Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Wiring Cost on the Large-Scale Architecture of Human Cortical Connectivity

In the past two decades some fundamental properties of cortical connectivity have been discovered: small-world structure, pronounced hierarchical and modular organisation, and strong core and rich-club structures. A common assumption when interpreting results of this kind is that the observed structural properties are present to enable the brain's function. However, the brain is also embedded into the limited space of the skull and its wiring has associated developmental and metabolic costs. These basic physical and economic aspects place separate, often conflicting, constraints on the brain's connectivity, which must be characterized in order to understand the true relationship between brain structure and function. To address this challenge, here we ask which, and to what extent, aspects of the structural organisation of the brain are conserved if we preserve specific spatial and topological properties of the brain but otherwise randomise its connectivity. We perform a comparative analysis of a connectivity map of the cortical connectome both on high- and low-resolutions utilising three different types of surrogate networks: spatially unconstrained (‘random’), connection length preserving (‘spatial’), and connection length optimised (‘reduced’) surrogates. We find that unconstrained randomisation markedly diminishes all investigated architectural properties of cortical connectivity. By contrast, spatial and reduced surrogates largely preserve most properties and, interestingly, often more so in the reduced surrogates. Specifically, our results suggest that the cortical network is less tightly integrated than its spatial constraints would allow, but more strongly segregated than its spatial constraints would necessitate. We additionally find that hierarchical organisation and rich-club structure of the cortical connectivity are largely preserved in spatial and reduced surrogates and hence may be partially attributable to cortical wiring constraints. In contrast, the high modularity and strong s-core of the high-resolution cortical network are significantly stronger than in the surrogates, underlining their potential functional relevance in the brain.
Role of Atypical Bacteria and Azithromycin Therapy for Children With Recurrent Respiratory Tract Infections

Background: The aim of this study of 352 patients, 1–14 years of age, with acute respiratory infections and a history of recurrent respiratory tract infections (RRTIs), and 208 healthy subjects was to evaluate whether Mycoplasma pneumoniae and Chlamydia pneumoniae played a role in causing acute respiratory episodes among children with RRTIs and whether specific antibiotic treatment for these bacteria could improve the acute episodes and reduce recurrences. Methods: The patients were blindly randomized to receive azithromycin (10 mg/kg/d for 3 days weekly, for 3 weeks) together with symptom-specific agents or symptom-specific agents alone. Acute M. pneumoniae and/or C. pneumoniae infection was diagnosed if the child had a significant antibody response in paired sera and/or if the DNA of the bacteria was detected in nasopharyngeal aspirates. Results: Atypical bacterial infections were identified for 190 patients (54.0%) and 8 healthy control subjects (3.8%; P < 0.0001). Short term (1-month) clinical success was significantly more frequent among the patients who had received azithromycin together with symptom-specific agents than among those who had received symptom-specific agents alone, but the difference was significant only for the group of patients with atypical bacteria. In contrast, long term (6-month) clinical success was significantly more frequent among the patients who had received azithromycin in addition to symptom-specific agents, regardless of whether they experienced infections with atypical bacteria or other pathogens, although positive outcomes were significantly more frequent among those with atypical bacteria. Conclusions: Atypical bacteria seem to play a role among children with RRTIs, and prolonged azithromycin therapy can significantly improve the acute episodes and reduce the risk of recurrences.
Reducing the Cost of Proton Radiation Therapy: The Feasibility of a Streamlined Treatment Technique for Prostate Cancer

Proton radiation therapy is an effective modality for cancer treatments, but the cost of proton therapy is much higher compared to conventional radiotherapy and this presents a formidable barrier to most clinical practices that wish to offer proton therapy. Little attention in literature has been paid to the costs associated with collimators, range compensators and hypofractionation. The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of cost-saving modifications to the present standard of care for proton treatments for prostate cancer. In particular, we quantified the dosimetric impact of a treatment technique in which custom fabricated collimators were replaced with a multileaf collimator (MLC) and the custom range compensators (RC) were eliminated. The dosimetric impacts of these modifications were assessed for 10 patients with a commercial treatment planning system (TPS) and confirmed with corresponding Monte Carlo simulations. We assessed the impact on lifetime risks of radiogenic second cancers using detailed dose reconstructions and predictive dose-risk models based on epidemiologic data. We also performed illustrative calculations, using an isoeffect model, to examine the potential for hypofractionation. Specifically, we bracketed plausible intervals of proton fraction size and total treatment dose that were equivalent to a conventional photon treatment of 79.2 Gy in 44 fractions. Our results revealed that eliminating the RC and using an MLC had negligible effect on predicted dose distributions and second cancer risks. Even modest hypofractionation strategies can yield substantial cost savings. Together, our results suggest that it is feasible to modify the standard of care to increase treatment efficiency, reduce treatment costs to patients and insurers, while preserving high treatment quality.
Unscented SLAM for large-scale outdoor environments

This paper presents an experimentally validated alternative to the classical extended Kalman filter approach to the solution of the probabilistic state-space simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. Several authors have reported the divergence of this classical approach due to the linearization of the inherent nonlinear nature of the SLAM problem. Hence, the approach described in this work aims to avoid the analytical linearization based on Taylor-series expansion of both the model and measurement equations by using the unscented filter. An innovation-based consistency checking validates the feasibility and applicability of the unscented SLAM approach to a real large-scale outdoor exploration mission.
Influence of Proton Pump Inhibitors on Dexamethasone-Induced Gastric Mucosal Damage in Rats

The present study was designed to compare the curative role of proton pump inhibitors, omeprazole, rabeprazole and lansoprazole against dexamethasone-induced ulcer model. Dexamethasone (5 mg/kg/day) was used as an ulcerogen. Dexamethasone suspended in 1% CMC in water was given orally to all rats. Omeprazole (20 mg/kg), rabeprazole (20 mg/kg), and lansoprazole (20 mg/kg) were administered by oral route 30 minutes prior to dexamethasone for ulcer protective studies, gastric secretion and mucosal studies. Effects of proton pump inhibitors were determined by the evaluation of various biochemical parameters such as estimation of myeloperoxidase, cortisol, alkaline phosphatase, malondialdehyde, endogenous anti-oxidants like superoxide dismutase, catalase and reduced glutathione. In dexamethasone induced ulcer model, omeprazole showed significant decrease in malondialdehyde, myeloperoxidase, alkaline phosphatase level and increase in superoxide dismutase, catalase and reduced glutathione level as compared to rabeprazole and lansoprazole. Omeprazole showed significant reduction in cortisol content where as rabeprazole and lansoprazole did not show significant changes as compared to control. The result indicates that omeprazole is the most effective and selective proton pump inhibitor in dexamethasone induced ulcer model as compared to rabeprazole and lansoprazole.
The Oxidative State of Chylomicron Remnants Influences Their Modulation of Human Monocyte Activation

Chylomicron remnants (CMRs) contribute directly to human monocyte activation in vitro, by increasing reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and cell migration. In this study, the effects of the oxidative state of CMR on the degree of monocyte activation was investigated. CMR-like particles (CRLPs) were prepared in three different oxidative states, normal (CRLPs), protected from oxidation by incorporation of the antioxidant, probucol (pCRLPs), or oxidised with CuSO4 (oxCRLPs). Lipid accumulation and ROS production were significantly increased in primary human monocytes incubated with CRLPs, whilst secretion on monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 was reduced, but oxCRLPs had no additional effect. In contrast, pCRLPs were taken up by monocytes to a lesser extent and had no significant effect on ROS or MCP-1 secretion. These studies suggest that the oxidative state of CMRs modulates their stimulation of the activation of peripheral blood human monocytes and that dietary antioxidants may provide some protection against these atherogenic effects.
Self-triggered rendezvous of gossiping second-order agents

A recent paper by some of the authors introduced several self-triggered coordination algorithms for first-order continuous-time systems. The extension of these algorithms to second-order agents is relevant in many practical applications but presents some challenges that are tackled in this contribution and that require to depart from the analysis that was carried out before. We design a self-triggered gossiping coordination algorithm that induces a time-varying communication graph, which is enough connected to guarantee useful convergence properties, and allows us to achieve the desired coordination task in a formation of double-integrator agents that (i) establish pair-wise communication at suitably designed times and (ii) exchange relative measurements while reducing the sensing and communication effort.
A weight pushing algorithm for large vocabulary speech recognition

Weighted ﬁnite-state transducers provide a general framework for the representation of the components of speech recognition systems; language models, pronunciation dictionaries, context-dependent models, HMM-level acoustic models, and the output word or phone lattices can all be represented by weighted automata and transducers. In general, a representation is not unique and there may be different weighted transducers realizing the same mapping. In particular, even when they have exactly the same topology with the same input and output labels, two equivalent transducers may differ by the way the weights are distributed along each path. We present a weight pushing algorithm that modiﬁes the weights of a given weighted transducer in a way such that the transition probabilities form a stochastic distribution. This re-sults in an equivalent transducer whose weight distribution is more suitable for pruning and speech recognition. We demonstrate substantial improvements of the speed of our recognition system in several tasks based on the use of this algorithm. We report a 45% speedup at 83% word accuracy with a simple single-pass 40;000 -word vocabulary North American Business News (NAB) recognition system on the DARPA Eval ’95 test set. With the same technique, we report a 550% speedup at 88% word accuracy in rescoring NAB word lattices with more accurate 2nd-pass models. We ﬁnally report a 280% speedup at 68% word accuracy for 100;000 ﬁrst name-last name pairs recognition.
Convergence of Iterative Algorithms for Continuous Pseudocontractive Mappings

In this paper, we prove convergence of a path for a convex combination of a pseudocontractive type of operators in a real reflexive Banach space having a weakly continuous duality mapping $J_{\varphi}$ with gauge function $\varphi$. Using of path convergency, we establish strong convergence of an implicit iterative algorithm for pseudocontractive mapping combined with strongly pseudocontractive mapping in the same Banach space.
HIV and malaria co-infection in Mumbai, western India.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Conflicting reports exist regarding the HIV-1 infection on the risk of malaria. A transient almost one-log elevation in HIV viral load occurs during febrile malaria episodes. We prospectively studied malaria patients for HIV infection from Mumbai. METHODS A total of 171 malaria patients and 28,749 normal voluntary blood donors were studied for their HIV status. Diagnosis of malaria was done by microscopical examination of blood. HIV screening was done by detection of HIV-1 & 2 antibodies by micro well ELISA using Enzaids & J Mitra kits followed by confirmation using western blot (Innogenetics, Belgium) analysis. RESULTS Out of 171 malaria patients 13 (7.6%; Odds ratio= 4.45; p <0.0001) and 521 blood bank donors were found to be HIV reactive. Among 13 HIV reactive patients, eight patients were Elisa borderline reactive and western blot positive (p24), which may be due to cross-reactive antibodies. Five of 13 malaria patients found to be HIV-1 positive by ELISA and by western blot confirming HIV and malaria co-infection. CONCLUSION Our findings suggest that HIV-1 and malaria co-infection can't be ruled out in malaria endemic countries like India.
Incident Light Metering in Computer Graphics

Every rendering process consists of two steps. The first is the computing of luminance values by methods like ray tracing or radiosity, and the second step is the mapping of the computed values to values appropriate for displaying. In the last years, as alternative to simple linear scaling which maps the average value to the medium luminance, some new ways of mapping were introduced. These new methods are based on photography analogies and on human vision models. All existing methods follow, implicitly or explicitly, the reflected light metering principle. The method introduced in this paper is the first that follows the incident light metering used in professional photography and in the movie industry. Actually the irradiances are measured using a set of diffusors, which are placed automatically in the scene, and a linear scale factor based on these measurements is used to map the computed radiances to the display device. The diffusors act as half space integrators, they collect the light energy from all half space directions. The light comes from the primary light sources, or it is the result of various interreflections. The newly introduced method reproduces original colors faithfully even for scenes with very low or very high average reflectivity.
Neuromuscular Dynamic Restraint in Women with Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries

The purpose of this study was to identify neuromuscular characteristics related to dynamic restraint in the knee. Observing compensatory changes to these characteristics in women with anterior cruciate ligament injuries provides important information for understanding functional knee stability, injury prevention, and performance. Twelve female subjects with anterior cruciate ligament injuries and 17 female control subjects participated in this study to assess electromyographic activity during landing from a hop and knee perturbation; hamstring muscle stiffness and flexibility; and isokinetic strength. Females with anterior cruciate ligament deficiencies had significantly increased preparatory muscle activity in the lateral hamstring before landing, but no differences in reactive muscle activity during landing or reflex latency after joint perturbation. Females with anterior cruciate ligament deficiencies had significantly less hamstring muscle stiffness and flexibility, but also had greater peak torque and torque development for knee flexion. Lower Lysholm scores were observed in females with anterior cruciate ligament deficiencies but no difference was found in functional performance of the single leg hop test. These neuromuscular characteristics provide a foundation for future research investigating injury prevention and rehabilitation techniques that maximize dynamic restraint through stiffness regulation and the timing of specific muscle activation strategies.
Biological Networks Underlying Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Temperate Crops—A Proteomic Perspective

Abiotic stress factors, especially low temperatures, drought, and salinity, represent the major constraints limiting agricultural production in temperate climate. Under the conditions of global climate change, the risk of damaging effects of abiotic stresses on crop production increases. Plant stress response represents an active process aimed at an establishment of novel homeostasis under altered environmental conditions. Proteins play a crucial role in plant stress response since they are directly involved in shaping the final phenotype. In the review, results of proteomic studies focused on stress response of major crops grown in temperate climate including cereals: common wheat (Triticum aestivum), durum wheat (Triticum durum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), maize (Zea mays); leguminous plants: alfalfa (Medicago sativa), soybean (Glycine max), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), pea (Pisum sativum); oilseed rape (Brassica napus); potato (Solanum tuberosum); tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum); tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum); and others, to a wide range of abiotic stresses (cold, drought, salinity, heat, imbalances in mineral nutrition and heavy metals) are summarized. The dynamics of changes in various protein functional groups including signaling and regulatory proteins, transcription factors, proteins involved in protein metabolism, amino acid metabolism, metabolism of several stress-related compounds, proteins with chaperone and protective functions as well as structural proteins (cell wall components, cytoskeleton) are briefly overviewed. Attention is paid to the differences found between differentially tolerant genotypes. In addition, proteomic studies aimed at proteomic investigation of multiple stress factors are discussed. In conclusion, contribution of proteomic studies to understanding the complexity of crop response to abiotic stresses as well as possibilities to identify and utilize protein markers in crop breeding processes are discussed.
Antenatal treatment of fetal goiter: a therapeutic challenge

Objective. Pre-natal ultrasonography presents an opportunity for in-utero therapy of a fetal goiter. Because of the morbidity associated with a large goiter and the risks of repeated intra-amniotic injections, controversy arose about the precise indications of this mode of treatment. We describe our observations in treating a 22-week-old fetus with a large goiter because of dyshormogenesis, monitored with serial 3D high frequency, high resolution ultrasonography and amniotic hormonal measurements. Fetal hypothyroidism was confirmed by cordocentesis and amniotic hormone levels. After assessment of relevant risk factors and the criteria for in-utero intervention, including goiter volume, amniotic fluid index, polyhydramnios and tracheal compression, we determined that hormonal therapy was warranted. Levothyroxine was injected every 7–10 days, and its efficacy monitored by ultrasound changes and amniotic hormone sampling. Results. Reduction in goiter volume restored normal neck flexion relieving the pressure on the trachea, polyhydramnios was prevented and amniotic hormone levels were normalised. The infant was euthyroid at birth, however, by age 4 days hypothyroidism was diagnosed, and treatment with l-thyroxine started. Conclusion. Advances in fetal ultrasonography permit judicious therapy of an enlarging goiter in a hypothyroid fetus, which may contribute to enhancing cognitive development. We discuss the value of amniotic hormone sampling, the objectives and risks of in-utero intervention in the light of recent literature and our own observations.
Barriers and facilitators to Evidence-Based Nursing in Colombia: Perspectives of nurse educators, nurse researchers and graduate students

Objective. To identify and describe the perceptions of nursing researchers, educators, and graduate students regarding the barriers to, and facilitators for, EBN in Medellín, Colombia. Methodology. Using a qualitative descriptive design, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 participants associated with a large university faculty of nursing in Medellín, and one member of the National Association of Nurses. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the interview transcripts. Results. Several barriers to EBN were reported, including: lack of recognition of nursing as an autonomous profession; a lack of incentives for nurses to pursue advanced education or engage in research; limited availability and utility of nursing evidence; and a lack of communication between academic and clinical practice environments. Perceived facilitators included an increase in nurses pursuing advanced education opportunities; the current healthcare accreditation process; access to international research and research collaborations; and clinical and research partnerships between universities and clinical institutions. Conclusion. Effective implementation of evidence-based nursing practices is a necessity to translate the vast amount of healthrelated research, knowledge, and experience into positive changes in healthcare quality.