Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hypofractionated Image-Guided Radiation Therapy for Patients with Limited Volume Metastatic Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Introduction: Outcomes data treating patients with oligometastatic (⩽5 metastases) non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) with hypofractionated image-guided radiotherapy (HIGRT) are limited. Methods: Consecutive oligometastatic NSCLC patients were reviewed from a prospective database. Patients were included if all active diseases were treated with HIGRT. Lesions that had received prior radiation or had radiographic/metabolic resolution after chemotherapy were not treated with HIGRT. Local control of all treated lesions, distant control, progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and control of individual lesions (LeC) were calculated. Results: Twenty-five patients with median of 2 treated oligometastatic lesions were included. Median follow-up was 14 months. Median age was 66 years. Nineteen patients received systemic therapy before HIGRT and 11 had progressive disease after their most recent systemic therapy before HIGRT. Median OS and PFS were 22.7 and 7.6 months. The 18 months local control, distant control, OS, and PFS were 66.1%, 31.7%, 52.9%, and 28.0%. Greater than two sites treated with HIGRT, nonadenocarcinoma histology, prior systemic therapy, and progression after systemic therapy were associated with worse PFS. Sixty-two individual lesions of median size 2.7 cm were treated. For extracranial lesions, median total and fraction dose were 50 and 5 Gy. Median standard equivalent dose in 2 Gy fractions for extracranial lesions was 64.6 Gy yielding 18 months LeC of 70.7%. Standard equivalent dose ≥64.6 Gy increased LeC (p = 0.04). Two patients experienced grade 3 toxicity. Conclusions: HIGRT for oligometastatic NSCLC provides durable LeC and may provide long-term PFS in some patients. Future HIGRT studies should optimize patient selection and integration with systemic therapy.
Analysis of the temporal model of perceived control in response to an imagined traumatic event: investigation of the measurement model and the relationships among temporal orientations and individual characteristics

This thesis applied a theory of meaning-making developed in the context of traumatic or stressful life events, the Temporal Model of Perceived Control (TMPC; Frazier, Berman, & Steward, 2002), to a new context – that of an imagined traumatic event. The study is linked with several areas of psychological research: the attribution literature, investigation of risk and resilience factors for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and studies into the impact of meaning-making in posttraumatic recovery. The aim of the study was to test whether the TMPC could be applied to an imagined event and also to discern the relationships among temporal orientations and other individual characteristics known to influence posttraumatic recovery. The sample comprised 589 participants who completed a range of scales measuring individual differences, followed by the Perceived Control Over Stressful Events Scale (PCOSS), which was applied to an imagined traumatic event (an armed robbery at an Automatic Teller Machine). Statistical analysis comprised two stages. First, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were utilised to determine whether the TMPC was a valid fit to the observed response to the PCOSS. Second, multiple and logistic regression were employed to determine significant predictors of each of the temporal orientations. The results demonstrated that, with a few adjustments, the responses to the imagined traumatic event aligned with the temporal orientations indicated by the TMPC. Significant and interpretable relationships were only found for the Present Control orientation. These analyses revealed that Ambivalent Attachment Type, Neuroticism, Optimism and Male gender were all significantly associated with Present Control; there was a negative relationship with Ambivalent Attachment and Neuroticism and a positive relationship with Optimism and male gender. Clinical implications are discussed for the treatment of PTSD and also for patients presenting with rumination and worry about crime. Future research into the relationship between Present Control and emotion regulation, as well as whether this orientation can be enhanced through treatment intervention, is recommended. It is concluded that the TMPC has some usefulness in understanding the lay theories that people may apply to traumatic events (actual and imagined). While the Present Control orientation was a robust construct that seemed highly applicable to a clinical context, the other temporal orientations did not appear as theoretically sound or clinically useful.
Hard Metrics from Cayley Graphs of Abelian Groups

Hard metrics are the class of extremal metrics with respect to embedding into Euclidean Spaces: their distortion is as bad as it possibly gets, which is Ω(log n). Besides being very interesting objects akin to expanders and good codes, with rich structure of independent interest, such metrics are important for obtaining lower bounds in Combinatorial Optimization, e.g., on the value of MinCut/MaxFlow ratio for multicommodity flows. For more than a decade, a single family of hard metrics was known (see [10,3]). Recently, a different such family was found (see [8]), causing a certain excitement among the researchers in the area. In this paper we present another construction of hard metrics, different from [10,3], and more general yet clearer and simpler than [8]. Our results naturally extend to NEG and to l1.
Navigating the Local Modes of Big Data: The Case of Topic Models

INTRODUCTION Each day humans generate massive volumes of data in a variety of different forms (Lazer et al., 2009). For example, digitized texts provide a rich source of political content through standard media sources such as newspapers, as well as newer forms of political discourse such as tweets and blog posts. In this chapter we analyze a corpus of 13,246 posts that were written for six political blogs during the course of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. But this is just one small example. An aggregator of nearly every document produced by the U.S. federal government, voxgov.com, has collected more than eight million documents from 2010–2014, including over a million tweets from members of Congress. These data open new possibilities for studies of all aspect of political life from public opinion (Hopkins and King, 2010) to political control (King, Pan, and Roberts, 2013) to political representation (Grimmer, 2013). The explosion of new sources of political data has been met by the rapid development of new statistical tools for meeting the challenges of analyzing “big data. ” (National Research Council, 2013; Grimmer and Stewart, 2013; Fan, Han, and Liu, 2014). A prominent example in the field of text analysis is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei, Ng, and Jordan, 2003; Blei, 2012), a topic model that uses patterns of word co-occurrences to discover latent themes across documents. Topic models can help us deal with the reality that large data sets of text are also typically unstructured. In this chapter we focus on a particular variant of LDA, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts et al., 2014), which provides a framework to relate the corpus structure we do have (in the form of document-level metadata) with the inferred topical structure of the model. Techniques for automated text analysis have been thoroughly reviewed elsewhere (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013). We instead focus on a less often discussed feature of topic models and of latent variable models more broadly: multimodality. That is, the models discussed here give rise to optimization problems that are nonconvex. Thus, unlike workhorse tools such as linear regression, the solution we find can be sensitive to our starting values (in technical parlance, the function we are optimizing has multiple modes). We engage directly with this issue of multimodality, helping the reader understand why it arises and what can be done about it.
Fentanyl-etomidate anesthesia for cardioversion.

The effectiveness and safety of anesthesia with fentanyl and etomidate were evaluated in 44 patients undergoing elective cardioversion. No drop in blood pressure was observed; endotracheal intubation was never necessary, and ambu bag assisted ventilation was needed in only five patients. Anesthesia was induced within 7 min in all patients with a mean dose of0.9 mg of fentanyl and 15.4 mg of etomidate. After cardioversion, naloxone 0.2 mg intravenously was used to antagonize fentanyl; patients were fully awake on average 9 min after the last cardioversion discharge. Complete amnesia was observed in all patients, both 1 hour after cardioversion and the next morning. For cardioversion, fentanyl-etomidate is as safe, more effective and less time-consuming than diazepam.
Insulin and Insulin-like Growth Factor II Differentially Regulate Endocytic Sorting and Stability of Insulin Receptor Isoform A*

Background: Insulin-like growth factor (IGF) II interacts with IR-A and is a more powerful mitogen than insulin. Results: IGF-II and insulin differ in regulating insulin receptor (IR)-A trafficking and stability. Conclusion: Compared with insulin, IGF-II induces lower IR-A and downstream effectors activation but protects IR-A and IRS-1 from down-regulation, thereby evoking a sustained mitogenic stimulus. Significance: These results further elucidate the mechanisms controlling IR-A biological responses. The insulin receptor isoform A (IR-A) binds both insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-II, although the affinity for IGF-II is 3–10-fold lower than insulin depending on a cell and tissue context. Notably, in mouse embryonic fibroblasts lacking the IGF-IR and expressing solely the IR-A (R−/IR-A), IGF-II is a more potent mitogen than insulin. As receptor endocytosis and degradation provide spatial and temporal regulation of signaling events, we hypothesized that insulin and IGF-II could affect IR-A biological responses by differentially regulating IR-A trafficking. Using R−/IR-A cells, we discovered that insulin evoked significant IR-A internalization, a process modestly affected by IGF-II. However, the differential internalization was not due to IR-A ubiquitination. Notably, prolonged stimulation of R−/IR-A cells with insulin, but not with IGF-II, targeted the receptor to a degradative pathway. Similarly, the docking protein insulin receptor substrate 1 (IRS-1) was down-regulated after prolonged insulin but not IGF-II exposure. Similar results were also obtained in experiments using [NMeTyrB26]-insulin, an insulin analog with IR-A binding affinity similar to IGF-II. Finally, we discovered that IR-A was internalized through clathrin-dependent and -independent pathways, which differentially regulated the activation of downstream effectors. Collectively, our results suggest that a lower affinity of IGF-II for the IR-A promotes lower IR-A phosphorylation and activation of early downstream effectors vis à vis insulin but may protect IR-A and IRS-1 from down-regulation thereby evoking sustained and robust mitogenic stimuli.
Fastigial nucleus-mediated respiratory responses depend on the medullary gigantocellular nucleus.

Electrical stimulation of the rostral fastigial nucleus (FNr) alters respiration via activation of local neurons. We hypothesized that this FNr-mediated respiratory response was dependent on the integrity of the nucleus gigantocellularis of the medulla (NGC). Electrical stimulation of the FNr in 15 anesthetized and tracheotomized spontaneously breathing rats significantly altered ventilation by 35.2 +/- 11.0% (P < 0.01) with the major effect being excitatory (78%). This respiratory response did not significantly differ from control after lesions of the NGC via bilateral microinjection of kainic or ibotenic acid (4.5 +/- 1.9%; P > 0.05) but persisted in sham controls. Eight other rats, in which horseradish peroxidase (HRP) solution was previously microinjected into the left NGC, served as nonstimulation controls or were exposed to either 15-min repeated electrical stimulation of the right FNr or hypercapnia for 90 min. Histochemical and immunocytochemical data showed that the right FNr contained clustered HRP-labeled neurons, most of which were double labeled with c-Fos immunoreactivity in both electrically and CO(2)-stimulated rats. We conclude that the NGC receives monosynaptic FNr inputs and is required for fully expressing FNr-mediated respiratory responses.
Corpus Annotation through Crowdsourcing: Towards Best Practice Guidelines

Crowdsourcing is an emerging collaborative approach that can be used for the acquisition of annotated corpora and a wide range of other linguistic resources. Although the use of this approach is intensifying in all its key genres (paid-for crowdsourcing, games with a purpose, volunteering-based approaches), the community still lacks a set of best-practice guidelines similar to the annotation best practices for traditional, expert-based corpus acquisition. In this paper we focus on the use of crowdsourcing methods for corpus acquisition and propose a set of best practice guidelines based in our own experiences in this area and an overview of related literature. We also introduce GATE Crowd, a plugin of the GATE platform that relies on these guidelines and offers tool support for using crowdsourcing in a more principled and efficient manner.
Inquiry-based science education: towards a pedagogical framework for primary school teachers

ABSTRACT Inquiry-based science education (IBSE) has been promoted as an inspiring way of learning science by engaging pupils in designing and conducting their own scientific investigations. For primary school teachers, the open nature of IBSE poses challenges as they often lack experience in supporting their pupils during the different phases of an open IBSE project, such as formulating a research question and designing and conducting an investigation. The current study aims to meet these challenges by presenting a pedagogical framework in which four domains of scientific knowledge are addressed in seven phases of inquiry. The framework is based on video analyses of pedagogical interventions by primary school teachers participating in open IBSE projects. Our results show that teachers can guide their pupils successfully through the process of open inquiry by explicitly addressing the conceptual, epistemic, social and/or procedural domain of scientific knowledge in the subsequent phases of inquiry. The paper concludes by suggesting further research to validate our framework and to develop a pedagogy for primary school teachers to guide their pupils through the different phases of open inquiry.
An Assessment of E-training Effectiveness in Multinational Companies in Malaysia

E-training has developed into a revolutionary way of learning in Malaysian organizations due to rapid growth in information technology infrastructure. The present study endeavors to determine the critical factors that influence e-training effectiveness in multinational companies (MNCs) in Malaysia. By integrating Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Delone and McLean information system success model and Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM), the study tested the causal pathway of the factors that could predict the effectiveness of e-training. Data from 163 employees in multinational companies (MNCs) with prior e-training experience was obtained via survey method. The result revealed that motivation to learn, management support and organization support were significant predictors of user satisfaction, however, self-efficacy, ease of use, and content of training were not significant. User satisfaction was also found not to influence net benefit but was a strong predictor of intention to continue usage as hypothesized. The value of this study lies in its effort to propose to practitioners that e-training system requires substantial investment not only at the development and implementation phase, but also the subsequent maintenance.
Proteomic analysis of plasma membrane and tonoplast from the leaves of mangrove plant Avicennia officinalis

In order to understand the salt tolerance and secretion in mangrove plant species, gel electrophoresis coupled with LC‐MS‐based proteomics was used to identify key transport proteins in the plasma membrane (PM) and tonoplast fractions of Avicennia officinalis leaves. PM and tonoplast proteins were purified using two‐aqueous‐phase partitioning and density gradient centrifugation, respectively. Forty of the 254 PM proteins and 31 of the 165 tonoplast proteins identified were predicted to have transmembrane domains. About 95% of the identified proteins could be classified based on their functions. The major classes of proteins were predicted to be involved in transport, metabolic processes, defense/stress response, and signal transduction, while a few of the proteins were predicted to be involved in other functions such as membrane trafficking. The main classes of transporter proteins identified included H+‐ATPases, ATP‐binding cassette transporters, and aquaporins, all of which could play a role in salt secretion. These data will serve as the baseline membrane proteomic dataset for Avicennia species. Further, this information can contribute to future studies on understanding the mechanism of salt tolerance in halophytes in addition to salt secretion in mangroves. All MS data have been deposited in the ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD000837 (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org/dataset/PXD000837).
Glomerular Diseases Dependent on Complement Activation, Including Atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, Membranoproliferative Glomerulonephritis, and C3 Glomerulopathy: Core Curriculum 2015

From the IRCCS–Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche “Mario Negri,” Clinical Research Center for Rare Diseases “Aldo e Cele Dacco,” Ranica; and Unit of Nephrology and Dialysis, Azienda Ospedaliera Papa Giovanni XXIII, Bergamo, Italy. Received November 19, 2014. Accepted in revised form March 20, 2015. Originally published online May 29, 2015. Address correspondence to Giuseppe Remuzzi, MD, FRCP, IRCCS–Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche “Mario Negri,” INTRODUCTION
Heme oxygenase‐1 in growth control and its clinical application to vascular disease

Heme oxygenase‐1 (HO‐1) catalyzes the degradation of heme to carbon monoxide (CO), iron, and biliverdin. Biliverdin is subsequently metabolized to bilirubin by the enzyme biliverdin reductase. Although interest in HO‐1 originally centered on its heme‐degrading function, recent findings indicate that HO‐1 exerts other biologically important actions. Emerging evidence suggests that HO‐1 plays a critical role in growth regulation. Deletion of the HO‐1 gene or inhibition of HO‐1 activity results in growth retardation and impaired fetal development, whereas HO‐1 overexpression increases body size. Although the mechanisms responsible for the growth promoting properties of HO‐1 are not well established, HO‐1 can indirectly influence growth by regulating the synthesis of growth factors and by modulating the delivery of oxygen or nutrients to specific target tissues. In addition, HO‐1 exerts important effects on critical determinants of tissue size, including cell proliferation, apoptosis, and hypertrophy. However, the actions of HO‐1 are highly variable and may reflect a role for HO‐1 in maintaining tissue homeostasis. Considerable evidence supports a crucial role for HO‐1 in blocking the growth of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs). This antiproliferative effect of HO‐1 is mediated primarily via the release of CO, which inhibits vascular SMC growth via multiple pathways. Pharmacologic or genetic approaches targeting HO‐1 or CO to the blood vessel wall may represent a promising, novel therapeutic approach in treating vascular proliferative disorders. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Antiviral protection after DNA vaccination is short lived and not enhanced by CpG DNA

In this study, we investigated the potential of a DNA vaccine expressing the minimal cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitope gp33 of the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus glycoprotein to protect against infection of a non‐lymphoid organ and compared this to protection against a systemic infection. Furthermore, since immune stimulatory sequences have been shown to augment CTL responses, we examined the capacity of CpG DNA to enhance CTL memory. The data show that DNA vaccination with a gp33‐based gene construct induced short‐lived gp33‐specific CTL which protected against a systemic infection but not against a peripheral infection. Immune stimulatory sequences were incapable of either prolonging CTL memory or promoting protection against infection of a peripheral organ.
Exploration of health anxiety among individuals with diabetes: Prevalence and implications

Health anxiety has been infrequently examined in individuals with diabetes. In this study, individuals with Type 1 or 2 diabetes (n = 414) completed questionnaires assessing health anxiety and related constructs. Elevated health anxiety was reported by 24.1 percent of the sample and was greater among younger individuals, females, unmarried participants, and those recently diagnosed with diabetes. The construct was related to trait anxiety, fear of diabetes complications, poorer adherence to dietary and exercise self-care activities as well as lower physical quality of life. The research improves our understanding of health anxiety among individuals with diabetes.
The Puzzling Role of CXCR4 in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection

The human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) is the etiological agent of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease highly lethal in the absence of combination antiretroviral therapy. HIV infects CD4+ cells of the immune system (T cells, monocyte-macrophages and dendritic cells) via interaction with a universal primary receptor, the CD4 molecule, followed by a mandatory interaction with a second receptor (co-receptor) belonging to the chemokine receptor family. Apart from some rare cases, two chemokine receptors have been evolutionarily selected to accomplish this need for HIV-1: CCR5 and CXCR4. Yet, usage of these two receptors appears to be neither casual nor simply explained by their levels of cell surface expression. While CCR5 use is the universal rule at the start of every infection regardless of the transmission route (blood-related, sexual or mother to child), CXCR4 utilization emerges later in disease coinciding with the immunological deficient phase of infection. Moreover, in most instances CXCR4 use as viral entry co-receptor is associated with maintenance of CCR5 use. Since antiviral agents preventing CCR5 utilization by the virus are already in use, while others targeting either CCR5 or CXCR4 (or both) are under investigation, understanding the biological correlates of this “asymmetrical” utilization of HIV entry co-receptors bears relevance for the clinical choice of which therapeutics should be administered to infected individuals. We will here summarize the basic knowledge and the hypotheses underlying the puzzling and yet unequivocal role of CXCR4 in HIV-1 infection.