Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alternative-Dose versus Standard-Dose Trivalent Influenza Vaccines for Immunocompromised Patients: A Meta-Analysis of Randomised Control Trials

The study compared immunogenicity and safety between alternative higher-dose and standard-dose trivalent vaccines in immunocompromised individuals. A literature search was performed using the PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane databases from inception until March 2019 to identify studies comparing the immunogenicity of alternative higher-dose (including high-dose, double-dose, and booster-dose vaccines) and standard-dose trivalent influenza vaccines in patients who underwent transplantation or chemotherapy. Effect estimates from the individual studies were derived and calculated using the DerSimonian and Laird random-effect model. The protocol for this systematic review is registered with PROSPERO (number CRD42019129220). Eight relevant studies involving 1020 patients were included in the systematic review and meta-analysis. The meta-analysis demonstrated that the higher-dose strategy provided had significantly superior seroconversion and seroprotection for A/H1N1 strains than the standard dose. Regarding H3N2 and B strains, no differences in immunogenicity responses were noted. No differences in safety were observed between the vaccination strategies. Alternative higher-dose vaccination strategies appear to associate with superior immunogenicity responses for A/H1N1 strains, and the strategies were generally well tolerated in immunocompromised populations. Future studies should clarify the optimal timing, frequency and dose of vaccination and assess whether these strategies improve vaccine immunogenicity and clinical outcomes.
The Role of Health Literacy and Social Networks in Arthritis Patients' Health Information-Seeking Behavior: A Qualitative Study

Background. Patients engage in health information-seeking behaviour to maintain their wellbeing and to manage chronic diseases such as arthritis. Health literacy allows patients to understand available treatments and to critically appraise information they obtain from a wide range of sources. Aims. To explore how arthritis patients' health literacy affects engagement in arthritis-focused health information-seeking behaviour and the selection of sources of health information available through their informal social network. Methods. An exploratory, qualitative study consisting of one-on-one semi-structured interviews. Twenty participants with arthritis were recruited from community organizations. The interviews were designed to elicit participants' understanding about their arthritis and arthritis medication and to determine how the participants' health literacy informed selection of where they found information about their arthritis and pain medication. Results. Participants with low health literacy were less likely to be engaged with health information-seeking behaviour. Participants with intermediate health literacy were more likely to source arthritis-focused health information from newspapers, television, and within their informal social network. Those with high health literacy sourced information from the internet and specialist health sources and were providers of information within their informal social network. Conclusion. Health professionals need to be aware that levels of engagement in health information-seeking behaviour and sources of arthritis-focused health information may be related to their patients' health literacy.
A thermodynamic model of mixed organic-inorganic aerosols to predict activity coe ffi

Tropospheric aerosols contain mixtures of inorganic salts, acids, water, and a large variety of organic compounds. Interactions between these substances in liquid mixtures lead to discrepancies from ideal thermodynamic behaviour. By means of activity coefficients, non-ideal behaviour can be taken into account. We present here a ther-5 modynamic model named AIOMFAC (Aerosol Inorganic–Organic Mixtures Functional groups Activity Coefficients) that is able to calculate activity coefficients covering inorganic , organic, and organic–inorganic interactions in aqueous solutions over a wide concentration range. This model is based on the activity coefficient model LIFAC by Yan et al. (1999) that we modified and reparametrised to better describe atmospherically 10 relevant conditions and mixture compositions. Focusing on atmospheric applications we considered H − 4 , and SO 2− 4 as cations and anions and a wide range of alcohols/polyols composed of the functional groups CH n and OH as organic compounds. With AIOMFAC, the activities of the components within an aqueous electrolyte solution are well represented up to high 15 ionic strength. Most notably, a semi-empirical middle-range parametrisation of direct organic–inorganic interactions in alcohol + water + salt solutions strongly improves the agreement between experimental and modelled activity coefficients. At room temperature , this novel thermodynamic model offers the possibility to compute equilibrium relative humidities, gas/particle partitioning and liquid–liquid phase separations with 20 high accuracy. In further studies, other organic functional groups will be introduced. The model framework is not restricted to specific ions or organic compounds and is therefore also applicable for other research topics.
Automatic Emotion Recognition (AER) System based on Two-Level Ensemble of Lightweight Deep CNN Models

Emotions play a crucial role in human interaction, health care and security investigations and monitoring. Automatic emotion recognition (AER) using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is an effective method for decoding the real emotions, which are independent of body gestures, but it is a challenging problem. Several automatic emotion recognition systems have been proposed, which are based on traditional hand-engineered approaches and their performances are very poor. Motivated by the outstanding performance of deep learning (DL) in many recognition tasks, we introduce an AER system (Deep-AER) based on EEG brain signals using DL. A DL model involves a large number of learnable parameters, and its training needs a large dataset of EEG signals, which is difficult to acquire for AER problem. To overcome this problem, we proposed a lightweight pyramidal one-dimensional convolutional neural network (LP-1D-CNN) model, which involves a small number of learnable parameters. Using LP-1D-CNN, we build a two level ensemble model. In the first level of the ensemble, each channel is scanned incrementally by LP-1D-CNN to generate predictions, which are fused using majority vote. The second level of the ensemble combines the predictions of all channels of an EEG signal using majority vote for detecting the emotion state. We validated the effectiveness and robustness of Deep-AER using DEAP, a benchmark dataset for emotion recognition research. The results indicate that FRONT plays dominant role in AER and over this region, Deep-AER achieved the accuracies of 98.43% and 97.65% for two AER problems, i.e., high valence vs low valence (HV vs LV) and high arousal vs low arousal (HA vs LA), respectively. The comparison reveals that Deep-AER outperforms the state-of-the-art systems with large margin. The Deep-AER system will be helpful in monitoring for health care and security investigations.
Is ulceration in cutaneous melanoma just a prognostic and predictive factor or is ulcerated melanoma a distinct biologic entity?

Purpose of review Ulceration of a primary cutaneous melanoma has for many years been recognized as a very important prognostic factor associated with increased risk for recurrence and mortality. Patients with an ulcerated melanoma do much worse than patients with a nonulcerated melanoma with the same breslow thickness. Ulceration may indicate a separate biologic entity. Recent findings Gene profiling studies of fresh frozen melanoma samples indicated that ulcerated melanomas have a very different profile. Analysis of the results of the two largest adjuvant interferon (IFN) trials ever conducted in 2644 patients [European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) 18952 and 18991], which used ulceration of the primary as a stratification factor, indicated that ulceration was not only a very strong prognostic factor, but more importantly a significant predictive factor for outcome of adjuvant IFN treatment. Only in patients with an ulcerated primary, was a similar and significant impact on disease-free survival, distant metastasis-free survival and overall survival observed. As a more general finding, in trials independent of ulceration used as a stratification factor, this IFN sensitivity of ulcerated melanomas has been reported in a meta-analysis in more than 3000 patients. It was also identified as a predictive factor of outcome in the Sunbelt adjuvant IFN trial in the USA. Summary These important findings regarding ulceration need biologic studies to identify the differences between ulcerated and nonulcerated melanoma at the molecular level. Moreover, the importance of ulceration will be assessed prospectively in the EORTC 18081 trial in patients with primary ulcerated melanomas more than 1 mm.
Performance analysis of SDMA in multicell wireless networks

Multi-antenna transmission, or MIMO, is a major enabling technique for broadband cellular networks. The current implementation, however, is mainly for the point-to-point link, and its potential for Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) has not been fully exploited. In this paper, we will analytically evaluate the performance of SDMA in multicell networks based on a spatial random network model, where both the base stations (BSs) and users are modeled as two independent Poisson point processes. The main difficulty is the evaluation of the interference distribution, for which we propose a novel BS grouping approach that leads to a closed-form expression for the network area spectral efficiency. We find that the number of active users (U) served with SDMA is critical, as it affects the spatial multiplexing gain, the aggregated interference, and the diversity gain for each user. The optimal value of U can be selected based on our analytical result, with which SDMA is shown to outperform both the single-user beamforming and full-SDMA for which U is the same as the number of BS antennas. In particular, it is shown that the performance gain of SDMA is higher when the BS density is relatively small compared to the user density, but the optimal value of U is almost the same for different scenarios, which is close to half of the BS antenna number.
Age and Hypertension Promote Endothelium‐Dependent Contractions to Acetylcholine in the Aorta of the Rat

This study was undertaken to compare age-related changes in endothelium-dependent vascular responses in both hypertensive and normotensive rats. Aorta from normotensive Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats and spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) aged 4–6 weeks (young), 3–6 months (adult), and 12–25 months (old) were examined for relaxation to acetylcholine, adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP), and sodium nitroprusside. Rubbed (endothelium denuded) aorta from all groups displayed neither relaxation nor contraction to acetylcholine. Maximal relaxation responses to acetylcholine were reduced progressively with increasing age in unrubbed aorta of both SHR and WKY rats. In addition, acetylcholine caused not only dose-dependent relaxations at lower concentrations but also increases in tension at higher concentrations in unrubbed aorta of old WKY rats as well as adult and old SHR. However, indomethacin completely inhibited the tension development. As a result, aorta treated with indomethacin demonstrated similar acetylcholine-induced, endothelium-dependent relaxations in all groups. The thromboxane A2 synthetase inhibitor (E)-7-phenyl-7-(3-pyridyl)-6-heptanoic acid (CV-4151) partially but significantly depressed the increases in tension in aorta of old WKY rats. The degrees of endothelium-dependent relaxations to ATP and endothelium-independent relaxations to sodium nitroprusside were almost similar in all groups. These findings suggest that the release of or vascular responsiveness to endothelium-derived relaxing factor in the aorta is well maintained through senescence in both strains and that, in the aorta of not only SHR but also old normotensive WKY rats, the endothelium releases contracting factors that may be thromboxane A2 and other vasoconstrictor prostanoids.
Eigenvalues and graph bisection: An average-case analysis

Graph Bisection is the problem of partitioning the vertices of a graph into two equal-size pieces so as to minimize the number of edges between the two pieces. This paper presents an algorithm that will, for almost all graphs in a certain class, output the minimum-size bisection. Furthermore the algorithm will yield, for almost all such graphs, a proof that the bisection is optimal. The algorithm is based on computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph.
The role of GNLY gene polymorphisms in psoriasis pathogenesis*

Background: Psoriasis is a systemic inflammatory disorder that involves complex pathogenic interactions between the innate and adaptive immune systems. The most accepted mechanism in the etiopathogenesis of psoriasis is the induction of inflammation with keratinocyte hyperproliferation. Granulysin (GNLY) is a cytolytic antimicrobial peptide (AMP) that is secreted together with granzyme and perforin from the granules of human cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and natural killer (NK) cells. It has been immunohistochemically proven that the expression of granulysin is increased in lesions of psoriasis. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between psoriasis disease and granulysin gene polymorphisms. Methods: GNLY rs7908 and rs10180391 polymorphisms were studied by PCR-RFLP in 100 psoriasis patients under treatment in the Dermatology Polyclinic of Bulent Ecevit University. In addition, 100 healthy individuals with similar age and sex distribution were used as a control group. Results: In the control group, GNLY rs7908 CC genotype was significantly higher than in psoriasis patients (P= 0.031; OR= 0.305; Cl= 0.305 (0.121 - 0.773). In our study, the genotype distributions in patients and control groups were GNLY rs7908 (SNP) GG (51%, 37%), GC (41%, 44%), CC (8%, 19%); GNLY rs10180391 (SNP) from the CC (41%, 44%), CT (42%, % 41), TT (17%, 15%). Study limitations: The study only included Turkish patients. Conclusion: Our findings showed that GNLY rs7908 CC genotype and C allele had a protective effect against psoriasis and decreased the disease severity (according to PASI score), whereas rs10180391 SNP did not show any effective role in psoriasis pathogenesis.
d‐Regular graphs of acyclic chromatic index at least d+2

An acyclic edge coloring of a graph is a proper edge coloring such that there are no bichromatic cycles. The acyclic chromatic index of a graph is the minimum number k such that there is an acyclic edge coloring using k colors and is denoted by a′(G). It was conjectured by Alon, Sudakov and Zaks (and earlier by Fiamcik) that a′(G)⩽Δ+2, where Δ=Δ(G) denotes the maximum degree of the graph. Alon et al. also raised the question whether the complete graphs of even order are the only regular graphs which require Δ+2 colors to be acyclically edge colored. In this article, using a simple counting argument we observe not only that this is not true, but in fact all d‐regular graphs with 2n vertices and d>n, requires at least d+ 2 colors. We also show that a′(Kn, n)⩾n+ 2, when n is odd using a more non‐trivial argument. (Here Kn, n denotes the complete bipartite graph with n vertices on each side.) This lower bound for Kn, n can be shown to be tight for some families of complete bipartite graphs and for small values of n. We also infer that for every d, n such that d⩾5, n⩾2d+ 3 and dn even, there exist d‐regular graphs which require at least d+2‐colors to be acyclically edge colored. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 63: 226–230, 2010
Systematic Review/meta-analysis Prognostic Role of Sparc Expression in Gastric Cancer: a Meta-analysis

A b s t r a c t Introduction: Secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) is involved in regulating cell adhesion, proliferation, migration, and tissue remodeling. We performed a meta-analysis to evaluate the association between SPARC expression and the clinicopathologic features and outcomes of gastric cancer patients. Material and methods: Publications that assessed the clinical or prognostic significance of SPARC in gastric cancer up to October 2013 were identified. A meta-analysis was performed to clarify the association between SPARC expression and clinical outcomes. Results: Ten studies, including 1417 cases, met the inclusion criteria. The data were analyzed and the results show that SPARC is not significantly associated with the depth of gastric cancer invasion (odds ratio Conclusions: The SPARC may play an important role in the progression of gastric cancer, and SPARC overexpression is closely correlated with poor patient survival. The SPARC is a potential clinical marker for the survival of gastric cancer patients; however, well-designed prospective studies are needed to confirm these findings.
Interval-Censored Data Analysis of Gaps between Recurrent Events with Cure Fraction

Interval-censored data of gaps between recurrent events arise as the exact gaps can not be available but only know, such as whether the event time of interest is no later than the examination time. The recurrent event times subject to this interval censoring are often encountered in epidemiological studies and clinical trials. In this paper we propose a gaps model which is a derivative of the marginal rate function of the recurrent events processes. This model can accommodate the cure fraction as well. The proposed model can be easily extended to the general case, however, for an easy representation, parametric model is assumed in this paper. As an example of application, the bladder tumor recurrent event data are reanalyzed by using the proposed model.
A Control Flow Representation for Component-Based Software Reliability Analysis

Current reliability analysis techniques encounter a prohibitive challenge with respect to the control flow representation of large software systems with intricate control flow structures. Some techniques use a component-based Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure which represents only inter-component control flow transitions. This CFG structure disregards the dependencies among multiple outward control flow transitions of a system component and does not provide any details about a component internal control flow structure. To overcome these problems, some techniques use statement-based or block-based CFGs. However, these CFG structures are remarkably complex and difficult to use for large software systems. In this paper, we propose a simple CFG structure called Connection Dependency Graph (CDG) that represents inter-component and intra-component control flow transitions and preserves the dependencies among them. We describe the CDG structure and explain how to derive it from a program source code. Our derivation exploits a number of architectural patterns to capture the control flow transitions and identify the execution paths among connections. We provide a case study to examine the effect of program size on the CDG, the statement-based, and the block-based CFGs by comparing them with respect to complexity using the PostgreSQL open source database system.
Reductions in the risks of recurrent stroke in patients with and without diabetes: The PROGRESS Trial

Background: Analyses of the risks of stroke were conducted for subjects with and without diabetes, participating in a randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial of a perindopril‐based blood pressure lowering regimen in 6105 people with prior stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA), followed for a median of 3.9 years. Findings: Seven hundred and sixty‐one patients had diabetes at baseline. Diabetes increased the risk of recurrent stroke by 35% (95% CI 10–65%) principally through an effect on ischaemic stroke (1.53, 95% CI 1.23–1.90). Active treatment reduced blood pressure by 9.5/4.6 mmHg in patients with diabetes and by 8.9/3.9 mmHg in patients without diabetes. The proportional risk reductions achieved for stroke in patients with diabetes, 38% (95% CI 8–58%), and patients without diabetes, 28% (95% CI 16–39%), were not significantly different (p homogeneity = 0.5). The absolute reduction in the risk of recurrent stroke in the patients with diabetes was equivalent to one stroke avoided among every 16 (95% CI 9–111) patients treated for 5 years. Conclusions: Diabetes is an important risk factor for stroke in patients with established cerebrovascular disease. Treatment with the ACE inhibitor perindopril with discretionary use of the diuretic indapamide produced reductions in the risk of recurrent stroke in patients with diabetes that were at least as great as those achieved in patients without diabetes.
Synthesis of Array Radiation Pattern Footprints Using Radial Stretching, Fourier Analysis, and Hankel Transformation

For the synthesis of radiation patterns using antenna arrays with thousands of elements, the combination of direct methods with non-stochastic optimization can be more efficient than stochastic optimization. Here we describe an efficient method for the synthesis of footprint patterns that combines Hankel transformation with Fourier analysis following angle-dependent homothesis (i.e., radial stretching and/or shrinking) of an axisymmetric Elliott-Stern pattern for a circular aperture. The new method can in principle be applied to arrays of radiating elements with arbitrary locations and element patterns.
Teaching assistants Toolkit

Full references Alborz, A. , Pearson, D. , Farrell, P., Howes, A. (2009). The impact of adult support staff on pupils and mainstream schools. Technical Report. In: Research Evidence in Education Library. London: EPPICentre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. Blatchford, P., Bassett, P., Brown, P., Koutsoubou, M. , Martin, C. , Russell, A. and Webster, R. , with Rubie-Davies, C. (2009). The impact of support staff in schools. Results from the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff project. (Strand 2 Wave 2) (DCSF-RR148). London: Department for Children, Schools and Families. Bowyer-Crane, C. , Snowling, M. J., Duff, F. J., Fieldsend, E. , Carroll, J. M. , Miles, J., . & Hulme, C. (2008). Improving early language and literacy skills: Differential effects of an oral language versus a phonology with reading intervention. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49(4), 422-432. Brown, K. J., Morris, D. , & Fields, M. (2005). Intervention after grade 1: Serving increased numbers of struggling readers effectively. Journal of Literacy Research, 37(1), 61-94.