Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immediate rehabilitation of the mandible with fixed full prosthesis supported by axial and tilted implants: interim results of a single cohort prospective study.

PURPOSE The aims of this prospective study were to assess the treatment outcome of immediately loaded full-arch fixed bridges anchored to both tilted and axially placed implants for the rehabilitation of the mandible and to compare the outcome of axial versus tilted implants. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sixty-two patients (34 women and 28 men) were included in the study. Each patient received a full-arch fixed bridge supported by two axial implants and two distal tilted implants (All-on-Four, Nobel Biocare AB, Göteborg, Sweden). Loading was applied within 48 hours of surgery. Patients were scheduled for follow-up at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months, and annually up to 5 years. At each follow-up, plaque level and bleeding scores were assessed; moreover, patient's satisfaction for aesthetics and function was evaluated by a questionnaire. Radiographic evaluation of marginal bone level change was performed at 1 year. RESULTS The overall follow-up range was 6 to 43 months (mean 22.4 months). Forty-four patients were followed for a minimum of 1 year. No implant failures were recorded to date, leading to a cumulative implant survival and prosthesis success rate of 100%. Plaque level and bleeding scores showed progressive decrease over time, parallel to increase of satisfaction for both aesthetics and function. No significant difference in marginal bone loss was found between tilted and axial implants at 1-year evaluation. CONCLUSION The present preliminary data suggest that immediate loading associated with tilted implants could be considered a viable treatment modality for the mandible.
Antibody Responses to Mycobacterial Antigens in Children with Tuberculosis: Challenges and Potential Diagnostic Value

ABSTRACT The identification of easily detectable biomarkers for active tuberculosis (TB) is a global health priority. Such biomarkers would be of particular value in childhood TB, which poses greater diagnostic challenges than adult TB. Serum antibodies can be detected by simple formats that provide extremely rapid results. However, attempts to develop accurate serodiagnostic tests for TB have been unsuccessful. Whereas antibody responses to mycobacterial antigens in adult TB have been studied extensively and reviewed, the same cannot be said for serologic data in pediatric populations. Here we appraise studies on serological responses in childhood TB and discuss findings and limitations in the context of the developing immune system, the age range, and the spectrum of TB manifestations. We found that the antibody responses to mycobacterial antigens in childhood TB can vary widely, with sensitivities and specificities ranging from 14% to 85% and from 86% to 100%, respectively. We conclude that the limitations in serodiagnostic studies of childhood TB are manifold, thereby restricting the interpretation of currently available data. Concerns about the methodology used in published studies suggest that conclusions about the eventual value of serodiagnosis cannot be made at this time. However, the available data suggest a potential adjunctive value for serology in the diagnosis of childhood TB. Despite the difficulties noted in this field, there is optimism that the application of novel antigens and the integration of those factors which contribute to the serological responses in childhood TB can lead to useful future diagnostics.
Fault injection-based assessment of aspect-oriented implementation of fault tolerance

Aspect-oriented programming provides an interesting approach for implementing software-based fault tolerance as it allows the core functionality of a program and its fault tolerance features to be coded separately. This paper presents a comprehensive fault injection study that estimates the fault coverage of two software implemented fault tolerance mechanisms designed to detect or mask transient and intermittent hardware faults. We compare their fault coverage for two target programs and for three implementation techniques: manual programming in C and two variants of aspect-oriented programming. We also compare the impact of different compiler optimization levels on the fault coverage. The software-implemented fault tolerance mechanisms investigated are: i) triple time-redundant execution with voting and forward recovery, and ii) a novel dual signature control flow checking mechanism. The study shows that the variations in fault coverage among the implementation techniques generally are small, while some variations for different compiler optimization levels are significant.
Bridging the Gap between Stochastic Gradient MCMC and Stochastic Optimization

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an SGMCMC algorithm. Furthermore, we extend recent SG-MCMC methods with two key components: i) adaptive preconditioners (as in ADAgrad or RMSprop), and ii) adaptive element-wise momentum weights. The zero-temperature limit gives a novel stochastic optimization method with adaptive element-wise momentum weights, while conventional optimization methods only have a shared, static momentum weight. Under certain assumptions, our theoretical analysis suggests the proposed simulated annealing approach converges close to the global optima. Experiments on several deep neural network models show state-of-the-art results compared to related stochastic optimization algorithms.
Effect of glucocorticoids on neuronal and vascular pathology in a transgenic model of selective Müller cell ablation

Retinal diseases such as macular telangiectasis type 2 (MacTel), age‐related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) affect both neurons and blood vessels. Treatments addressing both at the same time might have advantages over more specific approaches, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitors, which are used to treat vascular leak but are suspected to have a neurotoxic effect. Here, we studied the effects of an intravitreal injection of triamcinolone acetonide (TA) in a transgenic model in which patchy Müller cell ablation leads to photoreceptor degeneration, vascular leak, and intraretinal neovascularization. TA was injected 4 days before Müller cell ablation. Changes in photoreceptors, microglia and Müller cells, retinal vasculature, differential expression of p75 neurotrophin receptor (p75NTR), tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNFα), the precursor and mature forms of neurotrophin 3 (pro‐NT3 and mature NT3) and activation of the p53 and p38 stress‐activated protein kinase (p38/SAPK) signaling pathways were examined. We found that TA prevented photoreceptor degeneration and inhibited activation of microglial and Müller cells. TA attenuated Müller cell loss and inhibited overexpression of p75NTR, TNFα, pro‐NT, and the activation of p53 and p38/SAPK signaling pathways. TA not only prevented the development of retinal vascular lesions but also inhibited fluorescein leakage from established vascular lesions. TA inhibited overexpression of VEGF in transgenic mice but without affecting its basal level expression in the normal retina. Our data suggest that glucocorticoid treatment may be beneficial for treatment of retinal diseases such as MacTel, AMD, and DR that affect both neurons and the vasculature. GLIA 2014;62:1110–1124
Image-guided radiation therapy: Physician's perspectives

The evolution of radiotherapy has been ontogenetically linked to medical imaging. Over the years, major technological innovations have resulted in substantial improvements in radiotherapy planning, delivery, and verification. The increasing use of computed tomography imaging for target volume delineation coupled with availability of computer-controlled treatment planning and delivery systems have progressively led to conformation of radiation dose to the target tissues while sparing surrounding normal tissues. Recent advances in imaging technology coupled with improved treatment delivery allow near-simultaneous soft-tissue localization of tumor and repositioning of patient. The integration of various imaging modalities within the treatment room for guiding radiation delivery has vastly improved the management of geometric uncertainties in contemporary radiotherapy practice ushering in the paradigm of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). Image-guidance should be considered a necessary and natural corollary to high-precision radiotherapy that was long overdue. Image-guided radiation therapy not only provides accurate information on patient and tumor position on a quantitative scale, it also gives an opportunity to verify consistency of planned and actual treatment geometry including adaptation to daily variations resulting in improved dose delivery. The two main concerns with IGRT are resource-intensive nature of delivery and increasing dose from additional imaging. However, increasing the precision and accuracy of radiation delivery through IGRT is likely to reduce toxicity with potential for dose escalation and improved tumor control resulting in favourable therapeutic index. The radiation oncology community needs to leverage this technology to generate high-quality evidence to support widespread adoption of IGRT in contemporary radiotherapy practice.
Nutritive Value of Cookies Containing Wheat Germ Oil

Wheat germ, the main fatty component of wheat grain, is characterized by consisting of polyunsaturated fatty acids as well as its elevated content of natural antioxidant i.e. α-tocopherol. Cookies were prepared from wheat germ oil (WGO) with the objective of providing higher antioxidant content in the diet. Normal shortening was replaced with WGO at the levels of 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100% in the cookies formulation. The αtocopherol content was 1660mg/kg in the WGO. Fatty acid profile of WGO revealed the content of oleic acid (14.69%), linoleic acid (56.99%) and linolenic acid (9.51%). The α-tocopherol content of cookies improved significantly with gradual increase of WGO in cookies formulation, however sensory attributes of the cookies containing WGO up to 50% were as acceptable as control cookies. Above which the sensory characteristics of cookies were affected negatively. The biochemical effects of the cookies were assessed through weanling albino rats by feeding a diet of cookies (10 % protein basis) for three months. The results indicated a significant decrease in serum cholesterol and LDL (Low density lipoprotein) concentration of serum of rats fed over diets containing WGO against the control group. However, non significant differences were observed among diet groups fed over 50, 75 and 100% WGO levels. High density lipoprotein (HDL) concentration was not affected by the treatments during the study. Results indicated that WGO containing cookies lower LDL, without significantly changing the HDL in rats. These findings support the nutritional value of wheat germ as a natural source of edible oil containing essential fatty acids and natural antioxidant whose combined effects play a crucial role in reducing lipid peroxidation, which is ultimately useful in decreasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Drug-target interaction prediction from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in an integrated framework

Motivation: In silico prediction of drug–target interactions from heterogeneous biological data is critical in the search for drugs and therapeutic targets for known diseases such as cancers. There is therefore a strong incentive to develop new methods capable of detecting these potential drug–target interactions efficiently. Results: In this article, we investigate the relationship between the chemical space, the pharmacological space and the topology of drug–target interaction networks, and show that drug–target interactions are more correlated with pharmacological effect similarity than with chemical structure similarity. We then develop a new method to predict unknown drug–target interactions from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data on a large scale. The proposed method consists of two steps: (i) prediction of pharmacological effects from chemical structures of given compounds and (ii) inference of unknown drug–target interactions based on the pharmacological effect similarity in the framework of supervised bipartite graph inference. The originality of the proposed method lies in the prediction of potential pharmacological similarity for any drug candidate compounds and in the integration of chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in a unified framework. In the results, we make predictions for four classes of important drug–target interactions involving enzymes, ion channels, GPCRs and nuclear receptors. Our comprehensively predicted drug–target interaction networks enable us to suggest many potential drug–target interactions and to increase research productivity toward genomic drug discovery. Supplementary information: Datasets and all prediction results are available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~yyamanishi/pharmaco/. Availability: Softwares are available upon request. Contact: yoshihiro.yamanishi@ensmp.fr
The temperature-jump problem in rarefied-gas dynamics

An analytical version of the discrete-ordinates method is used here to solve the classical temperature-jump problem based on the BGK model in rarefied-gas dynamics. In addition to a complete development of the discrete-ordinates method for the application considered, the computational algorithm is implemented to yield very accurate results for the temperature jump and the complete temperature and density distributions in the gas. The algorithm is easy to use, and the developed code runs typically in less than a second on a 400 MHz Pentium-based PC.
Executive control, willed actions, and nonconscious processing

Neuroimaging studies have identified a number of cortical areas involved in the executive control of conscious actions. The areas most frequently implicated are prefrontal and cingulate cortices. Evidence suggests that both of these areas may be essential for executive control of willed action. Prefrontal cortex, however, may be responsible for the initial processing. Executive control is usually discussed with reference to willed actions and is assumed to regulate complex cognitive responses. Although many implicit processes involve complex responses, it is not known whether these actions are also controlled by executive processes. Significantly, some implicit tasks like those involving motor sequence learning and cross‐modality priming activate the same areas of prefrontal cortex that are implicated in the executive control of willed actions. It is, however, not clear whether a single executive process controls both implicit and explicit processes, or the implicit processes are regulated by a separate set of executive control having distinct neuroanatomical location and processing properties. Hum. Brain Mapping 9:38–41, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Migrants as a major risk group for imported malaria in European countries.

Methods and Results Systematic searches of MEDLINE and available national malaria statistics were scanned to identify studies and reports showing the proportions of malaria cases occurring in nonnationals in European countries.Nonnationals were defined as being foreign born residents, which embraces various categories of migrants, including immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, foreign workers, illegal migrants, or aliens. Only reports describing more than 250 malaria cases were included in the analysis. The period of the search was January 1991 to September 2001. A total of five MEDLINE reports2–6 were found that satisfied the inclusion criteria, and personal communication with surveillance groups provided additional information. Proportion of Nonnationals Depending on the country of origin of the report, the proportion of cases varied from 33% in the United Kingdom to 86% in a region of France, reflecting the profile of immigration in various areas at different time points. On pooling the reports, 43% of malaria cases registered in important European centers occur in nonnationals, frequently settled immigrants VFR. In Italy, where 44% of cases were related to foreigners, VFRs accounted for 72% of the cases reported in this group.2 Increasing Proportion of Nonnationals All reports describe an increasing proportion of malaria cases occurring in nonnationals. In the report describing imported malaria cases in northern Italy,4 the proportion of immigrants increased from 34% in 1991 to 59.9% in 1995 (p = .002). In the Netherlands, for the period 1979 to 1988, only 15% of cases were in persons originating in a malaria-endemic area, whereas for the period 1991 to 1994, 40% of cases were in persons from malaria-endemic areas, and 8% of cases were in children born to settled immigrants resident in the Netherlands.5 Comment Data from the aforementioned studies show that residents of foreign origin represent a growing proportion of imported cases, reflecting to some extent the increasing number of migrants in western Europe. In Britain, an older study has shown that migrants VFRs have a malaria incidence rate almost three times higher that that of tourists to Africa,7 suggesting a higher risk of exposure and/or insufficient protection measures. Although no prospective studies exist that confirm the hypothesis, migrants VFRs may be more exposed as they visit their families in rural areas with higher transmission rates and simple nonair-conditioned living conditions.Many return home during summer holidays, a period corresponding to the rainy season in West Africa or to the monsoon season in India when malaria transmission is at its peak.Many migrants VFRs mistakenly believe that they retain lifetime immunity and although immunity does wane when constant reexposure stops, some immunologic memory remains that partly explains the lower case fatality in Migrants .
A compiled implementation of strong reduction

Motivated by applications to proof assistants based on dependent types, we develop and prove correct a strong reducer and ß-equivalence checker for the λ-calculus with products, sums, and guarded fixpoints. Our approach is based on compilation to the bytecode of an abstract machine performing weak reductions on non-closed terms, derived with minimal modifications from the ZAM machine used in the Objective Caml bytecode interpreter, and complemented by a recursive "read back" procedure. An implementation in the Coq proof assistant demonstrates important speed-ups compared with the original interpreter-based implementation of strong reduction in Coq.
Cardiac muscle energetics: Improved normalisation of heat using optical coherence tomography

Heat liberated from isolated cardiac muscle has been used to inform us of thermo-mechanical processes that occur during a contraction. However, for comparisons between different samples to be useful, the heat output needs to be normalized to volume. We have implemented an optical coherence tomograph (OCT), together with a flow-through calorimeter, to accurately determine both muscle volume and heat in the same measurement chamber. The heat rate for multiple stimulation frequencies were recorded and normalized to the volume captured by the OCT. There was a ~15 % difference in the volume estimated by the OCT compared to the standard 1D approximation, suggesting the need for this imaging system, especially for irregularly shaped muscles.
Dynamic Synchrony of Firing in the Monkey Prefrontal Cortex during Working-Memory Tasks

Synchronized firing among neurons in the working brain is inferred to reflect coding by cell assemblies, which dynamically change their sizes and functional connections to encode various information. It therefore follows that, if synchronized firing reflects cell-assembly coding, it should show dynamic changes that depend on the tasks and events being processed and on the distance between the neurons. By using unique spike-sorting and multi-neuronal recording methods, we investigated such dynamics of synchrony in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys while they were successively performing two tasks in which working memory for either stimulus duration or color was required. Forty-eight percent of 1405 neuronal pairs showed firing synchrony during the performance of the tasks. Almost half of such neuronal pairs showed fixed synchrony and constantly fired together in both tasks. However, some neuronal pairs showed task-dependent synchrony that appeared in only one of the tasks. Moreover, the other neuronal pairs showed event-task-dependent synchrony that appeared during stimulus or retention periods in the tasks, but the periods showing synchrony varied between the tasks. Fixed synchrony and task-dependent synchrony were mostly observed among neighboring neurons and showed little variation of spike timings; the event-task-dependent synchrony, in contrast, was more often detected among distant neurons with larger variation of spike timings than the other two types of synchrony. These results suggest that some closely neighboring neurons have dynamic and sharp synchrony to represent certain situations (tasks), whereas some distant neurons show more dynamic and unstable synchronous firing to represent quickly changing events being processed in working memory.
Precise ego-localization in urban areas using Laserscanner and high accuracy feature maps

Robust ego-localization is an essential technology for future intelligent vehicles and cooperative applications. In this paper a new localization algorithm based on IBEO AS Laserscanners and high accuracy digital maps is proposed. Algorithms to create accurate grid maps with Laserscanners and the extraction of static objects used as landmarks for ego-localization is introduced. The key problem in landmark navigation in urban areas is the localization of landmarks in distance profiles of a Laserscanner. A fast algorithm is presented, that associates landmarks with data of a Laserscanner which is robust against large rotational, and translational position errors. A position correction algorithm determines the vehicles ego position in WGS-84 coordinates also often used by GPS and navigation maps.
Prevalence and Association of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis with Disease Course in Patients with Ulcero-Constrictive Ileocolonic Disease

Background Association of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) and Crohn’s disease (CD) has been controversial due to contradictory reports. Therefore, we determined the prevalence of MAP in patients with CD and intestinal tuberculosis (ITB) and its association with clinical course. Methodology Blood and intestinal biopsies were taken from 69 CD, 32 ITB patients and 41 patients with haemorrhoidal bleed who served as controls. qPCR targeting of MAP-specific IS900 gene was used to detect the presence of MAP DNA. qPCR results were further validated by sequencing. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was used to detect the presence of MAP antigen in biopsy specimens. CD and ITB patients were followed-up for disease course and response to therapy. Principal Findings The frequency of MAP-specific DNA in biopsies by qPCR was significantly higher in CD patients (23.2%, p = 0.03) as compared to controls (7.3%). No significant difference in intestinal MAP presence was observed between ITB patients (12.5%, p = 0.6) and controls (7.3%). MAP presence in blood of CD patients was 10.1% as compared to 4.9% in controls while no patients with ITB were found to be positive (p = 0.1). Using IHC for detection of MAP antigen, the prevalence of MAP in CD was 2.9%, 12.5% in ITB patients and 2.4% in controls. However, long-term follow-up of the patients revealed no significant associations between clinical characteristics and treatment outcomes with MAP positivity. Conclusion We report significantly high prevalence of MAP in intestinal biopsies of CD patients. However, the presence of MAP does not affect the disease course and treatment outcomes in either CD or ITB patients.