Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gamma knife surgery for glomus jugulare tumors: an intermediate report on efficacy and safety.

OBJECT Glomus jugulare tumors are rare tumors that commonly involve the middle ear, temporal bone, and lower cranial nerves. Resection, embolization, and radiation therapy have been the mainstays of treatment. Despite these therapies, tumor control can be difficult to achieve particularly without undo risk of patient morbidity or mortality. The authors examine the safety and efficacy of gamma knife surgery (GKS) for glomus jugulare tumors. METHODS A retrospective review was undertaken of the results obtained in eight patients who underwent GKS for recurrent, residual, or unresectable glomus jugulare tumors. The median radiosurgical dose to the tumor margin was 15 Gy (range 12-18 Gy). The median clinical follow-up period was 28 months, and the median period for radiological follow up was 32 months. All eight patients demonstrated neurological stability or improvement. No cranial nerve palsies arose or deteriorated after GKS. In the seven patients in whom radiographic follow up was obtained, the tumor size decreased in four and remained stable in three. CONCLUSIONS Gamma knife surgery would seem to afford effective local tumor control and preserves neurological function in patients with glomus jugulare tumors. If long-term results with GKS are equally efficacious, the role of stereotactic radiosurgery will expand.
Stress-dependent Moisture Diffusion in Composite Materials

Experiments have indicated that the diffusion properties of a penetrant organic matrix composite system may change with time due to evolution of the internal mechanical strain states experienced by the constituting matrix of the composite plies. A multi-scale approach coupling the internal mechanical states, predicted by continuum medium mechanics, and their localization at the ply-constituent scale to the traditional Fick's law governing the moisture diffusion process was used in order to achieve the modeling of the response of composite laminates submitted to environmental hygroscopic loads, from the transient part of the diffusion process to its permanent stage. Various numerical practical cases were considered: the effects of the internal swelling strains on the time- and space-dependent diffusion coefficient, maximum moisture absorption capacity, moisture content, and states of internal stresses are extensively studied and discussed.
The Triple-Flap Nipple-Reduction Technique

Background:Pure nipple hypertrophy (macrothelia) is a known but rare condition. Nevertheless, minor disproportions between nipple diameter or height and the areola are quite common. During breast surgery, the surgeon often faces the patient’s wish to perform nipple reduction. However the methods described are difficult or have drawbacks. This article proposes a simple technique for both height and diameter, or height only, nipple reduction. Method:A technique consisting of the creation of 3 symmetrical triangular flaps in a “Y” fashion and excision of the core of the nipple was performed on 15 consecutive patients between 2001 and 2004. The esthetic results, scars, sensibility, erectility, and complications were evaluated. Results:All patients presented good to excellent esthetic results, with inconspicuous scars. No major complications occurred in this series. Erectility function of the nipple was preserved in all 15 patients, which is a significant difference when compared with previously published techniques. Alterations in sensibility were temporary and were comparable with summarized alterations in representative published clinical series of both breast reduction and augmentation. Conclusion:The triple-flap nipple-reduction technique has the advantage of feasibility, applicable in both height and diameter nipple hypertrophy, with excellent esthetic results and the preservation of both sensibility and erectility.
Multichannel Azimuth Processing in ScanSAR and TOPS Mode Operation

Due to a system-inherent limitation, conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is incapable of imaging a wide swath with high geometric resolution. This restriction can be overcome by systems with multiple receive channels in combination with an additional digital signal processing network. So far, the application of such digital beamforming algorithms for high-resolution wide-swath SAR imaging has been restricted to multichannel systems in stripmap operation. However, in stripmap mode, the overall azimuth antenna length restricts the achievable swath width, thus preventing very wide swaths as requested by future SAR missions. Consequently, new concepts for ultrawide-swath imaging are needed. A promising candidate is a SAR system with multiple azimuth channels being operated in burst mode. This paper analyzes innovative ScanSAR and Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans (TOPS) system concepts with regard to multichannel azimuth processing. For this, the theoretical analyses, performance figures, and SAR signal processing, which had previously been derived for multichannel stripmap mode, are extended to systems operating in burst modes. The investigations reveal that multichannel ScanSAR systems enable the imaging of ultrawide swaths with high azimuth resolution and compact antenna lengths. These considerations are embedded in a multichannel ScanSAR system design example to demonstrate its capability to image an ultrawide swath of 400 km with a high geometric resolution of 5 m. In a next step, this system is adapted to TOPS mode operation, including an innovative “staircase” multichannel processing approach optimized for TOPS.
Systematic Review of Medication Errors in Pediatric Patients

Objective: To systematically locate and review studies that have investigated the incidence of medication errors (MEs) in pediatric inpatients and identify common errors. Methods: A systematic search of studies related to MEs in children was performed using the following databases: MEDLINE (1951–April 2006), EMBASE (1966–April 2006), Pharm-line (1978–April 2006), International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (1970–April 2006), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (1982–April 2006), and British Nursing Index (1994–April 2006). Studies of the incidence and nature of MEs in pediatrics were included. The title, abstract, or full article was reviewed for relevance; any study not related to MEs in children was excluded. Results: Three methods were used to detect MEs in the studies reviewed: spontaneous reporting (n = 10), medication order or chart review (n = 14), or observation (n = 8). There was great variation in the definitions of ME used and the error rates reported. The most common type of ME was dosing error, often involving 10 times the actual dose required. Antibiotics and sedatives were the most common classes of drugs associated with MEs; these are probably among the most common drugs prescribed. Conclusions: Interpretation of the literature was hindered by variation in definitions employed by different researchers, varying research methods and setting, and a lack of theory-based research. Overall, it would appear that our initial concern about MEs in pediatrics has been validated; however, we do not know the actual size of the problem. Further work to determine the incidence and causes of MEs in pediatrics is urgently needed, as well as evaluation of the best interventions to reduce them.
Colour plasticity and background matching in a threespine stickleback species pair

Examining differences in colour plasticity between closely-related species in relation to the heterogeneity of background colours found in their respective habitats may offer important insight into how cryptic colour change evolves in natural populations. In the present study, we examined whether nonbreeding dorsal body coloration has diverged between sympatric species of stickleback along with changes in habitat-specific background colours. The small, limnetic species primarily occupies the pelagic zone and the large, benthic species inhabits the littoral zone. We placed benthic and limnetic sticklebacks against extremes of habitat background colours and measured their degree of background matching and colour plasticity. Benthics matched the littoral background colour more closely than did the limnetics, although there was no difference between species in their resemblance to the pelagic background colour. Benthics were able to resemble both background colours by exhibiting greater directional colour plasticity in their dorsal body coloration than limnetics, which may be an adaptive response to the greater spectral heterogeneity of the littoral zone. The present study highlights how habitat-specific spectral characteristics may shape cryptic coloration differences between stickleback species. © 2011 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2011, 102, 902‐914. ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: cryptic coloration ‐ divergent natural selection ‐ environmental heterogeneity ‐ Gasterosteus aculeatus ‐ pigmentation.
A note on pseudoconvexity and proper holomorphic mappings

In this paper we discuss some connections between proper holomorphic mappings between domains in C' and the boundary behaviors of certain canonical invariant metrics. A compactness theorem has been proved. This generalizes slightly an earlier result proved by the second author. Introduction. A continuous mapping f: X1 -X2 between two topological spaces is called proper if f1 (K) C X1 is compact whenever K C X2 is compact. Proper holomorphic mappings between analytic spaces stand out for their beauty and simplicity. For instance, if g: D1 -+ D2 is a proper holomorphic mapping between two bounded domains in C', a theorem of Remmert says that (DIg 9, D2) is a finite branching cover. The branching locus in D1 is described by {z E D1 I det(dg(z)) = 0}. For the past ten years, there has been a great amount of activity in characterizing the proper holomorphic mappings between pseudoconvex domains. It has been known for a long time that there are numerous proper holomorphic maps between unit disks in C1. The simplest example is g: i = {z E C1 I IzI 2. Suppose f: Bn -Bn is a proper holomorphic mapping. Then f must be a biholomorphism. The following result due to S. Pin6uk is an extension of Alexander's theorem. THEOREM 2 [5]. Let D1 and D2 be two strongly pseudoconvex bounded domains with smooth boundaries in Cn, n > 2. Suppose f: D1 -D2 is a proper holomorphic mapping. Then f is a covering. In [7] the second author proved the following result concerning biholomorphic groups of strongly pseudoconvex domains. THEOREM 3 [7]. Let D be a strongly pseudoconvex bounded domain with smooth boundary in Cn. Then Aut(D) is noncompact if D is biholomorphic to Bn, n = dimc D. Received by the editors June 3, 1986 and, in revised form, December 30, 1986. 1980 Mathematics Subject Classification (1985 Revision). Primary 53C55; Secondary 32A17.
Personalized trip recommendation with multiple constraints by mining user check-in behaviors

In recent years, researches on travel recommendation have attracted extensive attentions due to the wide applications. Among them, one of the active topics is constraint-based trip recommendation for meeting user's personal requirements. Although a number of studies on this topic have been proposed in literatures, most of them only regard the user-specific constraints as some filtering conditions for planning the trip. In fact, immersing the constraints into travel recommendation systems to provide a personalized trip is desired for users. Furthermore, time complexity of trip planning from a set of attractions is sensitive to the scalability of travel regions. Hence, how to reduce the computational cost by parallel cloud computing techniques is also a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Personalized Trip Recommendation (PTR) to efficiently recommend the personalized trips meeting multiple constraints of users by mining user's check-in behaviors. In PTR, a mining-based module is first proposed to estimate the scores of attractions by considering both of user-based preferences and temporal-based properties. Then, a trip planning algorithm named Parallel Trip-Mine+ is proposed to efficiently plan the trip that satisfies multiple user-specific constraints. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on travel recommendation that considers the issues of multiple constraints, social relationship, temporal property and parallel computing simultaneously. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations on a real check-in dataset obtained from Gowalla, PTR is shown to deliver excellent performance.
Health Inequalities in Urban Adolescents: Role of Physical Activity, Diet, and Genetics

OBJECTIVE: Coordinated European projects relying on standardized methods are needed to identify health inequalities across Europe. This study aimed to compare fitness, fatness, and cardiometabolic risk between urban adolescents from the south and center-north of Europe and to explore whether physical activity (PA) and other factors might explain these differences. METHODS: The Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence cross-sectional project comprised 3528 adolescents from the south (4 cities) and central-north (6 cities) of Europe, 1089 of whom provided blood samples for analysis. Fitness (strength, speed-agility, and cardiorespiratory fitness), total and abdominal fatness (anthropometry and bioelectrical impedance), and cardiometabolic risk (z scores including fitness, fatness, blood lipids, insulin resistance, and blood pressure) were assessed. The analyses were adjusted for socioeconomic factors, objectively measured PA (accelerometry), total energy intake and diet quality, and genetic variants of the FTO rs9939609 polymorphism. RESULTS: Adolescents from southern Europe were less fit and fatter according to all markers (P < .001). Differences in cardiometabolic risk scores were not consistent. Adolescents from the south were less active and this would largely explain the differences observed in speed-agility and cardiorespiratory fitness. Differences in total and abdominal fatness could not be explained by PA, energy intake, diet quality, or FTO rs9939609 polymorphism. CONCLUSIONS: Fitness and fatness levels indicate that urban adolescents from the south are less healthy than those from central-northern Europe. Our data suggest that differences in PA might explain differences in important health-related fitness components, yet factors explaining the differences in fatness encountered remain unknown.
Both Neutralization Resistance and High Infectivity Phenotypes Are Caused by Mutations of Interacting Residues in the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 gp41 Leucine Zipper and the gp120 Receptor- and Coreceptor-Binding Domains

ABSTRACT Neutralization resistance of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a major impediment to vaccine development. We have found that residues of HIV-1 MN strain in the C terminus of gp120 and the leucine zipper (LZ) region of gp41 viral envelope proteins interact cooperatively to determine neutralization resistance and modulate infectivity. Further, results demonstrate that this interaction, by which regions of gp120 are assembled onto the LZ, involves amino acid residues intimately related to those which participate in the binding of the envelope to its receptor and coreceptor. Variations in this critical assembly structure determine the concordant, interdependent evolution of increased infectivity efficiency and neutralization resistance phenotypes of the envelopes. The results elucidate important structure-function relationships among epitopes that are important targets of vaccine development.
Towards blocking outgoing malicious impostor emails

Electronic mails (emails) have become an indispensable part of most people daily routines. However, they were not designed for deployment in an adversarial environment, which explains why there have been so many incidents such as spamming and phishing. Malicious impostor emails sent by sophisticated attackers are perhaps even more damaging, because their contents, except the attachments, may look perfectly legitimate while silently targeting certain critical information such as cryptographic keys and passwords. In this paper, we explore a mechanism for blocking malicious impostor emails called ContAining Malicious Emails Locally (CAMEL), which aims at blocking compromised victim user machines from further infecting others
Novel preparative method for porous hydrogels using overrun process

Porous poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) hydrogels were prepared using the overrun process which is usually used in manufacturing ice cream. The pores in the hydrogel formed exhibit dual-pore structure due to the injection of air bubbles and ice recrystallization. Morphological investigation revealed that overrun-processed hydrogels had closed pore structures and that their pore size and size distribution had been influenced by the impeller rate and concentration of polymer solution. The closed-pore structure was reformed into interconnected open-pore structure at lower concentrations of the solution. The freeze–thawing process, which takes place in PVA cross-linking, has no effect on the bubble structure, but removes the small pores formed during ice recrystallization. Besides the swelling ratio of overrun-processed PVA hydrogels is increased tenfold in comparison with non-porous hydrogels. Overrun-processed hydrogels showed more rapid swelling kinetics than freeze-dried and film-like hydrogels due to their larger surface area. In the future, the overrun process can be applied to prepare porous scaffolds containing proteins, such as growth factors and other cytokines, without denaturation, because it operates at a low temperature. Copyright © 2004 Society of Chemical Industry
Dissemination and Transmission of the E1-226V Variant of Chikungunya Virus in Aedes albopictus Are Controlled at the Midgut Barrier Level

Emergence of arboviruses could result from their ability to exploit new environments, for example a new host. This ability is facilitated by the high mutation rate occurring during viral genome replication. The last emergence of chikungunya in the Indian Ocean region corroborates this statement since a single viral mutation at the position 226 on the E1 glycoprotein (E1-A226V) was associated with enhanced transmission by the mosquito Aedes albopictus in regions where the major mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti, is absent. We used direct competition assays in vivo to dissect out the mechanisms underlying the selection of E1-226V by Ae. albopictus. When the original variant E1-226A and the newly emerged E1-226V were provided in the same blood-meal at equal titers to both species of mosquitoes, we found that the proportion of both variants was drastically different in the two mosquito species. Following ingestion of the infectious blood-meal, the E1-226V variant was preferentially selected in Ae. albopictus, whereas the E1-226A variant was sometimes favored in Ae. aegypti. Interestingly, when the two variants were introduced into the mosquitoes by intrathoracic inoculations, E1-226V was no longer favored for dissemination and transmission in Ae. albopictus, showing that the midgut barrier plays a key role in E1-226V selection. This study sheds light on the role of the midgut barrier in the selection of novel arbovirus emerging variants. We also bring new insight into how the pre-existing variant E1-226V was selected among other viral variants including E1-226A. Indeed the E1-226V variant present at low levels in natural viral populations could rapidly emerge after being selected in Ae. albopictus at the midgut barrier level.
Risk prediction models for oral clefts allowing for phenotypic heterogeneity

Oral clefts are common birth defects that have a major impact on the affected individual, their family and society. World-wide, the incidence of oral clefts is 1/700 live births, making them the most common craniofacial birth defects. The successful prediction of oral clefts may help identify sub-population at high risk, and promote new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Nevertheless, developing a clinically useful oral clefts risk prediction model remains a great challenge. Compelling evidences suggest the etiologies of oral clefts are highly heterogeneous, and the development of a risk prediction model with consideration of phenotypic heterogeneity may potentially improve the accuracy of a risk prediction model. In this study, we applied a previously developed statistical method to investigate the risk prediction on sub-phenotypes of oral clefts. Our results suggested subtypes of cleft lip (CL) and palate have similar genetic etiologies (AUC = 0.572) with subtypes of CL only (AUC = 0.589), while the subtypes of cleft palate only (CPO) have heterogeneous underlying mechanisms (AUCs for soft CPO and hard CPO are 0.617 and 0.623, respectively). This highlighted the potential that the hard and soft forms of CPO have their own mechanisms despite sharing some of the genetic risk factors. Comparing with conventional methods for risk prediction modeling, our method considers phenotypic heterogeneity of a disease, which potentially improves the accuracy for predicting each sub-phenotype of oral clefts.
Proteolytic Processing Regulates Placental Growth Factor Activities*

Background: The mechanisms of placental growth factor (PlGF)-mediated blood vessel formation are incompletely understood. Results: Plasmin cleaves the heparin-binding domain of PlGF-2. Conclusion: Plasmin regulates PlGF-2/Neuropilin-1-mediated tissue vascularization and growth. Significance: Plasmin-mediated carboxyl-terminal processing of VEGF family members may be considered as a principal mechanism to regulate their biological activity. Placental growth factor (PlGF) is a critical mediator of blood vessel formation, yet mechanisms of its action and regulation are incompletely understood. Here we demonstrate that proteolytic processing regulates the biological activity of PlGF. Specifically, we show that plasmin processing of PlGF-2 yields a protease-resistant core fragment comprising the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-1 binding site but lacking the carboxyl-terminal domain encoding the heparin-binding domain and an 8-amino acid peptide encoded by exon 7. We have identified plasmin cleavage sites, generated a truncated PlGF118 isoform mimicking plasmin-processed PlGF, and explored its biological function in comparison with that of PlGF-1 and -2. The angiogenic responses induced by the diverse PlGF forms were distinct. Whereas PlGF-2 increased endothelial cell chemotaxis, vascular sprouting, and granulation tissue formation upon skin injury, these activities were abrogated following plasmin digestion. Investigation of PlGF/Neuropilin-1 binding and function suggests a critical role for heparin-binding domain/Neuropilin-1 interaction and its regulation by plasmin processing. Collectively, here we provide new mechanistic insights into the regulation of PlGF-2/Neuropilin-1-mediated tissue vascularization and growth.