Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-term tolerance and cardiac function in breast cancer patients receiving trastuzumab therapy

We examined the long-term clinical tolerance and cardiac safety of trastuzumab treatment in ninety-four female patients diagnosed with breast cancer with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) overexpression. Electrocardiography (ECG) was monitored throughout trastuzumab treatment, and left ventricular ejection fractions (LVEFs) were estimated using echocardiography prior to treatment with trastuzumab and every 3 months after its first application. The duration of trastuzumab treatments ranged from 3 to 60 months. Declines in LVEF ≥ 15% were seen mainly after 3-15 months of trastuzumab treatment, and LVEF was lowest at 15 months, which coincided with the largest decline in LVEF from baseline. Spearman correlation coefficients indicated that accumulation of anthracycline, the use of cyto/cardioprotective drugs (CPD) and the duration of trastuzumab treatment were all associated with the change of LVEF, and there was a strong correlation between these factors and the change of LVEF (ρ=0.81, ρ=0.734 and ρ=0.777 respectively). These results indicate that significant decreases of LVEF may be seen after 3-15 months of trastuzumab treatment, but that there is a favorable benefit-risk ratio for patients undergoing long-term trastuzumab treatment.
Structural analysis and molecular docking of trypanocidal aryloxy-quinones in trypanothione and glutathione reductases: a comparison with biochemical data

A set of aryloxy-quinones, previously synthesized and evaluated against Trypanosoma cruzi epimastigotes cultures, were found more potent and selective than nifurtimox. One of the possible mechanisms of the trypanocidal activity of these quinones could be inhibition of trypanothione reductase (TR). Considering that glutathione reductase (GR) is the equivalent of TR in humans, biochemical, kinetic, and molecular docking studies in TR and GR were envisaged and compared with the trypanocidal and cytotoxic data of a set of aryloxy-quinones. Biochemical assays indicated that three naphthoquinones (Nq-h, Nq-g, and Nq-d) selectively inhibit TR and the TR kinetic analyses indicated that Nq-h inhibit TR in a noncompetitive mechanism. Molecular dockings were performed in TR and GR in the following three putative binding sites: the catalytic site, the dimer interface, and the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate-binding site. In TR and GR, the aryloxy-quinones were found to exhibit high affinity for a site near it cognate-binding site in a place in which the noncompetitive kinetics could be justified. Taking as examples the three compounds with TR specificity (TRS) (Nq-h, Nq-g, and Nq-d), the presence of a network of contacts with the quinonic ring sustained by the triad of Lys62, Met400′, Ser464′ residues, seems to contribute hardly to the TRS. Compound Nq-b, a naphthoquinone with nitrophenoxy substituent, proved to be the best scaffold for the design of trypanocidal compounds with low toxicity. However, the compound displayed only a poor and non-selective effect toward TR indicating that TR inhibition is not the main reason for the antiparasitic activity of the aryloxy-quinones.
Combined Pre-Distortion and Censoring for Bandwidth-Efficient and Energy-Efficient Fusion of Spectrum Sensing Information

This paper describes a novel scheme for the fusion of spectrum sensing information in cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio applications. The scheme combines a spectrum-efficient, pre-distortion-based fusion strategy with an energy-efficient censoring-based fusion strategy to achieve the combined effect of reduction in bandwidth and power consumption during the transmissions of the local decisions to the fusion center. Expressions for computing the key performance metrics of the spectrum sensing of the proposed scheme are derived and validated by means of computer simulations. An extensive analysis of the overall energy efficiency is made, along with comparisons with reference strategies proposed in the literature. It is demonstrated that the proposed fusion scheme can outperform the energy efficiency attained by these reference strategies. Moreover, it attains approximately the same global decision performance of the best among these strategies.
Decomposability of Translation Metrics for Improved Evaluation and Efficient Algorithms

Bleu is the de facto standard for evaluation and development of statistical machine translation systems. We describe three real-world situations involving comparisons between different versions of the same systems where one can obtain improvements in Bleu scores that are questionable or even absurd. These situations arise because Bleu lacks the property of decomposability, a property which is also computationally convenient for various applications. We propose a very conservative modification to Bleu and a cross between Bleu and word error rate that address these issues while improving correlation with human judgments.
Compressing Word Embeddings via Deep Compositional Code Learning

Natural language processing (NLP) models often require a massive number of parameters for word embeddings, resulting in a large storage or memory footprint. Deploying neural NLP models to mobile devices requires compressing the word embeddings without any significant sacrifices in performance. For this purpose, we propose to construct the embeddings with few basis vectors. For each word, the composition of basis vectors is determined by a hash code. To maximize the compression rate, we adopt the multi-codebook quantization approach instead of binary coding scheme. Each code is composed of multiple discrete numbers, such as (3, 2, 1, 8), where the value of each component is limited to a fixed range. We propose to directly learn the discrete codes in an end-to-end neural network by applying the Gumbel-softmax trick. Experiments show the compression rate achieves 98% in a sentiment analysis task and 94% ~ 99% in machine translation tasks without performance loss. In both tasks, the proposed method can improve the model performance by slightly lowering the compression rate. Compared to other approaches such as character-level segmentation, the proposed method is language-independent and does not require modifications to the network architecture.
Clinical Outcomes, Utilization, and Charges in Persons With Neck Pain Receiving Guideline Adherent Physical Therapy

In efforts to decrease practice variation, clinical practice guidelines for neck pain have been published. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of receiving guideline adherent physical therapy (PT) on clinical outcomes, health care utilization, and charges for health care services in patients with neck pain. A retrospective review of 298 patients with neck pain receiving PT from 2008 to 2011 was performed. Clinical outcomes, utilization, and charges were compared between patients who received guideline adherent care and nonadherent care. Patients in the adherent care group experienced a lower percentage improvement in pain score compared to nonadherent care group (p = .01), but groups did not significantly differ on percentage improvement in disability (p = .32). However, patients receiving adherent care had an average 3.6 fewer PT visits (p < .001) and less charges for PT (p < .001). Additionally, patients receiving adherent care had 7.3 fewer visits to other health care providers (p < .001), one less prescription medication (p = .02) and 43% fewer diagnostic images (p = .02) but did not differ in their charges to other health care providers (p = .68) during the calendar year of undergoing PT. Although receiving guideline adherent care demonstrated positive effects on health care utilization and financial outcomes, there appears to be a trade-off with clinical outcomes.
Posterior Parietal Cortex Guides Visual Decisions in Rats

Neurons in putative decision-making structures can reflect both sensory and decision signals, making their causal role in decisions unclear. Here, we tested whether rat posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is causal for processing visual sensory signals or instead for accumulating evidence for decision alternatives. We disrupted PPC activity optogenetically during decision making and compared effects on decisions guided by auditory versus visual evidence. Deficits were largely restricted to visual decisions. To further test for visual dominance in PPC, we evaluated electrophysiological responses after individual sensory events and observed much larger response modulation after visual stimuli than auditory stimuli. Finally, we measured trial-to-trial spike count variability during stimulus presentation and decision formation. Variability decreased sharply, suggesting that the network is stabilized by inputs, unlike what would be expected if sensory signals were locally accumulated. Our findings suggest that PPC plays a causal role in processing visual signals that are accumulated elsewhere. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Defining the neural circuits that support decision making bridges a gap between our understanding of simple sensorimotor reflexes and our understanding of truly complex behavior. However, identifying brain areas that play a causal role in decision making has proved challenging. We tested the causal role of a candidate component of decision circuits, the rat posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Our interpretation of the data benefited from our use of animals trained to make decisions guided by either visual or auditory evidence. Our results suggest that PPC plays a causal role specifically in visual decision making and may support sensory aspects of the decision, such as interpreting the visual signals so that evidence for a decision can be accumulated elsewhere.
Fifteen years of Belgian experience with external quality assessment of semen analysis

Semen analysis is difficult to standardize, quality control and quality assurance are necessary to ensure that results are accurate and precise. This Belgian EQA survey over a 15‐year period, involving 121 laboratories, attempted to reduce interlaboratory variability and at the same time, encouraged participating laboratories to implement correct techniques as advised by the WHO. Over the total period, the median coefficient of variation (CV) for sperm count, irrespective of the method used was 19.2%, while using improved Neubauer chamber resulted in a significantly (p < 0.001) lower median CV (14.4%). The overall median CV for rapid progressive motility was high (37.1%), but progressive motility (15.1%) and total motility (13.8%) were acceptable. Sperm morphology revealed a large variability in 79.4% irrespective of the staining procedures or evaluation criteria used. Participation in the Belgian EQA is on voluntary basis. Both, participation and implementation of the correct techniques should be made mandatory for accreditation and benefit of patient treatment. The existing Belgian EQA program should now be harmonized with other existing EQA schemes in Europe.
A Unified Framework for Multi-Modal Isolated Gesture Recognition

In this article, we focus on isolated gesture recognition and explore different modalities by involving RGB stream, depth stream, and saliency stream for inspection. Our goal is to push the boundary of this realm even further by proposing a unified framework that exploits the advantages of multi-modality fusion. Specifically, a spatial-temporal network architecture based on consensus-voting has been proposed to explicitly model the long-term structure of the video sequence and to reduce estimation variance when confronted with comprehensive inter-class variations. In addition, a three-dimensional depth-saliency convolutional network is aggregated in parallel to capture subtle motion characteristics. Extensive experiments are done to analyze the performance of each component and our proposed approach achieves the best results on two public benchmarks, ChaLearn IsoGD and RGBD-HuDaAct, outperforming the closest competitor by a margin of over 10% and 15%, respectively. Our project and codes will be released at https://davidsonic.github. io/index/acm_tomm_2017. html.
Experimental Demonstration of Localized Excess Protons at a Water‐Membrane Interface and the Effect of other Cations on Their Stability

The electrostatic localization of excess protons at a water‐membrane interface has now been clearly demonstrated experimentally, which corrects the Mitchellian proton delocalization view. To demonstrate the fundamental behavior of localized excess protons in a pure water‐membrane‐water system in relation to the newly derived pmf equation, excess protons and excess hydroxyl anions were generated by utilizing an “open‐circuit” water‐electrolysis system and their distributions were tested using a proton‐sensing aluminum membrane. The proton‐sensing film placed at the membrane‐water interface displayed localized proton activity while that placed into the bulk water phase showed no excess proton activity during the entire experiment. These observations clearly match with the prediction from the proton‐electrostatics localization hypothesis that excess protons do not stay in water bulk phase; they localize at the water‐membrane interface in a manner similar to the behavior of excess electrons in a conductor. Proton‐electrostatics localization hypothesis predicts that high concentration of other cations such as Mg++, K+, or Na+ could partially delocalize the electrostatically localized protons. Therefore, determination of the cation exchange equilibrium constant is another significant way to test this hypothesis. Since protons are the smallest cations and can exist as part of the water molecules, the predicted equilibrium constant for protons to electrostatically occupy the cation sites at the water‐membrane interface is likely to be much larger than one. Results indicated that the equilibrium constant for protons (H+) to electrostatically occupy the cation sites at the water‐membrane interface was about 107 as predicted. Therefore, electrostatically localized protons at the water‐surface interface are quite stable. These findings have significance not only in the science of bioenergetics but also in the fundamental understanding for the importance of water to life in serving as a proton conductor for energy transduction.
Autologous Platelet Rich Plasma (Platelet Gel): An Appropriate Intervention for Salvaging Cardiac Myocytes Under Oxidative Stress After Myocardial Infarction

Background: The prompt restoration of blood flow (reperfusion) to the ischemic myocardium after an acute myocardial infarction is critical to the survival of non damaged heart tissue. However, reperfusion is responsible for additional myocardial damage. Our objective was to investigate the role of autologous platelet rich plasma or platelet gel prepared using nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) in improving left ventricular mechanical function after ischemic reperfusion. Methods: The hearts of nine adult female New Zealand White rabbits were perfused using the Langendorff model. The hearts were exposed to global ischemia for 30 min and reperfused for 60 min. The hearts were injected with 600 μl of platelet gel supernatant prepared using nsPEF or platelet gel supernatant prepared using bovine thrombin or with bovine serum albumin (BSA) which served as our control. HUV-EC cells or H9c2 were used in vitro to determine the effect of platelet gel on ROS formation and mitochondrial depolarization using flow cytometry. Metalloproteinase’s and their inhibitors were assessed using western blot analysis. HPLC was used to identify the presence of endogenously secreted antioxidants in the platelet gel. Results: Platelet gel improved left ventricular mechanical function of the heart, reduced ROS formation and reduced mitochondrial depolarization. Platelet gel also decreased MMP-2 and increased TIMP-1. Catalase and superoxide dismutase were preserved at greater concentrations in the platelet gel made using nsPEFs than in the platelet gel made with bovine thrombin. Conclusion: Platelet gel is cardioprotective to non- ischemic reperfused cardiac tissue after acute myocardial infarction and reperfusion.
Real Time Spectroscopic Ellipsometry Analysis of First Stage CuIn1−xGaxSe2 Growth: Indium-Gallium Selenide Co-Evaporation

Real time spectroscopic ellipsometry (RTSE) has been applied for in-situ monitoring of the first stage of copper indium-gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin film deposition by the three-stage co-evaporation process used for fabrication of high efficiency thin film photovoltaic (PV) devices. The first stage entails the growth of indium-gallium selenide (In1−xGax)2Se3 (IGS) on a substrate of Mo-coated soda lime glass maintained at a temperature of 400 °C. This is a critical stage of CIGS deposition because a large fraction of the final film thickness is deposited, and as a result precise compositional control is desired in order to achieve the optimum performance of the resulting CIGS solar cell. RTSE is sensitive to monolayer level film growth processes and can provide accurate measurements of bulk and surface roughness layer thicknesses. These in turn enable accurate measurements of the bulk layer optical response in the form of the complex dielectric function ε = ε1 − iε2, spectra. Here, RTSE has been used to obtain the (ε1, ε2) spectra at the measurement temperature of 400 °C for IGS thin films of different Ga contents (x) deduced from different ranges of accumulated bulk layer thickness during the deposition process. Applying an analytical expression in common for each of the (ε1, ε2) spectra of these IGS films, oscillator parameters have been obtained in the best fits and these parameters in turn have been fitted with polynomials in x. From the resulting database of polynomial coefficients, the (ε1, ε2) spectra can be generated for any composition of IGS from the single parameter, x. The results have served as an RTSE fingerprint for IGS composition and have provided further structural information beyond simply thicknesses, for example information related to film density and grain size. The deduced IGS structural evolution and the (ε1, ε2) spectra have been interpreted as well in relation to observations from scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffractometry and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy profiling analyses. Overall the structural, optical and compositional analysis possible by RTSE has assisted in understanding the growth and properties of three stage CIGS absorbers for solar cells and shows future promise for enhancing cell performance through monitoring and control.
Sialendoscopy enhances salivary gland function in Sjögren’s syndrome: a 6-month follow-up, randomised and controlled, single blind study

Objectives To assess the effect of sialendoscopy of the major salivary glands on salivary flow and xerostomia in patients with Sjögren’s syndrome (SS). Methods Forty-nine patients with SS were randomly assigned to a control group (n=15) and two intervention groups: irrigation of the major glands with saline (n=16) or with saline followed by triamcinolone acetonide (TA) in saline (n=18). Unstimulated whole saliva flow (UWS), chewing-stimulated whole saliva flow (SWS), citric acid-stimulated parotid flow (SPF), Clinical Oral Dryness Score (CODS), Xerostomia Inventory (XI) score and the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) SS Patient-Reported Index (ESSPRI) were obtained 1 week (T0) before, and 1 (T1), 8 (T8), 16 (T16) and 24 (T24) weeks after sialendoscopy. Results Median baseline UWS, SWS and SPF scores were 0.14, 0.46 and 0.22 mL/min, respectively. After intervention, significant increases in UWS and SWS were observed in the saline group (at T8 (P=0.013) and T24 (P=0.004)) and the saline/TA group (at T24 (P=0.03) and T=16 (P=0.035)). SPF was increased significantly in the saline/TA group at T24 (P=0.03). XI scores declined after sialendoscopy in both intervention groups. Compared with the control group, CODS, XI and ESSPRI improved in the intervention groups. UWS, SWS and SPF were higher in the intervention groups compared with the control group, but these differences were not significant except for SPF in the saline/TA group at T24 (P=0.005). Conclusions Irrigation of the major salivary glands in patients with SS enhances salivary flow and reduces xerostomia up to 6 months after sialendoscopy.
Parent perceptions of an adapted evidence-based practice for toddlers with autism in a community setting

Although data from parent-implemented Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions have shown positive effects on decreasing core symptoms of autism, there has been limited examination of the effectiveness of Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions in community settings. In addition, parent perspectives of their involvement in parent-implemented early intervention programs have not been well studied. Using both qualitative and quantitative data to examine parent perspectives and the perceived feasibility of parent training by community providers, 13 families were followed as they received training in the Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention, Project ImPACT. Data indicate that parent training by community providers is feasible and well received, and parents find value in participating in intervention and perceive benefit for their children. Recommendations for adaptation of program elements and future research are discussed.
Importance of Risk Perception: Predictors of PrEP Acceptance Among Thai MSM and TG Women at a Community-Based Health Service

Background: HIV prevalence among Thai men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women (TG) are 9.15% and 11.8%, respectively, compared with 1.1% in the general population. To better understand early adopters of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in Thailand, we analyzed biobehavioral and sociodemographic characteristics of PrEP-eligible MSM and TG. Setting: Four Thai urban community clinics between October 2015 and February 2016. Methods: Sociodemographics, HIV risk characteristics, and PrEP knowledge and attitudes were analyzed in association with PrEP initiation among eligible Thai MSM and TG. Adjusted analysis explored factors associated with PrEP acceptance. We then analyzed HIV risk perception, which was strongly associated with PrEP initiation. Results: Of 297 participants, 55% accepted PrEP (48% of MSM, 54% of TG). Perceived HIV risk levels were associated with PrEP acceptance [odds ratio (OR): 4.3; 95% confidence interval (95% CI): 1.5 to 12.2. OR: 6.3; 95% CI: 2.1 to 19.0. OR: 14.7; 95% CI: 3.9 to 55.1; for minimal, moderate, and high perceived risks, respectively]. HIV risk perception was associated with previous HIV testing (OR: 2.2; 95% CI: 1.4 to 3.5); inconsistent condom use (OR: 1.8; 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.9); amphetamine use in the past 6 months (OR: 3.1; 95% CI: 1.1 to 8.6); and uncertainty in the sexually transmitted infection history (OR: 2.3; 95% CI: 1.4 to 3.7). Approximately half of those who reported either inconsistent condom use (46%), multiple partners (50%), group sex (48%), or had baseline bacterial sexually transmitted infection (48%) perceived themselves as having no or mild HIV risk. Conclusions: HIV risk perception plays an important role in PrEP acceptance. Perception does not consistently reflect actual risk. It is therefore critical to assess a client's risk perception and provide education about HIV risk factors that will improve the accuracy of perceived HIV risk.