Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myocardial Expression Level of Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule Correlates With Reduced Left Ventricular Function in Human Cardiomyopathy

Background— Recently, we screened for cardiac genes induced by metabolic stress and identified neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) as a candidate. This study aimed to clarify the expression pattern of NCAM in human cardiomyopathy. Methods and Results— A total of 64 cardiac tissue samples of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy were dichotomized according to the immunohistochemically determined signal intensity of NCAM staining (NCAM-high and NCAM-low groups). Clinical and hemodynamic data of the patients were compared between the 2 groups. Fibrosis area, left ventricular end-diastolic volume index, and left ventricular diastolic pressure were greater in the NCAM-high group (22.8% versus 11.6%, P<0.05; 130.3±57.6 versus 104.8±31.7 mL/m2, P<0.05; 14.3±8.0 versus 8.8±4.7 mm Hg, P<0.005; respectively). Incidence of cardiac death and admission for worsening heart failure was higher in the NCAM-high group during a follow-up of 6.3 years (log-rank P<0.05). Another 18 tissue samples were analyzed to determine the relationships between expression level of NCAM and major metabolic genes as well as hemodynamic parameters. The mRNA level of NCAM correlated with the serum (r=0.58; P=0.01) and mRNA levels (r=0.61; P=0.008) of brain-derived natriuretic peptides. It was also correlated with the mRNA levels of proliferator-activated receptor-&ggr; coactivator-1 &agr; (r=0.69; P=0.002) and the nuclear respiratory factor 1 (r=0.74; P<0.001). Conclusions— Expression of NCAM was associated with worsening hemodynamic parameters and major metabolic genes. Together with our previous findings, these data support the involvement of NCAM in left ventricular remodeling, revealing new insights into the pathophysiology of heart failure.
Differentiation of Lactobacillus Species by Molecular Typing

ABSTRACT A total of 64 type, reference, clinical, health food, and stock isolates of microaerophilic Lactobacillus species were examined by restriction fragment length polymorphisms. Of particular interest were members of six of the eight species most commonly recovered from the vaginas of healthy premenopausal women, namely,Lactobacillus jensenii, L. casei, L. rhamnosus, L. acidophilus, L. plantarum, and L. fermentum. Six main groupings were identified on the basis of ribotyping. This technique was able to classify fresh isolates to the species level. In the case of the ribotype A grouping forL. rhamnosus, differences between strains were evident by chromosome typing (chromotyping). Many isolates did not possess plasmids. Six L. rhamnosus strains isolated from four different health food products appeared to be identical toL. rhamnosus ATCC 21052. The molecular typing system is useful for identifying and differentiatingLactobacillus isolates. Studies of strains of potential importance to the urogenital flora should include molecular characterization as a means of comparing genetic traits with those of strains whose characteristics associated with colonization and antagonism against pathogens have been defined.
Morphine Side Effects in β-Arrestin 2 Knockout Mice

Morphine is a potent analgesic, yet, like most opioid narcotics, it exerts unwanted side effects such as constipation and respiratory suppression, thereby limiting its clinical utility. Pharmacological approaches taken to preserve the analgesic properties, while eliminating the unwanted side effects, have met with very limited success. Here, we provide evidence that altering μ opioid receptor regulation may provide a novel approach to discriminate morphine's beneficial and deleterious effects in vivo. We have previously reported that mice lacking the G protein-coupled receptor regulatory protein, β-arrestin 2, display profoundly altered morphine responses. β-Arrestin 2 knockout mice have enhanced and prolonged morphine analgesia with very little morphine tolerance. In this report, we examine whether the side effects of morphine treatment are also augmented in this animal model. Surprisingly, the genetic disruption of opioid receptor regulation, while enhancing and prolonging analgesia, dramatically attenuates the respiratory suppression and acute constipation caused by morphine.
3D hydrogel environment rejuvenates aged pericytes for skeletal muscle tissue engineering

Skeletal muscle tissue engineering is a promising approach for the treatment of muscular disorders. However, the complex organization of muscle, combined with the difficulty in finding an appropriate source of regenerative cells and in providing an adequate blood supply to the engineered tissue, makes this a hard task to face. In the present work, we describe an innovative approach to rejuvenate adult skeletal muscle-derived pericytes (MP) based on the use of a PEG-based hydrogel scaffold. MP were isolated from young (piglet) and adult (boar) pigs to assess whether aging affects tissue regeneration efficiency. In vitro, MP from boars had similar morphology and colony forming capacity to piglet MP, but an impaired ability to form myotubes and capillary-like structures. However, the use of a PEG-based hydrogel to support adult MP significantly improved their myogenic differentiation and angiogenic potentials in vitro and in vivo. Thus, PEG-based hydrogel scaffolds may provide a progenitor cell “niche” that promotes skeletal muscle regeneration and blood vessel growth, and together with pericytes may be developed for use in regenerative applications.
Very High-Resolution Morphometry Using Mass-Preserving Deformations and HAMMER Elastic Registration

This article presents a very high-resolution voxel-based morphometric method, by using a mass-preserving deformation mechanism and a fully automated spatial normalization approach, referred to as HAMMER. By using a hierarchical attribute-based deformation strategy, HAMMER partly overcomes limitations of several existing spatial normalization methods, and it achieves a level of accuracy that makes possible morphometric measurements of spatial specificity close to the voxel dimensions. The proposed method is validated by a series of experiments, with both simulated and real brain images.
Cultural Diffusion and Trends in Facebook Photographs

Online social media is a social vehicle in which people share various moments of their lives with their friends, such as playing sports, cooking dinner or just taking a selfie for fun, via visual means, that is, photographs. Our study takes a closer look at the popular visual concepts illustrating various cultural lifestyles from aggregated, de-identified photographs. We perform analysis both at macroscopic and microscopic levels, to gain novel insights about global and local visual trends as well as the dynamics of interpersonal cultural exchange and diffusion among Facebook friends. We processed images by automatically classifying the visual content by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Through various statistical tests, we find that socially tied individuals more likely post images showing similar cultural lifestyles. To further identify the main cause of the observed social correlation, we use the Shuffle test and the Preference-based Matched Estimation (PME) test to distinguish the effects of influence and homophily. The results indicate that the visual content of each user's photographs are temporally, although not necessarily causally, correlated with the photographs of their friends, which may suggest the effect of influence. Our paper demonstrates that Facebook photographs exhibit diverse cultural lifestyles and preferences and that the social interaction mediated through the visual channel in social media can be an effective mechanism for cultural diffusion.
SUMMARY verbA and citral reduce the teratogenic effects of all-trans retinoic acid and retinol , respectively , in Xenopus embryogenesis

All-trans retinoic acid (RA) is a vitamin A metabolite that exhibits diverse effects on cellular differentiation and organismal development (De Luca, 1991). RA is a potent teratogen in vertebrates affecting pattern formation at many developmental stages. For example, exogenous RA can induce digit duplication along the anterior-posterior axis in chick limb buds (Tickle et al., 1982; Summerbell, 1983) and can respecify vertebral identity in the developing mouse embryo (Kessel and Gruss, 1991; Kessel, 1992). In Xenopus, exogenous RA alters primary axis formation through effects on the determination of both mesoderm and neuroectoderm (Durston et al., 1989; Sive et al., 1990; Ruiz i Altaba and Jessell, 1991a, 1991b; Sive and Cheng, 1991). Similar effects have also been observed in zebrafish (Holder and Hill, 1991). The ability of exogenous RA to alter pattern formation coupled with the detection of endogenous RA in chick (Thaller and Eichele, 1987) and Xenopus (Durston et al., 1989) embryos has led to the suggestion that RA may be an endogenous morphogen providing positional information during development (Green, 1990). Biological responses to RA are believed to be mediated by the nuclear retinoic acid receptors (RARs), members of the steroid/thyroid hormone receptor super-family (Leid et al., 1992). These receptors act as ligand-modulated transcription factors and thus affect expression of specific genes. More recently, a second set of retinoid modulated nuclear receptors has been defined, the retinoid ‘X’ receptors (RXRs; Mangelsdorf et al., 1990), which appear to mediate the effects of 9-cis retinoic acid (Heyman et al., 1992; Levin et al., 1992). These receptors may also alter the transcriptional responses to a number of compounds, including alltrans RA, through the formation of heterodimers with the nuclear receptors for these compounds (Leid et al., 1992). Two members each of the RAR family and the RXR family have been cloned from Xenopus and the temporal expression of transcripts from these genes are consistent with a role for retinoids in the early development of this organism (Ellinger-Ziegelbauer and Dreyer, 1991; Blumberg et al., 1992). Proof that RA plays a role in early development requires the elimination of RA or components of its signalling pathway from early embryos. However, the lack of detailed 785 Development 119, 785-798 (1993) Printed in Great Britain © The Company of Biologists Limited 1993
Aggregation of complement receptors on human neutrophils in the absence of ligand

C3bi receptors (CR3) on human polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) bind ligand-coated particles and promote their ingestion. The binding activity of CR3 is not constitutive but is transiently enabled by phorbol esters (Wright, S. D., and B. D. Meyer, 1986, J. Immunol. 136:1759-1764). Our observations indicate that the capacity of CR3 to bind ligand is tightly correlated with the degree of ligand-independent aggregation of the receptor in the plane of the membrane. Fixed PMN were labeled with anti-CR3 monoclonal antibodies and streptavidin colloidal gold before viewing in the electron microscope either en face or in thin section. On unstimulated PMN, gold particles marking CR3 were dispersed randomly. Stimulation of PMN for 25 min with phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) dramatically enhances binding of C3bi-coated particles, and the CR3 on such stimulated cells was observed in clusters containing more than six gold particles. CR3 was not aggregated over coated pits. After 50 min in PMA, the binding activity of CR3 falls, and the distribution of CR3 was again observed to be disperse. If a hydrophilic phorbol ester was washed away after a 20-min stimulation, binding activity remains elevated for at least 50 min, and CR3 remained aggregated. Thus, clustering of CR3 was temporally correlated with its ability to bind ligand and initiate phagocytosis. Unlike CR3, Fc receptors and HLA did not exhibit changes in their aggregation state in response to PMA. Treating PMN with formyl- methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine, which enhances expression of CR3 but not its function, did not lead to aggregation of CR3. These observations suggest that a clustered configuration is a precondition necessary for binding ligand and signaling phagocytosis.
Remarks on isomorphisms in typed lambda calculi with empty and sum types

Tarski asked whether the arithmetic identities taught in high school are complete for showing all arithmetic equations valid for the natural numbers. The answer to this question for the language of arithmetic expressions using a constant for the number one and the operations of product and exponentiation is affirmative, and the complete equational theory also characterises isomorphism in the typed lambda calculus, where the constant for one and the operations of product and exponentiation respectively correspond to the unit type and the product and arrow type constructors. This paper studies isomorphisms in typed lambda calculi with empty and sum types from this viewpoint. We close an open problem by establishing that the theory of type isomorphisms in the presence of product, arrow, and sum types (with or without the unit type) is not finitely axiomatisable. Further, we observe that for type theories with arrow, empty and sum types the correspondence between isomorphism and arithmetic equality generally breaks down, but that it still holds in some particular cases including that of type isomorphism with the empty type and equality with zero.
Terminological Enrichment for non-Interactive MT Evaluation

In a previous study (Dabbadie, Mustafa, Timimi, 2001) we set a methodo logy for non interactive machine translation evaluation on big corpora, assuming that the goal of the translation was a simple understanding of the original message. The source text, in French, provided by INRA (Institut National pour la Recherche Agronomique i.e. National Institute for Agronomic Research) deals with biotechnology and animal reproduction. It has been translated into English by REVERSO. The output of the system (i.e. the result of the assembling of several components), as opposed to its individual modules or specific components (i.e. analysis, generation, grammar, lexicon, core, etc.), has been evaluated. In the present study we will recall the methodology and results obtained in the case of simple translation by REVERSO with no terminologic al enrichment and compare them to the results obtained after terminological enrichment. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of specific terminology when integrated to an MT System and after having run the system with a basic bilingual dictionary.
Generative Adversarial Network-Based Postfilter for STFT Spectrograms

We propose a learning-based postﬁlter to reconstruct the high-ﬁdelity spectral texture in short-term Fourier transform (STFT) spectrograms. In speech-processing systems, such as speech synthesis, voice conversion, and speech enhancement, the STFT spectrograms have been widely used as key acoustic representations. In these tasks, we normally need to precisely generate or predict the representations from inputs; however, generated spectra typically lack the ﬁne structures close to the true data. To overcome these limitations and reconstruct spectra having ﬁner structures, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based postﬁlter that is implicitly optimized to match the true feature distribution in adversarial learning. The challenge with this postﬁlter is that a GAN cannot be easily trained for very high-dimensional data such as the STFT. Therefore, we introduce a divide-and-concatenate strategy. We ﬁrst divide the spectrograms into multiple frequency bands with overlap, train the GAN-based postﬁlter for the individual bands, and ﬁnally connect the bands with overlap. We applied our proposed postﬁlter to a DNN-based speech-synthesis task. The re-sults show that our proposed postﬁlter can be used to reduce the gap between synthesized and target spectra, even in the high-dimensional STFT domain.
Prelayout interconnect yield prediction

Functional yield is a term used to describe the percentage of dies on a wafer that are not affected by catastrophic defects. Within the interconnect these defects are usually caused by particle contamination and are divided into bridging defects, which join adjacent wires and cuts, which result in broken wires. Functional yield is therefore determined by the geometry of the routing channels, how these channels are filled with wire and the distribution of defect sizes. Since the wire spacing and width are usually fixed and the distribution of defects within a mature production facility is well known, the problem reduces to estimating individual wire lengths for cuts and to estimating the overlapping distance that two wires share in neighboring sections of the routing grid for bridges. Previous work in this area has analyzed the problem by assuming that all wiring tracks are occupied with wire, leading to overestimates for the probability of failure due to both cuts and bridges. This paper utilizes statistical models of the placement/routing process to provide a more realistic approach for cut and bridge yield estimation. A comparison of the predicted probability of failure within each wiring layer with postlayout data indicate an average error of 20% for cuts and 26% for bridges.
Infant mortality and family welfare: policy implications for Indonesia

Study objective: To examine the effect of family welfare index (FWI) and maternal education on the probability of infant death. Design: A population based multistage stratified clustered survey. Setting: Women of reproductive age in Indonesia between 1983–1997. Data sources: The 1997 Indonesian Demographic and Health Survey. Main results: Infant mortality was associated with FWI and maternal education. Relative to families of high FWI, the risk of infant death was almost twice among families of low FWI (aOR=1.7, 95%CI=0.9 to 3.3), and three times for families of medium FWI (aOR=3.3 ,95%CI=1.7 to 6.5). Also, the risk of infant death was threefold higher (aOR=3.4, 95% CI=1.6 to 7.1) among mothers who had fewer than seven years of formal education compared with mothers with more than seven years of education. Fertility related indicators such as young maternal age, absence from contraception, birth intervals, and prenatal care, seem to exert significant effect on the increased probability of infant death. Conclusions: The increased probability of infant mortality attributable to family income inequality and low maternal education seems to work through pathways of material deprivation and chronic psychological stress that affect a person’s health damaging behaviours. The policies that are likely to significantly reduce the family’s socioeconomic inequality in infant mortality are implicated.
Tangible and body-based interaction with auditory maps

Blind people face a significant challenge navigating through the world, especially in novel environments. Maps, the most common of navigational aids, are of little use to the blind, who could benefit greatly from the information they contain. Recent work in auditory maps has shown the potential for delivering spatial information through sound. Users control their position and orientation on a digitally enhanced map and listen for the location of important landmarks. Orientation control is important because sound localization cues can sometimes be ambiguous, especially when in front of and behind a listener. Previous devices have used a tangible interface, in which users manipulate a small motion tracked object, to allow users to control their position and orientation on a map. Motivated by research that has identified the importance of body-based cues, from the joints, muscles and vestibular system in spatial perception, we expanded on previous interfaces by constructing an auditory map prototype that allows users to control their orientation through natural head movements. A pilot study was conducted to compare the head-movement-based interface to a tangible interface.
Factor Structure of the Geriatric Depression Scale and Relationships with Cognition and Function in Alzheimer’s Disease

Background/Aims: No study to date has systematically explored whether the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) measures symptoms of apathy and dysphoria in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or related these constructs to cognitive and functional status. Methods: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to identify factors of the GDS in a sample of 569 patients with probable AD. Two-way ANOVAs were used to determine the relationship of apathy and dysphoria to neuropsychological and functional measures. Results: The EFA yielded four factors associated with apathy, dysphoria, social withdrawal and cognitive impairment. Apathy was associated with greater impairments in verbal memory, motor speed, and functional abilities. Conclusion: Apathy, but not dysphoria, was associated with some cognitive and functional variables. Results suggest that the GDS may be used as a screening measure for symptoms of apathy in AD.
Using Index Structures for Anytime Stream Mining

Stream data mining has gained a lot of attention over the last years due to an abundance of streaming data in professional as well as personal applications. Solutions have been proposed for many mining tasks such as clustering, classication, frequent item set mining and aggregation. Stream mining is especially challenging due to the large (usually endless) amount of data and the time constraints posed by the stream’s arrival rate. We recently presented an indexbased solution for anytime stream classication that handles both large amounts of data and arbitrary arrival times. In this paper we present our ongoing work, wherein we investigate bulk loading strategies to improve the classication accuracy w.r. t. anytime constraints. We show promising results and discuss future challenges related to index-based classication on data streams. Furthermore we discuss extensions of our technique to other data mining tasks.
Optimal aminoglycoside dosing regimen for penicillin-tobramycin synergism in experimental Streptococcus adjacens endocarditis

The combination of penicillin and aminoglycoside is the recommended therapy for endocarditis caused by nutritionally variant streptococci (NVS). However, the optimal aminoglycoside dosing regimen remains controversial. We compared the efficacies of four regimens of tobramycin alone or combined with procaine penicillin in the therapy of rabbits with endocarditis caused by Streptococcus adjacens, a new species of NVS. Animals were injected intramuscularly for 4 days with procaine penicillin (150,000 U/kg of body weight twice daily) or tobramycin at a low dose (3 mg/kg every 24 h) or a high dose (12 mg/kg every 24 h) either once or three times daily (t.i.d.) alone or in combination with procaine penicillin. Additional groups of animals were treated with the combination regimens for a shorter period of time (2 days) in order to demonstrate a possible difference in the rapidity of efficacy between the regimens. The MICs and MBCs were 0.015 and 1 micrograms/ml and 8 and 16 micrograms/ml for penicillin and tobramycin, respectively. The mean peak tobramycin levels in plasma were 2.4 +/- 1.3 (1 mg/kg t.i.d.), 5.4 +/- 3.7 (4 mg/kg t.i.d.), and 25 +/- 9.3 (12 mg/kg once daily). The mean penicillin levels in serum were always above the MIC. In vitro kill curves plotted at the time that peak concentrations were reached in plasma showed a concentration-dependent killing effect of tobramycin alone but not in combination with penicillin. In vivo, low-dose tobramycin was significantly less effective than the high dose. Results for the combinations of the different dosing regimens of tobramycin with procaine penicillin were not significantly different. Our results suggest that (i) against susceptible strains of streptococci, aminoglycoside alone exhibits a concentration-dependent killing effect both in vitro and in vivo; (ii) against NVS strains, combinations of penicillin and high- or low-dose tobramycin are equally effective; and (iii) aminoglycoside given once daily or at a low dose t.i. d. with penicillin could be a cost-effective alternative with reduced toxic risk for patients with NVS endocarditis when the bacteria are susceptible to the killing activities of both compounds.