition and reconstruction, in monocular images. The system computes the figure-ground segmentation, semantically identifies the human body parts at pixel level, and estimates the 2d and 3d pose of the person. The model supports the joint training of all components by means of multi-task losses where early processing stages recursively feed into advanced ones for increasingly complex calculations, accuracy and robustness. The design allows us to tie a complete training protocol, by taking advantage of multiple datasets that would otherwise restrictively cover only some of the model components: complex 2d image data with no body part labeling and without associated 3d ground truth, or complex 3d data with limited 2d background variability. In detailed experiments based on several challenging 2d and 3d datasets (LSP, HumanEva, Human3.6M), we evaluate the sub-structures of the model, the effect of various types of training data in the multitask loss, and demonstrate that state-of-the-art results can be achieved at all processing levels. We also show that in the wild our monocular RGB architecture is perceptually competitive to a state-of-the art (commercial) Kinect system based on RGB-D data.
Algorithms, Initializations, and Convergence for the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

It is well known that good initializations can improve the speed and accuracy of the solutions of many nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms. Many NMF algorithms are sensitive with respect to the initialization of W or H or both. This is especially true of algorithms of the alternating least squares (ALS) type, including the two new ALS algorithms that we present in this paper. We compare the results of six initialization procedures (two standard and four new) on our ALS algorithms. Lastly, we discuss the practical issue of choosing an appropriate convergence criterion.