Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Utility of Clinical Biomarkers to Predict Central Line-associated Bloodstream Infections After Congenital Heart Surgery

Background: Central line-associated bloodstream infections is an important contributor of morbidity and mortality in children recovering from congenital heart surgery. The reliability of commonly used biomarkers to differentiate these patients has not been specifically studied. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study in a university-affiliated children’s hospital examining all patients with congenital or acquired heart disease admitted to the cardiovascular intensive care unit after cardiac surgery who underwent evaluation for a catheter-associated bloodstream infection. Results: Among 1260 cardiac surgeries performed, 451 encounters underwent an infection evaluation postoperatively. Twenty-five instances of central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI) and 227 instances of a negative infection evaluation were the subject of analysis. Patients with CLABSI tended to be younger (1.34 vs. 4.56 years, P = 0.011) and underwent more complex surgery (RACHS-1 score 3.79 vs. 3.04, P = 0.039). The 2 groups were indistinguishable in white blood cell, polymorphonuclears and band count at the time of their presentation. On multivariate analysis, CLABSI was associated with fever (adjusted odds ratio: 4.78; 95% CI: 1.6–5.8) and elevated C-reactive protein (CRP; adjusted odds ratio: 1.28; 95% CI: 1.09–1.68) after adjusting for differences between the 2 groups. Receiver-operating characteristic analysis demonstrated the discriminatory power of both fever and CRP (area under curve 0.7247, 95% CI: 0.42 to 0.74 and 0.58, 95% CI: 0.4208 to 0.7408). We calculated multilevel likelihood ratios for a spectrum of temperature and CRP values. Conclusions: We found commonly used serum biomarkers such as fever and CRP not to be helpful discriminators in patients after congenital heart surgery.
The neglected epidemic and the surgeon general's report: a call to action for better oral health.

The first US surgeon general’s report on oral health will be released soon. Oral diseases have been called a “neglected epidemic,”1–4 because, although they affect virtually the entire population, they have not been made a priority in our country. The surgeon general’s report can help educate and sensitize policy-makers and health leaders about the importance of oral health and the need to make oral health an integral component of all health programs. In the words of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, “You’re not healthy without good oral health. ” We must seize this unprecedented opportunity to ensure that the mouth becomes reconnected to the rest of the body in health policies and programs. It makes no sense that children, diabetic persons, or senior citizens with an abscess on their leg can receive care through their health insurance or a health program, but if the abscess is in their mouth, they may not be covered. For vulnerable populations and the “have-nots,” the barriers to dental care are even greater. Although we have made much progress in improving oral health since the 1970s as a result of fluoridation, fluorides, new technology, changing attitudes, and increased use of services, oral diseases are still a neglected epidemic. The facts speak for themselves. Seventy-eight percent of 17-year-olds have had tooth decay, with an average of 7 affected tooth surfaces (C. M. Vargas, unpublished estimates, Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2000), and 98% of 40- to 44-year-olds have had tooth decay, with an average of 45 affected tooth surfaces (C. M. Vargas, unpublished estimates, Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2000). Thirty percent of Americans older than 65 years have no teeth at all.5 Twenty-two percent of 35- to 44-year-olds have destructive periodontal disease.5 Finally, more Americans die from oral and pharyngeal cancer than cervical cancer or melanoma each year.6 Although tooth decay in children has decreased considerably,7 it still affects most children and adults, especially as people live longer and retain more of their teeth. Populations at higher socioeconomic levels are able to pay for dental care; however, dental care is often a luxury for vulnerable and high-risk populations. Jonathan Kozol writes, “Bleeding gums, impacted teeth and rotting teeth are routine matters for the children I have interviewed in the South Bronx. Children get used to feeling constant pain. They go to sleep with it. They go to school with it. … Children live for months with pain that grown-ups would find unendurable. ”8(p20,21)
The Strobe algorithms for multi-source warehouse consistency

A warehouse is a data repository containing integrated information for efficient querying and analysis. Maintaining the consistency of warehouse data is challenging, especially if the data sources are autonomous and views of the data at the warehouse span multiple sources. Transactions containing multiple updates at one or more sources, e.g., batch updates, complicate the consistency problem. The authors identify and discuss three fundamental transaction processing scenarios for data warehousing. They define four levels of consistency for warehouse data and present a new family of algorithms, the Strobe family, that maintain consistency as the warehouse is updated, under the various warehousing scenarios. All of the algorithms are incremental and can handle a continuous and overlapping stream of updates from the sources. Their implementation shows that the algorithms are practical and realistic choices for a wide variety of update scenarios.
Performance driven multi-layer general area routing for PCB/MCM designs

We present a new global router appropriate for Multichip Module (MCM) and dense Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design, which utilizes a hybrid of the classical rip-up and reroute approach, and the more recent iterative deletion method. The global router addresses performance issues by utilizing recent results in high performance interconnect design, while still effectively minimizing global congestion. With experiments on the maze-routing component of our global router, we show that the choice of routing cost functions can have a significant impact on final solution quality. The results of a number of previously proposed routers may be improved dramatically by adopting the cost functions we suggest here. We also find little evidence of the "net ordering problem" when our cost functions and routing model are applied. The iterative deletion method is shown to improve global solution quality, particularly when high performance interconnect is required. We evaluate the performance of our global router by comparing the congestion of routes produced by our global router to those of a well known MCM router, V4R. Our global router, MINOTAUR, supports arbitrary numbers of routing layers, differing capacities for each layer, preexisting congestion and obstacles, and high performance interconnect structures (including those which require variable width interconnect).
A Novel Digital Patient-Reported Outcome Platform for Head and Neck Oncology Patients—A Pilot Study

Introduction The patient's role in toxicity reporting is increasingly acknowledged. There is also a need for developing modern communication methods between the patient and the medical personnel. Furthermore, the increasing number of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients is reflected in the volume of treatment follow-up visits, which remains a challenge for the health care. Electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) measures may provide a cost-efficient way to organize follow-up for cancer patients. Materials and Methods We tested a novel ePRO application called Kaiku®, which enables real-time, online collection of patient-reported outcomes, such as side effects caused by treatment and quality of life. We conducted a pilot study to assess the suitability of Kaiku® for HNC patients at the Department of Oncology, Helsinki University Hospital, Helsinki, Finland. Patients used Kaiku® during and one month after radiotherapy to report treatment-related side effects and quality of life. Two physicians and a nurse performed the practical electronic communication part of the study. Results Five of the nine patients agreed to participate in the study: three of them had local early-stage larynx cancer (T2N0, T1aN0, and T2N0) and the remaining two patients had early-stage base of tongue cancer (T2N0 and T1N2b). The degree of side effects reported by the patients via Kaiku® ranged from mild to life threatening. The number of outcome data points on patients' progress was significantly increased, which resulted in a better follow-up and improved communication between the patient and the care team. Conclusions Kaiku® seems to be a suitable tool to monitor side effects and quality of life during and after radiotherapy among HNC patients. Kaiku® and similar tools could be useful in organizing a cost-effective follow-up process for HNC patients. We recommend conducting a larger study to further assess the impact of an ePRO solution in routine clinical practice. • ePRO solutions may aid in the follow-up for cancer patients. • They seem suitable to monitor, for example, side effects and quality of life. • These systems ensure fast patient-driven reporting.
Structural basis for the function and regulation of the receptor protein tyrosine phosphatase CD45

CD45 is the prototypic member of transmembrane receptor-like protein tyrosine phosphatases (RPTPs) and has essential roles in immune functions. The cytoplasmic region of CD45, like many other RPTPs, contains two homologous protein tyrosine phosphatase domains, active domain 1 (D1) and catalytically impaired domain 2 (D2). Here, we report crystal structure of the cytoplasmic D1D2 segment of human CD45 in native and phosphotyrosyl peptide-bound forms. The tertiary structures of D1 and D2 are very similar, but doubly phosphorylated CD3ζ immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motif peptide binds only the D1 active site. The D2 “active site” deviates from the other active sites significantly to the extent that excludes any possibility of catalytic activity. The relative orientation of D1 and D2 is very similar to that observed in leukocyte common antigen–related protein with both active sites in an open conformation and is restrained through an extensive network of hydrophobic interactions, hydrogen bonds, and salt bridges. This crystal structure is incompatible with the wedge model previously suggested for CD45 regulation.
Cross Talk between tRNA and rRNA Synthesis inSaccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT Temperature-sensitive RNA polymerase III (rpc160-112and rpc160-270) mutants were analyzed for the synthesis of tRNAs and rRNAs in vivo, using a double-isotopic-labeling technique in which cells are pulse-labeled with [33P]orthophosphate and coextracted with [3H]uracil-labeled wild-type cells. Individual RNA species were monitored by Northern blot hybridization or amplified by reverse transcription. These mutants impaired the synthesis of RNA polymerase III transcripts with little or no influence on mRNA synthesis but also largely turned off the formation of the 25S, 18S, and 5.8S mature rRNA species derived from the common 35S transcript produced by RNA polymerase I. In the rpc160-270mutant, this parallel inhibition of tRNA and rRNA synthesis also occurred at the permissive temperature (25°C) and correlated with an accumulation of 20S pre-rRNA. In the rpc160-112 mutant, inhibition of rRNA synthesis and the accumulation of 20S pre-rRNA were found only at 37°C. The steady-state rRNA/tRNA ratio of these mutants reflected their tRNA and rRNA synthesis pattern: therpc160-112 mutant had the threefold shortage in tRNA expected from its preferential defect in tRNA synthesis at 25°C, whereas rpc160-270 cells completely adjusted their rRNA/tRNA ratio down to a wild-type level, consistent with the tight coupling of tRNA and rRNA synthesis in vivo. Finally, an RNA polymerase I (rpa190-2) mutant grown at the permissive temperature had an enhanced level of pre-tRNA, suggesting the existence of a physiological coupling between rRNA synthesis and pre-tRNA processing.
On time scales and quasi-stationary distributions for multitype birth-and-death processes

We consider a class of birth-and-death processes describing a population made of $d$ sub-populations of different types which interact with one another. The state space is $\mathbb{Z}_+^d$ (unbounded). We assume that the population goes almost surely to extinction, so that the unique stationary distribution is the Dirac measure at the origin. These processes are parametrized by a scaling parameter $K$ which can be thought as the order of magnitude of the total size of the population at time $0$. For any fixed finite time span, it is well-known that such processes, when renormalized by $K$, are close, in the limit $K\to+\infty$, to the solutions of a certain differential equation in $\mathbb{R}_+^d$ whose vector field is determined by the birth and death rates. We consider the case where there is a unique attractive fixed point (off the boundary of the positive orthant) for the vector field (while the origin is repulsive). What is expected is that, for $K$ large, the process will stay in the vicinity of the fixed point for a very long time before being absorbed at the origin. To precisely describe this behavior, we prove the existence of a quasi-stationary distribution (qsd). In fact, we establish a bound for the total variation distance between the process conditioned to non-extinction before time $t$ and the qsd. This bound is exponentially small in $t$, for $t\gg \log K$. As a by-product, we obtain an estimate for the mean time to extinction in the qsd. We also quantify how close is the law of the process (not conditioned to non-extinction) either to the Dirac measure at the origin or to the qsd, for times much larger than $\log K$ and much smaller than the mean time to extinction, which is exponentially large as a function of $K$. Let us stress that we are interested in what happens for finite $K$. We obtain results much beyond what large deviation techniques could provide.
Summarize What You Are Interested In: An Optimization Framework for Interactive Personalized Summarization

Most traditional summarization methods treat their outputs as static and plain texts, which fail to capture user interests during summarization because the generated summaries are the same for different users. However, users have individual preferences on a particular source document collection and obviously a universal summary for all users might not always be satisfactory. Hence we investigate an important and challenging problem in summary generation, i.e., Interactive Personalized Summarization (IPS), which generates summaries in an interactive and personalized manner. Given the source documents, IPS captures user interests by enabling interactive clicks and incorporates personalization by modeling captured reader preference. We develop experimental systems to compare 5 rival algorithms on 4 instinctively different datasets which amount to 5197 documents. Evaluation results in ROUGE metrics indicate the comparable performance between IPS and the best competing system but IPS produces summaries with much more user satisfaction according to evaluator ratings. Besides, low ROUGE consistency among these user preferred summaries indicates the existence of personalization.
Expiratory measurement of maximal amino-pyrine demethylation in vivo: effect of phenobarbital, partial hepatectomy, protacaval shunt and bile duct ligation in the rat.

Current in vivo methods do not give information about the drug-metabolizing capacity (Vmax) and the affinity of the microsomal enzyme system for the drug i.e., the dose yielding Vmax/2 (Kd). To explore the possibility of estimating these variables from demethylation rates measured by 14CO2 exhalation, various doses of 14C-aminopyrine were injected i.v. to unanesthetized rats. Drug clearances based on 14CO2 exhalation agreed well with those derived from plasma disappearance rates. Evaluation of dose-response curves revealed saturation phenomena. In the normal rat, a Vmax of 173 nmol/min/100 g and Kd of 26 mumol/100 g could be calculated. Enzyme induction with phenobarbital increased Vmax to 745 nmol/min/100 g, whereas in the rat with portacaval shunt, it was reduced to 45 nmol/min/100 g. After 48-hour bile duct ligation, Vmax was not significantly different from the controls, but Kd increased to 36 mumol/100 g compatible with a competitive type of inhibition of aminopyrine demethylation. Two-thirds hepatectomy reduced Vmax by only 50% suggesting that a substantial portion of demethylation occurs extrahepatically. The approach presented appears to be a valid alternative to conventional plasma clearance methods allowing interpretation of some mechanisms affecting in vivo drug metabolism under various conditions.
Crosstalk between insulin-like growth factor-1 and angiotensin-II in dopaminergic neurons and glial cells: role in neuroinflammation and aging

The local renin-angiotensin system (RAS) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) have been involved in longevity, neurodegeneration and aging-related dopaminergic degeneration. However, it is not known whether IGF-1 and angiotensin-II (AII) activate each other. In the present study, AII, via type 1 (AT1) receptors, exacerbated neuroinflammation and dopaminergic cell death. AII, via AT1 receptors, also increased the levels of IGF-1 and IGF-1 receptors in microglial cells. IGF-1 inhibited RAS activity in dopaminergic neurons and glial cells, and also inhibited the AII-induced increase in markers of the M1 microglial phenotype. Consistent with this, IGF-1 decreased dopaminergic neuron death induced by the neurotoxin MPP+ both in the presence and in the absence of glia. Intraventricular administration of AII to young rats induced a significant increase in IGF-1 expression in the nigral region. However, aged rats showed decreased levels of IGF-1 relative to young controls, even though RAS activity is known to be enhanced in aged animals. The study findings show that IGF-1 and the local RAS interact to inhibit or activate neuroinflammation (i.e. transition from the M1 to the M2 phenotype), oxidative stress and dopaminergic degeneration. The findings also show that this mechanism is impaired in aged animals.
Australian adolescents' extracurricular activity participation and positive development: is the relationship mediated by peer attributes?

Adolescent participation in extracurricular activities is associated with numerous positive outcomes yet the mechanisms underlying this relationship are largely unknown. This study had two goals: to investigate the association between participation in extracurricular activities and indicators of positive and negative development for Australian adolescents; and to determine if these associations were mediated by the characteristics of adolescents’ friends. Extracurricular participation was positively associated with higher academic track enrolment university aspirations and school belonging and negatively associated with skipping school; participation in team sports was related to greater alcohol use. In addition friend characteristics were found to mediate the association between activity participation and developmental indicators.
Acute Phase Protein α1-Acid Glycoprotein Interacts with Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor Type 1 and Stabilizes Its Inhibitory Activity*

α1-Acid glycoprotein, one of the major acute phase proteins, was found to interact with plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1) and to stabilize its inhibitory activity toward plasminogen activators. This conclusion is based on the following observations: (a) α1-acid glycoprotein was identified to bind PAI-1 by a yeast two-hybrid system. Three of 10 positive clones identified by this method to interact with PAI-1 contained almost the entire sequence of α1-acid glycoprotein; (b) this protein formed complexes with PAI-1 that could be immunoprecipitated from both the incubation mixtures and blood plasma by specific antibodies to either PAI-1 or α1-acid glycoprotein. Such complexes could be also detected by a solid phase binding assay; and (c) the real-time bimolecular interactions monitored by surface plasmon resonance indicated that the complex of α1-acid glycoprotein with PAI-1 is less stable than that formed by vitronectin with PAI-1, but in both cases, the apparentK D values were in the range of strong interactions (4.51 + 1.33 and 0.58 + 0.07 nm, respectively). The on rate for binding of PAI-1 to α1-glycoprotein or vitronectin differed by 2-fold, indicating much faster complex formation by vitronectin than by α1-acid glycoprotein. On the other hand, dissociation of PAI-1 bound to vitronectin was much slower than that from the α1-acid glycoprotein, as indicated by 4-fold lower k off values. Furthermore, the PAI-1 activity toward urokinase-type plasminogen activator and tissue-type plasminogen activator was significantly prolonged in the presence of α1-acid glycoprotein. These observations suggest that the complex of PAI-1 with α1-acid glycoprotein can play a role as an alternative reservoir of the physiologically active form of the inhibitor, particularly during inflammation or other acute phase reactions.
The smooth switching control for TORA system via LMIs

This paper investigates the smooth switching control approach for linear parameter varying systems with applications to the nonlinear translational oscillator with rotational actuator (TORA) systems. In the smooth switching control, the control law for neighboring subsystems is smoothly switched or scheduled in the overlapped region instead of the usual instant switching methods. The design approach is presented in terms of the obtained maximum relative stability under control input and system output variables constraints. The control law is constructed based on the formulated linear matrix inequality conditions. As shown, the designed performance can be reasonably improved with the increase of number of partitions of the considered varying parameters range.
Paired subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissue aquaporin-7 expression in human obesity and type 2 diabetes: differences and similarities between depots.

CONTEXT AQP7 is considered to be the sole adipose glycerol channel, and its regulation is crucial for glycemia control. OBJECTIVES In this work, we aimed to further characterize AQP7 in human adipose tissue in obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D): 1) to assess AQP7 expression levels in paired abdominal adipose tissue depots (sc and visceral); 2) to relate it with gene expression of genes involved in lipid metabolism; and 3) to confirm that AQP7 is mainly expressed in the adipocytes. DESIGN We conducted a transversal study of gene expression in paired samples of sc adipose tissue (SAT) and visceral adipose tissue (VAT). PATIENTS Caucasian lean and obese subjects (n = 62, matched for age and gender) and T2D subjects (n = 11, matched for age, gender, and BMI with their control group) participated in the study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE We measured AQP7 expression levels in paired SAT and VAT. RESULTS We have proved the presence of AQP7 mRNA and protein in the adipocyte rather than the stromovascular fraction of adipose tissue (P = 0.001) and in mature adipocytes when differentiated in vitro. Increased AQP7 mRNA expression levels in VAT from T2D obese subjects (P < 0.05) were found. AQP7 transcript levels ratio of SAT vs. VAT changed with the presence of obesity and T2D. Interestingly, there were positive associations between AQP7 and both lipogenic and lipolytic genes in a similar manner in both adipose depots. CONCLUSIONS Taken together, these data suggest a subtle regulation between adipose depots of the sole adipose aquaporin, AQP7, which is unbalanced in obesity and T2D.