Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SCHOOL SURVEY OF EXPOSURE TO VIOLENCE AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS SYMPTOMS IN ADOLESCENTS

ABSTRACT This preliminary survey in a sample of grade 10 adolescents in secondary schools in the Western Cape examined:- (a) adolescents' exposure to violent and multiple traumas, (b) differences in trauma exposure among schools, and (c) the relationship between trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms. A survey design was employed, with anonymous self-report questionnaires administered to grade 10 students (n = 307, 57.5% female, 42.5% male) from three schools. Survey instruments included a demographic questionnaire, life events questionnaire, childhood trauma questionnaire, trauma checklist, and PTSD symptom checklist Respondents were asked to rate the presence or absence of posttraumatic stress symptoms in the past month based on their most traumatic experience. The most common traumatic experiences reported were: witnessing violence in the street, neighbourhood, or school (62.9%), being robbed or mugged (31.6%), and witnessing a family member being hurt or killed (30.0%). Although only 12.4% of adolescents reported sexual assaults, 32.4 of those assaulted met criteria (DSM-IV) for a self-report diagnosis of PTSD (not clinically confirmed). PTSD symptoms in the past month were a common manifestation of trauma exposure (mean PTSD symptoms = 5.3 ± 5.66). Gender effects in response to violence exposure were also evident, with girls responding with more PTSD symptoms than boys. Overall, thirty-seven adolescents (12.1%) met criteria (DSM-IV) for a self-report diagnosis of PTSD (not clinically confirmed). Epidemiological data specifically documenting PTSD prevalence following violence exposure in children and adolescents in South Africa is lacking. In this preliminary survey, a positive association was found between exposure to violent and multiple traumas and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in adolescents.
Spatial Evidential Clustering With Adaptive Distance Metric for Tumor Segmentation in FDG-PET Images

While the accurate delineation of tumor volumes in FDG-positron emission tomography (PET) is a vital task for diverse objectives in clinical oncology, noise and blur due to the imaging system make it a challenging work. In this paper, we propose to address the imprecision and noise inherent in PET using Dempster–Shafer theory, a powerful tool for modeling and reasoning with uncertain and/or imprecise information. Based on Dempster–Shafer theory, a novel evidential clustering algorithm is proposed and tailored for the tumor segmentation task in three-dimensional. For accurate clustering of PET voxels, each voxel is described not only by the single intensity value but also complementarily by textural features extracted from a patch surrounding the voxel. Considering that there are a large amount of textures without consensus regarding the most informative ones, and some of the extracted features are even unreliable due to the low-quality PET images, a specific procedure is included in the proposed clustering algorithm to adapt distance metric for properly representing the clustering distortions and the similarities between neighboring voxels. This integrated metric adaptation procedure will realize a low-dimensional transformation from the original space, and will limit the influence of unreliable inputs via feature selection. A Dempster–Shafer-theory-based spatial regularization is also proposed and included in the clustering algorithm, so as to effectively quantify the local homogeneity. The proposed method has been compared with other methods on the real-patient FDG-PET images, showing good performance.
Factors Influencing Perceived Oral Health of Japanese Middle-Aged Adults

The objective of this study was to analyze the relationships between subjective oral health symptoms and clinical oral health conditions on the perceived oral health of 1799 Japanese middle-aged adults. A self-administered questionnaire together with dental examinations was administered. A structural equation modeling analysis with Bayesian estimation was used to examine the factors influencing perceived oral health as a latent variable with 4 other latent variables: subjective oral health symptoms, clinical tooth conditions, clinical periodontal conditions, and other clinical oral conditions. For perceived oral health as the endogenous variable, only subjective oral health symptoms and clinical tooth conditions showed significant relationship. Clinical periodontal conditions and other clinical oral conditions did not show significant effects on the perceived oral health.
Comparison of nasotracheal intubation and tracheostomy in management of acute epiglottitis.

Acute epiglottitis is a life-threatening respiratory emergency of early childhood. The disease may progress so rapidly that complete upper airway obstruction occurs within hours.1 Trachostomy has been the procedure of choice2–4 to relieve airway obstruction; however, in recent years several investigators have reported the encouraging results of nasotracheal intubation5–12 as an alternate procedure in the management of acute epiglottitis. The purpose of this report is to evaluate the relative effectivenesses of two procedures, nasotracheal intubation and tracheostomy, using an interdisciplinary protocol.
Dermoscopic Image Segmentation via Multistage Fully Convolutional Networks

Objective: Segmentation of skin lesions is an important step in the automated computer aided diagnosis of melanoma. However, existing segmentation methods have a tendency to over- or under-segment the lesions and perform poorly when the lesions have fuzzy boundaries, low contrast with the background, inhomogeneous textures, or contain artifacts. Furthermore, the performance of these methods are heavily reliant on the appropriate tuning of a large number of parameters as well as the use of effective preprocessing techniques, such as illumination correction and hair removal. Methods: We propose to leverage fully convolutional networks (FCNs) to automatically segment the skin lesions. FCNs are a neural network architecture that achieves object detection by hierarchically combining low-level appearance information with high-level semantic information. We address the issue of FCN producing coarse segmentation boundaries for challenging skin lesions (e.g., those with fuzzy boundaries and/or low difference in the textures between the foreground and the background) through a multistage segmentation approach in which multiple FCNs learn complementary visual characteristics of different skin lesions; early stage FCNs learn coarse appearance and localization information while late-stage FCNs learn the subtle characteristics of the lesion boundaries. We also introduce a new parallel integration method to combine the complementary information derived from individual segmentation stages to achieve a final segmentation result that has accurate localization and well-defined lesion boundaries, even for the most challenging skin lesions. Results: We achieved an average Dice coefficient of 91.18% on the ISBI 2016 Skin Lesion Challenge dataset and 90.66% on the PH2 dataset. Conclusion and Significance: Our extensive experimental results on two well-established public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method is more effective than other state-of-the-art methods for skin lesion segmentation.
Multifactorial Analysis of Factors Affecting Recurrence of Stroke in Japan

Data on factors affecting stroke recurrence are relatively limited. The authors examined potential factors affecting stroke recurrence, retrospectively. The study participants were 1087 patients who were admitted to stroke centers suffering from first-ever ischemic stroke and returned questionnaires with usable information after discharge. The authors analyzed the association between clinical parameters of the patients and their prognosis. Recurrence rate of during an average of 2 years after discharge was 21.3%, and there were differences among stroke subtypes. It was found that the disability level of the patients after discharge correlated well with the level at discharge (rs = 0.66). Multivariate logistic regression analysis of the data shows that modified Rankin Scale score, National Institute of Health Stroke Scale score, gender, age, and family history had statistically significant impacts on stroke recurrence, and the impact was different depending on subtypes. These findings suggest that aggressive and persistent health education for poststroke patients and management of risk factors are essential to reduce stroke recurrence.
Dental trauma prevalence and disability types: A comparative study among children and adolescents in Dharwad, India

Introduction: Dental trauma (DT) has become an important attribute of dental public health. However, in the disabled population, the risks and consequences of DT have been barely studied. Aim: The aim was to assess and compare the prevalence of DT among disabled children and adolescents studying in special needs schools in the twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad, India. Materials and Methods: About 714 children and adolescents who were classified as visual impairment, speech and hearing (SH) disability, physical disability, mentally subnormal and multiple disabilities (MD) and in the age group of 4-19 years, studying in 14 special needs schools of Hubli-Dharwad were included. DT was recorded based on Ellis and Davey′s classification. Association between the trauma prevalence and disability types were analyzed using Chi-square test. Results: The prevalence of DT was found to be 28.6%. MD children sustained highest trauma (40.90%) and SH children experienced lowest trauma (18%). Statistically significant association was found between trauma prevalence and gender, geographic location, anterior teeth protrusion and lip coverage. Maxillary central incisors were most affected, and Ellis class 1 fracture was the most common type of traumatic injury. None of the children had undergone any treatment for DT. Conclusions: This should alert caregivers to carry out intense investigation of the events, and there is a need to take up preventive measures by dental professionals and public health authorities to reduce this type of morbidity.
Surgical management of a pony with a traumatic medial luxation of the patella

Summary This report describes a successful surgical repair of medial patellar luxation in a Miniature Shetland pony where manual reduction of the patella was not possible. The surgical procedure involves transection of the medial femoropatellar ligament to facilitate patellar release, the placement of a prosthetic suture to replace the lateral femoropatellar ligament and reinforcement of the lateral retinaculum by the use of a mesh implant. This is a newly described surgical technique for the rare but recognised condition of a medial luxation of the patella.
Exposure to High-Fluoride Drinking Water and Risk of Dental Caries and Dental Fluorosis in Haryana, India

The present study aimed to determine the prevalence of and relationship between dental caries and dental fluorosis at varying levels of fluoride in drinking water. The study was conducted among 3007 school children in the age group of 12 to 16 years in 2 districts of Haryana having varying fluoride levels in drinking water. Type III examination for dental caries according to the WHO index and dental fluorosis estimation according to Dean’s index was done. The prevalence of dental caries decreased from 48.02% to 28.07% as fluoride levels increased from 0.5 to 1.13 ppm, but as the fluoride level increased further to 1.51 ppm, there was no further reduction in caries prevalence, but there was a substantial increase in fluorosis prevalence. The optimum level of fluoride in drinking water was found to be 1.13 ppm, at which there was maximum caries reduction with minimum amount of esthetically objectionable fluorosis.
Low-to-High Cross-Frequency Coupling in the Electrical Rhythms as Biomarker for Hyperexcitable Neuroglial Networks of the Brain

<italic>Objective</italic>: One of the features used in the study of hyperexcitablility is high-frequency oscillations (HFOs, >80 Hz). HFOs have been reported in the electrical rhythms of the brain’s neuroglial networks under physiological and pathological conditions. Cross-frequency coupling (CFC) of HFOs with low-frequency rhythms was used to identify pathologic HFOs in the epileptogenic zones of epileptic patients and as a biomarker for the severity of seizure-like events in genetically modified rodent models. We describe a model to replicate reported CFC features extracted from recorded local field potentials (LFPs) representing network properties. <italic>Methods </italic>: This study deals with a four-unit neuroglial cellular network model where each unit incorporates pyramidal cells, interneurons, and astrocytes. Three different pathways of hyperexcitability generation—Na<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{+}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> ${\rm K}^{+}$</tex-math></inline-formula> ATPase pump, glial potassium clearance, and potassium afterhyperpolarization channel—were used to generate LFPs. Changes in excitability, average spontaneous electrical discharge (SED) duration, and CFC were then measured and analyzed. <italic>Results</italic>: Each parameter caused an increase in network excitability and the consequent lengthening of the SED duration. Short SEDs showed CFC between HFOs and theta oscillations (4–8 Hz), but in longer SEDs the low frequency changed to the delta range (1–4 Hz). <italic>Conclusion</italic>: Longer duration SEDs exhibit CFC features similar to those reported by our team. <italic>Significance</italic>: First, Identifying the exponential relationship between network excitability and SED durations; second, highlighting the importance of glia in hyperexcitability (as they relate to extracellular potassium); and third, elucidation of the biophysical basis for CFC coupling features.
The effectiveness of online courses in physician assistant education

The Journal of Physician Assistant Education | 2006 Vol 17 No 3 INTRODUCTION This paper summarizes a project in which a university-based physician assistant (PA) program piloted a federally funded online learning curriculum to determine whether online learning curricula were appropriate for PA programs. Online instruction can be implemented on a continuum from minimal computer use to completely online instruction. Boettcher proposed a framework of four categories in the continuum of online instruction.1 In the first of these, Web presence is essentially a marketing tool for the course—it includes information typically listed in a course catalog and may contain other items such as instructor contact information or pictures, but no real curricular information is imparted via the Web. A Web-enhanced course utilizes Web technology to provide access to course documents, materials, and resources. Web-centric courses make considerable use of Web technologies to facilitate access to class materials and facilitate communication between faculty and students, among students, and between students and resources, but some face-to-face contact is still required. Web courses are similar to Web-centric courses in the use of technology; however, they are typically accessed only through electronic means, with no physical or onsite presence required. This study evaluated the effectiveness of implementation of a Web-centric instructional format.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone.

In increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning to Sci-Hub, the controversial website that hosts 50 million pirated papers and counting. Now, with server log data from Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan, Science addresses some basic questions: Who are Sci-Hub9s users, where are they, and what are they reading? The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming the world9s de facto open-access research library. Among the revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents, with Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States the leading requestors.
Co-education and the erosion of gender stereotypes in the Zambian Copperbelt

This paper explores how single-sex and co-education affect girls' and boys' gender beliefs and relations. Earlier research in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that co-educational schools are sites of male intimidation, violence, and unequal power relations. Meanwhile single-sex education is said to enhance girls' self-confidence, improve their academic scores, and enable them to act as leaders, in a safe space, absent of boys. However, recent qualitative research in the Zambian Copperbelt suggests that co-education may actually be more conducive to gender equality. Seeing girls demonstrate equal competence in mixed-sex classes can undermine gender stereotypes, on the part of girls and boys alike. The research also calls into question assumptions that single-sex education is necessarily better at enhancing girls' self-confidence and protecting them from intimidation and male violence.
Hydrops fetalis due to homozygosity for α-thalassemia-1, -(α)-20.5.kb: the first observation in a turkish family

We report data on a fetus with hydrops fetalis due to a homozygosity for alpha-thalassemia-1, type -(alpha)-20.5 kb; this is the first reported case in a Turkish family. Characterization of the abnormality was based on data from family studies and from alpha-globin gene mapping of the DNA from the parents.
Risk Factors of Breast Cancer

The etiology of breast cancer might be explained by 2 mechanisms, namely, differentiation and proliferation of breast epithelial cells mediated by hormonal factors. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to update effects of risk factors for both mechanisms. MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched up to January 2011. Studies that assessed association between oral contraceptives (OC), hormonal replacement therapy (HRT), diabetes mellitus (DM), or breastfeeding and breast cancer were eligible. Relative risks with their confidence intervals (CIs) were extracted. A random-effects method was applied for pooling the effect size. The pooled odds ratios of OC, HRT, and DM were 1.10 (95% CI = 1.03-1.18), 1.23 (95% CI = 1.21-1.25), and 1.14 (95% CI = 1.09-1.19), respectively, whereas the pooled odds ratio of ever-breastfeeding was 0.72 (95% CI = 0.58-0.89). Our study suggests that OC, HRT, and DM might increase risks, whereas breastfeeding might lower risks of breast cancer.
Histamine, Substance P and Calcitonin Gene-Related Peptide Plasma Concentration and Pruritus in Patients Suffering from Psoriasis

Background: Many patients with psoriasis suffer from itch. The pathogenesis of psoriatic itch still remains unknown. Objective: To evaluate the relationships between plasma levels of histamine, substance P (SP) and calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) and the presence as well as intensity of itching among psoriatic patients. Patients and Methods: 59 psoriatic individuals (43 pruritic and 16 non-pruritic) and 32 healthy controls were included in the study. Itching was evaluated by a visual analog scale (VAS) and a specially designed questionnaire. Plasma concentrations of histamine, SP and CGRP were measured by RIA (radioimmunoassay) method. Results: The mean plasma concentration of histamine in psoriatic patients was not significantly different from that found in controls. No significant differences were found between plasma levels of histamine in the groups of psoriatic pruritic patients, non-pruritic psoriatics and controls. Also, there was no significant difference in SP plasma concentration between psoriatic individuals and controls or between pruritic, non-pruritic and healthy people. No relationships between the substances studied (histamine, SP) and intensity of pruritus could be revealed. The mean CGRP plasma level was markedly increased in patients suffering from psoriasis as compared to controls (p < 0.01). The mean CGRP concentration in the plasma of pruritic psoriatic patients was significantly higher than in controls (p < 0.01). This was not observed when comparing non-pruritic to healthy subjects. The mean concentration of CGRP in the plasma of pruritic patients was also higher than in that of non-pruritic ones, but this difference did not reach statistical significance. A significant correlation was found between itching intensity and CGRP plasma concentration in male subjects and in those patients who had been suffering from psoriasis for 5–20 years. There were, however, no correlations between CGRP level and itching intensity in the whole group of 43 psoriatic patients with pruritus. Conclusion: Circulatory CGRP could be an important factor in the pathogenesis of psoriatic pruritus, but this still needs further investigation.
A clinicopathologic study of various breast lesions with cytohistological correlation

Context: Most of the females suffer from breast diseases during their life at some time or the other. Confirmation of breast diseases by clinical examination and pathological confirmation by fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) and histopathologic examination has been found to be an important part of diagnostic workup in breast diseases. Aims: To establish a clinicopathologic correlation in patients suffering from breast diseases. Settings and Design: We conducted a prospective study from December 2008 to August 2010. One hundred and twenty-one cases were enrolled using simple random sampling methods. Materials and Methods: Data including age, complaints, and clinical examination was collected from patients presenting for FNAC with breast complaints. Results: A total of 128 cases were studied which included 101 benign cases, 21 malignant cases, and 6 inadequate cases. The final 122 cases included 3 (2.5%) cases of acute mastitis, 2 cases (1.6%) of tubercular mastitis, 44 cases (36.1%) of fibroadenoma, 42 cases (34.4%) of benign breast disease with non-specific descriptive diagnosis, 2 cases (1.6%) of fibrocystic disease, 3 cases (2.5%) of galactocele, 1 (0.9%) case of lactational adenoma, 2 cases (1.6%) of cellular fibroadenoma, and 2 cases (1.6%) of phyllodes tumor. Apart from this, there were 21 cases (17.21%) of ductal carcinoma. Majority of benign cases were between 30 and 39 years of age (43.6%). Majority of malignant cases fell between 50 and 59 years of age (47.6%). Majority (61.5%) of lumps (>3 cm) were malignant, whereas 94.8% of lumps (<3 cm) were benign. Left breast was commonly involved (49.18%) than the right breast (44.26%). Superolateral quadrant (63.1%) was the most commonly involved quadrant. Histology was available for 35 benign cases (34.65%) and out of total malignant cases (21), histology was available for 14 cases (66.66%). No discrepancy was noted.
Difficulty, despair and hope – an insight into the world of the health professionals treating paediatric pain in sub-Saharan Africa

The recognition and treatment of paediatric pain in sub-Saharan Africa brings many challenges and barriers for health professionals to overcome. This paper aims to give a unique insight into the world of the health professional through a dynamic cycle of interpretation via Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In-depth interviews with six health professionals were conducted and revealed four main themes: a burden-filled workload, mythology, lack of education and pharmacology. Findings showed how working in this field affects health professionals personally; the task of treating children who suffer unnecessary pain is emotive and potentially damaging. The way in which parents, health professionals and children view pain in terms of their everyday existence and within the context of their culture seems fundamental to gaining a better understanding of the barriers to providing pain relief to children in sub-Saharan Africa.