Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Erythropoiesis and renal transplant pregnancy

Objective. To examine erythropoiesis in renal transplant pregnancies. Methods. Retrospective cohort study of 30 renal transplant cases and 30 age, smoking and parity‐matched healthy controls with normal index pregnancy. Retrospective chart review and assay of frozen antenatal serum (for serum erythropoietin concentration [serum EPO]), transferrin receptor protein [TfR], ferritin, folate and B12) were performed. The linear regression equation for normal pregnancy controls was used to calculate predicted [serum EPO] and the observed/predicted (O/P) log [serum EPO] was plotted. The relationship between [serum EPO] and haemoglobin (Hb) among transplant cases was considered to be different from that among controls if the slope of the O/P log [serum EPO] versus Hb regression was significantly different from zero. Results. The transplant (14 cadaveric) to conception interval was (median [range]) 33.5 [4, 189] months. Immunosuppressants were azathioprine (n=25), cyclosporine (n=22) and/or prednisone (n=25). Cases were more often primiparous (20 vs. 7 [controls]; p=0.01), had pre‐existent hypertension (20 vs. 0 [controls]; p<0.001), developed new/increased hypertension or pre‐eclampsia (28 vs. 0 [controls]; p<0.001) and an antenatal rise in creatinine (14 vs. 2 [controls]; p<0.001). In early pregnancy, cases had similar EPO (15.2 [2.6, 84.6] vs. 15.7 [6.4, 41.0] [controls] U/L) but lower Hb (101 [65, 129] vs. 116 [106, 150] g/L; p<0.001). Twenty‐two (73%) cases had Hb<100 g/L (vs. 4 [controls]; p<0.0001); Hb was comparable at 6 wk postpartum. With advancing gestational age (GA), Hb remained stable and serum EPO increased in both groups. The slope of the O/P log [serum EPO] versus Hb for transplant cases was significantly different from zero within both the 17–28 wk (slope±SEM: 0.010±0.002; p<0.0001) and the 29–42 wk GA categories (0.006±0.003; p=0.02). Cases showed smaller rises in serum TfR (change 481 [−1 471, 2 780]) vs. 1119 [−698, 4 195] [controls] ng/mL; p=0.005). Conclusions. Anaemia frequently complicates renal transplant pregnancies, in which serum EPO is inappropriately low and the rate of erythropoiesis blunted.
Computer Use, Symptoms, and Quality of Life

Purpose. To model the effects of computer use on reported visual and physical symptoms and to measure the effects upon quality of life measures. Methods. A survey of 1000 university employees (70.5% adjusted response rate) assessed visual and physical symptoms, job, physical and mental demands, ability to control/influence work, amount of work at a computer, computer work environment, relations with others at work, life and job satisfaction, and quality of life. Data were analyzed to determine whether self-reported eye symptoms are associated with perceived quality of life. The study also explored the factors that are associated with eye symptoms. Structural equation modeling and multiple regression analyses were used to assess the hypotheses. Results. Seventy percent of the employees used some form of vision correction during computer use, 2.9% used glasses specifically prescribed for computer use, and 8% had had refractive surgery. Employees spent an average of 6 h per day at the computer. In a multiple regression framework, the latent variable eye symptoms was significantly associated with a composite quality of life variable (p = 0.02) after adjusting for job quality, job satisfaction, supervisor relations, co-worker relations, mental and physical load of the job, and job demand. Age and gender were not significantly associated with symptoms. After adjusting for age, gender, ergonomics, hours at the computer, and exercise, eye symptoms were significantly associated with physical symptoms (p < 0.001) accounting for 48% of the variance. Conclusions. Environmental variability at work was associated with eye symptoms and eye symptoms demonstrated a significant impact on quality of life and physical symptoms.
Concurrent 3D Object Category Learning and Recognition Based on Topic Modelling and Human Feedback

In open-ended domains, autonomous robots must have the ability to continuously process visual information, and execute learning and recognition in a concurrent and interleaved fashion. Because the set of categories to be learned is not predefined, it is not feasible to assume that one can pre-program all object categories required by service robots. Topic modelling approaches usually construct the topics from a training set to recognize objects. However, in open-ended domains, the data available for training increases continuously. If limited training data is used, this might lead to non-discriminative topics and, as a consequence, to poor object recognition performance. This paper proposes an object recognition system capable of learning object categories as well as the topics used to encode objects concurrently and in an open-ended manner. This system provides a robot with the capabilities to, (i) use unsupervised object exploration to construct a dictionary of visual words for representing objects and (ii) conceptualize object experiences and learn new object categories using topic modelling and human feedback. To examine the performance of the system, an on-line evaluation protocol is used to assess the performance of the system in an open-ended setting. The experimental results show the fulfilling performance of this approach on different types of objects.
IMPACT OF BLOOD FLOW OCCLUSION ON LIVER NECROSIS FOLLOWING THERMAL ABLATION

Background: Laser, radiofrequency and microwave are common techniques for local destruction of liver tumours by thermal ablation. The main limitation of thermal ablation treatment is the volume of necrosis that can be achieved. Blood flow occlusion is commonly advocated as an adjunct to thermal ablation to increase the volume of tissue necrosis based on macroscopic and histological assessment of immediate or direct thermal injury. This study examines the impact of blood flow occlusion on direct and indirect laser induced thermal liver injury in a murine model using histochemical methods to assess tissue vitality.
Evolving patterns of HIV-1 resistance to antiretroviral agents in newly infected individuals

ObjectiveTo assess temporal changes in prevalence of transmitted HIV-1 drug resistance in a homogeneous cohort of newly infected individuals. MethodsPretreatment genotypic and phenotypic drug resistance was tested in 154 subjects with primary HIV-1 infection identified between 1995 and 2001 (group A; n = 76) and 1999 and 2001 (group B; n = 78). Sequence analysis was assessed by population-based sequencing. Virus susceptibility to antiretroviral agents was determined by the PhenoSense assay (ViroLogic). ResultsThe frequency of resistance-associated mutations in protease (PR) and reverse transcriptase (RT) genes increased from 13.2% (1995–1998) to 19.7% (1999–2001). Although the overall prevalence of viruses with phenotypic resistance did not vary (1995–1998, 10.0%; 1999–2001, 10.8%), the distribution of drug classes changed [nucleoside RT inhibitor (NRTI): 8.3% to 2.7%; non-NRTI: 5.0% to 8.1%; protease inhibitors (PI): 1.7% to 5.4%]. The decrease of phenotypic resistance to NRTI in 1999–2001 was caused by the absence of transmitted lamivudine-resistant variants. Phenotypically susceptible variants with aspartic acid or serine residues at position 215 of RT (5.3%;P = 0.04) instead emerged. Hypersusceptibility to PI decreased from 18.3% to 5.4% (P = 0.02) while the amino acid substitutions in PR increased over time: M36I (6.6% to 19.7%) and A71V/T (3.9% to 15.8%). ConclusionsThere was an increase in the number of HIV-1 variants with both genotypic and phenotypic resistance to non-NRTI and PI over time. Furthermore, viruses with altered genotypes compatible with thymidine analogue or PI exposure but susceptible phenotypes were seen in 1999–2001. The latter findings suggest transmission of viruses from subjects who have either changed or discontinued therapy.
Atypical and malignant meningiomas: a clinicopathological review.

There has been continuing debate on the subject of malignant meningiomas, but few studies of large series have been reported. We present our experiences with 25 atypical and malignant meningiomas operated on at Henry Ford Hospital between 1976 and 1990. A total of 319 primary intracranial meningiomas were operated on during this period; of these, 294 (92%) were benign, 20 (6.26%) atypical, and 5 (1.7%) malignant. We used a modified histological grading system, based primarily on World Health Organization criteria of malignancy (hypercellularity, loss of architecture, nuclear pleomorphism, mitotic index, tumor necrosis, and brain invasion), to define atypical and malignant meningiomas. Each of these criteria was given a score from 0 to 3, and then partial scores were added to obtain cumulative scores. These total scores were then used to determine what is benign, atypical, and malignant. The peak incidence of atypical and malignant meningiomas was in the seventh and sixth decades, respectively. The predominance of female patients with benign meningiomas was not observed in the nonbenign group. The male:female ratio for atypical and malignant meningiomas was 1:0.9 versus 1:2.3 for benign meningiomas (P = 0.024). The most common presenting symptom and physical sign in our patients was paresis. In reviewing their radiographic features, all patients showed moderate or marked edema on computed tomography. Calcification was exhibited by one patient only and "mushrooming" was seen in three cases. Of the 25 patients, 11 (44%) died during follow-up: 2 in the perioperative period, 8 within the first 5 years, and 1 died 11 years after the diagnosis. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Front‐Running and Market Quality: An Evolutionary Perspective on High Frequency Trading

We study front-running by high-frequency traders (HFTs) in a limit order model with continuous trading. The model describes an evolutionary equilibrium of low-frequency traders who compete in portfolio management services by offering investment styles. The introduction of front-runners inflicts heavy losses on speculators, while leaving passive investors relatively unscathed. This encourages investment in the market portfolio and markedly reduces overall turnover. Speculative trading persists despite its lower profitability. By most measures, market quality is not affected to any significant extent by front-running HFTs.
Extracardiac findings on coronary CT angiograms: Limited versus complete image review.

OBJECTIVE Cardiac CT often reveals findings outside the heart and great vessels. A few cardiologists have suggested that the field of interpretation be restricted to avoid false-positive diagnoses. Radiologists generally favor a comprehensive review to avoid false-negative findings. The purpose of this study was to examine this tradeoff by comparing broad and focused approaches with viewing coronary CT angiograms. MATERIALS AND METHODS Outpatient coronary CT angiography was performed on consecutively registered patients. In the broad approach to review, both the large field-of-view and small field-of-view image sets, including lung windows, were evaluated. In the focused approach, attention was centered on the heart, great vessels, and immediately adjacent structures and did not include lung windows. Each finding was classified as necessitating immediate therapy, timely additional workup, longer-term follow-up, or no action. RESULTS Among 6,920 patients, 1,642 (23.7%) had one or more extracardiac findings for a total of 1,901 findings in the broad viewing scheme. Of the 6,920 patients, 16.2% had a finding necessitating therapy, workup, or follow-up. In the focused viewing scheme, 90.9% of the findings necessitating therapy, 64.1% necessitating workup, and 51.2% necessitating follow-up were missed. Use of the focused approach resulted in fewer false-positive diagnoses, but five malignant tumors of the breast, 88 lung infiltrates, 43 cases of adenopathy, two cases of polycystic kidney disease, one breast abscess, and one case of splenic flexure diverticulitis were missed. CONCLUSION Almost one fourth of all patients who underwent diagnostic coronary CT angiography in this study had extracardiac findings. Several serious diagnoses were missed with the limited viewing approach, but use of the broad viewing approach led to more workup and follow-up imaging.
Elite and amateur orienteers' running biomechanics on three surfaces at three speeds.

PURPOSE Orienteering athletes must adapt to running on various surfaces, with biomechanics likely contributing to performance. Here, our aims were to identify the effect of athletic status and of surface on the running biomechanics of orienteers. METHODS Seven elite and seven amateur male orienteers ran 20 m on road, path, and forest surfaces at maximal, 3.8 m·s, and 85% of maximal speeds. A three-dimensional motion capturing system monitored temporal gait and lower extremity kinematic parameters. Data were analyzed using mixed effects models that considered surface (road-path-forest), group (elite-amateur), and surface-group interaction effects. RESULTS Forest running at maximal speed was slower and involved longer step and cycle times, greater knee extension at foot strike, smaller peak hip flexion and dorsiflexion during stance, and increased ranges of vertical pelvis motion compared with those observed on the road. Elites specifically exhibited greater hip extension at foot strike, larger dorsiflexion at toe-off, and lower pelvis at foot strike and toe-off, whereas amateurs displayed longer stance, greater plantarflexion at foot strike, and greater knee with lesser ankle motion. At the slowest speed, subjects exhibited greater knee flexion at foot strike, greater dorsiflexion at toe-off, shorter strides, smaller peak dorsiflexion during stance, and greater hip, knee, and vertical pelvis motions on forest than on road surfaces. Elites specifically demonstrated shorter stance, step, and cycle times whereas amateurs did not. CONCLUSIONS Orienteering athletes adjusted their running biomechanics when off-road, with distinct adaptations observed in elite versus amateur competitors. The vertical pelvis motion was consistently greater when running off-road, coherent with reported increases in energy expenditure. However, our athletes did not exhibit more crouched lower limb postures when sprinting in the forest, indicating alternative responses to off-road running to that previously proposed by "Groucho" running.
Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities: Local Action for Global Goals

However, city level data of 43 African cities shows that 83% of the population lack toilets that are connected to sewers; for the large cities of Asia it is 55%. In Mahira, a section of Haruma slum in Nairobi, there is one toilet with ten units and two bathrooms for a settlement of 332 households or 1,500 inhabitants. A 1998 survey of 7512 slum households in Ahmedabad found that 80% had no water connection and 93% had to rely on unclean and dirty communal toilets. In other words, what these individual city studies indicate is that if assessment is widened to measure the proportion with access to safe water and those with access to clean toilet facilities the number of urban dwellers who are inadequately served is much higher than officially acknowledged.
Improving solids retention in upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactors at low temperatures using lamella settlers

Lamella settlers were used to increase sludge concentration in pilot scale UASB reactors treating concentrated sewage at low temperature. The aim was to increase sludge retention time (SRT) and achieve better digestion in UASB reactors without the need for increasing the hydraulic retention time (HRT). Two modified UASB reactors were used for this purpose. In the first reactor, lamella settlers were installed in the settling zone of the UASB reactor and the reactor was named UASB-ESR1. In the second reactor, lamella settlers were installed underneath the gas liquid separator (GLS) and the reactor was named UASB-ESR2. The sludge concentration, sludge profile, and system performance of each reactor were monitored. The obtained sludge concentrations were 50 and 53 g TS/l for UASB-ESR1 and UASB-ESR2, respectively. The measured concentrations were almost double the concentrations reported for conventional UASB reactors ranging 16–26 g TS/l. The calculated SRT in the modified UASB reactors was 103 days in both reactors. The average total COD (COD tot ) and suspended COD (COD ss ) removal efficiencies were 38% and 60%, respectively for the UASB-ESR1. The average COD tot and COD ss removal efficiencies for the UASB-ESR2 were 41% and 62%, respectively. The modified reactors were considered at the startup period and the performances of the modified systems are expected to significantly improve when arriving at steady state conditions.
The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Social Determinants in Predicting Accessibility and Barriers to Mental Health Services in the Canadian General Population

There is a tremendous discrepancy between the number of people likely meeting criteria for a mental disorder or substance dependence in Canada and the number of people actually receiving mental health or substance dependence treatment. Thus, it is important to examine what facilitates entrance into the mental health care system and what prevents people from receiving the treatment they need. Mixed findings exist as to whether socioeconomic status (SES) and other social determinants of health play a role in receiving treatment in Canada. However, due to several methodological issues with previous studies that have examined this issue, three studies were designed to re-examine and add to the literature in this area by investigating: (1) whether SES (i.e., income and education) and other social determinants as well as psychological distress predict the number of services received by any professional for any mental disorder or substance dependence, as well as predict overall satisfaction with the services received (2) the psychometric validity and reliability of the 3-factor model proposed by Statistics Canada to measure barriers due to accessibility, acceptability and availability, and (3) whether SES, other social determinants and psychological distress predict specific barriers to receiving mental health treatment for an unmet need. All data were obtained from the Canadian Community Health Survey, cycle 1.2, Mental Health and Wellbeing. In Study 1, the SES/social determinants model predicted the number of services received for both medication and psychotherapy. Out-of-pocket spending, was the strongest predictor of the number of consultations from any provider, however it was also inversely related to overall satisfaction with services. Higher levels of distress predicted greater dissatisfaction with services received. Study 2 revealed that the three factor model of accessibility, acceptability and availability was invalid and unreliable as a measure of barriers to mental health services. It is, therefore, recommended that each specific barrier be
Is time to closure a factor in the occurrence of infection in traumatic wounds? A prospective cohort study in a Dutch level 1 trauma centre

Background The dogma that traumatic wounds should not be sutured after 6 h is based on an animal experiment by P L Friedrich in 1898. There is no adequately powered prospective study on this cut-off of 6 h to confirm or disprove the dogma. The aim of this study was to provide evidence against the dogma that wounds should be sutured within 6 h after trauma. Method 425 patients were included in a prospective cohort study. Patients' wounds were closed, independent of time after trauma. All patients were seen after 7–10 days for removal of stitches and wound control on infection. Results Of the 425 patients, 17 were lost to follow-up. Of the remaining 408 patients, 45 had wounds older than 6 h after trauma. At follow-up 372 patients (91%) had no infection and 36 patients had redness of the suture sites or worse. 11 patients (2.7%) had general redness or pus. Of those with a wound older than 6 h, three of 45 (6.7%) wounds were infected, versus 30 of 363 (9.1%) in wounds younger than 6 h (p=0.59). Conclusion In everyday practice wounds are sutured regardless of elapsed time. Here an attempt was made to present the evidence for this daily routine, contrary to Friedrich's Dogma.
Haddad Syndrome: A Case of an Infant With Central Congenital Hypoventilation Syndrome and Hirschsprung Disease

This report presents an otherwise healthy infant who developed unexplained apnea and long-segment Hirschsprung disease. After extensive evaluation that included a paired-like homeobox 2b gene (PHOX2B) analysis, he was found to have Haddad syndrome, a congenital disorder that features central congenital hypoventilation syndrome in conjunction with Haddad syndrome. Recent work has associated polyalanine repeats within the PHOX2B gene on chromosome 4p12 with central congenital hypoventilation syndrome, whereas PHOX2B knockout mice develop aganglionic bowels.
Comparing Visual-Interactive Labeling with Active Learning: An Experimental Study

Labeling data instances is an important task in machine learning and visual analytics. Both fields provide a broad set of labeling strategies, whereby machine learning (and in particular active learning) follows a rather model-centered approach and visual analytics employs rather user-centered approaches (visual-interactive labeling). Both approaches have individual strengths and weaknesses. In this work, we conduct an experiment with three parts to assess and compare the performance of these different labeling strategies. In our study, we (1) identify different visual labeling strategies for user-centered labeling, (2) investigate strengths and weaknesses of labeling strategies for different labeling tasks and task complexities, and (3) shed light on the effect of using different visual encodings to guide the visual-interactive labeling process. We further compare labeling of single versus multiple instances at a time, and quantify the impact on efficiency. We systematically compare the performance of visual interactive labeling with that of active learning. Our main findings are that visual-interactive labeling can outperform active learning, given the condition that dimension reduction separates well the class distributions. Moreover, using dimension reduction in combination with additional visual encodings that expose the internal state of the learning model turns out to improve the performance of visual-interactive labeling.