Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pathogenesis of Male Reproductive Toxicity

Toxicologic disturbance of male reproductive function can occur at many sites and produce a range of effects, some primary and some secondary to the initial insult. The challenge to the toxicological pathologist is to identify the primary site of damage and provide an insight into the pathogenesis of the morphologic lesion or functional defi cit. Target sites include the testis, the epididymis, the mature sperm, and the hormonal regulatory system. Detection of effects at these varied sites requires the measurement of multiple endpoints only 1 of which is histopathology, but once identifi ed, careful microscopic examination of the early changes in lesion development can provide essential information on the probable target cell and possible mechanisms of toxicity. Chemicals that affect different cell types or specifi ccellular functions generally elicit predictable patterns of pathological changes that can be readily recognized. Understanding the pathogenesis, the likely reversibility and the significance of reproductive tract lesions is aided by a sound knowledge of the physiology of the testis and epididymis and, in particular, an understanding of the timing of sperm production and transport. and transport.
In Vitro Structural Properties of Braided Tendon Grafts

In an effort to increase strength in hamstring tendon grafts for anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, braiding or weaving of the tendons has been suggested. The purpose of this study was to examine the biomechanical properties of two braiding techniques compared with a four-stranded tendon graft using a sheep model. Digital extensor tendons from 5 adult sheep were harvested in 28 matched pairs and randomly allocated to French plait or four-stranded weave. The grafts were tested in a hydraulic testing machine with the tendons secured in brass grips frozen with liquid carbon dioxide. The tendons were preconditioned to a distraction of 1 mm for 10 cycles followed by testing to failure at 50 mm/sec, with a data acquisition rate of 1000 Hz. The stiffness, ultimate load to failure, and the mode of failure were recorded. All braided samples failed at the midsubstance, while the four-stranded controls failed at the grip interface. There was a significant reduction in strength and stiffness of the braided samples compared with the controls. This study demonstrated that braiding decreases the strength and stiffness of a four-stranded tendon graft by up to 54% and 85%, respectively. This finding is supported by the work of Hearle et al. (1969), who demonstrated that the decrease in strength of fiber bundles is equal to the square of the cosine of the twist angle. The twist angle in our samples was approximately 45°, which equates to a decrease in strength of 50%.
Completion of Proteomic Data Sets by Kd Measurement Using Cell-Free Synthesis of Site-Specifically Labeled Proteins

The characterization of phosphotyrosine mediated protein-protein interactions is vital for the interpretation of downstream pathways of transmembrane signaling processes. Currently however, there is a gap between the initial identification and characterization of cellular binding events by proteomic methods and the in vitro generation of quantitative binding information in the form of equilibrium rate constants (Kd values). In this work we present a systematic, accelerated and simplified approach to fill this gap: using cell-free protein synthesis with site-specific labeling for pull-down and microscale thermophoresis (MST) we were able to validate interactions and to establish a binding hierarchy based on Kd values as a completion of existing proteomic data sets. As a model system we analyzed SH2-mediated interactions of the human T-cell phosphoprotein ADAP. Putative SH2 domain-containing binding partners were synthesized from a cDNA library using Expression-PCR with site-specific biotinylation in order to analyze their interaction with fluorescently labeled and in vitro phosphorylated ADAP by pull-down. On the basis of the pull-down results, selected SH2’s were subjected to MST to determine Kd values. In particular, we could identify an unexpectedly strong binding of ADAP to the previously found binding partner Rasa1 of about 100 nM, while no evidence of interaction was found for the also predicted SH2D1A. Moreover, Kd values between ADAP and its known binding partners SLP-76 and Fyn were determined. Next to expanding data on ADAP suggesting promising candidates for further analysis in vivo, this work marks the first Kd values for phosphotyrosine/SH2 interactions on a phosphoprotein level.
Men, rheumatoid arthritis, psychosocial impact and self-management: A narrative review

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease affecting fewer men than women. We systematically reviewed the literature on impact and self-management of rheumatoid arthritis in men. A total of 28 papers were included and grouped into two categories: psychosocial impact of rheumatoid arthritis, and coping and self-management. This review finds gender differences relating to quality of life, work, distress, self-management, coping and support. We conclude that there is a dearth of literature focussing on rheumatoid arthritis in men only, and mixed gender studies include insufficient men to draw strong conclusions about men. Thus, further research is needed to understand the support needs of men with rheumatoid arthritis in depth.
Explorer Towards a Neural Statistician

An efficient learner is one who reuses what they already know to tackle a new problem. For a machine learner, this means understanding the similarities amongst datasets. In order to do this, one must take seriously the idea of working with datasets, rather than datapoints, as the key objects to model. Towards this goal, we demonstrate an extension of a variational autoencoder that can learn a method for computing representations, or statistics, of datasets in an unsupervised fashion. The network is trained to produce statistics that encapsulate a generative model for each dataset. Hence the network enables efficient learning from new datasets for both unsupervised and supervised tasks. We show that we are able to learn statistics that can be used for: clustering datasets, transferring generative models to new datasets, selecting representative samples of datasets and classifying previously unseen classes. We refer to our model as a neural statistician, and by this we mean a neural network that can learn to compute summary statistics of datasets without supervision.
Pulmonary veins branching pattern, assessed by magnetic resonance, does not affect transcatheter atrial fibrillation ablation outcome

Aim — The aim of the present study is to provide, in a large cohort of patients, a description of the left atrium (LA) and pulmonary veins (PV) anatomy in relation to ablation outcome. Background — The role of LA imaging, assessed before transcatheter ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF), is unknown. Methods — 330 patients referred for transcatheter ablation of AF (paroxysmal 62.7%; persistent 25.5%; long-standing 11.8%) underwent contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) before the procedure. Transcatheter ablation was performed aiming to AF interruption and/or absence of inducibility. Patients were followed clinically, by ECG, and 24-hour Holter ECG at 1-3-6-12-18-24 months. Results — The MRI preceding the procedure depicted a typical PV branching pattern, two left and two right, in 130 (39.4%) patients; 117 (35.4%) presented common left trunk (short and long) and 75 (22.7%) at least one accessory PV. Mean atrial volume was 142.0 ± 48.5 ml. The ablation procedure resulted successful, after 15.6 ± 7.2 months follow-up, in 174 (52.7%) patients. PV branching pattern did not relate (P = 0.304) to ablation outcome. A multiple Cox proportional hazard model, adjusted for potential confounders, proved that only LA volume was independently related to ablation outcome (HR 1.007, 95% CI 1.003-1.011; P = 0.001). A LA cut-off volume of 135 ml emerged as a significant predictor of ablation failure (ROC curve area 0.651, 95% CI 0.591-0.710; P < 0.001). Conclusions — Less than half of the patients referred for transcatheter AF ablation present a typical PV branching pattern; the PV branching pattern, however, does not affect ablation outcome. LA volume strongly predicts AF ablation outcome.
Genetics of Pink Bollworm Resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis Toxin Cry1Ac

Abstract Laboratory selection increased resistance of pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) to the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin Cry1Ac. Three selections with Cry1Ac in artificial diet increased resistance from a low level to >100-fold relative to a susceptible strain. We used artificial diet bioassays to test F1 hybrid progeny from reciprocal crosses between resistant and susceptible strains. The similarity between F1 progeny from the two reciprocal crosses indicates autosomal inheritance of resistance. The dominance of resistance to Cry1Ac depended on the concentration. Resistance was codominant at a low concentration of Cry1Ac, partially recessive at an intermediate concentration, and completely recessive at a high concentration. Comparison of the artificial diet results with previously reported results from greenhouse bioassays shows that the high concentration of Cry1Ac in bolls of transgenic cotton is essential for achieving functionally recessive inheritance of resistance.
ML-TREE: A Tree-Structure-Based Approach to Multilabel Learning

Multilabel learning aims to predict labels of unseen instances by learning from training samples that are associated with a set of known labels. In this paper, we propose to use a hierarchical tree model for multilabel learning, and to develop the ML-Tree algorithm for finding the tree structure. ML-Tree considers a tree as a hierarchy of data and constructs the tree using the induction of one-against-all SVM classifiers at each node to recursively partition the data into child nodes. For each node, we define a predictive label vector to represent the predictive label transmission in the tree model for multilabel prediction and automatic discovery of the label relationships. If two labels co-occur frequently as predictive labels at leaf nodes, these labels are supposed to be relevant. The amount of predictive label co-occurrence provides an estimation of the label relationships. We examine the ML-Tree method on 11 real data sets of different domains and compare it with six well-established multilabel learning algorithms. The performances of these approaches are evaluated by 16 commonly used measures. We also conduct Friedman and Nemenyi tests to assess the statistical significance of the differences in performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
An HMM-Based Threshold Model Approach for Gesture Recognition

A new method is developed using the hidden Markov model (HMM) based technique. To handle nongesture patterns, we introduce the concept of a threshold model that calculates the likelihood threshold of an input pattern and provides a confirmation mechanism for the provisionally matched gesture patterns. The threshold model is a weak model for all trained gestures in the sense that its likelihood is smaller than that of the dedicated gesture model for a given gesture. Consequently, the likelihood can be used as an adaptive threshold for selecting proper gesture model. It has, however, a large number of states and needs to be reduced because the threshold model is constructed by collecting the states of all gesture models in the system. To overcome this problem, the states with similar probability distributions are merged, utilizing the relative entropy measure. Experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully extract trained gestures from continuous hand motion with 93.14% reliability.
Validation of the transtheoretical model in medication compliance behavior

Practical and theoretically derived interventions are needed to improve medication compliance with prescribed therapies. The Transtheoretical Model of Behavioral Change (TTM) has been applied to various health related behaviors. This research examined whether the TTM is applicable to medication compliance behavior. A medication compliance measure using the TTM constructs of stages of change, decisional balance, and self-efficacy was developed. The scale development process consisted of two pilot trial phases and a patient testing phase. Two pilot surveys were administered to community pharmacy populations of 159 and 70 subjects. Initial testing provided valuable information in item selection and reduction for the final survey. The pilot surveys demonstrated the stage of change construct to exist as a three-factor structure consisting of precontemplation, contemplation, and maintenance for medication compliance behavior. Analysis of these surveys also revealed complexities in the multipleitem stage of change measure providing support to the use of a singleitem stage of change measure. The final survey form was tested using patients from 5 primary care physicians’ offices. Patients diagnosed with diabetes, hypothyroidism, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, or being treated with hormone replacement therapy were asked to complete a survey consisting of demographic questions, the TTM construct measures, and three compliance measures. Pharmacy refill records were collected for participating subjects as a fourth measure of compliance. Moderate correlations ranging from 0.18 to 0.79 were found between the TTM-model constructs and the four compliance measures. Regression models demonstrated that a range 9.61% to 41.07% of the variance in medication compliance could be explained through the TTM-constructs. The study results support additional investigation of the TTM in medication compliance behavior.
Bacteriophage-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Mutant Confers Broad Immunity against Staphylococcal Infection in Mice

In the presence of a bacteriophage (a bacteria-attacking virus) resistance is clearly beneficial to the bacteria. As expected in such conditions, resistant bacteria emerge rapidly. However, in the absence of the phage, resistant bacteria often display reduced fitness, compared to their sensitive counterparts. The present study explored the fitness cost associated with phage-resistance as an opportunity to isolate an attenuated strain of S. aureus. The phage-resistant strain A172 was isolated from the phage-sensitive strain A170 in the presence of the MSa phage. Acquisition of phage-resistance altered several properties of A172, causing reduced growth rate, under-expression of numerous genes and production of capsular polysaccharide. In vivo, A172 modulated the transcription of the TNF-α, IFN-γ and Il-1β genes and, given intramuscularly, protected mice from a lethal dose of A170 (18/20). The heat-killed vaccine also afforded protection from heterologous methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) (8/10 mice) or vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA) (9/10 mice). The same vaccine was also effective when administered as an aerosol. Anti-A172 mouse antibodies, in the dose of 10 µl/mouse, protected the animals (10/10, in two independent experiments) from a lethal dose of A170. Consisting predominantly of the sugars glucose and galactose, the capsular polysaccharide of A172, given in the dose of 25 µg/mouse, also protected the mice (20/20) from a lethal dose of A170. The above results demonstrate that selection for phage-resistance can facilitate bacterial vaccine preparation.
Visualizing electron rearrangement in space and time during the transition from a molecule to atoms

Imaging and controlling reactions in molecules and materials at the level of electrons is a grand challenge in science, relevant to our understanding of charge transfer processes in chemistry, physics, and biology, as well as material dynamics. Direct access to the dynamic electron density as electrons are shared or transferred between atoms in a chemical bond would greatly improve our understanding of molecular bonding and structure. Using reaction microscope techniques, we show that we can capture how the entire valence shell electron density in a molecule rearranges, from molecular-like to atomic-like, as a bond breaks. An intense ultrashort laser pulse is used to ionize a bromine molecule at different times during dissociation, and we measure the total ionization signal and the angular distribution of the ionization yield. Using this technique, we can observe density changes over a surprisingly long time and distance, allowing us to see that the electrons do not localize onto the individual Br atoms until the fragments are far apart (∼5.5 Å), in a region where the potential energy curves for the dissociation are nearly degenerate. Our observations agree well with calculations of the strong-field ionization rates of the bromine molecule.
Logistic regression for data mining and high-dimensional classification

The focus of this thesis is fast and robust adaptations of logistic regression (LR) for data mining and high-dimensional classification problems. LR is well-understood and widely used in the statistics, machine learning, and data analysis communities. Its benefits include a firm statistical foundation and a probabilistic model useful for “explaining” the data. There is a perception that LR is slow, unstable, and unsuitable for large learning or classification tasks. Through fast approximate numerical methods, regularization to avoid numerical instability, and an efficient implementation we will show that LR can outperform modern algorithms like Support Vector Machines (SVM) on a variety of learning tasks. Our novel implementation, which uses a modified iteratively re-weighted least squares estimation procedure, can compute model parameters for sparse binary datasets with hundreds of thousands of rows and attributes, and millions or tens of millions of nonzero elements in just a few seconds. Our implementation also handles real-valued dense datasets of similar size.
Limiar anaeróbio determinado pelo teste do lactato mínimo em ratos: efeito dos estoques de glicogênio muscular e do treinamento físico

Anaerobic threshold determined by lactate minimum test in rats: Effect of muscle glycogen stores and of physical training The present study aimed to verify, in rats: a) the effect of the muscle glycogen stores on the anaerobic threshold determined by lactate minimum test and b) to evaluate the sensitivity of the test to the alterations of the aerobic conditioning induced by physical training. For the evaluation of the influence of muscle glycogen stores, the test was performed
Towards Passive Political Opinion Polling using Twitter

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a forum for political communication where politicians broadcast messages and where the general public engages in the discussion of pertinent political issues. The open nature of Twitter, together with its large volume of traffic, makes it a useful resource for new forms of 'passive' opinion polling , i.e. automatically monitoring and de- tecting which key issues the general public is concerned about and inferring their voting intentions. In this paper, we present a number of case studies for the automatic analysis of UK political tweets. We investigate the automated senti- ment analysis of tweets from UK Members of Parliament (MPs) towards the main political parties. We then investigate using the volume and sentiment of the tweets from other users as a proxy for their voting intention and compare the results against existing poll data. Finally we conduct automatic identifica- tion of the key topics discussed by both the MPs and users on Twitter and com- pare them with the main political issues identified in traditional opinion polls. We describe our data collection methods, analysis tools and evaluation frame- work and discuss our results and the factors affecting their accuracy.
Quantifying the role of climate and landscape characteristics on hydrologic partitioning and vegetation response

There is no consensus on how changes in both temperature and precipitation will affect regional vegetation. We investigated controls on hydrologic partitioning at the catchment scale across many different ecoregions, and compared the resulting estimates of catchment wetting and vaporization (evapotranspiration) to remotely sensed indices of vegetation greenness. The fraction of catchment wetting vaporized by plants, known as the Horton index, is strongly related to the ratio of available energy to available water at the Earth's surface, the aridity index. Here we show that the Horton index is also a function of catchment mean slope and elevation, and is thus related to landscape characteristics that control how much and how long water is retained in a catchment. We compared the power of the components of the water and energy balance, as well as landscape characteristics, to predict Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a surrogate for vegetation productivity, at 312 Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) catchments across the United States. Statistical analysis revealed that the Horton index provides more precision in predicting maximum annual NDVI for all catchments than mean annual precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, or their ratio, the aridity index. Models of vegetation productivity should emphasize plant‐available water, rather than just precipitation, by incorporating the interaction of climate and landscape. Major findings related to the Horton index are: (1) it is a catchment signature that is relatively constant from year‐to‐year; (2) it is related to specific landscape characteristics; (3) it can be used to create catchment typologies; and (4) it is related to overall catchment greenness.
Neurocognitive Test Profiles of Extremely Low Birth Weight Five-Year-Old Children Differ According to Neuromotor Status

The neurocognitive outcome of children born with extremely low birth weight (ELBW) is highly variable due to the complexity of morbidity. So far, no study has compared comprehensive neuropsychological test profiles in groups with different neuromotor status. In a national cohort of ELBW children neuropsychological test profiles were assessed in 4 groups defined according to a neurological examination at 5 years of age: normal neuromotor status (N = 56), motor coordination problems (N = 32), multiple subtle neuromotor signs including both motor coordination problems and deviant reflexes (N = 20), and spastic diplegia (N = 12). The neurocognitive assessment included a test of intelligence, the Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence–Revised (WPPSI–R) and 14 subtests of attention and executive functions, verbal functions, manual motor functions, visuoconstructional functions and verbal learning (NEPSY). The children with normal neuromotor status performed within the average range; children with motor coordination problems had widespread impairment; and children with spastic diplegia and children with multiple minor neuromotor signs had uneven test profiles with stronger verbal results but weaknesses in attention and executive functions, and in manual motor and visuoconstructional tasks. In conclusion, very preterm children with neuromotor signs, including motor coordination problems, are at risk for neurocognitive impairment, in spite of average intelligence. More impaired children have more irregular test profiles. Follow-up and neuropsychological assessment of very preterm children with minor neuromotor signs are therefore indicated.