Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bacteriocin Producing Lactobacilli Strains as a Biological Strategy to Control Listerial Growth

Listeria monocytogenes causes listeriosis in humans and animals, and is predominantly transmitted by ingestion of contaminated food. This microorganism can also be transmitted transplacentally from mother to child, during passage through the colonized birth canal, or after direct contact with infected animals. The major groups at risk of invasive listeriosis include pregnant women, neonates, elderly people and immunocompromised individuals. Clinical manifestations such as neonatal infections, abortions, bacteremia, meningitis and rhombencephalitis have been the most severe infections [1, 2]. Listeriosis is one of the most relevant foodborne diseases with an elevated socio-economical impact due to severity of invasive infections associated with a high mortality rate [3]. Listeria spp. are widely distributed in the environment and different foods, including dairy products. Recently, several outbreaks of listeriosis associated to consumption of dairy products have been reported worldwide [4]. L. monocytogenes represents an important concern for food safety due to its ability to resist extreme conditions (low pH, high salt concentrations and refrigeration temperatures) which are commonly used as preservation procedures and thus may survive in food for long periods of time [2, 5]. Other listerial species, such as L. ivanovii, L. seeligeri, L. welshimeri and L. innocua, have been reported to cause infections in humans. Some of these species have been associated with bacteremia, acute meningitis, coagulation disorders, and multiple-organ dysfunction, leading to the death of the patients [6].
Testicular Function in Klinefelter Syndrome

Klinefelter syndrome (KS) is the most common genetic form of male hypogonadism, but the phenotype becomes evident only after puberty. During childhood, and even during early puberty, pituitary-gonadal function in 47,XXY subjects is relatively normal, but from midpuberty onwards, FSH and LH levels increase to hypergonadotropic levels, inhibin B decreases to undetectable levels, and testosterone after an initial increase levels off at a low or low-normal level. Hence, most adult KS males display a clear hypergonadotropism with a varying degree of androgen deficiency; subsequently, testosterone substitution therapy is widely used to prevent symptoms and sequels of androgen deficiency. Testicular biopsies of prepubertal KS boys have shown preservation of seminiferous tubules with reduced numbers of germ cells, but Sertoli and Leydig cells have appeared normal. The testes in the adult KS male are, however, characterized by extensive fibrosis and hyalinization of the seminiferous tubules, and hyperplasia of the interstitium, but the tubules may show residual foci of spermatogenesis. Introduction of testicular sperm extraction in combination with intracytoplasmic sperm injection techniques has allowed non-mosaic KS males to father children.
Hearing Aid Low Frequency Cut: Effect on Mandarin Tone and Vowel Perception in Normal-Hearing Listeners

Objective: To investigate the impact of low frequency cuts (LCs) in hearing aid frequency response on Mandarin tone and vowel perception at varying signal-to-noise ratios (S/N ratios). Patients and Methods: Four LC conditions were reviewed, using a programmable, behind-the-ear hearing aid: no LC (NoLC), a 6-dB/octave LC (LC6), a 12-dB/octave LC (LC12), and an 18-dB/octave LC (LC18). Five S/N ratios for speech to white noise were selected: +10 dB, +5 dB, 0 dB, –5 dB and –10 dB. Speech and noise stimuli were presented to 25 normal-hearing, native Mandarin-speaking listeners monaurally. Results: Tone and vowel recognition scores were high for subjects in all experimental conditions except for LC18 and S/N –10 dB. The LCs had minimal impact on tone perception in the positive S/N and S/N 0 conditions. Significant differences for tone recognition were found between the NoLC and LC6, and the LC6 and LC18 conditions with negative S/N ratios. Significant differences in vowel recognition were observed between the LC12 and LC18 settings, at all S/N conditions. Conclusion: LC hearing aid settings may negatively impact on vowel recognition, and may adversely affect Mandarin tone recognition in adverse noise conditions, in normal-hearing listeners.
Nanophasic morphologies as a function of the composition and molecular weight of the macromolecular cross-linker in poly(N-vinylimidazole)-l-poly(tetrahydrofuran) amphiphilic conetworks: bicontinuous domain structure in broad composition ranges

Macroscopically homogeneous poly(N-vinylimidazole)-linked by-poly(tetrahydrofuran) (PVIm-l-PTHF) amphiphilic conetworks (APCNs) were investigated to reveal the effect of conetwork composition in a broad composition range between 25–91 wt% PTHF content and the molecular weight of the components on phase separation and the formation of different morphological features. No macroscopic phase separation was found in these conetworks with semicrystalline PTHF phase, but the segregation of the various covalently connected phases occurs in the nanoscale. The nanophase separated APCNs possess compositionally asymmetric morphology with spherical and elongated domains together with a bicontinuous (cocontinuous) domain structure having ∼7–19 nm average domain sizes. The molecular weight of the PTHFDMA cross-linker, varying between 2170 and 10 030 g mol−1, also influences the size and distance between the phases. Moreover, morphology dependent interactions with polar and non-polar solvents, as well as amphiphilic swelling behavior were found. These nanostructured materials, due to their unique nanophasic morphology and swelling properties possess significant importance and have numerous potential applications in various fields from medicine to material science and engineering.
Driving Performances Assessment Based on Speed Variation Using Dedicated Route Truck GPS Data

It was hypothesized that a driver is not safe when travel speed is too high and also not necessarily safe when travel speed is too low. Based on this hypothesis, this paper studied the risky driving performances by measuring speed variations of a driver’s recurrent trips in two perspectives: 1) driver profiles, which scored the risk on-road driving of each driver and 2) driving patterns, which reflected the risk speed patterns of a type of drivers. The proposed method was tested on a 30-day global positioning system (GPS) dataset, collected from 100 trucks. The study first split the raw dataset into trips and finds the most repeatedly traveled route. Next, the frequency and amplitude of the speed variations from trips of each truck are calculated to establish driver profiles. A risk score is used to rank the truck drivers, i.e., a higher score indicates that the truck driver is more likely to conduct risky driving performances. All trucks are featured in four pre-defined driving patterns according to the different types of speed variations. The geospatial speed distribution of several trucks is manually examined from the raw dataset to verify the results. The contribution lies in providing a method to evaluate a driver’s risk performance through mass truck GPS data. The proposed method would help for monitoring on-road risky driving performances in large fleet management and also providing knowledge about driving styles among drivers which would be beneficial in study driver assistant system.
Localization of latent transforming growth factor-β binding protein-1 in human coronary atherosclerotic plaques.

BACKGROUND Transforming growth factor-β (TGFβ) and its receptors have been detected by immunohistochemistry in the normal vessel wall and in atherosclerotic lesions of human coronary arteries. However, TGFβ is normally secreted as an inactive complex associated with a latent TGFβ-binding protein (LTBP). Therefore, detection of TGFβ antigen only in the arterial wall does not imply the activated form of the growth factor. METHODS AND RESULTS In situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry demonstrated LTBP1 mRNA and protein expression throughout the media and intima of early coronary artery lesions, with the highest levels of protein at the luminal surface. In advanced lesions, LTBP1 mRNA and protein were detected mainly in regions of high cell density, such as the fibrous cap. CONCLUSIONS Assays of the TGFβ signalling pathway will be required to determine the activity associated with TGFβ antigen in the vessel wall.
Broad Antiviral Activity of Carbohydrate-Binding Agents Against Dengue Virus Infection

© 2012 Schols and Alen, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Broad Antiviral Activity of Carbohydrate-Binding Agents Against Dengue Virus Infection
Dual Policy Iteration

Recently, a novel class of Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms have demonstrated impressive practical performance (e.g., ExIt from [1], AlphaGo-Zero from [2]). This new family of algorithms maintains, and alternately optimizes, two policies: a fast, reactive policy (e.g., a deep neural network) deployed at test time, and a slow, non-reactive policy (e.g., Tree Search), that can plan multiple steps ahead. The reactive policy is updated under supervision from the non-reactive policy, while the non-reactive policy is improved with guidance from the reactive policy. In this work we study this Dual Policy Iteration (DPI) strategy in an alternating optimization framework and provide a convergence analysis that extends existing API theory. We also develop a special instance of this framework which reduces the update of non-reactive policies to model-based optimal control using learned local models, and provides a theoretically sound way of unifying model-free and model-based RL approaches with unknown dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on various continuous control Markov Decision Processes.
A qualitative comparative study of schizophrenic patients and control individuals assessed by magnetic resonance imaging

The present study examined, by means of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the qualitative brain abnormalities in a group of 58 schizophrenic patients compared to a group of 58 matched control individuals. The possible relationships between these abnormalities and the demographic and clinical features of the participants in the study were also investigated. Schizophrenic patients presented a higher percentage of bland-moderate enlargement of the periencephalic-subarachnoid spaces ( p= 0.01) and a widespread cerebral atrophy, the latter below the threshold of significance ( p= 0.06). In the subset of patients with ventricular asymmetry (right larger than left) the age was significantly lower compared to the age of patients without this abnormality ( p= 0.04). In the subset of patients with cerebellar cisterns enlargement the age as well as the age of onset was higher in comparison to the one of patients without this abnormality ( p = 0.02; p = 0.006). Taking together with previous studies, these findings underline the importance of qualitative assessment of brain morphology in research and clinical evaluation of patients with schizophrenia.
Homozygous missense MYBPC3 Pro873His mutation associated with increased risk for heart failure development in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a primary autosomal‐dominant disorder of the myocardium with variable expressivity and penetrance. Occasionally, homozygous sarcomere genetic variants emerge while genotyping HCM patients. In these cases, a more severe HCM phenotype is generally seen. Here, we report a case of HCM that was diagnosed clinically at 39 years of age. Initial symptoms were shortness of breath during exertion. Successively, he developed a wide array of severe clinical manifestations, which progressed to an ominous end‐stage heart failure that resulted in heart transplantation. Genotype analysis revealed a missense MYBPC3 variant NM_000256. 3:c.2618C>A,p.(Pro873His) that presented in the homozygous form. Conflicting interpretations of pathogenicity have been reported for the Pro873His MYBPC3 variant described here. Our patient, presenting with two copies of the variant and devoid of a normal allele, progressed to end‐stage heart failure, which supports the notion of a deleterious effect of this variant in the homozygous form.
Lysine requirement in parenterally fed postsurgical human neonates.

BACKGROUND The lysine requirement of human neonates receiving parenteral nutrition (PN) has not been determined experimentally. OBJECTIVE The objective was to determine the parenteral lysine requirement for human neonates by using the minimally invasive indicator amino acid oxidation technique with l-[1-(13)C] phenylalanine as the indicator amino acid. DESIGN Eleven postsurgical neonates were randomly assigned to 15 lysine intakes ranging from 50 to 260 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1). Breath and urine samples were collected at baseline and at plateau for (13)CO(2) (F(13)CO(2)) and amino acid enrichment, respectively. The mean lysine requirement was determined by applying a 2-phase linear regression crossover analysis to the measured rates of F(13)CO(2) release and l-[1-(13)C]phenylalanine oxidation. RESULTS The mean parenteral lysine requirement determined by F(13)CO(2) release oxidation was 104.9 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1) (upper and lower CIs: 120.6 and 89.1 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1), respectively). The mean lysine parenteral requirement determined by phenylalanine oxidation was 117.6 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1) (upper and lower CIs: 157.5 and 77.6 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1), respectively). Graded intakes of lysine had no effect on phenylalanine flux. CONCLUSION We recommend a mean lysine requirement for the postsurgical PN-fed neonate of 104.9 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1), which is 32-43% of the lysine concentration presently found in commercial PN solutions (246-330 mg . kg(-1) . d(-1)). This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT00779753.
Risk and protective factors underlying depression and suicidal ideation in Autism Spectrum Disorder

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are at significantly increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Given that social difficulties in ASD often lead to social isolation, which can in turn increase the risk for depression, this study examined loneliness and social support as potential risk and protective factors associated with depression and suicidal ideation.
NMF-based Cepstral Features for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has obtained growing attention during the past years. For this purpose, various methods have been proposed. Feature extraction is the major part of SER methods and aims to attain effective emotional features from speech signal. One of the most important features in speech processing task is Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). The vocal production mechanisms of speakers at different emotional states can improve the discrimination abilities of the aforementioned features for SER task. This work aims to propose a novel feature extraction scheme for SER task that integrates this particular information through the decomposition of emotional speech spectra and providing an improved spectral representation of various emotions. By employing this scheme, two novel procedures are represented. In the first procedures, cepstral-like features are obtained by a filter bank which is computed by Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) technique on emotional speech spectra. In the second procedures, the activation coefficients of NMF technique which are achieved by decomposition of speech spectrums, are considered as the new features. Finally, to increase the discrimination abilities of features among emotion classes, each of the feature vectors is normalized to its mean value. According to experiments on Emo-DB database, fusion of the proposed features with MFCCs outperforms the performance of an SER system compared with conventional MFCC as the baseline or the simple unsupervised NMF-based features derived from the speech spectra.
Extremely preterm children exhibit increased interhemispheric connectivity for language: findings from fMRI‐constrained MEG analysis

Abstract Children born extremely preterm are at significant risk for cognitive impairment, including language deficits. The relationship between preterm birth and neurological changes that underlie cognitive deficits is poorly understood. We use a stories‐listening task in fMRI and MEG to characterize language network representation and connectivity in children born extremely preterm (n = 15, <28 weeks gestation, ages 4–6 years), and in a group of typically developing control participants (n = 15, term birth, 4–6 years). Participants completed a brief neuropsychological assessment. Conventional fMRI analyses revealed no significant differences in language network representation across groups (p > .05, corrected). The whole‐group fMRI activation map was parcellated to define the language network as a set of discrete nodes, and the timecourse of neuronal activity at each position was estimated using linearly constrained minimum variance beamformer in MEG. Virtual timecourses were subjected to connectivity and network‐based analyses. We observed significantly increased beta‐band functional connectivity in extremely preterm compared to controls (p < .05). Specifically, we observed an increase in connectivity between left and right perisylvian cortex. Subsequent effective connectivity analyses revealed that hyperconnectivity in preterms was due to significantly increased information flux originating from the right hemisphere (p < 0.05). The total strength and density of the language network were not related to language or nonverbal performance, suggesting that the observed hyperconnectivity is a “pure” effect of prematurity. Although our extremely preterm children exhibited typical language network architecture, we observed significantly altered network dynamics, indicating reliance on an alternative neural strategy for the language task.
Learning-based Compressive Sensing for UWB Receiver

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication is an emerging technology for high data rate information transfer in a medium range wireless communication network. It has different applications such as UWB radars, wireless sensor networks, and medical imaging. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) requires UWB signals to have a very short width and a very low power. Such a low power signal demands Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC)s with high sampling rates which are hard to realize. The research community has put forth a number of approaches to address this issue using Compressive Sensing (CS) with random or semi-random measurement matrices. However, these approaches are computationally demanding when a higher accuracy is desired. In this research, we propose a data-driven approach for extracting rich signal segments. Such segments are identified using autoencoders which have been trained on training examples that are stochastically analogous to those of our interest. The learning-based approximation of the measurement matrix enables us to achieve a high accuracy by eliminating the need for sampling signal segments which are not quite effective in the reconstruction phase. Empirical results show our approach outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by yielding a superior Bit Error Rate (BER) especially in environments with low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).
Wilms’ Tumor in Children: An Overview

Wilms’ tumor is the most frequently occurring renal tumor in children and is one of the most treatment-responsive tumors. A tumor-suppressor gene and other genetic abnormalities have been implicated in its etiology. In addition, patients with several congenital anomalies, such as Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, WAGR syndrome, and Denys-Drash syndrome, have an increased risk of Wilms’ tumor. Previously, a three-drug chemotherapy regimen with surgery and radiotherapy was used with patients in all stages. Now, patients with early-stage Wilms’ tumor are treated with a two-drug regimen without radiotherapy, whereas those in advanced stages still receive the three-drug regimen and radiotherapy. Two large collaborative groups – the National Wilms’ Tumor Study Group (NWTS) in the United States and the International Society of Pediatric Oncology (SIOP) in Europe – are involved in Wilms’ tumor management, which differs in some aspects. Multimodality treatment has been used successfully, and in Europe preoperative strategies are used as well. As the survival rate has now reached 90%, the primary objectives of the physician are to perform nephron-sparing surgery in selected cases and to reduce the dosage and duration of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in appropriate cases. Other renal tumors occur rarely, but have also been treated successfully in the last decade.
Mechanistic Toxicity Assessment of Hexahydroisohumulone in Canine Hepatocytes, Renal Proximal Tubules, Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, and Enterocyte-like Cells

In vitro test methods are used primarily for rapid screening of chemicals based on mechanistic understanding of toxicity to predict hazards and potential risks. We investigated organ-specific oxidative stress and the molecular mechanism of toxicity using the pathway-focused DNA array of the hop ingredient hexahydroisohumulone (HEX) with canine hepatocytes, canine proximal tubule cells (CPTC), bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSC) and enterocyte-like cells (ELC). Free radical species were produced in HEX-treated hepatocytes and to a lesser extent in CPTC, BMSC and ELC. Transcriptional profiles showed 30.5% (113 genes) out of 370 genes were differentially expressed in hepatocytes followed by CPTC (21.6%, 80 genes), ELC (4.8%, 18 genes) and BMSC (1.0%, 4 genes). HEX predominantly affected DNA damage/ repair pathways in hepatocytes and CPTC, while for ELC endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress/unfolded protein response (UPR) dominated. Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and C/EBP homologous protein (CHOP) were most abundant genes in HEX-treated hepatocytes and CPTC; networked complementary between various pathways resulting in its adverse effect on oxidative stress, ER stress/UPR, mitochondrial metabolism and apoptosis. This work contributes to the understanding of the molecular effects of HEX, cellular response to oxidative stress and provides insight into genes altered with HEX exposure and the cell-type specific responses in dogs.