Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using the Interferometric Capabilities of the ESA CryoSat-2 Mission to Improve the Accuracy of Sea Ice Freeboard Retrievals

A significant source of error in the retrieval of sea ice freeboard from pulse-limited radar altimeters arises when scattering from off-nadir leads dominates the power echo causing the onboard tracker to “snag” and overestimate the two-way travel time. This range overestimate translates into an ocean elevation underestimate relative to the ice surface and an overestimate of the sea ice freeboard. We demonstrate using interferometric CryoSat-2 data that it is possible to infer the across-track angle of return to off-nadir leads and their location in the CryoSat-2 footprint and hence correct for the associated range error for the first time. It is found that specular scattering from leads can dominate the radar echo some 1530 m off nadir. Over the region studied, the mean ocean elevation bias is closely associated with the “pulse peakiness” (PP) parameter used for identifying specular waveforms. Considering only the most specular waveforms, the elevation bias was measured to be -1.21 ±0.93 cm. However, lowering the PP threshold includes lower power waveforms originating from higher off-nadir angles, and the elevation bias becomes -4.06 ±1.66 cm. Unaccounted for, these biases represent an ~ 10-40-cm overestimate in ice thickness. Despite the relatively large error on the mean bias, correcting for off-nadir ranging contributes only a small amount to the elevation uncertainty when combined with range and orbit determination uncertainties. We found that making use of CryoSat-2's interferometric mode over sea ice ultimately decreases the uncertainty on the area-averaged ocean elevation by allowing the inclusion of more waveforms in the analysis.
An Analysis of Centrality Measures for Complex and Social Networks

Measures of complex network analysis, such as vertex centrality, have the potential to unveil existing network patterns and behaviors. They contribute to the understanding of networks and their components by analyzing their structural properties, which makes them useful in several computer science domains and applications. Unfortunately, there is a large number of distinct centrality measures and little is known about their common characteristics in practice. By means of an empirical analysis, we aim at a clear understanding of the main centrality measures available, unveiling their similarities and differences in a large number of distinct social networks. Our experiments show that the vertex centrality measures known as information, eigenvector, subgraph, walk betweenness and betweenness can distinguish vertices in all kinds of networks with a granularity performance at 95%, while other metrics achieved a considerably lower result. In addition, we demonstrate that several pairs of metrics evaluate the vertices in a very similar way, i.e. their correlation coefficient values are above 0.7. This was unexpected, considering that each metric presents a quite distinct theoretical and algorithmic foundation. Our work thus contributes towards the development of a methodology for principled network analysis and evaluation.
Irreversible inhibition of cytosolic thioredoxin reductase 1 as a mechanistic basis for anticancer therapy

Selective irreversible inhibitors of selenoprotein TXNRD1 yield anticancer efficacy without overt systemic toxicity in mouse models. A safer way to reduce tumors Oxidative stress is a common feature of the tumor microenvironment, and the tumor cells adapt to it by activating the glutathione and thioredoxin antioxidant pathways. However, noncancer cells also require these pathways for survival, and inhibiting both pathways simultaneously can cause unacceptable toxicity. Instead, Stafford et al. decided to target the thioredoxin pathway alone in an effort to kill cancer cells with less collateral damage. Through a large-scale screening effort, the authors identified candidate inhibitors of the enzyme thioredoxin reductase 1 and then demonstrated their biological effects and anticancer efficacy in vitro and in multiple mouse models. Cancer cells adapt to their inherently increased oxidative stress through activation of the glutathione (GSH) and thioredoxin (TXN) systems. Inhibition of both of these systems effectively kills cancer cells, but such broad inhibition of antioxidant activity also kills normal cells, which is highly unwanted in a clinical setting. We therefore evaluated targeting of the TXN pathway alone and, more specifically, selective inhibition of the cytosolic selenocysteine-containing enzyme TXN reductase 1 (TXNRD1). TXNRD1 inhibitors were discovered in a large screening effort and displayed increased specificity compared to pan-TXNRD inhibitors, such as auranofin, that also inhibit the mitochondrial enzyme TXNRD2 and additional targets. For our lead compounds, TXNRD1 inhibition correlated with cancer cell cytotoxicity, and inhibitor-triggered conversion of TXNRD1 from an antioxidant to a pro-oxidant enzyme correlated with corresponding increases in cellular production of H2O2. In mice, the most specific TXNRD1 inhibitor, here described as TXNRD1 inhibitor 1 (TRi-1), impaired growth and viability of human tumor xenografts and syngeneic mouse tumors while having little mitochondrial toxicity and being better tolerated than auranofin. These results display the therapeutic anticancer potential of irreversibly targeting cytosolic TXNRD1 using small molecules and present potent and selective TXNRD1 inhibitors. Given the pronounced up-regulation of TXNRD1 in several metastatic malignancies, it seems worthwhile to further explore the potential benefit of specific irreversible TXNRD1 inhibitors for anticancer therapy.
Prevention of atherosclerosis by bioactive palmitoleate through suppression of organelle stress and inflammasome activation

A bioactive lipokine promotes metabolic resilience of organelles and limits the progression of atherosclerosis. Artery-saving fat Although fatty foods often have a bad reputation when it comes to atherosclerosis, a study by Çimen et al. identifies a type of fat that is not only harmless but also protective. Palmitoleate is a lipid that can be produced directly by the human body and is also found in a variety of foods, but only in small amounts. Using human cells and mouse models, the authors demonstrate that palmitoleate reduces metabolic stress in a variety of tissues as well as in atherosclerotic plaques and thus decreases the severity of atherosclerosis in mouse models. De novo lipogenesis (DNL), the conversion of glucose and other substrates to lipids, is often associated with ectopic lipid accumulation, metabolic stress, and insulin resistance, especially in the liver. However, organ-specific DNL can also generate distinct lipids with beneficial metabolic bioactivity, prompting a great interest in their use for the treatment of metabolic diseases. Palmitoleate (PAO), one such bioactive lipid, regulates lipid metabolism in liver and improves glucose utilization in skeletal muscle when it is generated de novo from the obese adipose tissue. We show that PAO treatment evokes an overall lipidomic remodeling of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membranes in macrophages and mouse tissues, which is associated with resistance of the ER to hyperlipidemic stress. By preventing ER stress, PAO blocks lipid-induced inflammasome activation in mouse and human macrophages. Chronic PAO supplementation also lowers systemic interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and IL-18 concentrations in vivo in hyperlipidemic mice. Moreover, PAO prevents macrophage ER stress and IL-1β production in atherosclerotic plaques in vivo, resulting in a marked reduction in plaque macrophages and protection against atherosclerosis in mice. These findings demonstrate that oral supplementation with a product of DNL such as PAO can promote membrane remodeling associated with metabolic resilience of intracellular organelles to lipid stress and limit the progression of atherosclerosis. These findings support therapeutic PAO supplementation as a potential preventive approach against complex metabolic and inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis, which warrants further studies in humans.
Computed tomography characteristics of fibrosarcoma — a histological subtype of feline injection-site sarcoma

Feline injection-site sarcoma (FISS) may be a consequence of subcutaneous injection. In the present study, the medical records and the computed tomography (CT) features of 22 cats with a FISS, histopathological subtype fibrosarcoma, were used. The majority of the fibrosarcomas (45%) were located in the interscapular region. All fibrosarcomas, except one with mild enhancement, showed strong contrast uptake, characterised as ring (42%), heterogeneous (36%), homogeneous (9%), heterogeneous/ring (6.5%) or mixed heterogeneous/homogeneous enhancement (6.5%). The longest axis of the mass was in a cranio-caudal (68%) or dorso-ventral (32%) direction. The median volume calculated on CT was 7.57 cm3. Common features were a marked local invasiveness of the musculature and heterogeneity of the tissue in the periphery of the neoplasia. When the fibrosarcoma was interscapular, performing an additional post-contrast scan with the forelimbs positioned caudally along the body, in addition to the standard protocol with the forelimbs extended cranially, allowed better evaluation of the actual relationship between the tumour and the surrounding tissues. The mean number of muscles involved with the tumour was 2.09 with extended and 1.95 with flexed forelimbs. When a lower number of structures was considered infiltrated through the double positioning, a less invasive surgical approach to underlying muscles and scapula was performed.
Do we need asthma clinics in primary care? Patients' views and perspectives

Asthma is a common chronic condition which places a considerable burden on patients and NHS resources. The relatively high prevalence, together with its innate variability, makes the provision of care by primary teams an essential and recognized part of overall management which is now generally undertaken by enthusiastic asthma-trained nurses. Despite 10 years of such organized care, there is little evidence of its effectiveness, with few data available on who attends and for what reason. We do not know the views of those for whom the clinics were intended, namely the patients. Here we report the results from two qualitative studies, one using in-depth interviews with individual patients and the other using focus groups on a range of different patients. The first study involved 30 adult patients whose pattern of compliance with inhaled medication allowed categorization of individuals into ‘compliers’ and ‘non-compliers’. The results of this study allowed a typology to be developed which categorized patients into ‘distancers/deniers’, ‘accepters’ and ‘pragmatists’. The focus group involved 70 patients (35 patients on two occasions) from a mixture of practices, and varying age and socio-economic groups. Both studies yielded remarkably similar results, and they show that patients, for a variety of reasons, do not regard asthma clinics as being of relevance to them and generally do not attend. Using the typology that was developed, we present reasons for their non-attendance based on the recurring rich quotes from patients. It is clear from these results that if practices run endless clinics, patients will not attend for the reasons given. Further work involving both quantitative and qualitative techniques is needed to explore who attends asthma clinics and why. Patients' views should now be integrated into future service planning, and the current educational role of the asthma clinic should be replaced by one which more closely reflects patients' needs and expectations.
Cardiovascular and respiratory effects, and quality of anesthesia produced by alfaxalone administered intramuscularly to cats sedated with dexmedetomidine and hydromorphone

The cardiovascular and respiratory effects, and the quality of anesthesia of alfaxalone administered intramuscularly (IM) to cats sedated with dexmedetomidine and hydromorphone were evaluated. Twelve healthy adult cats were anesthetized, with six cats receiving dexmedetomidine (0.01 mg/kg IM) followed by alfaxalone (5 mg/kg IM; group DA) and six receiving dexmedetomidine (0.01 mg/kg IM) plus hydromorphone (0.1 mg/kg IM) followed by alfaxalone (5 mg/kg IM; group DHA). Cardiorespiratory (pulse rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, saturation of oxygen with hemoglobin, end tidal carbon dioxide partial pressure) and bispectral index (BIS) data were collected every 10 mins for 90 mins starting immediately after intubation. The quality of anesthesia was scored by a blinded researcher at induction and at 5 and 60 mins after extubation. Recovery scores ranged from 1 (prolonged struggling) to 4 (no struggling). There were no clinically significant (P >0.05) differences in any data between groups or over time. Physiologic parameters were within normal limits for cats at all times. BIS values were consistent with light anesthesia in both groups. However, recovery was prolonged and marked with excitement, ataxia and hyper-reactivity in all cats. Thus, although cardiovascular and respiratory parameters are stable following IM injection of alfaxalone to cats sedated with dexmedetomidine and hydromorphone, recovery is extremely poor and this route of administration is not recommended for anesthesia in cats.
An Active Contour Model Based on Texture Distribution for Extracting Inhomogeneous Insulators From Aerial Images

The objects in natural images are often texturally inhomogeneous and prone to be falsely segmented into different parts by conventional methods. To overcome the difficulties caused by texture inhomogeneity, a new active contour model is proposed to extract inhomogeneous insulators from aerial images. First, a semilocal operator is employed to extract the texture features of insulators under the Beltrami framework. The layer of semilocal texture feature is single, and thus, it can avoid the high dimensionality of feature space. Then, a new convex energy functional is defined by taking the Xie's nonconvex model into a global minimization active contour framework during the process of segmentation. The proposed energy functional consists of not only the semilocal texture features of insulators but also their spatial relationship, which improves its ability to deal with textural inhomogeneity. Moreover, it can also avoid the existence of local minima in the minimization of the Xie's nonconvex model, thereby being independent of initial contour. In the process of contour evolution and numerical minimization, a fast dual formulation is employed to overcome the drawbacks of the usual level set and gradient descent method and to make the evolution of the contour more efficient. The experimental results on aerial insulator images confirm the ability of the proposed algorithm to effectively segment inhomogeneous textures with an overall average rmse of 1.87 pixels, a precision of 85.59%, and a recall of 86.47%. In addition, the proposed algorithm is extended to animal images, and satisfactory segmentation results can be obtained as well.
Evaluation of urinalyses from untreated adult cats with lower urinary tract disease and healthy control cats: predictive abilities and clinical relevance

This case-controlled study evaluated urinalyses from 111 primary cases diagnosed with feline lower urinary tract disease (FLUTD) and 101 healthy control cats. Urine samples were analysed by standardised procedures, and differences between the two groups were compared by multivariable logistic regression analysis, while controlling for age, body weight, gender and reproductive status. Further, the ability of using urine sediment findings to predict bacteriuria was evaluated. In addition, urinalyses from cats with bacterial cystitis, idiopathic cystitis, urolithiasis and urethral plugs were compared. The main findings were that increasing body weight was significantly associated with increased odds of FLUTD, while the influence of age and reproductive status was of less importance. Increasing amounts of red blood cells and epithelial cells were significantly associated with increased odds of FLUTD. The predictive ability of using bacterial sediment findings to predict bacterial growth was dependent on subjective grading of the amount of bacteria in the sediment and was, at best, only moderate. The few significant differences found between the different FLUTD diagnoses were of limited diagnostic value.
The Syndrome of Familial Atrial Septal Defect, Heart Arrhythmia and Hand Malformation (Holt‐Oram) in Mother and Son

The so‐called atrio‐digital dysplasia or Holt‐Oram syndrome consists of atrial septal defect, a tendency to cardiac arrhythmia and characteristic skeletal malformations, involving particularly the thumbs. It has previously been described in two families and seems to be transmitted as a dominant trait. The present report describes its occurrence in a mother and son, both of whom have been successfully operated upon for the atrial septal defect. The nature of the cardiac arrhythmia and its dependence upon different circumstances are discussed.
Joint Source-Relay Selection for Improving Wireless Physical-Layer Security

Abstract-We explore the physical-layer security for a multisource multi-relay wireless network in the presence of an eavesdropper, in which one of multiple sources is scheduled to send its message to a destination with the assistance of multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays. One eavesdropper is considered at the receiver side, and assumed to be capable of overhearing the transmission from relays to destination. In this paper, the round-robin scheduling and the joint source-relay selection schemes are presented to improve the physical-layer security of the multi-source multi-relay system, and their closedform intercept probability expressions are derived over Rayleigh fadingchannels.Numericalresultsdemonstratethattheproposed joint source-relay selection scheme achieves a better performance than the traditional round-robin scheduling in terms of the intercept probability.
Risk factors for urinary tract infection with multiple drug-resistant Escherichia coli in cats

The emergence of multiple drug-resistant (MDR) bacteria is a growing public health problem. The objective of this retrospective study was to identify risk factors associated with MDR Escherichia coli infection of the urinary tract in cats. All cats presenting with an E coli urinary infection between March 2010 and December 2012 were included and divided into two groups: an MDR group and a non-MDR group. The effects of different variables on the occurrence of an MDR E coli infection were evaluated: age, sex, additional diseases, number of antibiotics and number of days of hospitalisation. Fifty-two cats were identified (10 MDR and 42 non-MDR). The number of antibiotic groups used within the last 3 months was associated with an increased risk of MDR E coli urinary infection (P = 0.007). The association of the number of days of hospitalisation within the last 3 months and the increased risk of MDR E coli urinary infection did not reach significance (P = 0.090). This study provides evidence that systematic urinary culture with antibiotic sensitivity testing should be recommended when treating urinary tract infections if antibiotics have been prescribed within the past 3 months. Moreover, the selection of MDR bacteria through antibiotic use should be considered as a potential risk associated with treatment.
Kernel Sparse Multitask Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification With Empirical Mode Decomposition and Morphological Wavelet-Based Features

Recently, many researchers have attempted to exploit spectral-spatial features and sparsity-based hyperspectral image classifiers for higher classification accuracy. However, challenges remain for efficient spectral-spatial feature generation and combination in the sparsity-based classifiers. This paper utilizes the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and morphological wavelet transform (MWT) to gain spectral-spatial features, which can be significantly integrated by the sparse multitask learning (MTL). In the feature extraction step, the sum of the intrinsic mode functions extracted by an optimized EMD is taken as spectral features, whereas the spatial features are formed by the low-frequency components of one-level MWT. In the classification step, a kernel-based sparse MTL solved by the accelerated proximal gradient is applied to analyze both the spectral and spatial features simultaneously. Experiments are conducted on two benchmark data sets with different spectral and spatial resolutions. It is found that the proposed methods provide more accurate classification results compared to the state-of-the-art techniques with various ratio of training samples.
A miRNA181a/NFAT5 axis links impaired T cell tolerance induction with autoimmune type 1 diabetes

A miRNA181a/NFAT5 signaling axis promotes immune activation and interferes with the induction of regulatory T cells in islet autoimmunity. Meddling with microRNA to treat type 1 diabetes Among other immune dysfunctions, patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D) have defective regulatory T cell responses. T cell differentiation is guided by many types of signals and could potentially be altered to treat autoimmunity. Serr and colleagues examined how the microRNA miRNA181a can push immune activation in the context of T1D. They combine results from patients and a mouse model to demonstrate that miRNA181a increases NFAT5 and dampens regulatory T cell induction. Inhibiting this microRNA or NFAT5 could potentially open up new avenues of restoring immune balance in T1D. Molecular checkpoints that trigger the onset of islet autoimmunity or progression to human type 1 diabetes (T1D) are incompletely understood. Using T cells from children at an early stage of islet autoimmunity without clinical T1D, we find that a microRNA181a (miRNA181a)–mediated increase in signal strength of stimulation and costimulation links nuclear factor of activated T cells 5 (NFAT5) with impaired tolerance induction and autoimmune activation. We show that enhancing miRNA181a activity increases NFAT5 expression while inhibiting FOXP3+ regulatory T cell (Treg) induction in vitro. Accordingly, Treg induction is improved using T cells from NFAT5 knockout (NFAT5ko) animals, whereas altering miRNA181a activity does not affect Treg induction in NFAT5ko T cells. Moreover, high costimulatory signals result in phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)–mediated NFAT5, which interferes with FoxP3+ Treg induction. Blocking miRNA181a or NFAT5 increases Treg induction in murine and humanized models and reduces murine islet autoimmunity in vivo. These findings suggest targeting miRNA181a and/or NFAT5 signaling for the development of innovative personalized medicines to limit islet autoimmunity.