Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insulin Growth Factor-1 Gene Transfer Enhances Neurovascular Remodeling and Improves Long-Term Stroke Outcome in Mice

Background and Purpose— Insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-1) is a pleiotropic growth factor that has been demonstrated to protect against acute ischemic brain injury. Whether IGF-1 improves long-term functional outcome after ischemic stroke is not known. The aim of this study is to examine whether IGF-1 overexpression through adeno-associated virus (AAV) -mediated gene transfer enhances neurovascular remodeling and improves functional outcome in a mouse model of focal cerebral ischemia. Methods— Long-term cerebral IGF-1 overexpression was achieved with the AAV transduction system through stereotaxic injection. Control mice were injected with AAV–green fluorescent protein or saline. Three weeks after gene transfer, the mice underwent permanent distal middle cerebral artery occlusion. Histological and behavioral analyses were performed at day 21 after middle cerebral artery occlusion. Results— IGF-1 gene transfer compared with control treatment significantly improved motor performance assessed by sensorimotor tests. The functional recovery was accompanied by reduced volume of cerebral infarction. Immunohistochemical analysis with endothelial cell marker CD31 revealed that IGF-1 gene transfer potently increased neovessel formation in the periinfarct and injection needle tract area compared with AAV–green fluorescent protein transduction. Increased vascular density was associated with increased local vascular perfusion. Additionally, AAV-IGF-1 treatment enhanced neurogenesis in the subventricular zone compared with AAV–green fluorescent protein treatment. Conclusions— These data demonstrate that IGF-1 overexpression promoted long-lasting functional recovery after cerebral infarction. The improved functional performance was paralleled by enhanced neovascularization and neurogenesis.
Probabilistic Visual Learning for Object Representation

We present an unsupervised technique for visual learning, which is based on density estimation in high-dimensional spaces using an eigenspace decomposition. Two types of density estimates are derived for modeling the training data: a multivariate Gaussian (for unimodal distributions) and a mixture-of-Gaussians model (for multimodal distributions). Those probability densities are then used to formulate a maximum-likelihood estimation framework for visual search and target detection for automatic object recognition and coding. Our learning technique is applied to the probabilistic visual modeling, detection, recognition, and coding of human faces and nonrigid objects, such as hands.
Prevalence and Risk Factors of Prehypertension Among Chinese Adults

Purpose: We aimed to estimate the prevalence of prehypertension and to identify its risk factors among Chinese adults. Methods: A cross-sectional survey in a nationally representative sample of 15,540 Chinese adults aged 35 to 74 years was conducted during 2000 and 2001. Body weight, height, waist circumference, and blood pressure were measured by trained observers. Results: Overall, 21.9% of Chinese adults had prehypertension. The prevalences were 25.7% and 18.0% in men and in women, respectively. The prevalences of prehypertension were higher among residents in northern China compared with their counterparts in southern China. The prehypertensive group had higher levels of blood glucose, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides, higher body mass index, and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol than did the normotensive group. Of note, prehypertension was high among men and women who were overweight, as well as with central obesity (38.4% and 27.8%, respectively, for overweight and 37.8% and 25.9%, respectively, for central obesity). Multivariate analysis revealed that increased body mass index, waist circumference, and rural and northern residence were associated with prehypertension. High odds ratios of prehypertension were found in overweight and central obese adults. Conclusion: The fact that a large proportion of Chinese adults have prehypertension, a major precursor of hypertension, warrants more efforts to implement national programs of prevention and control of hypertension and excessive weight, especially in rural and northern China, to reduce the societal burden of hypertension in China.
Methods for the Evaluation of Traffic Safety Effects of Antilock Braking System (ABS) and Electronic Stability Control (ESC) – A Literature Review

A literature review was performed in this publication in order to establish how the traffic safety performances of active safety systems. The publication focuses on Antilock Braking System (ABS) and Electronic Stability Control (ESC). The areas covered in the publication were statistical evaluation, testing and driver behavior. The literature review showed that in particular statistical methods that are based on odds ratios, had been used in order to evaluate the traffic safety effect. In order to evaluate the effect of ESC in physical testing there are several test methods described in the publication. Estimations of driver behavior effects have been carried out by surveys among vehicle owners. Experiments performed in field or in simulator have also been found in the literature. For European Union (EU) projects a variety of measures and test methods are available for the assessment of driver behavior. Based on the findings in this literature review, future studies are suggested.
Ontology-based recommendation involving consumer product reviews

The rapid development of internet, stimulates the development of e-commerce sites. Generally, an e-commerce site provides some review pages, which are collections of reviews from the users of the product. The reviews are useful for a prospective buyer, as consideration for purchasing products. In addition, the recommender system has evolved as a tool for prospective buyers in obtaining the desired product. Most of prior works on knowledge-based recommender system area, utilize recommendation techniques that are based on product features. In this paper, we elaborate the product reviews into the recommendation technique, in addition to product features. Many customers are not familiar with the technical features of the product (e.g. smartphones, cars, cameras, notebooks, etc), so that in our proposed framework, preferences of customers (users) is expressed in the form of functional requirements of products. Mapping the functional requirements - product features - product reviews are in ontology, so the recommendation is based on the exploration of semantic relations in this ontology. To evaluate user's perception of our proposed framework, we compare our proposed framework with a recommender system based on product features (without involving the product reviews), using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Based on evaluation results, we conclude that involving product reviews on recommender system able to increase perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In addition, recommender system involving product reviews is more acceptable than recommender system that does not involve product reviews.
Analyzing the effects of electronic commerce on organizational performance: Evidence from small and medium enterprises

The main purpose of this research is to study the impacts of electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications on the organizational performance of the Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are many different types of e-commerce applications that may influence the organizational performances; in this research, they are categorized into five different categories: electronic advertising, electronic payment system, electronic marketing, electronic customer support service and electronic order and delivery. According to literature review, most common types of organizational performance measures that are used in recent empirical researches are included: Financial or accounting performance, operational performance and market-based performance. For analyzing the data derived from questionnaire structural equation modeling (goodness of fit tests and path analysis) were used and the software used for analyzing the data were LISREL 8.54 and SPSS 18. The survey method was considered to be the most suitable research method for this investigation. On the whole, this paper illuminates significant relationships between applications of electronic commerce and operational and market based performance. The proposed measurement model exhibited a good level of model fit, too. Key words: Electronic commerce, operational performance, organizational performance, market-based performance, financial performance, small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Finite-Sample System Identification: An Overview and a New Correlation Method

Finite-sample system identification algorithms can be used to build guaranteed confidence regions for unknown model parameters under mild statistical assumptions. It has been shown that in many circumstances these rigorously built regions are comparable in size and shape to those that could be built by resorting to the asymptotic theory. The latter sets are, however, not guaranteed for finite samples and can sometimes lead to misleading results. The general principles behind finite-sample methods make them virtually applicable to a large variety of even nonlinear systems. While these principles are simple enough, a rigorous treatment of the attendant technical issues makes the corresponding theory complex and not easy to access. This is believed to be one of the reasons why these methods have not yet received widespread acceptance by the identification community and this letter is meant to provide an easy access point to finite-sample system identification by presenting the fundamental ideas underlying these methods in a simplified manner. We then review three (classes of) methods that have been proposed so far—1) Leave-out Sign-dominant Correlation Regions (LSCR); 2) Sign-Perturbed Sums (SPS); 3) Perturbed Dataset Methods (PDMs). By identifying some difficulties inherent in these methods, we also propose in this letter a new sign-perturbation method based on correlation which overcome some of these difficulties.
Goal and Personality Trait Development in a Transitional Period: Assessing Change and Stability in Personality Development

This longitudinal study examined continuity and change in the Big Five personality traits and in the importance of life goals from eight domains (Personal Growth, Relationships, Community, Health, Wealth, Fame, Image, and Hedonism) in 2,141 students in a 2-year period at the transition from school to college or employment. Both personality traits and life goals demonstrated high levels of rank—order and structural stability and showed significant individual differences in individual change. Moreover, mean-level changes were in line with the maturity principle: Scores on Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness increased over time, whereas Neuroticism decreased. However, the importance of life goals decreased in all domains except health. Reciprocal effects models revealed that there were effects of prior personality traits on subsequent life goal importance but almost no effects of prior life goal importance on subsequent personality traits. Separate analyses by gender showed that the findings were almost invariant across gender.
Robust Constrained Clustering in Presence of Entry-Wise Outliers

We propose a robust heteroscedastic model-based clustering method based on snipping. An observation is snipped when some of its dimensions are discarded, but the remaining are used for estimation. An expectation-maximization algorithm augmented with a stochastic optimization step is used to derive inference, and its convergence properties are studied. We show global robustness of our resulting sclust procedure also when outliers arise entry-wise. The method is robust to contamination, even when most or even all of the observations contain outliers. Simulations and two real data applications illustrate and compare the approach with existing methods.
Influence of Western Tibetan Plateau Summer Snow Cover on East Asian Summer Rainfall

The influence of boreal winter‐spring eastern Tibetan Plateau snow anomalies on the East Asian summer rainfall variability has been the focus of previous studies. The present study documents the impacts of boreal summer western and southern Tibetan Plateau snow cover anomalies on summer rainfall over East Asia. Analysis shows that more snow cover in the western and southern Tibetan Plateau induces anomalous cooling in the overlying atmospheric column. The induced atmospheric circulation changes are different corresponding to more snow cover in the western and southern Tibetan Plateau. The atmospheric circulation changes accompanying the western Plateau snow cover anomalies are more obvious over the midlatitude Asia, whereas those corresponding to the southern Plateau snow cover anomalies are more prominent over the tropics. As such, the western and southern Tibetan Plateau snow cover anomalies influence the East Asian summer circulation and precipitation through different pathways. Nevertheless, the East Asian summer circulation and precipitation anomalies induced by the western and southern Plateau snow cover anomalies tend to display similar distribution so that they are more pronounced when the western and southern Plateau snow cover anomalies work in coherence. Analysis indicates that the summer snow cover anomalies over the Tibetan Plateau may be related to late spring snow anomalies due to the persistence. The late spring snow anomalies are related to an obvious wave train originating from the western North Atlantic that may be partly associated with sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Genome-Wide Association of Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator Activation With Life-Threatening Arrhythmias

Objectives To identify genetic factors that would be predictive of individuals who require an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), we conducted a genome-wide association study among individuals with an ICD who experienced a life-threatening arrhythmia (LTA; cases) vs. those who did not over at least a 3-year period (controls). Background Most individuals that receive implantable cardioverter-defibrillators never experience a life-threatening arrhythmia. Genetic factors may help identify who is most at risk. Methods Patients with an ICD and extended follow-up were recruited from 34 clinical sites with the goal of oversampling those who had experienced LTA, with a cumulative 607 cases and 297 controls included in the analysis. A total of 1,006 Caucasian patients were enrolled during a time period of 13 months. Arrhythmia status of 904 patients could be confirmed and their genomic data were included in the analysis. In this cohort, there were 704 males, 200 females, and the average age was 73.3 years. We genotyped DNA samples using the Illumina Human660 W Genotyping BeadChip and tested for association between genotype at common variants and the phenotype of having an LTA. Results and Conclusions We did not find any associations reaching genome-wide significance, with the strongest association at chromosome 13, rs11856574 at P = 5×10−6. Loci previously implicated in phenotypes such as QT interval (measure of the time between the start of the Q wave and the end of the T wave as measured by electrocardiogram) were not found to be significantly associated with having an LTA. Although powered to detect such associations, we did not find common genetic variants of large effect associated with having a LTA in those of European descent. This indicates that common gene variants cannot be used at this time to guide ICD risk-stratification. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00664807
Speech Evoked Auditory Brainstem Response in Stuttering

Auditory processing deficits have been hypothesized as an underlying mechanism for stuttering. Previous studies have demonstrated abnormal responses in subjects with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) at the higher level of the central auditory system using speech stimuli. Recently, the potential usefulness of speech evoked auditory brainstem responses in central auditory processing disorders has been emphasized. The current study used the speech evoked ABR to investigate the hypothesis that subjects with PDS have specific auditory perceptual dysfunction. Objectives. To determine whether brainstem responses to speech stimuli differ between PDS subjects and normal fluent speakers. Methods. Twenty-five subjects with PDS participated in this study. The speech-ABRs were elicited by the 5-formant synthesized syllable/da/, with duration of 40 ms. Results. There were significant group differences for the onset and offset transient peaks. Subjects with PDS had longer latencies for the onset and offset peaks relative to the control group. Conclusions. Subjects with PDS showed a deficient neural timing in the early stages of the auditory pathway consistent with temporal processing deficits and their abnormal timing may underlie to their disfluency.
Health‐related quality of life in Japanese children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia during and after chemotherapy

Quality of life (QOL) as a treatment outcome has not yet been evaluated among patients receiving a specific treatment regimen by treatment phase in a consistent manner. This exploratory cross‐sectional study evaluated the QOL of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) receiving one of the most popular treatment regimens in Japan (Japan Association of Childhood Leukemia Study ALL‐02 revised protocol).
Gingival Thickness Among Smokers and Non-smokers: A Comparative Study

BACKGROUND: It is a known fact that clinical appearance of gingiva directly correlates with the inflammatory status of the periodontium. Smoking and its effect on periodontium will be reflected in the gingiva by morphologic and histologic changes. The gingival thickness change is one among them. Thickness of gingiva seems to be of significance and an issue of concern in aesthetic and functional outcome of the periodontal, restorative and orthodontic therapy. Although, abundant literature is available regarding the effect of smoking on periodontium, very little has been focused on the thickness of gingiva among smokers and non-smoker healthy patients as well. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY: The purpose of the study is to comparatively assess the gingival thickness among smokers and non-smokers. METHODS: The study group included 30 age matched smokers and non-smokers whose gingival thickness was measured in the maxillary and mandibular anterior teeth by transgingival probing midbuccally in the attached gingiva and at the base of the interdental papilla. Plaque index and gingival bleeding index were recorded. The data was statistically analysed using paired t-test and Z-test. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Gingival bleeding index and plaque index were similar between both the groups. Gingiva is thicker in interdental areas when compared to midbuccal areas both in smokers and non-smokers. Both midbuccal and interdental areas were thicker among smokers when compared to non-smokers.
Development of a Novel Method for Analyzing Pseudomonas aeruginosa Twitching Motility and Its Application to Define the AmrZ Regulon

Twitching motility is an important migration mechanism for the Gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In the commonly used subsurface twitching assay, the sub-population of P. aeruginosa with active twitching motility is difficult to harvest for high-throughput studies. Here we describe the development of a novel method that allows efficient isolation of bacterial sub-populations conducting highly active twitching motility. The transcription factor AmrZ regulates multiple P. aeruginosa virulence factors including twitching motility, yet the mechanism of this activation remains unclear. We therefore set out to understand this mechanism by defining the AmrZ regulon using DNA microarrays in combination with the newly developed twitching motility method. We discovered 112 genes in the AmrZ regulon and many encode virulence factors. One gene of interest and the subsequent focus was lecB, which encodes a fucose-binding lectin. DNA binding assays revealed that AmrZ activates lecB transcription by directly binding to its promoter. The lecB gene was previously shown to be required for twitching motility in P. aeruginosa strain PAK; however, our lecB deletion had no effect on twitching motility in strain PAO1. Collectively, in this study a novel condition was developed for quantitative studies of twitching motility, under which the AmrZ regulon was defined.
Producing Power-Law Distributions and Damping Word Frequencies with Two-Stage Language Models

Standard statistical models of language fail to capture one of the most striking properties of natural languages: the power-law distribution in the frequencies of word tokens. We present a framework for developing statistical models that can generically produce power laws, breaking generative models into two stages. The first stage, the generator, can be any standard probabilistic model, while the second stage, the adaptor, transforms the word frequencies of this model to provide a closer match to natural language. We show that two commonly used Bayesian models, the Dirichlet-multinomial model and the Dirichlet process, can be viewed as special cases of our framework. We discuss two stochastic processes---the Chinese restaurant process and its two-parameter generalization based on the Pitman-Yor process---that can be used as adaptors in our framework to produce power-law distributions over word frequencies. We show that these adaptors justify common estimation procedures based on logarithmic or inverse-power transformations of empirical frequencies. In addition, taking the Pitman-Yor Chinese restaurant process as an adaptor justifies the appearance of type frequencies in formal analyses of natural language and improves the performance of a model for unsupervised learning of morphology.
Construction of a high efficiency retroviral vector for gene therapy of Hunter's syndrome

As an alternative method to the conventional therapies for Hunter's syndrome, which is a lethal lysosomal storage disorder, we have developed gene delivery vehicles using a series of retroviral vectors. The objective of this study was to develop a safe and efficient retroviral vector and to optimize conditions for efficient transduction of human bone marrow CD34+ stem cells using our vector.
Knowledge of Arsenic in Drinking-water: Risks and Avoidance in Matlab, Bangladesh

Widespread contamination of arsenic in Bangladesh has been jeopardizing the health of millions of people. Residents of Matlab, Bangladesh, are among the millions at risk. Using bivariate models in the analysis of survey data, knowledge of health risks and avoidance of arsenic exposure in response to widespread contamination of arsenic for residents of Matlab were estimated. The models examined individuals' knowledge of an arsenic problem in the household and knowledge of specific illnesses caused by arsenic exposure. The likelihood of avoiding exposure to arsenic contamination was further examined. Results of the estimation showed that individual's knowledge of arsenic problems in the household was gathered through awareness campaigns and by word of mouth and that knowledge of illnesses was predicated on education, health, presence of children, elderly and young women. Adoption of avoidance measures was not affected by exposure to arsenic-information sources, but level of education had a statistically significant positive effect on the decision to avoid arsenic exposure. Lack of convenience of safe drinking-water practices lead people to persist in drinking arsenic-contaminated water.