Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of rare copy number variants in high burden schizophrenia families

Over the last years, genome‐wide studies consistently showed an increased burden of rare copy number variants (CNVs) in schizophrenia patients, supporting the “common disease, rare variant” hypothesis in at least a subset of patients. We hypothesize that in families with a high burden of disease, and thus probably a high genetic load influencing disease susceptibility, rare CNVs might be involved in the etiology of schizophrenia. We performed a genome‐wide CNV analysis in the index patients of eight families with multiple schizophrenia affected members, and consecutively performed a detailed family analysis for the most relevant CNVs. One index patient showed a DRD5 containing duplication. A second index patient presented with an NRXN1 containing deletion and two adjacent duplications containing MYT1L and SNTG2. Detailed analysis in the subsequent families showed segregation of the identified CNVs. With this study we show the importance of screening high burden families for rare CNVs, which will not only broaden our knowledge concerning the molecular genetic mechanisms involved in schizophrenia but also allow the use of the obtained genetic data to provide better clinical care to these families in general and to non‐symptomatic causal CNV carriers in particular. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Combination Therapy in the Management of Atrophic Acne Scars

Background: Atrophic acne scars are difficult to treat. The demand for less invasive but highly effective treatment for scars is growing. Objective: To assess the efficacy of combination therapy using subcision, microneedling and 15% trichloroacetic acid (TCA) peel in the management of atrophic scars. Materials and Methods: Fifty patients with atrophic acne scars were graded using Goodman and Baron Qualitative grading. After subcision, dermaroller and 15% TCA peel were performed alternatively at 2-weeks interval for a total of 6 sessions of each. Grading of acne scar photographs was done pretreatment and 1 month after last procedure. Patients own evaluation of improvement was assessed. Results: Out of 16 patients with Grade 4 scars, 10 (62.5%) patients improved to Grade 2 and 6 (37.5%) patients improved to Grade 3 scars. Out of 22 patients with Grade 3 scars, 5 (22.7%) patients were left with no scars, 2 (9.1%) patients improved to Grade 1and 15 (68.2%) patients improved to Grade 2. All 11 (100%) patients with Grade 2 scars were left with no scars. There was high level of patient satisfaction. Conclusion: This combination has shown good results in treating not only Grade 2 but also severe Grade 4 and 3 scars.
Buccoadhesive gels of glibenclamide: A means for achieving enhanced bioavailability

The aim of the present study was to formulate and evaluate buccoadhesive gels of model drug, glibenclamide indented as an alternate route of drug delivery to have enhanced bioavailability. The buccoadhesive gels were prepared by solution polymerization technique containing Hydroxy Propyl Methyl Cellulose (HPMC, E15 LV) and Carbopol (CP, 934P). An apparatus, simulating the in-vivo conditions of the mouth was designed in order to assess in-vitro release kinetics of the prepared gels. The gels were also evaluated for buccoadhesive strength, hydration, and swelling index, and viscosity. In-vivo evaluation for pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties of the optimized gel was done in rabbits. The drug release of buccoadhesive gels through rabbit buccal mucosa increased significantly (p < 0.05) by the use of penetration enhancers. The release kinetics followed Higuchi model with release mechanism being Fickian diffusion. In-vivo results of the optimized gel (2% CP: 2% HPMC) revealed that the gel successfully prevented severe hypoglycemia, showed sustained action, and enhanced relative bioavailability with and without penetration enhancers as compared to the marketed formulation. The buccoadhesive gels could possibly be a means for alternative dosage form in avoiding first pass metabolism and ensuring enhanced bioavailability for glibenclamide.
Reduced code size modulo scheduling in the absence of hardware support

Modulo scheduling is a very effective instruction scheduling technique that exploits Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) in loop bodies by overlapping the execution of successive iterations. Unfortunately, modulo scheduling has been shown to cause heavy code expansion. To avoid the penalties of code expansion, some processors have dedicated hardware support for modulo scheduled loops. However, this dedicated hardware support has a cost in chip area, cycle time, processor complexity, and compiler complexity. This paper shows that the right combination of scheduling heuristics combined with speculative modulo scheduling can significantly reduce code expansion. In addition, several code generation schema heuristics are proposed to further reduce code expansion. The evaluations show that loops can be effectively modulo scheduled with an average code expansion only 1.5 times the original loop size. Compared with a state of the art modulo scheduler, our code size sensitive heuristics reduce the size of embedded domain benchmarks binaries by 30% on average. While performance is mostly unchanged, some applications show speed-ups up to 20% due to a reduction in instruction cache capacity misses.
Stereo panorama with a single camera

Full panoramic images, covering 360 degrees, can be created either by using panoramic cameras or by mosaicing together many regular images. Creating panoramic views in stereo, where one panorama is generated for the left eye, and another panorama is generated for the right eye is more problematic. Earlier attempts to mosaic images from a rotating pair of stereo cameras faced severe problems of parallax and of scale changes. A new family of multiple viewpoint image projections, the Circular Projections, is developed. Two panoramic images taken using such projections can serve as a panoramic stereo pair. A system is described to generates a stereo panoramic image using circular projections from images or video taken by a single rotating camera. The system works in real-time on a PC. It should be noted that the stereo images are created without computation of 3D structure, and the depth effects are created only in the viewer's brain.
Using x-ray tomography and lattice Boltzmann modeling to evaluate pore-scale processes in porous media

I Preface The present thesis " Using X-ray tomography and lattice Boltzmann modeling to evaluate pore-scale processes in porous media " has been submitted as a part of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). are thanked for their help and guidance throughout the study. Especially thanks to Dorthe Wildenschild for introducing me to the fascinating yet occasionally frustrating world of experimental work using X-ray tomography. I enjoyed and appreciated working in the laboratory with Dorthe Wildenschild and former Ph.D.-student Katherine A. Culligan. A special thanks also goes to Marcel Schaap without whom the modeling part of my Ph.D.-project could not have been done. Marcel Schaap always showed great patience and willingness to discuss questions and help with any modeling problems, for this I am very grateful. I would also like to thank former Ph.D.-student Petri de Willigen for a very beneficial collaboration on modeling issues, which I profited greatly from and helped keep me on track. The first part of the thesis gives an introduction to the subjects relevant to my Ph.D.-project and an overview of what I have worked with during my study. It summarizes the main results gained during the project and introduces the remainder of the thesis consisting of five journal papers. The first four papers deal with some of the laboratory work that I have been involved in. All experimental work in the second, third, and fourth paper were performed in very close collaboration with the first and second authors of the papers. These three papers have all been published or submitted for publication, whereas the first paper has not been submitted for publication yet. The last paper presents work using numerical modeling and is in a draft format not yet submitted for publication. Abstract A combination of experimental work and numerical modeling was used to investigate pore-scale two-fluid-phase flow in sand and glass bead porous media systems. The experimental work made use of the non-intrusive and non-destructive imaging technique X-ray computed tomography (CT) to visualize and quantify the experimental pore-scale systems. Both a medical CT-scanner and a high resolution synchrotron based scanner system were employed. Numerical modeling of the pore-scale processes was done using a lattice Boltzmann model. Using a medical CT-scanner and gravimetric measurements three different techniques for achieving full saturation as initial condition in a sand sample were evaluated. It was found that venting the sample …
Learning Multimodal Attention LSTM Networks for Video Captioning

Automatic generation of video caption is a challenging task as video is an information-intensive media with complex variations. Most existing methods, either based on language templates or sequence learning, have treated video as a flat data sequence while ignoring intrinsic multimodality nature. Observing that different modalities (e.g., frame, motion, and audio streams), as well as the elements within each modality, contribute differently to the sentence generation, we present a novel deep framework to boost video captioning by learning Multimodal Attention Long-Short Term Memory networks (MA-LSTM). Our proposed MA-LSTM fully exploits both multimodal streams and temporal attention to selectively focus on specific elements during the sentence generation. Moreover, we design a novel child-sum fusion unit in the MA-LSTM to effectively combine different encoded modalities to the initial decoding states. Different from existing approaches that employ the same LSTM structure for different modalities, we train modality-specific LSTM to capture the intrinsic representations of individual modalities. The experiments on two benchmark datasets (MSVD and MSR-VTT) show that our MA-LSTM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with 52.3 BLEU@4 and 70.4 CIDER-D metrics on MSVD dataset, respectively.
Development of a System for Genetic Manipulation ofBartonella bacilliformis

ABSTRACT Lack of a system for site-specific genetic manipulation has severely hindered studies on the molecular biology of allBartonella species. We report the first site-specific mutagenesis and complementation for a Bartonella species. A highly transformable strain of B. bacilliformis, termed JB584, was isolated and found to exhibit a significant increase in transformation efficiency with the broad-host-range plasmid pBBR1MCS-2, relative to wild-type strains. Restriction analyses of genomic preparations with the methylation-sensitive restriction enzymesClaI and StuI suggest that strain JB584 possesses a dcm methylase mutation that contributes to its enhanced transformability. A suicide plasmid, pUB1, which contains a polylinker, a pMB1 replicon, and a nptI kanamycin resistance cassette, was constructed. An internal 508-bp fragment of the B. bacilliformis flagellin gene (fla) was cloned into pUB1 to generate pUB508, a fla-targeting suicide vector. Introduction of pUB508 into JB584 by electroporation generated eight Kanr clones of B. bacilliformis. Characterization of one of these strains, termed JB585, indicated that allelic exchange between pUB508 andfla had occurred. Analysis by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, immunoblotting, and electron microscopy showed that synthesis of flagellin encoded byfla and secretion/assembly of flagella were abolished. Complementation of fla in trans was accomplished with a pBBR1MCS recombinant containing the entire wild-type fla gene (pBBRFLAG). These data conclusively show that inactivation of fla results in a bald, nonmotile phenotype and that pMB1 and REP replicons make suitable B. bacilliformis suicide and shuttle vectors, respectively. When used in conjunction with the highly transformable strain JB584, this system for site-specific genetic manipulation and complementation provides a new venue for studying the molecular biology of B. bacilliformis.
Sarcopenia impairs survival in patients with potentially curable hepatocellular carcinoma

A reduction in skeletal muscle mass (sarcopenia) independently predicts poor survival in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) undergoing treatment with curative intent. Whether this is due to an increased risk of recurrence and disease specific death, or due to an increased risk of postoperative morbidity and mortality is currently unclear. In this study, we investigate the association between sarcopenia and death in a cohort of HCC patients undergoing treatment with curative intent.
The effect of therapeutic horseback riding on 5 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a pilot study.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the effects of therapeutic horseback riding on behavior, health-related quality of life, and motor performance in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). DESIGN The study employed a time series quasi-experimental design with two pretests and two post-tests conducted 8 weeks apart. SETTING/LOCATION The study was conducted at a riding school in Levanger, Norway. SUBJECTS The subjects comprised a convenience sample of 5 children aged 10-11 years with ADHD. METHODS Subjects received a 1-hour therapeutic horseback riding twice a week for 8 weeks as intervention. OUTCOME MEASURES Behavior and health-related quality of life was assessed using Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and The KINDL(R)-Health-Related Quality of Life Questionnaire, respectively. The Modified Function-Neurological Assessment and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children assessed the subject's motor performance. RESULTS The pre- and post-tests scores were compared with the Wilcoxon paired sample tests and the Friedman test for nonparametric multiple test samples. Positive differences (p≤0.05) between the test results at pretest 2 and post-test 1 were noted for the behavior SDQ subscore "Total difficulties" reported by children (12.8±5.8), by parents (16.6±8.2), and by teachers (15.0±5.2). A significant difference (p<0.05) for the "Total difficulties" in SDQ was found between all 4 tests. In relation to quality of life, significant differences in the "Total score" (67.2±14.7) were reported by the children themselves. The motor performance improved after the intervention. The effect sizes and power were established. CONCLUSIONS The results of the present study indicate that therapeutic horseback riding had a positive effect on 5 children with ADHD in several domains of the social role behavior, quality of life, and motor performance. This pilot study constitutes a good scientific prospect for future studies.
Influence of Alkyl Chain Branching Positions on the Hole Mobilities of Polymer Thin‐Film Transistors

Four polymers that contain alkyl chains branched at different positions on the polymer backbone are prepared. A polymer with 4-decyltetradecyl chains gives an impressive mobility of 3.62 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) . This may arise from tighter polymer packing as well as stacking conformation change of the polymer backbone induced by the branching of the alkyl chains.
An intervention study of the relations of positive affect to the coping strategy of ‘finding positive meaning’ and health

This study examined the relations of positive affect (PA) to the coping strategy of ‘finding positive meaning’ and to health. Participants in the intervention group (29 university students) wrote about a happy event once a week in an experimental room and noted happy events each day as homework for four consecutive weeks. In addition, they received a small present each time they left the room after writing. Participants in the control group (29 university students) wrote about and noted trivial neutral events instead of happy events, and they did not receive any small presents. Results showed that PA induced by this manipulation did not significantly enhance coping but did significantly improve health status on several self-report scales.
Physicochemical properties of endodontic sealers of different bases

Objective To assess the setting time (ST), flow (FL), radiopacity (RD), solubility (SB) and dimensional change following setting (DC) of different sealers (AH Plus®, Polifil, Apexit Plus®, Sealapex®, Endométhasone® and Endofill® according to American National Standards Institute/American Dental Association (ANSI/ADA) Specification 57. Material and methods Five samples of each material were used for each test. For ST, cast rings were filled with sealers and tested with a Gilmore needle. For FL, the sealer was placed on a glass plate. After 180 s, another plate with 20 g and a load of 100 g were applied on the material, and the diameters of the discs formed were measured. In RD, circular molds were filled with the sealers, radiographed and analyzed using Digora software. For SB, circular molds were filled with the sealers, a nylon thread was placed inside the material and another glass plate was positioned on the set, pressed and stored at 37ºC. Samples were weighed, placed in water, dried and reweighed. The water used for SB was analyzed by atomic absorption spectrometry. For DC, circular molds were filled with the sealers, covered by glass plates and stored at 37ºC. Samples were measured and stored in water for 30 days. After this period, they were dryed and measured again. Results Regarding ST, AH Plus®, Apexit® and Endofil® sealers are in accordance with ANSI/ADA standards. Endométhasone's manufacturer did not mention the ST; Polifil is an experimental sealer and Sealapex® did not set. Considering RD, SB and DC, all sealers were in accordance with ANSI/ADA. The spectrometric analysis showed that a significant amount of K+ and Zn2+ ions was released from Apexit Plus® and Endofill®, respectively. Conclusion Except for DC, all other physicochemical properties of the tested sealers conformed to ANSI/ADA requirements.
EVOLUTION OF PREY BEHAVIOR IN RESPONSE TO CHANGES IN PREDATION REGIME: DAMSELFLIES IN FISH AND DRAGONFLY LAKES

Abstract In a large behavioral experiment we reconstructed the evolution of behavioral responses to predators to explore how interactions with predators have shaped the evolution of their prey's behavior. All Enallagma damselfly species reduced both movement and feeding in the presence of coexisting predators. Some Enallagma species inhabit water bodies with both fish and dragonflies, and these species responded to the presence of both predators, whereas other Enallagma species inhabit water bodies that have only large dragonflies as predators, and these species only responded to the presence of dragonflies. Lineages that shifted to live with large dragonflies showed no evolution in behaviors expressed in the presence of dragonflies, but they evolved greater movement in the absence of predators and greater movement and feeding in the presence of fish. These results suggest that Enallagma species have evolutionarily lost the ability to recognize fish as a predator. Because species coexisting with only dragonfly predators have also evolved the ability to escape attacking dragonfly predators by swimming, the decreased predation risk associated with foraging appears to have shifted the balance of the foraging/predation risk trade-off to allow increased activity in the absence of mortality threats to evolve in these lineages. Our results suggest that evolution in response to changes in predation regime may have greater consequences for characters expressed in the absence of mortality threats because of how the balance between the conflicting demands of growth and predation risk are altered.
Pressure-induced exotic states in rare earth hexaborides

Finding the exotic phenomena in strongly correlated electron systems (SCESs) and understanding the corresponding microphysics have long been the research frontiers of condensed matter physics. The remarkable examples for the intriguing phenomena discovered in past years include unconventional superconductivity, heavy Fermion behaviors, giant magneto-resistance and so on. A fascinating type of rare earth hexaboride RB6 (R = Sm, Yb, Eu and Ce) belongs to a strongly correlated electron system (SCES), but shows unusual ambient-pressure and high-pressure behaviors beyond the phenomena mentioned above. Particularly, the recent discovery of the coexistence of an unusual metallic surface state and an insulating bulk state in SmB6, known to be a Kondo insulator decades ago, by theoretical calculations and many experimental measurements creates new interest for the investigation of the RB6. This significant progress encourages people to revisit the RB6 with an attempt to establish a new physics that links the SCES and the unusual metallic surface state which is a common feature of a topological insulator (TI). It is well known that pressure has the capability of tuning the electronic structure and modifying the ground state of solids, or even inducing a quantum phase transition which is one of the kernel issues in studies of SCESs. In this brief review, we will describe the progress in high pressure studies on the RB6 based on our knowledge and research interests, mainly focusing on the pressure-induced phenomena in YbB6 and SmB6, especially on the quantum phase transitions and their connections with the valence state of the rare earth ions. Moreover, some related high-pressure results obtained from CeB6 and EuB6 are also included. Finally, a summary is given in the conclusions and perspectives section.
Estimation of close sinusoids in colored noise and model discrimination

This paper considers the estimation of the two close dominant frequencies in the signal when it is known a priori that the observation is a sum of two close sinusoids and an additive colored noise whose spectral density is unknown. Earlier attempts have assumed the additive noise to be independent. Next we develop decision rules for checking whether the observed signal has only one sinusoid or two close sinusoids. All of the earlier studies assumed that there are two close sinusoids in the signal. Another model discrimination problem considered is the determination of the causal structure of the observed periodicity. A rule is given to test whether the observation comes from a sinusoid plus additive noise, possible colored, or the observation comes from a stationary autoregressive model. We also present a numerical study showing the efficacy of the robust estimation procedure for estimating the two frequencies and the decision rules for checking the number of dominant frequencies and the causal mechanism. Finally, we compare the proposed method to well-known methods used for two close sinusoids in white noise.