Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mortality, stroke, and heart failure in atrial fibrillation cohorts after ablation versus propensity-matched cohorts

Background We sought to determine from key clinical outcomes whether catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with increased survival. Methods and results Using routinely collected hospital data, ablation patients were matched to two control cohorts using direct and propensity score methodology. Four thousand nine hundred ninety-one ablation patients were matched 1:1 with general AF controls without ablation. Five thousand four hundred seven ablation patients were similarly matched to controls who underwent cardioversion. We examined the rates of ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack (stroke/TIA), heart failure hospitalization, and death. Matched populations had very similar comorbidity profiles, including nearly identical CHA2DS2-VASc risk distribution (p=0.6948 and p=0.8152 vs general AF and cardioversion cohorts). Kaplan–Meier models showed increased survival after ablation for all outcomes compared with both control cohorts (p<0.0001 for all outcomes vs general AF, p=0.0087 for stroke/TIA, p<0.0001 for heart failure, and p<0.0001 for death vs cardioversion). Cox regression models also showed improved survival after ablation for all outcomes compared with the general AF cohort (hazard ratio [HR]=0.4, 95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 0.3–0.6, p<0.0001 for stroke/TIA; HR=0.4, 95% CI: 0.2–0.6, p<0.0001 for heart failure; HR=0.1, 95% CI: 0.1–0.1, p<0.0001 for death) and the cardioversion cohort (HR=0.6, 95% CI: 0.4–0.9, p=0.0111 for stroke/TIA; HR=0.4, 95% CI: 0.3–0.6, p<0.0001 for heart failure; HR=0.3, 95% CI:0.2–0.5, p<0.0001 for death). Conclusions Catheter ablation of AF was associated with very significant reductions in mortality, stroke/TIA, and heart failure compared with a matched general AF population and a matched population who underwent cardioversion. Potential confounding of outcomes was minimized by very tight cohort matching.
Should physicians have facial piercings?

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to assess attitudes of patrons and medical school faculty about physicians with nontraditional facial piercings. We also examined whether a piercing affected the perceived competency and trustworthiness of physicians.DESIGN: Survey.SETTING: Teaching hospital in the southeastern United States.PARTICIPANTS: Emergency department patrons and medical school faculty physicians.INTERVENTIONS: First, patrons were shown photographs of models with a nontraditional piercing and asked about the appropriateness for a physician or medical student. In the second phase, patrons blinded to the purpose of the study were shown identical photographs of physician models with or without piercings and asked about competency and trustworthiness. The third phase was an assessment of attitudes of faculty regarding piercings.MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Nose and lip piercings were felt to be appropriate for a physician by 24% and 22% of patrons, respectively. Perceived competency and trustworthiness of models with these types of piercings were also negatively affected. An earring in a male was felt to be appropriate by 35% of patrons, but an earring on male models did not negatively affect perceived competency or trustworthiness. Nose and eyebrow piercings were felt to be appropriate by only 7% and 5% of faculty physicians and working with a physician or student with a nose or eyebrow piercing would bother 58% and 59% of faculty, respectively. An ear piercing in a male was felt to be appropriate by 20% of faculty, and 25% stated it would bother them to work with a male physician or student with an ear piercing.CONCLUSIONS: Many patrons and physicians feel that some types of nontraditional piercings are inappropriate attire for physicians, and some piercings negatively affect perceived competency and trustworthiness. Health care providers should understand that attire may affect a patient’s opinion about their abilities and possibly erode confidence in them as a clinician.
Ultrasonic molecular imaging of primordial angiogenic vessels in rabbit and mouse models with /spl alpha//sub v//spl beta//sub 3/ -integrin targeted nanoparticles using information-theoretic signal detection: results at high frequency and in the clinical diagnostic frequency range

The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of image-based identification of nanoparticle targeted angiogenic neovasculature using backscattered ultrasound in several frequency ranges (7 to 15 and ~20- 35MHz). We employed a liquid-perfluorocarbon nanoparticle contrast agent to target the expression of αvβ3 in tumors implanted two different animal models. Ten K14-HPV16 transgenic mice were treated with either normal saline (n=5) or 0.3 mg/kg i.v. of αvβ3-targeted nanoparticles (n=5) and imaged dynamically for two hours using a research ultrasound imager (Vevo 660 30MHz probe) modified to store digitized RF waveforms. Data were analyzed for all mice at all times post-injection using conventional grayscale and C H (an information-theoretic quantity). These data demonstrate the ability and complementarity of information-theoretic receivers in conjunction with targeted nanoparticles to elucidate the presence of αvβ3-integrins in primordial neovasculature, particularly in acoustically unfavorable environments.
Neoplastic diseases in ferrets: 574 cases (1968-1997).

OBJECTIVE To determine incidence of neoplastic disease in ferrets. DESIGN Retrospective study. ANIMALS 574 ferrets with neoplastic disease. PROCEDURE Medical records from the Veterinary Medical Data Base at Purdue University from 1968 to May 1997 were reviewed to identify ferrets with neoplastic disease. Data on tumor type, organ or system affected, sex, age, geographic location of affected ferrets, participating institution, and year of diagnosis were retrieved. RESULTS 639 tumors of various types were diagnosed in 574 of 4,774 (12%) ferrets in the database. Sixty-one ferrets had multiple tumor types. Primary tumors were found in every system; endocrine (254; 39.7%), hemolymphatic (97; 15.2%), integumentary (83; 12.9%), and digestive (54; 8.4%) systems were most commonly affected. The most common tumor types were pancreatic islet cell (139; 21.7%) and adrenocortical cell (107; 16.7%) tumors and lymphoma (76; 11.9%). Most (94.2%) pancreatic islet cell tumors were functional. Age of affected ferrets ranged from less than 1 month to more than 15 years old. Tumor incidence was highest in ferrets between 4 and 7 years old. A sex predilection was not found, although tumors were found more commonly in spayed females and castrated males than in sexually intact females and males, respectively. Number of tumors diagnosed increased as the number of ferrets examined increased. Neoplastic disease accounted for an increasingly greater percentage of diseases diagnosed in ferrets during the study period. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS Ferrets have an incidence and spectrum of neoplastic disease similar to other mammalian species.
Influence of body size and gender on control of ventilation.

Hypoxic (HVR) and hypercapnic (HCVR) ventilatory responses are influenced by both metabolic activity and hormonal factors. By studying 67 subjects of both sexes, including those at the extremes of stature, we examined the influence of gender, CO2 production (VCO2), O2 consumption (VO2), body surface area (BSA), and vital capacity (VC) on resting ventilation (VE), HVR, and HCVR. We measured resting VE, VO2, and VCO2 and then performed isocapnic progressive hypoxic and hypercapnic ventilatory responses. The effect of stature was reflected in higher VE and metabolic rate (both P less than 0.001) in tall men compared with short men that was ablated by correction for BSA. Perhaps because their heights vary less than those of the men, tall women were not statistically distinguishable from short women in any of these measured parameters. Tall men tended to have greater hypoxic chemosensitivity than short men but this was not significantly different (P = 0.07). Gender affected the control of ventilation in a number of ways. Men had higher VE (P less than 0.05) and metabolic rate (P less than 0.001) than women. Even after correction for BSA men still had higher metabolic rates. Women had higher VE/VCO2 than men (P less than 0.05) and lower resting end-tidal Pco2 (PETCO2) values (P less than 0.05). Both A, the shape parameter of the hyperbolic HVR curve, and HVR determined from mouth occlusion pressure (AP) were greater in women than in men, although only AP reached statistical significance. However, corrections of A for BSA (P less than 0.05), VCO2 (P less than 0.01), and VC (P less than 0.001) amplified these differences. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Supplemental phytases of microbial and cereal sources improve dietary phytate phosphorus utilization by pigs from weaning through finishing.

This experiment was conducted to measure the nutritional and metabolic responses of pigs fed diets with continuous supplementation of microbial and cereal phytase from weaning to finishing, and to determine the feasibility of complete replacement of inorganic P addition by supplemental phytase in swine diets. Forty-eight Landrace x Hampshire x Meishan pigs were divided into four groups. In phase 1 (10 to 50 kg BW), pigs in Groups 1, 2, 3, and 4 were fed a low-P, corn-soybean meal basal diet (BD), the BD plus microbial phytase (A. ficuum) at 1,200 units/kg, the BD plus 10% wheat bran (230 units of cereal phytase/kg), and the BD + . 24% inorganic P (calcium phosphate), respectively. In phase 2 (51 to 90 kg BW), these pigs were fed a similar BD or the BD plus 1,000 microbial phytase units/kg, 20% wheat bran, or . 20% inorganic P, respectively. Repeated measures included growth performance, P, Ca, and N balance, metatarsal and metacarpal bone strength, serum concentration of inorganic P, Ca, and 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol, and serum alkaline phosphatase activity. Pigs fed the BD supplemented with microbial phytase and pigs fed the BD supplemented with inorganic P showed almost identical responses for all variables. Pigs fed the BD supplemented with cereal phytase also had responses for various measures that were similar to those of pigs fed microbial phytase or inorganic P, except for some differences in serum inorganic P concentrations and bone strength in phase 1. Because of improvements in apparent digestibility of dietary P and N, fecal excretion of these two nutrients was reduced by 31 to 62% (P < .05) in pigs fed the BD supplemented with phytase compared with pigs fed inorganic P. It is physiologically feasible and environmentally advantageous to replace inorganic P with microbial or cereal phytase in corn-soybean meal diets for this type of pig through the entire growing-finishing period.
MultiSentiNet: A Deep Semantic Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

With the prevalence of more diverse and multiform user-generated content in social networking sites, multimodal sentiment analysis has become an increasingly important research topic in recent years. Previous work on multimodal sentiment analysis directly extracts feature representation of each modality and fuse these features for classification. Consequently, some detailed semantic information for sentiment analysis and the correlation between image and text have been ignored. In this paper, we propose a deep semantic network, namely MultiSentiNet, for multimodal sentiment analysis. We first identify object and scene as salient detectors to extract deep semantic features of images. We then propose a visual feature guided attention LSTM model to extract words that are important to understand the sentiment of whole tweet and aggregate the representation of those informative words with visual semantic features, object and scene. The experiments on two public available sentiment datasets verify the effectiveness of our MultiSentiNet model and show that our extracted semantic features demonstrate high correlations with human sentiments.
Fréquence des pathologies et risque sanitaire dans la prison civile de Cotonou au Bénin

Lobjet de ce travail etait d'etudier la frequence des pathologies et le risque sanitaire dans la prison civile de Cotonou. A cet effet, une etude transversale descriptive analytique a ete effectuee dans ce milieu en octobre et novembre 2001. Les prisonniers ont ete recrutes selon la technique d'echantillonnage stratifiee avec allocation proportionnelle. Les donnees ont ete recueillies a l'aide d'un guide d'entretien pour ce milieu et respectivement a l'aide d'une grille d'observation et d'une fiche d'exploitation des dossiers des prisonniers. Au total, 246 detenus ont investigues sur les 1 657 interroges. Les resultats obtenus sont les suivants : la scabiose represente (45,5 %) des affections retrouvees dans ce milieu, suivie du paludisme (27,8 %) et de l'IRA (8,5 %). Il existe un lien significatif entre cette dermatose et l'etat de proprete des dortoirs et les vetements P < 0,001. Il existe aussi une forte promiscuite dans cette prison, en effet, 95 % des detenus occupent un espace de moins de 3 metres carres pendant la couchette. On note entre autres une insuffisance de latrines, des repas, du materiel de couchette puisque environ 22 % des prisonniers dorment a meme le sol.
MYC rearrangements are useful for predicting outcomes following rituximab and chemotherapy: multicenter analysis of Japanese patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Abstract Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and it has several morphologic and clinicopathologic variants. The prognosis of DLBCL can vary according to specific genetic and immunophenotypic abnormalities. The aim of this study was to investigate the prognostic impact of previously identified prognostic factors, such as activated B cell-like immunophenotype, CD5, BCL2 and MYC rearrangement (MYC-R), in patients treated with rituximab. We retrospectively analyzed the prognosis of 100 patients with DLBCL (median age, 66.5 years) treated with rituximab-containing chemotherapy. The 3-year overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were 66% and 62%. Outcomes were significantly worse in patients with MYC-R in 3-year OS (50% vs. 67.8%, p = 0.043) and PFS (30% vs. 57.8%, p = 0.003), and multivariate analysis showed that this finding was independent of the International Prognostic Index (IPI). Immunostaining by Muris algorithm had the highest predictive power among the three algorithms. However, other previously reported prognostic factors, such as BCL2 and CD5, were not good predictors of outcomes in these patients. In conclusion, our data suggest that fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis for MYC-R can predict outcomes in response to rituximab-containing chemotherapy in Japanese patients with DLBCL.
Association between serum haptoglobin and the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.

OBJECTIVE Haptoglobin (Hpg) is known to have several functional properties, including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. In addition, it has been shown that the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), involves inflammation as well as oxidative stress. However, evidence suggesting an association between the serum Hpg level and AD is lacking. Therefore, we conducted this study in order to investigate whether serum Hpg is associated with AD. METHODS We compared the serum Hpg levels of 121 patients with newly diagnosed AD, 58 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 43 healthy controls. We also evaluated the relationship between the severity of cognitive impairment in patients with AD and the serum Hpg level. RESULTS The mean serum Hpg level of the patients with AD was significantly higher than that of the healthy controls (p=0.042), although it was not significant different from that observed in the PD group (p=0.613). We also found a significant positive association between the serum Hpg level and the severity of cognitive impairment, as measured using several neuropsychological tests, in the patients with AD. The odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of the patients with AD grouped according to the Hpg level was 2.417 (95% confidence interval=1.134-5.149). CONCLUSION We observed a significantly higher mean serum Hpg level among the patients with AD compared to the healthy controls. These results support the hypothesis that oxidative stress and neuroinflammatory reactions play a role in the pathogenesis of AD.
Helioseismic Measurement of Solar Torsional Oscillations

Bands of slower and faster rotation, the so-called torsional oscillations, are observed at the Sun's surface to migrate in latitude over the 11-year solar cycle. Here, we report on the temporal variations of the Sun's internal rotation from solar p-mode frequencies obtained over nearly 6 years by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) instrument on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite. The entire solar convective envelope appears to be involved in the torsional oscillations, with phase propagating poleward and equatorward from midlatitudes at all depths throughout the convective envelope.
Revealing Downturns

When Bayesian risk-averse investors are uncertain about their assets' cash flows' exposure to systematic risk, stock prices react more to news in downturns than in upturns, implying higher volatility in downturns and negatively skewed returns. The reason is that, in good times, less desirable assets with low average cash flows and high loading on market risk perform similar to more desirable assets with high average cash flows and low market risk, rendering them difficult to distinguish. However, their relative fundamental performance diverges in downturns, enabling better inference. Consistent with these predictions, stocks' reaction to earnings news is up to 70% stronger in downturns than in upturns. Appendix is available at: <a href='https://ssrn.com/abstract=2996366'>https://ssrn.com/abstract=2996366</a>
Circuits of Power: A Study of Mandated Compliance to an Information Systems Security De Jure Standard in a Government Organization

Organizations need to protect information assets against cyber crime, denial-of-service attacks, web hackers, data breaches, identity and credit card theft, and fraud. Criminals often try to achieve financial, political, or personal gain through these attacks, so the threats that their actions prompt are insidious motivators for organizations to adopt information systems security (ISS) approaches. Extant ISS research has traditionally examined ISS in e-commerce business organizations. The present study investigates ISS within government, analyzing power relationships during an ISS standards adoption and accreditation process, where a head of state mandates that all government agencies are to comply with a national de jure ISS standard. Using a canonical action research method, designated managers of ISS services across small, medium, and large agencies were monitored and assessed for progress to accreditation through surveys, interviews, participant observation at round table forums, and focus groups. By 2008, accreditation status across the 89 agencies participating in this study was approximately 33 percent fully accredited, with 67 percent partially compliant. The research uses Clegg's (1989) circuits of power framework to interpret power, resistance, norms, and cultural relationships in the process of compliance. The paper highlights that a strategy based on organization subunit size is helpful in motivating and assisting organizations to move toward accreditation. Mandated standard accreditation was inhibited by insufficient resource allocation, lack of senior management input, and commitment. Factors contributing to this resistance were group norms and cultural biases.
Differences in susceptibility of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) and the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica) to the swim-bladder nematode Anguillicola crassus

The swim-bladder nematode Anguillicola crassus originates from the Far East where it is a parasite of the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica). After A. crassus was introduced to Europe, it became a predominant parasite of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla). A study performed with experimentally infected eels (98 days, 23 °C) revealed significant differences in the susceptibility of the two eel species to this parasite. The recovery rate of 30 administered infective A. crassus larvae (L3) from A. japonica was less than half of that from A. anguilla (33·2% and 13·8%, respectively). Almost 60% of the worms recovered from A. japonica were found as dead, encapsulated and necrotic larvae in the swimbladder wall. In contrast, no dead larvae were found in A. anguilla. Additionally, the development of the worms was shown to be significantly slower in A. japonica compared with A. anguilla. The lower survival rate of the worms, together with their slower development, resulted in a significantly lower adult worm burden (11 and 428 mg wet weight, respectively) and in a decreased reproductive success in A. japonica compared with A. anguilla. These results demonstrate that the original host, A. japonica, possesses more effective defence mechanisms against A. crassus than does the non-adapted host, A. anguilla.
Institutional Quality and Economic Performance in West Africa

This study empirically accessed the impact of institutional quality on economic performance in West Africa. The study employed the control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality and rule of law as institutional quality indicators as provided by the World Governance Indicators, WGI (2017). A panel data set of 12 West African countries from 1996 to 2015 was estimated using the fixed effect model, the random effect model and the panel two-stage least square technique. The result showed that all the indicators of institutional quality employed in the study have positive and significant impact on economic performance in West Africa when the fixed and random effect model estimation technique was employed but only government effectiveness was significant after taking account of endogeneity using the panel two-stage least square technique. The study concludes that economic performance in West Africa would be enhanced in the presence of improved institutions with more consideration to government effectiveness.
A novel tau mutation, S320F, causes a tauopathy with inclusions similar to those in Pick's disease

Mutations in the tau gene cause familial frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17. In this article, we describe a novel missense mutation, S320F, in the tau gene in a family with presenile dementia. To our knowledge, it is the first mutation to be described in exon 11 of tau. The proband died at age 53 years, after a disease duration of 15 years, and autopsy revealed a neuropathological picture similar to Pick's disease. Recombinant tau protein with the S320F mutation showed a greatly reduced ability to promote microtubule assembly.