Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Usefulness of the Forced Oscillation Technique in the Diagnosis of Bronchial Asthma in Children

The forced oscillation technique (FOT) requires minimal patient cooperation and is useful for children. However, comprehensive values of respiratory impedance at baseline and after the reversibility test have not been definitively confirmed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the basic parameters of FOT reactance (Xrs) and resistance (Rrs) in groups of healthy children and children with controlled and uncontrolled asthma. The second aim was the assessment of the reversibility bronchial test using the forced oscillation method in children with bronchial asthma. Materials and Methods. One hundred and six children aged from 2 to 6 years diagnosed with early-onset controlled or uncontrolled asthma and healthy controls were included in this single-center, prospective, randomized study. All asthmatic patients and healthy controls underwent basic FOT as one measurement according to the recommendation of Resmon Pro FOT. The reversibility test was then performed 15 min after the administration of 200 mcg salbutamol by MDI in all patients. Results. Basic Rrs showed significantly higher mean values in patients with uncontrolled asthma compared to patients with controlled asthma, which were in turn higher than the values for patients in the control group (11.14 ± 1.29 versus 15.71 ± 2.6 versus 9.21 ± 0.98, resp.; p < 0.05). The data analysis showed similar relationships in terms of the Xrs between the studied groups (−4.76 ± 1.19 versus −7.31 ± 2.33 versus −2.11 ± 0.48, resp.; p < 0.05). According to the changes in the Rrs values, 35 (66%) positive bronchial reversibility tests were obtained in 53 subjects with controlled asthma and in 39 (74%) subjects with uncontrolled asthma. Conclusions. Rrs and Xrs obtained by FOT well-discriminate patients with asthma from healthy children. A bronchial reversibility test involving the use of FOT is valuable for the diagnosis of bronchial asthma.
Association between aspirin dose and subarachnoid hemorrhage from saccular aneurysms

Objective To determine the association between ruptured saccular aneurysms and aspirin use/aspirin dose. Methods Four thousand seven hundred one patients who were diagnosed at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital between 1990 and 2016 with 6,411 unruptured and ruptured saccular intracranial aneurysms were evaluated. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the association between aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage and aspirin use, including aspirin dose. Inverse probability weighting using propensity scores was used to adjust for potential differences in baseline characteristics between cases and controls. Additional analyses were performed to examine the association of aspirin use and rerupture before treatment. Results In multivariate analysis with propensity score weighting, aspirin use (odds ratio [OR] 0.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.45–0.80) was significantly associated with decreased risk of ruptured intracranial aneurysms. There was a significant inverse dose-response relationship between aspirin dose and aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (OR 0.65, 95% CI 0.53–0.81). In contrast, there was a significant association between aspirin use and increased risk of rerupture before treatment (OR 8.15, 95% CI 2.22–30.0). Conclusions In this large case-control study, aspirin therapy at diagnosis was associated with a significantly decreased risk of subarachnoid hemorrhage, with an inverse dose-response relationship among aspirin users. However, once rupture has occurred, aspirin is associated with an increased risk of rerupture before treatment.
Improving Automatic Source Code Summarization via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Code summarization provides a high level natural language description of the function performed by code, as it can benefit the software maintenance, code categorization and retrieval. To the best of our knowledge, most state-of-the-art approaches follow an encoder-decoder framework which encodes the code into a hidden space and then decode it into natural language space, suffering from two major drawbacks: a) Their encoders only consider the sequential content of code, ignoring the tree structure which is also critical for the task of code summarization; b) Their decoders are typically trained to predict the next word by maximizing the likelihood of next ground-truth word with previous ground-truth word given. However, it is expected to generate the entire sequence from scratch at test time. This discrepancy can cause an exposure bias issue, making the learnt decoder suboptimal. In this paper, we incorporate an abstract syntax tree structure as well as sequential content of code snippets into a deep reinforcement learning framework (i.e., actor-critic network). The actor network provides the confidence of predicting the next word according to current state. On the other hand, the critic network evaluates the reward value of all possible extensions of the current state and can provide global guidance for explorations. We employ an advantage reward composed of BLEU metric to train both networks. Comprehensive experiments on a real-world dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed model when compared with some state-of-the-art methods.
Decomposing parietal memory reactivation to predict consequences of remembering

The act of remembering can strengthen, but also distort memories. Parietal cortex is a candidate region involved in retrieval-induced memory changes given that it reflects retrieval success and represents retrieved content. Here, we conducted a human fMRI experiment to test whether different forms of reactivation in parietal cortex predict distinct consequences of memory retrieval. Subjects first studied associations between words and pictures of faces, scenes, or objects. Then, during ‘retrieval practice’, subjects repeatedly retrieved half of the previously learned pictures, reporting the vividness of the retrieved pictures. On the following day, subjects completed a recognition memory test for individual pictures. Critically, the recognition memory test included pictures that were highly similar to studied pictures (‘similar lures’). Behavioral results indicated that retrieval practice increased both the hit rate and false alarm rate to similar lures, confirming a causal influence of retrieval practice on subsequent memory. Using pattern similarity analyses, we measured two different levels of reactivation during retrieval practice: 1) generic ‘category-level’ reactivation and 2) idiosyncratic ‘item-level’ reactivation. Vivid remembering during retrieval practice was associated with stronger category- and item-level reactivation in parietal cortex. However, these measures differentially predicted performance on the subsequent recognition memory test: whereas higher category-level reactivation tended to predict false alarms to lures, item-level reactivation predicted correct rejections. These findings indicate that parietal reactivation can be decomposed to tease apart distinct consequences of memory retrieval.
Neural Latent Extractive Document Summarization

Extractive summarization models need sentence level labels, which are usually created with rule-based methods since most summarization datasets only have document summary pairs. These labels might be suboptimal. We propose a latent variable extractive model, where sentences are viewed as latent variables and sentences with activated variables are used to infer gold summaries. During training, the loss can come directly from gold summaries. Experiments on CNN/Dailymail dataset show our latent extractive model outperforms a strong extractive baseline trained on rule-based labels and also performs competitively with several recent models.
A cross-brain neural mechanism for human-to-human verbal communication

Abstract Neural mechanisms that mediate dynamic social interactions remain understudied despite their evolutionary significance. The interactive brain hypothesis proposes that interactive social cues are processed by dedicated brain substrates and provides a general theoretical framework for investigating the underlying neural mechanisms of social interaction. We test the specific case of this hypothesis proposing that canonical language areas are upregulated and dynamically coupled across brains during social interactions based on talking and listening. Functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was employed to acquire simultaneous deoxyhemoglobin (deOxyHb) signals of the brain on partners who alternated between speaking and listening while doing an Object Naming & Description task with and without interaction in a natural setting. Comparison of interactive and non‐interactive conditions confirmed an increase in neural activity associated with Wernicke's area including the superior temporal gyrus (STG) during interaction (P = 0.04). However, the hypothesis was not supported for Broca's area. Cross‐brain coherence determined by wavelet analyses of signals originating from the STG and the subcentral area was greater during interaction than non‐interaction (P < 0.01). In support of the interactive brain hypothesis these findings suggest a dynamically coupled cross‐brain neural mechanism dedicated to pathways that share interpersonal information.
Heterogeneity of hypochlorous acid production in individual neutrophil phagosomes revealed by a rhodamine-based probe

The rhodamine-based probe R19-S has been shown to react with hypochlorous acid (HOCl) to yield fluorescent R19, but not with some other oxidants including hydrogen peroxide. Here, we further examined the specificity of R19-S and used it for real-time monitoring of HOCl production in neutrophil phagosomes. We show that it also reacts rapidly with hypobromous acid, bromamines, and hypoiodous acid, indicating that R19-S responds to these reactive halogen species as well as HOCl. Hypothiocyanous acid and taurine chloramine were unreactive, however, and ammonia chloramine and dichloramine reacted only very slowly. MS analyses revealed additional products from the reaction of HOCl with R19-S, including a chlorinated species as a minor product. Of note, phagocytosis of opsonized zymosan or Staphylococcus aureus by neutrophils was accompanied by an increase in R19 fluorescence. This increase depended on NADPH oxidase and myeloperoxidase activities, and detection of chlorinated R19-S confirmed its specificity for HOCl. Using live-cell imaging to track individual phagosomes in single neutrophils, we observed considerable heterogeneity among the phagosomes in the time from ingestion of a zymosan particle to when fluorescence was first detected, ranging from 1 to >30 min. However, once initiated, the subsequent fluorescence increase was uniform, reaching a similar maximum in ∼10 min. Our results confirm the utility of R19-S for detecting HOCl in real-time and provide definitive evidence that isolated neutrophils produce HOCl in phagosomes. The intriguing variability in the onset of HOCl production among phagosomes identified here could influence the way they kill ingested bacteria.
Controls on foliar aluminium accumulation among populations of the tropical shrub Melastoma malabathricum L. (Melastomataceae)

Aluminium (Al) accumulation is a common trait expressed in at least 60 plant families and particularly prevalent in tropical woody plants. However, the functional significance and genetic or physiological controls on Al accumulation are currently unknown. We tested the hypothesis that differential expression of Al accumulation among wild populations of the Al-accumulating tropical shrub Melastoma malabathricum L. is associated with habitat-related variation in total and exchangeable soil Al concentrations. Mature leaves and seeds were sampled from 20 populations of M. malabathricum growing in six habitats across Peninsular Malaysia, and soil was collected from each site. The seeds were grown in hydroponic solutions comprising 50% Hoagland's solution amended with Al in the form of 1.0 mM AlCl3 to test the hypothesis that differential expression of foliar Al accumulation is an inherited trait. Foliar Al concentrations varied significantly among populations, but were not consistently different among plants growing in different habitats and showed no relationship to total or exchangeable Al concentrations in soils collected at the 20 sites. Mean foliar Al concentration in wild plants was positively correlated with foliar calcium (Ca) concentrations, and with total soil nitrogen (N), Ca and magnesium (Mg) concentrations, across the 20 populations, and Al addition increased foliar concentrations of phosphorus, Ca, Mg and potassium in seedlings. The differential expression of Al accumulation in M. malabathricum populations is uncoupled to local variation in soil Al concentrations, but may be sensitive to local soil-related variation in the availability of other macro-nutrients, in particular N, Ca and Mg. Further research on the factors controlling Al uptake should focus on the plasticity of this trait within populations of Al accumulators and interactions with micro-habitat variation in the availability of the macronutrient cations.
Association between peripheral manganese levels and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a preliminary meta-analysis

Evidence has suggested that dysregulation of the dopaminergic system may play a significant role in the pathogenesis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. Manganese, a neurotoxicant, has been reported to exert its neurotoxicity by affecting the dopaminergic system. However, the association between peripheral manganese levels and ADHD has not been comprehensively reviewed. This study aimed to investigate the association between peripheral manganese levels and ADHD in children. An electronic search was performed on databases including PubMed, ProQuest, ClinicalKey, Cochrane Library, ClinicalTrials.gov, Embase, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect with last search on March 25th, 2018. As per the inclusion criteria, human observational studies investigating peripheral manganese levels in children with ADHD and controls were included. The meta-analysis was performed using a random-effects model, and possible confounders were examined by subgroup analysis. In total, four articles with 175 ADHD children and 999 controls were recruited. The manganese levels were significantly higher in ADHD children than in controls (p=0.033), when studies investigating blood levels and those investigating hair levels were included. However, when only studies investigating blood levels were included, there was no significant difference between ADHD children and controls (p=0.076). Our results support higher peripheral manganese levels in children diagnosed with ADHD than those in controls. Further primary studies are needed to clarify this association.
Guiding Formal Verification Orchestration Using Machine Learning Methods

Typical modern HW designs include many blocks associated with thousands of design properties. Having today's commercial formal verifiers utilize a complementary set of state-of-art formal algorithms is a key in enabling the formal verification tools to successfully cope with verification problems of different sizes, types, and complexities. Formal engines orchestration is the methodology used to pick the most appropriate formal engine for a specific verification problem. It assures proper scheduling of the formal engines to minimize the time consumed to solve individual design verification problems, hence highly impacts the time required to verify the overall design properties. This work proposes the utilization of supervised machine learning classification techniques to guide the orchestration step by predicting the formal engines that should be assigned to a design property. Up to 16,500 formal verification runs on RTL designs and their properties are used to train the classifier to create a prediction model. The classifier assigns any new verification problem to an appropriate list of formal engines associated with a probability distribution over the set of engines classes. Our results indicate how the proposed model is able to improve the formal suite total run-time by up to 59% of its maximum allowable time improvement using multi-classification-based orchestration and to nominate with 88% accuracy the appropriate formal engines for new-to-verify HW designs.
Nutrient and drought stress: implications for phenology and biomass quality in miscanthus

Abstract Background and Aims The cultivation of dedicated biomass crops, including miscanthus, on marginal land provides a promising approach to the reduction of dependency on fossil fuels. However, little is known about the impact of environmental stresses often experienced on lower-grade agricultural land on cell-wall quality traits in miscanthus biomass crops. In this study, three different miscanthus genotypes were exposed to drought stress and nutrient stress, both separately and in combination, with the aim of evaluating their impact on plant growth and cell-wall properties. Methods Automated imaging facilities at the National Plant Phenomics Centre (NPPC-Aberystwyth) were used for dynamic phenotyping to identify plant responses to separate and combinatorial stresses. Harvested leaf and stem samples of the three miscanthus genotypes (Miscanthus sinensis, Miscanthus sacchariflorus and Miscanthus × giganteus) were separately subjected to saccharification assays, to measure sugar release, and cell-wall composition analyses. Key Results Phenotyping showed that the M. sacchariflorus genotype Sac-5 and particularly the M. sinensis genotype Sin-11 coped better than the M. × giganteus genotype Gig-311 with drought stress when grown in nutrient-poor compost. Sugar release by enzymatic hydrolysis, used as a biomass quality measure, was significantly affected by the different environmental conditions in a stress-, genotype- and organ-dependent manner. A combination of abundant water and low nutrients resulted in the highest sugar release from leaves, while for stems this was generally associated with the combination of drought and nutrient-rich conditions. Cell-wall composition analyses suggest that changes in fine structure of cell-wall polysaccharides, including heteroxylans and pectins, possibly in association with lignin, contribute to the observed differences in cell-wall biomass sugar release. Conclusions The results highlight the importance of the assessment of miscanthus biomass quality measures in addition to biomass yield determinations and the requirement for selecting suitable miscanthus genotypes for different environmental conditions.
Can Bile Salt Export Pump Inhibition Testing in Drug Discovery and Development Reduce Liver Injury Risk? An International Transporter Consortium Perspective

Bile salt export pump (BSEP) inhibition has emerged as an important mechanism that may contribute to the initiation of human drug‐induced liver injury (DILI). Proactive evaluation and understanding of BSEP inhibition is recommended in drug discovery and development to aid internal decision making on DILI risk. BSEP inhibition can be quantified using in vitro assays. When interpreting assay data, it is important to consider in vivo drug exposure. Currently, this can be undertaken most effectively by consideration of total plasma steady state drug concentrations (Css,plasma). However, because total drug concentrations are not predictive of pharmacological effect, the relationship between total exposure and BSEP inhibition is not causal. Various follow‐up studies can aid interpretation of in vitro BSEP inhibition data and may be undertaken on a case‐by‐case basis. BSEP inhibition is one of several mechanisms by which drugs may cause DILI, therefore, it should be considered alongside other mechanisms when evaluating possible DILI risk.
How can we develop a more clinically useful and robust algorithm for diagnosing and treating nocturia? ICI‐RS 2017

Nocturia, or waking up at night to void, is a highly prevalent and bothersome symptom. Currently, there is a lack of clear and consistent recommendations regarding evaluation and management of nocturia. The aim of this report is to discuss how to fill the gaps in our knowledge in order to develop a practical patient‐oriented diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm for nocturia.
Reply to Gentry, Katherine; Lepere, Katherine; Opel, Douglas, regarding their comment ‘Informed Consent in Pediatric Anesthesiology’

Sir—We appreciate the comments made by Feinstein and Kodish in response to our recent study. Methodology matters, and Feinstein and Kodish appropriately lament the lack of more rigorously tested measures of parent understanding in pediatric informed consent. We have a few additional thoughts. First, it is important not to overlook that there is a place in survey research for the use of existing, psychometrically tested instruments. The use of a standard set of items, for instance, can facilitate comparisons between studies. The items on our instrument used to assess understanding were based on those adapted by Tait et al from the psychometrically tested Deaconess Informed Consent Comprehension Test. Second, Feinstein and Kodish correctly offer the reminder, however, that the use of existing instruments has limits. Independent testing of existing instruments with only weak or preliminary evidence for their validity and reliability needs to be strongly considered. Similarly, reevaluating the psychometric properties of items adapted from existing instruments before using them in contexts or populations that are sufficiently different from those in which they were originally tested improves rigor. Lastly, the indirect questions posed by Feinstein and Kodish certainly have the potential to more accurately assess parent understanding in the anesthesia informed consent context. In the spirit of their comments, however, these items too should be subjected to further testing. Nevertheless, Feinstein and Kodish’s message resonates. To paraphrase Paul Applebaum, we investigators need to do better if informed consent is to live up to its promise of empowering patients to make meaningful decisions.
The relationship between deficit in digit span and genotype in nonsense mutation Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Objective To evaluate the relationship between deficit in digit span and genotype in nonsense mutation (nm) Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) (nmDMD). Methods We investigated the relationship between normalized digit-span forward (d-sf) and digit-span backward (d-sb) scores to the location of nmDMD mutations in 169 participants ≥5 to ≤20 years who participated in a phase 2b clinical trial. Because alternative promoters are found upstream of DMD exons 30, 45, and 63, we correlated d-sf and d-sb to the specific nmDMD mutation location. Results Participants with nm downstream of exon 30, downstream of exon 45, and downstream of exon 63 had significantly lower normalized d-sf scores (p < 0.0001). Participants with nm downstream of exon 45 in addition had significantly lower normalized d-sb score (p < 0.04). There was no significant difference in the normalized d-sb score in participants with mutations upstream or downstream of DMD exon 30 or upstream or downstream of DMD exon 63. Conclusion Our data provide evidence that specific cognitive deficits correlate to genotype in individuals with nmDMD, highlighting the critical role of brain-specific dystrophin isoforms in the neurobiological manifestations of this disease. Clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT02090959.