Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transvaginal Ultrasonographic Cervical Measurement in Predicting Failed Labor Induction and Cesarean Delivery for Failure to Progress in Nulliparous Women

The aim of this study was to evaluate the value of transvaginal sonographic cervical measurement in predicting failed labor induction and cesarean delivery for failure to progress in nulliparous women. One hundred and sixty-one women scheduled for labor induction underwent transvaginal ultrasonography and digital cervical examinations. Logistic regression demonstrated that cervical length and gestational age at induction, but not the Bishop score, significantly and independently predicted failed labor induction. According to the receiver operating characteristic curves analysis, the best cut-off value of cervical length for predicting failed labor induction was 28 mm, with a sensitivity of 62% and a specificity of 60%. In terms of the likelihood of a cesarean delivery for failure to progress as the outcome variable, logistic regression indicated that maternal height and birth weight, but not cervical length or Bishop score, were significantly and independently associated with an increased risk of cesarean delivery for failure to progress. Transvaginal sonographic measurements of cervical length thus independently predicted failed labor induction in nulliparous women. However, the relatively poor predictive performance of this test undermines its clinical usefulness as a predictor of failed labor induction. Moreover, cervical length appears to have a poor predictive value for the likelihood of a cesarean delivery for failure to progress.
Oligomeric Structure of Type I and Type II Transforming Growth Factor β Receptors: Homodimers Form in the ER and Persist at the Plasma Membrane

Abstract. Transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) signaling involves interactions of at least two different receptors, types I (TβRI) and II (TβRII), which form ligand-mediated heteromeric complexes. Although we have shown in the past that TβRII in the absence of ligand is a homodimer on the cell surface, TβRI has not been similarly investigated, and the site of complex formation is not known for either receptor. Several studies have indicated that homomeric interactions are involved in TGF-β signaling and regulation, emphasizing the importance of a detailed understanding of the homooligomerization of TβRI or TβRII. Here we have combined complementary approaches to study these homomeric interactions in both naturally expressing cell lines and cells cotransfected with various combinations of epitope-tagged type I or type II receptors. We used sedimentation velocity of metabolically labeled receptors on sucrose gradients to show that both TβRI and TβRII form homodimer-sized complexes in the endoplasmic reticulum, and we used coimmunoprecipitation studies to demonstrate the existence of type I homooligomers. Using a technique based on antibody-mediated immunofluorescence copatching of receptors carrying different epitope tags, we have demonstrated ligand-independent homodimers of TβRI on the surface of live cells. Soluble forms of both receptors are secreted as monomers, indicating that the ectodomains are not sufficient to mediate homodimerization, although TGF-β1 is able to promote dimerization of the type II receptor ectodomain. These findings may have important implications for the regulation of TGF-β signaling.
Lunar phase does not influence perioperative complications in total hip arthroplasty

Introduction Lunar calendars, publishing recommendations for daily life, are gaining more and more attention in Germany, where 10.5% of the population believe in lunar effects on disease. A widespread and often heard belief is that a full moon has the most negative effects on surgical outcome. The present study evaluates the effects of lunar phase on perioperative complications in total hip arthroplasty. Material and methods We performed a retrospective study with 305 patients being provided with a primary hip arthroplasty. To identify possible influences of the lunar phase on perioperative complications we investigated data such as operation length, blood loss and course of C-reactive protein that were collected during the patients’ stay in the hospital and allocated them to moon illumination. Results There were no significant differences in all collected data concerning the lunar phase (p > 0.05). Although not statistically significant, there were fewer operations during the full moon phase. Conclusions Therefore there is no evidence that lunar phase has an effect on perioperative complications in total hip arthroplasty. Fewer, though not significantly fewer, operations were performed during the full moon phase. Although this was not a prospective randomized trial, the statistical magnitude of the results does not support any recommendations for scheduling patients for total hip arthroplasty at any particular day of the lunar phase.
Clinical and psychological effects of marihuana in man.

In the spring of 1968 we conducted a series of pilot experiments on acute marijuana intoxication in human subjects. The study was not undertaken to prove or disprove popularly held convictions about marijuana as an intoxicant, to compare it with other drugs, or to introduce our own opinions. Our concern was simply to collect some long overdue pharmacological data. In this article we describe the primitive state of knowledge of the drug, the research problems encountered in designing a replicable study, and the results of our investigations. Marijuana is a crude preparation of flowering tops, leaves, seeds, and stems of female plants of Indian hemp Cannabis sativa L. ; it is usually smoked. The intoxicating constituents of hemp are found in the sticky resin exuded by the tops of the plants, particularly the females. Male plants produce some resin but are grown mainly for hemp fiber, not for marijuana. The resin itself, when prepared for smoking or eating, is known as “hashish. ” Various Cannabis preparations are used as intoxicants throughout the world; their potency varies directly with the amount of resin present. ’ Samples of American marijuana differ greatly in pharmacological activity, depending on their composition (tops contain most resin ; stems, seeds and lower leaves least) and on the conditions
Perceptual Decisions Formed by Accumulation of Audiovisual Evidence in Prefrontal Cortex

To form perceptual decisions in our multisensory environment, the brain needs to integrate sensory information derived from a common source and segregate information emanating from different sources. Combining fMRI and psychophysics in humans, we investigated how the brain accumulates sensory evidence about a visual source in the context of congruent or conflicting auditory information. In a visual selective attention paradigm, subjects (12 females, 7 males) categorized video clips while ignoring concurrent congruent or incongruent soundtracks. Visual and auditory information were reliable or unreliable. Our behavioral data accorded with accumulator models of perceptual decision making, where sensory information is integrated over time until a criterion amount of information is obtained. Behaviorally, subjects exhibited audiovisual incongruency effects that increased with the variance of the visual and the reliability of the interfering auditory input. At the neural level, only the left inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) showed an “audiovisual-accumulator” profile consistent with the observed reaction time pattern. By contrast, responses in the right fusiform were amplified by incongruent auditory input regardless of sensory reliability. Dynamic causal modeling showed that these incongruency effects were mediated via connections from auditory cortex. Further, while the fusiform interacted with IFS in an excitatory recurrent loop that was strengthened for unreliable task-relevant visual input, the IFS did not amplify and even inhibited superior temporal activations for unreliable auditory input. To form decisions that guide behavioral responses, the IFS may accumulate audiovisual evidence by dynamically weighting its connectivity to auditory and visual regions according to sensory reliability and decisional relevance.
Effects of the Principal Nutrients on Lovastatin Production by Monascus pilosus

Lovastatin production is dependent on the substrates provided. We investigated how several carbon and nitrogen sources in the medium affect lovastatin production by Monascus pilosus. M. pilosus required a suitable concentration of organic nitrogen peptone for high lovastatin production. As sole carbon source with peptone, although glucose strongly repressed lovastatin production, maltose was responsible for high production. Interestingly, glycerol combined with maltose enhanced lovastatin production, up to 444 mg/l in the most effective case. Moreover, an isolated mutant, in which glucose repression might be relieved, easily produced the highest level of lovastatin, 725 mg/l on glucose–glycerol–peptone medium. These observations indicate that lovastatin production by M. pilosus is regulated by strict glucose repression and that an appropriate release from this repression by optimizing medium composition and/or by a mutation(s) is required for high lovastatin production.
Scalable Montgomery Modular Multiplication Architecture with Low-Latency and Low-Memory Bandwidth Requirement

Montgomery modular multiplication is widely used in public-key cryptosystems. This work shows how to relax the data dependency in conventional word-based algorithms to maximize the possibility of reusing the current words of variables. With the greatly relaxed data dependency, we then proposed a novel scheduling scheme to alleviate the number of memory access in the developed scalable architecture. Analytical results show that the memory bandwidth requirement of the proposed scalable architecture is almost 1/(w - 1) times that of conventional scalable architectures, where w denotes word size. The proposed one also retains a latency of exactly one cycle between the operations of the same words in two consecutive iterations of the Montgomery modular multiplication algorithm when employing enough processing elements. Compared to the design in the related work, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed one achieves an almost 54 percent reduction in power consumption with no degradation in throughput. The reduced number of memory access not only leads to lower power consumption, but also facilitates the design of scalable architectures for any precision of operands.
How often do wrong models produce better phylogenies?

As phylogenetic analyses find widespread use in various fields of biology, studies on methods of phylogeny reconstruction are becoming ever more important. Although tree reconstruction has been identified as a statistical estimation problem since the pioneering work of Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards (1967), the complexity of the problem does not seem to be well recognized. In this note I report simulation results in which use of a false model in the maximum-likelihood method recovers the correct tree with higher probabilities than use of the true model. Indeed the false model on average recovers the correct tree more often than the true model, and the difference is not due to small sample sizes or restricted to the case of four taxa. The results highlight the complexity of phylogeny reconstruction and the need for more theoretical work on statistical methods for this type of estimation problem. A simulation study was carried out to examine the performance of phylogeny reconstruction by the maximum-likelihood method when either the correct evolutionary model (referred to as the True method) or a wrong model (the False method) is assumed. The correct model used for simulating data, represented as “JC+G,” uses the substitution model of Jukes and Cantor (1969) in combination with a gamma model of rate variation among sites in which the rates at different sites are multiplied by independent gamma variates normalized to have mean one (Yang 1994). The gamma parameter (x is inversely related to the extent of among-site rate variation and is fixed at (x = 0.2. Probabilities of observing all site patterns were calculated under the JC+G model, and the observed numbers of site patterns, which constitute the simulated data, were sampled from these probabilities (Yang 1996). Five sets of branch lengths for a tree of four taxa and 12 sequence lengths were used (fig. 1); for each tree and sequence length combination, 5,000 data sets were generated. Each simulated data set was analyzed by the two methods to recover the correct tree (Felsenstein 198 1; Yang 1994). Although (x could be estimated from the data under the JC+G model, the correct value (0.2) was used in the True method so that the same number of parameters was estimated in both methods. The only difference between the two methods is that True uses the correct value of CY (0.2) while False uses a false value (a). Twice the log-likelihood difference between the two models averaged from 10.0 for tree D to 27.2 for tree A in the simulation for N = 100 nucleotides and was greater for
Changes of Variability in Response to Increasing Greenhouse Gases. Part II: Hydrology

Abstract This paper examines hydrological variability and its changes in two different versions of a coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation model developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and forced with estimates of future increases of greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations. This paper is the second part, documenting potential changes in variability as greenhouse gases increase. The variance changes are examined using an ensemble of 8 transient integrations for an older model version and 10 transient integrations for a newer model. Monthly and annual data are used to compute the mean and variance changes. Emphasis is placed on computing and analyzing the variance changes for the middle of the twenty-first century and compared with those found in the respective control integrations. The hydrologic cycle intensifies because of the increase of greenhouse gases. In general, precipitation variance increases in most places. This is the case .
Mutations in MUSK causing congenital myasthenic syndrome impair MuSK–Dok-7 interaction

We describe a severe congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS) caused by two missense mutations in the gene encoding the muscle specific receptor tyrosine kinase (MUSK). The identified MUSK mutations M605I and A727V are both located in the kinase domain of MuSK. Intracellular microelectrode recordings and microscopy studies of the neuromuscular junction conducted in an anconeus muscle biopsy revealed decreased miniature endplate potential amplitudes, reduced endplate size and simplification of secondary synaptic folds, which were consistent with postsynaptic deficit. The study also showed a striking reduction of the endplate potential quantal content, consistent with additional presynaptic failure. Expression studies in MuSK deficient myotubes revealed that A727V, which is located within the catalytic loop of the enzyme, caused severe impairment of agrin-dependent MuSK phosphorylation, aggregation of acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) and interaction of MuSK with Dok-7, an essential intracellular binding protein of MuSK. In contrast, M605I, resulted in only moderate impairment of agrin-dependent MuSK phosphorylation, aggregation of AChRs and interaction of MuSK with Dok-7. There was no impairment of interaction of mutants with either the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein, Lrp4 (a co-receptor of agrin) or with the mammalian homolog of the Drosophila tumorous imaginal discs (Tid1). Our findings demonstrate that missense mutations in MUSK can result in a severe form of CMS and indicate that the inability of MuSK mutants to interact with Dok-7, but not with Lrp4 or Tid1, is a major determinant of the pathogenesis of the CMS caused by MUSK mutations.
Novelty as a Measure of Interestingness in Knowledge Discovery

— Rule Discovery is an important technique for mining knowledge from large databases. Use of objective measures for discovering interesting rules leads to another data mining problem, although of reduced complexity. Data mining researchers have studied subjective measures of interestingness to reduce the volume of discovered rules to ultimately improve the overall efficiency of KDD process. In this paper we study novelty of the discovered rules as a subjective measure of interestingness. We propose a hybrid approach based on both objective and subjective measures to quantify novelty of the discovered rules in terms of their deviations from the known rules (knowledge). We analyze the types of deviation that can arise between two rules and categorize the discovered rules according to the user specified threshold. We implement the proposed framework and experiment with some public datasets. The experimental results are promising.
Evaluation of left ventricular dyssynchrony using combined pulsed wave and tissue Doppler imaging

Introduction The combination of pulsed wave (PW) and tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) has been proposed as a new method to assess left ventricular (LV) mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD), but results have not been validated. We investigated the correlation of a combination of PW and TDI with a positive response to cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). Material and methods We studied 108 consecutive patients who received CRT. Patients with atrial fibrillation were excluded. The time difference (TPW-TDI) between onset of QRS to the end of LV ejection by PW (TPW) and onset of QRS to the end of the systolic wave in LV basal segments with greatest delay by TDI (TTDI) was measured before CRT and during short-term and long-term follow-up. Results The TPW-TDI interval before CRT was 74 ±48 ms. Intra-observer variabilities for TPW and TTDI were 1.5 ±0.24% and 1 ±0.17%. Inter-observer variabilities for TPW and TTDI were 1 ±0.36% and 1 ±0.64%, respectively. TPW-TDI > 50 ms was defined as the cutoff value for diagnosis of LVMD by receiver operating curve (ROC) analysis. During follow-up of 15 ±11 months, the sensitivity and specificity of TPPW-TDI to predict a positive response to CRT were 98% and 82%, respectively. The area under the ROC curve was 0.92. There was a significant agreement between LVMD determined by TPW-TDI and the positive response to CRT (κ=0.80). Conclusions Left vertricular dyssynchrony detected by the method combining PW and TDI demonstrated a high reproducibility, sensitivity, specificity and agreement with a positive response to CRT.
Synthesis of Thinned Planar Concentric Circular Antenna Arrays --- a Differential Evolutionary Approach

Circular antenna array design is one of the most important electromagnetic optimization problems of current interest. The problem of designing a large multiple concentric planar thinned circular ring arrays of uniformly excited isotropic antennas is considered in this paper. This antenna must generate a pencil beam pattern in the vertical plane along with minimized side lobe level (SLL). In this paper, we present an optimization method based on an improved variant of one of the most powerful real parameter optimizers of current interest, called Difierential Evolution (DE). Two sets of difierent cases have been studied here. First set deals with thinned array design with the goal to achieve number of switched ofi elements equal to 220 or more. The other set contains design of array while maintaining side lobe level (SLL) below a flxed value. Both set contains two types of design, one with uniform inter-element spacing flxed at 0.5‚ and the other with optimum uniform inter-element spacing. The half-power beam width of the synthesized pattern is attempted to maintain flxed at the value equal to that of a fully populated array with uniform spacing of 0.5‚. Simulation results of the designed thinned arrays are compared with a fully populated array for all the cases to illustrate the efiectiveness of our proposed method.
A Spherical Indentation Technique Based on FE Solutions for Material Property Evaluation

In this work, some inaccuracies and limitation of prior indentation theory, which is based on experimental observations and the deformation theory of plasticity, are first investigated. Then effects of major material properties on the configuration of indentation load-deflection curve are examined via incremental plasticity theory based finite element analyses. A new numerical approach of indentation theory is proposed by examining the finite element solutions at the new optimal point. Numerical regressions of obtained data exhibit that strain hardening exponent and yield strain are the two main parameters which govern the subindenter deformation characteristics. The new indentation theory provides the stress-strain curve and material properties with an average error less than 3%. Introduction On this setting the present work begins with a review of prior indentation theory. We then perform finite element (FE) analyses [1]. Comparing FE solutions from deformation and incremental plasticity theories, we clarify the limitation of prior indentation approach based on the deformation plasticity solutions. We then analyze the effects of material properties on the shape of indentation load-depth curve. From incremental plasticity FE solutions, we select an optimal location with the negligible frictional effect. In the present work we examine the FE solutions and propose new numerical indentation formulae for material property evaluation. Prior spherical indentation theories Automated indentation test gives stress-strain curve from measured load-depth data. With an indenter of diameter D, we have following relation from spherical geometric configuration. 2 2 t t t h D h d − = (1) Here ht and dt are ideal indentation depth and projected diameter at loaded state. Tabor [2] came to the experimental conclusion that equivalent (plastic) strain at the indenter contact “edge” is given by       = D d p 2 . 0 ε (2) where d is indented contact diameter. Mean contact pressure pm is defined by 2 4 /( ) m p P d π ≡ where P is the compressive indentation load. Then constraint factor ψ, which is a function of equivalent plastic strain, is defined as the ratio between mean contact pressure and equivalent stress [3]. σ ε ψ / ) ( m p p ≡ (3) Hence, we can express the equivalent stress in the form Key Engineering Materials Online: 2004-08-15 ISSN: 1662-9795, Vols. 270-273, pp 133-138 doi:10.4028/www.scientific. net/KEM.270-273.133 © 2004 Trans Tech Publications Ltd, Switzerland All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of Trans Tech Publications Ltd, www.scientific. net. (Semanticscholar.org-13/03/20,17:37:39) Title of Publication (to be inserted by the publisher) 2r/d 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 1.25 ε p 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 CAX4 (Incremental Plasticity) CAX4 (Deformation Plasticity) Fig. 1. The FE mesh for indentation analyses. Fig. 2. Comparison of equivalent plastic strain distribution at the contact surface.