Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Healthcare resource use and costs of diabetic macular oedema for patients with antivascular endothelial growth factor versus a dexamethasone intravitreal implant in Korea: a population-based study

Objectives To estimate the costs and healthcare resources of patients with diabetic macular oedema (DME) who received intravitreal antivascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) agents or a dexamethasone intravitreal implant (DEX-implant) in Korea. Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting The Korean National Health Insurance claim data from 1 January 2015 to 30 June 2017 were retrieved from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. Participants Adult patients with DME who were diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy or DME and received ranibizumab, aflibercept or a DEX-implant in conjunction with intravitreal injection were included. Patients whose primary diagnoses were age-related macular degeneration or retinal vein occlusion were excluded. Main outcome measures Healthcare resource utilisation and costs related to DME in the 12-month postindex period. Results During the study period, 182 patients and 414 patients were identified in the anti-VEGF and DEX-implant groups, respectively, and there was no significant difference in the demographic characteristics between the two groups. The outpatient eye care-related medical costs were US$3002.33 for the anti-VEGF group vs US$2250.35 for the DEX-implant group (p<0.0001). After adjusting the relevant covariates based on the generalised linear model, the estimated outpatient eye care-related medical costs were 33% higher in the anti-VEGF group than in the DEX-implant group (p<0.0001, 95% CI 22% to 45%). The utilisation pattern of the two groups showed no significant difference except for the number of intravitreal injections, which was higher in the anti-VEGF group (2.69±2.29) than in the DEX-implant group (2.09±1.37, p<0.001). Conclusion The average annual eye-related medical cost of the DEX-implant group was significantly lower than that of the anti-VEGF group during the study period, which was mainly due to decreased utilisation of eye care-related injections. Further long-term studies are needed.
Associations Between the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire – Brazilian Version (DCDQ-BR) and Motor Competence in School-Age Children

Abstract Aim: Parental screening of children’s motor skills can be helpful for early identification of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). The present study examined the associations between the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire – Brazilian version (DCDQ-BR) and motor competence in school-age children. Methods: 707 children (332 boys, 375 girls) aged between 6- to 10-years and one of their parents participated in the study. Parents completed the DCDQ-BR and children’s motor competence was determined using the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency – 2nd edition (BOT-2). Results: The agreement between the BOT-2 and DCDQ-BR results was comparable across age, ranging from 74-84 percent. In general, there were low- to moderate correlations between all aspects of the parent report and children’s motor competence. Sensitivity and specificity of the DCDQ-BR were 70% and 81%, respectively. Overall, boys had higher motor competence than girls, but parent reports were similar for gender. Conclusions: Parental assessment of their child’s motor ability is moderately associated with motor competence, and this association is similar for boys and girls, even though boys scored higher in motor competence. Our findings suggest that it may be possible to reduce the length of clinical assessment by only testing children that flag as suspect for DCD in the DCDQ-BR.
Medical Management vs Mechanical Thrombectomy for Mild Strokes: An International Multicenter Study and Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Importance The benefit of mechanical thrombectomy (MT) in patients with stroke presenting with mild deficits (National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale [NIHSS] score <6) owing to emergency large-vessel occlusion (ELVO) remains uncertain. Objective To assess the outcomes of patients with mild-deficits ELVO (mELVO) treated with MT vs best medical management (bMM). Data Sources We retrospectively pooled patients with mELVO during a 5-year period from 16 centers. A meta-analysis of studies reporting efficacy and safety outcomes with MT or bMM among patients with mELVO was also conducted. Data were analyzed between 2013 and 2017. Study Selection We identified studies that enrolled patients with stroke (within 24 hours of symptom onset) with mELVO treated with MT or bMM. Main Outcomes and Measures Efficacy outcomes included 3-month favorable functional outcome and 3-month functional independence that were defined as modified Rankin Scale scores of 0 to 1 and 0 to 2, respectively. Safety outcomes included 3-month mortality and symptomatic and asymptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (ICH). Results We evaluated a total of 251 patients with mELVO who were treated with MT (n = 138; 65 women; mean age, 65.2 years; median NIHSS score, 4; interquartile range [IQR], 3-5) or bMM (n = 113; 51 women; mean age, 64.8; median NIHSS score, 3; interquartile range [IQR], 2-4). The rate of asymptomatic ICH was lower in bMM (4.6% vs 17.5%; P = .002), while the rate of 3-month FI (after imputation of missing follow-up evaluations) was lower in MT (77.4% vs 88.5%; P = .02). The 2 groups did not differ in any other efficacy or safety outcomes. In multivariable analyses, MT was associated with higher odds of asymptomatic ICH (odds ratio [OR], 11.07; 95% CI, 1.31-93.53; P = .03). In the meta-analysis of 4 studies (843 patients), MT was associated with higher odds of symptomatic ICH in unadjusted analyses (OR, 5.52; 95% CI, 1.91-15.49; P = .002; I2 = 0%). This association did not retain its significance in adjusted analyses including 2 studies (OR, 2.06; 95% CI, 0.49-8.63; P = .32; I2 = 0%). The meta-analysis did not document any other independent associations between treatment groups and safety or efficacy outcomes. Conclusions and Relevance Our multicenter study coupled with the meta-analysis suggests similar outcomes of MT and bMM in patients with stroke with mELVO, but no conclusions about treatment effect can be made. The clinical equipoise can further be resolved by a randomized clinical trial.
Beta-blocker Therapy is Associated with Decreased 1-year Mortality After Emergency Laparotomy in Geriatric Patients

Background and Aims: Emergency laparotomy is associated with a great risk of mortality in the elderly. The hyperadrenergic state induced by surgical trauma may play an important role in the pathophysiology of this increased risk. Studies have shown that beta-blocker exposure may be associated with decreased morbidity and mortality in the perioperative period. We aimed to study the effect of beta-blocker on mortality in geriatric patients undergoing emergency laparotomy. Material and Methods: This is a retrospective study of patients who underwent emergency laparotomy between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2016 at a single institution. The outcomes of interest were the association between post-operative complications and in-hospital and 1-year mortality in patients on beta-blocker therapy (BB(+)) and those who were not (BB(−)). The Poisson regression analysis was used to evaluate the association. Results: A total of 192 patients were included of whom 62 (32.2%) had pre-operative beta-blocker therapy with continued exposure during their hospital stay. The in-hospital mortality was 17.7% in the BB(+) and 23.8% in the BB(−) cohorts (p = 0.441). One-year mortality was significantly lower in the BB(+) group compared to the BB(−) group (30.6% versus 47.7%; p = 0.038). After adjusting for confounders, the incidence of deaths during 1 year post-operatively decreased by 35% in the BB(+) group (incidence rate ratio = 0.65, p = 0.004). No significant differences in the incidence of post-operative complications between the two groups could be measured. Conclusion: Beta-blocker therapy may be associated with reduced 1-year mortality following emergency laparotomy in geriatric patients.
Improvement in sleep quality after total shoulder arthroplasty

ABSTRACT Objective Poor sleep quality due to nocturnal pain is increasingly reported as a major symptom in advanced glenohumeral arthritis. The current study aimed to evaluate preoperative and postoperative sleep quality, shoulder pain, and function in patients who underwent total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA). Preoperative factors contributing to delayed improvements in sleep quality were examined. Methods Patients scheduled for anatomic or reverse TSA due to glenohumeral arthritis were included. Patients completed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons (ASES) survey preoperatively, and at 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year following surgery. A higher PSQI score (maximum 21) indicated greater sleep disturbance. Results Seventy-four patients (34 males, 40 females), with a mean age of 65.8 years were prospectively enrolled. Eighty-four percent of patients reported preoperative PSQI scores indicative of sleep disturbance (6 or greater), with a mean of 10.1 ± 4.3. The PSQI score significantly improved to 7.7 at 6 weeks (P = .003), and to 6.1 at 3 months (P = .08). At 12 months, the PSQI was within normal limits (less than or equal to 5) with a mean score of 4.3. A normal PSQI score was achieved by 40.8%, at 6 weeks, 50% at 3 months, 53.7% at 6 months, and 73.9% at 1 year. The ASES score significantly improved from 32.6 ± 17.2 at baseline to 58.4 at 6 weeks (p < .001), 76.1 at 3 months (p < .001), and 85.3 at 12 months. Linear regression demonstrated that the ASES and PSQI scores were negatively associated with each other at each time point. Body mass index and female gender were associated with a delayed return to baseline sleep quality. Conclusion Shoulder-related sleep disturbance significantly improved at 6 weeks following TSA, and normalized for most patients by 1 year post-operatively. Enhanced sleep quality after TSA was directly related to improved functional outcomes.
Oxygen therapy in respiratory disorders

S American Thoracic Society International Conference 2010, New Orleans Assessing PaCO2 in the emergency department: Accuracy of a transcutaneous carbon dioxide device in acute respiratory disease. K Perrin, M Wijesinghe, M Weatherall, R Beasley British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2009, London Randomised Controlled Trial of High flow versus titrated oxygen therapy in community acquired pneumonia. Meme Wijesinghe, Kyle Perrin, Mark Weatherall, Richard Beasley British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2009, London High flow oxygen causes carbon dioxide retention in severe asthma: a randomised controlled trial. Kyle Perrin, Meme Wijesinghe, Mark Weatherall, Richard Beasley British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2009, London The Effects of Hyperoxia in Obesity Hypoventilation Syndrome. Meme Wijesinghe, Kyle Perrin, Richard Beasley British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2009, London An audit of the effect of oxygen prescription charts on clinical practice. Meme Wijesinghe, Kyle Perrin, Richard Beasley
CTHRC1 and PD-1/PD-L1 expression predicts tumor recurrence in prostate cancer

Collagen triple helix repeat containing 1 (CTHRC1) is a gene that has been associated with tumor progression in human prostate cancer (PC). The tumor immune microenvironment has been linked with disease outcome in PC. In the present study, the correlation between CTHRC1 with PC recurrence and the tumor immunological microenvironment was investigated. Using the data supplied by the Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER), the expression of CTHRC1, programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1), and programmed cell death 1 ligand 1 (PD-L1) were analyzed. Immunohistochemical staining of CTHRC1, PD-1 and PD-L1 was performed using a tissue microarray construction of prostate adenocarcinoma (PRAD) specimens. In PRAD, an association was reported between the CTHRC1 expression and the disease free survival (DFS) rate (P=0.022). Overexpression of CTHRC1 was correlated with increased levels of PD-1 (R=0.272, P=0.021) and PD-L1 (R=0.298, P=0.016), elevated levels of infiltrating B cells (P=9.51e−11), CD4+ cells (P=1.51e−11), macrophages (P=8.25e−5), neutrophils (P=2.17e−9) and dendritic cells (P=3.13e−13). Bioinformatics analysis revealed that CTHRC1 was correlated with the expression levels of matrix metalloproteinase-9, mucin 1 and solute carrier organic anion transporter family member 2B1 genes, which exert an influence in PRAD. The occurrence of this condition is most likely to be associated with regulation of the tumor microenvironment. Taken together, we demonstrated that the prognosis and immunity of PC are closely linked to CTHRC1 upregulation. Furthermore, these results suggest that the immune function of PC may be suppressed by CTHRC1-targeting therapy.
Illness perceptions and panic-fear in coping with difficult asthma

Background: Difficult Asthma is a heterogeneous diagnosis for those with poorly controlled asthma with no definitive link to severe lung pathology. Several psychological variables predict clinical outcomes in this population. Illness perceptions as measured by the Illness Perceptions Questionnaire – Revised (IPQ-R) are increasingly used to understand beliefs about chronic illness. Sophisticated use of this tool has evolved beyond interpretation of individual dimensions to consider illness belief schemata using cluster analysis. Aims: To understand how illness beliefs schemata of individuals with Difficult Asthma vary in relation to panic-fear, coping and clinical variables. Method: 119 adults with a diagnosis of Difficult Asthma were recruited from a specialist clinic during November 2011 to April 2012. They completed the IPQ-R for asthma, Asthma Symptom Checklist and Asthma Specific Coping Scale. Clinical and demographic information was obtained, including spirometry values (Forced Expiratory Volume in one second, Forced Vital Capacity and FEV1/FVC ratio). Results: Cluster analysis yielded a four cluster solution based on IPQ-R dimensions. MANOVA comparisons revealed differences in panic-fear and strategies used to cope with asthma. Groups did not differ in lung function. Compliers were least likely to experience panic-fear, least likely to have a passive coping style and least likely to seek information or restrict their lifestyle in response to asthma. Reactive Strivers experienced high amounts of panic-fear, and the highest degree of lifestyle restriction and information seeking. Survivors reported the highest levels of panic-fear, high passive coping and high amounts of personal control. Ambivalent patients were more likely to have adult-onset asthma, moderate panicfear and moderate use of all coping strategies. Conclusions & Implications: It is feasible to understand a Difficult Asthma population using illness perception schemas. The differences in experienced panic-fear and coping strategies between these groups suggest clinical utility in tailoring psychological interventions or care pathways for these groups.
Direct training based spiking convolutional neural networks for object recognition

Direct training based spiking neural networks (SNNs) have been paid a lot of attention recently because of its high energy efficiency on emerging neuromorphic hardware. However, due to the non-differentiability of the spiking activity, most of the related SNNs still cannot achieve high object recognition accuracy for the complicated dataset, such as CIFAR-10. Even though some of them can reach the accuracy of 90%, the energy consumption in those networks is very high. Considering this, we propose a direct supervised learning based spiking convolutional neural networks (SCNNs) using temporal coding scheme in this study, aiming to exploit minimum trainable parameters to recognize the object in the image with high accuracy. The MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed networks. For the MNIST dataset, the proposed networks with noise input are able to reach the high recognition accuracy (99.13%) as the other state-of-art models but use the much less trainable parameters than them. For CIFAR-10 dataset, the proposed networks with data augmentation step can reach the recognition accuracy of 80.49%. , which is the state-of-art high accuracy in the field of direct training based SNNs using temporal coding manner. In addition, the number of trainable parameters used in such networks is much less than that in the conversion based SCNNs reported in the literature.
Subsampling Generative Adversarial Networks: Density Ratio Estimation in Feature Space With Softplus Loss

Filtering out unrealistic images from trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) has attracted considerable attention recently. Two density ratio based subsampling methods—Discriminator Rejection Sampling (DRS) and Metropolis-Hastings GAN (MH-GAN)—were recently proposed, and their effectiveness in improving GANs was demonstrated on multiple datasets. However, DRS and MH-GAN are based on discriminator-based density ratio estimation (DRE) methods, so they may not work well if the discriminator in the trained GAN is far from optimal. Moreover, they do not apply to some GANs (e.g., MMD-GAN). In this paper, we propose a novel Softplus (SP) loss for DRE. Based on it, we develop a sample-based DRE method in a feature space learned by a specially designed and pre-trained ResNet-34, termed DRE-F-SP. We derive the rate of convergence of a density ratio model trained under the SP loss. Then, we propose three density ratio based subsampling methods for GANs based on DRE-F-SP. Our subsampling methods do not rely on the optimality of the discriminator and are suitable for all types of GANs. We empirically show our subsampling approach can substantially outperform DRS and MH-GAN on a synthetic dataset, CIFAR-10, MNIST and CelebA, using multiple GANs.
Suppression of quarkonia in PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{{s}_{{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV

We study different processes responsible for the modification of quarkonia yields in the medium produced in PbPb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV. The quarkonia and heavy flavour cross sections are estimated using the measurements in pp collisions at LHC energies and shadowing corrections are obtained using the EPS09 parametrizations. A kinetic model is used which incorporates quarkonia suppression inside the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), suppression due to hadronic comovers, and regeneration from recombination of heavy quark pairs. The quarkonia dissociation cross section due to gluon collisions, including both color-electric dipole and color-magnetic dipole transitions, has been employed. The regeneration rate is obtained using the principle of detailed balance. The effect of these processes on the nuclear modification factors for both J/ψ and Υ in different ranges of transverse momentum pT and rapidity have been studied for PbPb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV. The calculations are compared with the available results from LHC experiments. Both the suppression and regeneration due to a QGP are effective in the low and intermediate pT range. The large observed suppression of J/ψ at pT ≥ 10 GeV/c is larger than the suppression expected due to gluon dissociation.
Knowledge-Enriched Transformer for Emotion Detection in Textual Conversations

Messages in human conversations inherently convey emotions. The task of detecting emotions in textual conversations leads to a wide range of applications such as opinion mining in social networks. However, enabling machines to analyze emotions in conversations is challenging, partly because humans often rely on the context and commonsense knowledge to express emotions. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a Knowledge-Enriched Transformer (KET), where contextual utterances are interpreted using hierarchical self-attention and external commonsense knowledge is dynamically leveraged using a context-aware affective graph attention mechanism. Experiments on multiple textual conversation datasets demonstrate that both context and commonsense knowledge are consistently beneficial to the emotion detection performance. In addition, the experimental results show that our KET model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on most of the tested datasets in F1 score.
ALMA observations of water deuteration: a physical diagnostic of the formation of protostars

Context. How water is delivered to planetary systems is a central question in astrochemistry. The deuterium fractionation of water can serve as a tracer for the chemical and physical evolution of water during star formation and can constrain the origin of water in Solar System bodies. Aims. The aim is to determine the HDO/H2O ratio in the inner warm gas toward three low-mass Class 0 protostars selected to be in isolated cores, i.e., not associated with any cloud complexes. Previous sources for which the HDO/H2O ratio have been established were all part of larger star-forming complexes. Determining the HDO/H2O ratio toward three isolated protostars allows comparison of the water chemistry in isolated and clustered regions to determine the influence of local cloud environment. Methods. We present ALMA Band 6 observations of the HDO 31,2–22,1 and 21,1–21,2 transitions at 225.897 GHz and 241.562 GHz along with the first ALMA Band 5 observations of the H218O 31,3–22,0 transition at 203.407 GHz. The high angular resolution observations (0′′.3–1′′.3) allow the study of the inner warm envelope gas. Model-independent estimates for the HDO/H2O ratios are obtained and compared with previous determinations of the HDO/H2O ratio in the warm gas toward low-mass protostars. Results. We successfully detect the targeted water transitions toward the three sources with signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) > 5. We determine the HDO/H2O ratio toward L483, B335 and BHR71–IRS1 to be (2.2 ± 0.4) × 10−3, (1.7 ± 0.3) × 10−3, and (1.8 ± 0.4) × 10−3, respectively, assuming Tex = 124 K. The degree of water deuteration of these isolated protostars are a factor of 2–4 higher relative to Class 0 protostars that are members of known nearby clustered star-forming regions. Conclusions. The results indicate that the water deuterium fractionation is influenced by the local cloud environment. This effect can be explained by variations in either collapse timescales or temperatures, which depends on local cloud dynamics and could provide a new method to decipher the history of young stars.