Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future Prospects for the Total Artificial Heart

SUMMARY A total artificial heart (TAH) is the sole remaining option for patients with biventricular failure who cannot be rescued by left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) alone. However, the pulsatile TAH in clinical use today has limitations: large pump size, unknown durability, required complex anticoagulation regimen, and association with significant postsurgical complications. That pump is noisy; its large pneumatic driving lines traverse the body, with bulky external components for its drivers. Continuous-flow pumps, which caused a paradigm shift in the LVAD field, have already contributed to the rapidly evolving development of TAHs. Novel continuous-flow TAHs are only in preclinical testing or developmental stages. We here review the current state of TAHs, with recommended requirements for the TAH of the future.
The role of teachers in implementing curriculum changes

In 2011 New Zealand introduced computer science into high schools after a long period when computing was mainly focussed on training students to be users. The transition was rapid, and teachers had little time to upskill to prepare for the new topics, and yet there was widespread voluntary adoption of the new standards. The role of teachers and the national teachers' organisation in making the change has been pivotal, and this paper reviews the changes from the teachers' perspective. This story is intended to inform those planning similar changes in other countries, and provide a context for the next steps in NZ. The discussion centres around a survey of 91~teachers, which reveals strong intrinsic motivation from teachers to make the changes, a mixture of prior knowledge and skills that teachers shared with each other through peer support and online communication, a low level of confidence as teachers of computer science, and a need for further professional development.
Lower Third Molar Region

La region del tercer molar inferior es una region importante para la practica odontoestomatologica, en ella se presenta una gran cantidad de procesos patologicos relacionados con el desarrollo y erupcion del tercer molar, por lo que se practican un gran numero de intervenciones quirurgicas. No obstante su importancia, esta region no se encuentra considerada en la terminologia anatomica ni descrita en la anatomia topografica y a pesar de la gran cantidad de estudios que analizan la anatomia quirurgica de la region, es necesario sistematizar la descripcion de sus limites, planos, contenidos, elementos de riesgo, puntos de reparo, etc., es por ello que el proposito de este articulo es revisar los conceptos modernos relacionados con la anatomia quirurgica de la region del tercer molar inferior y proponer una descripcion basada en estos conceptos.
Ethnic and social inequalities in women's experience of maternity care in England: results of a national survey

Summary Objective To examine ethnic and social inequalities in women's experience of maternity care in England. Design A 2007 national survey of women (16 years or over) about their experience of maternity care. Multiple logistic regression analysis, controlling for several maternal characteristics, was used to examine inequalities by ethnicity, partner status and education. Setting Sample of records of 149 NHS acute trusts and two primary care trusts (PCTs) providing maternity services in England. Results A total of 26,325 women responded to the survey (response rate 59%). Ethnic minority women were more likely than White British women to access services late, not have a scan by 20 weeks, and experience complications during pregnancy and birth. They were more likely to initiate breastfeeding and say they were treated with respect and dignity. Single women responded more negatively to almost all questions than women with a husband/partner. They were less likely to access care within 12 weeks of pregnancy (OR 0.45, 95% CI 0.39–0.52), have a scan at 20 weeks (OR 0.49, 95% CI 0.39–0.63), attend NHS antenatal classes (OR 0.56, 95% CI 0.49–0.65), have a postnatal check-up (OR 0.67, 95% CI 0.60–0.75), and initiate breastfeeding (OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.51–0.62), and were more likely to experience complications. Women completing education at 19+ years were more likely to access services early (OR 1.21, 95% CI 1.04–1.40), attend antenatal classes (OR 1.48, 95% CI 1.31–1.67), have a postnatal check-up (OR 1.19, 95% CI 1.07–1.32) and initiate breastfeeding (OR 3.88, 95% CI 3.56–4.22) than those completing education at 16 years or younger, and were less likely to experience complications. Conclusions Ethnic minority women, single mothers, and those with an earlier age at completing education access maternity services late, have poorer outcomes, and report poorer experiences across some – though not all – dimensions of maternity care. Ethnic differences were absent or inconsistent between groups for some aspects of care. We recommend these findings are used by commissioners, trusts and healthcare professionals to inform improvements in maternity services for high-risk groups and reduce inequalities.
The Clinical Characteristics According to the Risk Factors of Idiopathic Nonhemolytic Hyperbilirubinemia

목적: 최근 출생 후 조기 퇴원과 모유수유 증가로 인해 신생아고빌리루빈혈증에 의한 재입원 비율이 증가하고 있다. 신생아 고빌리루빈혈증은 적절한 시기에 치료하지 않으면 빌리루빈 뇌증을 유발하여 치명적인 신경학적 후유증을 남길 수 있어 적절한치료와 함께 조기 예방의 중요성이 부각되고 있다. 이에 저자는우리나.
The quality of nutrition research reporting by leading daily newspapers in India

Background: Newspapers are an important form of Mass media which plays significant role in health promotion, and is crucial for social development. Studies revealed that newspaper reports lacked consistency in presenting nutrition research results to the readers. A study was conducted with a hypothesis “Newspapers often highlight nutrition research findings disproportionately in order to draw reader’s attention”. Objective: To assess presentation of nutrition research findings/ outcomes by newspapers as compared to the original research papers on which they are based. Method: The top six popular newspapers in India were selected for the study. A scale was evolved based on 10 parameters for gauging accuracy of the reports. Results: A total of 214 reports were identified as based or claimed on nutrition research in all the above six newspapers. One-fourth of the newspaper reports did not conveyed nutrition research results properly. Few reports were found as contrary to the original findings on which they were based on. Almost one-fifth of the reports have no mention of the source, which denies access to the reader for the original report. Usually, any research or scientific study has its own limitations. But, this vital aspect is missing in the newspapers reports on nutrition research. Conclusions: With emphasis on short, "newsworthy" pieces, the media often only report the results of single studies, and many stories are chosen simply because the results run contrary to current health recommendations. Scientists need to help translate their research for consumers. Key words:, Print media, Nutrition, Research translation, Health communication. Key words: Newspapers, Nutrition, Research translation, Health communication.
Inducible clindamycin resistance in Staphylococci: Should clinicians and microbiologists be concerned?

The increasing incidence of a variety of infections due to Staphylococcus aureus and the expanding role of community-associated methicillin-resistant S. aureus has led to an emphasis on the need for safe and effective agents to treat both systemic and localized Staphylococcal infections. Several newer antimicrobial agents are available for treatment of systemic Staphylococcal infections, but their use may be limited by the relatively high cost of these agents or the need forparenteral administration. Clindamycin has been used successfully to treat soft-tissue and musculoskeletal infections due to MRSA, in adults and children. However, concern over the possibility of the emergence of clindamycin resistance during therapy has discouraged some clinicians from prescribing that agent. Simple laboratory testing (e.g., the erythromycin-clindamycin ′D-zone′ test) can separate strains that have the genetic potential (i.e., the presence of erm genes) to become resistant during therapy, from strains that are fully susceptible to clindamycin.
Slight difference in the labeling of ‘identical’ concentrations and justification for historical  controls

Sir, We thank Professor Rosenberg for his interest in our article (1). It is true that the concentration of levobupivacaine is expressed as mg/ml base in contrast to preparations of racemic bupivacaine, where the dose is expressed as mg/ml of hydrochloride, resulting in a 12.6% difference in concentration between levobupivacaine base and levobupivacaine hydrochloride. However, in our paper, the presented total concentrations in both parts of the study were expressed as the concentration of the pharmacologically active base of the drugs. The use of an appropriate correction factor would have resulted in only slightly lower plasma concentrations of levobupivacaine, with no clinical significance. Furthermore, the labeled concentrations are considered ‘identical’ in everyday clinical practice It is also true that the lack of randomization involves a risk of bias. As already discussed in the paper, however, we felt that, while injecting such a large dose of local anesthetic for ilioinguinal-iliohypogastric blockade and also doing so under general anesthesia, we did not want to expose our pediatric patients to a more toxic substance, such as bupivacaine, merely for research purposes (2). Although ilioinguinal-iliohypogastric nerve blockade is a common procedure in our institution and relatively easy to perform, this would have been an unnecessary risk, as further supported by our earlier finding that bupivacaine concentrations after ilioinguinal-iliohypogatric blockade are three times higher than those after caudal blocks (3, 4).
Robust inside-outside segmentation using generalized winding numbers

Solid shapes in computer graphics are often represented with boundary descriptions, e.g. triangle meshes, but animation, physically-based simulation, and geometry processing are more realistic and accurate when explicit volume representations are available. Tetrahedral meshes which exactly contain (interpolate) the input boundary description are desirable but difficult to construct for a large class of input meshes. Character meshes and CAD models are often composed of many connected components with numerous self-intersections, non-manifold pieces, and open boundaries, precluding existing meshing algorithms. We propose an automatic algorithm handling all of these issues, resulting in a compact discretization of the input's inner volume. We only require reasonably consistent orientation of the input triangle mesh. By generalizing the winding number for arbitrary triangle meshes, we define a function that is a perfect segmentation for watertight input and is well-behaved otherwise. This function guides a graphcut segmentation of a constrained Delaunay tessellation (CDT), providing a minimal description that meets the boundary exactly and may be fed as input to existing tools to achieve element quality. We highlight our robustness on a number of examples and show applications of solving PDEs, volumetric texturing and elastic simulation.
Introducing a problem-based anatomy course in a traditional curriculum: a Croatian experience

SUMMARY This paper reports the incorporation of a problem based anatomy course for all 250 students in a traditional curriculum at the School of Medicine University of Zagreb. The challenges that arose during this transition and the institutional solutions include: gaining acceptance within the organization, recruiting and training faculty to teach, locating space for small-group teaching and observing the tutorials for feedback to students and faculty. A short description of the course as well as its evaluations is presented. The end-of-course evaluations indicate a high level of student preference for the active learning process experienced in tutorials, in comparison with the more passive learning experience of lectures.
The effect of antidrug antibodies on the sustainable efficacy of biologic therapies in rheumatoid arthritis: practical consequences

Biologic therapies, predominantly TNF-α inhibitors, have revolutionized the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, their clinical utility can be limited by the development of antidrug antibodies (ADAs). Immunogenicity is a complex phenomenon related to various drug, disease, and patient characteristics, and may be more common with the monoclonal antibodies than with etanercept, a soluble TNF receptor-Fc immunoglobulin fusion protein. Neutralizing antibodies – those that hinder bioactivity by preventing drug molecules from binding to TNF – are correlated with reduced serum drug concentrations, loss of therapeutic response, adverse events, and treatment discontinuation. Cost-effective use of these agents will depend on further research into drug and ADA assays, and how they should guide dose reduction or switching strategies.
Automated telephone reminder messages can assist electronic diabetes care

Summary Telephone reminder systems have been used to assist in the treatment of many chronic diseases. However, it is unclear if these systems can increase medication and appointment adherence in patients with diabetes without direct patient–provider telephone contact. We tested the feasibility of using an automated telephone reminder system (ATRS) to deliver reminder messages to 253 adults with diabetes enrolled in a randomized controlled trial. Eighty-four percent of the patients were able to register using voice recognition and at least one reminder was delivered to 95% of registered patients over a period of 7.5 months. None of the demographic features studied predicted a patient's ability to enrol or to receive reminder calls. At the end of the study, 63% of patients indicated that they wished to continue to receive ATRS calls. The level of system use as determined by the number of received reminder calls was not associated with a change in the number of physician visits or diabetes-related laboratory tests during follow-up. The clinical benefits and sustainability of ATRS remain unproven, but our results indicate that an automated reminder system can be effective for providing messages to a large group of older patients with diabetes.
Risk factors for renal disease in systemic lupus erythematosus and their clinical implications

Lupus nephritis is one of the most common severe manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Genetic, ethnic and hormonal factors may influence the presence and severity of renal involvement and therefore affect the outcome and overall prognosis of patients. In this review, we will discuss the association of known lupus risk factors in developing renal disease and explore the recent literature to identify potential risk factors and their clinical implications in terms of diagnostic vigilance, management and prognosis.
BigBench: towards an industry standard benchmark for big data analytics

There is a tremendous interest in big data by academia, industry and a large user base. Several commercial and open source providers unleashed a variety of products to support big data storage and processing. As these products mature, there is a need to evaluate and compare the performance of these systems. In this paper, we present BigBench, an end-to-end big data benchmark proposal. The underlying business model of BigBench is a product retailer. The proposal covers a data model and synthetic data generator that addresses the variety, velocity and volume aspects of big data systems containing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The structured part of the BigBench data model is adopted from the TPC-DS benchmark, which is enriched with semi-structured and unstructured data components. The semi-structured part captures registered and guest user clicks on the retailer's website. The unstructured data captures product reviews submitted online. The data generator designed for BigBench provides scalable volumes of raw data based on a scale factor. The BigBench workload is designed around a set of queries against the data model. From a business prospective, the queries cover the different categories of big data analytics proposed by McKinsey. From a technical prospective, the queries are designed to span three different dimensions based on data sources, query processing types and analytic techniques. We illustrate the feasibility of BigBench by implementing it on the Teradata Aster Database. The test includes generating and loading a 200 Gigabyte BigBench data set and testing the workload by executing the BigBench queries (written using Teradata Aster SQL-MR) and reporting their response times.
Photon: fault-tolerant and scalable joining of continuous data streams

Web-based enterprises process events generated by millions of users interacting with their websites. Rich statistical data distilled from combining such interactions in near real-time generates enormous business value. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Photon, a geographically distributed system for joining multiple continuously flowing streams of data in real-time with high scalability and low latency, where the streams may be unordered or delayed. The system fully tolerates infrastructure degradation and datacenter-level outages without any manual intervention. Photon guarantees that there will be no duplicates in the joined output (at-most-once semantics) at any point in time, that most joinable events will be present in the output in real-time (near-exact semantics), and exactly-once semantics eventually. Photon is deployed within Google Advertising System to join data streams such as web search queries and user clicks on advertisements. It produces joined logs that are used to derive key business metrics, including billing for advertisers. Our production deployment processes millions of events per minute at peak with an average end-to-end latency of less than 10 seconds. We also present challenges and solutions in maintaining large persistent state across geographically distant locations, and highlight the design principles that emerged from our experience.
NADEEF: a commodity data cleaning system

Despite the increasing importance of data quality and the rich theoretical and practical contributions in all aspects of data cleaning, there is no single end-to-end off-the-shelf solution to (semi-)automate the detection and the repairing of violations w.r. t. a set of heterogeneous and ad-hoc quality constraints. In short, there is no commodity platform similar to general purpose DBMSs that can be easily customized and deployed to solve application-specific data quality problems. In this paper, we present NADEEF, an extensible, generalized and easy-to-deploy data cleaning platform. NADEEF distinguishes between a programming interface and a core to achieve generality and extensibility. The programming interface allows the users to specify multiple types of data quality rules, which uniformly define what is wrong with the data and (possibly) how to repair it through writing code that implements predefined classes. We show that the programming interface can be used to express many types of data quality rules beyond the well known CFDs (FDs), MDs and ETL rules. Treating user implemented interfaces as black-boxes, the core provides algorithms to detect errors and to clean data. The core is designed in a way to allow cleaning algorithms to cope with multiple rules holistically, i.e. detecting and repairing data errors without differentiating between various types of rules. We showcase two implementations for core repairing algorithms. These two implementations demonstrate the extensibility of our core, which can also be replaced by other user-provided algorithms. Using real-life data, we experimentally verify the generality, extensibility, and effectiveness of our system.
Current challenges and controversies in the management of chronic spontaneous urticaria

Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is characterized by the recurrence of itchy wheals for at least 6 weeks, affects up to 1% of the general population and may severely impair quality of life. H1-antihistamines are the cornerstones of treatment, but in about 10% of cases they fail to control the disease even at higher than licensed doses. In these patients, short courses of oral steroids may induce a remission in about 50% of cases. Omalizumab, a monoclonal anti-IgE, is effective in antihistamine-unresponsive patients although optimal treatment duration needs to be defined. Immunosuppressive treatment with cyclosporine is also effective in the majority of antihistamine-resistant chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) patients, but its use is limited by potential side effects. In refractory patients, other approaches include intravenous immunoglobulin, rituximab, dapsone and anticoagulants. The present review looks with particular interest at the prevalence of treatment failures with the main third-level treatments (corticosteroids, omalizumab and cyclosporine) and discusses them in light of the possible different pathogenic mechanisms underlying chronic spontaneous urticaria.
The effects of pre-pregnancy body mass index and gestational weight gain on neonatal birth weight in Taiwan

The aim of this retrospective study was to explore the effects of pre-pregnancy body mass index and gestational weight gain on neonatal birth weight in Taiwan. Study subjects included two hundred and sixty three women who delivered their babies at two local hospitals in southern Taiwan. Initial data included maternity records on age, parity, socio-economic status, body mass index (BMI), pregnancy weight gain, neonatal gender, and neonatal birth weight. The mean age of 263 women was 29.99 years (range 19 - 42). The mean BMI was 21.19 kg/m 2 (range 16.22 - 32.05), and the mean pregnancy weight gain was 13.98 kg (range 3 - 33.5). The mean neonatal birth weight was 3192.57 gm (range 2120 - 4390). Mothers whose BMI was 24 - 27 had significantly higher neonatal birth weight than those mothers with a BMI > 27 and < 18.5) (F = 5.816, p = 0.001). After dividing the weight gain during pregnancy into four groups based on the recommendation of the Department of Health in Taiwan, our results show differences between maternal weight gain and neonatal body weight (F = 9.49, p < 0.001). Pregnant women with a weight gain less than 10 kg resulted in deliveries of neonates with lower birth weight (113.94, 237.62 and 332.58 gm) than those mothers who gained 10 - 14, 14 ‐ 16 kg, and more than 16kg. Multiple regression models control for other maternal and neonatal characteristics were able to document, weight gain as being more strongly associated with neonatal birth weight than prepregnancy body mass index. Neonatal birth weight was not correlated with maternal working status, socio-economical status and was not differentiated between primipara and multipara status. Conclusively, pre-pregnancy BMI and prenatal weight gain are related to neonatal birth weight. These results suggest that the pre-pregnancy BMI and prenatal weight gain should be among the most important concerns for providers offering prenatal services. Hopefully these findings will serve as a useful reference for prenatal nurses and will reinforce health insurance departments’ efforts to ensure quality prenatal care.