Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How many measurements are needed for liver stiffness assessment by 2D-Shear Wave Elastography (2D-SWE) and which value should be used: the mean or median?

AIM To analyze how many measurements are needed for non-invasive assessment of liver stiffness (LS) by means of 2D-Shear Wave Elastography (2D-SWE) and if the use of mean of median values of 2D-SWE measurements is needed. METHODS We evaluated 449 consecutive subjects (with or without chronic liver disease) by means of Transient Elastography (TE) and 2D-SWE. We compared the correlation of LS assessed by TE with 2D-SWE measurements when using either the median of 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements or the mean of 3 or 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements. RESULTS We obtained reliable LS measurements by TE in 330/449 subjects (73.5%). From these, in 281 subjects we obtained 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements. The correlation of LS assessed by TE with 2D-SWE values was similar when we used the median value of 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements, the mean value of 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements or the mean value of 3 valid 2D-SWE measurements: r =0.683, r=0.711 and r=0.691, respectively. There were no significant differences between the median value of 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements; the mean value of 5 valid 2D-SWE measurements; or the mean value of 3 valid 2D-SWE measurements: 7.6 kPa, 7.7 kPa and 7.6 kPa, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Our study showed that it is enough to perform 3 valid 2D-SWE measurements and to use the mean value of these measurements.
Early Onset Neonatal Sepsis: The Burden of Group B Streptococcal and E. coli Disease Continues

BACKGROUND: Guidelines for prevention of group B streptococcal (GBS) infection have successfully reduced early onset (EO) GBS disease. Study results suggest that Escherichia coli is an important EO pathogen. OBJECTIVE: To determine EO infection rates, pathogens, morbidity, and mortality in a national network of neonatal centers. METHODS: Infants with EO infection were identified by prospective surveillance at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Neonatal Network centers. Infection was defined by positive culture results for blood and cerebrospinal fluid obtained from infants aged ≤72 hours plus treatment with antibiotic therapy for ≥5 days. Mother and infant characteristics, treatments, and outcomes were studied. Numbers of cases and total live births (LBs) were used to calculate incidence. RESULTS: Among 396 586 LBs (2006–2009), 389 infants developed EO infection (0.98 cases per 1000 LBs). Infection rates increased with decreasing birth weight. GBS (43%, 0.41 per 1000 LBs) and E coli (29%, 0.28 per 1000 LBs) were most frequently isolated. Most infants with GBS were term (73%); 81% with E coli were preterm. Mothers of 67% of infected term and 58% of infected preterm infants were screened for GBS, and results were positive for 25% of those mothers. Only 76% of mothers with GBS colonization received intrapartum chemoprophylaxis. Although 77% of infected infants required intensive care, 20% of term infants were treated in the normal newborn nursery. Sixteen percent of infected infants died, most commonly with E coli infection (33%). CONCLUSION: In the era of intrapartum chemoprophylaxis to reduce GBS, rates of EO infection have declined but reflect a continued burden of disease. GBS remains the most frequent pathogen in term infants, and E coli the most significant pathogen in preterm infants. Missed opportunities for GBS prevention continue. Prevention of E coli sepsis, especially among preterm infants, remains a challenge.
Hyperglycemia in postmenopausal women screened for the metabolic syndrome is associated to increased sexual complaints

Background. Postmenopausal metabolic changes increase cardiovascular risk and impair quality of life (QoL). Despite this, few reports have addressed the association of these changes with female sexuality. Objective. To determine the association between the metabolic syndrome (METS), and its components, and female sexuality. Methods. Data of sexually active postmenopausal women who participated in a METS screening program who filled out the menopause-specific quality of life questionnaire (MENQOL) were assessed. Specifically the sexual domain of the MENQOL was analyzed in regard to mean total and item scores (decreased libido, vaginal dryness, and sexual avoidance). Criteria of the Third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) were used to identify women with the METS. Results. Two hundred six women fulfilled inclusion criteria. Mean age of participants was 54 ± 6.9 years (median: 54 years). Prevalence of the METS in this sexually active postmenopausal series was 39.8%. About 52.9% of them presented abdominal obesity, 35.4% hypertension, 55.8% high triglycerides, 17.5% hyperglycemia, and 59.7% decreased high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C). Women with the METS as compared with those without the syndrome displayed no significant differences in MENQOL sexual scorings (total or of its composing items). Equally there were also no score differences among those presenting any of the five components of the METS, except women with hyperglycemia who significantly displayed a higher total sexual domain score (5.6 ± 2.1 vs. 4.8 ± 2.3, p < 0.05) in association to a higher mean score in the decreased libido item (6.0 ± 2.3 vs. 4.8 ± 2.6, p < 0.01). After controlling for several confounding factors, logistic regression confirmed that women with hyperglycemia were significantly at higher risk for presenting decreased libido (higher item score, OR 2.4, CI 95%: 1.0–5.7, p < 0.05) and more impaired sexuality (higher total MENQOL sexual domain score: OR, 2.5, CI 95%: 1.1–5.4, p < 0.05). Conclusion. Despite the limitations of this study, as assessed with the MENQOL, hyperglycemia in postmenopausal women screened for the METS was associated to a negative impact in sexuality. More research is warranted in this regard.
Use of Mycelial-Phase Sporothrix schenckii Exoantigens in an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay for Diagnosis of Sporotrichosis by Antibody Detection

ABSTRACT An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was developed for specific antibody detection in serum specimens of patients with sporotrichosis. The assay was made with mycelial-phase Sporothrix schenckii exoantigens and was tested against 90 sera from patients with different clinical forms of sporotrichosis. Potential cross-reactions were analyzed with 72 heterologous sera from patients with paracoccidioidomycosis, cryptococcosis, aspergillosis, histoplasmosis, tuberculosis, and American tegumentary leishmaniasis, as well as 76 sera from healthy controls. We found a sensitivity of 97% and a specificity of 89% in this assay. Some cross-reactions were seen, as observed in other immunoassays for the diagnosis of sporotrichosis. The ELISA appears to be especially useful for cutaneous forms of disease, since these are not promptly diagnosed with available immunoprecipitation or agglutination techniques. These results suggest that the ELISA using mycelial-phase S. schenckii exoantigens is a very sensitive diagnostic tool for the serodiagnosis of sporotrichosis and can be used in conjunction with conventional methods of diagnosis, particularly in cases where cross-reactions or false-positive results are experienced with the serodiagnosis.
Sodium channels in planar lipid bilayers. Channel gating kinetics of purified sodium channels modified by batrachotoxin

Single channel currents of sodium channels purified from rat brain and reconstituted into planar lipid bilayers were recorded. The kinetics of channel gating were investigated in the presence of batrachotoxin to eliminate inactivation and an analysis was conducted on membranes with a single active channel at any given time. Channel opening is favored by depolarization and is strongly voltage dependent. Probability density analysis of dwell times in the closed and open states of the channel indicates the occurrence of one open state and several distinct closed states in the voltage (V) range-120 mV less than or equal to V less than or equal to +120 mV. For V less than or equal to 0, the transition rates between stages are exponentially dependent on the applied voltage, as described in mouse neuroblastoma cells (Huang, L. M., N. Moran, and G. Ehrenstein. 1984. Biophysical Journal. 45:313- 322). In contrast, for V greater than or equal to 0, the transition rates are virtually voltage independent. Autocorrelation analysis (Labarca, P., J. Rice, D. Fredkin, and M. Montal. 1985. Biophysical Journal. 47:469-478) shows that there is no correlation in the durations of successive open or closing events. Several kinetic schemes that are consistent with the experimental data are considered. This approach may provide information about the mechanism underlying the voltage dependence of channel activation.
Toronto Walking Strategy: Putting Pedestrians First

This paper will describe the development of the Toronto Walking Strategy, an action plan for building the policy, infrastructure and program elements needed to create a culture of walking in the City of Toronto. The Walking Strategy Team reviewed existing policies and programs, identified areas for improvement and gaps where new initiatives were needed, in order to integrate all walking-related initiatives into a single strategy. An extensive consultation process ensured that the Strategy was built on the knowledge and coordination of several City divisions, public advisory committees, external stakeholders, international experts and Toronto residents. The Strategy, to be presented to Toronto Council in September 2008, establishes clear implementation targets for each of the Strategy's actions. The City's new "Public Realm Office", within the Transportation Services Division, will be responsible for implementing the Strategy, coordinating work across all City Divisions, and monitoring and reporting on progress in achieving the Strategy's actions. This paper will also explain how implementation of the Walking Strategy has been integrated into the regular business of all relevant City Divisions.
Barriers Are Not the Limiting Factor to Participation in Physical Activity in Canadian Seniors

The identification of barriers to physical activity and exercise has been used for many decades to explain exercise behavior in older adults. Typically health concerns are the number one barrier to participation. Data from CCHS-HA dataset (N = 20, 875) were used to generate a sample of Canadians, 60+ years, who did not identify a health condition limitation, illness, or injury as a barrier to participation in physical activity (n = 4,900) making this dataset unique in terms of the study of barriers to participation. While the vast majority of older adults participated in physical activity, 9.4% did not. The relationships between nonparticipation, barriers, self-reported health status, and chronic health conditions were determined using binary logistic regression. The main findings suggest that traditional barriers and self-reported health status are not responsible for nonparticipation. Nonparticipation was best predicted by chronic health conditions suggesting a disconnect between self-reported health status and underlying health conditions. The data are clear in suggesting that barriers are not the limiting factor and physical activity programming must be focused on meeting the health needs of our aging population.
A Two-Temperature Model of the Intracluster Medium

We investigate evolution of the intracluster medium (ICM), considering the relaxation process between the ions and electrons. According to the standard scenario of structure formation, the ICM is heated by the shock in the accretion flow to the gravitational potential well of the dark halo. The shock primarily heats the ions because the kinetic energy of an ion entering the shock is larger than that of an electron by the ratio of masses. Then the electrons and ions exchange the energy through Coulomb collisions and reach equilibrium. From simple order estimation we find that the region where the electron temperature is considerably lower than the ion temperature spreads out on a megaparsec scale. We then calculate the ion and electron temperature profiles by combining the adiabatic model of a two-temperature plasma by Fox & Loeb with spherically symmetric N-body and hydrodynamic simulations based on three different cosmological models. It is found that the electron temperature is about half the mean temperature at radii ~1 Mpc. This could lead to about a 50% underestimation in the total mass contained within ~1 Mpc when the electron temperature profiles are used. The polytropic indices of the electron temperature profiles are ≃1.5, whereas those of mean temperature are ≃1.3 for r ≥ 1 Mpc. This result is consistent both with the X-ray observations on electron temperature profiles and with some theoretical and numerical predictions about mean temperature profiles.
The lock holder and the lock waiter pre-emption problems: nip them in the bud using informed spinlocks (I-Spinlock)

In native Linux systems, spinlock's implementation relies on the assumption that both the lock holder thread and lock waiter threads cannot be preempted. However, in a virtualized environment, these threads are scheduled on top of virtual CPUs (vCPU) that can be preempted by the hypervisor at any time, thus forcing lock waiter threads on other vCPUs to busy wait and to waste CPU cycles. This leads to the well-known Lock Holder Preemption (LHP) and Lock Waiter Preemption (LWP) issues. In this paper, we propose I-Spinlock (for Informed Spinlock), a new spinlock implementation for virtualized environments. Its main principle is to only allow a thread to acquire a lock if and only if the remaining time-slice of its vCPU is sufficient to enter and leave the critical section. This is possible if the spinlock primitive is aware (informed) of its time-to-preemption (by the hypervisor). We implemented I-Spinlock in the Xen virtualization system. We show that our solution is compliant with both para-virtual and hardware virtualization modes. We performed extensive performance evaluations with various reference benchmarks and compared our solution to previous solutions. The evaluations demonstrate that I-Spinlock outperforms other solutions, and more significantly when the number of core increases.
Patient opinions on medicine-use review: exploring an expanding role of community pharmacists

Background Current evidence supports the benefit of medicine-use review (MUR) for the safe and effective use of medicines. However, little is known about opinions of consumers regarding their preference for undertaking MUR, especially in the developing world, eg, in some Asian countries. We aimed to explore patients’ opinions about potential MUR and other enhanced services provided by community pharmacists. Patients and methods A qualitative study using focus groups was conducted at Naresuan University’s community pharmacy, Phitsanulok, Thailand. MUR-naïve patients were recruited from two pharmacies in Phitsanulok. All focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed. Results Twenty participants attended four focus groups. The following themes were identified: 1) requirement and need for the service, 2) accessibility and convenience of receiving the service, 3) pharmacist attributes needed in delivering the service, and 4) how to promote the use of MUR successfully. The majority of participants had poor understanding about their medicines and were interested in receiving a MUR service. Regarding accessibility, convenience and close proximity of pharmacies to homes were deemed to be supportive of participants to use the service. However, several potential barriers to uptake were identified: perceived difficulty on the part of recipients in making time to receive the service and the inconvenience of having to provide medicines/records of medicines to pharmacists. The following domains of pharmacists’ characteristics were viewed as supportive determinants: personality (friendliness and confidence in giving information) and attitude (willingness to provide the service and not commercially oriented). The participants suggested that promoting the services using a mix of strategies would increase an awareness of MUR service. Conclusion Recognizing the unmet needs of patients for information on their medicines provides a good opportunity for community pharmacists to offer an MUR service to ensure quality use of medicines in the community.
Discovery and Potential of SNP Markers in Characterization of Tunisian Olive Germplasm

Single Nucelotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) have become the most widely used markers in many current genetic applications. Here we report the discovery of nine new SNPs in olives by direct partial sequencing of two genes (OEX and OEW) in sixteen Tunisian cultivars. The SNP markers were then used to genotype 24 olive cultivars and assess the level of genetic diversity. Power of discrimination of SNP markers was then compared to that of microsatellites (SSRs). A combination of SSR and SNP markers was finally proposed that can be used for cultivars identification in juvenile step or for oil traceability.
A Deterministic Particle Swarm Optimization Maximum Power Point Tracker for Photovoltaic System Under Partial Shading Condition

This paper proposes a deterministic particle swarm optimization to improve the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) capability for photovoltaic system under partial shading condition. The main idea is to remove the random number in the accelerations factor of the conventional PSO velocity equation. Additionally, the maximum change in velocity is restricted to a particular value, which is determined based on the critical study of P-V characteristics during partial shading. Advantages of the method include: 1) consistent solution is achieved despite a small number of particles, 2) only one parameter, i.e., the inertia weight, needs to be tuned, and 3) the MPPT structure is much simpler compared to the conventional PSO. To evaluate the idea, the algorithm is implemented on a buck-boost converter and compared to the conventional hill climbing (HC) MPPT method. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the HC method in terms of global peak tracking speed and accuracy under various partial shading conditions. Furthermore, it is tested using the measured data of a tropical cloudy day, which includes rapid movement of the passing clouds and partial shading. Despite the wide fluctuations in array power, the average efficiency for the 10-h test profile reaches 99.5%.
Star cluster versus field star formation in the nucleus of the prototype starburst galaxy M 82

We analyse high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys imaging of the nuclear starburst region of M82, obtained as part of the Hubble Heritage mosaic made of this galaxy, in four filters (Johnson-Cousins equivalent B, V, and I broad bands, and an Hnarrow-band filter), as well as subsequently acquired U-band images. We find a complex system of ∼150 star clusters in the inner few 100 pc of the galaxy. We do not find any conclusive evidence of a cluster-formation epoch associated with the most recent starburst event, believed to have occurred about 4-6 Myr ago. This apparent evidence of decoupling between cluster and field-star formation is consistent with the view that sta r cluster formation requires special conditions. However, we strongly caution, and provide compelling evidence, that the 'standard' simple stellar population analysis method we have used s ignificantly underestimates the true uncertainties in the derived ages d ue to stochasticity in the stellar initial mass function and the corresponding sampling effects.
NP-complete decision problems for quadratic polynomials

In this article we show the NP-completeness of some simple number-theoretic problems. Natural simplifications of these problems invariably are known to be in P. Our research was motivated by the question whether one could study non-deterministic computation without loss of generality on a restricted, number theoretically significant class of nondeterministic Turing machines, the nondeterministic diophantine machines defined below [1,2]. The results suggest this is true. Because of the relative difficulty of the reduction of the satisfiability problem used in the proof, and the distinctly number-theoretic character of the problems shown to be NP-complete, we hope that the NP-completeness of these problems will play a role in showing the NP-completeness of further problems of a numerical nature, much as the satisfiability problem has in showing the NP-completeness of combinatorial problems ([3],[5]). The results illustrate an intimate connection between problems in computational theory, such as “P&equil;NP? ”, and problems in number theory, e.g. about quadratic congruences in one unknown, which are just beyond the range in which efficient algorithms exist. Thus our work exposes an interface between the state-of-the-art in number theory and in the theory of computation. Also, our results can be seen as the solution to a natural and important revision of Hilbert's 10thproblem: Give a feasible algorithmic procedure to decide whether an arbitrary diophantine equation has solutions. Unless P&equil;NP this is impossible, even for a class of quadratic diophantine equations in two unknowns for which a decision procedure in the original sense is in fact available. Certainly, these results present a striking rigorous demonstration that number theorists' intuitions about where problems about diophantine equations and quadratic congruences start to be truly difficult are justified.
How Did the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut Affect Stock Prices and Corporate Payout Policy?

We examine the effects of the 2003 dividend tax cut on U.S. stock prices and corporate payout policies. First, using an event-study methodology, we compare the performance of U.S. stocks to that of other securities that should not have benefited from the tax change. We find that U.S. large-cap and small-cap indexes do not outperform their European counterparts, nor REIT stocks, over the event windows, suggesting little if any aggregate stock market effect from the tax change. In cross-sectional analysis, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the event windows. On the other hand, non-dividend paying stocks are found to have outperformed the overall market by a small margin, but this result does not appear specific to the event windows, suggesting that non-tax factors were at play. Second, the tax change did appear to induce an increase in dividends, especially at firms where executive compensation was weighted more heavily toward stock than options. However, the effect on total payouts was more muted, as many firms scaled back share repurchases.
Hypothesis testing via a comparator and hypercontractivity

This paper investigates the best achievable performance by a hypothesis test satisfying a structural constraint: two functions are computed at two different terminals and the detector consists of a simple comparator checking if the functions agree. Such tests arise as part of study of fundamental limits of channel coding, and hypothesis testing with communication (rate) constraints. A simple expression for the Stein exponent is found. Connections to the Gács-Körner common information and to hypercontractivity properties of the conditional expectation operator are identified. In the case of zero Stein exponent, a non-vanishing lower bound on probability of error is established by pairing estimates of Ahslwede-Gács and Mossel et al.