Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
External Quality Assessment/Proficiency Testing and Internal Quality Control for the PFA-100 and PFA-200: An Update

Abstract Platelet function testing is an essential component of comprehensive hemostasis evaluation within the framework of bleeding and/or bruising investigations, and it may also be performed to evaluate antiplatelet medication effects. Globally, the platelet function analyzer (PFA)-100 (Siemens Healthcare, Marburg, Germany) is the most used primary hemostasis-screening instrument and has also been recently remodeled/upgraded to the PFA-200. The PFA-100 is sensitive to a wide range of associated disorders, including platelet function defects and von Willebrand disease (VWD), as well as to various antiplatelet medications. The PFA-100 is also useful in therapy monitoring, especially in VWD. External quality assessment (EQA) (or proficiency testing) and internal quality control (IQC) are critical to ensuring quality of test practice, inclusive of all hemostasis tests. However, both EQA and IQC for platelet function testing, including the PFA-100, is logistically challenging, given theoretical requirements for production, storage, and shipment of large volumes of “stabilized” normal and pathological blood/platelets covering both normal function plus a wide variety of potential defects. We accordingly describe the development and testing of novel feasible approaches to both EQA and IQC of PFA-100/PFA-200 instruments, whereby a range of formulated “platelet function antagonist” materials are utilized. For EQA purposes, these are distributed to participants, and citrated normal whole blood collected on site is then added locally, thereby creating test material that can be locally evaluated. Several exercises have been conducted by the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia Quality Assurance Program (RCPAQAP) over the past 6 years. A total of 26 challenges, with most designed to mimic moderate to severe primary hemostasis defects, have been tested in 26 to 50 laboratories depending on the year of dispatch. Numerical results for PFA-100/PFA-200 closure times (CTs) and interpretive comments supplied by participants are analyzed by the RCPAQAP. During this period, reported CTs for each challenge were within limits of expectation and good reproducibility was evidenced by repeated challenges. Coefficients of variation (CVs) generated for challenges using the two major PFA-100/PFA-200 cartridge types (collagen/adenosine diphosphate and collagen/epinephrine) are always similar to those obtained using native whole blood, and in general range from 15 to 25%. Interpretations are also in general consistent with expectations and test data provided by laboratories. The EQA created material has also been assessed within the context of possible IQC material. In conclusion, EQA and IQC processes for the PFA-100/PFA-200 have been developed that include highly reproducible test challenge processes, not only supporting the concept that EQA/IQC is possible for platelet function testing but also providing a valuable mechanism for monitoring and improving laboratory performance in this area.
An Optimal Transformation for Discriminant and Principal Component Analysis

A general method is proposed to describe multivariate data sets using discriminant analysis and principal-component analysis. First, the problem of finding K discriminant vectors in an L-class data set is solved and compared to the solution proposed in the literature for two-class problems and the classical solution for L-class data sets. It is shown that the method proposed is better than the classical method for L classes and is a generalization of the optimal set of discriminant vectors proposed for two-class problems. Then the method is combined with a generalized principal-component analysis to permit the user to define the properties of each successive computed vector. All the methods were tested using measurements made on various kinds of flowers (IRIS data). >
Lifetime cognitive function and timing of the natural menopause

Background: There is evidence that ovarian steroids influence both reproductive aging and neural development. Objective: We investigated the relationship between menopause and lifetime cognitive function in a prospective birth cohort study. Methods: Participants were 1,572 women enrolled in the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (the British 1946 birth cohort). By age 50, 245 women were postmenopausal, 724 were pre- or perimenopausal, 288 had had a hysterectomy or bilateral oophorectomy, and 291 women had started taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) before their menopause. The remaining 24 women, for various reasons, could not be classified into any of these groups. We investigated the association between cognitive function at ages 8, 11, 15, 26, and 43 years and menopause timing using Cox proportional hazard models, censoring for hysterectomy and bilateral oophorectomy, and initially for HRT use. The effect of including HRT use before menopause as an additional outcome was investigated using a competing risks analysis. Results: Higher cognitive scores were associated with later menopause. The effect was strongest in childhood. This finding could not be explained by a variety of potential confounders, including early social background, physical development, education, adult social class, parity, smoking, and alcohol consumption. Conclusions: Childhood cognitive function is related to timing of the natural menopause. Both may be influenced by ovarian steroids across the life-span.
Cultural Resources and the Gap between Educational Theory and Practice.

One source of potential failure in fostering reforms in education is educators’ cap-tivity between an educational manifesto—a conscious ideology or theory, which aimsto guide educational practice—and dominant cultural resources that may prevent theactualization of the manifesto. The aim of this paper is to raise educators’ awarenessof this issue and to illustrate, through the qualitative analysis of an educationalactivity, the dynamics in which an educational manifesto is imprisoned by culturalresources.
eCONSULTS TO ENDOCRINOLOGISTS IMPROVE ACCESS AND CHANGE PRIMARY CARE PROVIDER BEHAVIOR.

OBJECTIVE To describe the impact of an eConsult service on access to endocrinologists along with its influence on changing primary care provider (PCP) course of action and referral behaviors. METHODS Established in 2011, the Champlain BASE (Building Access to Specialist Care via eConsult) service allows PCPs to access specialist care in lieu of traditional face-to-face referrals. We conducted a cross-sectional study of eConsult cases submitted to endocrinologists by PCPs between April 15, 2011 and January 31, 2015. Usage data and PCP responses to a mandatory closeout survey were analyzed to determine eConsult response times, PCP practice behavior, referral outcomes, and provider satisfaction. Each eConsult was coded according to clinical topic and question type based on established taxonomies. RESULTS A total of 180 PCPs submitted 464 eConsults to endocrinology during the study period. Specialist median response time was 7 hours, with 90% of responses occurring within 3 days. PCPs received a new or additional course of action in 62% of submitted cases. An unnecessary face-to-face referral was avoided in 44% of all eConsults and in 67% of cases where the PCP initially contemplated requesting a referral. Over 95% of cases were rated at least 4 out of 5 in value for PCPs and their patients. CONCLUSION The use of eConsult improves access to endocrinologists by providing timely, highly rated practice-changing clinical advice while reducing the need for patients to attend face-to-face office visits. ABBREVIATIONS BASE = Building Access to Specialist Advice through eConsult PCP = primary care physician UCSF = University of California San Francisco.
Regional Distribution of Paired Helical Filaments and Normal Tau Proteins in Aging and in Alzheimer's Disease with and without Occipital Lobe Involvement

A characteristic hallmark of Alzheimer''s disease is the presence of neurofibrillary tangles which consist of paired helical filaments (PHFs) in the brain. Tau protein, which is normally an axonal microtubule-associated protein, becomes incorporated into PHFs that accumulate in the somatodendritic compartment of neurons in Alzheimer''s disease. We have examined the regional distribution of PHF-bound tau and normal tau proteins in aging and in Alzheimer''s disease using immunoassays which selectively measure these two immunochemically distinct presentations of tau protein in brain tissue. Normal, soluble tau protein levels were decreased in Alzheimer''s disease, the most affected regions being frontal and temporal cortices. Accumulation of tau protein in PHFs, that was restricted largely to the grey matter, was greatest in entorhinal and temporal cortices. The PHF-bound tau content, measured biochemically, matched the neurofibrillary pathology observed immunohistochemically. In 2 out of 14 Alzheimer''s disease cases, very high PHF levels were observed in the occipital lobe. This correlated with an abundance of tau-immunoreactive dystrophic neurites throughout the neuropil and around neuritic plaques in the absence of significant numbers of neurofibrillary tangles.
Patterns of Psycho-Stimulant Drug use Amongst ‘Social/Operational Users’: Implications for Services

This paper presents the results of a survey which aimed to explore: 1) patterns of drug use amongst a group of young people who had used psycho-stimulant drugs at least six times during the previous year; 2) any problems this group had experienced as a result of their drug use; and 3) whether or not information and advice could be targeted at this group. Discussion relates the findings of this study to other small scale studies of psycho-stimulant users. The challenge of acting to benefit both socio-operational users of drugs and the wider society within which they live is noted.
DANN: a deep learning approach for annotating the pathogenicity of genetic variants

UNLABELLED Annotating genetic variants, especially non-coding variants, for the purpose of identifying pathogenic variants remains a challenge. Combined annotation-dependent depletion (CADD) is an algorithm designed to annotate both coding and non-coding variants, and has been shown to outperform other annotation algorithms. CADD trains a linear kernel support vector machine (SVM) to differentiate evolutionarily derived, likely benign, alleles from simulated, likely deleterious, variants. However, SVMs cannot capture non-linear relationships among the features, which can limit performance. To address this issue, we have developed DANN. DANN uses the same feature set and training data as CADD to train a deep neural network (DNN). DNNs can capture non-linear relationships among features and are better suited than SVMs for problems with a large number of samples and features. We exploit Compute Unified Device Architecture-compatible graphics processing units and deep learning techniques such as dropout and momentum training to accelerate the DNN training. DANN achieves about a 19% relative reduction in the error rate and about a 14% relative increase in the area under the curve (AUC) metric over CADD's SVM methodology. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION All data and source code are available at https://cbcl.ics. uci.edu/public_data/DANN/.
Expert-Novice Differences in Perceiving and Processing Visual Classroom Information

Findings from a study designed to examine differences in ex pert and novice teachers' information processing are pre sented. Specifically, results are described which suggest differ ences in the ways expert, novice, and "postulant" teachers perceive, understand, monitor, and process visual information in classrooms. Expert, novice, and postulant subjects were asked to view a series of slides taken in science and mathema tics classrooms and to discuss their perceptions about and reactions to visual stimuli. Subjects were asked to respond to structured interview questions both orally and in writing; the responses were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Protocols and written responses were analyzed through a multi-step, itera tive process designed to determine patterns, trends, and differ ences in both kind and quantity of responses. Results suggested that experts, novices, and postulants differed with respect to their abilities to perceive and interpret classroom information. Experts appeared better able to weigh the import of one piece of visual information against another, to form connections among pieces of information, and to represent management and instructional situations into meaningful problem units. In general, experts appeared to possess comparatively richer schemata for ascribing meaning to visual classroom information.
mmunomodulatory therapies for sepsis : unexpected effects with macrolides vangelos

Despite intensive efforts to increase our knowledge of the inflammatory pathways involved in the pathogenesis of sepsis, several clinical trials of agents aimed at modulating the immune response of the host, such as anti-endotoxin antibodies, anti-tumour necrosis factor (TNF) antibodies and soluble TNF receptors, have failed to disclose any definite clinical benefit. The same applies to the administration of low-dose hydrocortisone as well as intense glucose control by continuous insulin infusion. Macrolides are a traditional class of antimicrobials proven to act as modulators of the host’s response in chronic lung disorders such as diffuse panbronchiolitis and cystic fibrosis. The favourable outcome of communityacquired pneumonia treated with the combination of a -lactam and a macrolide is partly attributed to their immunomodulatory properties. Based on favourable responses to intravenous administration of clarithromycin in experimental models of sepsis by susceptible and multidrug-resistant Gram-negative isolates, a randomised clinical trial was conducted in 200 patients with ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and sepsis (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov; NCT00297674). Clarithromycin was administered at a dose of 1 g within 1 h of infusion for three consecutive days. Analysis revealed a considerable benefit of clarithromycin in shortening the time to resolution of VAP and to de-intubation from mechanical ventilation. The relative risk of death by septic shock and multiple organ dysfunction was 19.00 among placebo-treated patients; it was reduced to 3.78 among clarithromycin-treated patients. These results render new perspectives for the future application of clarithromycin as an immunomodulatory therapy
Young children's divergent movement ability: a study revisited

The effectiveness of Mosston and Ashworth's [2008. Teaching physical education (1st online ed.). Retrieved September 10, 2010, from http://www.spectrumofteachingstyles. org/ebook] divergent discovery style of teaching on eight-year-old children's critical thinking was explored in this study. The participants (N = 58) were randomly assigned to a treatment group (divergent discovery, n = 29) or a control group (no instruction, n = 29). The same skill themes and movement concepts were taught to the learners in both groups (20 45-minute lessons). Three fundamental movement tasks were employed to measure divergent movement ability (DMA), an aspect of critical thinking, prior to and after instructional intervention. A 2 × 2 (group × gender) analysis of variance on the post-test scores showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups favouring the treatment group (p < 0.041) and no significant gender effect or interactive effect. A separate 2 × 2 (group × test) repeated measures analysis of variance showed a significant improvement of DMA for the treatment group (p < 0.001). The study supports certain tenets set forth by Mosston and Ashworth (2008) for the divergent discovery style.
Quantification of left ventricular function with thallium-201 and technetium-99m-sestamibi myocardial gated SPECT.

UNLABELLED Myocardial gated SPECT with 99mTc-sestamibi has been used to quantify left ventricular function. The purpose of this study was to determine if myocardial gated SPECT with 201Tl was possible and reliable to quantify left ventricular function. METHODS One hundred and four patients referred for a myocardial perfusion study were included. Myocardial gated SPECT acquisition was performed 15 min after the intravenous injection of 111 MBq (3mCi) 201Tl and at 1 hr postinjection of 925 MBq (25 mCi) 99mTc-sestamibi. A commercially available automated myocardial gated SPECT processing software was used. Parameters evaluated were left ventricular ejection fractions (LVEF), end-diastolic volumes (EDV), end-systolic volumes (ESV) and stroke volumes (SV). RESULTS The correlation between gated SPECT with 201Tl and gated SPECT with 99mTc-sestamibi was: r = 0.93 for LVEF, 0.92 for EDV, 0.96 for ESV and 0.68 for SV. CONCLUSION Myocardial gated SPECT quantification of left ventricular function with 201Tl was possible and as reliable as gated SPECT with 99mTc-sestamibi. There was excellent correlation between gated SPECT with 201Tl and gated SPECT with 99mTc-sestamibi. In addition to assessment of myocardial perfusion, myocardial function and viability can be quantified in a single gated 201Tl study.
The effects of Suramin on Ca2+ activated force and sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ release in skinned fast‐twitch skeletal muscle fibers of the rat

Suramin has long been used in the treatment of various human diseases. Intravenous infusions of Suramin are commonly administered to patients over extended periods of time but there are a number of significant contraindications with peripheral muscle weakness being one of the most frequently reported. Previous work has shown that even after a single infusion (300 mg kg−1) Suramin remains in skeletal muscle in effective concentrations (11.6 μg mL−1; 84 days) for prolonged periods. These observations provide a strong rationale for investigation of the specific effects of Suramin on skeletal muscle function. Single mechanically skinned fibers were directly exposed to Suramin (10, 100 or 500 μmol L−1) for defined durations (2–10 min) in controlled physiological solutions that mimic the intracellular ionic environment of a fiber. Suramin treatment (10–500 μmol L−1) directly affected the contractile apparatus in a dose‐dependent manner causing a decrease in Ca2+‐sensitivity (pCa50 = −log (Ca2+) concentration, where 50% of maximum Ca2+‐ activated force is produced) by 0.14 to 0.42 pCa units and reduction in maximum Ca2+‐activated force by 14 to 62%. Suramin treatment (100 μmol L−1 for 10 min and 500 μmol L−1 for 2 min) also caused development of a Ca2+‐independent force corresponding to 2.89 ± 4.33 and 16.77 ± 7.50% of pretreatment maximum Ca2+‐activated force, respectively. Suramin treatment (100 μmol L−1, 2 min) also increased the rate of sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca2+ release without significant changes in SR Ca2+ uptake. We report new functional effects for Suramin related to alterations in both the contractile apparatus and SR Ca2+‐handling of skeletal muscle that may contribute to the peripheral muscle weakness noted in human pharmacological treatments.
Validity of the Dissociative Experiences Scale in screening for multiple personality disorder: a multicenter study.

OBJECTIVE The Dissociative Experiences Scale has proved a reliable and valid instrument to measure dissociation in many groups, but its capacity to distinguish patients with multiple personality disorder from patients with other psychiatric disorders has not yet been conclusively tested. METHOD A discriminant analysis was performed to classify 1,051 subjects as having or not having multiple personality disorder. Another discriminant analysis was performed on a subgroup of 883 subjects more closely representing patients in a typical psychiatric facility in terms of base rates of dissociative disorders. A cutoff score of 30 was also used to classify subjects, and Bayes's theorem, which allows for the calculation of the positive predictive value and the negative predictive value of a screening test, was applied. RESULTS According to discriminant analysis of the total study group, the scale's sensitivity was 76% and its specificity was also 76%; according to discriminant analysis of the more representative subgroup, the scale's sensitivity was 76% and its specificity was 85%. Use of the cutoff score of 30 produced similar results. Results of the application of Bayes's theorem showed that 17% of the subjects scoring 30 or higher would actually have multiple personality disorder and 99% of those scoring less than 30 would not have multiple personality disorder. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that the Dissociative Experiences Scale performs quite well as a screening instrument to identify subjects with multiple personality disorder. In addition, the consistency of responses to scale items across centers indicates that the symptoms reported by patients with multiple personality disorder are highly similar across diverse geographic centers. This consistency supports the reliability and validity of the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder across centers.
Changes in Criminal Thinking and Identity in Novice and Experienced Inmates

Criminal thinking and identity were assessed in 55 federal prison inmates with no prior prison experience (novice inmates) and 93 inmates with at least one prior adult incarceration and 5 or more years in prison (experienced inmates). Changes on the Self-Assertion/Deception scale of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Syles (PICTS) and Centrality subscale of the Social Identity as a Criminal(SIC) questionnaire were congruent with the prisonization hypothesis and a priori predictions that measures of criminal thinking and identity would rise in novice inmates between initial assessment and follow-up but would remain stable in experienced inmates. On the other hand, experienced inmates recorded significant gains on the In-Group Affect subscale of the SIC. Incarceration, it would seem, may promote prisonization in both novice and experienced inmates.
Bidirectional Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation

This paper investigates the effect of direction in phrase-based statistial machine translation decoding. We compare a typical phrase-based machine translation decoder using a left-to-right decoding strategy to a right-to-left decoder. We also investigate the effectiveness of a bidirectional decoding strategy that integrates both mono-directional approaches, with the aim of reducing the effects due to language specificity. Our experimental evaluation was extensive, based on 272 different language pairs, and gave the surprising result that for most of the language pairs, it was better decode from right-to-left than from left-to-right. As expected the relative performance of left-to-right and right-to-left strategies proved to be highly language dependent. The bidirectional approach outperformed the both the left-to-right strategy and the right-to-left strategy, showing consistent improvements that appeared to be unrelated to the specific languages used for translation. Bidirectional decoding gave rise to an improvement in performance over a left-to-right decoding strategy in terms of the BLEU score in 99% of our experiments.