Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vesselplasty: A New Minimally Invasive Approach to Treat Pathological Vertebral Fractures in Selected Tumor Patients – Preliminary Results

Abstract Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of percutaneous vesselplasty in pathological vertebral fractures of the thoracolumbar spine in selected tumor patients. Materials and Methods: Eleven pathological vertebral fractures in nine patients were treated with vesselplasty (Vessel-X®, MAXXSPINE). Nine of eleven vertebras (81.8 %) had major posterior wall deficiency (> 30 %). Clinical and radiological (CT) measures were obtained before and 3 months after the procedure. Results: The mean VAS improved significantly from preoperative to postoperative (6.9 ± 2.2 to 3.7 ± 2.3; p < 0.05), as did the ODI (59.7 %± 19.2 % to 40.3 %± 24.0 %; p < 0.05). The physical component summary of the SF-36 was significantly improved by the operation (19.2 ± 8.0 to 31.0 ± 16.5; p < 0.05). Symptomatic cement leakage or other operation-associated complications were not observed. Three patients were primarily treated with concomitant minimally invasive stabilization via fixateur interne. One patient had to undergo minimally invasive stabilization via fixateur interne 4 months after vesselplasty due to further collapse of the treated vertebral body. Conclusion: From these preliminary results, vesselplasty appears to be a treatment option worth considering in pathological vertebral fractures, even in the case of posterior wall deficiency. Selected tumor patients might benefit from vesselplasty as a minimally invasive procedure for stabilization of the fractured vertebra, pain control, and improvement in body function and quality of life. Long-term prospective studies with a larger sample size are required to validate these results.
Comparison of Treatment Results between Selective Peripheral Denervation and Deep Brain Stimulation in Patients with Cervical Dystonia

Background/Aims: Cervical dystonia (CD) is the most common form of focal dystonia. The treatment options for CD include medical therapy and surgery. The 3 basic types of CD are tonic, phasic and tremulous. Selective peripheral denervation (SPD) and globus pallidus internus (GPi) deep brain stimulation (DBS) have been developed as therapeutic options for the treatment of CD. Methods: Between 1997 and 2009, 24 patients with CD underwent operations: either SPD (n = 16) or DBS (n = 8). The mean follow-up period was 29.5 months (range = 2–59). The mean age at onset of symptoms was 46.6 years (range = 27–65). The patients were evaluated with the subjective scores and the Toronto Western Spasmodic Torticollis Scale scores. Results: All patients showed gradual improvement after SPD and DBS. No statistically significant differences were seen between the SPD group and the DBS group. However, there was a trend toward greater pain reduction in the DBS group (p = 0.094). Conclusion: Both the SPD group and the DBS group showed successful improvement in their Toronto Western Spasmodic Torticollis Scale scores as well as subjective scores. The GPi DBS group showed a remarkable improvement on the pain scale and there was a trend toward greater pain reduction in the DBS group.
Variability of Symmetric Dimethylarginine in Apparently Healthy Dogs

Background Symmetric dimethylarginine (SDMA) is a screening tool for early kidney dysfunction and monitoring treatment in cases of chronic kidney disease (CKD). There are no current studies describing the suitability of this test for use with published population‐based reference intervals. Hypothesis/Objectives To determine the components of biological variability, the index of individuality (IOI), the critical difference between sequential measurements (C D) and the number of measurements required to assess the homeostatic set point (HSP), for both SDMA and serum creatinine (sCr), in apparently healthy dogs. Animals Twenty apparently healthy adult dogs owned by clients or staff at a veterinary teaching hospital. Methods Prospective, observational study. Blood was collected from each dog on 9 occasions, and SDMA and sCr were measured in duplicate using commercially available assays. Results SDMA and sCr had intermediate and low IOI values of 0.87 and 0.28, respectively. The C D of SDMA and sCr, was 1.34 µg/dL and 0.89 µmol/L, respectively. The sample numbers required for estimation of an individual's HSP (with 90 and 95% CI) for SDMA and sCr were 8 and 45, and 2 and 12 sequential measurements, respectively. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Based on our findings, in comparison to sCr, SDMA is better suited for use with population‐based reference intervals. False‐negative test results could occur when comparing a single test result from an individual to such intervals. Ideally C D should be used with sequential measurements.
Theoretical Orbital Period Distributions of Cataclysmic Variables above the Period Gap: Effects of Circumbinary Disks

Population synthesis tools are used to investigate the population of nonmagnetic cataclysmic variables with unevolved main-sequence-like donors at orbital periods greater than 2.75 hr. In addition to the angular momentum losses associated with gravitational radiation, magnetic braking, and mass loss from the system, we also include the effects of circumbinary disks on the evolution. For a fractional mass input rate into the disk, corresponding to 3 × 10-4 of the mass transfer rate, the model systems exhibit a bounce at orbital periods greater than 2.75 hr. The simulations reveal that (1) some systems can exist as dwarf novae throughout their lifetime, (2) dwarf novae can evolve into novalike systems, and (3) novalike systems can evolve back into dwarf novae during their postbounce evolution to longer orbital periods. Among these subclasses, novalike cataclysmic variables would be the best candidates to search for circumbinary disks at wavelengths ≳10 μm. The theoretical orbital period distribution is in reasonable accord with the combined population of dwarf novae and novalike systems above the period gap, suggesting the possibility that systems with unevolved donors need not detach and evolve below the period gap as in the disrupted magnetic braking model. The resulting population furthermore reveals the possible presence of systems with small mass ratios and a preference of O/Ne/Mg white dwarfs in dwarf nova systems in comparison to novalike systems. The novalike population furthermore shows a lack of systems with high-mass white dwarfs. The importance of observational bias in accounting for the differing populations is examined, and it is shown that an understanding of these effects is necessary in order to confront the theoretical distributions with the observed ones in a meaningful manner.
Impact of deploying multiple point-of-care tests with a ‘sample first’ approach on a sexual health clinical care pathway. A service evaluation

Objectives To assess clinical service value of STI point-of-care test (POCT) use in a ‘sample first’ clinical pathway (patients providing samples on arrival at clinic, before clinician consultation). Specific outcomes were: patient acceptability; whether a rapid nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) for Chlamydia trachomatis/Neisseria gonorrhoeae (CT/NG) could be used as a POCT in practice; feasibility of non-NAAT POCT implementation for Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) and bacterial vaginosis (BV); impact on patient diagnosis and treatment. Methods Service evaluation in a south London sexual health clinic. Symptomatic female and male patients and sexual contacts of CT/NG-positive individuals provided samples for diagnostic testing on clinic arrival, prior to clinical consultation. Tests included routine culture and microscopy; CT/NG (GeneXpert) NAAT; non-NAAT POCTs for TV and BV. Results All 70 (35 males, 35 females) patients approached participated. The ‘sample first’ pathway was acceptable, with >90% reporting they were happy to give samples on arrival and receive results in the same visit. Non-NAAT POCT results were available for all patients prior to leaving clinic; rapid CT/NG results were available for only 21.4% (15/70; 5 males, 10 females) of patients prior to leaving clinic. Known negative CT/NG results led to two females avoiding presumptive treatment, and one male receiving treatment directed at possible Mycoplasma genitalium infection causing non-gonococcal urethritis. Non-NAAT POCTs detected more positives than routine microscopy (TV 3 vs 2; BV 24 vs 7), resulting in more patients receiving treatment. Conclusions A ‘sample first’ clinical pathway to enable multiple POCT use was acceptable to patients and feasible in a busy sexual health clinic, but rapid CT/NG processing time was too long to enable POCT use. There is need for further development to improve test processing times to enable POC use of rapid NAATs.
Investigation into Contact Resistance And Damage of Metal Contacts Used in RF-MEMS Switches

Abstract : This research examines the physical and electrical processes involved in lifecycle failure of Microelectromechanical (MEMS) Radio-Frequency (RF) cantilever beam ohmic contact switches. Failures of these switches generally occur at the contact, but complete details of performance of microcontacts are difficult to measure and have not been previously reported. This study investigated the mechanics of microcontact behavior by designing and constructing a novel experimental setup. Three representative contact materials of varying microstructure (Au, Au5%Ru, Au4%V2O5) were tested and parameters of contact during cycling were measured. The Au4%V2O5, a dispersion strengthened material developed at Lehigh University, showed the most promise of the materials tested with the longest-life contact lasting more than 15.5x106 cycles. Evidence of time-dependent deformation and contact heating during cycling was noted in all materials tested. Material hardness was not proportional to contact lifetime or adhesive forces measured during testing. Surfaces of post-cycling contact surfaces were evaluated and failures were categorized by ductile or brittle separation characteristics. Separation characteristics were correlated by contact lifetime.
Transport properties of finite-β microturbulence

Via nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, microturbulent transport is investigated for electromagnetic trapped electron mode (TEM) and ion temperature gradient (ITG) tokamak core turbulence with β up to and beyond the kinetic ballooning mode threshold. Deviations from linear expectations are explained by zonal flow activity in the TEM case. For the ITG scenario, β-induced changes are observed in the nonlinear critical gradient upshift—from a certain β, a strong increase is observed in the Dimits shift. Additionally, a Rechester–Rosenbluth-type model for magnetic transport is applied, and the amplitudes of magnetic field fluctuations are quantified for different types of turbulence.
Active Surface Topographies in Constrained Hydrogel Films for Biomedical Applications

Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate relative to all types of cancers, and unfortunately there still exist numerous challenges towards decreasing this rate. One of these challenges is gaining a clear understanding of why metastatic lung cancer cells attach and detach to colonize other areas of the body. Reports suggest that the attachment of cells to secondary tumor sites does not occur randomly. It is theorized that both the physical and chemical properties of the tissue are able to create a suitable environment for their adhesion. Therefore, the motivation for the work presented herein is to use dynamic thermoresponsive polymer surfaces as a tool towards unraveling this seemingly mysterious behavior of metastatic cancer cells. This type of polymer is able to swell and deswell as a function of temperature. As such, spin-cast thin films of this polymer provide for topographies that have been used to investigate how highly metastatic lung cancer cells are able to rearrange their structure, specifically the cytoskeleton. Changes in cell to surface anchorage as a function of thin film structure can also monitored.
Distributed location-aware hovering information systems

The rapid developments in the amount of mobile devices and in the mobile technology, as well as the surge of positioning technology in the mobile devices, have created a user base and demand for location-aware mobile applications. The authors of Hovering information, AD LOC, and Abiding geocast have presented systems, which main idea is to bind information to geographical locations in ad hoc mobile networks. We will call these kind of systems as Distributed Location-Aware Hovering Information (DLAHI) systems. DLAHI systems are decentralised, distributed, scalable, and generally lightweight. They are also human-driven meaning, that by default anyone should be able to create, share, and access information.
Open Reading Frame 33 of a Gammaherpesvirus Encodes a Tegument Protein Essential for Virion Morphogenesis and Egress

ABSTRACT Tegument is a unique structure of herpesvirus, which surrounds the capsid and interacts with the envelope. Morphogenesis of gammaherpesvirus is poorly understood due to lack of efficient lytic replication for Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus/human herpesvirus 8, which are etiologically associated with several types of human malignancies. Murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (MHV-68) is genetically related to the human gammaherpesviruses and presents an excellent model for studying de novo lytic replication of gammaherpesviruses. MHV-68 open reading frame 33 (ORF33) is conserved among Alpha-, Beta-, and Gammaherpesvirinae subfamilies. However, the specific role of ORF33 in gammaherpesvirus replication has not yet been characterized. We describe here that ORF33 is a true late gene and encodes a tegument protein. By constructing an ORF33-null MHV-68 mutant, we demonstrated that ORF33 is not required for viral DNA replication, early and late gene expression, viral DNA packaging or capsid assembly but is required for virion morphogenesis and egress. Although the ORF33-null virus was deficient in release of infectious virions, partially tegumented capsids produced by the ORF33-null mutant accumulated in the cytoplasm, containing conserved capsid proteins, ORF52 tegument protein, but virtually no ORF45 tegument protein and the 65-kDa glycoprotein B. Finally, we found that the defect of ORF33-null MHV-68 could be rescued by providing ORF33 in trans or in an ORF33-null revertant virus. Taken together, our results indicate that ORF33 is a tegument protein required for viral lytic replication and functions in virion morphogenesis and egress.
Older patients with late‐stage COPD: Their illness experiences and involvement in decision‐making regarding mechanical ventilation and noninvasive ventilation

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To explore the illness experiences of older patients with late-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and to develop knowledge about how patients perceive their preferences to be taken into account in decision-making processes concerning mechanical ventilation and/or noninvasive ventilation. BACKGROUND Decisions about whether older patients with late-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease will benefit from noninvasive ventilation treatment or whether the time has come for palliative treatment are complicated, both medically and ethically. Knowledge regarding patients' values and preferences concerning ventilation support is crucial yet often lacking. DESIGN Qualitative design with a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach. METHODS The data consist of qualitative in-depth interviews with 12 patients from Norway diagnosed with late-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The data were analysed within the three interpretative contexts described by Kvale and Brinkmann. RESULTS The participants described their lives as fragile and burdensome, frequently interrupted by unpredictable and frightening exacerbations. They lacked information about their diagnosis and prognosis and were often not included in decisions about noninvasive ventilation or mechanical ventilation. CONCLUSION Findings indicate that these patients are highly vulnerable and have complex needs in terms of nursing care and medical treatment. Moreover, they need access to proactive advanced care planning and an opportunity to discuss their wishes for treatment and care. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE To provide competent care for these patients, healthcare personnel must be aware of how patients experience being seriously ill. Advanced care planning and shared decision-making should be initiated alongside the curative treatment.
Spatially Transformed Adversarial Examples

Recent studies show that widely used deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. Many advanced algorithms have been proposed to generate adversarial examples by leveraging the $\mathcal{L}_p$ distance for penalizing perturbations. Researchers have explored different defense methods to defend against such adversarial attacks. While the effectiveness of $\mathcal{L}_p$ distance as a metric of perceptual quality remains an active research area, in this paper we will instead focus on a different type of perturbation, namely spatial transformation, as opposed to manipulating the pixel values directly as in prior works. Perturbations generated through spatial transformation could result in large $\mathcal{L}_p$ distance measures, but our extensive experiments show that such spatially transformed adversarial examples are perceptually realistic and more difficult to defend against with existing defense systems. This potentially provides a new direction in adversarial example generation and the design of corresponding defenses. We visualize the spatial transformation based perturbation for different examples and show that our technique can produce realistic adversarial examples with smooth image deformation. Finally, we visualize the attention of deep networks with different types of adversarial examples to better understand how these examples are interpreted.
A Study for Texture Feature Extraction of High-Resolution Satellite Images Based on a Direction Measure and Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix Fusion Algorithm

To address the problem of image texture feature extraction, a direction measure statistic that is based on the directionality of image texture is constructed, and a new method of texture feature extraction, which is based on the direction measure and a gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) fusion algorithm, is proposed in this paper. This method applies the GLCM to extract the texture feature value of an image and integrates the weight factor that is introduced by the direction measure to obtain the final texture feature of an image. A set of classification experiments for the high-resolution remote sensing images were performed by using support vector machine (SVM) classifier with the direction measure and gray level co-occurrence matrix fusion algorithm. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were applied to assess the classification results. The experimental results demonstrated that texture feature extraction based on the fusion algorithm achieved a better image recognition, and the accuracy of classification based on this method has been significantly improved.
Abrasion Studies of Sized Cotton Yarns Before and After Weaving

Cotton warp yams treated with various sizing formulations were subjected to weaving trials. Warp yams extracted from the greige fabrics (woven yarns) and those from their antecedent loom beams (feed yarns) were subjected to abrasion resistance mea surements with the Zweigle yam abrader and TRI's multistation cyclic tensile abrader (CTA), as well as to tensile measurements of breaking force. CTA abrasion resistance values were much more sensitive to differences in size treatments than Zweigle values, and there were significant differences in the rankings by the two methods. In general, correlations were good between weaving performance and CTA values for both feed and woven yams and Zweigle values for feed yams only. A statistical analysis was developed for finding the fraction of "most vulnerable" yam specimens for each sample. Using CTA data, this fraction showed good correlation with weaving performance for both feed and woven yams. Using CTA measure ents of the abrasion resistance of warp yams from greige fabrics to evaluate weavin performance could significantly shorten the time currently devoted to weaving trials. Weaving performance tended to improve with increasing relative tensile breaking force of the feed yams, but there was no such correlation for the woven yams.
Interactive Grounded Language Acquisition and Generalization in a 2D World

We build a virtual agent for learning language in a 2D maze-like world. The agent sees images of the surrounding environment, listens to a virtual teacher, and takes actions to receive rewards. It interactively learns the teacher's language from scratch based on two language use cases: sentence-directed navigation and question answering. It learns simultaneously the visual representations of the world, the language, and the action control. By disentangling language grounding from other computational routines and sharing a concept detection function between language grounding and prediction, the agent reliably interpolates and extrapolates to interpret sentences that contain new word combinations or new words missing from training sentences. The new words are transferred from the answers of language prediction. Such a language ability is trained and evaluated on a population of over 1.6 million distinct sentences consisting of 119 object words, 8 color words, 9 spatial-relation words, and 50 grammatical words. The proposed model significantly outperforms five comparison methods for interpreting zero-shot sentences. In addition, we demonstrate human-interpretable intermediate outputs of the model in the appendix.