Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Consistency of Blood Pressure Control After Ischemic Stroke: Prevalence and Prognosis

Background and Purpose— Blood pressure (BP) reduction lowers vascular risk after stroke; however, little is known about the relationship between consistency of BP control and risk of subsequent vascular events. Methods— In this post hoc analysis of the Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention trial (n=3680), individuals with recent (<120 days) stroke, followed up for 2 years, were divided according to proportion of visits in which BP was controlled (<140/90 mm Hg): <25%, 25% to 49%, 50% to 74%, and ≥75%. Multivariable models adjusting for demographic and clinical variables determined the association between consistency of BP control versus primary (stroke) and secondary (stroke, myocardial infarction, or vascular death) outcomes. Results— Only 30% of participants had BP controlled ≥75% of the time. Consistency of BP control affected outcomes in individuals with baseline systolic BP >132 mm Hg. Among individuals with baseline systolic BP >75th percentile (>153 mm Hg), risks of primary and secondary outcomes were lower in those with BP controlled ≥75% versus <25% of visits (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.46; 95% confidence interval, 0.26–0.84 and adjusted hazard ratio, 0.51; 95% confidence interval, 0.32–0.82). Individuals with mean follow-up BP <140/90 mm Hg had lower risk of primary and secondary outcomes than those with BP ≥140/90 mm Hg (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.76; 95% confidence interval, 0.59–0.98 and adjusted hazard ratio, 0.76; 95% confidence interval, 0.62–0.92). Conclusions— In this rigorous clinical trial, fewer than one third of patients with stroke had BP controlled ≥75% of the time for 2 years. Furthermore, consistency of BP control among those with elevated baseline systolic BP was linked to reduction in risk of recurrent stroke and stroke, myocardial infarction, and vascular death.
Elusive functions and lower bounds for arithmetic circuits

A basic fact in linear algebra is that the image of the curve f(x)=(x1,x2,x3,.,xm), say over C, is not contained in any m-1 dimensional affine subspace of Cm. In other words, the image of f is not contained in the image of any polynomial-mapping Γ:Cm-1 → Cm of degree~1 (that is, an affine mapping). Can one give an explicit example for a polynomial curve f:C → Cm, such that, the image of f is not contained in the image of any polynomial-mapping Γ:Cm-1 → Cm of degree 2? In this paper, we show that problems of this type are closely related to proving lower bounds for the size of general arithmetic circuits. For example, any explicit f as above (with the right notion of explicitness implies super-polynomial lower bounds for computing the permanent over~C. More generally, we say that a polynomial-mapping f:Fn → Fm is (s,r)-elusive, if for every polynomial-mapping Γ:Fs → Fm of degree r, Im(f) ⊄ Im(Γ). We show that for many settings of the parameters n,m,s,r, explicit constructions of elusive polynomial-mappings imply strong (up to exponential) lower bounds for general arithmetic circuits. Finally, for every r < log n, we give an explicit example for a polynomial-mapping f:Fn → Fn2, of degree O(r), that is (s,r)-elusive for s = n1+Ω(1/r). We use this to construct for any r, an explicit example for an n-variate polynomial of total-degree O(r), with coefficients in {0,1,}such that, any depth r arithmetic circuit for this polynomial (over any field) is of size ≥ n1+Ω(1/r). In particular, for any constant r, this gives a constant degree polynomial, such that, any depth r arithmetic circuit for this polynomial is of size ≥ n1+Ω(1). Previously, only lower bounds of the type Ω(n • λr (n)), where λr (n) are extremely slowly growing functions (e.g., λ5(n) = log n, and λ7(n) = log* log*n), were known for constant-depth arithmetic circuits for polynomials of constant degree.
A Study of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Utilization in Sunday Catechism Classes in the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City

The current study was carried out in the context of Church efforts to promote the utilization of ICT in religious activities, especially in catechism education to children and adolescents in the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City. In this day and age, information and communication technology (ICT) has become an important integrated component in every area of people’s lives from the workplace and to the school/educational environment, from social activities to religious practices. The Church acknowledges that these ICT advances provide people with various ways of learning new knowledge, sharing ideas and faith, and expanding means of communicating with other people, creatively and conveniently. This research was conducted in May, 2012. The quantitative research approach was employed by means of a survey questionnaire. Data obtained from 351 lay catechists were statistically analyzed in order to identify the types of ICT used in catechesis classes and, at the same time, to examine gender and age differences in ICT utilization. The results of data analysis revealed the following: (a) lay catechists used different types of ICT to support their teaching practice, with Internet/Catholic websites being the most frequently used ICT tool, followed by mobile phone, and then by desktop/laptop computer; (b) there are no differences within catechists’ gender in the use of ICT tools for catechism activities in catechism classes; and (c) there are no differences among catechists’ ages in the use of ICT tools for catechism activities in catechism classes.
Improving Sparse Word Representations with Distributional Inference for Semantic Composition

Distributional models are derived from co-occurrences in a corpus, where only a small proportion of all possible plausible co-occurrences will be observed. This results in a very sparse vector space, requiring a mechanism for inferring missing knowledge. Most methods face this challenge in ways that render the resulting word representations uninterpretable, with the consequence that semantic composition becomes hard to model. In this paper we explore an alternative which involves explicitly inferring unobserved co-occurrences using the distributional neighbourhood. We show that distributional inference improves sparse word representations on several word similarity benchmarks and demonstrate that our model is competitive with the state-of-the-art for adjective-noun, noun-noun and verb-object compositions while being fully interpretable.
Rab22 controls NGF signaling and neurite outgrowth in PC12 cells

Rab22 is a small GTPase that is localized on early endosomes and regulates early endosomal sorting. This study reports that Rab22 promotes NGF signaling–dependent neurite outgrowth and gene expression in PC12 cells by sorting NGF and the activated/phosphorylated receptor (pTrkA) into signaling endosomes to sustain signal transduction in the cell.
miR-7 and miR-153 protect neurons against MPP+-induced cell death via upregulation of mTOR pathway

Differential expression of microRNAs (miRs) in the brain of patients with neurodegenerative diseases suggests that they may have key regulatory roles in the development of these disorders. Two such miRs, miR-7, and miR-153 have recently been shown to target α-synuclein, a protein critically involved in the pathological process of Parkinson's disease. By using a well-established in culture Parkinson's disease model that of neurotoxin 1-Methyl-4-Phenyl-Pyridinium (MPP+), we examined whether miR-7 and miR-153 display neuroprotective properties. Herein, we demonstrate that treatment of cortical neurons with MPP+ induced a dose-dependent cell death with apoptotic characteristics. This was reflected in altered intracellular signaling characterized by increased levels of activated kinases p38MAPK and ERK1/2 and reduced levels of activated AKT, p70S6K, and SAPK/JNK. Overexpression of miR-7 or miR-153 by adenoviral transduction protected cortical neurons from MPP+-induced toxicity, restored neuronal viability and anti-apoptotic BCL-2 protein levels while attenuated activation of caspase-3. Moreover, both miR-7 and miR-153 interfered with MPP+-induced alterations in intracellular signaling pathways in a partially overlapping manner; specifically, they preserved activation of mTOR and SAPK/JNK signaling pathways in the MPP+-treated neurons, while miR-153 also attenuated MPP+-induced activation of p38MAPK. No major effects were observed in the rest of signaling cascades or proteins investigated. Furthermore, the neuroprotective effect of miR-7 and miR-153 was alleviated when MPP+ was co-administered with rapamycin. Taken together, our results suggest that miR-7 and miR-153 protect neurons from cell death by interfering with the MPP+-induced downregulation of mTOR signaling.
Restraint Stress Alters Nociceptin/Orphanin FQ and CRF Systems in the Rat Central Amygdala: Significance for Anxiety-Like Behaviors

Corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is the primary mediator of stress responses, and nociceptin/orphanin FQ (N/OFQ) plays an important role in the modulation of these stress responses. Thus, in this multidisciplinary study, we explored the relationship between the N/OFQ and the CRF systems in response to stress. Using in situ hybridization (ISH), we assessed the effect of body restraint stress on the gene expression of CRF and N/OFQ-related genes in various subdivisions of the amygdala, a critical brain structure involved in the modulation of stress response and anxiety-like behaviors. We found a selective upregulation of the NOP and downregulation of the CRF1 receptor transcripts in the CeA and in the BLA after body restraint. Thus, we performed intracellular electrophysiological recordings of GABAA-mediated IPSPs in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) to explore functional interactions between CRF and N/OFQ systems in this brain region. Acute application of CRF significantly increased IPSPs in the CeA, and this enhancement was blocked by N/OFQ. Importantly, in stress-restraint rats, baseline CeA GABAergic responses were elevated and N/OFQ exerted a larger inhibition of IPSPs compared with unrestraint rats. The NOP antagonist [Nphe1]-nociceptin(1–13)NH2 increased the IPSP amplitudes in restraint rats but not in unrestraint rats, suggesting a functional recruitment of the N/OFQ system after acute stress. Finally, we evaluated the anxiety-like response in rats subjected to restraint stress and nonrestraint rats after N/OFQ microinjection into the CeA. Intra-CeA injections of N/OFQ significantly and selectively reduced anxiety-like behavior in restraint rats in the elevated plus maze. These combined results demonstrate that acute stress increases N/OFQ systems in the CeA and that N/OFQ has antistress properties.
The Evolution of Primary Hyperalgesia in Orthopedic Surgery: Quantitative Sensory Testing and Clinical Evaluation Before and After Total Knee Arthroplasty

BACKGROUNDQuantitative sensory testing (QST) allows precise characterization of sensory deficits and painful symptoms and may offer additional information on the pathophysiology of postoperative pain. METHODSWe evaluated 20 patients scheduled for total knee arthroplasty clinically and with QST before surgery, at 1 and 4 days after surgery, and at 1 and 4 mo after surgery. The clinical evaluation included preoperative pain and inflammation of the operative knee, postoperative assessment of pain at rest and during movement (Visual Analog Scale score), cumulative morphine consumption, and circumference and temperature of both knees. QST included thermal and mechanical (pressure) pain threshold measurements and assessment of responses to suprathreshold stimuli. Brush-evoked allodynia was also evaluated. Measurements were taken on the operative knee, contralateral knee, and on the hand as a control site. RESULTSAll patients had prolonged and severe pain before surgery and inflammation of the operative knee. Preoperative QST provided evidence of heat hyperalgesia in the inflammatory area on the operative knee, but absence of punctate or brush-evoked allodynia in the adjacent noninflamed area. Patients had intense postoperative pain, mostly induced by movement. Primary heat hyperalgesia was present on the operative knee on the first and fourth day after surgery, and was associated with punctate mechanical allodynia in the inflammatory area, but not in the adjacent noninflamed area. Postoperative morphine consumption was correlated with preoperative heat hyperalgesia (r = 0.63; P = 0.01). QST returned to baseline at the 4-mo evaluation. Only four patients had moderate knee pain induced by movement at that time. CONCLUSIONHeat hyperalgesia was the predominant QST symptom associated with perioperative pain after total knee arthroplasty, and was predictive of postoperative morphine consumption.
Long-Term Effects of Complex Decongestive Therapy in Breast Cancer Patients With Arm Lymphedema After Axillary Dissection

Objective To investigate the long-term effects of complex decongestive therapy (CDT) on edema reduction in breast cancer-related lymphedema patients after axillary dissection, according to the initial volume of edema. Methods A retrospective review of 57 patients with unilateral arm after an axillary dissection for breast cancer was performed. The patients, treated with two weeks of CDT and self-administered home therapy, were followed for 24 months. Arm volume was serially measured by using an optoelectronic volumeter prior to and immediately after CDT; and there were follow-up visits at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. Patients were divided into two groups according to the percent excess volume (PEV) prior to CDT: group 1, PEV<20% and group 2, PEV≥20%. Results In group 1, mean PEV before CDT was 11.4±5.0% and 14.1±10.6% at 24 months after CDT with no significant difference. At the end of CDT, PEV was 28.8±15.7% in group 2, which was significantly lower than the baseline (41.9±19.6%). The reduction of PEV was maintained for 24 months in group 2. Conclusion The long-term effects of CDT were well-maintained for 24 months, but there was a difference in progression of PEV between the two groups. The patients with more initial PEV showed significant volume-reducing effects of CDT. In patients with less initial PEV, the severity of lymphedema did not progress to higher grades.
Finding Expandable Induced Cardiovascular Progenitor Cells.

Expandable Cardiovascular Progenitor Cells Reprogrammed From Fibroblasts Zhang et al Cell Stem Cell . 2016;18:368–381. Lineage Reprogramming of Fibroblasts Into Proliferative Induced Cardiac Progenitor Cells by Defined Factors Lalit et al Cell Stem Cell . 2016;18:354–367. Cardiovascular progenitor cells (CPCs) are a promising cell source for cardiac regenerative therapy because of their ability for self-renewal and differentiation into various cardiovascular cell types beneficial for myocardial repair: cardiomyocytes, smooth muscle cells, and endothelial cells. Previous evaluations of exogenously derived CPCs have focused mainly on their capacity for trilineage differentiation rather than self-renewal because of the lack of an effective protocol to maintain and expand CPCs long-term in culture. In a recent issue of Cell Stem Cell , 2 groups of investigators independently reported their success in isolating, maintaining, and expanding mouse CPCs in culture for >18 to 20 passages (1010- to 1015-fold expansion), with faithful preservation of progenitor phenotype and ability for trilineage-restricted differentiation in both cell culture and mouse models of myocardial infarction (MI). This commentary will discuss the unique findings of these 2 studies, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each CPC derivation/expansion technique, and propose additional steps necessary to accelerate their clinical translation. The past 2 decades have witnessed some of the most dramatic developments in the field of cardiac regeneration. Central to numerous controversies is the debate on whether certain stem cell types can differentiate into functional cardiomyocytes at a clinically relevant efficiency after implantation for repair of MI. Bone marrow–derived hematopoietic stem cells1,2 and c-kit+ resident cardiac stem cells3 are 2 notable cell types at the center of contention. Although many adult stem cells can still confer modest therapeutic benefits via paracrine effects, the search for a bona fide progenitor cell type that can generate a significant …
Total Recall: Automatic Query Expansion with a Generative Feature Model for Object Retrieval

Given a query image of an object, our objective is to retrieve all instances of that object in a large (1M+) image database. We adopt the bag-of-visual-words architecture which has proven successful in achieving high precision at low recall. Unfortunately, feature detection and quantization are noisy processes and this can result in variation in the particular visual words that appear in different images of the same object, leading to missed results. In the text retrieval literature a standard method for improving performance is query expansion. A number of the highly ranked documents from the original query are reissued as a new query. In this way, additional relevant terms can be added to the query. This is a form of blind rele- vance feedback and it can fail if 'outlier' (false positive) documents are included in the reissued query. In this paper we bring query expansion into the visual domain via two novel contributions. Firstly, strong spatial constraints between the query image and each result allow us to accurately verify each return, suppressing the false positives which typically ruin text-based query expansion. Secondly, the verified images can be used to learn a latent feature model to enable the controlled construction of expanded queries. We illustrate these ideas on the 5000 annotated image Oxford building database together with more than 1M Flickr images. We show that the precision is substantially boosted, achieving total recall in many cases.
The meaning of comfort for pediatric patients with cancer.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To describe the meaning of being cared for and comforted by pediatric oncology nurses among a sample of childhood cancer survivors. RESEARCH APPROACH A hermeneutic analysis was conducted to describe the meaning of the phenomenon. SETTING An oncology treatment center in the northeastern United States. PARTICIPANTS 11 childhood cancer survivors. METHODOLOGIC APPROACH Four childhood cancer survivors participated in a focus group, and seven were interviewed one-on-one via telephone interviews. The focus groups and the one-on-one interviews were tape-recorded, and the audio recordings were then transcribed into an electronic text file. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Comfort and caring behavior. FINDINGS All participants agreed that simple acts of caring by nurses were meaningful to them and provided comfort. The five themes generated from the data analysis were (a) You Just Can't Pretend to Care, (b) Try to Take the Hospital Experiences Out of the Hospital, (c) I'm Not Just Another Kid With Cancer-There Is a Lot More About Me That You Should Get to Know, (d) Caring for Me Also Includes Caring for My FAMILY, AND (E) NURSES MAKE TREATMENT EXPERIENCES MORE BEARABLE THROUGH THEIR SMALL ACTS OF CARING. CONCLUSIONS Pediatric patients with cancer find physical and emotional comfort through nurses' acts of caring. INTERPRETATION The findings highlight the significance of caring acts by pediatric oncology nurses that provide comfort for children and adolescents with cancer.
Drosophila gene expression pattern annotation using sparse features and term-term interactions

The Drosophila gene expression pattern images document the spatial and temporal dynamics of gene expression and they are valuable tools for explicating the gene functions, interaction, and networks during Drosophila embryogenesis. To provide text-based pattern searching, the images in the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (BDGP) study are annotated with ontology terms manually by human curators. We present a systematic approach for automating this task, because the number of images needing text descriptions is now rapidly increasing. We consider both improved feature representation and novel learning formulation to boost the annotation performance. For feature representation, we adapt the bag-of-words scheme commonly used in visual recognition problems so that the image group information in the BDGP study is retained. Moreover, images from multiple views can be integrated naturally in this representation. To reduce the quantization error caused by the bag-of-words representation, we propose an improved feature representation scheme based on the sparse learning technique. In the design of learning formulation, we propose a local regularization framework that can incorporate the correlations among terms explicitly. We further show that the resulting optimization problem admits an analytical solution. Experimental results show that the representation based on sparse learning outperforms the bag-of-words representation significantly. Results also show that incorporation of the term-term correlations improves the annotation performance consistently.
Prospective Study of Ocular Manifestations of Pemphigus and Bullous Pemphigoid Identifies a High Prevalence of Dry Eye Syndrome

Purpose: To study the range of ocular manifestations in an Australian cohort of patients with pemphigus and bullous pemphigoid (BP), including a detailed assessment for dry eye syndrome (DES). Methods: Twenty-two patients with pemphigus vulgaris, pemphigus foliaceus, and BP were referred for a detailed ophthalmology review between September 2011 and March 2012. Results: A total of 44 eyes of 22 patients with pemphigus vulgaris, pemphigus foliaceus, and BP were examined. Photophobia was the most common symptom reported. The most common ocular signs found in both groups were blepharitis (68.1%), conjunctival hyperemia (22.7%), and limbal broadening (18.2%). In our DES assessment, 92.9% of patients had a reduced Schirmer test score and an abnormal tear break-up time was recorded in 100% of patients. The ocular surface disease index score ranged from 0 to 47.2, with a median score of 10. Conclusions: The high occurrence of patient-reported ocular symptoms and clinical evidence of dry eye on Schirmer testing and break-up time demonstrate high prevalence of DES in our cohort of pemphigus and BP patients, which is a novel finding. Limbal broadening was another common finding not previously reported.
Application of the Karhunen-Loeve Procedure for the Characterization of Human Faces

The use of natural symmetries (mirror images) in a well-defined family of patterns (human faces) is discussed within the framework of the Karhunen-Loeve expansion. This results in an extension of the data and imposes even and odd symmetry on the eigenfunctions of the covariance matrix, without increasing the complexity of the calculation. The resulting approximation of faces projected from outside of the data set onto this optimal basis is improved on average. >