Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Gene Underlies Bleomycin-Response Variation in Caenorhabditis elegans

Bleomycin is a powerful chemotherapeutic drug used to treat a variety of cancers. However, individual patients vary in their responses to bleomycin. The identification of genetic differences that underlie this response variation could improve treatment outcomes by tailoring bleomycin dosages to each patient. We used the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans to identify genetic determinants of bleomycin-response differences by performing linkage mapping on recombinants derived from a cross between the laboratory strain (N2) and a wild strain (CB4856). This approach identified a small genomic region on chromosome V that underlies bleomycin-response variation. Using near-isogenic lines, and strains with CRISPR-Cas9 mediated deletions and allele replacements, we discovered that a novel nematode-specific gene (scb-1) is required for bleomycin resistance. Although the mechanism by which this gene causes variation in bleomycin responses is unknown, we suggest that a rare variant present in the CB4856 strain might cause differences in the potential stress-response function of scb-1 between the N2 and CB4856 strains, thereby leading to differences in bleomycin resistance.
Understanding the β-Lactam/Inhibitor of β-Lactamase Combinations: Reassessment for Better Antimicrobial Stewardship

1. Pires D, Soule H, Bellissimo-Rodrigues F, Gayet-Ageron A, Pittet D. Hand hygiene with alcohol-based hand rub: how long is long enough? Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2017:1–6. 2. Girard R, Aupee M, Erb M, Bettinger A, Jouve A. Hand rub dose needed for a single disinfection varies according to product: a bias in benchmarking using indirect hand hygiene indicator. J Epidemiol Global Health 2012;2:193–198. 3. Macinga DR, Shumaker DJ, Werner HP, et al. The relative influences of product volume, delivery format and alcohol concentration on dry-time and efficacy of alcohol-based hand rubs. BMC Infect Dis 2014;14:511. 4. Kampf G, Marschall S, Eggerstedt S, Ostermeyer C. Efficacy of ethanol-based hand foams using clinically relevant amounts: a cross-over controlled study among healthy volunteers. BMC Infect Dis 2010;10:78. 5. Azim S, Juergens C, McLaws ML. An average hand hygiene day for nurses and physicians: The burden is not equal. Am J Infect Control 2016;44:777–781. 6. Wilkinson MAC, Ormandy K, Bradley CR, Fraise AP, Hines J. Dose considerations for alcohol-based hand rubs. J Hosp Infect 2017;95:175–182. 7. Bellissimo-Rodrigues F, Soule H, Gayet-Ageron A,Martin Y, Pittet D. Should alcohol-based handrub use be customized to healthcare workers’ hand size? Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2016;37:219–221. 8. World Health Organization.WHOGuidelines on HandHygiene in Health Care. First Global Patient Safety Challenge Clean Care is Safer Care. Geneva: WHO; 2009. 9. Macinga DR, Beausoleil CM, Campbell E, et al. Quest for a realistic in vivo test method for antimicrobial hand-rub agents: introduction of a low-volume hand contamination procedure. Appl Environ Microbiol 2011;77:8588–8594.
Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint in Pediatric Patients.

INTRODUCTION While surgical interventions for temporomandibular joint (TMJ) ankylosis are well-documented, there is lack of consensus regarding the ideal approach in pediatric patients. Surgical interventions include gap arthroplasty, interpositional arthroplasty, or total joint reconstruction. METHODS A systematic review of PubMed (Jan 1, 1990-Jan 1, 2017) and Scopus (Jan 1, 1990-Jan 1, 2017) was performed and included studies in English with at least one patient under the age of 18 diagnosed with TMJ ankylosis who underwent surgical correction. Primary outcomes of interest included surgical modality, preoperative maximum interincisal opening (MIO) (MIOpreop), postoperative MIO (MIOpostop), ΔMIO (ΔMIO = MIOpostop - MIOpreop), and complications. RESULTS Twenty-four case series/reports with 176 patients and 227 joints were included. By independent sample t tests MIOpostop (mm) was greater for gap arthroplasty (30.18) compared to reconstruction (27.47) (t = 4.9, P = 0.043), interpositional arthroplasty (32.87) compared to reconstruction (t = 3.25, P = 0.002), but not for gap compared to interpositional (t = -1.9, P = 0.054). ΔMIO (mm) was greater for gap arthroplasty (28.67) compared to reconstruction (22.24) (t = 4.2, P = 0.001), interpositional arthroplasty (28.33) compared to reconstruction (t = 3.27, P = 0.002), but not for interpositional compared to gap (t = 0.29, P = 0.33). Weighted-average follow-up time was 28.37 months (N = 164). 4 of 176 (2.27%) patients reported development of re-ankylosis. There was no significant difference in occurrence of re-ankylosis between interventions. CONCLUSIONS Given the technical ease of gap arthroplasty and nonsignificant differences in ΔMIO, MIOpostop, or occurrence of re-ankylosis between gap and interpositional arthroplasty, gap arthroplasty should be considered for primary ankylosis repair in pediatric patients, with emphasis on postoperative physiotherapy to prevent recurrent-ankylosis.
Micro-fabricated Surface Electrode Ion Trap with 3D-TSV Integration for Scalable Quantum Computing

In this paper, 3D architecture for TSV integrated Si surface ion-trap is proposed, in which the TSV and microbump technology is used to connect the surface electrodes of ion trap to a bottom Si interposer. The pseudopotential simulation is used to determine the trapped ion height for both the “planar trap” and “TSV trap” geometry. No significant deviation in the pseudopotential for both cases is observed. Preliminary micro-fabricated ion-trap chips are characterized. The proposed technology is promising in form factor and parasitic reduction of micro-fabricated surface ion-trap for scalable quantum computing application.
Decisional Guidance for Computer-Based Decision Support

In the course of interacting with a decision support system (DSS), decision makers may have numerous opportunities for exercising judgments. Some judgments pertain to what to do next; others require predictions or evaluations. Either deliberately or inadvertently, a DSS may guide its users in performing these judgments. This article lays a foundation and proposes an agenda for researching such "decisional guidance. " Studying decisional guidance matters for two reasons. First, deliberately incorporating guidance in a system offers the potential of more supportive systems while raising a number of design questions. Second, understanding the consequences of guidance -- deliberate or not -- contributes to comprehending how DSSs affect decision-making behavior. This article examines three aspects of decisional guidance: (1) when and why system designers should provide decisional guidance, considering the opportunities, motives, and means for guiding; (2) how designers can provide guidance, introducing a three-dimensional typology for deliberate guidance; and (3) the consequences of decisional guidance -- that is, its effects and effectiveness. This article provides a coherent approach to a set of behavioral questions just now beginning to be addressed by researchers in a fragmented, tehnologically oriented manner.
Research on Charging Control System of Electric Vehicle Based on MATLAB

Large-scale network has the characteristics of complex system, and its survivability is different from simple network. The current network survivability studies usually only aim for a specific network level or type, and seldom investigate survivability from a system perspective. In this paper, the concept of large-scale network survivability is defined from the perspective of complex system, the survivability association is analyzed based upon the correlation characteristics of complex system, and the structural model of large-scale network survivability association is established and its properties are analyzed. On the basis of survivability association properties, the survivability association function is defined based upon set pair analysis theory, which is utilized to characterize the survivability association degree among subsystems in large-scale network. Finally, the effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper is validated through case study.
Vision and Acceleration Modalities: Partners for Recognizing Complex Activities

Wearable devices have been used widely for human activity recognition in the field of pervasive computing. One big area of in this research is the recognition of activities of daily living where especially inertial and interaction sensors like RFID tags and scanners have been used. An issue that may arise when using interaction sensors is a lack of certainty. A positive signal from an interaction sensor is not necessarily caused by a performed activity e.g, when an object is only touched but no interaction occurred afterwards. In our work, we aim to overcome this limitation and present a multi-modal egocentric-based activity recognition approach which is able to recognize the critical activities by looking at movement and object information at the same time. We present our results of combining inertial and video features to recognize human activities on different types of scenarios where we achieve a $F_{1}$-measure up to 79.6%.
Quantification of lignans in 30 ground coffee samples and evaluation of theirs extraction yield in espresso coffee by HPLC-MS/MS triple quadrupole

Abstract Lignans are a class of polyphenols considered to be phytoestrogens because of their oestrogenic/antiestrogenic activities and their plant origin. Few works have reported on the content of lignans in ground coffee, and most of them analysed a small number of samples. Hence, our aim was to quantify the content of three lignans, secoisolariciresinol, lariciresinol and matairesinol, in ground coffee by using high-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Evaluation of acidic hydrolysis, methanolic extractions, and enzymatic digestions as extraction methods indicated that enzymatic digestion with Taka-diastase 2% was the best. When this method was applied to 30 different ground coffees, we found that SECO was the highest concentration lignan (84.4–257.8 μg kg−1), followed by LARI (26.1–91.5 μg kg−1). Moreover, comparison of lignan extraction yield in espresso coffee and ground coffee showed that these molecules seem to be completely extracted during espresso coffee percolation, since the extraction yield average was 95.2%.
Deep Learning Framework and Visualization for Malware Classification

In this paper we propose a deep learning framework for classification of malware. There has been an enormous increase in the volume of malware generated lately which represents a genuine security danger to organizations and people. So as to battle the expansion of malwares, new strategies are needed to quickly identify and classify malware. Malimg dataset, a publicly available benchmark data set was used for the experimentation. The architecture used in this work is a hybrid cost-sensitive network of one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network which obtained an accuracy of 94.4%, an increase in performance compared to work done by [1] which got 84.9%. Hyper parameter tuning is done on deep learning architecture to set the parameters. A learning rate of 0.01 was taken for all experiments. Train-test split of 70-30% was done during experimentation. This facilitates to find how well the models perform on imbalanced data sets. Usual methods like disassembly, decompiling, de-obfuscation or execution of the binary need not be done in this proposed method. The source code and the trained models are made publicly available for further research.
Personality-Achievement Associations in Adolescence-Examining Associations Across Grade Levels and Learning Environments.

OBJECTIVE This study examined associations between the five-factor personality traits and indicators of academic achievement (grades and test scores). A particular aim was to investigate whether personality-achievement associations differ between primary and secondary educational contexts and whether these differences vary between differential learning environments, that is academic vs. nonacademic secondary schools. METHOD We used two representative random samples from Germany: N = 3,658 6th graders in their last year of primary school and N = 2,129 9th graders attending different secondary school tracks (n = 566 academic track students; n = 1,563 nonacademic track students). RESULTS First, our results confirmed positive associations between conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness and academic achievement as well as negative associations between academic achievement and neuroticism. Second, associations with conscientiousness were more pronounced for school grades than for test scores. Third, associations were higher for 6th than for 9th graders in the overall sample for all personality traits with the exception of Openness. Fourth, personality-achievement associations differed between academic and nonacademic track students. CONCLUSION In sum, our results suggest the need for an educational stage-specific perspective and contextually sensitive approach when examining personality-achievement associations. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Effect of protein secondary structures in mixed feedstuff detected by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy on ruminal protein degradation kinetics

Liu D. , Li Y. , Zhang G. , Zhang P., Wu P., Wang S. , Wang X. (2017): Effect of protein secondary structures in mixed feedstuff detected by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy on ruminal protein degradation kinetics. Czech J. Anim. Sci., 62, 89–97. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between the protein secondary structure and the protein rumen degradation kinetics and the protein fractions of mixed feedstuffs of soybean meal with distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) at five mixed ratios (DDGS to soybean meal: 100 : 0, 70 : 30, 50 : 50, 30 : 70, 0 : 100). The Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) as a novel and cheap approach was used to detect the protein secondary structure, and the in situ nylon bag method was used to measure degradation kinetics of protein. Protein fractions were classified based on the Cornell net carbohydrate protein system. The results showed that (1) with the increasing soybean meal rate, the ruminal degraded protein and fractions of PB1 and PB2 were changed, (2) a higher α-helix to β-sheet ratio could result in a higher ruminally degraded protein, lower PB3 and PC, and higher PB1 and PB2 fractions in the feedstuff. So, mixing processing changed the feedstuff protein molecular structure spectral feature, which could influence the rumen degradation kinetics and protein fractions. It was inferred that protein degradation rate in mixed feedstuff can be measured by FTIR.
Computing Trajectory Similarity in Linear Time: A Generic Seed-Guided Neural Metric Learning Approach

Trajectory similarity computation is a fundamental problem for various applications in trajectory data analysis. However, the high computation cost of existing trajectory similarity measures has become the key bottleneck for trajectory analysis at scale. While there have been many research efforts for reducing the complexity, they are specific to one similarity measure and often yield limited speedups. We propose NeuTraj to accelerate trajectory similarity computation. NeuTraj is generic to accommodate any existing trajectory measure and fast to compute the similarity of a given trajectory pair in linear time. Furthermore, NeuTraj is elastic to collaborate with all spatial-based trajectory indexing methods to reduce the search space. NeuTraj samples a number of seed trajectories from the given database, and then uses their pair-wise similarities as guidance to approximate the similarity function with a neural metric learning framework. NeuTraj features two novel modules to achieve accurate approximation of the similarity function: (1) a spatial attention memory module that augments existing recurrent neural networks for trajectory encoding; and (2) a distance-weighted ranking loss that effectively transcribes information from the seed-based guidance. With these two modules, NeuTraj can yield high accuracies and fast convergence rates even if the training data is small. Our experiments on two real-life datasets show that NeuTraj achieves over 80% accuracy on Fre chet, Hausdorff, ERP and DTW measures, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines consistently and significantly. It obtains 50x-1000x speedup over bruteforce methods and 3x-500x speedup over existing approximate algorithms, while yielding more accurate approximations of the similarity functions.
Exploiting Centrality Information with Graph Convolutions for Network Representation Learning

Network embedding has been proven effective to learn low-dimensional vector representations for network vertices, and recently received a tremendous amount of research attention. However, most of existing methods for network embedding merely focus on preserving the first and second order proximities between nodes, and the important properties of node centrality are neglected. Various centrality measures such as Degree, Closeness, Betweenness, Eigenvector and PageRank centralities have been designed to measure the importance of individual nodes. In this paper, we focus on a novel yet unsolved problem that aims to learn low-dimensional continuous nodes representations that not only preserve the network structure, but also keep the centrality information. We propose a generalizable model, namely GraphCSC, that utilizes both linkage information and centrality information to learn low-dimensional vector representations for network vertices. The learned embeddings by GraphCSC are able to preserve different centrality information of nodes. In addition, we further propose GraphCSC-M, a more comprehensive model that can preserve different centrality information simultaneously through learning multiple centrality-specific embeddings, and a novel attentive multi-view learning approach is developed to compress multiple embeddings of one node into a compact vector representation. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that our model is able to preserve different centrality information of nodes, and achieves better performance on several benchmark tasks compared with recent state-of-the-art network embedding methods
GPU Sparse Ray-Traced Segmentation

This paper introduces a real-time region growing segmentation algorithm, designed for graphics processing units (GPUs), which labels only a fraction of the input elements. Instead of searching locally around each element for strong similarity, like state-of-the-art segmentation and pre-segmentation methods do, the proposed algorithm searches both locally and remotely, using a unique ray tracing-based search strategy, which quickly covers the segmentation search space. The presented algorithm fully exploits the parallelism of the GPUs, sparsely segmenting high-resolution images (4K) in real-time on low range laptops and other mobile devices, approximately $5\times $ times faster than the state-of-the-art simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC). While this paper demonstrates the results with images, the algorithm is trivially modifiable to work with input sets of any dimension. In contrast to the state-of-the-art real-time GPU methods, this algorithm doesn’t require additional merging steps, as pre-segmentation methods do, and it produces complete segmentation. Additionally, post-segmentation optional stages for complete labeling and region merging on the GPU are also provided, although they are not always necessary.
Unrecognized Cardiac Amyloidosis at the Time of Mitral Valve Surgery: Incidence and Outcomes

Objective: It is increasingly recognized that cardiac amyloidosis can occur in patients with severe aortic stenosis undergoing both surgical and transcatheter valve replacements. We aimed to investigate whether unrecognized cardiac amyloidosis may also occur in patients with severe mitral valve disease undergoing surgery. Methods: The pathology department database at our center was retrospectively analyzed over a 10-year period for cases in which the mitral valve or another type of cardiac tissue removed at the time of mitral surgery demonstrated incidental amyloidosis. Clinical and echocardiographic variables were collected from the electronic medical record and the echocardiographic database. Results: Between 2007 and 2016, a total of 7,733 mitral valve surgical specimens were received. Of these, there were 15 cases in which the mitral valve, or another type of cardiac tissue removed at surgery, demonstrated incidentally detected amyloidosis. The most frequent comorbidities were hypertension (87%) and atrial fibrillation (80%); 13 patients (87%) underwent bioprosthetic mitral valve replacement, and 2 patients (13%) underwent mitral valve repair. Sites of amyloid deposition were the mitral valve (80%), left atrial appendage (33%), and subaortic tissue (7%); 14 patients (93%) had wild-type transthyretin amyloid. The mean duration of follow-up was 1,023 days (range: 29–2,811 days). There were no surgical complications in the follow-up period. Conclusions: Over a 10-year period, incidentally detected cardiac amyloidosis occurred in 0.2% of the mitral valve surgical cases. The outcomes for these patients undergoing mitral valve surgery were excellent, with no complications or deaths attributable to surgery at a mean follow-up of 1,023 days.
Double-blind randomised controlled trial of vitamin D3 supplementation for the prevention of acute respiratory infection in older adults and their carers (ViDiFlu)

Rationale Low-dose vitamin D supplementation is already recommended in older adults for prevention of fractures and falls, but clinical trials investigating whether higher doses could provide additional protection against acute respiratory infection (ARI) are lacking. Objective To conduct a clinical trial of high-dose versus low-dose vitamin D3 supplementation for ARI prevention in residents of sheltered-accommodation housing blocks (‘schemes’) and their carers in London, UK. Measurements and methods Fifty-four schemes (137 individual participants) were allocated to the active intervention (vitamin D3 2.4 mg once every 2 months +10 μg daily for residents, 3 mg once every 2 months for carers), and 54 schemes with 103 participants were allocated to control (placebo once every 2 months +vitamin D3 10 μg daily for residents, placebo once every 2 months for carers) for 1 year. Primary outcome was time to first ARI; secondary outcomes included time to first upper/lower respiratory infection (URI/LRI, analysed separately), and symptom duration. Main results Inadequate vitamin D status was common at baseline: 220/240 (92%) participants had serum 25(OH)D concentration <75 nmol/L. The active intervention did not influence time to first ARI (adjusted HR (aHR) 1.18, 95% CI 0.80 to 1.74, p=0.42). When URI and LRI were analysed separately, allocation to the active intervention was associated with increased risk of URI (aHR 1.48, 95% CI 1.02 to 2.16, p=0.039) and increased duration of URI symptoms (median 7.0 vs 5.0 days for active vs control, adjusted ratio of geometric means 1.34, 95% CI 1.09 to 1.65, p=0.005), but not with altered risk or duration of LRI. Conclusions Addition of intermittent bolus-dose vitamin D3 supplementation to a daily low-dose regimen did not influence risk of ARI in older adults and their carers, but was associated with increased risk and duration of URI. Trial registration number clinicaltrials.gov NCT01069874.