Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Beta-Sympathomimetic Tocolysis and Risk of Autistic Spectrum Disorders, Behavioural and Developmental Outcome in Toddlers

AIM: To investigate whether maternal intravenous beta-mimetic tocolytic therapy increases the risk of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and poorer behavioural and developmental outcomes. METHOD: Our study is a prospective case-control study among 90 children between 1.5 and three years old. Cases (n = 46) were toddlers with betamimetic tocolytic exposure; control group toddlers (n = 44) were tocolytic untreated. Treated and untreated groups were also divided into subgroups: term and preterm delivered. The gestational age of tocolytic treatment start, the dose and duration of exposure in hours were obtained from obstetric medical records. The Brief Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (BITSEA), the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) and the Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST) tests were applied for evaluation of social, emotional problems, autism and developmental disorders. RESULTS: Term and preterm born toddlers treated tocolytically in utero didn’t demonstrate a higher risk of autistic disorders or poorer behavioural and developmental results than controls. In the preterm group, the earliest start of tocolytic treatment was correlated with toddlers lower score of the Competencies Scale (p = 0.009) and a higher score of the Problems Scale (p = 0.048). Also, we concluded that preterm membrane rupture was associated with higher ASD risk in the untreated group (p = 0.043). CONCLUSION: Exposure to betamimetics during pregnancy was not associated with an increased risk of autism, behavioural and developmental disorders.
Agreement and reproducibility of gray‐scale intravascular ultrasound and optical coherence tomography for the analysis of the bioresorbable vascular scaffold

Objective: To report the agreement between gray‐scale intravascular ultrasound (GS‐IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) in assessing the bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) structures and their respective reproducibility. Background: BVS are composed of an erodible polymer. Ultrasound and light signals backscattered from polymeric material differs from metallic stents using GS‐IVUS and OCT. Methods: Forty‐five patients included in the ABSORB trial were treated with a 3.0 × 18 mm BVS and imaged with GS‐IVUS 20 MHz and OCT post‐implantation. Qualitative (ISA, side‐branch struts, protrusion, and dissections) and quantitative (number of struts, lumen, and scaffold area) measurements were assessed by two investigators. The agreement and the inter‐ and intraobserver reproducibility were investigated using the kappa (κ) and the interclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: GS‐IVUS and OCT agreement was predominantly poor at a lesion, frame, and strut level analysis (κ and ICC <0.4) for qualitative measurements. GS‐IVUS demonstrated a reduced ability to detect cross‐sections with ISA (4.5% vs. 20.6%), side‐branch (SB) struts (6.3% vs. 7.8%), protrusions (3.2% vs. 9.6%), and dissections (0.2% vs. 9.0%) compared with OCT. GS‐IVUS reproducibility was poor–moderate (κ and ICC <0.6) except for ISA and SB‐struts (κ and ICC between 0.2 and 0.75). OCT showed an excellent reproducibility (κ and ICC > 0.75) except for the assessment of tissue protrusion (κ and ICC between 0.47 and 0.94). GS‐IVUS reproducibility was poor–moderate (ICC ≤ 0.5) in assessing the number of struts but excellent with OCT (ICC > 0.85). The reproducibility to assess lumen and scaffold areas was excellent using both techniques (ICC > 0.85). Conclusions: GS‐IVUS has a poor capacity to detect qualitative findings post‐BVS implantation and its reproducibility is low compared with OCT. The use of GS‐IVUS should be limited when assessing lumen and scaffold areas. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Numerical Comparison of Several Approximations of the Word Count Distribution in Random Sequences

The exact distribution of word counts in random sequences and several approximations have been proposed in the past few years. The exact distribution has no theoretical limit but may require prohibitive computation time. On the other hand, approximate distributions can be rapidly calculated but, in practice, are only accurate under specific conditions. After making a survey of these distributions, we compare them according to both their accuracy and computational cost. Rules are suggested for choosing between Gaussian approximations, compound Poisson approximation, and exact distribution. This work is illustrated with the detection of exceptional words in the phage Lambda genome.
Neurokinin B Regulates Gonadotropin Secretion, Ovarian Follicle Growth, and the Timing of Ovulation in Healthy Women

Context: Neurokinin B (NKB) is obligate for human puberty, but its role in adult female gonadotropin secretion and ovarian follicle growth is unknown. Objective: To investigate antagonism of NKB on pulsatile gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion and ovarian follicle development in healthy women. Design: Open investigation of the effects of a neurokinin-3 receptor (NK3R) antagonist (NK3Ra) vs a no-treatment control cycle. Setting: Clinical research facility. Patients or other participants: Healthy women with regular menses (n = 13). Intervention(s): NK3Ra MLE4901 40 mg taken orally twice daily from cycle day 5 to 6 for 7 days. Main outcome measure(s): LH secretion, ovarian follicle growth, and timing of ovulation. Results: NK3Ra administration reduced basal LH secretion without a change in pulse frequency and delayed the LH surge by 7 days, the duration of treatment [mean cycle day ± standard error of the mean (SEM), 22 ± 1 days vs 15 ± 1 days in control cycles; P = 0.0006]. Follicle growth (mean diameter at the end of administration of NK3Ra administration ± SEM, 9.3 ± 0.4 mm vs 15.1 ± 0.9 mm in control cycles; P < 0.0001) and rising estradiol concentrations (mean ± SEM, 166 ± 29 pmol/L vs 446 ± 86 pmol/L in control cycles; P < 0.0001) were prevented. After treatment, follicle development resumed and normal preovulatory follicle diameter and estradiol concentrations were demonstrated. Postovulatory progesterone rise was similarly delayed (peak cycle day, 30 ± 2 vs 22 ± 1; P = 0.002) and cycle length was prolonged (35 ± 1 days vs 29 ± 1 days in control cycles; P = 0.0003) but luteal progesterone excretion was unaffected by the NK3Ra (LH surge day +7 mean urinary progesterone levels ± SEM, 58 ± 10 pmol/mol vs 48±7 pmol/mol creatinine in control cycles; nonsignificant). Conclusion: These data demonstrate the involvement of NKB-NK3R signaling in the physiological regulation of GnRH/LH secretion, determining normal follicle development in women.
Daily energy expenditure of male barn swallows correlates with tail–streamer length: handicap–mediated foraging strategies

Daily energy expenditure (DEE) of male barn swallows (Hirundo rustica), measured using the doubly labelled water technique, correlated with streamer length. Contrary to predictions derived from previous findings, neither a positive linear nor a u–shaped relationship was found between DEE and streamer length. Instead, an n–shaped curve showed that the highest DEE corresponded to an intermediate streamer length of 119 mm. A model incorporating estimates of resting metabolism and flight energy expenditure from aerodynamics models suggested that variation in individual tail dynamics was the most likely explanation for the observed DEE. We suggest that streamer length is coupled to foraging strategy, because tail dynamics control flight performance, which in turn influences flight behaviour.
Mechanisms of slow conductions during ventricular volume loading

Several studies have linked increased myocardial strain (wall stretch) with atrial and ventricular arrhythmias. Although the precise mechanisms for these loading related rhythm disturbances remain unclear, the predominant mechanism underlying ventricular arrhythmias associated with mechanical dysfunction is reentrant conduction, which is promoted and sustained by slowed conduction. Passive ventricular volume loading in the Langendorff-perfused isolated rabbit heart has been shown to slow conduction. Optical mapping was used to image myocardial conduction. A phase-shifting filtering technique was previously developed to enhance optical maps of myocardial electrical activity. The improvements of the phase-shifting scheme were validated by processing a known data set taken from a modified FitzHugh-Nagumo model, to which comparable noise was added. Further improvements were made to the filtering and analysis routines to improve efficiency and accuracy. Conduction slowing in response to ventricular volume loading was validated by excluding several potentially confounding factors. Improved oxygen delivery with a synthetic oxygen carrier, indicated that the effect is not a result of global ischemia. Measurement of regional tissue perfusion with microspheres suggested that the load effect is not due to regional ischemia. Conduction slowing was not significantly attributable to a decrease in epicardial surface temperature during loading. Measurements with epicardial electrodes were performed without two reagents used during optical mapping: di-4- ANEPPS and 2,3-butanedione monoxime. These measurements indicated that incremental loading within a physiological range still led to incrementally longer activation times (slowed conduction). Several potential physiological mechanisms of conduction slowing during ventricular volume loading were investigated. Inclusion of the stretch- activated channel blocker gadolinium3+ in the perfusate attenuated the reversible increase in action potential duration during volume loading, but did not alter the reversible slowing of conduction. Volume loading reduced conduction despite changes in membrane excitability caused by varying perfusate potassium concentrations. Effective cross-fiber space and time constants, assessed by optical mapping of the tissue response to a cathodal-break point stimulus, increased significantly, indicating that loading may reduce intercellular resistance and increase effective membrane capacitance, resulting in a net slowing of conduction due to the greater sensitivity of conduction velocity to a change in capacitance
On the Ice-Wine problem: Recovering linear combination of codewords over the Gaussian Multiple Access Channel

In this paper, we consider the Ice-Wine problem: Two transmitters send their messages over the Gaussian Multiple-Access Channel (MAC) and a receiver aims to recover a linear combination of codewords. The best known achievable rate-region for this problem is due to [1], [2] as Ri ≤ ½ log (½ + SNR) (i = 1, 2). In this paper, we design a novel scheme using lattice codes and show that the rate region of this problem can be improved. The main difference between our proposed scheme with known schemes in [1], [2] is that instead of recovering the sum of codewords at the decoder, a non-integer linear combination of codewords is recovered. Comparing the achievable rate-region with the outer bound, Ri ≤ ½ log (1 + SNR) (i = 1, 2), we observe that the achievable rate for each user is partially tight. Finally, by applying our proposed scheme to the Gaussian Two Way Relay Channel (GTWRC), we show that the best rate region for this problem can be improved.
Comparative Analysis of the Global Transcriptome of Anopheles funestus from Mali, West Africa

Background Anopheles funestus is a principal vector of malaria across much of tropical Africa and is considered one of the most efficient of its kind, yet studies of this species have lagged behind those of its broadly sympatric congener, An. gambiae. In aid of future genomic sequencing of An. funestus, we explored the whole body transcriptome, derived from mixed stage progeny of wild-caught females from Mali, West Africa. Principal Findings Here we report the functional annotation and comparative genomics of 2,005 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from An. funestus, which were assembled with a previous EST set from adult female salivary glands from the same mosquito. The assembled ESTs provided for a nonredundant catalog of 1,035 transcripts excluding mitochondrial sequences. Conclusions/Significance Comparison of the An. funestus and An. gambiae transcriptomes using computational and macroarray approaches revealed a high degree of sequence identity despite an estimated 20–80 MY divergence time between lineages. A phylogenetically broader comparative genomic analysis indicated that the most rapidly evolving proteins– those involved in immunity, hematophagy, formation of extracellular structures, and hypothetical conserved proteins– are those that probably play important roles in how mosquitoes adapt to their nutritional and external environments, and therefore could be of greatest interest in disease control.
FaulTM: Error detection and recovery using Hardware Transactional Memory

Reliability is an essential concern for processor designers due to increasing transient and permanent fault rates. Executing instruction streams redundantly in chip multi processors (CMP) provides high reliability since it can detect both transient and permanent faults. Additionally, it also minimizes the Silent Data Corruption rate. However, comparing the results of the instruction streams, checkpointing the entire system and recovering from the detected errors might lead to substantial performance degradation. In this study we propose FaulTM, an error detection and recovery schema utilizing Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) in order to reduce these performance degradations. We show how a minimally modified HTM that features lazy conflict detection and lazy data versioning can provide low-cost reliability in addition to HTM's intended purpose of supporting optimistic concurrency. Compared with lockstepping, FaulTM reduces the performance degradation by 2.5X for SPEC2006 benchmark.
Exploring molecular genetics of bladder cancer: lessons learned from mouse models

Urothelial cell carcinoma (UCC) of the bladder is one of the most common malignancies worldwide, causing considerable morbidity and mortality. It is unusual among the epithelial carcinomas because tumorigenesis can occur by two distinct pathways: low-grade, recurring papillary tumours usually contain oncogenic mutations in FGFR3 or HRAS, whereas high-grade, muscle-invasive tumours with metastatic potential generally have defects in the pathways controlled by the tumour suppressors p53 and retinoblastoma (RB). Over the past 20 years, a plethora of genetically engineered mouse (GEM) models of UCC have been developed, containing deletions or mutations of key tumour suppressor genes or oncogenes. In this review, we provide an up-to-date summary of these GEM models, analyse their flaws and weaknesses, discuss how they have advanced our understanding of UCC at the molecular level, and comment on their translational potential. We also highlight recent studies supporting a role for dysregulated Wnt signalling in UCC and the development of mouse models that recapitulate this dysregulation.
DCMP: A Distributed Cycle Minimization Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Broadcast-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, including flat (for example, Gnutella) and two-layer superpeer implementations (for example, Kazaa), are extremely popular nowadays due to their simplicity, ease of deployment, and versatility. The unstructured network topology, however, contains many cyclic paths, which introduce numerous duplicate messages in the system. Although such messages can be identified and ignored, they still consume a large proportion of the bandwidth and other resources, causing bottlenecks in the entire network. In this paper, we describe the distributed cycle minimization protocol (DCMP), a dynamic fully decentralized protocol that significantly reduces the duplicate messages by eliminating unnecessary cycles. As queries are transmitted through the peers, DCMP identifies the problematic paths and attempts to break the cycles while maintaining the connectivity of the network. In order to preserve the fault resilience and load balancing properties of unstructured P2P systems, DCMP avoids creating a hierarchical organization. Instead, it applies cycle elimination symmetrically around some powerful peers to keep the average path length small. The overall structure is constructed fast with very low overhead. With the information collected during this process, distributed maintenance is performed efficiently even if peers quit the system without notification. The experimental results from our simulator and the prototype implementation on PlanetLab confirm that DCMP significantly improves the scalability of unstructured P2P systems without sacrificing their desirable properties. Moreover, due to its simplicity, DCMP can be easily implemented in various existing P2P systems and is orthogonal to the search algorithms.
Neuropsychiatric and Socioeconomic Status Impact Antiretroviral Adherence and Mortality in Rural Zambia

We conducted a prospective cohort study of 496 adults starting antiretroviral treatment (ART) to determine the impact of neuropsychiatric symptoms and socioeconomic status on adherence and mortality. Almost 60% had good adherence based upon pharmacy records. Poor adherence was associated with being divorced, poorer, food insecure, and less educated. Longer travel time to clinic, concealing one’s human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status, and experiencing side effects predicted poor adherence. Over a third of the patients had cognitive impairment and poorer cognitive function was also associated with poor adherence. During follow-up (mean 275 days), 20% died—usually within 90 days of starting ART. Neuropsychiatric symptoms, advanced HIV, peripheral neuropathy symptoms, food insecurity, and poverty were associated with death. Neuropsychiatric symptoms, advanced HIV, and poverty remained significant independent predictors of death in a multivariate model adjusting for other significant factors. Social, economic, cognitive, and psychi- atric problems impact adherence and survival for people receiving ART in rural Zambia.
The Allelic Partition for Coalescent Point Processes

Assume that individuals alive at time t in some population can be ranked in such a way that the coalescence times between consecutive individuals are i.i. d. The ranked sequence of these branches is called a coalescent point process. We have shown in a previous work (14) that splitting trees are important instances of such populations. Here, individuals are given DNA sequences, and for a sample of n DNA sequences belonging to distinct individuals, we consider the number Sn of poly- morphic sites (sites at which at least two sequences dier), and the number An of distinct haplotypes (sequences diering at one site at least). It is standard to assume that mutations arrive at constant rate (on germ lines), and never hit the same site on the DNA sequence. We study the muta- tion pattern associated with coalescent point processes under this assumption. Here, Sn and An grow linearly as n grows, with explicit rate. However, when the branch lengths have innite expectation, Sn grows more rapidly, e.g. as n ln(n) for critical birth{death processes. Then, we study the frequency spectrum of the sample, that is, the numbers of polymorphic sites/haplotypes carried by k individuals in the sample. These numbers are shown to grow also linearly with sample size, and we provide sim- ple explicit formulae for mutation frequencies and haplotype frequencies. For critical birth{death processes, mutation frequencies are given by the harmonic series and haplotype frequencies by Fisher's logarithmic series.
Psychometric Evaluation of the Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 in an Italian Sample

The 15-item Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (GPIUS2) is one of the few theory-driven instruments to measure problematic Internet use (PIU). Since PIU has emerged in several cultural contexts, it seems relevant to evaluate the psychometric properties of the scale across various cultures. The aim of the present study was to test the psychometric properties (i.e., dimensionality, reliability, and validity) of the Italian version of the GPIUS2. The sample consisted of 371 participants (128 males and 243 females), and their age ranged from 14 to 33 years (M=18.07 years, SD=5.58). The GPIUS2 and the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) were administered individually in both high school and college classes. With regard to scale dimensionality, the best-fit measurement model includes four first-order factors: preference for online social interaction, mood regulation, deficient self-regulation, and negative outcomes (Satorra-Bentler scaled chi-square [S-Bχ(2)]/df=2.27; comparative fit index [CFI]=0.94; Tucker-Lewis index [TLI]=0.93; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA]=0.05). With regard to reliability, internal-consistency Cronbach's alpha ranged from 0.78 to 0.89. Convergent validity is demonstrated with significant correlations between GPIUS2 (total score and all the subscale scores) and IAT score. Results showed that GPIUS2 scores significantly discriminated between high school and undergraduate students. The overall findings of the present study provide evidence that the Italian version of the GPIUS2 appears to be an adequate measure of generalized PIU cognitions, behaviors, and outcomes. Suggestions for further research are provided.
Use of synthetic antigens improves detection by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay of antibodies against abortigenic Chlamydia psittaci in ruminants

Synthetic peptide antigens were prepared for use in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) to detect serum antibodies against abortigenic strains of Chlamydia psittaci in livestock. Peptide antigens were identified with C. psittaci B577-immune sera by solid-phase scanning of overlapping octapeptides of variable domains (VDs) of the major outer membrane protein of C. psittaci serovar 1 (omp1 type C. psittaci B577). Two VD 4 regions and one VD 2 region were strongly reactive with all C. psittaci B577 antisera. Peptides encompassing these regions were synthesized with biotin and a serine-glycine-serine-glycine spacer at the N terminus and were attached to streptavidin-coated microtiter plates. In direct ELISAs with these plates, the synthetic peptides reacted with C. psittaci B577 antisera, but not with sera from specific-pathogen-free animals. Serum specimens from 40 sheep and 40 cattle, obtained from herds with abortion problems, were screened for antibodies by these C. psittaci B577 peptide ELISAs and an ELISA with recombinant, genus-specific Chlamydia lipopolysaccharide (LPS) antigen. Results from these newly developed ELISAs were compared to those from the reference C. psittaci B577 elementary body (EB) ELISA and the Chlamydia complement fixation test (CFT). The C. psittaci B577 peptide ELISAs, the LPS ELISA, and the EB ELISA correctly identified the presence or absence of antibodies against chlamydiae in all sheep and bovine sera. The Chlamydia CFT, which is the most widely accepted serodiagnostic method for chlamydial infections in animals, correctly identified the presence or absence of antibodies against chlamydiae in only 78 and 4.9% of sheep and bovine sera, respectively. These results suggest that the C. psittaci B577-peptide and Chlamydia LPS ELISAs are superior for the serodiagnosis of ruminant infections with abortigenic chlamydiae, since they are more sensitive than the CFT, they are easy to standardize, and they use readily available synthetic antigens instead of organism-derived CFT antigen.