Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANR: Aspect-based Neural Recommender

Textual reviews, which are readily available on many e-commerce and review websites such as Amazon and Yelp, serve as an invaluable source of information for recommender systems. However, not all parts of the reviews are equally important, and the same choice of words may reflect a different meaning based on its context. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Aspect-based Neural Recommender (ANR) to perform aspect-based representation learning for both users and items via an attention-based component. Furthermore, we model the multi-faceted process behind how users rate items by estimating the aspect-level user and item importance by adapting the neural co-attention mechanism. Our proposed model concurrently address several shortcomings of existing recommender systems, and a thorough experimental study on 25 benchmark datasets from Amazon and Yelp shows that ANR significantly outperforms recently proposed state-of-the-art baselines such as DeepCoNN, D-Attn and ALFM.
NR5A1 gene variants repress the ovarian‐specific WNT signaling pathway in 46,XX disorders of sex development patients

Several recent reports have described a missense variant in the gene NR5A1 (c.274C>T; p.Arg92Trp) in a significant number of 46,XX ovotesticular or testicular disorders of sex development (DSDs) cases. The affected residue falls within the DNA‐binding domain of the NR5A1 protein, however the exact mechanism by which it causes testicular development in 46,XX individuals remains unclear. We have screened a cohort of 26 patients with 46,XX (ovo)testicular DSD and identified three unrelated individuals with this NR5A1 variant (p.Arg92Trp), as well as one patient with a novel NR5A1 variant (c.779C>T; p.Ala260Val). We examined the functional effect of these changes, finding that while protein levels and localization were unaffected, variant NR5A1 proteins repress the WNT signaling pathway and have less ability to upregulate the anti‐testis gene NR0B1. These findings highlight how NR5A1 variants impact ovarian differentiation across multiple pathways, resulting in a switch from ovarian to testis development in genetic females.
Motor Learning Improvement Remains 3 Months After a Multisession Anodal tDCS Intervention in an Aging Population

Healthy aging is associated with decline of motor function that can generate serious consequences on the quality of life and safety. Our studies aim to explore the 3-month effects of a 5-day multisession anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) protocol applied over the primary motor cortex (M1) during motor sequence learning in elderly. The present sham-controlled aging study investigated whether tDCS-induced motor improvements previously observed 1 day after the intervention persist beyond 3 months. A total of 37 cognitively-intact aging participants performed five consecutive daily 20-min sessions of the serial-reaction time task (SRTT) concomitant with either anodal (n = 18) or sham (n = 19) tDCS over M1. All participants performed the Purdue Pegboard Test and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) measures of cortical excitability were collected before, 1 day after and 3 months after the intervention. The last follow-up session also included the execution of the trained SRTT. The main findings are the demonstration of durable effects of a 5-day anodal tDCS intervention at the trained skill, while the active intervention did not differ from the sham intervention at both the untrained task and on measures of M1-disinhibition. Thus, the current article revealed for the first time the durability of functional effects of a-tDCS combined with motor training after only 5 days of intervention in an aging population. This finding provides evidence that the latter treatment alternative is effective in achieving our primary motor rehabilitation goal, that is to allow durable motor training effects in an aging population.
Computationally-guided drug repurposing enables the discovery of kinase targets and inhibitors as new schistosomicidal agents

The development of novel therapeutics is urgently required for diseases where existing treatments are failing due to the emergence of resistance. This is particularly pertinent for parasitic infections of the tropics and sub-tropics, referred to collectively as neglected tropical diseases, where the commercial incentives to develop new drugs are weak. One such disease is schistosomiasis, a highly prevalent acute and chronic condition caused by a parasitic helminth infection, with three species of the genus Schistosoma infecting humans. Currently, a single 40-year old drug, praziquantel, is available to treat all infective species, but its use in mass drug administration is leading to signs of drug-resistance emerging. To meet the challenge of developing new therapeutics against this disease, we developed an innovative computational drug repurposing pipeline supported by phenotypic screening. The approach highlighted several protein kinases as interesting new biological targets for schistosomiasis as they play an essential role in many parasite’s biological processes. Focusing on this target class, we also report the first elucidation of the kinome of Schistosoma japonicum, as well as updated kinomes of S. mansoni and S. haematobium. In comparison with the human kinome, we explored these kinomes to identify potential targets of existing inhibitors which are unique to Schistosoma species, allowing us to identify novel targets and suggest approved drugs that might inhibit them. These include previously suggested schistosomicidal agents such as bosutinib, dasatinib, and imatinib as well as new inhibitors such as vandetanib, saracatinib, tideglusib, alvocidib, dinaciclib, and 22 newly identified targets such as CHK1, CDC2, WEE, PAKA, MEK1. Additionally, the primary and secondary targets in Schistosoma of those approved drugs are also suggested, allowing for the development of novel therapeutics against this important yet neglected disease.
A Mediterranean diet supplemented with dairy foods improves markers of cardiovascular risk: results from the MedDairy randomized controlled trial.

Background The Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) offers benefits to cardiovascular health but may not meet Western recommendations for calcium and dairy intake, which could impede long-term adoption. Objective The current study aimed to determine the effect of a MedDiet supplemented with dairy foods on cardiovascular risk factors. Design A randomized, controlled, crossover design compared a MedDiet with 3-4 daily servings of dairy (MedDairy) and a low-fat (LF) control diet. Forty-one participants aged ≥45 y and at risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) were randomly allocated to their first intervention, either the MedDairy or LF diet. Participants followed each intervention for 8 wk, and an 8-wk washout period separated interventions. The primary outcome was home-measured systolic blood pressure (SBP) assessed in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Secondary outcomes included clinic-measured blood pressure (morning), body composition, blood lipids, C-reactive protein (CRP), plasma glucose, serum insulin, and the Framingham Risk Score. Results Compared with the LF intervention, the MedDairy intervention resulted in a significantly lower morning SBP (mean difference: -1.6 mm Hg; 95% CI: -2.8, -0.4 mm Hg; P = 0.01), lower morning diastolic blood pressure (mean difference: -1.0; 95% CI: -1.7, -0.2 mm Hg; P = 0.01) and clinic SBP (mean difference: -3.5 mm Hg; 95% CI: -6.4, -0.7 mm Hg; P = 0.02), significantly higher HDL cholesterol (mean difference: 0.04 mmol/L; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.06 mmol/L; P < 0.01), lower triglycerides (mean difference: = -0.05 mmol/L; 95% CI: -0.08, -0.01 mmol/L; P < 0.01), and lower ratio of total to HDL cholesterol (mean difference: -0.4; 95% CI: -0.6, -0.2; P < 0.001). No effects were observed for other outcome measures. Conclusions Following a MedDiet with additional dairy foods led to significant changes in markers of cardiovascular risk over 8 wk. The MedDiet supplemented with dairy may be appropriate for an improvement in cardiovascular risk factors in a population at risk of CVD. This trial was registered at anzctr.org. au as ACTRN12616000309482.
Mining Semantics-Preserving Attention for Group Activity Recognition

In this paper, we propose a Semantics-Preserving Teacher-Student (SPTS) model for group activity recognition in videos, which aims to mine the semantics-preserving attention to automatically seek the key people and discard the misleading people. Conventional methods usually aggregate the features extracted from individual persons by pooling operations, which cannot fully explore the contextual information for group activity recognition. To address this, our SPTS networks first learn a Teacher Network in semantic domain, which classifies the word of group activity based on the words of individual actions. Then we carefully design a Student Network in vision domain, which recognizes the group activity according to the input videos, and enforce the Student Network to mimic the Teacher Network during the learning process. In this way, we allocate semantics-preserving attention to different people, which adequately explores the contextual information of different people and requires no extra labelled data. Experimental results on two widely used benchmarks for group activity recognition clearly show the superior performance of our method in comparisons with the state-of-the-arts.
MiME: Multilevel Medical Embedding of Electronic Health Records for Predictive Healthcare

Deep learning models exhibit state-of-the-art performance for many predictive healthcare tasks using electronic health records (EHR) data, but these models typically require training data volume that exceeds the capacity of most healthcare systems. External resources such as medical ontologies are used to bridge the data volume constraint, but this approach is often not directly applicable or useful because of inconsistencies with terminology. To solve the data insufficiency challenge, we leverage the inherent multilevel structure of EHR data and, in particular, the encoded relationships among medical codes. We propose Multilevel Medical Embedding (MiME) which learns the multilevel embedding of EHR data while jointly performing auxiliary prediction tasks that rely on this inherent EHR structure without the need for external labels. We conducted two prediction tasks, heart failure prediction and sequential disease prediction, where MiME outperformed baseline methods in diverse evaluation settings. In particular, MiME consistently outperformed all baselines when predicting heart failure on datasets of different volumes, especially demonstrating the greatest performance improvement (15% relative gain in PR-AUC over the best baseline) on the smallest dataset, demonstrating its ability to effectively model the multilevel structure of EHR data.
An End-to-End Quadrilateral Regression Network for Comic Panel Extraction

Comic panel extraction, i.e., decomposing a comic page image into panels, has become a fundamental technique for meeting many practical needs of mobile comic reading such as comic content adaptation and comic animating. Most of existing approaches are based on handcrafted low-level visual patterns and heuristics rules, thus having limited ability to deal with irregular comic panels. Only one existing method is based on deep learning and achieves better experimental results, but its architecture is redundant and its time efficiency is not good. To address these problems, we propose an end-to-end, two-stage quadrilateral regressing network architecture for comic panel detection, which inherits the architecture of Faster R-CNN. At the first stage, we propose a quadrilateral region proposal network for generating panel proposals, based on a newly proposed quadrilateral regression method. At the second stage, we classify the proposals and refine their shapes with the proposed quadrilateral regression method again. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing comic panel detection methods on multiple datasets by F1-score and page accuracy.
Addressing Medical Students' Negative Bias Toward Patients With Obesity Through Ethics Education.

Context Negative bias toward patients with obesity is an ethical challenge in patient care. Several interventions to mitigate medical students' negative weight bias have been tried but none with an explicit focus on ethics. Here we describe first-year medical students' attitudes toward obesity and our effort to improve their attitudes through an innovative ethics session embedded within the required course, "Obesity, Nutrition, and Behavior Change," at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Methods Precourse survey data were collected from 6 first-year cohorts (2012-2017). Before the ethics session, students take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure implicit weight bias. During the session, students discuss their classmates' personal struggles with weight, beliefs about causes of obesity, and the IAT results. They also watch and discuss video clips from the TV show House depicting negative weight bias. In addition, the 2017 cohort was surveyed 4 months later to evaluate the impact of different components of the session on students' self-reported attitudes. Results All students responded to the precourse survey. Across cohorts, IAT results revealed that 70% of students held a thin preference, 18% were neutral and 12% held a fat preference. Forty-seven percent had personally struggled with weight loss. While most students thought obesity is a disease (89%) or behavioral (88%), 74% thought it results from ignorance, and 28% thought people with obesity are lazy. Among the 59 respondents to the follow-up survey, 30% reported improvement in their attitudes after the session. Over 40% thought it was useful to discuss students' personal struggles with weight and the IAT and survey results, and over 70% thought the House video clips were useful. Conclusions Medical students have negative attitudes about obesity that are consistent over time. Providing opportunities for students to discuss their personal experiences and beliefs about obesity within an ethics framework and using popular media as a basis for discussion might improve their attitudes toward obesity.
The fluorescent protein sensor roGFP2-Orp1 monitors in vivo H2 O2 and thiol redox integration and elucidates intracellular H2 O2 dynamics during elicitor-induced oxidative burst in Arabidopsis.

Hydrogen peroxide (H2 O2 ) is ubiquitous in cells and at the centre of developmental programmes and environmental responses. Its chemistry in cells makes H2 O2 notoriously hard to detect dynamically, specifically and at high resolution. Genetically encoded sensors overcome persistent shortcomings, but pH sensitivity, silencing of expression and a limited concept of sensor behaviour in vivo have hampered any meaningful H2 O2 sensing in living plants. We established H2 O2 monitoring in the cytosol and the mitochondria of Arabidopsis with the fusion protein roGFP2-Orp1 using confocal microscopy and multiwell fluorimetry. We confirmed sensor oxidation by H2 O2 , show insensitivity to physiological pH changes, and demonstrated that glutathione dominates sensor reduction in vivo. We showed the responsiveness of the sensor to exogenous H2 O2 , pharmacologically-induced H2 O2 release, and genetic interference with the antioxidant machinery in living Arabidopsis tissues. Monitoring intracellular H2 O2 dynamics in response to elicitor exposure reveals the late and prolonged impact of the oxidative burst in the cytosol that is modified in redox mutants. We provided a well defined toolkit for H2 O2 monitoring in planta and showed that intracellular H2 O2 measurements only carry meaning in the context of the endogenous thiol redox systems. This opens new possibilities to dissect plant H2 O2 dynamics and redox regulation, including intracellular NADPH oxidase-mediated ROS signalling.
Reasoning and concurrent timing: a study of the mechanisms underlying the effect of emotion on reasoning

ABSTRACT Negative emotions typically have an adverse effect on reasoning, especially analytic or logical reasoning. This effect can be explained using an attentional framework in which emotion detracts limited-capacity cognitive resources which are required for reasoning. Another possibility is that the effect of emotion on reasoning is mediated by arousal, as previous research has shown that physiological arousal can be associated with decreased reasoning performance. In this research, we used a dual-task paradigm combining a syllogistic reasoning task and a time production task. Prospective timing allows to disentangle the effects of attention and arousal: time productions should lengthen if emotion takes up cognitive resources that are therefore not available for timing, whereas time productions should shorten if emotional reasoning results from increased arousal. Results from two experiments confirm the adverse impact of emotion on logical reasoning performance. Reasoning about emotional contents led to lengthened time productions, which suggests that the capture of limited cognitive resources is the main factor accounting for the adverse effect of emotion on reasoning and not arousal.
Circ-ITCH correlates with small tumor size, decreased FIGO stage and prolonged overall survival, and it inhibits cells proliferation while promotes cells apoptosis in epithelial ovarian cancer.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the correlation of circular RNA itchy E3 ubiquitin protein ligase (Circ-ITCH) expression with clinicopathological features and survival in patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC), and to explore its effect on cells proliferation as well as apoptosis in EOC cells. METHODS Seventy-seven EOC patients underwent surgery were retrospectively reviewed. Tumor tissues and paired adjacent tissues samples were collected, and Circ-ITCH expression was evaluated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). Blank mimic, Circ-ITCH mimic, blank inhibitor and Circ-ITCH inhibitor plasmids were transfected into SKOV3 cells and OVCAR-3 cells, and Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) was performed to assess cells proliferation and Annexin V (AV)/propidium iodide (PI) was conducted to detect cells apoptosis. RESULTS Median value of Circ-ITCH relative expression was 0.697 (0.367-1.106) in tumor tissues, which was lower compared with paired adjacent tissues (1.690 (0.867-2.813)) (P< 0.001), and it negatively correlated with tumor size (P= 0.005) as well as International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage (P< 0.001) in EOC patients. Multivariate Cox's analysis revealed that high Circ-ITCH expression was an independent predictive factor for favorable OS in EOC patients. Moreover, further in vitro experiments disclosed that Circ-ITCH expression was decreased in several EOC cell lines compared with normal ovarian epithelial cell line, and it inhibited cells proliferation while promoted cells apoptosis in SKOV3 and OVCAR-3 cells. CONCLUSIONS Circ-ITCH correlates with small tumor size, decreased FIGO stage and prolonged OS, and it inhibits cells proliferation while promotes cells apoptosis in EOC.
The demise of caterpillar fungus in the Himalayan region due to climate change and overharvesting

Significance Global demand for species used in traditional medicine is increasing among wealthy urban consumers. This growing trade provides livelihood opportunities for harvesters, but also risks causing resource overexploitation. A dearth of reliable data hinders assessments of whether these species are declining, and why. We investigate these issues for Himalayan caterpillar fungus—one of the world’s most expensive medicinal species—by integrating local harvesters’ knowledge of production trends with ecological modeling. We find that harvesters increasingly attribute declining production to overexploitation, while models indicate that climate warming is also contributing to this decline. Our results underscore the “double whammy” threatening highly valuable species, and demonstrate the complementarity of different knowledge systems for assessing the sustainability of the medicinal resource trade. Demand for traditional medicine ingredients is causing species declines globally. Due to this trade, Himalayan caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) has become one of the world’s most valuable biological commodities, providing a crucial source of income for hundreds of thousands of collectors. However, the resulting harvesting boom has generated widespread concern over the sustainability of its collection. We investigate whether caterpillar fungus production is decreasing—and if so, why—across its entire range. To overcome the limitations of sparse quantitative data, we use a multiple evidence base approach that makes use of complementarities between local knowledge and ecological modeling. We find that, according to collectors across four countries, caterpillar fungus production has decreased due to habitat degradation, climate change, and especially overexploitation. Our statistical models corroborate that climate change is contributing to this decline. They indicate that caterpillar fungus is more productive under colder conditions, growing in close proximity to areas likely to have permafrost. With significant warming already underway throughout much of its range, we conclude that caterpillar fungus populations have been negatively affected by a combination of overexploitation and climate change. Our results underscore that harvesting is not the sole threat to economically valuable species, and that a collapse of the caterpillar fungus system under ongoing warming and high collection pressure would have serious implications throughout the Himalayan region.
Comparison of Nonabsorbable and Absorbable Suture in Total Knee Arthroplasty

Background Wound closure of KA is important for postoperative rehabilitation. At present there is still no consensus on the best wound closure technique for KA. We performed the present study to determine whether absorbable suture is better than nonabsorbable suture in total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Material/Methods A total of 180 patients who underwent TKA were divided into 3 groups: 80 cases of nonabsorbable suture, 50 cases of 2-0 absorbable suture, and 50 cases of 4-0 absorbable suture. The time required for closure, frequency of gauze change, length of stay in hospital, adverse events, range of motion (ROM) after 3 months postoperatively, and VAS score of wounds were calculated. Comparison was made to explore any significant differences between different groups. Results There were significant differences between the nonabsorbable group and the absorbable group with regards to closure time, frequency of gauze change, and hospital length of stay (LOS). Closure time was longer in the absorbable group than in the nonabsorbable group. Frequency of gauze change, hospital LOS, and adverse events were lower, and VAS was higher in the absorbable group. Closure time was longer in the 4-0 absorbable group than in the 2-0 group. There was no significant difference between the 4-0 group and 2-0 group in other variables. There was no significant difference in long-term ROM among all groups. Conclusions Absorbable suture in TKA reduces the incidence of fatty liquefaction, frequency of gauze change, and postoperative LOS. It improves the cosmetic appearance and overall reduces the economic cost. There was no significant effect on early and long-term functional ROM. In conclusion, absorbable suture can be used in TKA when appropriately indicated.