Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Clinical Measures Associated with C-peptide Decline in Patients with Type 1 Diabetes over 15 Years

This study was done to characterize the natural course of C-peptide levels in patients with type 1 diabetes and identify distinguishing characters among patients with lower rates of C-peptide decline. A sample of 95 children with type 1 diabetes was analyzed to retrospectively track serum levels of C-peptide, HbA1c, weight, BMI, and diabetic complications for the 15 yr after diagnosis. The clinical characteristics were compared between the patients with low and high C-peptide levels, respectively. The average C-peptide level among all patients was significantly reduced five years after diagnosis (P < 0.001). The incidence of diabetic ketoacidosis was significantly lower among the patients with high levels of C-peptide (P = 0.038). The body weight and BMI standard deviation scores (SDS) 15 yr after diagnosis were significantly higher among the patients with low C-peptide levels (weight SDS, P = 0.012; BMI SDS, P = 0.044). In conclusion, C-peptide level was significantly decreased after 5 yr from diagnosis. Type 1 diabetes patients whose beta-cell functions were preserved might have low incidence of diabetic ketoacidosis. The declines of C-peptide level after diagnosis in type 1 diabetes may be associated with changes of body weight and BMI.
Bacterial infection‐triggered acute‐on‐chronic liver failure is associated with increased mortality

Acute‐on‐chronic liver failure (ACLF) is characterized by an acute deterioration of liver function in patients with cirrhosis in combination with recently defined organ failures. Our aim was to independently validate the prognostic value of the recently established EASL‐CLIF‐Consortium definition of ACLF and to identify new predictors of short‐term mortality.
Looking for love (in all the wrong places)

Onward! Seeks future directions. The Feyerabend project seeks to redefine computing. Thoroughly disillusioned with traditional and contemporary practices, a significant number are looking for a software development profession that we can love. If a person has a history of repetitive (only the names change) unsuccessful relationships they are advised to look at themselves in order to discover the roots of the problem that leads to them making the same mistaken choices over and over again. The same advice can be given to our profession -- look inward to discover the true source of our problems. This paper introduces five factors that arise from reflective examination of computing and software development.
The state of multiple sclerosis: current insight into the patient/health care provider relationship, treatment challenges, and satisfaction

Background Managing multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment presents challenges for both patients and health care professionals. Effective communication between patients with MS and their neurologist is important for improving clinical outcomes and quality of life. Methods A closed-ended online market research survey was used to assess the current state of MS care from the perspective of both patients with MS (≥18 years of age) and neurologists who treat MS from Europe and the US and to gain insight into perceptions of treatment expectations/goals, treatment decisions, treatment challenges, communication, and satisfaction with care, based on current clinical practice. Results A total of 900 neurologists and 982 patients completed the survey, of whom 46% self-identified as having remitting-relapsing MS, 29% secondary progressive MS, and 11% primary progressive MS. Overall, patients felt satisfied with their disease-modifying therapy (DMT); satisfaction related to comfort in speaking with their neurologist and participation in their DMT decision-making process. Patients who self-identified as having relapsing-remitting MS were more likely to be very satisfied with their treatment. Top challenges identified by patients in managing their DMT were cost, side effects/tolerability of treatment, and uncertainty if treatment was working. Half of the patients reported skipping doses, but only 68% told their health care provider that they did so. Conclusion Several important differences in perception were identified between patients and neurologists concerning treatment selection, satisfaction, expectations, goals, and comfort discussing symptoms, as well as treatment challenges and skipped doses. The study results emphasize that patient/neurologist communication and patient input into the treatment decision-making process likely influence patient satisfaction with treatment.
High rate of non-treatment among osteoporotic women enrolled in a US Medicare plan

Abstract Objective: To estimate the rate of non-treatment among elderly women with osteoporosis (OP) and to examine the association between patient characteristics and receiving treatment. Research design and methods: This cross-sectional, retrospective, observational study utilized patient information and claims from the Humana database to identify Medicare covered women aged ≥65 years old and continuously enrolled with evidence of either an OP diagnosis or an OP-related fracture during 2007–2011. The main outcome was receipt of pharmacological treatment of OP during 2012 (follow-up). The percentage of non-treatment was calculated and a stepwise selection logistic regression model was employed to estimate the association between baseline demographic and clinical characteristics and receiving treatment. Results: A total of 109,829 patients were included. Mean age was 75.7 years and 79.4% were identified with OP through OP diagnosis codes and did not have evidence of a prior fracture. Approximately one-third (32%) of patients had used OP medications during the baseline period, and 39% had experienced at least one gastro-intestinal event during baseline. Among all patients, 71.4% did not receive OP therapy during follow-up. The strongest factor associated with receiving treatment was prior use of OP therapy (odds ratio [OR] = 31.3; p < .001). Among the subgroup of patients with baseline fractures, 75.9% did not receive OP therapy during follow-up and the strongest factor associated with receiving treatment remained prior use of OP therapy (OR = 20.4; p < .001). Those with high comorbidity burden were less likely to receive treatment in both the overall cohort and within the subgroup with baseline fractures. Conclusions: Among Medicare-eligible women aged ≥65 identified with OP between 2007 and 2011, 71.4% did not receive OP treatment during 2012, including 75.9% of the subgroup of patients with a prior fracture. The use of diagnosis and procedures codes to identify patients with osteoporosis is subject to variation in coding.
Uterine Autotransplantation in the Nonhuman Primate With Preservation of the Uterine and Ovarian Vascular Pedicles

Purpose: To evaluate the technical feasibility of performing a uterine autotransplantation in the nonhuman primate while preserving the uterine and ovarian vascular pedicles. Methods: Eight (n = 8) female baboons at a primate research facility underwent a uterine autotransplant procedure with preservation of the vascular pedicles. The uterine arteries were separated from their amorphous tissue and skeletonized toward the internal iliac arteries bilaterally. A segment of the internal iliac artery was removed bilaterally along with both uterine arteries. Both ovarian veins were preserved to assist with the reperfusion of the uterine organ. Due to larger vascular pedicles in one of the primates, the uterine arteries were separated and reattached directly via end-to-end anastomosis. In another baboon, the deep uterine vein was used as a vascular pedicle rather than the ovarian vein on the left side due to adequate size and visualization. Results: Immediate tissue reperfusion occurred intraoperatively in 5 of the animals, with slower perfusion in 3 of the animals. Average warm ischemia time was 43.8 minutes while the average cold ischemia time was 174 minutes (2 hours, 54 minutes). Average total surgical time was 5.9 hours. All animals were sheltered into separate cages and monitored for behavior changes and food and drink consumption. Three of the primates expired immediately postoperatively, 2 from severe dehydration and 1 from gastric aspiration. Conclusions: This pilot study describes a modified surgical approach for uterine transplants in the nonhuman primate. This surgical technique may be applicable to living and deceased donor uterine transplantation.
Generalizability of the Maximum Proportional Recovery Rule to Visuospatial Neglect Early Poststroke

Background and objective. Proportional recovery of upper-extremity motor function and aphasia after stroke may suggest common mechanisms for spontaneous neurobiological recovery. This study aimed to investigate if the proportional recovery rule also applies to visuospatial neglect (VSN) in right-hemispheric first-ever ischemic stroke patients and explored the possible common underlying mechanisms. Methods. Patients with upper-limb paresis and VSN were included. Recovery defined as the change in Letter Cancellation Test (LCT) score at ~8 days and 6 months poststroke. Potential recovery defined as LCTmax-LCTinitial = 20 − LCTinitial. Hierarchical clustering separated fitters and nonfitters of the prediction rule. A cutoff value on LCTmax-LCTinitial was determined. The change in LCT and Fugl-Meyer Assessment Upper Extremity was expressed as a percentage of the total possible score to investigate the communality of proportional recovery. Results. Out of 90 patients, 80 displayed proportional recovery of VSN (ie, “fitters,” 0.97; 95% CI = 0.82-1.12). All patients who did not follow the prediction rule for VSN (ie, ”nonfitters”) had ≥15 missing O’s at baseline and failed to show proportional recovery of the upper limb. Conclusions. This study shows that the proportional recovery rule also applies to patients with VSN poststroke. Patients who fail to show proportional recovery of VSN are the same patients who fail to show proportional recovery of the upper limb. These findings support the idea of common intrahemispheric mechanisms underlying spontaneous neurobiological recovery in the first months poststroke. Future studies should investigate the prognostic clinical and neurobiological markers of these subgroups.
Learning Spatial-Temporal Regularized Correlation Filters for Visual Tracking

Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) are efficient in visual tracking but suffer from unwanted boundary effects. Spatially Regularized DCF (SRDCF) has been suggested to resolve this issue by enforcing spatial penalty on DCF coefficients, which, inevitably, improves the tracking performance at the price of increasing complexity. To tackle online updating, SRDCF formulates its model on multiple training images, further adding difficulties in improving efficiency. In this work, by introducing temporal regularization to SRDCF with single sample, we present our spatial-temporal regularized correlation filters (STRCF). The STRCF formulation can not only serve as a reasonable approximation to SRDCF with multiple training samples, but also provide a more robust appearance model than SRDCF in the case of large appearance variations. Besides, it can be efficiently solved via the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). By incorporating both temporal and spatial regularization, our STRCF can handle boundary effects without much loss in efficiency and achieve superior performance over SRDCF in terms of accuracy and speed. Compared with SRDCF, STRCF with hand-crafted features provides a 5Ã— speedup and achieves a gain of 5.4% and 3.6% AUC score on OTB-2015 and Temple-Color, respectively. Moreover, STRCF with deep features also performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers and achieves an AUC score of 68.3% on OTB-2015.
Pathotyping of Escherichia coli isolated from community toilet wastewater and stored drinking water in a slum in Bangladesh

This study investigated the occurrence of Escherichia coli pathotypes in sanitary wastewater and drinking water in a Bangladeshi urban slum and the potential associations between these sources. We examined 621 E. coli isolates from sanitary wastewater and stored drinking water by multiplex PCR and dual‐index sequencing, classifying them into eight pathotypes based on 14 virulence genes and additionally evaluating the possession of the human‐specific E. coli genetic biomarker H8. The proportions of pathogenic E. coli were significantly different (P < 0·001) between wastewater (18·6%) and drinking water (1·7%). StIb‐positive enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) were predominant in wastewater, indicating that people in the site carried ETEC. In contrast, no ETEC was present in drinking water and the proportion of H8‐positive isolates was significantly smaller (7·8%) than that in wastewater (16·3%) (P = 0·001). Our findings indicate that sanitary wastewater from the slum was heavily contaminated with pathogenic E. coli, posing a great health risk. Furthermore, E. coli contamination of drinking water could be derived from not only human but also other sources.
Analyzing the pathways enriched in genes associated with nicotine dependence in the context of human protein–protein interaction network

Nicotine dependence is the primary addictive stage of cigarette smoking. Although a lot of studies have been performed to explore the molecular mechanism underlying nicotine dependence, our understanding on this disorder is still far from complete. Over the past decades, an increasing number of candidate genes involved in nicotine dependence have been identified by different technical approaches, including the genetic association analysis. In this study, we performed a comprehensive collection of candidate genes reported to be genetically associated with nicotine dependence. Then, the biochemical pathways enriched in these genes were identified by considering the gene’s propensity to be related to nicotine dependence. One of the most widely used pathway enrichment analysis approach, over-representation analysis, ignores the function non-equivalence of genes in candidate gene set and may have low discriminative power in identifying some dysfunctional pathways. To overcome such drawbacks, we constructed a comprehensive human protein–protein interaction network, and then assigned a function weighting score to each candidate gene based on their network topological features. Evaluation indicated the function weighting score scheme was consistent with available evidence. Finally, the function weighting scores of the candidate genes were incorporated into pathway analysis to identify the dysfunctional pathways involved in nicotine dependence, and the interactions between pathways was detected by pathway crosstalk analysis. Compared to conventional over-representation-based pathway analysis tool, the modified method exhibited improved discriminative power and detected some novel pathways potentially underlying nicotine dependence. In summary, we conducted a comprehensive collection of genes associated with nicotine dependence and then detected the biochemical pathways enriched in these genes using a modified pathway enrichment analysis approach with function weighting score of candidate genes integrated. Our results may provide insight into the molecular mechanism underlying nicotine dependence.
Immunogenicity and safety of the 2015 Southern Hemisphere formulation of a split-virion inactivated quadrivalent vaccine

ABSTRACT An inactivated split-virion quadrivalent influenza vaccine (IIV4; Fluzone® Quadrivalent; Sanofi Pasteur) has been available in the US since 2013 and in the Southern Hemisphere since 2015. Here, we describe the results of an open-label, post-licensure trial (WHO Universal Trial Number, U1111-1143-9256) to confirm the immunogenicity and safety of the Southern Hemisphere 2015 formulation of IIV4. Adults 18–60 years of age and > 60 years of age (n = 60 per age group) received a single 0.5-mL intramuscular injection of IIV4. After vaccination, hemagglutination inhibition titers for each strain in IIV4 increased by a geometric mean of at least 10-fold for younger adults and at least 9-fold for older adults. All of the younger adult participants and 98%–100% of the older adult participants had seroprotective titers for each strain. Also, at least 80% of younger adults and 78% of older adults seroconverted or had a significant increase in titer for all four vaccine strains. These post-vaccination immune responses exceeded the criteria of the Committee for Human Medicinal Products former Note for Guidance for influenza vaccines. Finally, no serious adverse events were reported, and no new safety signals were detected. These results confirmed that the Southern Hemisphere 2015 formulation of IIV4 was well tolerated, highly immunogenic, and met the criteria for influenza vaccine immunogenicity and safety.
Geobacter Dominates the Inner Layers of a Stratified Biofilm on a Fluidized Anode During Brewery Wastewater Treatment

In this study, we designed a microbial electrochemical fluidized bed reactor (ME-FBR), with an electroconductive anodic bed made of activated carbon particles for treating a brewery wastewater. Under a batch operating mode, acetate and propionate consumption rates were 13-fold and 2.4-fold higher, respectively, when the fluidized anode was polarized (0.2 V) with respect to open circuit conditions. Operating in a continuous mode, this system could effectively treat the brewery effluent at organic loading rates (OLR) over 1.7 kg m-3NRV d-1 and with removal efficiencies of 95 ± 1.4% (hydraulic retention time of 1 day and an influent of 1.7 g-COD L-1). The coulombic efficiency values highly depended upon the OLR applied, and varied from a 56 ± 15% to 10 ± 1%. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis revealed a relative high abundance of Geobacter species (ca. 20%), and clearly showed a natural microbial stratification. Interestingly, the Geobacter cluster was highly enriched in the innermost layers of the biofilm (thickness of 10 μm), which were in contact with the electroconductive particles of bed, whereas the rest of bacteria were located in the outermost layers. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a clear microbial stratification has been observed on an anode-respiring biofilm. Our results revealed the relevant role of Geobacter in switching between the electrode and other microbial communities performing metabolic reactions in the outermost environment of the biofilm.
Unconscious Evaluation of Faces on Social Dimensions

It has been proposed that two major axes, dominance and trustworthiness, characterize the social dimensions of face evaluation. Whether evaluation of faces on these social dimensions is restricted to conscious appraisal or happens at a preconscious level is unknown. Here we provide behavioral evidence that such preconscious evaluations exist and that they are likely to be interpretations arising from interactions between the face stimuli and observer-specific traits. Monocularly viewed faces that varied independently along two social dimensions of trust and dominance were rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression (CFS) when a flashing pattern was presented to the other eye. Participants pressed a button as soon as they saw the face emerge from suppression to indicate whether the previously hidden face was located slightly to the left or right of central fixation. Dominant and untrustworthy faces took significantly longer time to emerge (T2E) compared with neutral faces. A control experiment showed these findings could not reflect delayed motor responses to conscious faces. Finally, we showed that participants' self-reported propensity to trust was strongly predictive of untrust avoidance (i.e., difference in T2E for untrustworthy vs neutral faces) as well as dominance avoidance (i.e., difference in T2E for dominant vs neutral faces). Dominance avoidance was also correlated with submissive behavior. We suggest that such prolongation of suppression for threatening faces may result from a passive fear response, leading to slowed visual perception.
Health Interest Modulates Brain Reward Responses to a Perceived Low-Caloric Beverage in Females

Objective: Health labels are omnipresent in the supermarket. Such labels give rise to expectations about the product experience and may change flavor perception and perceived reward value. Consumers vary in their degree of health interest and may be differentially affected by such labels. However, how health interest influences neural reward responses to anticipation and receipt of heath-labeled foods is not known. This study assessed to what extent brain responses induced by anticipation and receipt of a beverage with different levels of perceived caloric content are associated with health interest. Method: Twenty-five females completed an fMRI motivational taste-task in which they were presented with a low-caloric cue or a high-caloric cue and subsequently worked for sips of lemonade by moving a joystick. If they responded correctly and in time, they received the lemonade as a reward. Because of the 2 cue types, participants believed they were receiving 2 different lemonades, a high-caloric (HC-receipt) and a low-caloric (LC-receipt) one. Health interest was assessed with the General health interest subscale of the Health and Taste Attitude Scales. Results: Health interest scores correlated significantly (r = .65) with LC-versus HC-receipt activation in the dorsal striatum (putamen), a region involved in encoding food reward. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the reward value of a healthy product compared to its unhealthy counterpart increases with health interest. This provides more insight into the working mechanism of government campaigns that focus on increasing health interest to encourage the formation of healthy eating habits.
Thermomechanical Modelling for Phonon Transport and Damping Analysis of Silicon Nano-Structure

With the technology advancement in fabrication and processing over the past decades, the miniaturization of structures down to nano-scale has been successfully applied in many fields such as high strength automotive parts, ultra-high frequency electromechanical resonators, ultra-light sensors, high efficiency energy harvesting devices and etc. For these applications, the concept of energy efficiency is of particular significance to designing high performance and stability nanoscale electromechanical and thermomechanical systems. Similar to traditional engineering fields, effective computational tools can be extremely useful to investigate the properties and behavior, and to expedite the design process of nano-sized materials and structures. However, the development of these computational tools relies on physical models that accurately describe the fundamental physics of nanoscale systems, for which many classical continuum models of mechanics, transport and thermodynamics are no longer valid. Due to the lack of effective computational tools for nano-scale systems, atom based simulation tools are often adopted. However, atomistic simulations are computationally costly and become infeasible for systems larger than a few tens of nanometers. To tackle these challenges, in this research, we aim to develop thermomechanical models based on phonon theories and study the thermal transport and damping behavior of silicon nano-structures. In the first part of this research, a computational approach is developed for the calculation of thermoelectric properties of nanoporous silicon. The approach employs a