Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Total protein measurement in canine cerebrospinal fluid: agreement between a turbidimetric assay and 2 dye-binding methods and determination of reference intervals using an indirect a posteriori method.

BACKGROUND In veterinary clinical laboratories, qualitative tests for total protein measurement in canine cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) have been replaced by quantitative methods, which can be divided into dye-binding assays and turbidimetric methods. There is a lack of validation data and reference intervals (RIs) for these assays. OBJECTIVES The aim of the present study was to assess agreement between the turbidimetric benzethonium chloride method and 2 dye-binding methods (Pyrogallol Red-Molybdate method [PRM], Coomassie Brilliant Blue [CBB] technique) for measurement of total protein concentration in canine CSF. Furthermore, RIs were determined for all 3 methods using an indirect a posteriori method. METHODS For assay comparison, a total of 118 canine CSF specimens were analyzed. For RIs calculation, clinical records of 401 canine patients with normal CSF analysis were studied and classified according to their final diagnosis in pathologic and nonpathologic values. RESULTS The turbidimetric assay showed excellent agreement with the PRM assay (mean bias 0.003 g/L [-0.26-0.27]). The CBB method generally showed higher total protein values than the turbidimetric assay and the PRM assay (mean bias -0.14 g/L for turbidimetric and PRM assay). From 90 of 401 canine patients, nonparametric reference intervals (2.5%, 97.5% quantile) were calculated (turbidimetric assay and PRM method: 0.08-0.35 g/L (90% CI: 0.07-0.08/0.33-0.39); CBB method: 0.17-0.55 g/L (90% CI: 0.16-0.18/0.52-0.61). Total protein concentration in canine CSF specimens remained stable for up to 6 months of storage at -80°C. CONCLUSIONS Due to variations among methods, RIs for total protein concentration in canine CSF have to be calculated for each method. The a posteriori method of RIs calculation described here should encourage other veterinary laboratories to establish RIs that are laboratory-specific.
Management of Brain Arteriovenous Malformations: A Scientific Statement for Healthcare Professionals From the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association

Purpose— The aim of this statement is to review the current data and to make suggestions for the diagnosis and management of both ruptured and unruptured brain arteriovenous malformations. Methods— The writing group met in person and by teleconference to establish search terms and to discuss narrative text and suggestions. Authors performed their own literature searches of PubMed, Medline, or Embase, specific to their allocated section, through the end of January 2015. Prerelease review of the draft statement was performed by expert peer reviewers and by the members of the Stroke Council Scientific Oversight Committee and Stroke Council Leadership Committee. Results— The focus of the scientific statement was subdivided into epidemiology; diagnosis; natural history; treatment, including the roles of surgery, stereotactic radiosurgery, and embolization; and management of ruptured and unruptured brain arteriovenous malformations. Areas requiring more evidence were identified. Conclusions— Brain arteriovenous malformations are a relatively uncommon but important cause of hemorrhagic stroke, especially in young adults. This statement describes the current knowledge of the natural history and treatment of patients with ruptured and unruptured brain arteriovenous malformations, suggestions for management, and implications for future research.
Reappraising social emotions: the role of inferior frontal gyrus, temporo-parietal junction and insula in interpersonal emotion regulation

Previous studies have reported the effect of emotion regulation (ER) strategies on both individual and social decision-making, however, the effect of regulation on socially driven emotions independent of decisions is still unclear. In the present study, we investigated the neural effects of using reappraisal to both up- and down-regulate socially driven emotions. Participants played the Dictator Game (DG) in the role of recipient while undergoing fMRI, and concurrently applied the strategies of either up-regulation (reappraising the proposer's intentions as more negative), down-regulation (reappraising the proposer's intentions as less negative), as well as a baseline “look” condition. Results showed that regions responding to the implementation of reappraisal (effect of strategy, that is, “regulating regions”) were the inferior and middle frontal gyrus, temporo parietal junction and insula bilaterally. Importantly, the middle frontal gyrus activation correlated with the frequency of regulatory strategies in daily life, with the insula activation correlating with the perceived ability to reappraise the emotions elicited by the social situation. Regions regulated by reappraisal (effect of regulation, that is, “regulated regions”) were the striatum, the posterior cingulate and the insula, showing increased activation for the up-regulation and reduced activation for down-regulation, both compared to the baseline condition. When analyzing the separate effects of partners' behavior, selfish behavior produced an activation of the insula, not observed when subjects were treated altruistically. Here we show for the first time that interpersonal ER strategies can strongly affect neural responses when experiencing socially driven emotions. Clinical implications of these findings are also discussed to understand how the way we interpret others' intentions may affect the way we emotionally react.
Inventory budget optimization: Meeting system-wide service levels in practice

The work described in the literature on inventory and supply chain management has advanced greatly over the last few decades and now covers many aspects and challenges of applied supply chain management. In this paper we describe an approach that combines many of these academic aspects in a practical way to manage the spare parts logistics at a German automobile manufacturer. The basic problem is a single-echelon inventor), problem with a system-wide service-level requirement and the possibility of issuing emergency orders. There exist two related optimization problems: One is to maximize the system-wide service level under the constraint of a given budget; the other is to minimize the budget for a given system-wide service level. The most important requirements and constraints considered are a detailed cost structure, different packaging sizes, capacity constraints, several storage zones, the decision whether or not to stock a product, stochastic lead times, highly sporadic demands, and the stability of the optimization result over time. Our approach has been implemented successfully in an automotive spare parts planning environment. The complete solution package integrates into the mySAP ERP®, the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning system, and APO 4.0, the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization system. A detailed description of the model is given and results are presented.
Where the Slopes Are

Fix a prime number p and choose, once and for all, an embedding of the algebraic closure of Q into Qp. Let k and N be integers, and suppose N is not divisible by p. If f is a modular form of weight k, level N, and trivial character which is an eigenform for the p-th Hecke operator Tp, we define the slope of f to be the p-adic valuation of the eigenvalue of Tp. This paper reports on computations that suggest that there is quite a lot of structure to the set of slopes for eigenforms of varying weight k. In particular, we find that the slopes are often smaller than expected, that they are almost always integers, that there is evidence of a connection between fractional slopes and slopes which are "bigger than usual", and that there are some hints of a connection to the theory of theta-cycles.
Dynamics of Opinion Forming in Structurally Balanced Social Networks

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how the social relationships between individuals influence their opinions in the case of structurally balanced social networks. If we represent a social network as a signed graph in which individuals are the nodes and the signs of the edges represent friendly or hostile relationships, then the property of structural balance corresponds to the social community being splittable into two antagonistic factions, each containing only friends. A classical example of this situation is a two-party political system. The paper studies the process of opinion forming on such a social community, starting from the observation that the property of structural balance is formally analogous to the monotonicity property of dynamical systems. The paper shows that under the assumption that individuals are positively influenced by their friends and negatively influenced by their enemies, monotone dynamical systems, due to their order-preserving solutions, are natural candidates to describe the highly predictable process of opinion forming on structurally balanced networks.
Differential Effects of Temperature Extremes on Hospital Admission Rates for Respiratory Disease between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory

The health gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians may be exacerbated by climate change if temperature extremes have disproportionate adverse effects on Indigenous people. To explore this issue, we analysed the effect of temperature extremes on hospital admissions for respiratory diseases, stratified by age, Indigenous status and sex, for people living in two different climates zones in the Northern Territory during the period 1993–2011. We examined admissions for both acute and chronic respiratory diagnoses, controlling for day of the week and seasonality variables. Our analysis showed that: (1) overall, Indigenous hospital admission rates far exceeded non-Indigenous admission rates for acute and chronic diagnoses, and Top End climate zone admission rates exceeded Central Australia climate zone admission rates; (2) extreme cold and hot temperatures were associated with inconsistent changes in admission rates for acute respiratory disease in Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and older adults; and (3) no response to cold or hot temperature extremes was found for chronic respiratory diagnoses. These findings support our two hypotheses, that extreme hot and cold temperatures have a different effect on hospitalisations for respiratory disease between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and that these health risks vary between the different climate zones. We did not, however, find that there were differing responses to temperature extremes in the two populations, suggesting that any increased vulnerability to climate change in the Indigenous population of the Northern Territory arises from an increased underlying risk to respiratory disease and an already greater existing health burden.
Design of LDPC Codes Based on Multipath EMD Strategies for Progressive Edge Growth

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are capable of achieving excellent performance and provide a useful alternative for the high-performance applications. However, at medium to high signal-to-noise ratios, an observable error floor arises from the loss of independence of messages passed under iterative graph-based decoding. In this paper, the error floor performance of the short block length codes is improved by the use of a novel candidate selection metric in code graph construction. The proposed multipath extrinsic message degree (EMD) approach avoids harmful structures in the graph by evaluating certain properties of the cycles introduced in each edge placement. We present multipath EMD-based designs for several structured LDPC codes, including quasi-cyclic and the irregular repeat accumulate codes. In addition, an extended class of the diversity-achieving codes on the challenging block fading channel is proposed and considered with the multipath EMD design. This combined approach is demonstrated to provide the gains in decoder convergence and error rate performance. A simulation study evaluates the performance of the proposed and existing state-of-the-art methods.
Keratinizing-Type Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Oropharynx: p16 Overexpression Is Associated With Positive High-Risk HPV Status and Improved Survival

It is well established that nonkeratinizing squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the oropharynx is causally related to transcriptionally active human papillomavirus (HPV) and has better survival as compared with carcinomas with a keratinizing phenotype (KSCC). Although the great majority of KSCCs are unrelated to HPV, transcriptionally active HPV is detected in a minority of oropharyngeal cases. To date, it has not been established whether the HPV status in KSCC also confers a survival advantage as it does in HPV-related nonkeratinizing SCC. This study compares clinical outcomes between patients with HPV-positive versus HPV-negative oropharyngeal KSCC. Among a total of 54 cases, 7 (13%) were diffusely and strongly positive for p16. HPV E6/E7 RNA was positive in 5 of the 6 (83%) p16-positive cases that were tested and in only 1 of the 47 (2%) p16-negative cases. Only 1 of the 7 (14%) p16-positive patients developed disease recurrence and died in the follow-up period. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed significantly better overall and disease-specific survival in the p16-positive than in the p16-negative patients (P=0.01 and 0.046, respectively). These data, although with relatively small patient numbers, suggest that HPV-related SCC in the oropharynx is associated with highly favorable outcomes, regardless of the keratinizing or nonkeratinizing phenotype.
Opioid agonist pharmacotherapy in New South Wales from 1985 to 2006: patient characteristics and patterns and predictors of treatment retention.

AIMS The aims of this study were to: examine the number and characteristics of patients entering and re-entering opioid replacement treatment between 1985 and 2006, to examine select demographic and treatment correlates of leaving treatment between 1985 and 2000, and to compare retention rates in methadone and buprenorphine maintenance treatment from 2001 to 2006. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study using register data from the Pharmaceutical Drugs of Addiction System. SETTING Opioid substitution treatment in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. PARTICIPANTS A total of n = 42 690 individuals prescribed opioid replacement treatment between 1985 and 2006 in NSW. MEASUREMENTS Client characteristics over time, retention in days in first treatment episode, number of episodes of treatment and proportion switching medication. FINDINGS Overall, younger individuals were significantly more likely to leave their first treatment episode than older individuals. In 2001-06, after controlling for age, sex and first administration point, the hazard of leaving treatment was 1.9 times for those on buprenorphine relative to those on methadone. Retention in treatment varied somewhat across historical time, with those entering during 1995-2000 more likely to leave at an earlier stage than those who entered before that time. CONCLUSIONS Retention in treatment appears to fluctuate in inverse proportion to the availability of heroin. Individuals in contemporary treatment are older users with a lengthy treatment history. This study has provided population-level evidence to suggest that retention in methadone and buprenorphine differ in routine clinical practice. Future work might investigate ways in which patient adherence and retention may be improved.
Characterization of a Dchs1 mutant mouse reveals requirements for Dchs1-Fat4 signaling during mammalian development

The Drosophila Dachsous and Fat proteins function as ligand and receptor, respectively, for an intercellular signaling pathway that regulates Hippo signaling and planar cell polarity. Although gene-targeted mutations in two mammalian Fat genes have been described, whether mammals have a Fat signaling pathway equivalent to that in Drosophila, and what its biological functions might be, have remained unclear. Here, we describe a gene-targeted mutation in a murine Dachsous homolog, Dchs1. Analysis of the phenotypes of Dchs1 mutant mice and comparisons with Fat4 mutant mice identify requirements for these genes in multiple organs, including the ear, kidney, skeleton, intestine, heart and lung. Dchs1 and Fat4 single mutants and Dchs1 Fat4 double mutants have similar phenotypes throughout the body. In some cases, these phenotypes suggest that Dchs1-Fat4 signaling influences planar cell polarity. In addition to the appearance of cysts in newborn kidneys, we also identify and characterize a requirement for Dchs1 and Fat4 in growth, branching and cell survival during early kidney development. Dchs1 and Fat4 are predominantly expressed in mesenchymal cells in multiple organs, and mutation of either gene increases protein staining for the other. Our analysis implies that Dchs1 and Fat4 function as a ligand-receptor pair during murine development, and identifies novel requirements for Dchs1-Fat4 signaling in multiple organs.
An efficient and novel three-factor user authentication scheme for large-scale heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a new three-factor user authentication mechanism in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, which is a biometric-based scheme that makes use of smart card along with the user's password. The proposed protocol provides strong authentication as compared to traditional related password-based schemes and achieves good properties such as it works without synchronised clock, it freely changes password, and it provides low computation, communication and sensor's energy costs, and mutual authentication. Our scheme establishes a symmetric secret session key shared between a legal user and a sensor node so that the secret session key can be used later for secure future communications between them. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides unconditional security against node capture attack and it is also resilient against different attacks. Furthermore, the simulation results of our scheme using the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications AVISPA tool ensure that our scheme is secure.
Detecting and Summarizing Action Items in Multi-Party Dialogue

This paper addresses the problem of identifying action items discussed in open-domain conversational speech, and does so in two stages: firstly, detecting the subdialogues in which action items are proposed, discussed and committed to; and secondly, extracting the phrases that accurately capture or summarize the tasks they involve. While the detection problem is hard, we show that we can improve accuracy by taking account of dialogue structure. We then describe a semantic parser that identifies potential summarizing phrases, and show that for some task properties these can be more informative than plain utterance transcriptions.
Study on factors influencing durations of syllables in Mandarin

This paper studies factors that have influences on durations of syllables in Mandarin. Six factors are investigated by comparing means of duration in different categories in the preparatory study. The vector space is reduced from 299250 to 1000 by removing factors that do not cause significant changes in means and merging levels in each factor that have similar means. In order to remove influences from various initials and finals, durations of syllables are divided by the mean duration of the corresponding base syllables. The sum of squared residuals analysis is performed on the normalized duration. The results reveal that boundary index has the largest influence on syllable durations. Tone identity comes next. Though, position in word is not a very important single factor, it influences duration together with boundary index.
Eradication Therapy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Non-Cystic Fibrosis Bronchiectasis

Background: No prospective study has assessed eradication treatment of early Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonisation in bronchiectasis not due to cystic fibrosis (CF). Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy of 3 months of nebulised tobramycin after a short course of intravenous antibiotics in the eradication of P. aeruginosa and its clinical consequences in non- CF bronchiectasis following initial P. aeruginosa infection. Methods: A 15-month, single-masked, randomised study including 35 patients was conducted in a tertiary university hospital. Following the isolation of P. aeruginosa and a 14-day intravenous treatment with ceftazidime and tobramycin, patients received 300 mg nebulised tobramycin twice daily or placebo during 3 months, and were followed up for 12 months thereafter. Results: The median time to recurrence of P. aeruginosa infection was higher in the tobramycin than in the placebo group (p = 0.048, log-rank test). At the end of the study 54.5% of the patients were free of P. aeruginosa in the tobramycin group and 29.4% in the placebo group. The numbers of exacerbations (p = 0.044), hospital admissions (p = 0.037) and days of hospitalisation (p = 0.034) were lower in the tobramycin than in the placebo group. A global, non-significant trend to improvement in the tobramycin group was observed in most of the other studied parameters on comparing the two groups. Bronchospasm in the tobramycin group was remarkable. Conclusions: Our study shows that 3 months of nebulised tobramycin following a short course of intravenous antibiotics may prevent bronchial infection with P. aeruginosa and has a favourable clinical impact on non-CF bronchiectasis.
Trabecular bone structure in the primate wrist

Trabecular (or cancellous) bone has been shown to respond to mechanical loading throughout ontogeny and thus can provide unique insight into skeletal function and locomotion in comparative studies of living and fossil mammalian morphology. Trabecular bone of the hand may be particularly functionally informative because the hand has more direct contact with the substrate compared with the remainder of the forelimb during locomotion in quadrupedal mammals. This study investigates the trabecular structure within the wrist across a sample of haplorhine primates that vary in locomotor behaviour (and thus hand use) and body size. High‐resolution microtomographic scans were collected of the lunate, scaphoid, and capitate in 41 individuals and eight genera (Homo, Gorilla, Pan, Papio, Pongo, Symphalangus, Hylobates, and Ateles). We predicted that particular trabecular parameters would 1) vary across suspensory, quadrupedal, and bipedal primates based on differences in hand use and load, and 2) scale with carpal size following similar allometric patterns found previously in other skeletal elements across a larger sample of mammals and primates. Analyses of variance (trabecular parameters analysed separately) and principal component analyses (trabecular parameters analysed together) revealed no clear functional signal in the trabecular structure of any of the three wrist bones. Instead, there was a large degree of variation within suspensory and quadrupedal locomotor groups, as well as high intrageneric variation within some taxa, particularly Pongo and Gorilla. However, as predicted, Homo sapiens, which rarely use their hands for locomotion and weight support, were unique in showing lower relative bone volume (BV/TV) compared with all other taxa. Furthermore, parameters used to quantify trabecular structure within the wrist scale with size generally following similar allometric patterns found in trabeculae of other mammalian skeletal elements. We discuss the challenges associated with quantifying and interpreting trabecular bone within the wrist. J. Morphol. 275:572–585, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.