Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physician referral patterns and racial disparities in total hip replacement: A network analysis approach

Background Efforts to reduce racial disparities in total hip replacement (THR) have focused mainly on patient behaviors. While these efforts are no doubt important, they ignore the potentially important role of provider- and system-level factors, which may be easier to modify. We aimed to determine whether the patterns of interaction among physicians around THR episodes differ in communities with low versus high concentrations of black residents. Materials and methods We analyzed national Medicare claims from 2008 to 2011, identifying all fee-for-service beneficiaries who underwent THR. Based on physician encounter data, we then mapped the physician referral networks at the hospitals where beneficiaries’ procedures were performed. Next, we measured two structural properties of these networks that could affect care coordination and information sharing: clustering, and the number of external ties. Finally, we estimated multivariate regression models to determine the relationship between the concentration of black residents in the community [as measured by the hospital service area (HSA)] served by a given network and each of these 2 network properties. Results Our sample included 336,506 beneficiaries (mean age 76.3 ± SD), 63.1% of whom were women. HSAs with higher concentrations of black residents tended to be more impoverished than those with lower concentrations. While HSAs with higher concentrations of black residents had, on average, more acute care beds and medical specialists, they had fewer surgeons per capita than those with lower concentrations. After adjusting for these differences, we found that HSAs with higher concentrations of black residents were served by physician referral networks that had significantly higher within-network clustering but fewer external ties. Conclusions We observed differences in the patterns of interaction among physicians around THR episodes in communities with low versus high concentrations of black residents. Studies investigating the impact of these differences on access to quality providers and on THR outcomes are needed.
Tics as a model of over‐learned behavior—imitation and inhibition of facial tics

Tics are the defining feature in Tourette syndrome and can be triggered by watching tics or single voluntary movements. This automatic imitation of movements referred to as “echopraxia” has been ascribed to a failure in top‐down inhibition of imitative response tendencies. Alternatively, it could be interpreted in the context of automatic overlearned behavior. To this end, we investigated 18 Tourette patients aged 28.22 years (9.44 standard deviation; 16 male) and 24 healthy controls (mean age 29.21 years [9.1 standard deviation]; 17 male) using an adapted version of an action‐interference paradigm.
Staged percutaneous atrial septal defect closure and pulmonic balloon valvuloplasty in an adult with congenital heart disease

Combined atrial septal defect and pulmonic stenosis, while a common occurrence in children, is relatively uncommon in adults. There is no widely accepted order in which the defects should be corrected. We report a case that highlights the hemodynamics and the technical dilemma of deciding which lesion to correct first. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cranberry (poly)phenol metabolites correlate with improvements in vascular function: A double-blind, randomized, controlled, dose-response, crossover study.

SCOPE Cranberries are rich in potentially bioactive (poly)phenols. The aim of this paper was to investigate whether cranberry juice intake can improve vascular function in healthy men in a dose- and time-dependent manner, and to understand which of the circulating (poly)phenol metabolites correlate with vascular effects. METHODS AND RESULTS A double-blind randomized controlled crossover trial was conducted in ten healthy males. Flow-mediated dilation (FMD), blood pressure, pulse wave velocity and augmentation index were investigated at baseline, 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 h post-consumption of cranberry juices containing 409, 787, 1238, 1534, and 1910 mg of total cranberry (poly)phenols (TP), and a control drink. Plasma (poly)phenol metabolites were analyzed by UPLC-Q-TOF MS using authentic standards. We observed dose-dependent increases in FMD at 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 h with a peak at 4 h and maximal effects with juice containing 1238 mg TP. A total of 60 metabolites were quantified in plasma after cranberry consumption. Twelve (poly)phenol metabolites significantly correlated with the increases in FMD, including ferulic and caffeic acid sulfates, quercetin-3-O-ß-D-glucuronide and a γ-valerolactone sulfate. CONCLUSION (Poly)phenols in cranberry juice can improve vascular function in healthy males and this is linked to the presence of specific newly identified plasma metabolites.
A Machine Learning Approach to Automatic Creation of Architecture-Sensitive Performance Heuristics

Recent interest in machine-learning based methods has produced many sophisticated models for performance modeling and optimization. These models tend to be sensitive to parameters of the underlying architecture and hence yield the highest prediction accuracy when trained on the target platform. Training a classifier, however, is a fairly involved process and requires knowledge of statistics and machine learning that the end users of such models may not possess. This paper presents a new framework for automatically generating machine-learning based performance models. A tool-chain is developed that provides automated mechanisms for sample generation, dynamic feature extraction, feature selection, data labeling, validation and hyper parameter tuning. We describe the design and implementation of this system and demonstrate its efficacy by developing a learning heuristic for register allocation in GPU kernels. Results show that auto-generated models can predict register thresholds that lead to integer factor performance improvements over kernels produced by state-of-the-art optimizing compilers.
Tool support for executable documentation of Java class hierarchies

While object‐oriented programming offers great solutions for today's software developers, this success has created difficult problems in class documentation and testing. In Java, two tools provide assistance: Javadoc allows class interface documentation to be embedded as code comments and JUnit supports unit testing by providing assert constructs and a test framework. This paper describes JUnitDoc, an integration of Javadoc and JUnit, which provides better support for class documentation and testing. With JUnitDoc, test cases are embedded in Javadoc comments and used as both examples for documentation and test cases for quality assurance. JUnitDoc extracts the test cases for use in HTML files serving as class documentation and in JUnit drivers for class testing. To address the difficult problem of testing inheritance hierarchies, JUnitDoc provides a novel solution in the form of a parallel test hierarchy. A small controlled experiment compares the readability of JUnitDoc documentation to formal documentation written in Object‐Z. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Applying Speech-to-Text Recognition and Computer-Aided Translation for Supporting Multi-lingual Communications in Cross-Cultural Learning Project

We applied a speech-to-text recognition (STR) and computer-aided translation (CAT) systems to support multi-lingual communications students participating in cross-cultural learning project. The participants were engaged in interactions and information exchanges in order to learn and understand cultures and traditions of their peers. Their communications were carried out in their native languages on social communication platforms. The participants spoke and STR system generated texts from their voice inputs. CAT system then simultaneously translated STR-texts into English. Finally, translated texts were posted on social communication platforms along with spoken content in the participants' native languages. We aimed to examine accuracy rates of processes associated with STR and CAT for different languages during multi-lingual communications in our cross-cultural learning project. In addition, the feasibility of our approach to support multi-lingual communications in cross-cultural learning project was investigated. Our results showed that the lowest accuracy rate was for Mongolian and Filipino and the highest was for Spanish, Russian, and French. Our results also demonstrated that cross-cultural learning took place, the participants understood and were able to explain foreign traditions to others as well as to compare foreign traditions with their own local. Based on our results, we made several suggestions and implications for the teaching and research community.
A case study in programming coinductive proofs: Howe’s method

Bisimulation proofs play a central role in programming languages in establishing rich properties such as contextual equivalence. They are also challenging to mechanize, since they require a combination of inductive and coinductive reasoning on open terms. In this paper, we describe mechanizing the property that similarity in the call-by-name lambda calculus is a pre-congruence using Howe’s method in the Beluga formal reasoning system. The development relies on three key ingredients: (1) we give a higher order abstract syntax (HOAS) encoding of lambda terms together with their operational semantics as intrinsically typed terms, thereby avoiding not only the need to deal with binders, renaming and substitutions, but keeping all typing invariants implicit; (2) we take advantage of Beluga’s support for representing open terms using built-in contexts and simultaneous substitutions: this allows us to directly state central definitions such as open simulation without resorting to the usual inductive closure operation and to encode very elegantly notoriously painful proofs such as the substitutivity of the Howe relation; (3) we exploit the possibility of reasoning by coinduction in Beluga’s reasoning logic. The end result is succinct and elegant, thanks to the high-level abstractions and primitives Beluga provides. We believe that this mechanization is a significant example that illustrates Beluga’s strength at mechanizing challenging (co)inductive proofs using HOAS encodings.
Tribological behaviour of nanostructured Al2O3 coatings

Nanostructured alumina coatings have been deposited on SS 304 substrate using atmospheric plasma spray process. In the present work, nanostructured feed powder is obtained by manual granulation of nano-Al2O3 powder particles followed by exhaustive sieving, which is helpful in their proper consolidation. The tribological performance of the nano-alumina coatings, such as dry sliding, slurry erosion and cavitation erosion, has been investigated and compared with conventional coatings. The superior wear and erosion resistance of nanostructured coatings as compared to conventional coatings are due to its higher hardness and effective hindrance to crack propagation. Wear mechanism was explained based on their microstructure and worn surface morphologies. The microhardness and porosity of the two coatings were also experimentally investigated.
Structural basis of sterol binding and transport by a yeast StARkin domain

The StARkin superfamily comprises proteins with steroidogenic acute regulatory protein–related lipid transfer (StART) domains that are implicated in intracellular, non-vesicular lipid transport. A new family of membrane-anchored StARkins was recently identified, including six members, Lam1–Lam6, in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Lam1–Lam4 are anchored to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane at sites where the ER is tethered to the plasma membrane and proposed to be involved in sterol homeostasis in yeast. To better understand the biological roles of these proteins, we carried out a structure-function analysis of the second StARkin domain of Lam4, here termed Lam4S2. NMR experiments indicated that Lam4S2 undergoes specific conformational changes upon binding sterol, and fluorescence-based assays revealed that it catalyzes sterol transport between vesicle populations in vitro, exhibiting a preference for vesicles containing anionic lipids. Using such vesicles, we found that sterols are transported at a rate of ∼50 molecules per Lam4S2 per minute. Crystal structures of Lam4S2, with and without bound sterol, revealed a largely hydrophobic but surprisingly accessible sterol-binding pocket with the 3-OH group of the sterol oriented toward its base. Single or multiple alanine or aspartic acid replacements of conserved lysine residues in a basic patch on the surface of Lam4S2 near the likely sterol entry/egress site strongly attenuated sterol transport. Our results suggest that Lam4S2 engages anionic membranes via a basic surface patch, enabling “head-first” entry of sterol into the binding pocket followed by partial closure of the entryway. Reversal of these steps enables sterol egress.
Oral administration of antioxidants improves skin wound healing in diabetic mice

Oxidative stress aggravates several long‐term complications in diabetes mellitus. We evaluated the effectiveness of the oral administration of antioxidants (vitamins E and C, 40 and 100 mg/kg b.w., respectively) on skin wound healing acceleration in alloxan‐induced diabetic mice. Mice were wounded 30 days after the induction of diabetes. Antioxidants were effective in preventing oxidative stress, as assessed by TBARS. The enzymes catalase, glutathione reductase, glutathione peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase were increased in diabetics on the 3rd day post‐wounding; catalase and glutathione peroxidase remained still augmented in diabetics after 14th day postwounding, and the treatment with vitamins restored their activities to control. After 3 days, diabetic mice showed lower infiltration of inflammatory cells (including CD11b+ and Ly6G+ cells) and reduced levels of KC, TNF‐α, IL‐1β, and IL‐12 p40 when compared with control mice. The treatment restored cytokine levels. After 14 days, diabetic mice showed late wound closure, persistent inflammation and delayed reepithelialization, accompanied by an increase in MIG+/CD206− macrophages whereas CD206+/MIG− macrophages were decreased. Cytokines IL‐12p40, TNF‐α, IL‐1β, and KC were increased and normal levels were restored after treatment with antioxidants. These results suggest that oxidative stress plays a major role in diabetic wound healing impairment and the oral administration of antioxidants improves healing by modulating inflammation and the antioxidant system with no effect on glycemia.
Connecting Eating Pathology with Risk for Engaging in Suicidal Behavior: The Mediating Role of Experiential Avoidance

Individuals with eating pathology, particularly those with diagnosed eating disorders, are at high risk for suicide. It is less clear whether undiagnosed eating pathology and subsyndromal eating disorders carry the same risk and, if so, what mechanisms may explain why higher levels of eating pathology yield greater risk for engaging in suicidal behaviors. The indirect relationship between disordered eating and risk for suicidal behaviors via facets of experiential avoidance was tested using a multiple-mediator model. The model was tested using bootstrapping estimates of indirect effects in a sample of 218 noncollege student adults (Mage = 32.33, 66.1% women) with a history of suicidal attempt and/or history of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). Results revealed that disordered eating indirectly predicted risk for suicidal behaviors, distress aversion (i.e., negative attitudes or dislike of distress), and procrastination (i.e., delaying engagement with distressing activities). Results suggest that targeting experiential avoidance and helping those who have a history of engaging in suicidal behaviors and/or NSSI develop regulation strategies to use during times of distress may be of utmost importance for treatment and prevention of eating pathology.
De-anonymizing Clustered Social Networks by Percolation Graph Matching

Online social networks offer the opportunity to collect a huge amount of valuable information about billions of users. The analysis of this data by service providers and unintended third parties are posing serious treats to user privacy. In particular, recent work has shown that users participating in more than one online social network can be identified based only on the structure of their links to other users. An effective tool to de-anonymize social network users is represented by graph matching algorithms. Indeed, by exploiting a sufficiently large set of seed nodes, a percolation process can correctly match almost all nodes across the different social networks. In this article, we show the crucial role of clustering, which is a relevant feature of social network graphs (and many other systems). Clustering has both the effect of making matching algorithms more prone to errors, and the potential to greatly reduce the number of seeds needed to trigger percolation. We show these facts by considering a fairly general class of random geometric graphs with variable clustering level. We assume that seeds can be identified in particular sub-regions of the network graph, while no a priori knowledge about the location of the other nodes is required. Under these conditions, we show how clever algorithms can achieve surprisingly good performance while limiting the number of matching errors.
Local Differential Privacy for Evolving Data

There are now several large scale deployments of differential privacy used to collect statistical information about users. However, these deployments periodically recollect the data and recompute the statistics using algorithms designed for a single use. As a result, these systems do not provide meaningful privacy guarantees over long time scales. Moreover, existing techniques to mitigate this effect do not apply in the “local model” of differential privacy that these systems use. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for local differential privacy that makes it possible to maintain up-to-date statistics over time, with privacy guarantees that degrade only in the number of changes in the underlying distribution rather than the number of collection periods. We use our technique for tracking a changing statistic in the setting where users are partitioned into an unknown collection of groups, and at every time period each user draws a single bit from a common (but changing) group-specific distribution. We also provide an application to frequency and heavy-hitter estimation.
Intermittent, low dose carbon monoxide exposure enhances survival and dopaminergic differentiation of human neural stem cells

Exploratory studies using human fetal tissue have suggested that intrastriatal transplantation of dopaminergic neurons may become a future treatment for patients with Parkinson’s disease. However, the use of human fetal tissue is compromised by ethical, regulatory and practical concerns. Human stem cells constitute an alternative source of cells for transplantation in Parkinson’s disease, but efficient protocols for controlled dopaminergic differentiation need to be developed. Short-term, low-level carbon monoxide (CO) exposure has been shown to affect signaling in several tissues, resulting in both protection and generation of reactive oxygen species. The present study investigated the effect of CO produced by a novel CO-releasing molecule on dopaminergic differentiation of human neural stem cells. Short-term exposure to 25 ppm CO at days 0 and 4 significantly increased the relative content of β-tubulin III-immunoreactive immature neurons and tyrosine hydroxylase expressing catecholaminergic neurons, as assessed 6 days after differentiation. Also the number of microtubule associated protein 2-positive mature neurons had increased significantly. Moreover, the content of apoptotic cells (Caspase3) was reduced, whereas the expression of a cell proliferation marker (Ki67) was left unchanged. Increased expression of hypoxia inducible factor-1α and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in cultures exposed to CO may suggest a mechanism involving mitochondrial alterations and generation of ROS. In conclusion, the present procedure using controlled, short-term CO exposure allows efficient dopaminergic differentiation of human neural stem cells at low cost and may as such be useful for derivation of cells for experimental studies and future development of donor cells for transplantation in Parkinson’s disease.
The Effect of Oral Dexmedetomidine Premedication on Preoperative Cooperation and Emergence Delirium in Children Undergoing Dental Procedures

Introduction The aim of this study was to detect the effect of 1 μg/kg of oral dexmedetomidine (DEX) as premedication among children undergoing dental procedures. Materials and Methods The study involved 100 children between 2 and 6 years of age, ASA I, who underwent full-mouth dental rehabilitation. The DEX group (n = 50) received 1 μg/kg DEX in apple juice, and the control group (n = 50) received only apple juice. The patients' scores on the Ramsay Sedation Scale (RSS), parental separation anxiety scale, mask acceptance scale, and pediatric anesthesia emergence delirium scale (PAEDS) and hemodynamic parameters were recorded. The data were analyzed using chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, Student's t-test, and analysis of variance in SPSS. Results RSS scores were significantly higher in the DEX group than group C at 15, 30, and 45 min (p < 0.05). More children (68% easy separation, 74% satisfactory mask acceptance) in the DEX group showed satisfactory ease of parental separation and mask acceptance behavior (p < 0.05). There was no significant difference in the PAEDS scores and mean hemodynamic parameters of both groups. Conclusions Oral DEX administered at 1 μg/kg provided satisfactory sedation levels, ease of parental separation, and mask acceptance in children but was not effective in preventing emergence delirium. The trial was registered (Protocol Registration Receipt NCT03174678) at clinicaltrials.gov.