Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Analysis of Implant Retention and Antibiotic Suppression in Instrumented Spine Infections: A Preliminary Data Set of 67 Patients

ABSTRACT Background: It is unclear whether patients can be taken off suppressive antibiotics with infected retained instrumentation. This study aimed to retrospectively analyze the perioperative course and antibiotic regimen that led to the clinical intervention of patients with infected spinal instrumentation. Methods: Consecutive adult patients with spine instrumentation who suffered surgical site infections (SSI) requiring debridement were retrospectively analyzed. The patients were grouped into 4 cohorts based on their clinical intervention: removal of instrumentation, reinstrumentation, retention of instrumentation with continued antibiotic suppression, and retention of instrumentation with no antibiotic suppression. Patient factors, infection factors, debridement, and antibiosis were compared. Results: Of the 67 patients with SSI after spine surgery and instrumentation, 19 (28%) had their instrumentation removed, 6 (9%) had their instrumentation exchanged, 25 (37%) had their instrumentation retained and were on antibiotic suppression, and 17 (25%) had their instrumentation retained without any suppression. Those who had their instrumentation removed had a later presentation of their infection averaging 85 days (range 6–280 days) postoperatively. There was an earlier presentation for those who retained their implants, with suppression averaging 19 days (range 9–39) and no suppression averaging 29 days (range 6–90 days) post operatively (P < .001). Conclusions: None of the patients with retained instrumentation without suppression had recurrence of infections after long-term follow-up. Lifelong antibiotic suppression may not be required with SSI that present early after early aggressive debridement. Patients with infections detected later are difficult to treat without removal of their original instrumentation. Clinical Relevance: This study presents the outcomes of surgical and antibiotic factors in patients with infected spinal instrumentation.
MultiWOZ - A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling

Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available.To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics.At a size of 10k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora.The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset is two-fold:firstly, a detailed description of the data collection procedure along with a summary of data structure and analysis is provided. The proposed data-collection pipeline is entirely based on crowd-sourcing without the need of hiring professional annotators;secondly, a set of benchmark results of belief tracking, dialogue act and response generation is reported, which shows the usability of the data and sets a baseline for future studies.
Pairwise Preferences in the Stable Marriage Problem

We study the classical, two-sided stable marriage problem under pairwise preferences. In the most general setting, agents are allowed to express their preferences as comparisons of any two of their edges, and they also have the right to declare a draw or even withdraw from such a comparison. This freedom is then gradually restricted as we specify six stages of orderedness in the preferences, ending with the classical case of strictly ordered lists. We study all cases occurring when combining the three known notions of stability—weak, strong, and super-stability—under the assumption that each side of the bipartite market obtains one of the six degrees of orderedness. By designing three polynomial algorithms and two NP-completeness proofs, we determine the complexity of all cases not yet known and thus give an exact boundary in terms of preference structure between tractable and intractable cases.
Statistical Learning Is Not Age-Invariant During Childhood: Performance Improves With Age Across Modality

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood to see whether it is fully developed in infancy or improves with age, like many other cognitive abilities. A recent study showed modality-based differences in the effect of age during childhood: While visual SL improved with age, auditory SL did not. This finding was taken as evidence for modality-based differences in SL. However, since that study used auditory linguistic stimuli (syllables), the differential effect of age may have been driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non-linguistic) rather than modality. Here, we ask whether age will affect performance similarly in the two modalities when non-linguistic auditory stimuli are used (familiar sounds instead of syllables). We conduct a large-scale study of children's performance on visual and non-linguistic auditory SL during childhood (ages 5-12 years). The results show a similar effect of age in both modalities: Unlike previous findings, both visual and non-linguistic auditory SL improved with age. These findings highlight the stimuli-sensitive nature of SL and suggest that modality-based differences may be stimuli-dependent, and that age-invariance may be limited to linguistic stimuli.
Phosphoric Acid Doped Polybenzimidazole (PBI)/Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework Composite Membranes with Significantly Enhanced Proton Conductivity under Low Humidity Conditions

The preparation and characterization of composite polybenzimidazole (PBI) membranes containing zeolitic imidazolate framework 8 (ZIF-8) and zeolitic imidazolate framework 67 (ZIF-67) is reported. The phosphoric acid doped composite membranes display proton conductivity values that increase with increasing temperatures, maintaining their conductivity under anhydrous conditions. The addition of ZIF to the polymeric matrix enhances proton transport relative to the values observed for PBI and ZIFs alone. For example, the proton conductivity of PBI@ZIF-8 reaches 3.1 × 10−3 S·cm−1 at 200 °C and higher values were obtained for PBI@ZIF-67 membranes, with proton conductivities up to 4.1 × 10−2 S·cm−1. Interestingly, a composite membrane containing a 5 wt. % binary mixture of ZIF-8 and ZIF-67 yielded a proton conductivity of 9.2 × 10−2 S·cm−1, showing a synergistic effect on the proton conductivity.
BACE inhibitors in clinical development for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT Introduction: The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affirms that brain accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) oligomers and soluble aggregates represent the major pathological event of the disease. Several anti-Aβ small organic molecules, monoclonal antibodies and antigens were developed to interfere with Aβ production and clearance, including β–site amyloid precursor protein cleaving enzyme (BACE) inhibitors, blocking the first enzymatic step of Aβ formation. All these approaches, including BACE inhibitors, have failed in large randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in mild-to-moderate AD, but further studies are now being carried out in patients at early AD stages and in asymptomatic subjects at risk of developing AD. Areas covered: The paper provides a comprehensive review of BACE inhibitors for AD treatment, focusing on the most advanced compounds in Phase III RCTs. Expert commentary: BACE inhibitors inhibited robustly, and dose-dependently, Aβ formation in cerebrospinal fluid of AD patients, but without cognitive, clinical, or functional benefit in large RCTs. BACE inhibition may be not sufficient to decrease brain Aβ plaques and aggregates. Indeed, several BACE inhibitors were found to be poorly tolerated and some of them failed also in patients with prodromal AD. This may indicate that blocking the formation of nascent Aβ is not useful in AD.
On the robustness and discriminative power of information retrieval metrics for top-N recommendation

The evaluation of Recommender Systems is still an open issue in the field. Despite its limitations, offline evaluation usually constitutes the first step in assessing recommendation methods due to its reduced costs and high reproducibility. Selecting the appropriate metric is a critical and ranking accuracy usually attracts the most attention nowadays. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the advantages of different ranking metrics which were previously used in Information Retrieval and are now used for assessing top-N recommenders. We propose methodologies for comparing the robustness and the discriminative power of different metrics. On the one hand, we study cut-offs and we find that deeper cut-offs offer greater robustness and discriminative power. On the other hand, we find that precision offers high robustness and Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain provides the best discriminative power.
Interwealth Contact and Young Children's Concern for Equity.

This study examined young children's contact with individuals of high-wealth and low-wealth backgrounds and their behavior toward peers of these backgrounds in a resource distribution task. The sample included 72 ethnically diverse higher income children (Mage = 6.68 years, SD = 0.98 years). Contact with individuals of low-wealth backgrounds (interwealth contact) affected children's behavior indirectly, through social-cognitive reasoning processes. The more interwealth contact children reported, the more likely they were to reason about access to resources rather than their own wealth preferences in this context. This reasoning, in turn, was associated with more resources allocated to a low-wealth peer relative to a high-wealth peer. Thus, interwealth contact early in development was associated with more equitable peer interactions.
Attention to Emotional Information Is Associated With Cytokine Responses to Psychological Stress

This study aimed to investigate the impact of mental stress on salivary cytokines and attention to emotional stimuli, as well as associations between stress-induced changes of immune and cognitive parameters. In a randomized order a total of 60 young adults were assigned to one of two stress conditions with varying stress intensity. High stress was induced by a socially evaluated Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT). As a low stress task a paper-and-pencil version of PASAT was administered. Salivary cytokines were measured before, 5 min after, and 45 min after completion of the stress task, and were assayed for pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. Three distinct types of attention – alerting, orienting, and executive control – were measured by the modified Emotional Attention Network Test Integration (E-ANTI). IL-1β and IL-6 increased only in the high-stress group. Significant increases in IFN-α, IFN-γ, TNF-α, and IL-10 at 45 min after stress induction (all p’s < 0.05) were observed in both the high-stress and the low-stress group. Alerting attention was positively related to more pronounced increases in IFN-α and TNF-α in both groups. Further, better orienting attention after presentation of negative cues was associated with higher increases in IFN-α, TNF-α, IL-2, IL-5, and IL-10 in both groups, and higher overall levels of IFN-α, IFN-γ, and IL-12p70 in the high-stress group. There were no systematic gender differences in cytokine responses. We conclude that attention processes modulate the increases of salivary cytokines after stress exposure, and that these effects depend on stress level, particular attention network, and stimulus valence.
Part-Level Convolutional Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection Using Saliency and Boundary Box Alignment

Pedestrians in videos have a wide range of appearance factors, such as body poses, occlusions, and complex backgrounds, which make their detection difficult. Moreover, a proposal shift problem causes the loss of body parts, such as head and legs in pedestrian detection, which further degrades the detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose part-level convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for pedestrian detection using saliency and boundary box (BB) alignment. The proposed network consists of two subnetworks: detection and alignment. In the detection subnetwork, we use saliency to remove false positives, such as lamp posts and trees, by combining a fully convolutional network and a class activation map to extract deep features. Subsequently, we adopt the BB alignment on detection proposals in the alignment subnetwork to overcome the proposal shift problem by applying the part-level CNN to recall the lost body parts. The experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed method remarkably improves accuracy in pedestrian detection and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Innovating SI Units in Maxwell's Equations. Evolutionary Approach to Electrodynamics as an Alternative to the Time-Harmonic Field Concept

A novel format of Maxwell's equations in SI units is proposed. To this aim, the original field vectors, $\mathcal{E}$ and $\mathcal{H}$, are scaled by the specially introduced factors, carrying dimension of volt and ampere, respectively. Maxwell's equations in novel format involve only one dimensional physical constant, namely: the speed of light in vacuum. Maxwell's equations in that format are applied for studying propagation in waveguides of the time-varying waveforms (signals). To this aim, a simplified waveguide version of the evolutionary approach to electrodynamics is presented. Ultimately, modal amplitudes of the signals are expressed via solutions to Klein-Gordon equation, the arguments of which involve axial coordinate $z$ and time $t$ as variables.
Tau Pathology in Parkinson's Disease

Tau protein—a member of the microtubule-associated protein family—is a key protein involved in many neurodegenerative diseases. Tau pathology in neurodegenerative diseases is characterized by pathological tau aggregation in neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). Diseases with this typical pathological feature are called tauopathies. Parkinson's disease (PD) was not initially considered to be a typical tauopathy. However, recent studies have demonstrated increasing evidence of tau pathology in PD. A genome-wide association (GWA) study indicated a potential association between tauopathy and sporadic PD. The aggregation and deposition of tau were also observed in ~50% of PD brains, and it seems to be transported from neuron to neuron. The aggregation of NFTs, the abnormal hyperphosphorylation of tau protein, and the interaction between tau and alpha-synuclein may all contribute to the cell death and poor axonal transport observed in PD and Parkinsonism.
Layer-compensated Pruning for Resource-constrained Convolutional Neural Networks

Resource-efficient convolution neural networks enable not only the intelligence on edge devices but also opportunities in system-level optimization such as scheduling. In this work, we aim to improve the performance of resource-constrained filter pruning by merging two sub-problems commonly considered, i.e., (i) how many filters to prune for each layer and (ii) which filters to prune given a per-layer pruning budget, into a global filter ranking problem. Our framework entails a novel algorithm, dubbed layer-compensated pruning, where meta-learning is involved to determine better solutions. We show empirically that the proposed algorithm is superior to prior art in both effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, we reduce the accuracy gap between the pruned and original networks from 0.9% to 0.7% with 8x reduction in time needed for meta-learning, i.e., from 1 hour down to 7 minutes. To this end, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm using ResNet and MobileNetV2 networks under CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and Bird-200 datasets.
An Adaptive IEEE 802.11ad Indoor mmWave Inner-Receiver Architecture

IAnAdaptiveIEEE802.11ad WLAN system is proposed. The proposed design is a modified version of the well-known Golay Correlator (GC) based inner receiver. The GC synchronizer and channel estimator performance is degraded in the low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) regime due to a fixed threshold. Furthermore, higher throughput may be achieved as a result of an early SNR range indication. In our proposed scheme, an adaptive algorithm optimizes the threshold of the GC based blocks so that it becomes SNR-independent. Moreover, it gives an indication of the SNR of the received signal in an early stage. Signal path is adapted accordingly in several blocks, achiveing higher accuracy at a higher throughput rate. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional GC based inner receivers in different indoor environments.
Differentially Private Contextual Linear Bandits

We study the contextual linear bandit problem, a version of the standard stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where a learner sequentially selects actions to maximize a reward which depends also on a user provided per-round context. Though the context is chosen arbitrarily or adversarially, the reward is assumed to be a stochastic function of a feature vector that encodes the context and selected action. Our goal is to devise private learners for the contextual linear bandit problem. We first show that using the standard definition of differential privacy results in linear regret. So instead, we adopt the notion of joint differential privacy, where we assume that the action chosen on day $t$ is only revealed to user $t$ and thus needn't be kept private that day, only on following days. We give a general scheme converting the classic linear-UCB algorithm into a joint differentially private algorithm using the tree-based algorithm. We then apply either Gaussian noise or Wishart noise to achieve joint-differentially private algorithms and bound the resulting algorithms' regrets. In addition, we give the first lower bound on the additional regret any private algorithms for the MAB problem must incur.
The association between the ring finger protein 213 gene R4810K variant and intracranial major artery stenosis/occlusion in the Han Chinese population and high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging findings

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The ring finger protein 213 (RNF213) gene R4810K variant, a susceptibility locus for moyamoya disease (MMD), has recently been identified to be associated with intracranial major artery stenosis/occlusion (ICASO) without satisfying the diagnostic criteria of MMD in the Japanese population. However, further studies are needed to determine whether this variant is associated with ICASO in other populations and whether R4810K variant-related ICASO could be categorized as MMD. The aim of this study is to elucidate whether the R4810K variant was associated with ICASO among the Han Chinese population and potential histopathology of R4810K variant-related ICASO. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a case–control study to evaluate association and performed high-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate arterial wall feature of ICASO. The R4810K variant was genotyped in 114 ICASO patients and 268 controls. Then, patients with R4810K variant-related ICASO were subjected to HR MRI examination and presumptively diagnosed based on the characteristics thus observed. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: The relationship between R4810K variant and ICASO was evaluated by Fisher's exact test with odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI). RESULTS: The R4810K variant was associated with ICASO and increased the risk for ICASO (P < 0.01; OR: 20.2; 95% CI: 2.5–163.11). Presumptive MMD was diagnosed in all female patients with R4810K variant. However, presumptive intracranial atherosclerotic stenosis was diagnosed in one of three males harboring this variant. CONCLUSIONS: The R4810K variant is a genetic risk factor for ICASO among the Han Chinese population and that R4810K variant-related ICASO should be identified as MMD in female but not uncertain in male patients.
Montelukast abrogates prednisolone‐induced hepatic injury in rats: Modulation of mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative/nitrosative stress, and apoptosis

The aim of this study was to investigate the protective effect of montelukast (MTK) against prednisolone‐induced hepatic injury in rats. Twenty‐eight male albino rats were categorized into four equal groups. Group I served as the control group; group II: rats orally received prednisolone (5 mg·kg−1·d−1) for 30 days; groups III and IV: rats orally received MTK at 10 and 20 mg·kg−1·d−1, respectively, simultaneously with prednisolone for 30 days. Serum liver enzymes, hepatic mitochondrial function, oxidative/nitrosative stress, and inflammatory and apoptotic markers were evaluated, and the results were confirmed by histopathological examination. MTK showed significant hepatic protection evidenced by alleviated histological lesion and improvement of mitochondrial function, oxidative/nitrosative stress, and inflammatory and apoptotic changes induced by prednisolone, with more profound protection in higher MTK dose (20 mg·kg−1). In view of these findings, we can conclude that MTK may have hepatoprotective potential, beyond its therapeutic value for asthmatic patients during their course of corticosteroid therapy.
VTH Instability of  ${p}$ -GaN Gate HEMTs Under Static and Dynamic Gate Stress

The impacts of static and dynamic gate stress on the threshold voltage (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {TH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) instability in Schottky-type <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-GaN gate AlGaN/GaN heterojunction field-effect transistors are experimentally investigated. <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {TH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> shifts negatively under large positive bias static stress (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {G}}\_ {\text {stress}} > 5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> V) by adopting conventional quasi-static characterization techniques. In contrast, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {TH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> under fast-dynamic-stress exhibits positive shift, and a positive frequency dependence occurs within a wide range of frequency from 10 Hz to 1 MHz. The different <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {TH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> instability behavior under static and dynamic stress mainly originates from the time-dependent charges (electrons and holes) storage/release mechanisms in the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-GaN layer, which is floating in the Schottky-type <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-GaN gate HEMT.