Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling the individual height and volume of two integrated crop-livestock-forest systems of Eucalyptus spp. in the Brazilian Savannah

The aim of this study was to model the individual height and volume of eucalyptus wood in two integrated crop-livestock-forest systems (ICLF1 and ICLF2) in Campo Grande, a city in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Classic nonlinear growth models were adjusted for height (Logistic, Gompertz, Richards, Weibull, Van Bertalanffy, Brody, Mitscherlich, and Chapman and Richards) and volume (Shumacher-hall nonlinear, Takata, Honner, Logistic, Gompertz, and Weibull) in two structural arrangements: ICLF1, with a spacing of 14 x 2 m and density of 357 trees ha-1, and ICLF2, with a spacing of 22 x 2 m and density of 227 trees ha-1. Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) measurements were performed in 100% of trees, with measurements of the total height of some individuals and a rigorous scaling procedure in diameter classes. According to the calculated value of Student's t-test, there was no significant evidence that DBH and the average height of the trees were different between ICLF1 and ICLF2. Based on the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the corrected Akaike information criterion (AICC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), the Richards model was selected to estimate heights and the Takata model was selected to estimate the volume.
To Establish Bethesda System for Diagnosis of Thyroid Nodules on the Basis of Fnac with Histopathological Correlation.

INTRODUCTION In October 2007, "The National Cancer Institute (NCI), Thyroid Fine Needle Aspiration State of the Science Conference" was held in Bethesda, Maryland hosted by the NCI with the intention of formulating internationally acceptable guidelines for reporting of thyroid cytopathology. This was because, thyroid FNAC have a reporting confusion due to multiplicity of category terminologies. To overcome this, The Bethesda System for Reporting Thyroid Cytopathology (TBSRTC) was introduced for unifying the terminology and morphologic criteria along with the corresponding risk of malignancy. The Bethesda system for reporting thyroid cytopathology represents a major step towards standardization, reproducibility, improved clinical significance, and greater predictive value of thyroid fine needle aspirates (FNAs). AIM The aim of this study was to elucidate the diagnostic utility of the Bethesda system in reporting thyroid FNAs and to assess the effectiveness of FNAC in the evaluation of thyroid nodules by comparing the results with histopathological evaluation. MATERIALS AND METHODS The present study was carried out in our institute during the July 2012 to September 2014. In this study, 100 FNACs done which were classified according to the Bethesda system and out of them, 60 histopathological evaluations obtained from this group were evaluated. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were evaluated. RESULTS Out of 100 FNACs, 06% were Non-diagnostic, 78% were Benign, 04% were Atypical follicular lesion of undetermined significance (AFLUS), 04% were suspicious for Follicular neoplasm (SFN), 01% were suspicious for Follicular neoplasm Hurthle cell type, 03% were suspicious for malignancy (SM), and 04% malignant. In 60 cases, data of follow-up histopathologic examination (HPE) were available. The sensitivity was 88.89% and specificity was 84.31%. The positive and negative predictive value were 50% and 97.7%, respectively. CONCLUSION The Bethesda system is very useful for a standardized system of reporting thyroid cytopathology, improving communication between cytopathologists and clinicians, and inter-laboratory agreement, leading to more consistent management approaches. An additional point which is in favor of the implementation of this system is that the classification is directly related to the risk of malignancy in each category, which in turn, prompts the recommended clinical management of that category, thus truly embodying the clinico-pathological correlation in its true spirit. The correlation of FNAC with histopathology is necessary before starting treatment.
Effect of blood pressure lowering medications on leg ischemia in peripheral artery disease patients: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Background It has been suggested that anti-hypertensive medications may worsen leg ischemia in peripheral artery disease (PAD) patients. We undertook a meta-analysis to assess the effect of anti-hypertensive medications on measures of leg ischemia including maximum walking distance (MWD), pain free walking distance (PFWD) and ankle brachial pressure index (ABPI). A meta-regression was performed to evaluate whether the effect of the anti-hypertensive medications on mean arterial pressure (MAP) was associated with changes in ABPI, MWD or PFWD. Method A systematic literature search was performed to identify placebo controlled randomized control trials (RCT) testing anti-hypertensive medications, which reported baseline and follow-up measurements of: MAP and MWD, PFWD or ABPI in patients with intermittent claudication (IC) due to PAD. Result A meta-analysis was performed on 5 RCTs comprising a total of 180 and 127 patients receiving anti-hypertensive medications and placebo respectively. This analysis suggested that anti-hypertensive medication did not significantly affect MWD, PFWD or ABPI. In contrast, the meta-regression analysis showed that the reduction in MAP due to the anti-hypertensive drugs was positively correlated with increased MWD during follow-up (β = 8.371, p = 0.035). Heterogeneity across studies, as assessed by I2, was high. The follow-up period within the included trials was generally short with 3 out of 5 studies having a follow-up period of ≤ 6 weeks. Conclusion This study suggests that anti-hypertensive treatment does not worsen but may improve leg ischemia in PAD patients. Larger multicenter trials with longer anti-hypertensive treatment periods are required to clarify the effect of anti-hypertensives on leg ischemia in PAD patients.
Adversarial Multi-task Deep Features and Unsupervised Back-end Adaptation for Language Recognition

This paper presents an investigation into speaker-invariant feature learning and domain adaptation for language recognition (LR) with short utterances. While following the conventional design of i-vector front-end and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) back-end, we propose to apply speaker adversarial multi-task learning (AMTL) to aim explicitly at learning speaker-invariant multilingual bottleneck features and perform unsupervised PLDA adaptation to alleviate performance degradation caused by domain mismatch between training and test data. Through a demo experiment, we show the adverse effect of domain mismatch and motivate the necessity of domain adaptation. LR experiments are carried out with the AP17-OLR challenge dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in comparison with the state of the art. The results show that both speaker AMTL and unsupervised PLDA adaptation contribute significantly to performance improvement on the short-duration LR task. The effectiveness of PLDA adaptation is found to be insensitive to the number of clusters assumed in unsupervised data labeling. Our best system outperforms the state-of-the-art system of AP17-OLR and shows relative improvements of 6.98% in terms of Cavg and 4.80% in terms of EER on 1-second test set.
Different bacterial communities in heat and gamma irradiation treated replant disease soils revealed by 16S rRNA gene analysis – contribution to improved aboveground apple plant growth?

Replant disease (RD) severely affects apple production in propagation tree nurseries and in fruit orchards worldwide. This study aimed to investigate the effects of soil disinfection treatments on plant growth and health in a biotest in two different RD soil types under greenhouse conditions and to link the plant growth status with the bacterial community composition at the time of plant sampling. In the biotest performed we observed that the aboveground growth of apple rootstock M26 plants after 8 weeks was improved in the two RD soils either treated at 50°C or with gamma irradiation compared to the untreated RD soils. Total community DNA was extracted from soil loosely adhering to the roots and quantitative real-time PCR revealed no pronounced differences in 16S rRNA gene copy numbers. 16S rRNA gene-based bacterial community analysis by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and 454-pyrosequencing revealed significant differences in the bacterial community composition even after 8 weeks of plant growth. In both soils, the treatments affected different phyla but only the relative abundance of Acidobacteria was reduced by both treatments. The genera Streptomyces, Bacillus, Paenibacillus, and Sphingomonas had a higher relative abundance in both heat treated soils, whereas the relative abundance of Mucilaginibacter, Devosia, and Rhodanobacter was increased in the gamma-irradiated soils and only the genus Phenylobacterium was increased in both treatments. The increased abundance of genera with potentially beneficial bacteria, i.e., potential degraders of phenolic compounds might have contributed to the improved plant growth in both treatments.
The effects of transport stress on the behaviour and adrenocortical activity of the black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata)

The aim of this study was to assess behavioural and glucocorticoid changes in black-and-white ruffed lemur females transported for breeding purposes between Czech ZOOs. The frequency of the presented behaviour elements was recorded via direct observation. The faecal samples were collected from the floor and subsequently the faecal glucocorticoid values were determined using specifically designed assays for faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (FGM) analysis. While the frequency of certain comfort behaviour patterns decreased (P < 0.05) in response to transport and change of the environment, grooming, resting, sleeping as well as playful behaviour (chasing, climbing) were not affected (P > 0.05). No changes were found in the frequency of behaviour connected to metabolic events with the exception of defecation. Lemur females defecated more frequently (P < 0.05) in their new environment. The frequency of neither fear nor exploratory behaviour differed (P > 0.05) before and after transport. The positive effect of the novelty was shown by the reduction (P < 0.01) of behavioural signs of frustration and stereotypical behaviour after transport. In response to transport, a significant (P < 0.05) increase of FGM levels was found the second day after the transport, reaching peak levels in the morning and starting to decline to baseline levels in the afternoon. The results of both behaviour and adrenocortical activity analysis suggest that despite some presented changes in the monitored indices prior and after transport, the transportation under the studied conditions presented only a mild stressor with limited behavioural and glucocorticoid responses.
Impact of adjunctive tirofiban administration on myocardial perfusion and mortality in patients undergoing primary angioplasty for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction

Summary Several studies have shown that suboptimal myocardial perfusion may be observed despite optimal epicardial recanalisation in patients undergoing primary angioplasty for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), resulting in unfavourable outcome. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the benefits in myocardial perfusion and mortality from adjunctive tirofiban administration in patients undergoing primary angioplasty for (STEMI). A total of 1,969 patients with STEMI treated by primary angioplasty represent the population of the current study. All clinical, angiographic and follow-up data were prospectively collected. Tirofiban was administrated in 481 patients (24.4%) (all before angioplasty). Tirofiban was associated with less distal embolisation (11.7% vs 16.1%, p = 0.048), better postprocedural MBG 3 (50.9% vs 39.7%, adjusted p < 0.0001) and a significant reduction in 1-year mortality (3% vs 6.4%, adjusted p = 0.045). The benefits in mortality were confirmed in all subgroups identified according to the quartiles of the propensity score. This study shows that, when compared to control group, adjunctive tirofiban before primary angioplasty for STEMI is associated with better myocardial perfusion and a reduction in 1-year mortality.
Comparing Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods for Real-Time Crash Prediction

Although there are numerous studies examining the impact of real-time traffic and weather parameters on crash occurrence on freeways, to the best of the authors’ knowledge there are no studies which have compared the prediction performances of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. The present study adds to current knowledge by comparing and validating ML and DL methods to predict real-time crash occurrence. To achieve this, real-time traffic and weather data from Attica Tollway in Greece were linked with historical crash data. The total data set was split into training/estimation (75%) and validation (25%) subsets, which were then standardized. First, the ML and DL prediction models were trained/estimated using the training data set. Afterwards, the models were compared on the basis of their performance metrics (accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under curve, or AUC) on the test set. The models considered were k-nearest neighbor, Naïve Bayes, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine, shallow neural network, and, lastly, deep neural network. Overall, the DL model seems to be more appropriate, because it outperformed all other candidate models. More specifically, the DL model managed to achieve a balanced performance among all metrics compared with other models (total accuracy = 68.95%, sensitivity = 0.521, specificity = 0.77, AUC = 0.641). It is surprising though that the Naïve Bayes model achieved a good performance despite being far less complex than other models. The study findings are particularly useful, because they provide a first insight into performance of ML and DL models.
Double diffraction at a pair of coplanar skew wedges

The present work is a generalization of that dealing with a pair of knife-edges. In particular, a high-frequency solution is obtained for the scattering in the near zone of a pair of coplanar skew wedges with arbitrary exterior angle, illuminated by a source at finite distance. The solution is achieved by using a spherical wave spectral representation of the incident, singly diffracted field by the first wedge. The electromagnetic solution is constructed from the relevant scalar formulation by choosing appropriate ray-fixed reference systems. The final dyadic closed form expression is cast in the uniform theory of diffraction (UTD) framework, and includes terms up to the second order. These latter become of the same order as the leading terms in overlapping transition regions of the two wedges. This solution is also directly applicable when the two wedges share a common face for both polarizations; in this case, the second order terms provide an accurate description of those contributions that are usually neglected for soft polarization.
Safety and Efficacy of Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy in Children.

BACKGROUND Renal stone disease is a common problem in children in developing countries. Its prevalence in children varies from 5% to 15%. It is suggested that anatomic abnormalities, recurrent urinary tract infections, metabolic disturbances, dietary and environmental factors are the predisposing factors.The aim of this study is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of percutaneous nephrolithotomy in children. METHODS Between May 2012 and Dec 2016, 25 children with renal stone diseases underwent percutaneous nephrolithotomy and were evaluated for stone free rate, complications, blood transfusion rate, sandwich therapy, etc. RESULTS The mean age of children was 9.3 years (7-15 years) and the mean size of the stone was 20 mm (13-27 mm). The anatomical location of stone was important in terms of stone clearance. Three patients needed blood transfusion. The overall stone free rate was 88% before discharge. Three patients had residual stones and were treated with extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy. Complications included fever, haematuria, ileus and urine leak. No major complications were noted. There were no significant differences in haemoglobin and creatinine levels before and 12 hours after the surgery. CONCLUSIONS Percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) can be considered a safe, effective and feasible modality of treatment for children with an average of 2 cm sized renal stones.
Acute effects of melatonin administration on cardiovascular autonomic regulation in healthy men.

BACKGROUND Previous studies have suggested that melatonin, a major pineal hormone, possibly modulates the autonomic nervous system in animals. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of melatonin administration on heart rate variability (HRV) in human beings. METHODS In 26 healthy men, melatonin (2 mg) or placebo was randomly administered. Power spectral analysis of HRV and blood pressure monitoring were performed in the supine position before and 60 minutes after administration and in the standing position 60 minutes after administration. Plasma catecholamine levels were also assessed. RESULTS No differences in any baseline parameters were found between the two groups. Compared with placebo, melatonin administration within 60 minutes increased R-R interval, the square root of the mean of the squared differences between adjacent normal R-R intervals, high-frequency power, and low-frequency power of HRV and decreased the low-frequency to high-frequency ratio and blood pressure in the supine position (all P <.01). Plasma norepinephrine and dopamine levels in the supine position 60 minutes after melatonin administration were lower compared with placebo (P <.05 and P <.01, respectively). Standing up resulted in the decrease of HRV and the increase of blood pressure and plasma catecholamine levels in both administration groups, and the differences between the groups found in the supine position disappeared. CONCLUSIONS These findings indicate that melatonin administration increased cardiac vagal tone in the supine position in awake men. Melatonin administration also may exert suppressive effects on sympathetic tone.
A role for Xlim-1 in pronephros development in Xenopus laevis.

Xlim-1, a LIM class homeobox gene expressed in Xenopus laevis, is one of the earliest known marker genes of pronephros development and is expressed in pronephros rudiment. In this study, we examined the role of Xlim-1 in pronephros development. Temporal expression of Xlim-1 in explants was analyzed in a series of induction assays using RT-PCR analysis. Xlim-1 was expressed 9 to 15 h after activin/retinoic acid treatment, corresponding to pronephros differentiation in explants. We further examined the role of Xlim-1 using a series of microinjection experiments. Presumptive pronephric anlagen of embryos were injected with various Xlim-1 mutants, and effects of these Xlim-1 mutants on pronephrogenesis in embryos and in explants were analyzed by RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry. Dominant-negative Xlim-1 inhibited differentiation of pronephros in activin/retinoic acid-treated animal caps. In embryos injected with a dominant-negative form of Xlim-1, development of pronephric tubules was inhibited at the late tail-bud stage. Our results suggest that Xlim-1 may not initiate differentiation of the pronephros, but that it is necessary for growth and elongation in the development of pronephric tubules.
Update on Salmonella spp contamination of pet food, treats, and nutritional products and safe feeding recommendations.

JAVMA, Vol 238, No. 11, June 1, 2011 R there have been several recalls of commercial pet foods and treats in the United States because of contamination with Salmonella spp. This contamination creates a risk that pets ingesting these food items can become clinically ill or may become carriers of Salmonella organisms, but it is also a public health concern for pet owners who handle the food products and interact with these pets. As recalls and media attention make the public more aware of the potential for Salmonella contamination, clients may rely more heavily on veterinarians for advice in choosing safe diets for their pets and minimizing the risk of salmonellosis in their households. By keeping current on recalls and understanding the basics of how contamination with Salmonella spp can lead to disease, veterinarians can provide accurate and educated nutritional recommendations to clients as well as suggestions on public health and hygiene to minimize the risk of salmonellosis in their clients’ households.
Cyclin degradation for cancer therapy and chemoprevention

Cancer is characterized by uncontrolled cell division resulting from multiple mutagenic events. Cancer chemoprevention strategies aim to inhibit or reverse these events using natural or synthetic pharmacologic agents. Ideally, this restores normal growth control mechanisms. Diverse classes of compounds have been identified with chemopreventive activity. What unites many of them is an ability to inhibit the cell cycle by specifically modulating key components. This delays division long enough for cells to respond to mutagenic damage. In some cases, damage is repaired and in others cellular damage is sufficient to trigger apoptosis. It is now known that pathways responsible for targeting G1 cyclins for proteasomal degradation can be engaged pharmacologically. Emergence of induced cyclin degradation as a target for cancer therapy and chemoprevention in pre‐clinical models is discussed in this article. Evidence for cyclin D1 as a molecular pharmacologic target and biological marker for clinical response is based on experience of proof of principle trials. J. Cell. Biochem. 102: 869–877, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Occurrence of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in Untreated Water in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis is the known cause of Johne's disease of both domestic and wild ruminants and has been implicated as a possible cause of Crohn's disease in humans. The organism is shed in the feces of infected animals and can survive for protracted periods in the environment and hence could be present in catchment areas receiving agricultural runoff. A limited survey was undertaken in Northern Ireland to test for M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis in untreated water entering nine water treatment works (WTWs) over a 1-year period. Three detection methods were employed, viz., immunomagnetic separation-PCR and culture on Herrold's egg yolk medium (HEYM) and BACTEC 12B medium, the latter both supplemented with mycobactins. Of the 192 untreated water samples tested, 15 (8%) tested M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis positive by one or more of the three detection methods. M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis was successfully isolated from eight untreated water samples, three by BACTEC culture and five by culture on HEYM. Although the highest incidence of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis was found in spring, overall, there was no statistically significant difference between the seasons. No significant correlation was found between numbers of coliforms or fecal coliforms and the presence of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis. In general, a higher incidence of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis was found in untreated water entering those WTWs that had a high mean water pH value over the sampling period. This work indicates the need to determine the efficacy of water treatment processes to either kill or remove M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis from untreated water and the possible risks posed by contact with recreational water sources.