Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of Cerebral Lesions in Endocarditis on Systematic Cerebral Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Prospective Study

Background and Purpose— Cerebral lesions are frequent complications of infective endocarditis (IE) and have a prognostic impact. Cerebral MRI identifies lesions in a high number of patients. However, their determinants have not been identified. The aim of the study was to define the determinants of cerebral lesions in patients with IE undergoing systematic cerebral MRI. Methods— Determinants of ischemic lesions and of microbleeds were prospectively analyzed in 120 patients with left-sided IE, using systematic cerebral MRI. Results— Median age was 60 years (interquartile range 51–72); IE occurred on a prosthetic valve in 37 patients (30.8%) and was due to Streptococci in 47 patients and Staphylococci in 36; 15 (12.5%) had neurological symptoms. MRI detected ischemic lesions in 64 patients (53.3%; territorial lesions in 32 and small lesions in 57) and microbleeds in 72 (60.0%). In multivariate analysis, ischemic lesions were associated with vegetation length (odds ratio 1.10/mm; 95% confidence interval 1.03–1.16; P=0.003) and Staphylococcus aureus IE (odds ratio 2.65; 95% confidence interval 1.01–6.96; P=0.05). A vegetation length >4 mm identified ischemic lesions with a sensitivity of 74.6% and a specificity of 51.5%. Microbleeds were associated with prosthetic IE (odds ratio 8.01; 95% confidence interval 2.58–24.90; P=0.0003) and not with prior anticoagulant therapy (P=0.67). Conclusions— Systematic cerebral MRI frequently detects ischemic lesions and microbleeds during acute IE. The high sensitivity of MRI shows that each millimeter increase in vegetation length is associated with a 10% increase in the rate of ischemic lesions. Conversely, microbleeds are associated only with prosthetic IE in this study. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00144885.
The influence of local area physician supply on the dispersion of care among Medicare patients with a consistent diagnosis

The influence of local area physician supply on the dispersion of care among Medicare patients with a consistent diagnosis. Table 8. Number of physicians in the four specialty groups within 50 miles from each patient's zip code centroid (The numerator of the local physician supply measurements). Table 9. Number of patients treated by all medical physicians within 50 miles from each patient's zip code centroid (The denominator of the local physician supply measurements). Table 13. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in primary care physicians in the four Table 14. The effect of the local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in oncology specialists in the four categories Table 15. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in surgical specialists in the four categories v Table 16. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in other specialists in the four categories per Table A4. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in primary care physicians in the four Table A5. The effect of the local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in oncology specialists in the four categories Table A6. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in surgical specialists in the four categories Table A7. The effect of local area physician supply in four specialty categories on the number of unique physicians used in other specialists in the four categories per INTRODUCTION With healthcare costs increasing faster than inflation in the United States (Chernew, Hirth, & Cutler, 2003), it is expected that fewer people will be able to afford healthcare in the future without changes to the healthcare system. It has been argued that much of the healthcare utilization presently observed is unnecessary, and that a large portion of this wasteful spending can be attributed to the characteristics of local area physician supply and specialty mix arguments are based on observed positive correlations between local area health utilization and the local area supply of physicians and physician specialists 2009). Commentators have suggested that greater local area physician …
BONE GEOMETRY AND MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF THE HUMAN SCAPULA USING COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY DATA

Mechanical properties of scapular trabecular bone are assumed to be similar to those of other trabecular bone of different anatomical regions, like tibia, femur, humerus. The goal of this study was to develop a technique that may be useful to detect bone geometry and pixel gray value from contour data of CT-scan slice of the scapula. In this paper an attempt has been made to relate quantitative Computed Tomography (CT) gray values with apparent density, and apparent density with elastic modulus. A contour detection algorithm has been developed that finds the optimised bone contour by connecting the points with high derivatives of CT gray value on lines perpendicular to an initial contour. The number of points in a contour were stored as keypoints which were useful for generating a three-dimensional model of the scapula. A linear regression, generalised for all CT-scan slices defining the whole scapula, was derived from two reference points (one nobone condition, i.e. air, another cortical bone). Based on structural and analytical models of trabecular bone, power law relations were fitted for two ranges of apparent density. Powers of 2 and 3 (E~p2, E~p3) have been used for open cell rod-like structure and closed cell plate-like structure, respectively. The transition from open to closed structure was assumed to occur at an apparent density of 350 kg m-3. The theoretical relationships were fitted to experimental data of glenoid cancellous bone specimens. The above-mentioned relationships for scapular trabecular bone are meant to be used for a finite element model of a scapula, with or without an implant, based on CT-scan images.
Enabling biomarkers for tuberculosis control [State of the Art Series. New tools. Number 3 in the series].

Accelerated control of tuberculosis (TB) requires better control measures. Biomarkers, which reliably diagnose active TB or even predict risk of disease progression in individuals, could facilitate rapid diagnosis and treatment of TB patients and allow preventive measures for latently infected individuals with a high risk of TB. Moreover, biomarkers could speed up clinical trials with novel drug and vaccine candidates. Three platforms of global biomarker profiling will be described, with an emphasis on the most recent achievements: transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Moreover, we will discuss the need for computational analyses to make the best use of the plethora of data generated by biomarker research. Aside from their potential prognostic and diagnostic value, biomarkers could provide deeper insight into pathological processes underlying disease, and hence form the basis for novel intervention measures that target host molecules and pathways. We propose that biosignatures, which discriminate active TB from both latent infection and uninfected status, as well as from other diseases, will become available within the next decade. However, simple, low-cost biomarker-based point-of-care diagnosis will probably not be achieved in the next few years.
Analysis of Natural Variants of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 gag-pol Frameshift Stem-Loop Structure

ABSTRACT Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 uses ribosomal frameshifting for translation of the Gag-Pol polyprotein. Frameshift activities are thought to be tightly regulated. Analysis of gag p1 sequences from 270 plasma virions identified in 64% of the samples the occurrence of polymorphism that could lead to changes in thermodynamic stability of the stem-loop. Expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae of p1-β-galactosidase fusion proteins from 10 representative natural stem-loop variants and three laboratory mutant constructs (predicted the thermodynamic stability [ΔG°] ranging from −23.0 to −4.3 kcal/mol) identified a reduction in frameshift activity of 13 to 67% compared with constructs with the wild-type stem-loop (ΔG°, −23.5 kcal/mol). Viruses carrying stem-loops associated with greater than 60% reductions in frameshift activity presented profound defects in viral replication. In contrast, viruses with stem-loop structures associated with 16 to 42% reductions in frameshift efficiency displayed no significant viral replication deficit.
Controversial Cases of Human Gender Identification by Amelogenin Test

Gender identification is essential on forensic science to provide the initial information for criminal investigation. However, gender identification by amplification of amelogenin gene sometimes showed controversial cases, in which male samples was falsely identified as females. We reported the anomalous amelogenin results of 8 samples in Taiwan. The frequency was about 0.00625 % for males and 0.015 % for females, and lower than those of the other populations reported. To confirm amelogenin results of the 8 controversial samples, DNA was further used in SRY and Y-STR typing. All samples but one showed with Y chromosome. From the results, it was highly suggested that for the controversial cases of human gender identification with amelogenin tests, amplification of SRY gene or/and Y-STR markers will be adopted to confirm the gender.
Adaptive noise cancellation for speech employing fuzzy and neural network

Adaptive filtering constitutes one of the core technologies in digital signal processing and finds numerous application areas in science as well as in industry. Adaptive filtering techniques are used in a wide range of applications such as noise cancellation. Noise cancellation is a common occurrence in today telecommunication systems. The LMS algorithm which is one of the most efficient criteria for determining the values of the adaptive noise cancellation coefficients are very important in communication systems, but the LMS adaptive noise cancellation suffers response degrades and slow convergence rate under low Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) condition. This paper presents an adaptive noise canceller algorithm based fuzzy and neural network. The major advantage of the proposed system is its ease of implementation and fast convergence. The proposed algorithm is applied to noise canceling problem of long distance communication channel. The simulation results showed that the proposed model is effectiveness.
HEMATOLOGIC AND SERUM BIOCHEMICAL REFERENCE RANGES AND AN ASSESSMENT OF EXPOSURE TO INFECTIOUS DISEASES PRIOR TO TRANSLOCATION OF THE THREATENED WESTERN RINGTAIL POSSUM (PSEUDOCHEIRUS OCCIDENTALIS)

Abstract Health screening of animals before translocation is important to minimize the risk of pathogen transmission between sites and species. Reintroduction has been incorporated into management of the endangered western ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus occidentalis) to mitigate for habitat loss within the species' core range in southwestern Australia. Between November 2005 and March 2008 we screened 47 wild and 24 captive P. occidentalis and 68 sympatric common brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula hypoleucus) for infectious diseases that might compromise possum survival or fecundity at translocation sites. We found no evidence that infectious disease limits translocation success, and neither possum species showed evidence of infection with Salmonella spp. , Toxoplasma gondii, Leptospira spp. , or Chlamydophila spp. Antigen of Cryptococcus gattii was detected in one T. v. hypoleucus but was not of pathologic significance. Hematologic and serum biochemical reference ranges were determined for 81 wild and 24 captive P. occidentalis. Site differences were identified for red blood cell count, hemoglobin, albumin, urea, and globulin, suggesting that habitat quality or nutrient intake may vary among sites. Differences between wild and captive values were found for several parameters. These data are useful for health evaluations of injured P. occidentalis and the future monitoring of wild populations.
Real time object tracking via a mixture model

Object tracking has been applied in many fields such as intelligent surveillance and computer vision. Although much progress has been made, there are still many puzzles which pose a huge challenge to object tracking. Currently, the problems are mainly caused by appearance model as well as real-time performance. A novel method was been proposed in this paper to handle both of these problems. Locally dense contexts feature and image information (i.e. the relationship between the object and its surrounding regions) are combined in a Bayes framework. Then the tracking problem can be seen as a prediction question which need to compute the posterior probability. Both scale variations and temple updating are considered in the proposed algorithm to assure the effectiveness. To make the algorithm runs in a real time system, a Fourier Transform (FT) is used when solving the Bayes equation. Therefore, the MMOT (Mixture model for object tracking) runs in real-time and performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms on some challenging image sequences in terms of accuracy, quickness and robustness.
Hip resurfacing increases bone strains associated with short‐term femoral neck fracture

Short‐term femoral neck fracture is a primary complication associated with contemporary hip resurfacing. Some fractures are associated with neck notching, while others occur in the absence of notching. These unexplained fractures may be due to large magnitude strains near the implant rim, which could cause bone damage accumulation and eventual neck fracture. We used statistically augmented finite element analysis to identify design and environmental variables that increase bone strains near the implant rim after resurfacing, and lead to strain magnitudes sufficient for rapid damage accumulation. After resurfacing, the compressive strains in the inferior, peripheral neck increased by approximately 25%, particularly when the implant shell was bonded. While the tensile strains in the peripheral neck were low in magnitude in the immediate postoperative models, they increased substantially following compressive damage accumulation. Low bone modulus, within the range of normal bone, and high head load contributed the most to large magnitude strains. Therefore, in some cases, hip resurfacing may cause a region of compressive bone damage to develop rapidly, which in turn leads to large tensile strains and potential neck fracture. Our study suggests that indications for surgery should account for bone material quality, and that rehabilitation protocols should avoid high‐load activities. © 2009 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 27:1319–1325, 2009
Validity and reliability of the Thai version of the Experiences of Close Relationships-Revised questionnaire.

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Thai version of the Experiences of Close Relationships-Revised (Thai ECR-R) questionnaire. METHODS 400 students from a university in northern Thailand were randomly selected to complete the Thai ECR-R, the extraversion scale for 16 personality factors, the self-esteem scale and the trait anxiety scale. A retest of the Thai ECR-R was conducted at four-week intervals. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to test the validity of the construct. RESULTS The Thai ECR-R showed good internal consistency and satisfactory test-retest reliability. The avoidance and anxiety subscales demonstrated a convergent validity with the extraversion, self-esteem and trait anxiety scales. An exploratory analysis yielded a two-factor structure. Confirmatory factor analysis also provided general support for the hypothesised two-factor model, although there was a slight lack-of-fit. CONCLUSION The overall psychometric properties of the Thai ECR-R were acceptable. In order to render it more congruent with Thai culture, a revision of some items was considered. Further research on other age groups should be conducted in future.
Recombinant factor concentrates may increase inhibitor development: a single centre cohort study

Summary. Recent reports have raised concerns regarding potential risk factors for inhibitor development. In Israel, all haemophilia patients (n = 479) are followed by the National Hemophilia Center. Most children are neonatally exposed to factor concentrate (due to circumcision performed at the age of 8 days). The impact of early exposure and recombinant FVIII products (rFVIII) administration (approved in Israel since 1996) upon inhibitor occurrence in our cohort of haemophilia A (HA) patients was analysed. Two hundred ninety‐two consecutive paediatric cases with a first symptomatic onset of HA were enrolled and followed over a median time of 7 years [min–max: 9 months to 17 years]. Study endpoint was inhibitor development against factor VIII. In addition, the treatment regimens applied, i.e. bolus administration or ‘continuous infusion’ and the family history of inhibitor development were investigated. During the follow‐up period 31/292 children (10.6%) developed high titre inhibitors. Inhibitors occurred in 14/43 (32.5%) HA patients neonatally exposed to rFVIII, as compared to 22/249 previously treated with Plasma Derived (PD) products (8.8%). The odds ratio for inhibitor formation in rFVIII treated HA patients was 3.43 (95% CI: 1.36–8.65). Transient inhibitor evolved among 2/43 paediatric HA patients, only among those treated with rFVIII. The risk of inhibitor detection significantly increased among HA children treated by continuous infusion (P = 0.025). Our experience shows that the risk of inhibitor formation may be increased by early exposure to recombinant concentrates. The multiple variables affecting inhibitor incidence deserve further attention by larger prospective studies.
Rosemary: A Robust, Secure, and High-performance Network Operating System

Within the hierarchy of the Software Defined Network (SDN) network stack, the control layer operates as the critical middleware facilitator of interactions between the data plane and the network applications, which govern flow routing decisions. In the OpenFlow implementation of the SDN model, the control layer, commonly referred to as a network operating system (NOS), has been realized by a range of competing implementations that offer various performance and functionality advantages: Floodlight, POX, NOX, and ONIX. In this paper we focus on the question of control layer resilience, when rapidly developed prototype network applications go awry, or third-party network applications incorporate unexpected vulnerabilities, fatal instabilities, or even malicious logic. We demonstrate how simple and common failures in a network application may lead to loss of the control layer, and in effect, loss of network control. To address these concerns we present the ROSEMARY controller, which implements a network application containment and resilience strategy based around the notion of spawning applications independently within a micro-NOS. ROSEMARY distinguishes itself by its blend of process containment, resource utilization monitoring, and an application permission structure, all designed to prevent common failures of network applications from halting operation of the SDN Stack. We present our design and implementation of ROSEMARY, along with an extensive evaluation of its performance relative to several of the mostly well-known and widely used controllers. Rather than imposing significant performance costs, we find that with the integration of two optimization features, ROSEMARY offers a competitive performance advantage over the majority of other controllers.
Interoception and stress

Afferent neural signals are continuously transmitted from visceral organs to the brain. Interoception refers to the processing of visceral-afferent neural signals by the central nervous system, which can finally result in the conscious perception of bodily processes. Interoception can, therefore, be described as a prominent example of information processing on the ascending branch of the brain–body axis. Stress responses involve a complex neuro-behavioral cascade, which is elicited when the organism is confronted with a potentially harmful stimulus. As this stress cascade comprises a range of neural and endocrine pathways, stress can be conceptualized as a communication process on the descending branch of the brain–body axis. Interoception and stress are, therefore, associated via the bi-directional transmission of information on the brain–body axis. It could be argued that excessive and/or enduring activation (e.g., by acute or chronic stress) of neural circuits, which are responsible for successful communication on the brain–body axis, induces malfunction and dysregulation of these information processes. As a consequence, interoceptive signal processing may be altered, resulting in physical symptoms contributing to the development and/or maintenance of body-related mental disorders, which are associated with stress. In the current paper, we summarize findings on psychobiological processes underlying acute and chronic stress and their interaction with interoception. While focusing on the role of the physiological stress axes (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis and autonomic nervous system), psychological factors in acute and chronic stress are also discussed. We propose a positive feedback model involving stress (in particular early life or chronic stress, as well as major adverse events), the dysregulation of physiological stress axes, altered perception of bodily sensations, and the generation of physical symptoms, which may in turn facilitate stress.