Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute respiratory distress syndrome: the heart side of the moon

Purpose of review Circulatory failure is a frequent complication during acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and is associated with a poor outcome. This review aims at clarifying the mechanisms of circulatory failure during ARDS. Recent findings For the past decades, the right ventricle (RV) has gained a crucial interest since many authors confirmed the high incidence of acute cor pulmonale during ARDS and showed a potential role of the acute cor pulmonale in the poor outcome of ARDS patients. The most important recent progress demonstrated in ARDS ventilatory strategy is represented by the prone position, which has a huge beneficial effect on RV afterload. This review will focus on the mechanisms responsible for the RV dysfunction/failure during ARDS and on the strategy, which allows improving the right ventricular function. Summary The RV has a pivotal role in the circulatory failure of ARDS patients. The ventilatory strategy during ARDS has to pay a peculiar attention to the RV to rigorously control its afterload.
No pharmacokinetic interactions between mycophenolic acid and tacrolimus in renal transplant recipients

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate drug interactions between mycophenolic acid (MPA), the active metabolite of mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) and tacrolimus, as well as the impact of CYP3A5 and UGT2B7 genetic polymorphisms on these drug interactions in 71 Japanese renal transplant recipients.
Enhancement of phytochemical content and drying efficiency of onions (Allium cepa L.) through blanching.

BACKGROUND This study investigated the effect of blanching (60, 70 and 80 °C for 1, 3, 5 and 10 min) combined with oven drying at 60 °C on the phenolic compounds, antioxidant activity, colour and drying characteristics (drying time, drying rate constant, effective moisture diffusivity and activation energy) of onion slices. RESULTS Blanching of onion slices at 60 °C for 3 min and at 70 °C for 1 min prior to drying increased their bioactive compounds and antioxidant activity compared to the control samples and other treatments. Eighteen drying models were evaluated. The Modified Page and two-term exponential models best represented the drying data. The effective diffusivity ranged from 3.32 × 10-11 m2 s-1 (control) to 5.27 × 10-11 m2 s-1 , 5.01 × 10-11 m2 s-1 , and 4.74 × 10-11 m2 s-1 for onions blanched at 60 °C, 70 °C and 80 °C, respectively. The higher activation energy was observed for the control (unblanched) sample and slightly lower values were found for 1 min- and 3 min-blanched samples, confirming the higher drying efficiency as a result of the blanching pre-treatment. CONCLUSION The use of blanching as a pre-treatment before drying of onions resulted in enhanced phytochemical content and drying efficiency. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.
Two Microwave Vector Signal Transmission on a Single Optical Carrier Based on PM-IM Conversion Using an On-Chip Optical Hilbert Transformer

A new microwave photonic link to simultaneously transmit and detect two microwave vector signals modulated on a single optical carrier based on orthogonal modulation and optical Hilbert transformation is proposed and demonstrated, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. In the proposed system, two microwave vector signals are phase and intensity modulated on a single optical carrier at a dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator and transmitted over a single-mode fiber (SMF). At the receiver, the optical signal is applied directly to a photodetector (PD) to recover the microwave vector signal that is intensity modulated and the second microwave vector signal is recovered by using an on-chip optical Hilbert transformer (OHT) to perform phase-modulation to intensity-modulation conversion followed by photodetection at a second PD. An experiment is performed. The transmission of a 16QAM and a QPSK signal with a total data rate of 2.4 Gb/s over a 10-km SMF is implemented. The performance of the transmission in terms of error vector magnitude, bit error rate, and energy efficiency is evaluated.
The Efficacy of Cricoid Pressure in Preventing Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux in Rapid Sequence Induction of Anaesthesia

Aspiration pneumonitis (AP) is a recognised complication of general anaesthesia (GA) that has an associated morbidity and mortality. Sellick's manoeuvre – the application of a sustained pressure to the cricoid cartilage – is one commonly taught anaesthetic practice that is deemed to reduce this risk of aspiration. However, this practice is not without its failings and some of the evidence base surrounding the use of cricoid pressure is examined in this short article.
The influence of environment: Experiences of users of myoelectric arm prosthesis—a qualitative study

Background: Prostheses are used to varying degrees; however, little is known about how environmental aspects influence this use. Objectives: To describe users’ experiences of how environmental factors influence their use of a myoelectric arm prosthesis. Study design: Qualitative and descriptive. Methods: A total of 13 patients previously provided with a myoelectric prosthetic hand participated. Their age, sex, deficiency level, etiology, current prosthesis use, and experience varied. Semi-structured interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed through inductive content analysis. Results: Four categories were created from the data: “Prosthesis function,” “Other people’s attitudes,” “Support from family and healthcare,” and “Individual’s attitude and strategies. ” The overarching theme, “Various degrees of embodiment lead to different experiences of environmental barriers and facilitators,” emerged from differences in individual responses depending on whether the individual was a daily or a non-daily prosthesis user. Environmental facilitators such as support from family and healthcare and good function and fit of the prosthesis seemed to help the embodiment of the prosthesis, leading to daily use. This embodiment seemed to reduce the influence of environmental barriers, for example, climate, attitudes, and technical shortcomings. Conclusion: Embodiment of prostheses seems to reduce the impact of environmental barriers. Support and training may facilitate the embodiment of myoelectric prosthesis use. Clinical relevance For successful prosthetic rehabilitation, environmental factors such as support and information to the patient and their social network about the benefits of prosthesis use are important. Local access to training in myoelectric control gives more people the opportunity to adapt to prosthesis use and experience less environmental barriers.
Effect of Powder Compact Holding Time on the Microstructure and Properties of Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Produced by Powder Compact Extrusion of a Powder Mixture of HDH Titanium and Al-V Master Alloy

Ti-6Al-4V (wt%) alloy rods were prepared successfully using a low-cost method that combines mixing HDH titanium, elemental aluminum and Al-V master alloy powders and powder compact extrusion. The microstructure and mechanical properties of Ti-6Al-4V alloy and the effects of powder compact holding time on them were investigated. The results showed that powder compact holding time had a significant effect on the microstructure and mechanical properties of the extruded Ti-6Al-4V alloy rods. With increasing powder compact holding time from 2 to 10 min., the microstructure of the extruded rods became more homogeneous, and their UTS decreased from 1300 to 1215MPa and the elongation to fracture increased from 7.1 to 10.2%. The tensile properties of the Ti-6Al-4V alloy rods produced by powder compact extrusion of the powder mixture are comparable to those of Ti-6Al-4V alloy produced by ingot metallurgy and thermomechanical processing.
Secular vs. Islamist polarization in Egypt on Twitter

We use public data from Twitter, both in English and Arabic, to study the phenomenon of secular vs. Islamist polarization in Twitter. Starting with a set of prominent seed Twitter users from both camps, we follow retweeting edges to obtain an extended network of users with inferred political orientation. We present an in-depth description of the members of the two camps, both in terms of behavior on Twitter and in terms of offline characteristics such as gender. Through the identification of partisan users, we compute a valence on the secular vs. Islamist axis for hashtags and use this information both to analyze topical interests and to quantify how polarized society as a whole is at a given point in time. For the last 12 months, large values on this “polarization barometer” coincided with periods of violence. Tweets are furthermore annotated using hand-crafted dictionaries to quantify the usage of (i) religious terms, (ii) derogatory terms referring to other religions, and (ii) references to charitable acts. The combination of all the information allows us to test and quantify a number of stereo-typical hypotheses such as (i) that religiosity and political Islamism are correlated, (ii) that political Islamism and negative views on other religions are linked, (iii) that religiosity goes hand in hand with charitable giving, and (iv) that the followers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are more tightly connected and expressing themselves “in unison” than the secular opposition. Whereas a lot of existing literature on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution is largely of qualitative and descriptive nature, our contribution lies in providing a quantitative and data-driven analysis of online communication in this dynamic and politically charged part of the world.
A Reexamination of the Cognitive Behavioral Model of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Investigating the Cogency of the Model’s Behavioral Pathway

x Introduction . 2 Development of the Cognitive Behavioral Model of CFS. 4 Limitations of the Vercoulen et al. (1998) Study . 6 Broad inclusion criteria. 6 Measurement selection. 7 Sample size. 8 Causal claims. 8 Replication Attempt of the Vercoulen et al. (1998) Model . 10 Rationale . 11 Statement of Hypotheses. 17 Hypothesis I. 17 Hypothesis II. 18 Hypothesis III. 20
DCEIL: Distributed Community Detection with the CEIL Score

Community detection in complex networks has a wide range of applications such as detection of cyber-communities in social networks, recommendations based on the interest group, and estimating hidden features in a social network. In distributed frameworks, the primary focus has been scalability. However, the accuracy of the algorithm's output is also critical. We propose the first distributed community detection algorithm based on the state-of-the-art CEIL scoring function. Our algorithm, named DCEIL, is fast, scalable and maintains the quality of communities. DCEIL outperforms the existing state-of-the-art distributed Louvain algorithm by 180% on an average in Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) Index and 6.61% on an average in Jaccard Index metrics. DCEIL completes execution for 1 billion edges within 112 minutes and outperforms state-of-the-art distributed Louvain algorithm by 4.3 ×. DCEIL critically exploits three novel heuristics which address the existing issues with distributed community detection algorithms that have the hierarchical structure of CEIL or Louvain methods. Further, our proposed heuristics are generic as well as efficient, and we illustrate their efficacy by enhancing the accuracy of distributed Louvain algorithm by 22.91% on an average in Jaccard Index, and the average execution time by 1.68 × over popular datasets.
Design of backstepping controller based on online multiparameter estimation for permanent magnet synchronous motor

A backstepping controller based on online multiparameter estimation is designed for permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs). The online multiparameter estimator consists of an extended sliding-mode observer and affine projection algorithm. The extended sliding-mode observer is used to track mechanical system parameters in real-time of PMSM, and the affine algorithm is applied to identify the stator resistance, inductance, rotor flux linkage. The designed backstepping controller, which utilizes the accurate system parameters identified by multiparameter estimator in real time, achieves an exponential ultimate boundedness of control state variables with arbitrarily fast decay rate and arbitrarily small bound. The proposed controller is constructed only by static feedback of measured voltages and currents which makes the control input smooth and easy to implement without the needs of differentiation or switching operations. The simulation experiments are conducted by SimPowerSystems in MATLAB and the results show the validity of the proposed controller with online parameter estimator.
Provably Minimally-Distorted Adversarial Examples

The ability to deploy neural networks in real-world, safety-critical systems is severely limited by the presence of adversarial examples: slightly perturbed inputs that are misclassified by the network. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed for increasing robustness to adversarial examples --- and yet most of these have been quickly shown to be vulnerable to future attacks. For example, over half of the defenses proposed by papers accepted at ICLR 2018 have already been broken. We propose to address this difficulty through formal verification techniques. We show how to construct provably minimally distorted adversarial examples: given an arbitrary neural network and input sample, we can construct adversarial examples which we prove are of minimal distortion. Using this approach, we demonstrate that one of the recent ICLR defense proposals, adversarial retraining, provably succeeds at increasing the distortion required to construct adversarial examples by a factor of 4.2.
Extended release naltrexone for alcohol use disorders: quasi-experimental effects on mortality and subsequent detoxification episodes.

BACKGROUND Utilization of extended release naltrexone (XRN) for alcohol use disorders (AUDs) in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has been limited, perhaps due to high cost, lack of established superiority over less expensive alternatives including oral naltrexone, and related formulary restrictions. Despite these barriers, pockets of higher utilization exist in VHA, allowing for the quasi-experimental examination of the effects of XRN on 1-year mortality and number of subsequent detoxification episodes among patients with high rates of psychiatric comorbidities and previous psychosocial and pharmacological addiction treatment. METHODS Using propensity score-weighted mixed-effects logistic regression, 1-year mortality was compared between patients with AUDs who received XRN in fiscal year 2010 (n = 387) and a random sample of patients with AUDs who did not receive XRN (n = 3,759). Among the subgroup of patients who had at least 1 detoxification episode in the previous year, 1-year mortality and number of subsequent detoxification episodes were compared between those who did and did not receive XRN. RESULTS Overall, 1-year mortality for the patients receiving XRN was significantly lower than for the comparison group who did not receive XRN (odds ratio [OR] = 0.30; p < 0.001). Among patients with a detoxification episode in the previous year, those receiving XRN had, on average, 0.80 fewer subsequent detoxification episodes (p < 0.001) and significantly lower mortality (OR = 0.78, p < 0.001) in the postindex year. CONCLUSIONS Among patients with AUDs, those receiving XRN had lower 1-year mortality and fewer detoxifications compared to similar patients not receiving XRN. These results, although observational, support the use of XRN, especially among patients with high rates of psychiatric comorbidities and previous addiction treatment who are still struggling with AUDs and/or facing a period of vulnerability to relapse.
Feature selection in multimodal continuous emotion prediction

Advances in affective computing have been made by combining information from different modalities, such as audio, video, and physiological signals. However, increasing the number of modalities also grows the dimensionality of the associated feature vectors, leading to higher computational cost and possibly lower prediction performance. In this regard, we present an comparative study of feature reduction methodologies for continuous emotion recognition. We compare dimensionality reduction by principal component analysis, filter-based feature selection using canonical correlation analysis, and correlation-based feature selection, as well as wrapper-based feature selection with sequential forward selection, and competitive swarm optimisation. These approaches are evaluated on the AV+EC-2015 database using support vector regression. Our results demonstrate that the wrapper-based approaches typically outperform the other methodologies, while pruning a large number of irrelevant features.
Effect of Thymoquinone on Reproductive Parameter in Morphine-treated Male Mice

Background: Thymoquinone as the main active component of Nigella sativa might have a various pharmacological effects such as antiapoptotic and antioxidant. Morphine is commonly used for the treatment of severe pain that can increase the generation of free radicals and affects the spermatogenesis. This study was designed to evaluate protective effects of thymoquinone against morphine-induced damages, sperm viability, count, motility, morphology and testis histology, and nitric oxide and testosterone hormone of the mice. Materials and Methods: In this experimental study, we divided 48 mice into eight groups (n = 6); various doses of thymoquinone (2, 10, and 20 mg/kg) and morphine (20 mg/kg) plus thymoquinone (2, 10, and 20 mg/kg) were administered intraperitoneally to 48 male mice for 30 consequent days. Male reproductive parameters including testis weight, testosterone hormone, serum nitric oxide, germinal thickness, sperm morphology, count, viability, and motility were analyzed and compared. Results: The results indicated that morphine administration significantly decreased germinal thickness, testis weight, testosterone level, viability, morphology, count, and motility of sperm and increased nitric oxide as compared to saline group (P < 0.05). However, increasing the dose of thymoquinone in the thymoquinone and thymoquinone plus morphine groups significantly decreases nitric oxide level (P < 0.05) while significantly boosted motility, morphology, count, viability of sperm cells, germinal thickness, and testosterone hormone in all groups as compared to morphine group (P < 0.05). Conclusion: It seems that thymoquinone administration could increase the quality some of spermatozoa and improves morphine-induced adverse effects on reproductive parameters in male mice
Trimethylamine N-oxide in atherogenesis: impairing endothelial self-repair capacity and enhancing monocyte adhesion

Several studies have reported a strong association between high plasma level of trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) and atherosclerosis development. However, the exact mechanism underlying this correlation is unknown. In the present study, we try to explore the impact of TMAO on endothelial dysfunction. After TMAO treatment, human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) showed significant impairment in cellular proliferation and HUVECs-extracellular matrix (ECM) adhesion compared with control. Likewise, TMAO markedly suppressed HUVECs migration in transwell migration assay and wound healing assay. In addition, we found TMAO up-regulated vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) expression, promoted monocyte adherence, activated protein kinase C (PKC) and p-NF-κB. Interestingly, TMAO-stimulated VCAM-1 expression and monocyte adherence were diminished by PKC inhibitor. These results demonstrate that TMAO promotes early pathological process of atherosclerosis by accelerating endothelial dysfunction, including decreasing endothelial self-repair and increasing monocyte adhesion. Furthermore, TMAO-induced monocyte adhesion is partly attributable to activation of PKC/NF-κB/VCAM-1.
Design, simulation and test of silicon immersed gratings: key to compact spectrometers in the short-wave infrared

We present results of our integrated approach to the development of novel diffraction gratings. At SRON we manufacture prism-shaped silicon immersed gratings. Diffraction takes place inside the high-refractive index medium, boosting the resolving power and the angular dispersion. This enables highly compact spectrometer designs. We are continuously improving the cycle of design, simulation and test to create custom gratings for space and ground-based spectroscopic applications in the short-wave infrared wavelength range. Applications are space-based monitoring of greenhouse and pollution gases in the Earth atmosphere and ground-based SWIR spectroscopy for, a.o. , characterization of exo-planet atmospheres [1]. We make gratings by etching V-shaped grooves in mono-crystalline silicon. The groove facets are aligned with the crystal lattice yielding a smooth and highly deterministic groove shape. This enables us to predict the polarized efficiency performance accurately by simulation. Feeding back manufacturing tolerances from our production process, we can also determine reliable error bars for the predicted performance. Combining the simulated values for polarized efficiency with ray-tracing, we can optimize the shape of the grating prism to eliminate unwanted internal reflections. In this contribution we present the architecture of our design and simulation platform as well as a description of test setups and typical results.
A pilot study to evaluate the effectiveness of an individualized and cognitive behavioural communication intervention for informal carers of people with dementia: The Talking Sense programme.

BACKGROUND People with dementia and family carers often experience difficulties communicating together. These difficulties are considered to contribute significantly to the depression, anxiety and negative feelings such as guilt often reported by dementia family carers. AIMS To develop and contribute to the theory and evidence base for single-component, psychosocial interventions that address these difficulties by evaluating the effectiveness of the Talking Sense programme which was designed to reflect existing best evidence. METHODS & PROCEDURES Talking Sense was delivered as an individualized, one to one, cognitive behavioural approach for developing knowledge, skills, thinking and behaviour of dementia family carers in managing communication difficulties. In this study, a randomized controlled trial compared 27 carers who completed three one-to-one individualized sessions using Talking Sense with 25 carers who received a single, knowledge-only, control discussion. OUTCOMES & RESULTS There were no significant differences for the primary outcome measure of carer anxiety and depression as well as carer quality of life and general self-efficacy. Statistically significant results suggested carers receiving the Talking Sense intervention had fewer communication difficulties happening (p = 0.046) and felt more valued by their relatives (p = 0.046). A score close to significance (p = 0.052) suggested they perceived their relatives to be more communicatively competent. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS The intervention and research design were shown to be effective with low attrition and high adherence to treatment. A non-significant finding for the primary outcome measure does not support the potential for this intervention to effect carer anxiety and depression. The potential for perceived change in the person with dementia, with statistically fewer communication difficulties happening and the carer feeling more valued by their relative, was the most significant finding from this programme of research. Recommendations for further research are made.