Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association Between Sickle Cell Trait With Selected Chronic Medical Conditions in U.S. Service Members.

Introduction Sickle cell trait (SCT), the heterozygous carrier state for hemoglobin S, is present in an estimated 1.6% of all newborns and 7.3% in black individuals in the USA. SCT has long been considered a benign condition with anticipated normal life expectancy and no increased risk for chronic diseases. The medical literature is inconclusive on the potential association between SCT and chronic medical conditions (CMC) including chronic kidney disease, venous thromboembolism, and stroke. Studies addressing these questions are lacking particularly in non-Black young adults. Materials and Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort study among U.S. active duty, enlisted, service members who entered from 1992 to 2012 using existing Department of Defense (DoD Military Healthcare System databases). SCT positive subjects (1,323) were matched by demographic characteristics to SCT negative subjects (3,136) and followed through 2013 for CMC that included deep vein thrombosis, diabetes mellitus and hematologic, pulmonary, and renal conditions. Results The rate of developing any of the included CMC was higher for those with SCT (incidence rate ratio = 1.71 95% CI 1.61-1.81) compared with those who were SCT negative and their healthcare utilization rate for any of CMC studied was higher for SCT positive compared with negative individuals (URR = 2.45 95% CI 2.41-2.50), with the highest rate ratios observed for hematologic and renal conditions. SCT positive compared with negative individuals were more likely to have encounter diagnoses of sickle cell disease and diabetes Type II and were less likely to have encounter diagnoses of other hemoglobinopathies and diabetes type I. Conclusion SCT in these racially diverse, young adults increased both the incidence of and healthcare utilization for thromboembolism, diabetes mellitus type II, sickle cell disease, pulmonary, and chronic renal conditions. These findings suggest that clinicians treating young adults with SCT should exercise heightened surveillance for these CMC to ensure both early diagnosis and access to treatments.
Cyanobacteria Inoculation Improves Soil Stability and Fertility on Different Textured Soils: Gaining Insights for Applicability in Soil Restoration

Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous components of biocrust communities and the first colonizers of terrestrial ecosystems. They play multiple roles in the soil by fixing C and N and synthesizing exopolysaccharides, which increase soil fertility and water retention and improve soil structure and stability. Application of cyanobacteria as inoculants to promote biocrust development has been proposed as a novel biotechnological technique for restoring barren degraded areas and combating desertification processes in arid lands. However, previous to their widespread application under field conditions, research is needed to ensure the selection of the most suitable species. In this study, we inoculated two cyanobacterial species, Phormidium ambiguum (non N-fixing) and Scytonema javanicum (N-fixing), on different textured soils (from silt loam to sandy), and analyzed cyanobacteria biocrust development and evolution of physicochemical soil properties for three months under laboratory conditions. Cyanobacteria inoculation led to biocrust formation in all soil types. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images showed contrasting structure of the biocrust induced by the two cyanobacteria. The one from P. ambiguum was characterized by thin filaments that enveloped soil particles and created a dense, entangled network, while the one from S. javanicum consisted of thicker filaments that grouped as bunches in between soil particles. Biocrust development, assessed by chlorophyll a content and crust spectral properties, was higher in S. javanicum-inoculated soils compared to P. ambiguum-inoculated soils. Either cyanobacteria inoculation did not increase soil hydrophobicity. S. javanicum promoted a higher increase in total organic C and total N content, while P. ambiguum was more effective in increasing total exopolysaccharide (EPS) content and soil penetration resistance. The effects of cyanobacteria inoculation also differed among soil types and the highest improvement in soil fertility compared to non-inoculated soils was found in sandy and silty soils, which originally had lowest fertility. On the whole, the improvement in soil fertility and stability supports the viability of using cyanobacteria to restore degraded arid soils.
The Small Effect of Poroelastic Pressure Transients on Triggering of Production‐Induced Earthquakes in the Groningen Natural Gas Field

Over the past decade, a steep increase in the number of seismic events has been observed in the Groningen gas field, the Netherlands. It is generally accepted that these are induced by compaction of the reservoir rock due to extensive depletion, causing a buildup of strain energy in faults that may be released seismically. We address the possible triggering of fault slip by the transient pressure field surrounding a well that has undergone a sudden rate change. Assuming a unilateral decoupling between displacement and pressure, numerical experiments are conducted using a sequential finite volume‐finite element solution strategy that fully incorporates second‐order terms in the radial flow equation. We investigate an idealized Groningen‐like geometry to discover whether the hypothesized possibility of triggering‐induced seismicity exists, explore how some controllable and uncontrollable variables influence its severity, and possibly provide clues on how production strategy might be able to avoid its occurrence. The results demonstrate that sudden production changes can indeed trigger near‐well seismic events, but that the effect is very small compared to other potential causes. Changing from sudden to gradual changes in well rates is therefore not expected to lead to a significant reduction in the number or magnitude of production‐induced earthquakes in the Groningen field.
Inter‐cortical modulation from premotor to motor plasticity

Synaptic plasticity is involved in daily activities but abnormal plasticity may be deleterious. In this study, we found that motor plasticity could be modulated by suppressing the premotor cortex with the theta burst form of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. Such changes in motor plasticity were associated with reduced learning of a simple motor task. We postulate that the premotor cortex adjusts the amount of motor plasticity to modulate motor learning through heterosynaptic metaplasticity. The present results provide an insight into how the brain physiologically coordinates two different areas to bring them into a functional network, a concept that could be employed to intervene in diseases with abnormal plasticity.
An Explicit Construction of Systematic MDS Codes with Small Sub-Packetization for All-Node Repair

An explicit construction of systematic MDS codes, called HashTag+ codes, with arbitrary sub-packetization level for all-node repair is proposed. It is shown that even for small sub-packetization levels, HashTag+ codes achieve the optimal MSR point for repair of any parity node, while the repair bandwidth for a single systematic node depends on the sub-packetization level. Compared to other codes in the literature, HashTag+ codes provide from 20% to 40% savings in the average amount of data accessed and transferred during repair.
Just a Few Seeds More: Value of Network Information for Diffusion

Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information ('seeds') in a social network is a widely-studied question in many settings, such as the diffusion of information, microfinance programs, and new technologies. Numerous studies have proposed various network-centrality based heuristics to choose seeds in a way that is likely to boost diffusion. Here we show that, for some frequently studied diffusion processes, randomly seeding s plus x individuals can prompt a larger cascade than optimally targeting the best s individuals, for a small x. We prove our results for large classes of random networks, but also show that they hold in simulations over several real-world networks. This suggests that the returns to collecting and analyzing network information to identify the optimal seeds may not be economically significant. Given these findings, practitioners interested in communicating a message to a large number of people may wish to compare the cost of network-based targeting to that of slightly expanding initial outreach.
Role of habit in treatment adherence among adults with cystic fibrosis

Among adults with cystic fibrosis (CF), medication adherence is low and reasons for low adherence are poorly understood. Our previous exploratory study showed that stronger ‘habit’ (ie, automatically experiencing an urge to use a nebuliser) was associated with higher nebuliser adherence. We performed a secondary analysis of pilot trial data (n=61) to replicate the earlier study and determine whether habit–adherence association exists in other cohorts of adults with CF. In this study, high adherers also reported stronger habit compared with low adherers. Habit may be a promising target for self-management interventions. Trial registration number ACtiF pilot, ISRCTN13076797.
The Role of von Willebrand Factor, ADAMTS13, and Cerebral Artery Thrombus Composition in Patient Outcome Following Mechanical Thrombectomy for Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background The aim of the study was to investigate the role of von Willebrand factor (vWF), the vWF-cleaving protease, ADAMTS13, the composition of thrombus, and patient outcome following mechanical cerebral artery thrombectomy in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Material/Methods A prospective cohort study included 131 patients with ischemic stroke (<6 hours) with or without intravenous thrombolysis. Interventional procedure parameters, hemocoagulation markers, vWF, ADAMTS13, and histological examination of the extracted thrombi were performed. The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score was used on hospital admission, after 24 hours, at day 7; the three-month modified Rankin Scale score was used. Results Mechanical thrombectomy resulted in a Treatment in Cerebral Ischemia (TICI) score of 2–3, with recanalization in 89% of patients. Intravenous thrombolysis was used in 101 (78%). Patients with and without intravenous thrombolysis therapy had a good clinical outcome (score 0–2) in 47% of cases (P=0.459) using the three-month modified Rankin Scale. Patients with a National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score ≥15 had significantly increased vWF levels (P=0.003), and a significantly increased vWF: ADAMTS13 ratio (P=0.038) on hospital admission. Significant correlation coefficients were found for plasma vWF and thrombo-embolus vWF (r=0.32), platelet (r=0.24), and fibrin (r=0.26) levels. In the removed thrombus, vWF levels were significantly correlated with platelet count (r=0.53), CD31-positive cells (r=0.38), and fibrin (r=0.48). Conclusions In patients with acute ischemic stroke, mechanical cerebral artery thrombectomy resulted in a good clinical outcome in 47% of cases, with and without intravenous thrombolysis therapy.
The association between adipocytokines and glycemic control in women with gestational diabetes mellitus

Abstract Objective: To evaluate the relationship between adipocytokines and glycemic control. Study design: Prospective observational trial of gestations with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Fasting glucose (FG), insulin, adiponectin, leptin, chemerin, retinol-binding protein 4 (RBP-4), osteocalcin, and resistin were measured. HomeOstasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) and QUantitative insulin sensitivity ChecK Index (QUICKI) were calculated. Women who required medications for glycemic control were compared to women using nutritional therapy only. Results: Overall, 75 women were included −26 (34.7%) required medications to achieve good glycemic control. Factors associated with poor control are as follows: low resistin (aOR 0.84), HOMA-IR (aOR 1.96), QUICKI (aOR 0.62), first trimester FG (aOR 1.43), and maternal age (aOR 1.26). HOMA-IR and QUICKI performed highest for prediction. Resistin, first trimester FG, maternal age, and QUICKI had an AUC of 0.878, sensitivity and specificity of 87.5% for the prediction of the need for medications. Conclusions: Low resistin is associated with poor control. A model utilizing maternal age, first trimester fasting glucose, and first visit QUICKI yields good predictability.
Evaluating Robustness of Neural Networks with Mixed Integer Programming

Neural networks have demonstrated considerable success on a wide variety of real-world problems. However, neural networks can be fooled by adversarial examples – slightly perturbed inputs that are misclassified with high confidence. Verification of networks enables us to gauge their vulnerability to such adversarial examples. We formulate verification of piecewise-linear neural networks as a mixed integer program. Our verifier finds minimum adversarial distortions two to three orders of magnitude more quickly than the state-of-the-art. We achieve this via tight formulations for non-linearities, as well as a novel presolve algorithm that makes full use of all information available. The computational speedup enables us to verify properties on convolutional networks with an order of magnitude more ReLUs than had been previously verified by any complete verifier, and we determine for the first time the exact adversarial accuracy of an MNIST classifier to perturbations with bounded l[infinity] norm e = 0:1. On this network, we find an adversarial example for 4.38% of samples, and a certificate of robustness for the remainder. Across a variety of robust training procedures, we are able to certify more samples than the state-of-the-art and find more adversarial examples than a strong first-order attack for every network.
Pinsight: A Novel Way of Creating and Sharing Digital Content through 'Things' in the Wild

Existing platforms for sharing locative digital content rely on the use of mobile phones for accessing the content. This can be a major deterrent to wider public access and also hinders immediacy and 'in the moment' discoverability. Building on previous work in situated public installations, we developed Pinsight, a novel platform for enabling end-users, such as local communities, to create and share digital content in-situ with public audiences through physical interactive devices. Pinsight is based on a set of design principles that focus on supporting both the expressiveness of content creators and the appeal to public audiences. This paper describes the design of the platform and how it supports sharing knowledge in ways different to conventional media. Through preliminary evaluations and two in-the-wild studies, we explore how such a situated technology can be used by different user groups (content designers, history communities, local residents) for sharing content with public audiences (visitors, pedestrians, residents) in different contexts.
Learning Continuous Hierarchies in the Lorentz Model of Hyperbolic Geometry

We are concerned with the discovery of hierarchical relationships from large-scale unstructured similarity scores. For this purpose, we study different models of hyperbolic space and find that learning embeddings in the Lorentz model is substantially more efficient than in the Poincar\'e-ball model. We show that the proposed approach allows us to learn high-quality embeddings of large taxonomies which yield improvements over Poincar\'e embeddings, especially in low dimensions. Lastly, we apply our model to discover hierarchies in two real-world datasets: we show that an embedding in hyperbolic space can reveal important aspects of a company's organizational structure as well as reveal historical relationships between language families.
A Tunable Measure for Information Leakage

A tunable measure for information leakage called maximal a-leakage is introduced. This measure quantifies the maximal gain of an adversary in refining a tilted version of its prior belief of any (potentially random) function of a dataset conditioning on a disclosed dataset. The choice of $\alpha$ determines the specific adversarial action ranging from refining a belief for $\alpha=1$ to guessing the best posterior for $\alpha=\infty$, and for these extremal values this measure simplifies to mutual information (MI) and maximal leakage (MaxL), respectively. For all other $\alpha$ this measure is shown to be the Arimoto channel capacity. Several properties of this measure are proven including: (i) quasi-convexity in the mapping between the original and disclosed datasets; (ii) data processing inequalities; and (iii) a composition property. A full version of this paper is in [1].
The polyphyly of Plasmodium: comprehensive phylogenetic analyses of the malaria parasites (order Haemosporida) reveal widespread taxonomic conflict

The evolutionary relationships among the apicomplexan blood pathogens known as the malaria parasites (order Haemosporida), some of which infect nearly 200 million humans each year, has remained a vexing phylogenetic problem due to limitations in taxon sampling, character sampling and the extreme nucleotide base composition biases that are characteristic of this clade. Previous phylogenetic work on the malaria parasites has often lacked sufficient representation of the broad taxonomic diversity within the Haemosporida or the multi-locus sequence data needed to resolve deep evolutionary relationships, rendering our understanding of haemosporidian life-history evolution and the origin of the human malaria parasites incomplete. Here we present the most comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of the malaria parasites conducted to date, using samples from a broad diversity of vertebrate hosts that includes numerous enigmatic and poorly known haemosporidian lineages in addition to genome-wide multi-locus sequence data. We find that if base composition differences were corrected for during phylogenetic analysis, we recovered a well-supported topology indicating that the evolutionary history of the malaria parasites was characterized by a complex series of transitions in life-history strategies and host usage. Notably we find that Plasmodium, the malaria parasite genus that includes the species of human medical concern, is polyphyletic with the life-history traits characteristic of this genus having evolved in a dynamic manner across the phylogeny. We find support for multiple instances of gain and loss of asexual proliferation in host blood cells and production of haemozoin pigment, two traits that have been used for taxonomic classification as well as considered to be important factors for parasite virulence and used as drug targets. Lastly, our analysis illustrates the need for a widespread reassessment of malaria parasite taxonomy.
Parallelizing garbage collection with I/O to improve flash resource utilization

Garbage Collection (GC) has been a critical optimization target for improving the performance of flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs); the long-lasting GC process occupies the flash resources, thereby blocking normal I/O requests and increasing response times. This is a well-documented problem, and a wide range of prior works successfully hide the negative impact of GC on the 1/O response times. In this paper, however, we unveil another serious side-effect of GC, called the plane under-utilization problem. More specifically, while a plane is busy doing GC, the other plane(s) in the same die remain idle, as all the planes in a die share a single command and address path that is dedicated to the GC. We also note that most of the state-of-the-art proposals attacking the GC impact on I/O response times are not able to resolve the plane under-utilization problem, and in turn, miss a great potential to further improve the SSD performance. Thus, we next propose a scheduling technique, I/O-parallelized GC, which leverages the idle planes during GC to serve the blocked I/O requests. As a result, flash resources (planes) can be active during the most of GC time and the blocked I/O requests can get serviced quickly, and in turn, an improved SSD performance can be achieved. Using simulation-based evaluations over a wide variety of workloads, we show that the proposed I/O-parallelized GC scheme can improve the response times of the GC-affected I/O requests by 83% (reads) and 70% (writes), by increasing the average plane utilization from the (two planes-per-die) baseline 50% to 74.4% during GC. The I/O-parallelized GC is orthogonal to prior proposals that hide GC overheads; so, they can be combined for further SSD performance improvement.
Prediction models for clinical outcome after a carotid revascularisation procedure: A systematic review

Introduction Prediction models for clinical outcome after carotid artery stenting or carotid endarterectomy could aid physicians in estimating peri- and postprocedural risks in individual patients. We aimed to identify existing prediction models for short- and long-term outcome after carotid artery stenting or carotid endarterectomy in patients with symptomatic or asymptomatic carotid stenosis, and to summarise their most important predictors and predictive performance. Patients and methods We performed a systematic literature search for studies that developed a prediction model or risk score published until 22 December 2016. Eligible prediction models had to predict the risk of vascular events with at least one patient characteristic. Results We identified 37 studies that developed 46 prediction models. Thirty-four (74%) models were developed in carotid endarterectomy patients; 27 of these (59%) predicted short-term (in-hospital or within 30 days) risk. Most commonly predicted outcome was stroke or death (n = 12; 26%). Age (n = 31; 67%), diabetes mellitus (n = 21; 46%), heart failure (n = 16; 35%), and contralateral carotid stenosis ≥50% or occlusion (n = 16; 35%) were most commonly used as predictors. For 25 models (54%), it was unclear how missing data were handled; a complete case analysis was performed in 15 (33%) of the remaining 21 models. Twenty-eight (61%) models reported the full regression formula or risk score with risk classification. Twenty-one (46%) models were validated internally and 12 (26%) externally. Discriminative performance (c-statistic) ranged from 0.66 to 0.94 for models after carotid artery stenting and from 0.58 to 0.74 for models after carotid endarterectomy. The c-statistic ranged from 0.55 to 0.72 for the external validations. Discussion Age, diabetes mellitus, heart failure, and contralateral carotid stenosis ≥50% or occlusion were most often used as predictors in all models. Discriminative performance (c-statistic) was higher for prediction models after carotid artery stenting than after carotid endarterectomy. Conclusion The clinical usefulness of most prediction models for short- or long-term outcome after carotid artery stenting or carotid endarterectomy remains unclear because of incomplete reporting, methodological limitations, and lack of external validation.