Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are the cardiovascular actions of dopamine altered by isoflurane?

Dopamine seems theoretically to be a rationale choice when adrenergic support is needed to counter undesired cardiovascular depressant effects of isoflurane. Although the cardiovascular effects of isoflurane (ISO) and exogenous dopamine (DA) are well documented, there are no reports on their pharmacological interaction. The effects of ISO 1.4% (MAC 1.0) on the cardiovascular response to exogenous DA were studied in dogs during chloralose anesthesia. Instrumentation included catheterizations of the femoral artery (for aortic pressures and heart rate, HR), the pulmonary artery (for thermodilution cardiac output, CO, and pulmonary arterial pressures) and the left ventricle (for tip‐manometer measured left ventricular end‐diastolic pressure, LVEDP). ISO per se decreased HR (‐16%), mean arterial pressure (MAP; ‐33%), CO (‐29%), left ventricular dP/dt (LV dP/dt; ‐51%), and increased pulmonary artery occlusion (PAOP; +64%) and LVEDP (+28%). Prior to ISO, DA increased MAP, CO stroke volume (SV), LV dP/dt and LV dP/dt/SAP (systolic arterial pressure) at the dose 10 ug · kg‐1 · min‐1. At the dose 20 μf · kg‐1 · min‐1 DA, besides these effects, increased PAOP and mean pulmonary artery pressure (MPAP). During ISO, DA at the dose 10 μg · kg‐1 · min‐1 restored MAP, CO, and SV to pre‐ISO control levels, while LV dP/dt was increased to +96% above the pre‐ISO control level. At the dose 20 μg · kg‐1 · min‐1, DA increased MAP (+33%), LV dP/dt (+172%), PAOP (+ 132%) and MPAP (+50%) above pre‐ISO control levels. The cardiac effects of DA were similar to when it was given alone. However, the increase in SVR (at the dose 20 μg · kg‐1 · min‐1) and MAP (at the 10 and 20 μg · kg‐1 · min‐1 doses) by DA was significantly more pronounced with ISO than without ISO.
Performance Evaluation of OLSR and AODV in VANET Cloud Computing Using Fading Model with SUMO and NS3

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a new emerging type of mobile ad-hoc network that is characterized by high speed and extreme topology changes over short time. These two characteristics dramatically affect the performance of the routing protocols employed in these networks. The evaluation of different routing protocols for general VANET configuration provides great insight into the performance of the entire network. In this work, we evaluate, analyze, and compare the performances of two prevalent routing protocols: ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and optimized link-state routing protocol (OLSR). The evaluation is performed using Network Simulator 3 (NS3) and assumes high mobility and account for signal fading to present worst-case scenarios for the two protocols. We consider the architecture Network-as-a-service of VANET cloud computing. Simulation results indicate that while AODV outperforms OLSR in terms of packet delivery ratio for low transmission rates, statistical analysis shows that there is no significant difference between the performances of the two protocols.
Dietary carbohydrate, fibre, glycaemic index, glycaemic load and the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer

Evidence that the insulin pathway may be involved in breast carcinogenesis has increased the interest in dietary factors that influence insulin secretion and resistance. We investigated dietary carbohydrate, fibre, glycaemic index (GI) and glycaemic load (GL) in a prospective study of 324 breast cancers diagnosed in 12,273 post‐menopausal women. Although an increase of 1 standard deviation in carbohydrate was marginally associated with risk of breast cancer, relative risk (RR) 1.31 (95% CI, 0.98, 1.75), there were no significant associations with fibre, 1.08 (0.92, 1.26), GI, 0.98 (0.88, 1.10) or GL, 1.19 (0.93, 1.52) or with carbohydrate foods (bread, rice, pasta). The RR for carbohydrate and localized disease was elevated, 1.40 (1.02, 1.92), but like those for fibre, GI and GL did not differ significantly between localized and non‐localized disease. RRs for grade I, but not grade II or III, tumours were elevated for fibre, 1.38 (1.08, 1.75), carbohydrate, 1.56 (1.08, 2.25) and GL, 1.41 (1.01, 1.98) but not for GI, 0.84 (0.65, 1.09). The RRs for fibre and oestrogen receptor (ER) positive (+) and progesterone receptor (PR) positive (+) tumours, 1.36 (1.10, 1.67), differed significantly from those for ER positive (+) and PR negative (−) tumours, 1.01 (0.61, 1.69) and ER−/PR− tumours, 0.65 (0.43, 0.99), p = 0.005. Our data do not support a strong role for GI and GL in breast carcinogenesis but suggest that increased intake of fibre and carbohydrate may be associated with the diagnosis of cancers of more favourable prognosis. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Context-Aware Generative Adversarial Privacy

Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. On the one hand, context-free privacy solutions, such as differential privacy, provide strong privacy guarantees, but often lead to a significant reduction in utility. On the other hand, context-aware privacy solutions, such as information theoretic privacy, achieve an improved privacy-utility tradeoff, but assume that the data holder has access to dataset statistics. We circumvent these limitations by introducing a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP). GAP leverages recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs) to allow the data holder to learn privatization schemes from the dataset itself. Under GAP, learning the privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between two players: a privatizer that sanitizes the dataset in a way that limits the risk of inference attacks on the individuals' private variables, and an adversary that tries to infer the private variables from the sanitized dataset. To evaluate GAP's performance, we investigate two simple (yet canonical) statistical dataset models: (a) the binary data model, and (b) the binary Gaussian mixture model. For both models, we derive game-theoretically optimal minimax privacy mechanisms, and show that the privacy mechanisms learned from data (in a generative adversarial fashion) match the theoretically optimal ones. This demonstrates that our framework can be easily applied in practice, even in the absence of dataset statistics.
Müller Muscle-Conjunctiva Resection for Blepharoptosis in Patients With Glaucoma Filtering Blebs

Purpose: To study the safety and efficacy of Müller muscle-conjunctiva resection (MMCR) for blepharoptosis in patients with functional glaucoma-filtering blebs. Methods: Retrospective chart review of patients who underwent MMCR in the presence of a functioning filtering bleb. Patients offered MMCR all responded satisfactorily to preoperative topical phenylephrine hydrochloride testing. Using a similar technique, MMCR was performed by 6 surgeons at 6 different centers. Two patients had simultaneous upper blepharoplasty. Postoperative slit lamp examination was performed to assess for bleb injury or infection. In addition, all patients had routine glaucoma follow-up visits to assess for bleb functioning. Results: Nine patients with functional filtering blebs tolerated MMCR well and had no bleb complications. All blebs remained functional after surgery. One patient had anterior chamber reaction for 10 days and another patient had foreign body sensation for 6 weeks. At 9.2-months mean follow-up time, the mean change in margin reflex distance-1 was 2.9 mm. Conclusion: MMCR may be safe and effective in the setting of a glaucoma-filtering bleb.
Atrial fibrillation detection using a smart phone

We hypothesized that an iPhone 4s can be used to detect atrial fibrillation (AF) based on its ability to record a pulsatile photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal from a fingertip using the built-in camera lens. To investigate the capability of the iPhone 4s for AF detection, 25 prospective subjects with AF pre- and post-electrical cardioversion were recruited. Using an iPhone 4s, we collected 2-minute pulsatile time series. We investigated 3 statistical methods consisting of the Root Mean Square of Successive Differences (RMSSD), the Shannon entropy (ShE) and the Sample entropy (SampE), which have been shown to be useful tools for AF assessment. The beat-to-beat accuracy for RMSSD, ShE and SampE was found to be 0.9844, 0.8494 and 0.9552, respectively. It should be recognized that for clinical applications, the most relevant objective is to detect the presence of AF or normal sinus rhythm (NSR) in the data. Using this criterion, we achieved an accuracy of 100% for both detecting the presence of either AF or NSR.
Minimizing the Maximal Loss: How and Why

A commonly used learning rule is to approximately minimize the average loss over the training set. Other learning algorithms, such as AdaBoost and hard-SVM, aim at minimizing the maximal loss over the training set. The average loss is more popular, particularly in deep learning, due to three main reasons. First, it can be conveniently minimized using online algorithms, that process few examples at each iteration. Second, it is often argued that there is no sense to minimize the loss on the training set too much, as it will not be reflected in the generalization loss. Last, the maximal loss is not robust to outliers. In this paper we describe and analyze an algorithm that can convert any online algorithm to a minimizer of the maximal loss. We prove that in some situations better accuracy on the training set is crucial to obtain good performance on unseen examples. Last, we propose robust versions of the approach that can handle outliers.
Reporting guidance considerations from a statistical perspective: overview of tools to enhance the rigour of reporting of randomised trials and systematic reviews

Objective Research waste has received considerable attention from the biomedical community. One noteworthy contributor is incomplete reporting in research publications. When detailing statistical methods and results, ensuring analytic methods and findings are completely documented improves transparency. For publications describing randomised trials and systematic reviews, guidelines have been developed to facilitate complete reporting. This overview summarises aspects of statistical reporting in trials and systematic reviews of health interventions. Methods A narrative approach to summarise features regarding statistical methods and findings from reporting guidelines for trials and reviews was taken. We aim to enhance familiarity of statistical details that should be reported in biomedical research among statisticians and their collaborators. Results We summarise statistical reporting considerations for trials and systematic reviews from guidance documents including the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement for reporting of trials, the Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials (SPIRIT) Statement for trial protocols, the Statistical Analyses and Methods in the Published Literature (SAMPL) Guidelines for statistical reporting principles, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement for systematic reviews and PRISMA for Protocols (PRISMA-P). Considerations regarding sharing of study data and statistical code are also addressed. Conclusions Reporting guidelines provide researchers with minimum criteria for reporting. If followed, they can enhance research transparency and contribute improve quality of biomedical publications. Authors should employ these tools for planning and reporting of their research.
Robustness of supervisors for discrete-event systems

Supervisory control in the context of /spl omega/-languages is considered. The nominal supervisor design problem is to find a non-blocking supervisor for a nominal plant such that the closed-loop infinite behavior equals a specified closed-loop behavior. The robustness of solutions to the nominal problem is defined with respect to variations in the plant. It is shown there exists a supervisor solving the nominal problem which maximizes the set of plants for which the closed-loop languages for all other plants in the set satisfy lower and upper bounds in the sense of language containment. Computational issues are discussed and the theoretical results are illustrated with an example.
Are Chinese Exports Sensitive to Changes in the Exchange Rate?

This paper builds a model of two types of Chinese exports, those processed and assembled largely from imported inputs ("processed" exports) and "non-processed" exports. Based on this model, the sensitivity of Chinese exports to exchange rate changes is empirically examined. Unlike previous work, the estimation period includes the net real appreciation of the renminbi that has occurred over the past three years. The results show that greater exchange rate appreciation dampens export growth, both for non-processed and processed exports, with the estimated cumulative price elasticity being substantially greater than unity. When the source of the increase in the Chinese real exchange rate is appreciations against the currencies of other emerging Asian trading partners, the effect on processing exports is positive but insignificant, while the effect on non-processing exports is significantly negative. By contrast, when the source of the increase in the Chinese real exchange rate is appreciation against China's advanced-economy trading partners, the effects on both types of exports are negative. These results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model. Counterfactual simulations based on the estimated model strongly suggest that if the trade-weighted real renminbi had appreciated at an annual rate of 10 percent per quarter since mid-2005, Chinese real exports would have been roughly 30 percent lower today. Thus greater exchange rate flexibility could contribute to lowering China's huge trade surplus through restraining growth of exports.
Heterophil Phagocytic Activity Stimulated by Lactobacillus salivarius L61 and L55 Supplementation in Broilers with Salmonella Infection

Newborn chicks are susceptible to Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis (SE). The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of Lactobacillus probiotic isolated from chicken feces on heterophil phagocytosis in broiler chicks. A total of 150 newborn broiler chicks were divided into 5 groups (30 chicks per group) as follows: group 1 (normal control), given feed and water only, group 2 (positive control) given feed, water and SE infection, group 3 (L61 treated) given feed, water, SE infection followed by Lactobacillus salivarius L61 treatment, group 4 (L55 treated) given feed, water, SE infection followed by L. salivarius L55 treatment, and group 5 given feed, water, SE infection followed by L. salivarius L61 + L55 combination treatment. After SE infection, L. salivarius treatment lasted for 7 days. The results showed that L. salivarius L61 and L. salivarius L55 treatment, either alone or combination of both, increased the survival rate after SE infection, and upregulated heterophil phagocytosis and phagocytic index (PI). Conversely, chick groups treated with Lactobacillus showed lower SE recovery rate from cecal tonsils than that of the positive control group. The PI values of the chicken group with SE infection, followed by the combination of L. salivarius L61 and L. salivarius L55 were the highest as compared to either positive control or normal control group. Two Lactobacillus strains supplementation group showed significantly (p<0.05) higher PI value at 48 h than 24 h after treatment.
Calculation of the bulk viscosity in SU(3) gluodynamics.

We perform a lattice Monte Carlo calculation of the trace-anomaly two-point function at finite temperature in the SU(3) gauge theory. We obtain the long distance properties of the correlator in the continuum limit and extract the bulk viscosity zeta via a Kubo formula. Unlike the tensor correlator relevant to the shear viscosity, the scalar correlator depends strongly on temperature. If s is the entropy density, we find that zeta/s becomes rapidly small at high T, zeta/s<0.15 at 1.65T(c), and zeta/s<0.015 at 3.2T(c). However, zeta/s rises dramatically just above T(c), with 0.5
Improved sum-rate optimization in the multiuser MIMO downlink

We consider linear precoding and decoding in the downlink of a multiuser multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) system. In this scenario, the transmitter and the receivers may each be equipped with multiple antennas, and each user may receive more than one data stream. We examine the relationship between the sum capacity for the broadcast channel with channel state information at the transmitter under a sum power constraint and the achievable sum rates under linear precoding. We show that achieving the optimum sum throughput under linear precoding is equivalent to minimizing the product of mean squared error (MSE) matrix determinants. The resulting nonconvex optimization problem is solved numerically, guaranteeing local convergence only. The performance of this approach is analyzed via comparison to the sum capacity and to existing approaches for linear precoding.
Demographic Characteristics and Neural Mechanisms of Synaesthesia

In synaesthetes, stimulation of one sensory pathway provokes an additional sensory experience in a different modality or sub-modality. Data concerning the demographic characteristics of synaesthetes and various aspects of the synaesthetic experience were gathered from 63 synaesthetes and compared with results of previous surveys. The following issues were addressed: prevalence of the different forms of synaesthesia, specificity of stimulus components responsible for modulating synaesthesia, implications of the high prevalence of cross-modal synaesthesia and variability of the condition over time. To understand the role that perceptual and semantic processes play in synaesthesia, I investigated by means of electroencephalography (EEG) the time-course of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a form in which graphemes elicit the perception of colours. EEG and behavioural measurements were collected during a cued-congruency task applied to synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes who were trained on grapheme-colour associations. An inverted priming task was used to investigate implicit bidirectional synaesthesia. Results showed longer reaction time and more negative N400 and N300 components for incongruent than for congruent trials in both groups. While non-synaesthetes largely engaged cognitive processes, synaesthetes showed congruency-related and faster perceptual activation than controls. Implicit bidirectional synaesthesia relied both on early- and late-stage cognitive processes. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to shed light on the neural basis of synaesthesia and on possible shared neural mechanisms between this condition and imagery. Spatial sequence synaesthesia (SSS), which involves the perception of ordinal stimuli as arranged in peripersonal space, was investigated in a blind synaesthete. The additional synaesthetic colour perception that the subject reported for some of the stimuli, provided the opportunity to compare two different experimental and one control condition: coloured SSS, non-coloured SSS, and non-synaesthetic control. Stimuli eliciting SSS activated the occipito-parietal, infero-frontal and insular cortex. The visual colour area hOC4v was engaged when the synaesthetic experience included colour, thus indicating the continued recruitment of visual colour cortex in a late-blind synaesthete. The occipito-parietal activation suggests that the perception of spatial geometry in SSS is related to areas that are also engaged in spatial imagery in the blind as well as in sighted non-synaesthetes.
Novel Recombinant Virus Assay for Measuring Susceptibility of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Group M Subtypes To Clinically Approved Drugs

ABSTRACT Combination therapy can successfully suppress human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) replication in patients but selects for drug resistance, requiring subsequent resistance-guided therapeutic changes. This report describes the development and validation of a novel assay that offers a uniform method to measure susceptibility to all clinically approved HIV type 1 (HIV-1) drugs targeting reverse transcriptase (RT), protease (PR), integrase (IN), and viral entry. It is an assay in which the antiviral effect on infection within a single replication cycle is measured in triply transfected U87.CD4. CXCR4.CCR5 cells, based on homologous recombination between patient-derived amplicons and molecular proviral clones tagged with the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) reporter gene and from which certain viral genomic regions are removed. The deletions stretch from p17 codon 7 to PR codon 98 in pNL4.3-ΔgagPR-EGFP, from PR codons 1 to 99 in pNL4.3-ΔPR-EGFP, from RT codons 1 to 560 in pNL4.3-ΔRT-EGFP, from IN codons 1 to 288 in pNL4.3-ΔIN-EGFP, and from gp120 codon 34 to gp41 codon 237 in pNL4.3-Δenv-EGFP. The optimized experimental conditions enable the investigation of patient samples regardless of viral subtype or coreceptor use. The extraction and amplification success rate for a set of clinical samples belonging to a broad range of HIV-1 group M genetic forms (A-J, CRF01-03, CRF05, and CRF12-13) and displaying a viral load range of 200 to >500,000 RNA copies/ml was 97%. The drug susceptibility measurements, based on discrimination between infected and noninfected cells on a single-cell level by flow cytometry, were reproducible, with coefficients of variation for resistance ranging from 7% to 31%, and were consistent with scientific literature in terms of magnitude and specificity.
Paper Special Section on Papers Selected from Itc-cscc 2005 Error Analysis for Ultra-wideband Ds-and Hybrid Ds/th-cdma with Arbitrary Chip-duty *

SUMMARY In this paper, ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple access systems are introduced by using direct-sequence (DS) and hybrid direct-sequence time-hopping (DS/TH) code division multiple access (CDMA) that use arbitrary chip-duty of the spreading sequences. The bit error probabilities are presented. First of all, the variances of the multiple access interference are developed by investigating the collision properties of the signals. Afterward, various approximations are applied. The standard Gaussian approximation (SGA) for the DS system is shown to become extremely optimistic as the chip-duty becomes low. Though the hybrid system performs better, the SGA still remains optimistic. To obtain accurate results, Holtzman's simplified improved Gaussian approximation (SIGA) and Morrow and Lehnert's improved Gaussian approximation (IGA) are used. A shortcoming of the SIGA is rediscovered that renders it unusable for low-duty DS systems, especially, at high signal-to-noise ratio. However , for the hybrid system, the SIGA works as an excellent tool. The IGA is used to get accurate results for the low-duty DS systems. It is shown that lowering of chip-duty by keeping chip rate and chip length unchanged improves performance for asynchronous DS and both asynchronous and synchronous hybrid systems. However, under the same processing gain, a high-duty system performs better than a low-duty system. Performance of synchronous DS system remains independent of chip-duty.