Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Elevated Alanine Aminotransferase Is Strongly Associated with Incident Metabolic Syndrome: A Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies

Background The incidence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) is rapidly increasing worldwide and associated with alanine aminotransferase (ALT) activity. However, the impact of ALT activity on MetS incidence is inconsistent in published literature. We therefore estimated the association between elevated ALT activity and incident MetS through a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Methods/Principal Findings All published prospective cohort studies on the association between elevated ALT activity and incident MetS were retrieved from Pubmed, Embase, and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). In all, seven prospective cohort studies, with 31545 participants and 2873 cases of incident MetS were recruited. If there was insignificant heterogeneity (P-value>0.05 and I2<50%), the fixed-effect model was used to calculate the pooled relative risks (RRs) of incident MetS induced by raised ALT. Otherwise, the random-effect model was used. The calculated RR was 1.81 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.49–2.14) when the incidence of MetS was compared between the highest versus the lowest classification of ALT activities. The pooled RR was 1.13 (95% CI: 1.11–1.16) in dose-response analysis with 5 units per liter (U/l) of ALT increment. Subgroup analysis suggested that gender disparity might be the main origin of heterogeneity in overall analysis (P = 0.007 between RRs of gender-specific subgroups evaluated with 5 U/l increments of ALT). Women had a higher dose-response risk of MetS incidence (1.38, 95% CI: 1.20–1.55) than men. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis confirmed the stability of results. No publication bias was found in our meta-analysis. Conclusions/Significance Current evidence from prospective studies supports the association between ALT elevation and increasing MetS incidence. This association is closer and more consistent in female population. Further studies are needed to confirm this association and to investigate the potential mechanism of ALT activity on MetS occurrence.
Assessing the Nursing and Midwifery Students Competencies in Communication With Patients With Severe Communication Problems

Background: Clients with communication impairment are at risk for health disparity. Hence, health care workers should be knowledgeable and skillful in communication. However, no studies are available on Iranian nursing and midwifery students’ communication skills with patients with severe communication problems. Objectives: The present study was conducted to investigate Iranian nursing and midwifery students' competencies in communication with patients with severe communication problems. Materials and Methods: This study was performed on all senior nursing and midwifery students of Kashan University of Medical Sciences in spring 2013. Data were collected through a knowledge questionnaire and two checklists for evaluation of skills needed for communication with patients with severe communication problems. Data analysis was performed through independent samples t test, and Fisher’s exact test. Results: In total, 68.8% of the participants were female, 37.6% had a history of part-time job as a nurse or midwife. The mean score of knowledge were 4.41 ± 1.42 and 4.77 ± 1.77 for nursing and midwifery students, respectively and the difference was not significant (P = 0.312). In addition, the mean score of communication skills with deaf patients was 13.23 ± 4.68 and 11.86 ± 5.55 for nursing and midwifery students, respectively and the difference was not significant (P = 0.258). Also, the mean score of communication skills with stutter patients was 23.91 ± 4.17 and 21.25 ± 3.91 for nursing and midwifery students, respectively but the difference was not significant (P = 0.269). Conclusions: Nursing and midwifery students did not significantly differ in terms of communication with patients with severe communication problems. Most of the students had low or very low knowledge and skills in communication with patients with hearing impairment. However, they had better skills in communication with patient with speech problem. Special workshops or training programs are recommended to empower nursing and midwifery students in communication with patients with communication problems.
Vortex Sheet Computations: Roll-Up, Wakes, Separation

Chorin's vortex blob method has been proposed as a way to extend vortex sheet motion past the singularity formation time, into the physically important roll-up regime. Basic questions are: 1. Does the vortex blob method converge to an infinite spiral as the smoothing parameter tends to zero? 2. Do vortex blob computations approximate real fluid motion? This paper will present and discuss three computations which are relevant to these issues: a) periodic roll-up, b) wake patterns in a thin soap film, c) separation at a sharp edge. 1. Introduction. Coherent vortex structures occur in many types of fluid flow such as wakes, jets, and boundary layers. To make progress in the analysis of these flows, one may consider simpler models in which various physical effects are assumed to be small. In the vortex sheet model, a thin shear layer is replaced by a surface across which the tangential component of the fluid velocity has a jump discontinuity. The mathematical study of vortex sheets has advanced in recent years, but many important questions are still open. Vortex sheet motion belongs to the larger field of vortex dynamics, one of the main approaches to understanding fluid turbulence. Careful numerical experiments have played a key role in advancing the analysis and application of the vortex sheet model. Difficulties arise in computing vortex sheet motion due to short wavelength instability, singu­ larity formation, and spiral roll-up. Chorin's vortex blob method (10,11), in which the vortex sheet's velocity is desingularized, has been proposed to deal with these difficulties. Basic questions concerning this approach are: 1. Does the vortex blob method converge to an infinite spiral as the smoothing parameter tends to zero?
Investigation of debonding propagation in aluminum/composite joints under fatigue loading

In this paper, Fracture Mechanics is used to predict debonding propagation in adhesive joint between aluminum and composite plates. Three types of loadings (λ = 0, λ = 0.5, and λ = 1 when λ is the ratio of lateral to in-plane loading) and two types of glass–epoxy composite sequences: [0/90]2s and [0/45/−45/90]s are considered for the composite plate and their results are compared. It was seen that generally the cases with stacking sequence of [0/45/−45/90]s have much shorter lives than cases with [0/90]2s. It was also seen that in cases with λ = 0, the ends of the debonding front propagates forward more than its middle, while in cases with λ = 0.5 or λ = 1 it is vice versa. Moreover, regardless of value of λ, the difference between the debonding propagations of the ends and the middle of the debonding front is very close in cases λ = 0.5 and λ = 1. Another main conclusion was that the non-dimensionalized debonding front profile is almost independent of sequence type or the applied load value.
Cross-Spectral Local Descriptors via Quadruplet Network

This paper presents a novel CNN-based architecture, referred to as Q-Net, to learn local feature descriptors that are useful for matching image patches from two different spectral bands. Given correctly matched and non-matching cross-spectral image pairs, a quadruplet network is trained to map input image patches to a common Euclidean space, regardless of the input spectral band. Our approach is inspired by the recent success of triplet networks in the visible spectrum, but adapted for cross-spectral scenarios, where, for each matching pair, there are always two possible non-matching patches: one for each spectrum. Experimental evaluations on a public cross-spectral VIS-NIR dataset shows that the proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art. Moreover, the proposed technique can also be used in mono-spectral settings, obtaining a similar performance to triplet network descriptors, but requiring less training data.
Preparation and mechanical characterization of chicken feather/PLA composites

Green composites, a bio-based polymer matrix is reinforced by natural fibers, are special class of bio-composites. Interest about green composites is continuously growing because they are environment-friendly. This study describes the preparation and mechanical characterization of green composites using polylactic acid (PLA) matrix including chicken feather fiber (CFF) as reinforcement. Extrusion and an injection molding process were used to prepare CFF/PLA composites at a controlled temperature range. CFF/PLA composites with fiber mass content of 2%, 5%, and 10% were manufactured. The effects of fiber concentration and fiber length on mechanical properties of CFF/PLA composites have been studied. Mechanical properties of composites were investigated by tensile, compression, bending, hardness, and Izod impact testing. The results of experiments indicated that Young's modulus, compressive strength, flexural modulus, and hardness of the PLA reinforced CFF composites are higher but tensile strength, elongation at break, bending strength and impact strength of them are lower than pure PLA. The results indicate that these types of composites can be used for various applications. POLYM. COMPOS. , 2015. © 2015 Society of Plastics Engineers
A network flow approach for simultaneous escape routing in PCB

Simultaneous Escape Routing (SER) is one of the most difficult problems in the Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) routing as the pins from inside of two ICs have to be escaped to the boundaries simultaneously. The ever evolving integrated circuits (ICs) manufacturing techniques have made SER even more difficult by increasing the complexity of these ICs to a whole new level. This increase in complexity of ICs has not only increased the number of pins in an IC but has also reduced the size of the package making SER in PCBs a very hectic task. The SER problem has not been addressed by many studies in the literature and mostly, heuristic algorithms have been proposed in order to solve SER problem which fail to achieve 100 percent route-ability. In this work, we employed network flow approach to solve the SER problem using optimization modeling technique. We propose two optimal algorithms that use integer linear program for testing different sizes of grids to check their efficiency. The analysis and results show the improved efficiency of the proposed algorithms in terms of route-ability, time consumption, independence from grid topology & component pin arrangement.
Soluble Fas ligand released by colon adenocarcinoma cells induces host lymphocyte apoptosis: an active mode of immune evasion in colon cancer

Expression of membrane-bound Fas ligand (mFasL) on colon cancer cells serves as a potential mechanism to inhibit host immune function by inducing apoptosis of host lymphocytes. Membrane-bound FasL can be cleaved and released as a soluble mediator (sFasL), which may spread the apoptosis induction effect. Our study examined whether colon adenocarcinoma cells release sFasL, and induce apoptosis of host lymphocytes without direct cell–cell contact. In 12 consecutive patients with colon adenocarcinoma mFasL was identified in the tumours, sFasL was measured in the sera and apoptosis identified in tumour-infiltrating and peripheral blood lymphocytes. To analyse the function of sFasL, colon cancer cells were primarily cultured; sFasL was isolated from supernatants, measured, incubated with Fas-bearing Jurkat cells, and the resulting apoptosis was analysed. Serum levels of sFasL were significantly elevated in all colon cancer patients with mFasL expression in tumour tissues (n = 8). In these patients, the number of apoptotic lymphocytes was significantly increased within tumour and peripheral blood. Furthermore, sFasL was present in the corresponding supernatants and induced apoptosis of Jurkat cells in a dose-dependent manner. These findings suggest that mFasL-positive colon cancer cells release sFasL, and thus may induce apoptosis of host lymphocytes as a potential mechanism for immune evasion. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer. com
The Application of Mamdani Fuzzy Model for Auto Zoom Function of a Digital Camera

Mamdani Fuzzy Model is an important technique in Computational Intelligence (CI) study. This paper presents an implementation of a supervised learning method based on membership function training in the context of Mamdani fuzzy models. Specifically, auto zoom function of a digital camera is modelled using Mamdani technique. The performance of control method is verified through a series of simulation and numerical results are provided as illustrations.
Real-World Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos

Surveillance videos are able to capture a variety of realistic anomalies. In this paper, we propose to learn anomalies by exploiting both normal and anomalous videos. To avoid annotating the anomalous segments or clips in training videos, which is very time consuming, we propose to learn anomaly through the deep multiple instance ranking framework by leveraging weakly labeled training videos, i.e. the training labels (anomalous or normal) are at video-level instead of clip-level. In our approach, we consider normal and anomalous videos as bags and video segments as instances in multiple instance learning (MIL), and automatically learn a deep anomaly ranking model that predicts high anomaly scores for anomalous video segments. Furthermore, we introduce sparsity and temporal smoothness constraints in the ranking loss function to better localize anomaly during training. We also introduce a new large-scale first of its kind dataset of 128 hours of videos. It consists of 1900 long and untrimmed real-world surveillance videos, with 13 realistic anomalies such as fighting, road accident, burglary, robbery, etc. as well as normal activities. This dataset can be used for two tasks. First, general anomaly detection considering all anomalies in one group and all normal activities in another group. Second, for recognizing each of 13 anomalous activities. Our experimental results show that our MIL method for anomaly detection achieves significant improvement on anomaly detection performance as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. We provide the results of several recent deep learning baselines on anomalous activity recognition. The low recognition performance of these baselines reveals that our dataset is very challenging and opens more opportunities for future work. The dataset is available at: http://crcv.ucf. edu/projects/real-world/
Robust Early Pregnancy Prediction of Later Preeclampsia Using Metabolomic Biomarkers

Preeclampsia is a pregnancy-specific syndrome that causes substantial maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. The etiology is incompletely understood, and there is no clinically useful screening test. Current metabolomic technologies have allowed the establishment of metabolic signatures of preeclampsia in early pregnancy. Here, a 2-phase discovery/validation metabolic profiling study was performed. In the discovery phase, a nested case-control study was designed, using samples obtained at 15±1 weeks' gestation from 60 women who subsequently developed preeclampsia and 60 controls taking part in the prospective Screening for Pregnancy Endpoints cohort study. Controls were proportionally population matched for age, ethnicity, and body mass index at booking. Plasma samples were analyzed using ultra performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. A multivariate predictive model combining 14 metabolites gave an odds ratio for developing preeclampsia of 36 (95% CI: 12 to 108), with an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.94. These findings were then validated using an independent case-control study on plasma obtained at 15±1 weeks from 39 women who subsequently developed preeclampsia and 40 similarly matched controls from a participating center in a different country. The same 14 metabolites produced an odds ratio of 23 (95% CI: 7 to 73) with an area under receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.92. The finding of a consistent discriminatory metabolite signature in early pregnancy plasma preceding the onset of preeclampsia offers insight into disease pathogenesis and offers the tantalizing promise of a robust presymptomatic screening test.
Phenotypic and Genotypic Selection of Microbiota Surviving under Dental Restorations

ABSTRACT The effects of sealing infected carious dentine below dental restorations on the phenotypic and genotypic diversity of the surviving microbiota was investigated. It was hypothesized that the microbiota would be subject to nutrient limitation or nutrient simplification, as it would no longer have access to dietary components or salivary secretion for growth. The available nutrients would be limited primarily to serum proteins passing from the pulp through the patent dentinal tubules to the infected dentine. Ten lesions were treated, and infected dentine was sealed below dental restorations for approximately 5 months. Duplicate standardized samples of infected dentine were taken at baseline and after the removal of the restorations. The baseline microbiota were composed primarily of Lactobacillus spp. , Streptococcus mutans, Streptococcus parasanguinis, Actinomyces israelii, and Actinomyces gerencseriae. None of these taxa were isolated among the microbiota of the dentine samples taken after 5 months, which consisted of only Actinomyces naeslundii, Streptococcus oralis, Streptococcus intermedius, and Streptococcus mitis. The microbiota of the final sample exhibited a significantly (P < 0.001) increased ability to produce glycosidic enzymes (sialidase, β-N-acetylglucosaminidase, and β-galactosidase), which liberate sugars from glycoproteins. The genotypic diversity of S. oralis and A. naeslundii was significantly (P = 0.002 and P = 0.001, respectively) reduced in the final samples. There was significantly (P < 0.001) greater genotypic diversity within these taxa between the pairs of dentine samples taken at baseline than was found in the 5-month samples, indicating that the dentine was more homogenous than it was at baseline. We propose that during the interval between placement of the restorations and their removal, the available nutrient, primarily serum proteins, or the relative simplicity and homogeneity of the nutrient supply significantly affected the surviving microbiota. The surviving microbiota was less complex, based on compositional, phenotypic, and genotypic analyses, than that isolated from carious lesions which were also exposed to salivary secretions and pH perturbations.
The “3-Day Rule” for Stool Tests May Not Apply When Using PCR Panels

aDepartment of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA bCollege of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA cDepartment of Infection Prevention and Control, University of Florida Health Shands Hospital, Gainesville, Florida, USA dDivision of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
Changes in muscarinic acetylcholine receptor expression in form deprivation myopia in guinea pigs.

PURPOSE Muscarinic receptor signaling is involved in ocular development and implicated in myopia. The aims of this study were to identify the presence of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) in normal ocular tissues of guinea pigs and to determine if ocular expression of mRNA and protein changes in guinea pigs with or without form-deprived myopia (FDM). METHODS One- to two-week-old guinea pigs were monocularly treated with a translucent lens. Twenty-one days after the induction of FDM, we collected the retina, choroid, sclera, and iris-ciliary body. We used a semiquantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to detect changes in mRNA expression for mAChRs. Western blotting analysis was used to investigate changes in protein expression for mAChRs. Levels of mAChRs as well as mRNA and protein expression were statistically compared among FDM, internal, and normal eyes. RESULTS We observed expression of mRNA for muscarinic subtypes M1 to M5 in the retina, choroid, sclera, and iris-ciliary body. Proteins for the M1 to M5 subtypes were present in normal ocular tissues. Their molecular weights ranged from 80 kDa for M5 to 52 kDa for M1 as noted on Western blotting. Twenty-one days after the induction of myopia, we observed statistically significant increases in mRNA expression for subtypes M1 (+18.67%) and M4 (+26.48%) as well as in protein expression for M1 (+24.65%) and M4 (+49.11%) in the posterior sclera of FDM-affected eyes (p<0.05 vs. internal control and normal eyes). CONCLUSIONS The ocular tissues of guinea pigs express muscarinic subtypes M1 to M5. In the posterior sclera, expression of the M1 and M4 subtypes significantly increased in FDM eyes. This finding indicates that muscarinic antagonists may have the potential to act directly on the sclera as a strategy to prevent myopia.
Mutations in the RNase H domain of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase affect the initiation of DNA synthesis and the specificity of RNase H cleavage in vivo

Retroviral reverse transcriptases contain a DNA polymerase activity that can copy an RNA or DNA template and an RNase H activity that degrades the viral RNA genome during reverse transcription. RNase H makes both specific and nonspecific cleavages; specific cleavages are used to generate and remove the polypurine tract primer used for plus-strand DNA synthesis and to remove the tRNA primer used for minus-strand DNA synthesis. We generated mutations in an HIV-1-based vector to change amino acids in the RNase H domain that contact either the RNA and DNA strands. Some of these mutations affected the initiation of DNA synthesis, demonstrating an interdependence of the polymerase and RNase H activities of HIV-1 reverse transcription during viral DNA synthesis. The ends of the linear DNA form of the HIV-1 genome are defined by the specific RNase H cleavages that remove the plus- and minus-strand primers; these ends can be joined to form two-long-terminal repeat circles. Analysis of two-long-terminal repeat circle junctions showed that mutations in the RNase H domain affect the specificity of RNase H cleavage.