Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arthroscopic debridement for knee osteoarthritis.

BACKGROUND Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a progressive disease that initially affects the articular cartilage. Observational studies have shown benefits for arthroscopic debridement (AD) on the osteoarthritic knee, but other recent studies have yielded conflicting results that suggest AD may not be effective. OBJECTIVES To identify the effectiveness of AD in knee OA on pain and function. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library Issue 2, 2006); MEDLINE (1966 to August, 2006); CINAHL (1982 to 2006); EMBASE (1988 to 2006) and Web of Science (1900 to 2006) and screened the bibliographies, reference lists and cited web sites of papers. SELECTION CRITERIA We included randomised controlled trials (RCT) or controlled clinical trials (CCT) assessing effectiveness of AD compared to another surgical procedure, including sham or placebo surgery and other non-surgical interventions, in patients with a diagnosis of primary or secondary OA of the knees, who did not have other joint involvement or conditions requiring long term use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). The main outcomes were pain relief and improved function of the knee. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two review authors independently selected trials for inclusion, assessed trial quality and extracted the data. Results are presented using weighted mean difference (WMD) for continuous data and relative risk (RR) for dichotomous data, and the number needed to treat to benefit (NNTB) or harm (NNTH). MAIN RESULTS Three RCTs were included with a total of 271 patients. They had different comparison groups and a moderate risk of bias. One study compared AD with lavage and with sham surgery. Compared to lavage the study found no significant difference. Compared to sham surgery placebo, the study found worse outcomes for AD at two weeks (WMD for pain 8.7, 95% CI 1.7 to 15.8, and function 7.7, 95% CI 1.1 to 14.3; NNTH=5) and no significant difference at two years. The second trial, at higher risk of bias, compared AD and arthroscopic washout, and found that AD significantly reduced knee pain compared to washout at five years (RR 5.5, 95% CI 1.7 to 15.5; NNTB=3). The third trial, also at higher risk of bias, compared AD to closed-needle lavage, and found no significant difference. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS There is 'gold' level evidence that AD has no benefit for undiscriminated OA (mechanical or inflammatory causes).
Comparative study of isoflurane and ketamine anesthetics in Rabbits

The current study was aimed to establish best anesthetic protocols in rabbit, for this purpose six clinically healthy male New Zealand White rabbits weighing 2±00 kg were procured. All rabbits received two anesthetic treatments with one week interval. Treatment: A Ketamine 35 mg/kg IM and Xylazine 5 mg/kg IM, Treatment B: Isoflurane (3 to 5 %) through facemask followed by Xylazine 5 mg/kg IM. Physiological parameters such as, heart rate, rectal temperature and respiratory rate were recorded before and after administration of anesthetics in all animals. Heart rate of all animals significantly (P<0.05) decreased with Xylazine and increased significantly (P<0.05) with Ketamine at 10 minutes and at 15 minutes with Isoflurane after induction of anesthesia. Respiratory rates were significantly decreased (P<0.05) at 15 and 10 minutes in Group A and B respectively. No significant difference was observed in rectal temperature in both treatment groups. The onset and degree of sedation was non-significant (P>0.05) in both treatment groups. Induction of anesthesia was same in both treatment groups and was non-significant at (P>0.05). Isoflurane showed a significantly (P<0.05) longer duration of Anesthesia compared to Ketamine. Relaxation of muscle increased significantly (P<0.05) with Isoflurane compared to ketamine. Duration of analgesia and recovery from anesthesia was also found significant (P<0.05) with Isoflurane compared with ketamine. It was concluded that Isoflurane is the safe anesthetic agent for rabbits as an alternative of ketamine for longer duration of anesthesia and smooth recovery with enhanced analgesia.
Age‐related microvascular dysfunction: novel insight from near‐infrared spectroscopy

What is the central question of this study? Can near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)‐derived post‐occlusion tissue oxygen saturation recovery kinetics be used to study age‐related impairments in microvascular function? What is the main finding and its importance? Using a previously established 5 min cuff occlusion protocol, we found that NIRS‐derived indices of microvascular function were markedly reduced in elderly compared with young participants. However, when we controlled for the absolute level of vasodilatory stimulus and matched the tissue desaturation level between groups, we found similar responses in young and elderly participants. Overall, these data highlight the important role NIRS can serve in clinical vascular biology, but also establish the need for assessing tissue ischaemia during cuff occlusion protocols.
Exploiting link types during the conceptual design of websites

With recent developments in World Wide Web technology, expressiveness of websites and web applications is starting to converge to the functionality offered by Open Hypermedia Systems. In this paper, we examine how link typing, and an appropriate link definition can be used during the website design process. Different existing approaches to link categorisation are reviewed before going into closer detail to the concept of link and its properties. Next, four different types of links are defined, with a description of how each of them can be exploited to enhance the design process as well as the usability of the website. Explicitly modelling the links as belonging to one of these four categories during the design phase allows separaration of concerns during the modelling process; provides for clearer design guidelines; allows for better usability, multiple customised presentations, and other automatically generated enhancements to websites (e.g. site map, in-page navigation structures, etc). The approach is presented in the context of WSDM, an audience driven website design method, but the principles are generally applicable.
Axonal accumulation of synaptic markers in APP transgenic Drosophila depends on the NPTY motif and is paralleled by defects in synaptic plasticity

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by neurofibrillary tangles and extracellular plaques, which consist mainly of β‐amyloid derived from the β‐amyloid precursor protein (APP). An additional feature of AD is axonopathy, which might contribute to impairment of cognitive functions. Specifically, axonal transport defects have been reported in AD animal models, including mice and flies that overexpress APP and tau. Here we demonstrate that the APP‐induced traffic jam of vesicles in peripheral nerves of Drosophila melanogaster larvae depends on the four residues NPTY motif in the APP intracellular domain. Furthermore, heterologous expression of Fe65 and JIP1b, scaffolding proteins interacting with the NPTY motif, also perturb axonal transport. Together, these data indicate that JIP1b or Fe65 may be involved in the APP‐induced axonal transport defect. Moreover, we have characterized neurotransmission at the neuromuscular junction in transgenic larvae that express human APP. Consistent with the observation that these larvae do not show any obvious movement deficits, we found no changes in basal synaptic transmission. However, short‐term synaptic plasticity was affected by overexpression of APP. Together, our results show that overexpression of APP induces partial stalling of axonal transport vesicles, paralleled by abnormalities in synaptic plasticity, which may provide a functional link to the deterioration of cognitive functions observed in AD.
A comparison of two starting doses of human menopausal gonadotrophin for follicle stimulation in unselected patients for in-vitro fertilization.

Ovarian responses and embryology data were compared in patients undergoing in-vitro fertilization following follicular stimulation using long course gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogue/human menopausal gonadotrophin (HMG) in which the initial daily dose was two (150 IU) or three ampoules (225 IU) maintained for a minimum of 7 days. Group 1 (n = 31; centre A) patients were treated with a starting dose of two ampoules, while group 2 (n = 46; centre A) patients were treated chronologically immediately before group 1 with a starting dose of three ampoules per day. Group 3 (n = 74; centre B) patients were treated with three ampoules per day simultaneously with group 1. There was no difference in the distributions of patient ages or reasons for treatment between the three groups. Group 1 required longer treatment before the plasma oestradiol attained 250 pg/ml than did both the other groups (group 1, 9.0; group 2, 6.9; group 3, 6.7 days; P < 0.01), and this resulted in a longer follicular phase for group 1 (mean: 14.5 days compared with 12.7 and 12.8 for groups 2 and 3 respectively; P < 0.05). The numbers of follicles > 16 mm in diameter at human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) administration and the numbers of eggs and embryos were all significantly lower (P < 0.04) in group 1, and cycle cancellations due to insufficient ovarian responses were higher (P < 0.02) in group 1. There was no difference in the numbers of ampoules used, the oestradiol concentration at HCG, the fertilization and pregnancy rates or the incidence of hyperstimulation syndrome in the three groups. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Disambiguating Temporal Connectors into TimeML relations

The project is about learning temporal relations from unannotated text. This e ort builds on the work of Lapata and Lascarides (2006), who developed a system that uses temporal connectors (after, before, while, when, as, once, until and since) in unannotated text to build a system to determine intra-sentential temporal relations. In an extension of this approach, they used their system to determine TimeML relations (before, includes, begins, ends and simultaneous) between events. Since temporal connectors do not translate one-to-one to TimeML relations, the main focus of this project is on disambiguating the temporal connectors into TimeML relations to preprocess the training data and use the system to directly learn the TimeML relations. This will be done using a rule-based system and will be evaluated on the TimeBank corpus.
Silver concentrations in Colorado, USA, watersheds using improved methodology

River water samples were collected at five sites in the state of Colorado, USA, to assess the impact of municipal and industrial discharges on Ag concentrations and speciation in surface waters. Samples were collected and analyzed for total (unfiltered collections), filtered (0.1 and 0.4 μm), particulate (≥0.45 μm), and colloidal Ag (3 kDa‐0.1 μm) using ultraclean protocols. A series of laboratory experiments were conducted to assess bias from sample storage, digestion, and preconcentration protocols. In general, upstream unfiltered and particulate Ag concentrations fell within a fairly narrow range, 3.1 to 21 ng/L and 0.2 to 1.7 μg/g, respectively. Downstream unfiltered and particulate Ag concentrations showed a more broad range, 2.8 to 1,110 ng/L and 0.5 to 104 μLg/g, respectively, and reflected attenuated impacts of Ag‐laden discharge effluents. However, Ag concentrations in the 0.1‐μm filter‐passing fraction 0.8 to 1.2 km downstream from major treatment plant effluents were all below the chronic silver criteria. On average, more than 60% of the 0.1‐μm filter‐passing Ag was associated with colloidal macromolecular organic matter. Silver concentrations in colloids (μg/g) were, on average, the same as those in suspended particulate matter. The percentage abundance of colloidal Ag was similar to that of dissolved organic carbon, suggesting that strong Ag binding ligands exist in both the colloidal and the particle size fractions, as these macromolecular ligands likely play a major role in Ag speciation.
Are Firms Successful at Selectively Hedging?

We analyze the corporate risk management policies of 44 companies in the gold mining industry. Firms tend to decrease hedging as prices move against them—behavior contrary to that predicted by risk management theory. These results, along with new survey evidence, suggest that firms attempt to time market prices, so-called selective hedging. Although estimates show a statistically significant ability of producers to favorably adjust hedge ratios, this can be attributed to sample-specific negative autocorrelation in gold prices. Economic gains to selective hedging are small, and no evidence suggests that selective hedging leads to superior operating or financial performance.
Prevalence of Thermotolerant Campylobacter spp. in Chicken Meat in Croatia and Multilocus Sequence Typing of a Small Subset of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli Isolates.

In order to detect thermotolerant Campylobacter spp. , 241 samples of fresh chicken meat, at retail in Croatia, were analysed according to a standard method, followed by biochemical test and molecular polymerase chain reaction/restriction enzyme analysis for exact species determination. Campylobacter spp. prevalence was 73.86%. Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli were isolated from 53.53 and 15.35% of the samples, respectively. In 4.98% of isolates thermotolerant Campylobacter spp. were not determined. The multilocus sequence typing method was used to evaluate genetic diversity of eight Campylobacter jejuni and four Campylobacter coli isolates. To our knowledge, these results of genotyping provided the first data on the presence of sequence types (STs) and clonal complexes (CCs) of Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli isolates in Croatia. By applying the multilocus sequence typing, a new allele of tkt gene locus was discovered and marked tkt508. The C. jejuni ST 6182 and C. coli ST 6183 genotypes were described for the first time, and all other identified genotypes were clustered in the previously described sequence types and clonal complexes. These findings provide useful information on the prevalence and epidemiology of Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli in Croatia.
WASP: A WSI Associative String Processor

ASP (Associative String Processor) modules (and support software) comprise highly-versatile and fault-tolerant building-blocks for the simple construction of dynamically-reconfigurable low-MIMD/high-SIMD second-generation Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) systems. Indeed, based on state-of-the-art microelectronics and packaging technologies, ASP modules constitute a family of packaged MPP configurations for the cost-effective implementation of highly-compact application-specific high performance information processing systems.Based on scalar-vector content-matching rather than location addressing, ASP substrings comprise homogeneous fine-grain SIMD MPP structures, which, in operation, execute a form of set processing (i.e. a sequence of scalar-vector and vector-vector processes) on relevant data. Moreover, application flexibility enables simple tailoring of parallel processing power to match user requirements.WASP devices are WSI (Wafer Scale Integration) implementations of ASP substrings and, as such, constitute fundamental building blocks for the assembly of ASP modules. Exploiting either monolithic or hybrid 1 μm CMOS WSI technologies, 8,192-processor WASP devices would enable the assembly of 65,536-processor SEM-E compatible ASP modules achieving 10 Tera-OPS/ft3, 1 Giga-OPS/W and 1 Mega-OPS/$ in cost-effectiveness.The paper discusses second-generation MPP design targets and describes ASP modules for real-time signal and data processing applications. In particular, the paper focuses on the architecture, operation, and implementation of the WASP device and reports on the progress of its development.
Application of Insecticides to Vegetation as Barriers Against Host-Seeking Mosquitoes

ABSTRACT The application of insecticides to perimeter vegetation for the purpose of controlling adult mosquitoes in backyards and other recreational areas has generated renewed interest among the general public. Several pyrethroids have been labeled for this use and provided, depending on chemical and formulation, up to ≈6 wk of acceptable adult mosquito reduction. A review of past work in this area is presented. In addition, results from a recent field study by the author to determine the residual effectiveness of bifenthrin-treated vegetation as a barrier against adult mosquitoes in northwestern Florida is also presented. Bifenthrin (TalstarOne™) suppressed mosquito populations in the treatment area below an annoyance action threshold of 25 mosquitoes per night in carbon dioxide-baited light traps for 5 out of the 8-wk study. Excised leaf bioassays conducted at the same time as trap collections revealed that bifenthrin-treated leaves exhibited >70% knockdown/mortality against laboratory-reared female Aedes albopictus and Culex quinquefasciatus for 4 of those weeks.
A continuous deployment-based approach for the collaborative creation, maintenance, testing and deployment of CityGML models

ABSTRACT Georeferenced 3D models are an increasingly common choice to store and display urban data in many application areas. CityGML is an open and standardized data model, and exchange format that provides common semantics for 3D city entities and their relations and one of the most common options for this kind of information. Currently, creating and maintaining CityGML models is costly and difficult. This is in part because both the creation of the geometries and the semantic annotation can be complex processes that require at least some manual work. In fact, many publicly available CityGML models have errors. This paper proposes a method to facilitate the regular maintenance of correct city models in CityGML. This method is based on the continuous deployment strategy and tools used in software development, but adapted to the problem of creating, maintaining and deploying CityGML models, even when several people are working on them at the same time. The method requires designing and implementing CityGML deployment pipelines. These pipelines are automatic implementations of the process of building, testing and deploying CityGML models. These pipelines must be run by the maintainers of the models when they make changes that are intended to be shared with others. The pipelines execute increasingly complex automatic tests in order to detect errors as soon as possible, and can even automate the deployment step, where the CityGML models are made available to their end users. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this method, and as an example of its application, a CityGML deployment pipeline has been developed for an example scenario where three actors maintain the same city model. This scenario is representative of the kind of problems that this method intends to solve, and it is based on real work in progress. The main benefits of this method are the automation of model testing, every change to the model is tested in a repeatable way; the automation of the model deployment, every change to the model can reach its end users as fast as possible; the systematic approach to integrating changes made by different people working together on the models, including the possibility of keeping parallel versions with a common core; an automatic record of every change made to the models (who did what and when) and the possibility of undoing some of those changes at any time.
Successful mucosal immunization of cotton rats in the presence of measles virus-specific antibodies depends on degree of attenuation of vaccine vector and virus dose.

After passive transfer of measles virus (MV)-specific antibodies, vaccine-induced seroconversion and subsequent protection is inhibited in cotton rats (Sigmodon hispidus). In this system, an attenuated, recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus expressing the MV haemagglutinin (VSV-H) was found previously to induce neutralizing antibodies and protection against MV challenge after intranasal (i.n.) immunization. Here it is demonstrated that, after i.n. immunization, VSV-H is found in both lung and brain tissue in the absence of clinical signs. Intratracheal inoculation, which does not lead to infection of the brain, proved that immunization via the lung mucosa is sufficient to protect. To reduce or eliminate infection of the brain after i.n. inoculation, stepwise-attenuated VSV-H mutants with truncated cytoplasmic tails of the G protein were tested in cotton rats. A mutant with 9 aa in the G cytoplasmic tail was found at much lower levels in the brain and was protective in the absence or presence of MV-specific antibodies. A more attenuated mutant containing only 1 aa in its tail was not found in brain tissue after inoculation, but it still induced protective antibody to measles in the absence of MV-specific antibody. However, its ability to induce MV-neutralizing antibodies in the presence of passively transferred MV-specific antibodies and its protective capacity was abolished unless higher-dose immunizations were used. This study demonstrates that a lower degree of attenuation is required to be able to immunize in the presence of MV-specific antibodies.
Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing: a Standardized Approach for Molecular Typing of Mycoplasma gallisepticum

ABSTRACT Mycoplasma gallisepticum is the most virulent and economically important Mycoplasma species for poultry worldwide. Currently, M. gallisepticum strain differentiation based on sequence analysis of 5 loci remains insufficient for accurate outbreak investigation. Recently, whole-genome sequences (WGS) of many human and animal pathogens have been successfully used for microbial outbreak investigations. However, the massive sequence data and the diverse properties of different genes within bacterial genomes results in a lack of standard reproducible methods for comparisons among M. gallisepticum whole genomes. Here, we proposed the development of a core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) scheme for M. gallisepticum strains and field isolates. For development of this scheme, a diverse collection of 37 M. gallisepticum genomes was used to identify cgMLST targets. A total of 425 M. gallisepticum conserved genes (49.85% of M. gallisepticum genome) were selected as core genome targets. A total of 81 M. gallisepticum genomes from 5 countries on 4 continents were typed using M. gallisepticum cgMLST. Analyses of phylogenetic trees generated by cgMLST displayed a high degree of agreement with geographical and temporal information. Moreover, the high discriminatory power of cgMLST allowed differentiation between M. gallisepticum strains of the same outbreak. M. gallisepticum cgMLST represents a standardized, accurate, highly discriminatory, and reproducible method for differentiation among M. gallisepticum isolates. cgMLST provides stable and expandable nomenclature, allowing for comparison and sharing of typing results among laboratories worldwide. cgMLST offers an opportunity to harness the tremendous power of next-generation sequencing technology in applied avian mycoplasma epidemiology at both local and global levels.