Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The accuracy of an electronic Pulmonary Embolism Severity Index auto-populated from the electronic health record

Summary Background: The Pulmonary Embolism (PE) Severity Index identifies emergency department (ED) patients with acute PE that can be safely managed without hospitalization. However, the Index comprises 11 weighted variables, complexity that can impede its integration into contextual work-flow. Objective: We designed a computerized version of the PE Severity Index (e-Index) to automatically extract the required variables from discrete fields in the electronic health record (EHR). We tested the e-Index on the study population to determine its accuracy compared with a gold standard generated by physician abstraction of the EHR on manual chart review. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included adults with objectively-confirmed acute PE in four community EDs from 2010–2012. Outcomes included performance characteristics of the e-Index for individual values, the number of cases requiring physician editing, and the accuracy of the e-Index risk category (low vs. higher). Results: For the 593 eligible patients, there were 6,523 values automatically extracted. Fifty one of these needed physician editing, yielding an accuracy at the value-level of 99.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 99.0%-99.4%). Sensitivity was 96.9% (95% CI, 96.0%-97.9%) and specificity was 99.8% (95% CI, 99.7%-99.9%). The 51 corrected values were distributed among 47 cases: 43 cases required the correction of one variable and four cases required the correction of two. At the risk-category level, the e-Index had an accuracy of 96.8% (95% CI, 95.0%-98.0%), under-classifying 16 higher-risk cases (2.7%) and over-classifying 3 low-risk cases (0.5%). Conclusion: Our automated extraction of variables from the EHR for the e-Index demonstrates substantial accuracy, requiring a minimum of physician editing. This should increase user acceptability and implementation success of a computerized clinical decision support system built around the e-Index, and may serve as a model to automate other complex risk stratification instruments. Citation: Vinson DR, Morley JE, Huang J, Liu V, Anderson ML, Drenten CE, Radecki RP, Nishijima DK, Reed ME. The accuracy of an electronic pulmonary embolism severity index auto-populated from the electronic health record. Appl Clin Inf 2015; 6: 318–333 http://dx.doi. org/10.4338/ACI-2014-12-RA-0116
A Comparison of the Orthogonal and the Oblique Factor Structures of Correlation Matrixes of Individual Items and of Composites of Items (Subtests) Derived from a Standardized Affective Measure

For a 90-item standardized affective measure containing six factor scales (with 15 items per scale) that in its original form of 150 items (25 items per subscale) had undergone three item-analysis studies (with two representing cross-validation efforts) to achieve a relatively higher degree of homogeneity than that in the orginal scales, the major purpose of this investigation was to compare both an orthogonally and obliquely rotated factor structure of a correlation matrix of individual items with that of sets of composites of five items (three subtests per factor scale). The two groups of tenth and eleventh grade students employed in this study came primarily from middle-class families: (a) a suburban Anglo sample of 337 subjects (170 males and 167 females) and (b) a rural Anglo sample of 146 (74 males and 72 females) with fewer than two percent of the participants in either sample representing minorities. The orthogonally rotated factor solution was achieved from use of the varimax procedure, and the obliquely rotated factor solution was effected from employment of the promax method. The two major conclusions suggested by the data analyses were that (a) both an orthogonally rotated (varimax) and an obliquely rotated (promax) factor solution can be expected to yield meaningful psychological dimensions that can be interpreted as corresponding to the scales of the instrument irrespective of whether an item correlation matrix or subtest correlation matrix has been analyzed and (b) the orthogonally rotated and obliquely rotated factor solutions afford comparable structures that permit inferences regarding what are readily interpretable or identifiable latent traits underlying a test that has been designed to operationalize a given psychological domain. The outcomes of these exploratory factor analyses are being used in several confirmatory factor analyses with various data bases to test a number of alternative hypotheses regarding the factorial structure of the affective measure employed.
Microemulsion of babassu oil as a natural product to improve human immune system function

Background The aim of this study was to develop and characterize a babassu oil microemulsion system and determine the effect of this microemulsion on the functional activity of phagocytes. Methods The microemulsion was formulated using distilled water, babassu as the oil phase component, Sorbitan monooleate-Span 80® (SP), Polysorbate 80-Tween 80® (TW), and 1-butanol (BT). Pseudoternary diagrams were prepared, and microemulsion diagram regions were preselected. Rheological characterization and preliminary and accelerated stability tests were performed. The effect of the microemulsion on the interactions between leukocytes and bacteria was determined by superoxide release, phagocytosis, and microbicidal activity. Results The developed formulation SP/TW/BT (4.2/4.8/1.0) was classified as oil/water, showed a Newtonian profile, and had linear viscosity. When we assessed the interaction of the microemulsion or babassu oil with phagocytes, we observed an increase in superoxide, phagocytosis, and microbicidal activity. Conclusion The babassu oil microemulsion system is an option for future applications, including for vaccine delivery systems. Babassu oil is a natural product, so is an alternative for future immunotherapy strategies, in particular for infectious diseases.
Fimbrin, a new microfilament-associated protein present in microvilli and other cell surface structures

A 68,000 mol wt polypeptide has been identified as one of the few major proteins in the microfilament bundles of the microvilli present on intestinal epithelial cells. Antibodies against the purified protein have been used in indirect immunofluorescence microscopy on several cultured cells. The protein have been used in indirect immunofluorescence microscopy on several cultured cells. The protein is found particularly prominent in membrane ruffles, microspikes, and microvilli.
Health Risks of Smoking Compared to Swedish Snus

Interest in tobacco harm reduction strategies has raised the question of the comparative health risks of cigarette smoking and use of other tobacco products. Although there appears to be a general belief that a unique smokeless tobacco product called Swedish snus has fewer health risks than cigarettes, no one has systematically reviewed the literature and compared the data on health risks in a quantitative manner. We reviewed the literature to identify all analytic epidemiologic studies that provided quantitative risk estimates associated with Swedish snus and cigarette smoking in a single population, using a common reference group. Seven studies were identified that addressed eight health outcomes. Although few in number, these seven studies do provide quantitative evidence that, for certain health outcomes, the health risks associated with snus are lower than those associated with smoking. Specifically, this is true for lung cancer (based on one study), for oral cancer (based on one study), for gastric cancer (based on one study), for cardiovascular disease (based on three of four studies), and for all-cause mortality (based on one study). This review has likely omitted many of the adverse effects of cigarettes, but probably few of the potential health effects of snus. Continued investigation of the reduced health risks of Swedish snus compared to cigarette smoking is warranted.
Influence of normal stress difference on polymer drop deformation

Polypropylene drops of varying viscosity and elasticity were sheared in a polystyrene matrix. Two transparent, counter-rotating parallel disks provided simple shear flow. By adjusting the speed of one disk the drop center was fixed in the laboratory frame and deformation followed via high magnification video camera. It was found that with high matrix elasticity drops of the minor phase stretched perpendicular (x 3 ) to the flow direction (x 1 ). This is the first report of widening of drops in shear flow. An analytical relation was established between the second normal stress differences of the phases and degree of widening. The formation of sheets and the phenomena of widening results in a larger than affine area generation.
Geometric LDA: A Generative Model for Particular Object Discovery

Automatically organizing collections of images presents serious challenges to the current state-of-the art methods in image data mining. Often, what is required is that images taken in the same place, of the same thing, or of the same person be conceptually grouped together. To achieve this, we introduce the Geometric Latent Dirichlet Allocation (gLDA) model for unsupervised particular object discovery in unordered image collections. This explicitly represents documents as mixtures of particular objects or facades, and builds rich latent topic models which incorporate the identity and locations of visual words specific to the topic in a geometrically consistent way. Applying standard inference techniques to this model enables images likely to contain the same object to be probabilistically grouped and ranked. We demonstrate the model on a publicly available dataset of Oxford images, and show examples of spatially consistent groupings.
Temporal Relations Between Unexplained Fatigue and Depression: Longitudinal Data From an International Study in Primary Care

Objective: Unexplained fatigue syndromes, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and neurasthenia, are strongly associated with depression, but the temporal nature of this association is not clear. Methods: The authors examined this issue by using data from the World Health Organization collaborative study of psychological problems in general health care. Three thousand two hundred one subjects from 15 primary care centers in 14 countries were followed up for 12 months. The Composite International Diagnostic Interview was the main instrument used. Odds ratios and their 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated using logistic regression models adjusted for sociodemographic variables, physical morbidity and intercenter variability. Results: Cases of depression were found to have an increased risk of developing a new episode of unexplained fatigue at follow-up with an adjusted odds ratio of 4.15 (95% CI = 2.64–6.54). Similarly, cases of unexplained fatigue were found to have an increased risk of developing a new episode of depression at follow-up with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.76 (95% CI = 1.32–5.78). Further adjustment for subthreshold symptoms at baseline weakened the reported associations, especially between fatigue and development of a new episode of depression, but these remained significant. Conclusions: The findings support the view that unexplained fatigue and depression might act as independent risk factors for each other.
Biodiversity promotes primary productivity and growing season lengthening at the landscape scale

Significance Research of the past decades has shown that biodiversity promotes ecosystem functions including primary productivity. However, most studies focused on experimental communities at small spatial scales, and little is known about how these findings scale to nonexperimental, real-world ecosystems at large spatial scales, despite these systems providing essential ecosystem services to humans. Here, we show that primary productivity, its temporal stability, and the decadal trend of a prolonged growing season strongly increase with biodiversity across heterogeneous landscapes, which is consistent over vast environmental, climatic, and altitudinal gradients. Our findings thus underline the critical role biodiversity plays for ecosystem functioning and responses to environmental change in heterogeneous, real-world ecosystems at the landscape scale. Experiments have shown positive biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships in small plots with model communities established from species pools typically comprising few dozen species. Whether patterns found can be extrapolated to complex, nonexperimental, real-world landscapes that provide ecosystem services to humans remains unclear. Here, we combine species inventories from a large-scale network of 447 1-km2 plots with remotely sensed indices of primary productivity (years 2000–2015). We show that landscape-scale productivity and its temporal stability increase with the diversity of plants and other taxa. Effects of biodiversity indicators on productivity were comparable in size to effects of other important drivers related to climate, topography, and land cover. These effects occurred in plots that integrated different ecosystem types (i.e., metaecosystems) and were consistent over vast environmental and altitudinal gradients. The BEF relations we report are as strong or even exceed the ones found in small-scale experiments, despite different community assembly processes and a species pool comprising nearly 2,000 vascular plant species. Growing season length increased progressively over the observation period, and this shift was accelerated in more diverse plots, suggesting that a large species pool is important for adaption to climate change. Our study further implies that abiotic global-change drivers may mediate ecosystem functioning through biodiversity changes.
Cross-lingual projection for class-based language models

This paper presents a cross-lingual projection technique for training class-based language models. We borrow from previous success in projecting POS tags and NER mentions to that of a trained class-based language model. We use a CRF to train a model to predict when a sequence of words is a member of a given class and use this to label our language model training data. We show that we can successfully project the contextual cues for these classes across pairs of languages and retain a high quality class model in languages with no supervised class data. We present empirical results that show the quality of the projected models as well as their effect on the down-stream speech recognition objective. We are able to achieve over 70% of the WER reduction when using the projected class models as compared to models trained on human annotations.
Pain catastrophizing as a risk factor for chronic pain after total knee arthroplasty: a systematic review

Background Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is a common and costly surgical procedure. Despite high success rates, many TKA patients develop chronic pain in the months and years following surgery, constituting a public health burden. Pain catastrophizing is a construct that reflects anxious preoccupation with pain, inability to inhibit pain-related fears, amplification of the significance of pain vis-à-vis health implications, and a sense of helplessness regarding pain. Recent research suggests that it may be an important risk factor for untoward TKA outcomes. To clarify this impact, we systematically reviewed the literature to date on pain catastrophizing as a prospective predictor of chronic pain following TKA. Methods We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsycINFO databases to identify articles related to pain catastrophizing, TKA, risk models, and chronic pain. We reviewed titles and abstracts to identify original research articles that met our specified inclusion criteria. Included articles were then rated for methodological quality. including methodological quality. Due to heterogeneity in follow-up, analyses, and outcomes reported across studies, a quantitative meta-analysis could not be performed. Results We identified six prospective longitudinal studies with small-to-mid-sized samples that met the inclusion criteria. Despite considerable variability in reported pain outcomes, pain catastrophizing was identified as a significant predictor of chronic pain persisting ≥3 months following TKA in five of the studies assessed. Limitations of studies included lack of large-scale data, absence of standardized pain measurements, inadequate multivariate adjustment, such as failure to control for analgesic use and other relevant covariates, and failure to report non-significant parameter estimates. Conclusion This study provides moderate-level evidence for pain catastrophizing as an independent predictor of chronic pain post-TKA. Directions for future research include larger, well-controlled studies with standard pain outcomes, identification of clinically-relevant catastrophizing cut-offs that predict pain outcomes, investigation of other psychosocial risk factors, and assessment of interventions aimed to reduce pain catastrophizing on chronic pain outcomes following TKA surgery.
Clinically undetected motor neuron disease in pathologically proven frontotemporal lobar degeneration with motor neuron disease.

BACKGROUND Frontotemporal lobar degeneration with motor neuron disease (FTLD-MND) is a pathological entity characterized by motor neuron degeneration and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. The ability to detect the clinical signs of dementia and motor neuron disease in pathologically confirmed FTLD-MND has not been assessed. OBJECTIVES To determine if all cases of pathologically confirmed FTLD-MND have clinical evidence of frontotemporal dementia and motor neuron disease, and to determine the possible reasons for misdiagnosis. METHOD Review of historical records and semiquantitative analysis of the motor and extramotor pathological findings of all cases of pathologically confirmed FTLD-MND. RESULTS From a total of 17 cases of pathologically confirmed FTLD-MND, all had clinical evidence of frontotemporal dementia, while only 10 (59%) had clinical evidence of motor neuron disease. Semiquantitative analysis of motor and extramotor pathological findings revealed a spectrum of pathological changes underlying FTLD-MND. Hippocampal sclerosis, predominantly of the subiculum, was a significantly more frequent occurrence in the cases without clinical evidence of motor neuron disease (P<.01). In addition, neuronal loss, gliosis, and corticospinal tract degeneration were less severe in the other 3 cases without clinical evidence of motor neuron disease. CONCLUSIONS Clinical diagnostic sensitivity for the elements of FTLD-MND is modest and may be affected by the fact that FTLD-MND represents a spectrum of pathological findings, rather than a single homogeneous entity. Detection of signs of clinical motor neuron disease is also difficult when motor neuron degeneration is mild and in patients with hippocampal sclerosis.
Impact of diabetes on cognitive function and brain structure

Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes have been associated with reduced performance on multiple domains of cognitive function and with structural abnormalities in the brain. With an aging population and a growing epidemic of diabetes, central nervous system–related complications of diabetes are expected to rise and could have challenging future public health implications. In this review, we will discuss the brain structural and functional changes that have been associated with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Diabetes duration and glycemic control may play important roles in the development of cognitive impairment in diabetes, but the exact underlying pathophysiological mechanisms causing these changes in cognition and structure are not well understood. Future research is needed to better understand the natural history and the underlying mechanisms, as well as to identify risk factors that predict who is at greatest risk of developing cognitive impairment. This information will lead to the development of new strategies to minimize the impact of diabetes on cognitive function.
Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF) Protects Resistant C57BL/6 Mice against Herpes Simplex Virus-Induced Encephalitis Independently of Signaling via TNF Receptor 1 or 2

ABSTRACT Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is a multifunctional cytokine that has a role in induction and regulation of host innate and adaptive immune responses. The importance of TNF antiviral mechanisms is reflected by the diverse strategies adopted by different viruses, particularly members of the herpesvirus family, to block TNF responses. TNF binds and signals through two receptors, Tnfrsf1a (TNF receptor 1 [TNFR1], or p55) and Tnfrsf1b (TNFR2, or p75). We report here that herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infection of TNF−/− mice on the resistant C57BL/6 genetic background results in significantly increased susceptibility (P < 0.0001, log rank test) to fatal HSV encephalitis (HSE) and prolonged persistence of elevated levels of virus in neural tissues. In contrast, although virus titers in neural tissues of p55−/−N13 mice were elevated to levels comparable to what was found for the TNF−/− mice, the p55−/−N13 mice were as resistant as control C57BL/6 mice (P > 0.05). The incidence of fatal HSE was significantly increased by in vivo neutralization of TNF using soluble TNFR1 (sTNFR1) or depletion of macrophages in C57BL/6 mice (P = 0.0038 and P = 0.0071, respectively). Strikingly, in vivo neutralization of TNF in HSV-1-infected p55−/− p75−/− mice by use of three independent approaches (treatment with soluble p55 receptor, anti-TNF monoclonal antibody, or in vivo small interfering RNA against TNF) resulted in significantly increased mortality rates (P = 0.005), comparable in magnitude to those for C57BL/6 mice treated with sTNFR1 (P = 0.0018). Overall, these results indicate that while TNF is required for resistance to fatal HSE, both p55 and p75 receptors are dispensable. Precisely how TNF mediates protection against HSV-1 mortality in p55−/− p75−/− mice remains to be determined.
Evaluation of human sense of security for coexisting robots using virtual reality. 1st report: evaluation of pick and place motion of humanoid robots

When robots coexisting with humans are designed, it is important to evaluate the influence of the shape and size of the robots and their motions on human sense of security. For this purpose, an evaluation system of human sense of security for coexisting robots using virtual reality is discussed. Virtual robots are visually presented to a human subject through a head mounted display; the subject and the robots coexist in the virtual world. Some kinds of physiological indices of the subject are measured, he answers the questionnaire about his impression of the robots, and his sense of security is evaluated. Because of using virtual reality technique, the shape and size of the robots and their motions can be easily changed and tested. In the present report, pick and place motion of humanoid robots is evaluated. As a result of analyzing the questionnaire, it is found that turning the body coordinating with the arm gives good impression on humans.
The Effect of Diversity on Turnover: A Large Case Study

Using longitudinal data collected in 1996–98 from over 800 similar workplaces owned and operated by one corporation, the authors examine how workplace diversity and employee isolation along the dimensions of gender, race, and age affected employee turnover. This design controls for much of the variation in job characteristics and labor markets that have confounded other studies of diversity. The authors use the non-linearity of diversity to distinguish its effect from the main effects of demographic groups and from isolation (being in a numerical minority). The study examines how diversity and isolation by race (white, black, Hispanic, Asian), sex, and age affected different groups. The authors find no consistent evidence that diversity itself increased turnover. In contrast, isolation from coworkers and from customers was often associated with higher turnover.