Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Engaging Patients, Health Care Professionals, and Community Members to Improve Preoperative Decision Making for Older Adults Facing High-Risk Surgery.

Importance Older patients are at greater risk for postoperative complications, yet they are less likely than younger patients to ask questions about surgery. Objective To design an intervention to improve preoperative decision making and manage postoperative expectations. Design, Setting, and Participants A Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) was created to help identify preoperative decisional needs. The PFAC included 4 men and women who had previous experience with high-risk surgery as older patients or their family members; the PFAC met monthly at a local library from May 2014 to April 2015 to examine findings from a prior qualitative study and to integrate themes with PFAC members' experiences. Patient observations included 91 recorded conversations between patients and surgeons and 61 patient interviews before and after surgery. The PFAC members and other stakeholders evaluated 118 publicly available questions and selected 12 corresponding to identified needs to generate a question prompt list (QPL). Three focus groups, including 31 community members from diverse backgrounds, were conducted at community centers in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to refine the QPL. A clinical pilot with 42 patients considering surgery was conducted in one outpatient surgical clinic in Madison. Main Outcomes and Measures Generation of a QPL to address patients' preoperative informational and decisional needs. Results Through exploration of qualitative data, the PFAC noted 3 critical problems. Patients and family members believed surgery had to be done, were surprised that postoperative recovery was difficult, and lacked knowledge about the perioperative use of advance directives. The PFAC identified a need for more information and decisional support during preoperative conversations that included clarification of treatment options, setting postoperative expectations, and advance care planning. The following 3 question prompt categories arose: "Should I have surgery? " "What should I expect if everything goes well? " and "What happens if things go wrong? " The final list included 11 questions within these domains, was understandable in English and Spanish, and was acceptable to patients in the clinic. Conclusions and Relevance Through direct engagement of stakeholders, a QPL was created to address core decisional and informational needs of surgical patients. Future testing will evaluate whether this list can be used to improve patient engagement and reduce postoperative regret and conflict about postoperative treatments.
Activated Rho kinase mediates diabetes-induced elevation of vascular arginase activation and contributes to impaired corpora cavernosa relaxation: possible involvement of p38 MAPK activation.

INTRODUCTION Activated RhoA/Rho kinase (ROCK) has been implicated in diabetes-induced erectile dysfunction. Earlier studies have demonstrated involvement of ROCK pathway in the activation of arginase in endothelial cells. However, signaling pathways activated by ROCK in the penis remain unclear. AIM We tested whether ROCK and p38 MAPK are involved in the elevation of arginase activity and subsequent impairment of corpora cavernosal (CC) relaxation in diabetes. METHODS Eight weeks after streptozotocin-induced diabetes, vascular functional studies, arginase activity assay, and protein expression of RhoA, ROCK, phospho-p38 MAPK, p38 MAPK, phospho-MYPT-1(Thr850), MYPT-1 and arginase levels were assessed in CC tissues from nondiabetic wild type (WT), diabetic (D) WT (WT + D), partial ROCK 2(+/-) knockout (KO), and ROCK 2(+/-) KO + D mice. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The expression of RhoA, ROCK 1 and 2, phosphorylation of MYPT-1(Thr850) and p38 MAPK, arginase activity/expression, endothelial- and nitrergic-dependent relaxation of CC was assayed. RESULTS Diabetes significantly reduced maximum relaxation (Emax ) to both endothelium-dependent acetylcholine (WT + D: Emax; 61 ± 4% vs. WT: Emax; 75 ± 2%) and nitrergic nerve stimulation. These effects were associated with increased expression of active RhoA, ROCK 2, phospho-MYPT-1(Thr850), phospho-p38 MAPK, arginase II, and activity of corporal arginase (1.6-fold) in WT diabetic CC. However, this impairment in CC of WT + D mice was absent in heterozygous ROCK 2(+/-) KO + D mice for acetylcholine (Emax : 80 ± 5%) and attenuated for nitrergic nerve-induced relaxation. CC of ROCK 2(+/-) KO + D mice showed much less ROCK activity, did not exhibit p38 MAPK activation, and had reduced arginase activity and arginase II expression. These findings indicate that ROCK 2 mediates diabetes-induced elevation of arginase activity. Additionally, pretreatment of WT diabetic CC with inhibitors of arginase (ABH) or p38 MAPK (SB203580) partially prevented impairment of ACh- and nitrergic nerve-induced relaxation and elevation of arginase activity. CONCLUSION ROCK 2, p38 MAPK and arginase play key roles in diabetes-induced impairment of CC relaxation.
Microbial Composition Predicts Genital Tract Inflammation and Persistent Bacterial Vaginosis in South African Adolescent Females

ABSTRACT Young African females are at an increased risk of HIV acquisition, and genital inflammation or the vaginal microbiome may contribute to this risk. We studied these factors in 168 HIV-negative South African adolescent females aged 16 to 22 years. Unsupervised clustering of 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed three clusters (subtypes), one of which was strongly associated with genital inflammation. In a multivariate model, the microbiome compositional subtype and hormonal contraception were significantly associated with genital inflammation. We identified 40 taxa significantly associated with inflammation, including those reported previously (Prevotella, Sneathia, Aerococcus, Fusobacterium, and Gemella) as well as several novel taxa (including increased frequencies of bacterial vaginosis-associated bacterium 1 [BVAB1], BVAB2, BVAB3, Prevotella amnii, Prevotella pallens, Parvimonas micra, Megasphaera, Gardnerella vaginalis, and Atopobium vaginae and decreased frequencies of Lactobacillus reuteri, Lactobacillus crispatus, Lactobacillus jensenii, and Lactobacillus iners). Women with inflammation-associated microbiomes had significantly higher body mass indices and lower levels of endogenous estradiol and luteinizing hormone. Community functional profiling revealed three distinct vaginal microbiome subtypes, one of which was characterized by extreme genital inflammation and persistent bacterial vaginosis (BV); this subtype could be predicted with high specificity and sensitivity based on the Nugent score (≥9) or BVAB1 abundance. We propose that women with this BVAB1-dominated subtype may have chronic genital inflammation due to persistent BV, which may place them at a particularly high risk for HIV infection.
Prevalence of Tick-Borne Pathogens in Ixodes ricinus and Dermacentor reticulatus Ticks from Different Geographical Locations in Belarus

Worldwide, ticks are important vectors of human and animal pathogens. Besides Lyme Borreliosis, a variety of other bacterial and protozoal tick-borne infections are of medical interest in Europe. In this study, 553 questing and feeding Ixodes ricinus (n = 327) and Dermacentor reticulatus ticks (n = 226) were analysed by PCR for Borrelia, Rickettsia, Anaplasma, Coxiella, Francisella and Babesia species. Overall, the pathogen prevalence in ticks was 30.6% for I. ricinus and 45.6% for D. reticulatus. The majority of infections were caused by members of the spotted-fever group rickettsiae (24.4%), 9.4% of ticks were positive for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, with Borrelia afzelii being the most frequently detected species (40.4%). Pathogens with low prevalence rates in ticks were Anaplasma phagocytophilum (2.2%), Coxiella burnetii (0.9%), Francisella tularensis subspecies (0.7%), Bartonella henselae (0.7%), Babesia microti (0.5%) and Babesia venatorum (0.4%). On a regional level, hotspots of pathogens were identified for A. phagocytophilum (12.5–17.2%), F. tularensis ssp. (5.5%) and C. burnetii (9.1%), suggesting established zoonotic cycles of these pathogens at least at these sites. Our survey revealed a high burden of tick-borne pathogens in questing and feeding I. ricinus and D. reticulatus ticks collected in different regions in Belarus, indicating a potential risk for humans and animals. Identified hotspots of infected ticks should be included in future surveillance studies, especially when F. tularensis ssp. and C. burnetii are involved.
Localization-Oriented Network Adjustment in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Localization is an enabling technique for many sensor network applications. Real-world deployments demonstrate that, in practice, a network is not always entirely localizable, leaving a certain number of theoretically nonlocalizable nodes. Previous studies mainly focus on how to tune network settings to make a network localizable. However, the existing methods are considered to be coarse-grained, since they equally deal with localizable and nonlocalizable nodes. Ignoring localizability induces unnecessary adjustments and accompanying costs. In this study, we propose a fine-grained approach, localizability-aided localization (LAL), which basically consists of three phases: node localizability testing, structure analysis, and network adjustment. LAL triggers a single round adjustment, after which some popular localization methods can be successfully carried out. Being aware of node localizability, all network adjustments made by LAL are purposefully selected. Experiment and simulation results show that LAL effectively guides the adjustment while makes it efficient in terms of the number of added edges and affected nodes.
Automatic Image Cropping for Visual Aesthetic Enhancement Using Deep Neural Networks and Cascaded Regression

Despite recent progress, computational visual aesthetic is still challenging. Image cropping, which refers to the removal of unwanted scene areas, is an important step to improve the aesthetic quality of an image. However, it is challenging to evaluate whether cropping leads to aesthetically pleasing results because the assessment is typically subjective. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded cropping regression (CCR) method to perform image cropping by learning the knowledge from professional photographers. The proposed CCR method improves the convergence speed of the cascaded method, which directly uses random-ferns regressors. In addition, a two-step learning strategy is proposed and used in the CCR method to address the problem of lacking labelled cropping data. Specifically, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is first trained on large-scale visual aesthetic datasets. The deep CNN model is then designed to extract features from several image cropping datasets, upon which the cropping bounding boxes are predicted by the proposed CCR method. Experimental results on public image cropping datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art image cropping methods.
Review article: intestinal barrier dysfunction and central nervous system disorders – a controversial association

Central nervous system (CNS) development and physiopathology are greatly affected by environmental stimuli. The intestinal barrier restricts the entrance of toxins, pathogens, and antigens while modulating the expression of various neuroactive compounds. The existence of a rich gut‐to‐brain communication raises the possibility that intestinal barrier alterations may take part in the pathophysiology of CNS disorders.
A Core Compact Model for IGZO TFTs Considering Degeneration Mechanism

A core scheme including dc and capacitance models of amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors is presented based on terms of surface potential. Due to the intrinsic physical fact, carrier degeneracy is taken into account. A simpler symmetric quadrature version of charge-sheet model is adopted, which offers a new approach to deduce the expressions of current and terminal charges. Through the extensive comparisons between model results and numerical iterations or experimental data, the validity of the proposed models is strongly supported. The simplicity of algorithm and clear physical conception make the model suitable for circuit simulators.
Proactive Control: Neural Oscillatory Correlates of Conflict Anticipation and Response Slowing

Abstract Proactive control allows us to anticipate environmental changes and adjust behavioral strategy. In the laboratory, investigators have used a number of different behavioral paradigms, including the stop-signal task (SST), to examine the neural processes of proactive control. Previous functional MRI studies of the SST have demonstrated regional responses to conflict anticipation—the likelihood of a stop signal or P(stop) as estimated by a Bayesian model—and reaction time (RT) slowing and how these responses are interrelated. Here, in an electrophysiological study, we investigated the time–frequency domain substrates of proactive control. The results showed that conflict anticipation as indexed by P(stop) was positively correlated with the power in low-theta band (3–5 Hz) in the fixation (trial onset)-locked interval, and go-RT was negatively correlated with the power in delta-theta band (2–8 Hz) in the go-locked interval. Stimulus prediction error was positively correlated with the power in the low-beta band (12–22 Hz) in the stop-locked interval. Further, the power of the P(stop) and go-RT clusters was negatively correlated, providing a mechanism relating conflict anticipation to RT slowing in the SST. Source reconstruction with beamformer localized these time–frequency activities close to brain regions as revealed by functional MRI in earlier work. These are the novel results to show oscillatory electrophysiological substrates in support of trial-by-trial behavioral adjustment for proactive control.
Zinc oxide nano particles coating on polyester fabric functionalized through alkali treatment

In recent years, zinc oxide nano particles coating on textiles such as polyester is considered because of UV blocking and self-cleaning properties. Alkaline hydrolysis of polyester is a method in textile industry for surface treatment in large scale to enhance wettability. In the present work, polyester fabric was treated with sodium hydroxide, then was coated with ZnO nano particles, and also polyester fabric was treated with sodium hydroxide and ZnO nano particles at the same time. The bending length, water adsorption time, bactericidal properties, atomic absorption spectroscopy, and self-cleaning effect were measured according to the standard methods. Scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analysis were used for the study of surface morphology and surface chemical bonding. The results demonstrated that increasing of zinc oxide nano particles concentration increased bending length, water adsorption time, antibacterial and self-cleaning effect. Comparing with pre-alkaline and simultaneous alkali treatment showed that pre-alkaline-treated fabric had more zinc oxide nano particles, therefore more self-cleaning and bactericidal effect. The scanning electron microscopy of alkaline-treated polyester fabric showed surface hydrolysis and nano-particles on the surface of polyester, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy spectroscopy indicated chemical bonding.
Trail Making Test: Normative data for the Latin American Spanish-speaking pediatric population.

OBJECTIVE To generate normative data for the Trail Making Test (TMT) in Spanish-speaking pediatric populations. METHOD The sample consisted of 3,337 healthy children from nine countries in Latin America (Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Puerto Rico) and Spain. Each participant was administered the TMT as part of a larger neuropsychological battery. The TMT-A and TMT-B scores were normed using multiple linear regressions and standard deviations of residual values. Age, age2, sex, and mean level of parental education (MLPE) were included as predictors in the analyses. RESULTS The final multiple linear regression models showed main effects for age on both scores, such that as children needed less time to complete the test while they become older. TMT-A scores were affected by age2 for all countries except, Cuba, Guatemala, and Puerto. TMT-B scores were affected by age2 for all countries except, Guatemala and Puerto Rico. Models indicated that children whose parent(s) had a MLPE >12 years of education needed less time to complete the test compared to children whose parent(s) had a MLPE ≤12 years for Mexico and Paraguay in TMT-A scores; and Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Spain for TMT-B scores. Sex affected TMT-A scores for Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, in that boys needed less time to complete the test than girls. Sex did not affect TMT-B scores. CONCLUSIONS This is the largest Spanish-speaking pediatric normative study in the world, and it will allow neuropsychologists from these countries to have a more accurate approach to interpret the TMT in pediatric populations.
On the Structure of Classical Realizability Models of ZF

The technique of "classical realizability" is an extension of the method of "forcing"; it permits to extend the Curry-Howard correspondence between proofs and programs, to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and to build new models of ZF, called "realizability models". The structure of these models is, in general, much more complicated than that of the particular case of "forcing models". We show here that the class of constructible sets of any realizability model is an elementary extension of the constructibles of the ground model (a trivial fact in the case of forcing, since these classes are identical). It follows that Shoenfield absoluteness theorem applies to realizability models.
An Upstream YY1 Binding Site on the HIV-1 LTR Contributes to Latent Infection

During HIV-1 infection a population of latently infected cells is established. This population is the major obstacle preventing total eradication of the virus from AIDS patients. HIV-1 latency is thought to arise by various mechanisms including repressive chromatin modifications. Transcription factors such as YY1 have been shown to facilitate repressive chromatin modifications by the recruitment of histone deacetylases. In this study, we identified a novel binding site for YY1 on the HIV-1 LTR, 120 nucleotides upstream of the transcription start site. We show that YY1 can bind to this site in vitro and in vivo and that binding to the LTR is dissociated upon T cell activation. Overexpression of YY1 causes an increase in the proportion of cells that produce latent infections. These observations, in combination with previous results, demonstrate that YY1 plays a prominent role in controlling the establishment and maintenance of latent HIV-1 provirus in unstimulated cells.
Genomic and Transcriptomic Analysis of Escherichia coli Strains Associated with Persistent and Transient Bovine Mastitis and the Role of Colanic Acid

ABSTRACT Escherichia coli is a leading cause of bacterial mastitis in dairy cattle. It is most often transient in nature, causing an infection that lasts 2 to 3 days. However, E. coli has been shown to cause a persistent infection in a minority of cases. Mechanisms that allow for a persistent E. coli infection are not fully understood. The goal of this work was to determine differences between E. coli strains originally isolated from dairy cattle with transient and persistent mastitis. Using RNA sequencing, we show gene expression differences in nearly 200 genes when bacteria from the two clinical phenotypes are compared. We sequenced the genomes of the E. coli strains and report genes unique to the two phenotypes. Differences in the wca operon, which encodes colanic acid, were identified by DNA as well as RNA sequencing and differentiated the two phenotypes. Previous work demonstrated that E. coli strains that cause persistent infections were more motile than those that cause transient infections. Deletion of genes in the wca operon from a persistent-infection strain resulted in a reduction of motility as measured in swimming and swarming assays. Furthermore, colanic acid has been shown to protect bacteria from complement-mediated killing. We show that transient-infection E. coli strains were more sensitive to complement-mediated killing. The deletion of genes from the wca operon caused a persistent-infection E. coli strain to become sensitive to complement-mediated killing. This work identifies important differences between E. coli strains that cause persistent and transient mammary infections in dairy cattle.
Inhibition of DNA methyltransferases regulates cocaine self‐administration by rats: a genome‐wide DNA methylation study

DNA methylation is a major epigenetic process which regulates the accessibility of genes to the transcriptional machinery. In the present study, we investigated whether modifying the global DNA methylation pattern in the brain would alter cocaine intake by rats, using the cocaine self‐administration test. The data indicate that treatment of rats with the DNA methyltransferase inhibitors 5‐aza‐2′‐deoxycytidine (dAZA) and zebularine enhanced the reinforcing properties of cocaine. To obtain some insights about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms, a genome‐wide methylation analysis was undertaken in the prefrontal cortex of rats self‐administering cocaine and treated with or without dAZA. The study identified nearly 189 000 differentially methylated regions (DMRs), about half of them were located inside gene bodies, while only 9% of DMRs were found in the promoter regions of genes. About 99% of methylation changes occurred outside CpG islands. Gene expression studies confirmed the inverse correlation usually observed between increased methylation and transcriptional activation when methylation occurs in the gene promoter. This inverse correlation was not observed when methylation took place inside gene bodies. Using the literature‐based Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, we explored how the differentially methylated genes were related. The analysis showed that increase in cocaine intake by rats in response to DNA methyltransferase inhibitors underlies plasticity mechanisms which mainly concern axonal growth and synaptogenesis as well as spine remodeling. Together with the Akt/PI3K pathway, the Rho‐GTPase family was found to be involved in the plasticity underlying the effect of dAZA on the observed behavioral changes.
A Data Sorting and Searching Scheme Based on Distributed Asymmetric Searchable Encryption

Searchable encryption algorithm is a hot issue nowadays. It can sort the results of searching and return the optimal matching ﬁles. The essence of Asymmetric search-able encryption is that users exchange the data of encryption, one party sends a ciphertext with key encryption, the other party with another key receives the ciphertext. Encryption key is not the same as the decryption key, and cannot deduce another key from any one of the key, thus it greatly enhances the information protection, and can prevent leakage the user’s search pattern. In order to get higher eﬃciency and security in information retrieval, in this paper we introduce the concept of distributed Searchable asymmetric encryption, which is useful for security and can enable search operations on encrypted data. Moreover, we give the proof of security. Finally, experiments results show that our method has better retrieval eﬃciency.