Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hospital Incidence and Outcomes of the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Using the Kigali Modification of the Berlin Definition.

RATIONALE Estimates of the incidence of the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in high- and middle-income countries vary from 10.1 to 86.2 per 100,000 person-years in the general population. The epidemiology of ARDS has not been reported for a low-income country at the level of the population, hospital, or intensive care unit (ICU). The Berlin definition may not allow identification of ARDS in resource-constrained settings. OBJECTIVES To estimate the incidence and outcomes of ARDS at a Rwandan referral hospital using the Kigali modification of the Berlin definition: without requirement for positive end-expiratory pressure, hypoxia cutoff of SpO2/FiO2 less than or equal to 315, and bilateral opacities on lung ultrasound or chest radiograph. METHODS We screened every adult patient for hypoxia at a public referral hospital in Rwanda for 6 weeks. For every patient with hypoxia, we collected data on demographics and ARDS risk factors, performed lung ultrasonography, and evaluated chest radiography when available. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Forty-two (4.0%) of 1,046 hospital admissions met criteria for ARDS. Using various prespecified cutoffs for the SpO2/FiO2 ratio resulted in almost identical hospital incidence values. Median age for patients with ARDS was 37 years, and infection was the most common risk factor (44.1%). Only 30.9% of patients with ARDS were admitted to an ICU, and hospital mortality was 50.0%. Using traditional Berlin criteria, no patients would have met criteria for ARDS. CONCLUSIONS ARDS seems to be a common and fatal syndrome in a hospital in Rwanda, with few patients admitted to an ICU. The Berlin definition is likely to underestimate the impact of ARDS in low-income countries, where resources to meet the definition requirements are lacking. Although the Kigali modification requires validation before widespread use, we hope this study stimulates further work in refining an ARDS definition that can be consistently used in all settings.
Median nerve deformation and displacement in the carpal tunnel during finger motion

The objective of this study was to evaluate the correlations between deformation and displacement of median nerve and flexor tendons during finger motion in the carpal tunnel for both carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) patients and healthy controls. Sixty‐two wrists of 31 asymptomatic volunteers and fifty‐one wrists of 28 idiopathic CTS patients were evaluated by ultrasound. The displacement of the median nerve and the middle finger flexor digitorum superficialis (FDS) tendon, as well as area, perimeter, aspect ratio of a minimum enclosing rectangle, and circularity of the median nerve were measured in finger extension and flexion positions. Deformation indices were defined as the ratios of indices in finger extension and flexion positions. The correlations between displacement and deformation indices were evaluated. There were significant correlations between nerve palmar–dorsal displacement and deformation indices (p < 0.05). The aspect ratio deformation index showed the strongest correlation to palmar–dorsal displacement of the nerve (−0.572, p < 0.01). This study showed that there is a relationship between median nerve deformation indices and nerve palmar–dorsal displacement in the carpal tunnel. Since the highest correlations were between palmar–dorsal nerve displacement direction and aspect ratio deformation index, these parameters may be helpful to understand the pathophysiology of CTS. © 2013 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 31:1876–1880, 2013
Apoptosis Induced by Low-concentration Ethanol in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cell Strains and Down-regulated AFP and Survivin Analysis by Proteomic Technology

Ethanol is generally used as a therapeutic reagent against Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC or hepatoma) worldwide, as it can induce Hepatocellular carcinoma cell apoptosis at low concentration through a multifactorial process regulated by several unknown proteins. This paper provides a simple and available proteomic strategy for exploring differentially expressed proteins in the apoptotic pathway. The appropriate concentrations of ethanol required to induce HepG2 cell apoptosis were first assessed by MTT assay, Gisma and fluorescence staining. Next, the central proteins involved in the apoptosis pathway processs were determined using 2D-PAGE, SDS-PAGE, and bio-software analysis. Finally the downregulation of two proteins, AFP and survivin, were determined by immunocytochemistry and reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) technology. The simple, useful method demonstrated here provides a new approach to proteomic analysis in key bio-regulating process including proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, immunity and metastasis. Keywords—Hepatocellular carcinoma, Ethanol, Proteomics, survivin and AFP
Solution structure of a modified 2′,5′-linked RNA hairpin involved in an equilibrium with duplex

The isomerization of phosphodiester functionality of nucleic acids from 3′,5′- to a less common 2′,5′-linkage influences the complex interplay of stereoelectronic effects that drive pseudorotational equilibrium of sugar rings and thus affect the conformational propensities for compact or more extended structures. The present study highlights the subtle balance of non-covalent forces at play in structural equilibrium of 2′,5′-linked RNA analogue, 3′-O-(2-methoxyethyl) substituted dodecamer *CG*CGAA*U*U*CG*CG, 3′-MOE-2′,5′-RNA, where all cytosines and uracils are methylated at C5. The NMR and UV spectroscopic studies have shown that 3′-MOE-2′,5′-RNA adopts both hairpin and duplex secondary structures, which are involved in a dynamic exchange that is slow on the NMR timescale and exhibits strand and salt concentration as well as pH dependence. Unusual effect of pH over a narrow physiological range is observed for imino proton resonances with exchange broadening observed at lower pH and relatively sharp lines observed at higher pH. The solution structure of 3′-MOE-2′,5′-RNA hairpin displays a unique and well-defined loop, which is stabilized by Watson–Crick A5·*U8 base pair and by n → π* stacking interactions of O4′ lone-pair electrons of A6 and *U8 with aromatic rings of A5 and *U7, respectively. In contrast, the stem region of 3′-MOE-2′,5′-RNA hairpin is more flexible. Our data highlight the important feature of backbone modifications that can have pronounced effects on interstrand association of nucleic acids.
Toward a complexity theory of information systems development

Purpose – Existing literature acknowledges information systems development (ISD) to be a complex activity. This complexity is magnified by the continuous changes in user requirements due to changing organizational needs in changing external competitive environments. Research findings show that, if this increasing complexity is not managed appropriately, information systems fail. The paper thus aims to portray the sources of complexity related to ISD and to suggest the use of complexity theory as a frame of reference, analyzing its implications on information system design and development to deal with the emergent nature of IS.Design/methodology/approach – Conceptual analysis and review of relevant literature.Findings – This article provides a conceptual model explaining how top‐down “official” and bottom‐up “emergent” co‐evolutionary adaptations of information systems design with changing user requirements will result in more effective system design and operation. At the heart of this model are seven firs.
Prosodically-conditioned variability in children's production of French determiners*

ABSTRACT Researchers have long noted that children's grammatical morphemes are variably produced, raising questions about when and how grammatical competence is acquired. This study examined the spontaneous production of determiners by two French-speaking children aged 1 ; 5–2 ; 5. It found that determiners were produced earlier with monosyllabic words, and later with disyllabic and trisyllabic words. This suggests that French-speaking children's early determiners are prosodically licensed as part of a binary foot, with determiners appearing more consistently only once prosodic representations become more complex. This study therefore provides support for the notion that grammatical morphemes first appear in prosodically licensed contexts, suggesting that some of the early variability in morphological production is systematic and predictable.
Graph Cuts-Based Registration Revisited: A Novel Approach for Lung Image Registration Using Supervoxels and Image-Guided Filtering

This work revisits the concept of graph cuts as an efficient optimization technique in image registration. Previously, due to the computational burden involved, the use of graph cuts in this context has been mainly limited to 2D applications. Here we show how combining graph cuts with supervoxels, resulting in a sparse, yet meaningful graph-based image representation, can overcome previous limitations. Additionally, we show that a relaxed graph representation of the image allows for 'sliding' motion modeling and provides anatomically plausible estimation of the deformations. This is achieved by using image-guided filtering of the estimated sparse deformation field. We evaluate our method on a publicly available CT lung data set and show that our new approach compares very favourably with state-of-the-art in continuous and discrete image registration.
Intriguing properties of neural networks

Deep neural networks are highly expressive models that have recently achieved state of the art performance on speech and visual recognition tasks. While their expressiveness is the reason they succeed, it also causes them to learn uninterpretable solutions that could have counter-intuitive properties. In this paper we report two such properties. First, we find that there is no distinction between individual high level units and random linear combinations of high level units, according to various methods of unit analysis. It suggests that it is the space, rather than the individual units, that contains of the semantic information in the high layers of neural networks. Second, we find that deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extend. We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation, which is found by maximizing the network's prediction error. In addition, the specific nature of these perturbations is not a random artifact of learning: the same perturbation can cause a different network, that was trained on a different subset of the dataset, to misclassify the same input.
Efficient Transitive Closure Algorithms

We have developed some efficient algorithms for computing the transitive closure of a directed graph. This paper presents the algorithms for the problem of reachability. The algorithms, however, can be adapted to deal with path computations and a signitkantJy broader class of queries based on onesided recursions. We analyze these algorithms and compare them to algorithms in the literature. The resulti indicate that these algorithms, in addition to their ability to deal with queries that am generakations of transitive closure, also perform very efficiently, in particular, in the context of a dish-based database nvironment.
Body Mass Index as a Risk Factor for Developing Chronic Low Back Pain: A Follow-up in the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study

Study Design. A population-based, prospective cohort study. Objective. To determine whether overweight, obesity, or more generally an elevated body mass index (BMI) increase the probability of experiencing chronic low back pain (LBP) after an 11-year period, both among participants with and without LBP at baseline. Summary of Background Data. Chronic LBP is a common disabling disorder in modern society. Cross-sectional studies suggest an association between an elevated BMI and LBP, but it is not clear whether this is a causal relationship. Methods. Data were obtained from the community-based HUNT 2 (1995–1997) and HUNT 3 (2006–2008) studies of an entire Norwegian county. Participants were 8733 men and 10,149 women, aged 30 to 69 years, who did not have chronic LBP at baseline, and 2669 men and 3899 women with LBP at baseline. After 11 years, both groups indicated whether they currently had chronic LBP, defined as pain persisting for at least 3 months continuously during the last year. Results. A significant positive association was found between BMI and risk of LBP among persons without LBP at baseline. The odds ratio for BMI 30 or more versus BMI less than 25 was 1.34 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.08–1.67) for men and 1.22 (95% CI, 1.03–1.46) for women, in analyses adjusted for age, education, work status, physical activity at work and in leisure time, smoking, blood pressure, and serum lipid levels. A significant positive association was also established between BMI and recurrence of LBP among women. LBP status at baseline had negligible influence on subsequent change in BMI. Conclusion. High values of BMI may predispose to chronic LBP 11 years later, both in individuals with and without LBP. The association between BMI and LBP is not explained by an effect of LBP on later change in BMI.
Anomalous Concentration of Methane Emissions at the Continental Shelf Edge of the Northern Cascadia Margin

A recent compilation of methane plumes detected offshore Washington State includes 1,772 individual bubble streams issuing from 491 discrete vent sites. The majority of these plume sites form a narrow 10‐km‐wide band located shallower than 250‐m water depth, with most sites located near the 175‐m‐deep continental shelf break that tracks the head scarps of large submarine canyons. Archive multichannel seismic profiles over the Cascadia shelf and uppermost margin that were co‐located within a few hundred meters with active emission sites show that methane bubble streams arise from listric/normal faults and triangular‐shaped regions of disturbed seismic reflectors that intersect the seafloor and extend several kilometers into the subsurface. Geological processes were evaluated for producing the narrow emission site depths including nonuniform distribution of methane within the Cascadia accretionary sediment wedge and horizontal transfer of groundwater from onshore subaerial sources. A model of enhanced sediment permeability arising from a contrasting response between the inner and outer portions of the accretionary wedge deformation during a megathrust earthquake cycle appears the most likely mechanism. This faulting is generated during extension of the overriding plate during megathrust earthquake cycles, with semicontinuous permeability enhancement of the fluid pathways from excitation by contemporary incident seismic waves.
Message Dropping Attacks in Overlay Networks: Attack Detection and Attacker Identification

Overlay multicast networks are used by service providers to distribute contents such as Web pages, streaming multimedia data, or security updates to a large number of users. However, such networks are extremely vulnerable to message dropping attacks by malicious or selfish nodes that intentionally drop packets they are required to forward. It is difficult to detect such attacks both efficiently and effectively, not mentioning to further identify the attackers, especially when members in the overlay switch between online/offline statuses frequently. We propose a random-sampling-based scheme to detect such attacks, and a path-resolving-based scheme to identify the attack nodes. Our schemes work for dynamic overlay networks and do not assume the global knowledge of the overlay hierarchy. Analysis and simulation results show that our schemes are bandwidth-efficient and they both have high detection/identification rates but low false positive rates
Force control and force observer design of series elastic actuator based on its dynamic characteristics

A series elastic actuator (SEA) is a promising actuation method in robotics and mechatronics applications that intelligently interact with environments, including humans. The SEA is characterized by a spring placed between the load and an actuator, which is an electric motor in most SEA systems. Since the spring plays the role of a transducer between a position (i.e., spring deflection) and a force, it is able to control the output force (torque) precisely by utilizing typical position control methods. Also, realization of the precise force (torque) control implies that the SEA exhibits zero mechanical impedance, which renders its superior advantage in human-interactive systems. In many applications, however, the dynamic characteristics of an SEA have not been considered in controller design process, and mostly PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control has been applied to as controllers for SEA. However, PID controller has various drawbacks including wind-ups and thus there are rooms to be improved for SEA control. This paper, taking into considerations this, proposes a dynamic model based control design of SEA. The dynamic characteristics of SEA are analyzed theoretically and experimentally, and feedback controllers based on the derived dynamics is proposed. Comparisons with conventional control methods verify the advantage of the proposed dynamic model based controller on control performance and force observation.
Mutant PIK3CA accelerates HER2-driven transgenic mammary tumors and induces resistance to combinations of anti-HER2 therapies

Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2; ERBB2) amplification and phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate 3-kinase, catalytic subunit alpha (PIK3CA) mutations often co-occur in breast cancer. Aberrant activation of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway has been shown to correlate with a diminished response to HER2-directed therapies. We generated a mouse model of HER2-overexpressing (HER2+), PIK3CAH1047R-mutant breast cancer. Mice expressing both human HER2 and mutant PIK3CA in the mammary epithelium developed tumors with shorter latencies compared with mice expressing either oncogene alone. HER2 and mutant PIK3CA also cooperated to promote lung metastases. By microarray analysis, HER2-driven tumors clustered with luminal breast cancers, whereas mutant PIK3CA tumors were associated with claudin-low breast cancers. PIK3CA and HER2+/PIK3CA tumors expressed elevated transcripts encoding markers of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and stem cells. Cells from HER2+/PIK3CA tumors more efficiently formed mammospheres and lung metastases. Finally, HER2+/PIK3CA tumors were resistant to trastuzumab alone and in combination with lapatinib or pertuzumab. Both drug resistance and enhanced mammosphere formation were reversed by treatment with a PI3K inhibitor. In sum, PIK3CAH1047R accelerates HER2-mediated breast epithelial transformation and metastatic progression, alters the intrinsic phenotype of HER2-overexpressing cancers, and generates resistance to approved combinations of anti-HER2 therapies.
Influence of Packaging and Storage Conditions on Proximate Composition of Paddy

The study was conducted to find out the influence of packaging and storage conditions on proximate composition of paddy. Paddy seeds were stored in different packaging materials viz; vacuum packed bags (C1), polythene bags (C2), cloth bags (C3) and gunny bags (C4) stored at room temperature (25 ± 2o C) and cold storage (4 ± 1o C) for a period of 18 months. Proximate composition includes crude protein content; fat content, ash content and carbohydrate content were decreased with an advancement of storage period. Among the containers, vacuum packed bags recorded higher protein, fat, ash and carbohydrate content compared to polythene bags followed by gunny bags and cloth bags.
Non-concurrency analysis

Non-concurrency analysis is a set of techniques for statically identifying pairs (or sets) of statements in a concurrent program which can never happen together. This information aids programmers in debugging and manually optimizing programs, improves the precision of data flow analysis, enables optimized translation of rendezvous, facilitates dead code elimination and other automatic optimizations, and allows anomaly detection in explicitly parallel programs. We present a framework for non-concurrency analysis, capable of incorporating previous analysis algorithms [CS88, DS92] and improving upon them. We show general theoretical results which are useful in estimating non-concurrency, and examples of non-concurrency analysis frameworks for two synchronization primitives: the Ada rendezvous and binary semaphores. Both of these frameworks have a low-order polynomial bound on worst-case solution time. We provide experimental evidence that static non-concurrency analysis of Ada programs can be accomplished in a reasonable time, and is generally quite accurate. Our framework, and the set of refinement components we develop, also exhibits dramatic accuracy improvements over [DS91], when the latter is used as a stand-alone algorithm, as demonstrated by our experiments.
Familial Aggregation of Blood Lipid Response to Exercise Training in the Health, Risk Factors, Exercise Training, and Genetics (HERITAGE) Family Study

Background—Fasting levels of plasma lipids and lipoproteins are reported to improve with regular exercise training. However, little is known on whether the training responses are influenced by heritable factors. Methods and Results—The lipid profile was assessed in 115 black (224 individuals) and 99 white families (469 individuals), who participated in the HERITAGE Family Study, while in a sedentary state (baseline visit) and after exercise training for 20 weeks (post visit). Variables included total cholesterol, triglyceride, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), apolipoprotein B (ApoB), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), apolipoprotein A-I, and HDL-C subfractions 2 (HDL2-C) and 3 (HDL3-C). Familial correlations for the training responses (&Dgr;=post−baseline) were significant for most variables, and the percent variance accounted for by familial factors (ie, maximal heritabilities) ranged from 25% to 38%. Exceptions were for higher heritabilities near 60% for &Dgr;ApoB in blacks and &Dgr;HDL2-C in whites and a lower estimate of zero for &Dgr;LDL-C in blacks. Conclusions—Heritable factors in part determine lipid profile responses to regular exercise. Maximal heritabilities were similar across ethnic groups and variables, except for &Dgr;LDL-C, &Dgr;ApoB, and &Dgr;HDL2-C. Molecular studies to identify the markers and genes associated with these influences are currently underway.