Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LTBP2 knockdown by siRNA reverses myocardial oxidative stress injury, fibrosis and remodelling during dilated cardiomyopathy

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is characterised by left ventricular dilation and associated with systolic dysfunction. Recent evidence has reported the high expression of latent transforming growth factor beta binding protein 2 (LTBP2) in heart diseases, which may play a role in regulating multiple biological functions of myocardial cells. Thus, this study set out to investigate the molecular mechanism and effects of LTBP2 in myocardial oxidative stress injury, fibrosis and remodelling in a rat model of DCM, with the involvement of NF‐κB signalling pathway.
Anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor T-cells induce durable remission in relapsed Philadelphia chromosome-positive ALL with T315I mutation

Abstract Effective treatments for relapsed Ph+ALL with T315I mutation are few; CD19 CAR T-cell therapy are a potential therapy for this condition. We reported 7 patients with relapsed Ph+ALL with T315I mutation, who were treated pre- or post-allo-HSCT with CD19-specific CAR T-cells. Of the 7 cases, 6 were in CR or CRp within 1 month after the first infusion of CAR T-cells. MRD revealed a rapid decline in 6 patients. BCR/ABL fusion transcripts were negative in 4/5 cases (not performed in 2). Three patients maintained remission without evidence of MRD by QPCR until the final follow-up, of which 2 received anti-CD19 CAR T-cells and ponatinib at the same time. Our study confirmed the efficacy of anti-CD19 CAR T-cell therapy in treatment of relapsed Ph+ALL with T315I mutation pre- or post-allo-HSCT and the concurrent applicability of this therapy with ponatinib.
The Post-Movement Beta Rebound and Motor-Related Mu Suppression in Children

Abstract Age-related EEG activity change is a prominent feature that reflects the functional development of the brain. The current study investigated the beta and mu rhythms of 16 children (7.7 ± 1.5 years, 5 to 9.6 years) and 13 adults when a self-determining arm motion was performed. The results indicated that mu power was decreased during movement and returned to baseline level after the movement for both children and adults. However, although a decrease in beta power was observed for both children and adults during movement, the post-movement beta power rebound (PMBR) was observed in adults but not in children. These results suggest that motor-related mu suppression develops early in children; PMBR develops later and may be associated with a more prolonged motor development process.
Investigation of Preanalytical Variables Impacting Pathogen Cell-Free DNA in Blood and Urine

Pathogen cell-free DNA (pcfDNA) in blood and urine is an attractive biomarker; however, the impact of preanalytical factors is not well understood. Blood and urine samples from healthy donors spiked with cfDNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Salmonella enterica, Aspergillus fumigatus, and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and samples from tuberculosis patients were used to evaluate the impact of blood collection tube, urine preservative, processing delay, processing method, freezing and thawing, and sample volume on pcfDNA. ABSTRACT Pathogen cell-free DNA (pcfDNA) in blood and urine is an attractive biomarker; however, the impact of preanalytical factors is not well understood. Blood and urine samples from healthy donors spiked with cfDNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Salmonella enterica, Aspergillus fumigatus, and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and samples from tuberculosis patients were used to evaluate the impact of blood collection tube, urine preservative, processing delay, processing method, freezing and thawing, and sample volume on pcfDNA. The PCR cycle threshold (CT) was used to measure amplifiable cfDNA. In spiked samples, the median CT values for M. tuberculosis, S. enterica, and EBV cfDNA were significantly lower in blood collected in K2EDTA tubes than those in Streck and PAXgene blood collection tubes, and they were was significantly lower in urine preserved with EDTA (EDTA-urine) than in urine preserved with Streck reagent (Streck-urine). Blood and urine samples from TB patients preserved with K2EDTA and Tris-EDTA, respectively, showed significantly lower median M. tuberculosis CT values than with the Streck blood collection tube and Streck urine preservative. Processing delay increased the median pathogen CT values for Streck and PAXgene but not K2EDTA blood samples and for urine preserved with Streck reagent but not EDTA. Double-spin compared with single-spin plasma separation increased the median pathogen CT regardless of blood collection tube. No differences were observed between whole urine and supernatant and between fresh and thawed plasma and urine after 24 weeks at –80°C. Larger plasma and urine volumes in contrived and patient samples showed a significantly lower median M. tuberculosis CT. These findings suggest that large-volume single-spin K2EDTA-plasma and EDTA-whole urine with up to a 24-h processing delay may optimize pcfDNA detection.
Retrospective review of maternal deaths in Hawassa Comprehensive Specialised Hospital, in Southern Ethiopia

Abstract The aim of this study was to evaluate the causes of and contributors to maternal death at Hawassa Referral Comprehensive Specialised Hospital (HRCSH). A health facility–based, maternal death review was used. All maternal deaths that occurred between January 2016 and August 2017 in HRCSH were included. Data were collected using a structured data collection sheet and analysed. Eighty-two maternal deaths that occurred over a 20-month period were reviewed, of which 77 met the inclusion criteria. A total of 8466 births occurred in HRCSH during the study period. The overall facility-based maternal mortality rate (MMR) was 910 deaths per 100,000 live births. The majority of maternal deaths (69 deaths; 89.6%) were due to direct causes, with pregnancy-induced hypertension as the leading direct cause of 33 deaths (42.8%). Eight avoidable factors were identified in this review. Twenty-six patients (33.9%) died as a result of a combination of three or more factors. Patient-oriented and transport/referral factors were the most common avoidable factors, with each contributing to 62 deaths (80.5%). Prenatal patients would benefit from receiving information regarding danger signs that could assist in the early detection of health problems and increase the likelihood that they seek health care. Impact Statement What is already known on this subject? Most maternal deaths are preventable. However, maternal mortality rates remain high despite the presence of multiple measures in the southern part of Ethiopia. There is no adequate information about the maternal death rate in the study setting. What do the results of this study add? Hawassa Referral Comprehensive Specialised Hospital is a regional health centre. This study found that combinations of several factors may be contributing to a high maternal death rate. Most notably, transport, delay management initiation after admission and referral factors account for the majority of maternal deaths. What is the implication of these findings for clinical practice/or further research? Identification of potential problems could assist context-based management of problems. It helps in improving the level of practical skills for the management of pregnancy-related complications like hypertension. It also solves problems in the health services system like access to interventions. It insists on intersectoral collaboration to solve the transportation problems.
The attitudes of homeless women in London towards contraception

Abstract Aim: To gain a clearer understanding of the attitudes of homeless women towards contraception in central London. Background: Homeless women are more vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies. This makes it imperative to address the health needs of this population. Evidence regarding the obstacles homeless women face when using contraception and accessing sexual/reproductive care is sparse, and almost non-existent in the United Kingdom (UK). American research has identified past experiences of women suffering side effects and their fear of serious health risks as deterrents of sustained contraceptive use among this population. Method: This study used convenience sampling and semi-structured face-to-face interviews. During the interview, a topic guide was used to ensure data relevant to the study aim were being collected. In total, 14 English-speaking women, previously street homeless and/or living in temporary accommodation from two homeless shelters located in central London, were interviewed. Findings: In summary, the results suggest this group of study respondents find ongoing access to advice on contraception services difficult largely because of their homelessness. This pre-eminent factor alongside their vulnerability inevitably means that other issues take precedence on a daily basis. Furthermore, issues such as individual choice of contraception and the perceptions of this group of women to health professionals ultimately determine whether women receive the services they need. Bearing in mind the paucity of studies in this area of homelessness, the results point to the need for more research and to the allied question ‘how is it best to provide contraceptive services to those women who find themselves homeless? ’
Temporal Trends in the Incidence, Characteristics, and Outcomes of Hanging-Related Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest

Abstract Aim: The aim of this study was to describe temporal trends in the incidence, characteristics, and outcomes of hanging-related out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). Method: A retrospective study of all hanging-related OHCA in Victoria, Australia, between 2000 and 2017 was conducted. Trends in incidence, characteristics, and outcomes were assessed using linear regression and a non-parametric test for trend, as appropriate. Predictors of survival to hospital discharge were identified using multivariable logistic regression. Results: Between 2000 and 2017, emergency medical services (EMS)-attended 3,891 cases of hanging-related OHCA, of which 876 cases (23%) received an attempted resuscitation. The overall incidence rate of EMS-attended cases was 3.8 cases per 100,000 person-years increasing from 2.3 cases per 100,000 person-years in 2000 to 4.7 cases in 2017 (p for trend <0.001). Incidence rates increased approximately two-fold in young adults (18–44 years) and three-fold in middle aged adults (45–64 years). Despite improvement in the rate of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (from 49% in 2000–2005 to 75% in 2012–2017), the survival to hospital discharge rate remained unchanged (3% overall). Among adult survivors with 12-month follow-up (n = 10), five patients responded to telephone interviews. Of those, three (60%) reported severe functional disability. Five patients responded to telephone interviews, of which 3 patients reported severe functional disability. An initial shockable rhythm (OR 23.17, 95% CI: 5.75, 93.36) or pulseless electrical activity (OR 13.14, 95% CI: 4.79, 36.03) were associated with survival. Conclusion: The incidence of hanging-related OHCA doubled over the 18 year period with no change to survival rates. New preventative strategies are needed to reduce the community burden of these events.
Efficient template matching in quantum circuits

Given a large and a small quantum circuit, we are interested in finding all maximal matches of the small circuit, called template, in the large circuit under consideration of pairwise commutation relations between quantum gates. In this work we present a classical algorithm for this task that provably finds all maximal matches with a running time that is polynomial in the number of gates and the number of qubits of the circuit for a fixed template size. Such an algorithm finds direct applications in quantum circuit optimization. Given a template circuit for which a lower-cost implementation is known, we may search for all instances of the template in a large circuit and replace them with their optimized version.
dHybridR: A Hybrid Particle-in-cell Code Including Relativistic Ion Dynamics

We present the first plasma simulations obtained with the code dHybridR, a hybrid particle-in-cell code with fluid electrons and both thermal and energetic ions that retain relativistic dynamics. dHybridR is constructed to study astrophysical and space-physics problems where a few energetic nonthermal particles (i.e., cosmic rays, CRs) affect the overall dynamics of a nonrelativistic plasma, such as CR-driven instabilities, collisionless shocks, magnetic reconnection, turbulence, etc. In this method paper we provide some applications to linear (resonant/nonresonant CR streaming instability) and strongly nonlinear (parallel shocks) problems that show the capabilities of the code. In particular, we provide the first self-consistent hybrid runs that show the acceleration of relativistic ions at nonrelativistic shocks; CRs develop a power law in momentum, which translates into a broken power law in energy that exhibits a steepening around the ion rest mass, as predicted by the theory of diffusive shock acceleration. We present examples of 2D dHybridR runs relevant for fast shocks in radio supernovae, whose evolution can be followed in real time, and 3D runs of low-Mach-number heliospheric shocks, which can be compared with in situ spacecraft observations.
Detecting Robotic Affordances on Novel Objects with Regional Attention and Attributes

This paper presents a framework for predicting affordances of object parts of unseen categories, with application to robot manipulation. The framework generates affordance maps of novel objects within an image via region-based affordance segmentation. Earlier work used category priors while jointly optimizing detection and segmentation to boost accuracy with limited ability to generalize to unknown categories. This work integrates a category-agnostic region proposal network for proposing instance regions of an image across categories. A self-attention mechanism trained to interpret each proposal learns to capture rich contextual dependencies through the region. To further guide affordance learning in the absence of category priors, an auxiliary task of object attribute inference improves local feature learning. Experimental results show that the trained deep network architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on affordance segmentation of novel objects and outperforms several baselines. An ablation study quantifies the effectiveness and contributions of each proposed component. Experiments demonstrate the use of affordance detection on novel objects for vision tasks and for manipulation.
Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Streaming End-to-End Model

Multilingual end-to-end (E2E) models have shown great promise in expansion of automatic speech recognition (ASR) coverage of the world's languages. They have shown improvement over monolingual systems, and have simplified training and serving by eliminating language-specific acoustic, pronunciation, and language models. This work presents an E2E multilingual system which is equipped to operate in low-latency interactive applications, as well as handle a key challenge of real world data: the imbalance in training data across languages. Using nine Indic languages, we compare a variety of techniques, and find that a combination of conditioning on a language vector and training language-specific adapter layers produces the best model. The resulting E2E multilingual model achieves a lower word error rate (WER) than both monolingual E2E models (eight of nine languages) and monolingual conventional systems (all nine languages).
Spectral decimation of the magnetic Laplacian on the Sierpinski gasket: Hofstadter's butterfly, determinants, and loop soup entropy

The magnetic Laplacian (also called the line bundle Laplacian) on a connected weighted graph is a self-adjoint operator wherein the real-valued adjacency weights are replaced by complex-valued weights. When properly interpreted, these complex weights give rise to magnetic fluxes through cycles in the graph. In this paper we establish the spectrum of the magnetic Laplacian on the Sierpinski gasket graph ($SG$) where the magnetic fluxes equal $\alpha$ through the smallest upright triangles, and $\beta$ through the smallest downright triangles. This is achieved upon showing the spectral self-similarity of the magnetic Laplacian via a 3-parameter map involving non-rational functions, which takes into account $\alpha$, $\beta$, and the spectral parameter $\lambda$. When $\alpha,\beta\in \{0,\frac{1}{2}\}$, we can list the eigenvalues according to their multiplicities. When not both $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are in $\{0,\frac{1}{2}\}$, we show that the spectrum is essentially determined by the Julia set of the 3-parameter map. We provide two applications of our results: 1) demonstrate the true Hofstadter's butterfly appearing in the energy spectrum on $SG$ under uniform magnetic field; and 2) compute the magnetic Laplacian determinant which corresponds to the partition function for random cycle-rooted spanning forests on $SG$, derive the corresponding asymptotic complexity, and give its probabilistic interpretation in terms of a "loop soup entropy. "
Constraining the doability of relativistic quantum tasks

We show within the framework of relativistic quantum tasks that the doability of any task is fully determined by what we call its "coarse causal structure", that is the causal relation between each input point and each output point. We do this by introducing a new structure we call a spacetime circuit, with which we make rigorous the notion of a protocol. Using spacetime circuits we show that any protocol that can accomplish a given task can be modified to accomplish all tasks differing from the original by the location of input and output points, which may be changed in any way so long as the coarse causal structure of the task is maintained. Our results strengthen the no-go theorem for position based quantum cryptography to include arbitrary sending and receiving of signals by verifier agents outside the authentication region. Our results also serve as a consistency check for the holographic principle by showing that discrepancies between bulk and boundary causal structure can not cause a task to be doable in one but not the other.
Detection and Classification of UAVs Using RF Fingerprints in the Presence of Interference

This paper investigates the problem of detection and classification of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of wireless interference signals using a passive radio frequency (RF) surveillance system. The system uses a multistage detector to distinguish signals transmitted by a UAV controller from the background noise and interference signals. First, RF signals from any source are detected using a Markov models-based naive Bayes decision mechanism. When the receiver operates at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 10 dB, and the threshold, which defines the states of the models, is set at a level 3.5 times the standard deviation of the preprocessed noise data, a detection accuracy of 99.8% with a false alarm rate of 2.8% is achieved. Second, signals from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth emitters, if present, are detected based on the bandwidth and modulation features of the detected RF signal. Once the input signal is identified as a UAV controller signal, it is classified using machine learning (ML) techniques. Fifteen statistical features extracted from the energy transients of the UAV controller signals are fed to neighborhood component analysis (NCA), and the three most significant features are selected. The performance of the NCA and five different ML classifiers are studied for 15 different types of UAV controllers. A classification accuracy of 98.13% is achieved by k-nearest neighbor classifier at 25 dB SNR. Classification performance is also investigated at different SNR levels and for a set of 17 UAV controllers which includes two pairs from the same UAV controller models.
Efficient and Robust Equilibrium Strategies of Utilities in Day-Ahead Market With Load Uncertainty

We consider the scenario where $N$ utilities strategically bid for electricity in the day-ahead market and balance the mismatch between the committed supply and actual demand in the real-time market, with uncertainty in demand and local renewable generation in consideration. We model the interactions among utilities as a noncooperative game, in which each utility aims atminimizing its per-unit electricity cost. We investigate utilities’ optimal bidding strategies and show that all utilities bidding according to (net load) prediction is a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium with two salient properties. First, it incurs no loss of efficiency; hence, competition among utilities does not increase the social cost. Second, it is robust and (0, $N-1$) fault immune. That is, fault behaviors of irrational utilities only help to reduce other rational utilities’ costs. The expected market supply–demand mismatch is minimized simultaneously, which improves the planning and supply-and-demand matching efficiency of the electricity supply chain. We prove the results hold under the settings of correlated prediction errors and a general class of real-time spot pricing models, which capture the relationship between the spot price, the day-ahead clearing price, and the market-level mismatch. Simulations based on real-world traces corroborate our theoretical findings. Our article adds new insights to market mechanism design. In particular, we derive a set of fairly general sufficient conditions for the market operator to design real-time pricing schemes so that the interactions among utilities admit the desired equilibrium.
Variable Hα Emission in the Nebular Spectra of the Low-luminosity Type Ia SN2018cqj/ATLAS18qtd

We present optical photometry and spectroscopy of the Type Ia supernova SN2018cqj/ATLAS18qtd. The supernova exploded in an isolated region at ∼65 kpc from the S0 galaxy IC 550 at z = 0.0165 (D ≈ 74 Mpc) and has a redshift consistent with a physical association to this galaxy. Multicolor photometry show that SN2018cqj/ATLAS18qtd is a low-luminosity ( mag), fast-declining Type Ia, with color stretch sBV ≈ 0.6 and B-band decline rate Δm15(B) ≈ 1.77 mag. Two nebular-phase spectra obtained as part of the 100IAS survey at +193 and +307 days after peak show the clear detection of a narrow Hα line in emission that is resolved in the first spectrum with FWHM ≈ 1200 km s−1 and LHα ≈ 3.8 × 1037 erg s−1. The detection of a resolved Hα line with a declining luminosity is broadly consistent with recent models where hydrogen is stripped from the nondegenerate companion in a single-degenerate progenitor system. However, the amount of hydrogen consistent with the luminosities of the Hα line would be ∼10−3 M⊙, which is significantly less than theoretical model predictions in the classical single-degenerate progenitor systems. SN2018cqj/ATLAS18qtd is the second low-luminosity, fast-declining SN Ia after SN2018fhw/ASASSN-18tb that shows narrow Hα in emission in its nebular-phase spectra.