Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lack of association of diabetes with increased postoperative mortality and cardiac morbidity: results of 6565 major vascular operations.

HYPOTHESIS A number of preoperative factors, including diabetes mellitus (DM), have been cited as increasing risk in patients undergoing major vascular operations. In smaller studies at our institution we have not found this to be apparent. This study reviewed all major vascular operations to confirm our bias that DM is not associated with increased mortality or cardiac morbidity. DESIGN Case series retrospectively reviewed from a vascular registry established in 1990. SETTING Tertiary care center. PATIENTS Consecutive sample of 6565 patients who underwent lower extremity revascularization or carotid or aortic procedures, grouped by presence or absence of DM. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Postoperative mortality, congestive heart failure, or myocardial infarction. RESULTS Patients with DM made up 62.3% of the population, and those without diabetes, 37.7%. Average age of the DM group was 67.1 years, with 61.3% male and 38.7% female. Average age of the non-DM group was 70.6 years, with 61.8% male and 38.2% female. The rates of overall postoperative mortality, myocardial infarction, and congestive heart failure were 1.14%, 1.59%, and 1.13%, respectively. Comparing the DM with the non-DM group, these rates were 0.96% vs 1.46%, 1.77% vs 1.30%, and 1.13% vs 1.14%, respectively. Using multivariate analysis, the DM group had an inverse relationship to perioperative death, with an odds ratio of 0.53 (P =.01). The factors that were associated with increased mortality were hemodialysis and history of congestive heart failure. Previous myocardial infarction was the only factor that predicted postoperative myocardial infarction. Kaplan-Meier survival curves showed a significantly decreased survival in the DM group during the next 5 years (P<.001). CONCLUSIONS Diabetes alone does not confer a higher mortality or cardiac morbidity rate with major vascular procedures. However, long-term survival is significantly worse in this group of patients.
Reconstruction of solid models from oriented point sets

In this paper we present a novel approach to the surface reconstruction problem that takes as its input an oriented point set and returns a solid, water-tight model. The idea of our approach is to use Stokes' Theorem to compute the characteristic function of the solid model (the function that is equal to one inside the model and zero outside of it). Specifically, we provide an efficient method for computing the Fourier coefficients of the characteristic function using only the surface samples and normals, we compute the inverse Fourier transform to get back the characteristic function, and we use iso-surfacing techniques to extract the boundary of the solid model. The advantage of our approach is that it provides an automatic, simple, and efficient method for computing the solid model represented by a point set without requiring the establishment of adjacency relations between samples or iteratively solving large systems of linear equations. Furthermore, our approach can be directly applied to models with holes and cracks, providing a method for hole-filling and zippering of disconnected polygonal models.
The innervation of the diaphysis of the cat tibia.

Nerve fibres have been demonstrated in the periosteum, in the bone marrow and in the bone cortex. Kolliker (1850) has described nerve fibres in the periosteum. Later, sensory endings, principally of the Pacinian type, have been found in the periosteum by Kolliker (1858), Sfameni (1900) and Mickolczy (1922). Mickolczy has studied the innervation of the periosteum in dogs and has reported that, apart from the fibres innervating muscles and tendons, a separate small bundle innervates the periosteum and that it divides into several fine branches in the periosteum. He has also stated that in the extremities of mice the Pacinian corpuscles were rich, especially in the connective tissue between the insertion of muscles and the outer layer of the periosteum. Weddell & Harpman (1940) and Feindel, Weddell & Sinclair (1948) have stated that in the human tibia, the mandible and other bones of rats, the periosteum is freely supplied with sensory fibres, terminating as unmyelinated nerve networks. In the bone marrow myelinated and unmyelinated fibres have been described by many investigators such as Drinker & Drinker (1916) in the canine tibia; Rossi (1931) in the extremities of cats, dogs, rabbits, etc., Grant & Root (1952) in the cat's tibia; Takase & Nomura (1957) in the rat tibia. Nerve fibres have also been noted entering bone along with the vascular channels. De Castro (1930) has observed nerve twigs ending on osteoblasts in growing bone. He found no nerves in fully formed bone. Later, Hurrell (1937) traced the nerve fibres along the Haversian canals and into the bone matrix of the femur of adult cats and reported that even in adult bones nerve fibres end blindly in the bone matrix and that some fibres are in close relation with the bone cells. However, recent work carried out by Davies & Fearnhead (1960) on foetal and adult mice and rats, adult monkeys and human foetuses and by Miller & Kashara (1963) on the human femur has denied the existence of nerve terminals in the bone matrix. These observations were mainly histological studies ofhuman and animal materials. None of the textbooks on the anatomy of the cat and other domestic animals mentions the nerve supply to the bone (Reighard & Jennings, 1925; Hyman, 1942; Stromsten, 1947; Horsburgh & Heath, 1950; and Sisson & Grossman, 1953). The physiological function of the nerves supplying the bone still remains undetermined despite several investigations. The present investigation was designed to demonstrate the gross anatomy of the nerve supply to the diaphysis of the feline tibia so that its results could be applied to physiological experiments on the nervous influences acting on the bone.
Influence of shearing rate on the residual strength characteristic of
three landslides soils in loess area

Abstract. In order to investigate the effect of the shearing rate on the residual shear strength of slip zone soils, a series ring shear tests were carried out on slip zone soils from three landslides in loess area at the two shearing rates (0.1 mm/min and 1 mm/min). The slip zone soil specimens used in present study were from the northwest of China. Results indicated that the shear displacement to achieve the residual stage for specimens with higher shearing rate is greater than that of the lower rate. Relationship between the residual friction coefficients and normal stress shows that the residual friction coefficients for all specimens under the lower normal stress were greater than that under the higher normal stress at two shearing rate. Furthermore, the difference in the residual friction angle фr at the two shearing rates, фr (1) − фr (0.1), under each normal stress level were either positive or negative values, with the maximum absolute value of фr (1) − фr (0.1) reach up to 2.218°. However, the difference фr (1) − фr (0.1) under all normal stresses was negative, which indicates that the residual shear parameters reduced with the increasing of the shearing rate in loess area.
Flea-borne rickettsioses: ecologic considerations.

Ecologic and economic factors, as well as changes in human behavior, have resulted in the emergence of new and the reemergence of existing but forgotten infectious diseases during the past 20 years. Flea-borne disease organisms (e.g., Yersinia pestis, Rickettsia typhi, R. felis, and Bartonella henselae) are widely distributed throughout the world in endemic-disease foci, where components of the enzootic cycle are present. However, flea-borne diseases could reemerge in epidemic form because of changes in vector-host ecology due to environmental and human behavior modification. The changing ecology of murine typhus in southern California and Texas over the past 30 years is a good example of urban and suburban expansion affecting infectious disease outbreaks. In these areas, the classic rat-flea-rat cycle of R. typhi has been replaced by a peridomestic animal cycle involving, e.g., free-ranging cats, dogs, and opossums and their fleas. In addition to the vector-host components of the murine typhus cycle, we have uncovered a second typhuslike rickettsia, R. felis. This agent was identified from the blood of a hospitalized febrile patient and from opossums and their fleas. We reviewed the ecology of R. typhi and R. felis and present recent data relevant to the vector biology, immunology, and molecular characterization and phylogeny of flea-borne rickettsioses.
Applications of Wavelets to the Analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background Maps

We consider wavelets as a tool to perform a variety of tasks in the context of analyzing cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps. Using Spherical Haar Wavelets we define a position and angular-scale-dependent measure of power that can be used to assess the existence of spatial structure. We apply planar Daubechies wavelets for the identification and removal of points sources from small sections of sky maps. Our technique can successfully identify virtually all point sources which are above 3� and more than 80% of those above 1�. We discuss the trade-offs between the levels of correct and false detections. We denoise and compress a 100,000 pixel CMB map by a factor of � 10 in 5 seconds achieving a noise reduction of about 35%. In contrast to Wiener filtering the compression process is model independent and very fast. We discuss the usefulness of wavelets for power spectrum and cosmological parameter estimation. We conclude that at present wavelet functions are most suitable for identifying localized sources.
Delving Deeper into Convolutional Networks for Learning Video Representations

We propose an approach to learn spatio-temporal features in videos from intermediate visual representations we call "percepts" using Gated-Recurrent-Unit Recurrent Networks (GRUs). Our method relies on percepts that are extracted from all level of a deep convolutional network trained on the large ImageNet dataset. While high-level percepts contain highly discriminative information, they tend to have a low-spatial resolution. Low-level percepts, on the other hand, preserve a higher spatial resolution from which we can model finer motion patterns. Using low-level percepts can leads to high-dimensionality video representations. To mitigate this effect and control the model number of parameters, we introduce a variant of the GRU model that leverages the convolution operations to enforce sparse connectivity of the model units and share parameters across the input spatial locations. We empirically validate our approach on both Human Action Recognition and Video Captioning tasks. In particular, we achieve results equivalent to state-of-art on the YouTube2Text dataset using a simpler text-decoder model and without extra 3D CNN features.
Colocation as a Hybrid ICT Sourcing Strategy to Improve Operational Agility

Fast access to communication networks and the availability of high-performance information and com-munication technology (ICT) infrastructures is indis-pensable for accelerating business transactions. Yet with increased environmental volatility, companies need to become more agile in identifying and responding to market- and technology-based challenges. Accordingly, a responsive and high-performance ICT infrastructure remains a top priority for firms. Thus, new ICT sourcing strategies may lead to significant competitive advantages, especially in dynamic business environments. This article analyzes a hybrid ICT sourcing strategy called colocation that allows firms to operate their own ICT resources in facilities of special-ized data center providers. Grounded in the theory of dynamic capabilities, we theorize and empirically ex-amine how colocation and top management support enable firms to improve their operational agility in the presence of environmental turbulence.
Efficient Planning under Uncertainty with Macro-actions

Deciding how to act in partially observable environments remains an active area of research. Identifying good sequences of decisions is particularly challenging when good control performance requires planning multiple steps into the future in domains with many states. Towards addressing this challenge, we present an online, forward-search algorithm called the Posterior Belief Distribution (PBD). PBD leverages a novel method for calculating the posterior distribution over beliefs that result after a sequence of actions is taken, given the set of observation sequences that could be received during this process. This method allows us to efficiently evaluate the expected reward of a sequence of primitive actions, which we refer to as macro-actions. We present a formal analysis of our approach, and examine its performance on two very large simulation experiments: scientific exploration and a target monitoring domain. We also demonstrate our algorithm being used to control a real robotic helicopter in a target monitoring experiment, which suggests that our approach has practical potential for planning in real-world, large partially observable domains where a multistep lookahead is required to achieve good performance.
Alpha Internexin Expression Related with Molecular Characteristics in Adult Glioblastoma and Oligodendroglioma

Alpha-internexin (INA) is a proneuronal gene-encoding neurofilament interacting protein. INA is overexpressed mostly in oligodendroglial phenotype gliomas, is related to 1p/19q codeletion, and is a favorable prognostic marker. We studied INA expression in oligodendrogliomas (ODGs) and glioblastomas (GBMs) to verify its association with several molecular phenotypes, 1p/19q codeletion, and epidermal growth-factor-receptor (EGFR) amplification. A total of 230 low- and high-grade ODG and GBM cases was analyzed for INA expression by immunohistochemical staining; and 1p/19q and EGFR gene status was examined by fluorescence in-situ hybridization. INA was positive in 80.3% of ODGs and in 34.3% of GBMs. 1p/19q codeletion was detected in 77.0% of ODGs and 5.5% of GBMs. INA and 1p/19q codeletion were strongly correlated (P < 0.001). The specificity of INA expression for 1p/19q codeletion was 70.8%, while sensitivity was 100%; positive predictive value was 72.5%, and negative predictive value was 29.2% in all 228 tumors. INA expression was correlated with better progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) (P = 0.001). In conclusion, INA expression has high specificity and sensitivity to predict 1p/19q codeletion, and it is well correlated with PFS of both ODGs and GBMs. Therefore, INA expression could be a simple, reliable, and favorable prognostic and surrogate marker for 1p/19q codeletion and long term survival.
How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us? A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Previous research on the neural underpinnings of empathy has been limited to affective situations experienced in a similar way by an observer and a target individual. In daily life we also interact with people whose responses to affective stimuli can be very different from our own. How do we understand the affective states of these individuals? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how participants empathize with the feelings of patients who reacted with no pain to surgical procedures but with pain to a soft touch. Empathy for pain of these patients activated the same areas (insula, medial/anterior cingulate cortex) as empathy for persons who responded to painful stimuli in the same way as the observer. Empathy in a situation that was aversive only for the observer but neutral for the patient recruited areas involved in self–other distinction (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (right inferior frontal cortex). In addition, effective connectivity between the latter and areas implicated in affective processing was enhanced. This suggests that inferring the affective state of someone who is not like us can rely upon the same neural structures as empathy for someone who is similar to us. When strong emotional response tendencies exist though, these tendencies have to be overcome by executive functions. Our results demonstrate that the fronto-cortical attention network is crucially involved in this process, corroborating that empathy is a flexible phenomenon which involves both automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. Our findings have important implications for the understanding and promotion of empathy, demonstrating that regulation of one's egocentric perspective is crucial for understanding others.
Ident i f icat ion and Partial Character izat ion Using a Monoclonal An t ibody

Until the recent advent of monoclonal antibodies (mAb) ~ specific for human T cells, the most widely used marker for human peripheral T cells and thymocytes was their ability to bind sheep red blood cells (SRBC) (1-4). Early studies using polyvalent ant i -T cell sera suggested that the interaction resulting in E rosettes is mediated by specific receptors on the human T cells (5), a notion fully confirmed by the discovery that mAb against the T cell surface molecule carrying T 1 1 and related markers block rosette formation (6-9). Nevertheless, E rosetting remained a curious, if useful, phenomenon until a functional involvement of the E receptor in T cell activation was suggested by a number of findings: First, it was shown that the rosetting procedure rendered T cells reactive to growth factor(s) (10). More recently, anti-T11 mAb were reported to either inhibit T cell activation (1 1-15) and T cell-mediated cytolysis (12, 13), or, if certain combinations of mAb were used, to lead to polyclonal T cell activation (14). Accordingly, a "physiological ligand" of the E receptor with a role in T cell activation was postulated (11-13, 16), which could be envisaged as either a soluble mediator or a cell surface structure on cells with which T cells interact. We have pursued the latter hypothesis and have developed an experimental approach based on the following assumption: The binding of RBC to the E receptor is not due to fortuitous crossreactivity with the unknown physiological ligand. Since human T cells also bind autologous RBC (17), the target for T1 1 on RBC may be the physiological ligand itself; this ligand may be expressed on other cell types as well, where it is not as easily visualized by rosetting but may play its role in cellular interactions. In the present report, the identification, isolation, and partial biochemical characterization of the target structure for T 1 1 (T 1 1TS) is described. In contrast to earlier attempts to define this molecule by conventional biochemistry (18This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through SFB 105, W/irzburg. l Abbreviations used in this paper: BSA, bovine serum albumin; BSS, balanced salt solution; Con A, concanavalin A; FCS, fetal calf serum; FITC, fluorescein isothiocyanate; HuRBC, human red blood cells; IL-2, interleukin 2; mAb, monoclonal antibody(s); NMIgG, normal mouse IgG; NP-40, Nonidet P-40; PAGE, polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis; PBL, peripheral blood lymphocytes; PBS, phosphate-buffered saline; SDS, sodium dodecyl sulfate; SRBC, sheep red blood cells; SWBC, sheep white blood cells; TI ITS, T l 1 target structure.
Identification of Myocardial Damage in Systemic Sclerosis: A Nuclear Cardiology Approach

Myocardial involvement is an important prognostic factor in patients with systemic sclerosis, and early diagnosis and staging of the disease have been sought after. Since myocardial damage is characterized by connective tissue disease, including fibrosis and diffuse vascular lesions or microcirculation, nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging has been a promising option for evaluating myocardial damages in early stages. In addition to the conventional stress-rest perfusion imaging, the current use of quantitative electrocardiographic gated imaging has contributed to more precise evaluation of cardiac perfusion, ventricular wall motion, and diastolic function, all of which have enhanced diagnostic ability of evaluating myocardial dysfunction. Abnormal sympathetic imaging with Iodine-123 metaiodobenzylguanidine might be another option for identifying myocardial damage. This paper deals with approaches from nuclear cardiology to detect perfusion and functional abnormality as an early sign of myocardial involvement as well as possible prognostic values in patients with abnormal imaging results. The role of nuclear cardiology in the era of multiple imaging modalities is discussed.
Heritability of refractive error and ocular biometrics: the Genes in Myopia (GEM) twin study.

PURPOSE A classic twin study was undertaken to assess the contribution of genes and environment to the development of refractive errors and ocular biometrics in a twin population. METHODS A total of 1224 twins (345 monozygotic [MZ] and 267 dizygotic [DZ] twin pairs) aged between 18 and 88 years were examined. All twins completed a questionnaire consisting of a medical history, education, and zygosity. Objective refraction was measured in all twins, and biometric measurements were obtained using partial coherence interferometry. RESULTS Intrapair correlations for spherical equivalent and ocular biometrics were significantly higher in the MZ than in the DZ twin pairs (P < 0.05), when refraction was considered as a continuous variable. A significant gender difference in the variation of spherical equivalent and ocular biometrics was found (P < 0.05). A genetic model specifying an additive, dominant, and unique environmental factor that was sex limited was the best fit for all measured variables. Heritability of spherical equivalents of 88% and 75% were found in the men and women, respectively, whereas, that of axial length was 94% and 92%, respectively. Additive genetic effects accounted for a greater proportion of the variance in spherical equivalent, whereas the variance in ocular biometrics, particularly axial length was explained mostly by dominant genetic effects. CONCLUSIONS Genetic factors, both additive and dominant, play a significant role in refractive error (myopia and hypermetropia) as well as in ocular biometrics, particularly axial length. The sex limitation ADE model (additive genetic, nonadditive genetic, and environmental components) provided the best-fit genetic model for all parameters.
Levenberg marquardt algorithm for the training of type-2 fuzzy neuro systems with a novel type-2 fuzzy membership function

A new training approach based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is proposed for type-2 fuzzy neural networks. While conventional gradient descent algorithms use only the first order derivative, the proposed algorithm used in this paper benefits from the first and the second order derivatives which makes the training procedure faster. Besides, this approach is more robust than the other techniques that use the second order derivatives, e.g. Gauss-Newton's method. The training algorithm proposed is tested on the training of a type-2 fuzzy neural network used for the prediction of a chaotic Mackey-Glass time series. The results show that the learning algorithm proposed not only results in faster training but also in a better forecasting accuracy.