Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hyporeninemic Hypoaldosteronism in Patients with Nephrotic Syndrome

Five nephrotic patients, who did not present sodium retention when on sodium balance, have been studied. All had membranous nephropathy, were normotensive and renal function was normal in 2 and slightly reduced in 3. The following parameters were measured: 24-hour excretion of aldosterone, the response of plasma renin activity (PRA) and of plasma aldosterone to upright posture, postural changes of the fractional excretion of sodium and lithium, and natriuretic response to spironolactone. The resting values of plasma aldosterone were low in all patients, and after stimulation by upright posture they increased hardly to the low-normal limit only in 1 patient. Resting PRA was normal in all patients and increased slightly, after stimulation. The 24-hour urinary excretion of aldosterone was low in 4 patients and borderline in 1. No natriuretic response to spironolactone was observed in any patients. After upright posture the fractional excretions of sodium and lithium decreased significantly and to the same extent in all patients. Four nephrotic patients with fluctuating, spontaneous episodes of sodium retention and of sodium excretion have been studied as controls. These patients had normal values of urinary aldosterone and of resting PRA and aldosterone. After upright posture the changes of PRA and of aldosterone were clearly evident in 2, and exaggerated in the other 2 patients. In these patients, a significant increase of sodium excretion occurred after treatment with spironolactone. These results suggest that a not negligible number of patients with nephrotic syndrome have hyporeninemic hypoaldosteronism. This diagnosis should be taken into account when investigating the role of aldosterone in sodium retention in nephrotic syndrome.
Pantomime recognition impairment in Alzheimer's disease.

This study was designed to examine whether 10 AD patients with diffuse lesions and an early semantic deficit could comprehend the meaning of pantomimes and symbolic gestures. We especially wanted to determine the relationship between pantomime recognition and production. The tasks involved naming or showing an understanding (e.g., circumlocutions) of the pantomimes executed by the examiner and producing pantomimes to verbal command or to imitation. The results showed no significant relationship between pantomime comprehension and pantomime production. However, 60% of AD patients performed poorly compared to controls on the Gesture Recognition task. Gesture comprehension was highly correlated with a measure of global cognitive impairment (3MS). The data are consistent with the proposed separation of comprehension and action production systems in a cognitive model of praxis. Gesture comprehension may be diffusely distributed and thus preserved in the early stages of AD as in circumscribed lesions of the left parietal lobe.
Labdane‐type diterpenes from Hedychium gardnerianum with potent cytotoxicity against human small cell lung cancer cells

Seven labdane‐type diterpenes, coronarin E, coronarin A, yunnancoronarin A, yunnancoronarin B, hedyforrestin B, villosin, and hedyforrestin C were isolated from the rhizome of Hedychium gardnerianum and evaluated for cytotoxic activity against human small cell lung cancer (NCI‐H187) and non‐cancerous Vero cells. The results showed that villosin exhibited potent cytotoxic activity with IC50 of 0.40 μM, which was higher than that of the drug ellipticine (IC50 1.79 μM). Moreover, ellipticine was very toxic to Vero cells (IC50 7.47 μM) whereas the toxicity of villosin was undetectable at concentration lower than 166.42 μM. The results have indicated that the lactone ring is essential for high cytotoxic activity and that the presence of a hydroxyl group at the 6 or 7 position causes decrease in activity. The very high cytotoxicity against the NCI‐H187 cells and the exceptionally high selectivity index (>416) of villosin suggested that this compound may be used as a potential lead molecule for antitumor therapeutic development. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Entropy Applications to Water Monitoring Network Design: A Review

Having reliable water monitoring networks is an essential component of water resources and environmental management. A standardized process for the design of water monitoring networks does not exist with the exception of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) general guidelines about the minimum network density. While one of the major challenges in the design of optimal hydrometric networks has been establishing design objectives, information theory has been successfully adopted to network design problems by providing measures of the information content that can be deliverable from a station or a network. This review firstly summarizes the common entropy terms that have been used in water monitoring network designs. Then, this paper deals with the recent applications of the entropy concept for water monitoring network designs, which are categorized into (1) precipitation; (2) streamflow and water level; (3) water quality; and (4) soil moisture and groundwater networks. The integrated design method for multivariate monitoring networks is also covered. Despite several issues, entropy theory has been well suited to water monitoring network design. However, further work is still required to provide design standards and guidelines for operational use.
The prevalence of somatic RAS mutations in medullary thyroid cancer - a Polish population study.

INTRODUCTION Somatic RET mutations are detectable in two-thirds of sporadic cases of medullary thyroid cancer (MTC). Recent studies reported a high proportion of RAS somatic mutations in RET negative tumours, which may indicate RAS mutation as a possible alternative genetic event in sporadic MTC tumorigenesis. Thus, the aim of the study was to evaluate the frequency of somatic RAS mutations in sporadic medullary thyroid cancer in the Polish population and to relate the obtained data to the presence of somatic RET mutations. MATERIAL AND METHODS Somatic mutations (RET, RAS genes) were evaluated in 78 snap-frozen MTC samples (57 sporadic and 21 hereditary) by direct sequencing. Next, three randomly selected RET-negative MTC samples were analysed by the next generation sequencing. RESULTS RAS mutation was detected in 26.5% of 49 sporadic MTC tumours. None of all the analysed samples showed N-RAS mutation. When only RET-negative samples were considered, the prevalence of RAS mutation was 68.7%, compared to 6% observed in RET-positive samples. Most of these mutations were located in H-RAS codon 61 (72%). None of 21 hereditary MTC samples showed any RAS mutations. CONCLUSIONS RAS mutations constitute a frequent molecular event in RET-negative sporadic medullary thyroid carcinoma in Polish patients. However, their role in MTC tumorigenesis remains unclear.
Causes of Tinnitus in Patients Referred to ENT Clinic of Imam Khomeini Hospital in Urmia, 2012-2013

Introduction: Tinnitus includes all the sounds perceived by the patient, without any external stimulus that affects all aspects of life; there is no cure for most patients. Given that tinnitus and hearing of the ear are common complaints of patients in clinics and due to the impossibility of cure at the present time, it is necessary to set up common causes of tinnitus to solve social problems and present optimal solutions. The purpose of this study was to determine the causes of tinnitus in patients referred to ENT Clinic of Imam Khomeini Hospital in Urmia, 2012-2013. Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional analytic study that was performed on 184 patients with tinnitus referred to ENT clinic of Imam Khomeini Hospital, Urmia. After examination, audiometry performed and questionnaires of tinnitus patients were completed. The results were analyzed by statistical SPSS software. Results: The study included 111 males and 73 females and the mean age was 50.6 years. 168 patients (91.3%) had non-pulsatile tinnitus and the rest had pulsatile tinnitus. The mean hearing loss in patients was 31.4 dB, 79.9% were of sensory neurons kind, and 12.5% of patients did not show any hearing loss in audiometry. In total, 90.2% of the cases were detected; most causes of tinnitus were noise (19.6%), ototoxicity (16.8%) and presbycusis (16.3%). The most common causes of tinnitus were noise with 31.5% in males and ototoxicity with 27.4% in females. Between age and hearing loss of patients, there was a significant relationship (0.001> P-value), but there was no significant relationship between gender and degree of hearing loss. Discussion: The most common cause of tinnitus (NIHL) is quite predictable, except by accident, you can completely avoid by reducing noise levels on the source and ear protection. By reasonable prescription of ototoxic medications particularly antibiotics can reduce the prevalence of tinnitus that causes sleep disorders and concentration problems, depression and anxiety and help the public health.
Brain activation in response to bladder filling in healthy adults: An activation likelihood estimation meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies

Recent studies have used different neuroimaging techniques and identified various brain regions that are activated during bladder filling. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding which of these brain regions regulate the process of urine storage. The aim of this meta‐analysis is to identify brain regions that are commonly activated during bladder filling in healthy adults across different studies.
The appendix stump: should it be invaginated?

The place of antibiotics in preventing wound infection after clean operations in an Indian hospital The paper by iDrs Nundy and Ramchandran (Annals, November 1983, vol 65, p 400) raises a number of issues. (1) In our experience routine postoperative antibiotics suppress clinical features of imminent infection-a stage where reversal of the process is possible. Exploration at this stage permits culture of the offending organism followed by sensitivity tests. Proper surgical toilet can be performed and rational antibiotic therapy instituted. Delay in diagnosis caused by use of postoperative antibiotic is fraught with danger. In Orthopaedic operations routine postoperative antibiotics are definitely harmful as this leads to delay in diagnosis, causes extensive local tissue damage without overt physical signs and ultimately lead to irreversible tissue damage. No mention has been made about the postoperative clinical course in the two groups, ie with or without antibiotics. Did antibiotics merely delay diagnosis of infection or actually cause more tissue damage delay in recovery and perhaps late sequelae by fibrous tissue formation? Our experience with routine postoperative antibiotic therapy has been uniformly unsatisfactory. (2) Since the reported series were performed by trainees, it is relevant to find out whether the rate of infection was less in those patients who were operated upon during the same period by senior consultants in similar groups of cases. If such be the case, what steps can be taken to prevent unacceptable infection rates. (3) Such a high rate of postoperative infection in simple general surgical cases causes one to wonder what happens with orthopaedic, thoracic, cardiovascular, neurological and other complicated procedures. The study reveals a situation which is a cause for grave concern. An infection rate of above 1 ? 'o is quite unacceptable in any properly organised hospital. Somewhere something is grossly wrong at the prestigious AIIMS. DR B MUKHOPADHAYA MS FRCS MCh Emeritus Professor Saidpur Road Patna-4
A Massively Parallel, Energy Efficient Programmable Accelerator for Learning and Classification

Applications that use learning and classification algorithms operate on large amounts of unstructured data, and have stringent performance constraints. For such applications, the performance of general purpose processors scales poorly with data size because of their limited support for fine-grained parallelism and absence of software-managed caches. The large intermediate data in these applications also limits achievable performance on many-core processors such as GPUs. To accelerate such learning applications, we present a programmable accelerator that can execute multiple learning and classification algorithms. To architect such an accelerator, we profile five representative workloads, and find that their computationally intensive portions can be formulated as matrix or vector operations generating large amounts of intermediate data, which are then reduced by a secondary operation such as array ranking, finding max/min and aggregation. Our proposed accelerator, called MAPLE, has hundreds of simple processing elements (PEs) laid out in a two-dimensional grid, with two key features. First, it uses dynamic in-memory processing where on-chip memory blocks perform the secondary reduction operations. Second, MAPLE uses banked off-chip memory, and organizes its PEs into independent groups each with its own off-chip memory bank. These two features allow MAPLE to scale its performance with data size. We also present an Atom based energy-efficient heterogeneous system with MAPLE as the accelerator that satisfies the application’s performance requirements at a lower system power. This article describes the MAPLE architecture, explores its design space with a simulator, illustrates how to automatically map application kernels to the hardware, and presents its performance improvement and energy benefits over classic server-based implementations. We implement a 512-PE FPGA prototype of MAPLE and find that it is 1.5-10x faster than a 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon processor despite running at a modest 125 MHz clock rate. With MAPLE connected to a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom, we show an energy improvement of 38-84% over the Xeon server coupled to a 1.3 GHz 240 core Tesla GPU.
Recombinant Ochrobactrum anthropi Expressing Brucella abortus Cu,Zn Superoxide Dismutase Protects Mice against B. abortus Infection Only after Switching of Immune Responses to Th1 Type

ABSTRACT The members of the genus Brucella are gram-negative, facultatively intracellular bacterial pathogens that cause brucellosis in many animal species and humans. Although live, attenuated vaccines are available to protect several animal species from the disease, there is no safe and effective vaccine for human use. Here we report that a bacterium that is closely related to Brucella species, Ochrobactrum anthropi, can be used as a vaccine vector for the delivery of Brucella antigens to mice, leading to the elicitation of protective immunity against brucellosis. Brucella abortus Cu,Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD), a protective Brucella antigen, was expressed in large amounts in O. anthropi strain 49237 by use of the broad-host-range plasmid pBBR1MCS. Neither O. anthropi strain 49237 nor the recombinant O. anthropi strain 49237SOD, expressing B. abortus Cu,Zn SOD, provided protection against virulent Brucella infection in mice. Analysis of immune responses indicated that strains 49237 and 49237SOD stimulated a mix of Th1 and Th2 type responses in the mice. After the immune response was switched to a Th1-biased response by addition of oligonucleotides containing unmethylated CpG motifs, both O. anthropi strain 49237 and the recombinant O. anthropi strain 49237SOD induced protection in mice. However, the protection conferred by strain 49237SOD was significantly better than that induced by the parental strain, 49237.
Shape context and chamfer matching in cluttered scenes

This paper compares two methods for object localization from contours: shape context and chamfer matching of templates. In the light of our experiments, we suggest improvements to the shape context: shape contexts are used to find corresponding features between model and image. In real images it is shown that the shape context is highly influenced by clutters; furthermore, even when the object is correctly localized, the feature correspondence may be poor. We show that the robustness of shape matching can be increased by including a figural continuity constraint. The combined shape and continuity cost is minimized using the Viterbi algorithm on features, resulting in improved localization and correspondence. Our algorithm can be generally applied to any feature based shape matching method. Chamfer matching correlates model templates with the distance transform of the edge image. This can be done efficiently using a coarse-to-fine search over the transformation parameters. The method is robust in clutter, however, multiple templates are needed to handle scale, rotation and shape variation. We compare both methods for locating hand shapes in cluttered images, and applied to word recognition in EZ-Gimpy images.
Personal goals in old age : relationships with resources in life, exercise activity, and life-space mobility

Saajanaho, Milla Personal goals in old age – relationships with resources in life, exercise activity, and life-space mobility. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2016, 97 p. (Studies in Sport, Physical Education, and Health ISSN 0356-1070; 234) ISBN 978-951-39-6524-2 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-6525-9 (PDF) Finnish summary. Diss. Participation in activities according to one’s personal goals is a central component of active aging. This study explored what kinds of personal goals older people have, how these goals change over the years, and how they relate to resources in life. The cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of personal goals with exercise activity and life-space mobility were also examined. The thesis forms part of two larger studies: Life-Space Mobility in Old Age (LISPE) and the Finnish Twin Study on Aging (FITSA). Data on 824 men and women from the LISPE study (mean age 80.1 y), and 308 women from the FITSA study (mean age 71.2 y) were analyzed. Personal goals were obtained with a revised version of the Personal Project Analysis. Measures of life resources, mobility limitation and physical activity were self-reported. Lifespace mobility was assessed with the University of Alabama at Birmingham Study of Aging Life-Space Assessment. Health maintenance goals were the most commonly reported and they correlated with good health resources. In contrast, recovery goals were more often reported by people with poor health and functioning. Good health resources were associated with goal setting related to other people, leisure-time activities and physical activities. Activity goals were often abandoned with aging, at least partly due to mobility decline. Exercise-related goals correlated with higher exercise activity both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Lifespace mobility was higher among those with goals related to activeness in daily life, mental health, and exercise when compared to those not reporting such goals. Over the two-year follow-up, goals related to maintaining functioning predicted higher life-space mobility – an indicator of community participation. Poor health and functioning may prevent older people from engaging in active goals in their lives. However, goal engagement may also promote active aging and participation, even in the face of decline in health and functioning. Therefore, older people should be encouraged to actively strive for personal goals in their lives.
Practical applications of the NTG-EDSD for screening adults with intellectual disability for dementia: A German-language version feasibility study

ABSTRACT Background In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of using the German-language version of a recently developed screening tool for dementia for persons with intellectual disability (ID): the National Task Group – Early Detection Screen for Dementia (NTG-EDSD). Method Some 221 paid carers of ageing persons with ID were asked to use the NTG-EDSD and report back on its utility and on 4 feasibility dimensions, and to provide detailed feedback on aspects deemed critical or missing. Results All feasibility dimensions were rated good to very good, and 80% of respondents found the NTG-EDSD useful or very useful for the early detection of dementia. This highlights a high acceptability of this instrument by the main target group. Conclusions The positive feasibility evaluation of the NTG-EDSD indicates the usability and adequacy of this instrument for application of early detection of dementia in persons with ID.
Evidence for indigenous nitrogen in sedimentary and aeolian deposits from the Curiosity rover investigations at Gale crater, Mars

Significance We present data supporting the presence of an indigenous source of fixed nitrogen on the surface of Mars in the form of nitrate. This fixed nitrogen may indicate the first stage in development of a primitive nitrogen cycle on the surface of ancient Mars and would have provided a biochemically accessible source of nitrogen. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) investigation on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover has detected oxidized nitrogen-bearing compounds during pyrolysis of scooped aeolian sediments and drilled sedimentary deposits within Gale crater. Total N concentrations ranged from 20 to 250 nmol N per sample. After subtraction of known N sources in SAM, our results support the equivalent of 110–300 ppm of nitrate in the Rocknest (RN) aeolian samples, and 70–260 and 330–1,100 ppm nitrate in John Klein (JK) and Cumberland (CB) mudstone deposits, respectively. Discovery of indigenous martian nitrogen in Mars surface materials has important implications for habitability and, specifically, for the potential evolution of a nitrogen cycle at some point in martian history. The detection of nitrate in both wind-drifted fines (RN) and in mudstone (JK, CB) is likely a result of N2 fixation to nitrate generated by thermal shock from impact or volcanic plume lightning on ancient Mars. Fixed nitrogen could have facilitated the development of a primitive nitrogen cycle on the surface of ancient Mars, potentially providing a biochemically accessible source of nitrogen.