Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Daughter 3T3 cells. Are they mirror images of each other?

Using a new technique to visualize the tracks of moving 3T3 cells and combining it with the visualization of actin-containing microfilament bundles by indirect immunofluorescence (Lazarides, E. and K. Weber. 1974, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 71:2268-2272), I present experiments which suggest that: (a) 30-40% of the pairs of daughter 3T3 mouse fibroblasts in noncloned cultures have mirror symmetrical actin-bundle patterns. (b) The angle between separating daughter cells is approx. 90 degrees or 180 degrees and seems related to the directions of certain actin-containing bundles. (c) Approximately 40% of separately moving daughter cells which did not collide with any other cell in the culture performed directional changes in a mirror symmetrical way. Both daughter cells entered the next mitosis at approximately the same time. I suggest that the actin-bundle pattern, the angle of separation, major directional changes during interphase, and the time of the next mitosis are predetermined by the parental cell.
Dendritic Backpropagation and the State of the Awake Neocortex

The spread of somatic spikes into dendritic trees has become central to models of dendritic integrative properties and synaptic plasticity. However, backpropagating action potentials (BPAPs) have been studied mainly in slices, in which they are highly sensitive to multiple factors such as firing frequency and membrane conductance, raising doubts about their effectiveness in the awake behaving brain. Here, we examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of BPAPs in layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the visual cortex of adult, awake rabbits, in which EEG-defined brain states ranged from alert vigilance to drowsy/inattention, and, in some cases, to light sleep. To achieve this, we recorded extracellular spikes from layer 5 pyramidal neurons and field potentials above and below these neurons using a 16-channel linear probe, and applied methods of spike-triggered current source-density analysis to these records (Buzsáki and Kandel, 1998; Swadlow et al., 2002). Precise retinotopic alignment of superficial and deep cortical sites was used to optimize alignment of the recording probe with the axis of the apical dendrite. During the above network states, we studied BPAPs generated spontaneously, antidromically (from corticotectal neurons), or via intense synaptic drive caused by natural visual stimulation. Surprisingly, the invasion of BPAPs as far as 800 μm from the soma was little affected by the network state and only mildly attenuated by high firing frequencies. These data reveal that the BPAP is a robust and highly reliable property of neocortical apical dendrites. These events, therefore, are well suited to provide crucial signals for the control of synaptic plasticity during information-processing brain states.
Probiotics for the Treatment of Pediatric Helicobacter Pylori Infection: A Randomized Double Blind Clinical Trial

Objective Helicobacter pylori is recognized as a major etiological factor in the pathogenesis of gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. H. Pylori eradication has a failure rate of more than 30% in pediatric patients, particularly because of poor compliance, antibiotic resistance and occurrence of side-effects. This study was aimed to determine whether adding the probiotics to a standard anti-H. pylori regimen could minimize the gastrointestinal side-effect prevalence and improve the eradication rate. Methods Double-blind randomized placebo controlled study conducted at Children's Medical Center in Tehran, Iran. Sixty six H. pylori positive children were treated with a triple drug treatment protocol (omeprazole+amoxycillin+furazolidon) and randomly allocated to receive either probiotic or placebo. All patients underwent esophagogastroduodendoscopy. H. pylori infection was diagnosed by either rapid urease test (RUT) or histology. H. pylori status was assessed after 4-8 weeks of the completion of treatment with stool H. pylori antigen test. The side effects of the treatment were determined in each group. Findings Mean age of patients was 9.09 (range 3-14) years, 44 (65.7%) patients were boys (sex ratio 2:1). All 66 patients completed the course of treatment and follow-up. The rate of H. pylori eradication was significantly higher in probiotic group (P=0.04). In probiotic supplemented children there was a lower rate of nausea/vomiting (P=0.02) and diarrhea (P=0.039) during treatment. Conclusion This study showed that probiotics have positive effect on the eradication of H. pylori infection. Adjuvant therapy with probiotic is recommended in order to reduce the frequency of antibiotic induced side-effects during treatment with antibiotics.
Sensing Locations Positioning for Multi-robot Inspection Planning

Problems of cooperative multi-robot inspection and exploration play an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents an algorithm for inspection planning based on decomposition of the problem into two subproblems - art gallery problem (AGP) that finds guards (sensing locations) and multiple traveling salesmen problem (MTSP) that connects the found guards by routes. While standard approaches for art gallery problem try to minimize a number of guards, the proposed method is designed to optimise lengths found by a MTSP solver and therefore to minimise time needed by a team of robots to inspect the working environment. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested. Influence of the method to quality of the inspection planning solution and comparison with the randomized dual sampling schema are discussed
An Investigation of Reorganization Algorithms

Abstract Organization-based multiagent systems are designedto be highly adaptable systems. These systems areable to adapt themselves to changes that occur inthe environment. One of the ways to achieve adapt-ability is through reorganization. Currently, thereare a number of organization models that achieveadaptability with reorganization. This paper looksat how reorganization might occur for the Organi-zation Model for Adaptive Computational Systems.This paper highlights the shortcomings of the cur-rent model with respect to general-purpose reorga-nization algorithms and provides some suggestionsthat could improve eﬃciency of these reorganizationalgorithms. 1 Introduction As technology presses forward, more complex tasksarebeingdelegatedtocomputationalsystems. Gen-erally, these systems are distributed and expectedto adapt to changes in their environment. Whiledistributed systems oﬀer increased reliability andaccess to distributed resources, adaptive systemscontinue to perform eﬀectively while reacting totheir dynamically changing environments.One approach to building adaptive, distributedsystems is that of multiagent systems. However,early multiagent systems were typically designedwith a set of predeﬁned goals and emphasized indi-vidual agents and their interactions. This resultedin adaptivity at the agent-level with system-leveladaptation being a byproduct of the agent-leveladaptation.To achieve system-level adaptation, a system-level mechanism is required. Such a mechanism isthe focus of a number of ongoing research eﬀortsbased on an organizational metaphor. Various re-search groups are looking to provide mechanismsthat guide a group of agents by specifying high-levelobjectives within a predeﬁned organization struc-ture. [1, 2, 3]This paper investigates the feasibility of reorga-nization algorithms for the Organization Model forAdaptive Computational Systems (OMACS), pro-vides some suggestions to improving OMACS withrespect to these algorithms, and highlights somecharacteristicsthatcanbeusedfordesigning“good”and “eﬃcient” OMACS models.
Interaction between BDNF Val66Met and childhood trauma on adult’s violent suicide attempt

Genetic factors, specially those related to serotoninergic activities, and childhood maltreatment have both been implicated in suicidal behaviour (SB). However, little attention has been paid to the possible interaction between genes and childhood maltreatment in the comprehension of SB. Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays an important role in the growth of serotoninergic neurons during childhood and therefore is a good candidate for studies on SB. Moreover, decreased levels of BDNF have been found in the prefrontal cortex of suicide victims. In our study we wanted to see if Val66Met (a BDNF functional single‐nucleotide polymorphism) could moderate the effect of childhood maltreatment on the onset, number and violence of SB in a sample of 813 Caucasian suicide attempters. Childhood maltreatment was evaluated using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. We used a regression framework to test the interaction between Val66Met and childhood maltreatment. Childhood sexual abuse was associated with violent suicide attempts (SA) in adulthood only among Val/Val individuals and not among Val/Met or Met/Met individuals (P = 0.05). The severity of childhood maltreatment was significantly associated with a higher number of SA and with a younger age at onset of suicide attempt. This result suggests that Val66Met modulates the effect of childhood sexual abuse on the violence of SB. It is proposed that childhood sexual abuse elicits brain structural modifications through BDNF dysfunction and enhances the risk of violent SB in adulthood.
Modeling and simulation of packet scheduling in the downlink LTE-advanced

LTE-Advanced, the true 4G technology of 3GPP family, is a complex radio access technology with co-existence of many types of user equipments. As it is a new technology, there are few published research focusing on modeling and simulation of LTE-Advanced system. A simulation tool is indispensable for research relating to Radio Resource Management mechanisms such as packet scheduling. This paper presents detailed descriptions of a computer simulation tool that can effectively model packet scheduling, as well as describes some of its simulation results.
Stability in a Model of Interbank Lending

We propose a simple model of the banking system and analyze stochastic stability of interbank lending. The monetary reserves of banks are modeled as a system of interacting Feller diffusions. The model is simple enough for mathematical analysis, yet captures how lending preferences of banks affect possible multiple bank failures. In our model we quantify the lending preference from one bank to another as a function of all the reserves and find an extreme example that only $k$ out of $n$ banks can survive after the multiple bank failures. This banking system induces a class of random graph processes in continuous time exhibiting some stability property. Our analysis reveals quantities which can be used as indicators by regulators to assess the systemic risk.
Phacoemulsification and Intraocular Lens Implantation Before, During, or After Canaloplasty in Eyes with Open-Angle Glaucoma: 3-Year Results

Purpose:To report 3-year results evaluating the effect on safety and efficacy of canaloplasty to treat open-angle glaucoma when combined with cataract surgery. Patients and Methods:This was a retrospective subset analysis of a prospective, international, multicenter study evaluating 133 eyes of 133 adult, open-angle glaucoma patients who underwent canaloplasty with tensioning suture placement. Eighty-two phakic eyes that received canaloplasty alone were compared with 51 eyes that underwent cataract surgery before or during canaloplasty. Results:Phakic eyes that received combined cataract-canaloplasty surgery (phacocanaloplasty) had a mean±SD baseline IOP of 23.5±5.2 mm Hg and mean glaucoma medication usage of 1.5±1.0 decreasing to a mean IOP of 13.6±3.6 mm Hg on 0.3±0.5 medications at 3 years postoperatively. Pseudophakic eyes undergoing canaloplasty had a mean baseline IOP of 23.9±5.2 mm Hg on a mean of 1.8±0.8 glaucoma medications decreasing to 15.6±3.5 mm Hg on 1.1±0.8 medications at 3 years. In phakic eyes, reductions in IOP were significantly greater and less postoperative IOP lowering medication was needed after undergoing phacocanaloplasty compared to eyes which had canaloplasty alone. Conclusions:Clear corneal phacoemulsification performed before or in combination with canaloplasty is a safe and effective surgical procedure to reduce IOP in adult patients with open-angle glaucoma.
Mapping the evolution of regional atrophy in Alzheimer's disease: Unbiased analysis of fluid-registered serial MRI

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by progressive cerebral atrophy, which may be assessed by using volumetric MRI. We describe a voxel-based analysis of nonlinear-registered serial MRI to demonstrate the most statistically significant (P < 0.001) regions of change at different stages of the disease. We compared presymptomatic (n = 4), mild (n = 10), and moderately affected (n = 12) patients with early- and late-onset AD, with age- and sex-matched controls, and demonstrated increasing global atrophy with advancing disease. Significantly increased rates of hippocampal atrophy were seen in presymptomatic and mildly affected patients. There was a shift in the distribution of temporal lobe atrophy with advancing disease; the inferolateral regions of the temporal lobes showed the most significantly increased rates of atrophy by the time the patients were mildly or moderately affected. Significantly increased rates of medial parietal lobe atrophy were seen at all stages, with frontal lobe involvement occurring later in the disease. Our results suggest that the sites showing the most significant rates of atrophy alter as the disease advances, and that regional atrophy is already occurring before the onset of symptoms. This technique provides insights into the natural history of AD, and may be a valuable tool in assessing the efficacy of disease-modifying treatments, especially if these treatments were to have region-specific effects.
Intermediate to long-term outcomes of the STAR Total Ankle Replacement: the patient perspective.

BACKGROUND The purpose of the present study was to document the patient self-reported improvements in quality of life, function, and overall impairment scores, as well as the improvement in the clinically derived outcome scores, following a Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement (STAR) arthroplasty performed for the treatment of end-stage ankle arthritis. METHODS All patients who underwent a Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement arthroplasty from July 1998 through February 2008 were prospectively followed and retrospectively reviewed. All surgical procedures were performed by a single surgeon. Preoperatively and at subsequent follow-up visits, patients were assessed with (1) a visual analog scale (VAS) score for pain, (2) the Short Form-36 (SF-36) quality-of-life scale, (3) the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS) hindfoot scale and subscales, (4) the Buechel-Pappas pain and function scores, and (5) the ankle range of motion. Additional measures that were recorded included (1) concomitant surgical procedures during the initial ankle replacement, (2) revision surgery during the follow-up period, and (3) any additional surgical procedures. Revision was defined as failure of either the tibial or the talar metallic component that required removal of a metallic implant for any reason. RESULTS Eighty-two consecutive patients were evaluated. The duration of follow-up ranged from twenty-four to 108 months (mean, sixty-one months; median, sixty months). During the follow-up period, three patients died and six patients moved out of the region. The latter six patients were followed by another surgeon group, and their data were included. Eight patients were lost to follow-up after twelve months. There were significant improvements in all outcome categories between the preoperative and postoperative evaluations. The most compelling finding of the present study involved the marked improvement in terms of the self-reported measures of impairments, quality of life, pain, and function. CONCLUSIONS Total ankle arthroplasty with the Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement prosthesis was associated with significant improvements in terms of pain, function, and quality of life after intermediate to long-term follow-up.
Multi-class bootstrapping learning aspect-related terms for aspect identification

Aspect identification in entity reviews involving multiple aspects is a top priority for aspect-based opinion mining. Most of previous studies adopted machine learning techniques taking it as a multi-class text classification task. However, since building labeled training data is often expensive, some researchers put more interest in unsupervised techniques. With the subject of online restaurant reviews, this paper presents a new multi-class bootstrapping algorithm to learn aspect-related terms to be used for aspect identification. Experimental results demonstrate that our method without requiring labeled training data achieves good performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art supervised learning techniques.
Unsupervised discovery of visual object class hierarchies

Objects in the world can be arranged into a hierarchy based on their semantic meaning (e.g. organism - animal - feline - cat). What about defining a hierarchy based on the visual appearance of objects? This paper investigates ways to automatically discover a hierarchical structure for the visual world from a collection of unlabeled images. Previous approaches for unsupervised object and scene discovery focused on partitioning the visual data into a set of non-overlapping classes of equal granularity. In this work, we propose to group visual objects using a multi-layer hierarchy tree that is based on common visual elements. This is achieved by adapting to the visual domain the generative hierarchical latent Dirichlet allocation (hLDA) model previously used for unsupervised discovery of topic hierarchies in text. Images are modeled using quantized local image regions as analogues to words in text. Employing the multiple segmentation framework of Russell et al. [22], we show that meaningful object hierarchies, together with object segmentations, can be automatically learned from unlabeled and unsegmented image collections without supervision. We demonstrate improved object classification and localization performance using hLDA over the previous non-hierarchical method on the MSRC dataset [33].
Reconstitution of a bacteriallplant polyamine biosyn t hesi s pathway i n Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Pace University, Haskins Laboratories, 41 Park Row, New York, NY 10038-1 598, USA 12201 -2002, USA Polyamine synthesis in most organisms is initiated by the decarboxylation of ornithine to form putrescine via ornithine decarboxylase (ODC). Plants, some bacteria and some fungi and protozoa generate putrescine from arginine, via arginine decarboxylase (ADC) and agmatine ureohydrolase (AUH) or agmatine i m i no hydro I ase. A pol yam i ne-requ i r i ng strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a mutation in the gene encoding ODC was transformed with plasmids bearing genes encoding Escherichia coli ADC and AUH. Transformants regained the ability to grow in the absence of exogenous polyamines and contained enzyme activities consistent with the presence of both prokaryotic enzymes. Similar results were obtained when a plasmid containing a gene encoding oat (Avena sativa L.) ADC was substituted for the E. coli gene. These data demonstrate the successful complementation of a yeast biosynthetic polyamine synthesis defect by genes encoding an alternative pathway found in bacteria; they also show that plant ADC can substitute for the bacterial enzyme in this pathway. The recombinant yeast provides a tool for the study of the functional properties of these enzymes and for discovery of compounds that specifically inhibit this pathway.
Object transportation by multiple mobile robots controlled by attractor dynamics: theory and implementation

Dynamical systems theory is used as a theoretical language and tool to design a distributed control architecture for teams of mobile robots, that must transport a large object and simultaneously avoid collisions with (either static or dynamic) obstacles. Here we demonstrate in simulations and implementations in real robots that it is possible to simplify the architectures presented in previous work and to extend the approach to teams of n robots. The robots have no prior knowledge of the environment. The motion of each robot is controlled by a time series of asymptotical stable states. The attractor dynamics permits the integration of information from various sources in a graded manner. As a result, the robots show a strikingly smooth an stable team behaviour.
Atrial Fibrillation Therapy Now and in the Future: Drugs, Biologicals, and Ablation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a complex disease with multiple inter-relating causes culminating in rapid, seemingly disorganized atrial activation. Therapy targeting AF is rapidly changing and improving. The purpose of this review is to summarize current state-of-the-art diagnostic and therapeutic modalities for treatment of AF. The review focuses on reviewing treatment as it relates to the pathophysiological basis of disease and reviews preclinical and clinical evidence for potential new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, including imaging, biomarkers, pharmacological therapy, and ablative strategies for AF. Current ablation and drug therapy approaches to treating AF are largely based on treating the arrhythmia once the substrate occurs and is more effective in paroxysmal AF rather than persistent or permanent AF. However, there is much research aimed at prevention strategies, targeting AF substrate, so-called upstream therapy. Improved diagnostics, using imaging, genetics, and biomarkers, are needed to better identify subtypes of AF based on underlying substrate/mechanism to allow more directed therapeutic approaches. In addition, novel antiarrhythmics with more atrial specific effects may reduce limiting proarrhythmic side effects. Advances in ablation therapy are aimed at improving technology to reduce procedure time and in mechanism-targeted approaches.
Latent‐Model Robustness in Joint Models for a Primary Endpoint and a Longitudinal Process

Summary Joint modeling of a primary response and a longitudinal process via shared random effects is widely used in many areas of application. Likelihood‐based inference on joint models requires model specification of the random effects. Inappropriate model specification of random effects can compromise inference. We present methods to diagnose random effect model misspecification of the type that leads to biased inference on joint models. The methods are illustrated via application to simulated data, and by application to data from a study of bone mineral density in perimenopausal women and data from an HIV clinical trial.
Forward Models: Supervised Learning with a Distal Teacher

Internal models of the environment have an important role to play in adaptive systems, in general, and are of particular importance for the supervised learning paradigm. In this article we demonstrate that certain classical problems associated with the notion of the “teacher” in supervised learning can be solved by judicious use of learned internal models as components of the adaptive system. In particular, we show how supervised learning algorithms can be utilized in cases in which an unknown dynamical system intervenes between actions and desired outcomes. Our approach applies to any supervised learning algorithm that is capable of learning in multilayer networks.