Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intravenous thrombolysis in acute ischemic stroke: standard and potential future applications

Acute ischemic stroke is a medical emergency requiring urgent treatment. Randomized clinical trial and Phase IV data have provided unequivocal evidence that intravenous thrombolysis with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) improves early functional outcomes by restoring brain perfusion. Moreover, these studies have shed substantial light on the factors which are associated with more favorable outcome with tPA and are related to the highest benefit-to-risk ratio. Stroke physicians should consider vascular imaging techniques to aid decision making with thrombolytic therapy. The presence of intracranial occlusion is the target of treatment with early recanalization being the goal. Successful use of intravenous thrombolysis depends on a sound understanding of the decision-making process and organization of the treating team who strives for early treatment initiation and strict adherence to the protocol. Intravenous rt-PA within 4.5 h of onset should now be a standard treatment of acute disabling ischemic stroke throughout the world. This review also summarizes intravenous thrombolysis contraindications as well as the safety of novel reperfusion therapies including tenecteplase, sonothrombolysis and the combination of alteplase with direct thrombin inhibitors or glycoprotein IIb/IIIa receptor antagonists.
Knowledge of and attitude towards cervical cancer among female university students in South Africa

The objectives of this descriptive cross-sectional study were to assess the knowledge of the risk factors associated with, and detection methods of cervical cancer among female undergraduate students at Mangosuthu University of Technology. A total of 389 students were selected by stratifed random sampling techniques. Participants' mean age was 20 years (SD=2). Results indicated that 51.2% students were currently involved in a sexual relationship, with 19.2% reporting two or more sexual partners in the past year. Less than half (42.9%) of the participants had heard of cervical cancer and of these, 26 (15.6%) did not know any risk factors for cervical cancer, while 96 (58.6%) of 164 participants who knew of risk factors, did not know that cervical cancer is preventable. One-hundred and sixty-three (41.9%) participants had heard about the Pap smear test. That the Pap smear test is used for detection or prevention of cervical cancer, was known to 62 (38%) of the respondents. Only 16 (9.8%) participants had ha.
From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification"

Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as "gamification", this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how "gamification" relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate "gamification" and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that "gamified" applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of "gamification" as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.
Therapeutic strategies for relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis: a special focus on reduction of grey matter damage as measured by brain atrophy

In the past two decades, several pathological and radiological findings convincingly demonstrated that damage of the cortical and deep grey matter is a key issue in multiple sclerosis with a significant impact on physical and cognitive disability. Moreover, it has become increasingly evident that the effect of available therapies on the inflammatory white matter damage is not a guarantee of a meaningful effect on the neurodegenerative process mainly affecting the grey matter. Despite the efficacy of all approved disease-modifying drugs should be measured considering such a relevant aspect of the disease, data from clinical trials are few, scattered and heterogeneous. The aim of this review is to summarize the evidence so far acquired on the effect of reducing grey matter damage produced by current and emerging disease-modifying therapies for multiple sclerosis.
Anaplastic glioma: current treatment and management

Anaplastic glioma (AG) is divided into three morphology-based groups (anaplastic astrocytoma, anaplastic oligodendroglioma, anaplastic oligoastrocytoma) as well as three molecular groups (glioma-CpG island methylation phenotype [G-CIMP] negative, G-CIMP positive non-1p19q codeleted tumors and G-CIMP positive codeleted tumors). The RTOG 9402 and EORTC 26951 trials established radiotherapy plus (procarbazine, lomustine, vincristine) chemotherapy as the standard of care in 1p/19q codeleted AG. Uni- or non-codeleted AG are currently best treated with radiotherapy only or alkylator-based chemotherapy only as determined by the NOA-04 trial. Maturation of NOA-04 and results of the currently accruing studies, CODEL (for codeleted AG) and CATNON (for uni or non-codeleted AG), will likely refine current up-front treatment recommendations for AG.
Clinical development of curcumin in neurodegenerative disease

Curcumin, a polyphenolic antioxidant derived from the turmeric root has undergone extensive preclinical development, showing remarkable efficacy in wound repair, cancer and inflammatory disorders. This review addresses the rationale for its use in neurodegenerative disease, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. Curcumin is a pleiotropic molecule, which not only directly binds to and limits aggregation of the β-sheet conformations of amyloid characteristic of many neurodegenerative diseases but also restores homeostasis of the inflammatory system, boosts the heat shock system to enhance clearance of toxic aggregates, scavenges free radicals, chelates iron and induces anti-oxidant response elements. Although curcumin corrects dysregulation of multiple pathways, it may exert many effects via a few molecular targets. Pharmaceutical development of natural compounds like curcumin and synthetic derivatives have strong scientific rationale, but will require overcoming various hurdles including; high cost of trials, concern about profitability and misconceptions about drug specificity, stability, and bioavailability.
Analysing child deaths and serious injury through abuse and neglect : what can we learn? : a biennial analysis of serious case reviews 2003-2005

Serious case reviews are carried out when abuse and neglect are known or suspected factors when a child dies (or is seriously injured or harmed), and there are lessons to be learnt about inter-agency working to protect children. At least every two years, an overview analysis of serious case reviews in England is conducted to draw out themes and trends, so that lessons learnt from these cases as a whole can inform both policy and practice. This is the third such overview analysis and involved a near-total sample of 161 cases.
Front, side, and back-loading: Patrons' rationales for consuming alcohol purchased off-premises before, during, or after attending nightclubs

Aims: To examine motivations for consumption of alcohol purchased off-trade when visiting on-trade licensed premises. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with nightclub patrons who also completed a drinking diary, detailing the time and place their previous week's alcohol consumption. Results: Drinking before entering nightclubs was the norm, although the location and extent of this ‘front-loading’ varied. Consuming alcohol purchased elsewhere while attending nightclubs (‘side-loading’) or continued drinking after leaving these premises (‘back-loading’) were reported much less frequently. Interviewees reported a range of psychosocial motives for consuming alcohol before or after night-club attendance, rather than a single reason (e.g. cost) Conclusions: The findings of this research imply that off-premises alcohol consumption by night-clubbers is widespread and motivated as much by the structure of the night-time economy as by price differentials between competing sectors of the licensed trade.
Functional maps

We present a novel representation of maps between pairs of shapes that allows for efficient inference and manipulation. Key to our approach is a generalization of the notion of map that puts in correspondence real-valued functions rather than points on the shapes. By choosing a multi-scale basis for the function space on each shape, such as the eigenfunctions of its Laplace-Beltrami operator, we obtain a representation of a map that is very compact, yet fully suitable for global inference. Perhaps more remarkably, most natural constraints on a map, such as descriptor preservation, landmark correspondences, part preservation and operator commutativity become linear in this formulation. Moreover, the representation naturally supports certain algebraic operations such as map sum, difference and composition, and enables a number of applications, such as function or annotation transfer without establishing point-to-point correspondences. We exploit these properties to devise an efficient shape matching method, at the core of which is a single linear solve. The new method achieves state-of-the-art results on an isometric shape matching benchmark. We also show how this representation can be used to improve the quality of maps produced by existing shape matching methods, and illustrate its usefulness in segmentation transfer and joint analysis of shape collections.
Practical temporal consistency for image-based graphics applications

We present an efficient and simple method for introducing temporal consistency to a large class of optimization driven image-based computer graphics problems. Our method extends recent work in edge-aware filtering, approximating costly global regularization with a fast iterative joint filtering operation. Using this representation, we can achieve tremendous efficiency gains both in terms of memory requirements and running time. This enables us to process entire shots at once, taking advantage of supporting information that exists across far away frames, something that is difficult with existing approaches due to the computational burden of video data. Our method is able to filter along motion paths using an iterative approach that simultaneously uses and estimates per-pixel optical flow vectors. We demonstrate its utility by creating temporally consistent results for a number of applications including optical flow, disparity estimation, colorization, scribble propagation, sparse data up-sampling, and visual saliency computation.
DRAPE

We describe a complete system for animating realistic clothing on synthetic bodies of any shape and pose without manual intervention. The key component of the method is a model of clothing called DRAPE (DRessing Any PErson) that is learned from a physics-based simulation of clothing on bodies of different shapes and poses. The DRAPE model has the desirable property of "factoring" clothing deformations due to body shape from those due to pose variation. This factorization provides an approximation to the physical clothing deformation and greatly simplifies clothing synthesis. Given a parameterized model of the human body with known shape and pose parameters, we describe an algorithm that dresses the body with a garment that is customized to fit and possesses realistic wrinkles. DRAPE can be used to dress static bodies or animated sequences with a learned model of the cloth dynamics. Since the method is fully automated, it is appropriate for dressing large numbers of virtual characters of varying shape. The method is significantly more efficient than physical simulation.
Learning aspects and potential pitfalls regarding detection of pulmonary nodules in chest tomosynthesis and proposed related quality criteria

Background In chest tomosynthesis, low-dose projections collected over a limited angular range are used for reconstruction of an arbitrary number of section images of the chest, resulting in a moderately increased radiation dose compared to chest radiography. Purpose To investigate the effects of learning with feedback on the detection of pulmonary nodules for observers with varying experience of chest tomosynthesis, to identify pitfalls regarding detection of pulmonary nodules, and present suggestions for how to avoid them, and to adapt the European quality criteria for chest radiography and computed tomography (CT) to chest tomosynthesis. Material and Methods Six observers analyzed tomosynthesis cases for presence of nodules in a jackknife alternative free-response receiver-operating characteristics (JAFROC) study. CT was used as reference. The same tomosynthesis cases were analyzed before and after learning with feedback, which included a collective learning session. The difference in performance between the two readings was calculated using the JAFROC figure of merit as principal measure of detectability. Results Significant improvement in performance after learning with feedback was found only for observers inexperienced in tomosynthesis. At the collective learning session, localization of pleural and subpleural nodules or structures was identified as the main difficulty in analyzing tomosynthesis images. Conclusion The results indicate that inexperienced observers can reach a high level of performance regarding nodule detection in tomosynthesis after learning with feedback and that the main problem with chest tomosynthesis is related to the limited depth resolution.
How do humans sketch objects?

Humans have used sketching to depict our visual world since prehistoric times. Even today, sketching is possibly the only rendering technique readily available to all humans. This paper is the first large scale exploration of human sketches. We analyze the distribution of non-expert sketches of everyday objects such as 'teapot' or 'car'. We ask humans to sketch objects of a given category and gather 20,000 unique sketches evenly distributed over 250 object categories. With this dataset we perform a perceptual study and find that humans can correctly identify the object category of a sketch 73% of the time. We compare human performance against computational recognition methods. We develop a bag-of-features sketch representation and use multi-class support vector machines, trained on our sketch dataset, to classify sketches. The resulting recognition method is able to identify unknown sketches with 56% accuracy (chance is 0.4%). Based on the computational model, we demonstrate an interactive sketch recognition system. We release the complete crowd-sourced dataset of sketches to the community.
Structure-aware synthesis for predictive woven fabric appearance

Woven fabrics have a wide range of appearance determined by their small-scale 3D structure. Accurately modeling this structural detail can produce highly realistic renderings of fabrics and is critical for predictive rendering of fabric appearance. But building these yarn-level volumetric models is challenging. Procedural techniques are manually intensive, and fail to capture the naturally arising irregularities which contribute significantly to the overall appearance of cloth. Techniques that acquire the detailed 3D structure of real fabric samples are constrained only to model the scanned samples and cannot represent different fabric designs. This paper presents a new approach to creating volumetric models of woven cloth, which starts with user-specified fabric designs and produces models that correctly capture the yarn-level structural details of cloth. We create a small database of volumetric exemplars by scanning fabric samples with simple weave structures. To build an output model, our method synthesizes a new volume by copying data from the exemplars at each yarn crossing to match a weave pattern that specifies the desired output structure. Our results demonstrate that our approach generalizes well to complex designs and can produce highly realistic results at both large and small scales.
Secondary students and sexual health 2008: results of the 4th national survey of Australian secondary students

Results of the 4th National Survey of Australian Secondary Students, HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health. The Fourth National Survey of Secondary Students and Sexual Health involved nearly 3,000 Year 10 and Year 12 students from more than 100 secondary schools from the Government, Catholic and Independent school systems and from every jurisdiction in Australia. The key findings are arranged under the key themes of knowledge, behaviour and health. Knowledge HIV knowledge remains relatively high and comparable to the levels found in 2002. There has been a marked improvement in student sexually transmissible infection (STI) knowledge between 2002 and 2008 studies. Despite this, in some areas student STI knowledge remains relatively poor. Despite generally poor student knowledge of chlamydia, knowledge of this infection has nonetheless improved significantly since 2002. Hepatitis A, B and C knowledge remains relatively poor, but there has nonetheless been some improvement in student knowledge regarding hepatitis B and C. Human papillomavirus (HPV) knowledge was measured for the first time in 2008 and student knowledge of this sexually transmissible infection was very poor. In most cases more than half the sample reported being unsure of correct answers to HPV knowledge questions. Cervical cancer knowledge was measured for the first time in the 2008 study and knowledge was generally poor. There were no gender differences in students HIV knowledge, however young women demonstrated better knowledge generally in terms of STIs, HPV, cervical cancer and hepatitis compared with young men.
EFFECTS OF INFANT FEEDING PRACTICES AND BIRTH SPACING ON INFANT AND CHILD SURVIVAL: A REASSESSMENT FROM RETROSPECTIVE AND PROSPECTIVE DATA

Retrospective and prospective data collected in Cameroon were used to reassess hypotheses about how infant and early childhood mortality is affected by birth spacing and breast-feeding. These data show that: (a) a short preceding birth interval is detrimental for child survival in the first 4 months of life; (b) full and partial breast-feeding have direct protective effects on child survival in the first 4-6 months of life, with the effects of the former stronger than those of the latter; (c) early subsequent conception significantly increases mortality risks in the first 16 months of life of the index child. These findings are robust to various controls, e.g. study design, data defects, child's health conditions at/around birth, postnatal maternal and child recurrent illnesses, patterns of utilisation of health care services, and immunisation status of the child.
Risk-adapted treatment and follow-up management in childhood-onset craniopharyngioma

ABSTRACT Craniopharyngiomas are rare embryonic malformations of the sellar/parasellar region with low histological grade. Here, we review findings on the diagnosis, treatment, clinical course, follow-up, and prognosis of craniopharyngioma patients. Clinical manifestations develop from increased intracranial pressure, anterior visual pathway damage, and hypothalamic/pituitary deficiencies. If the tumor is favorably localized (no anatomical involvement with the hypothalamic and optical structures) therapy of choice is complete resection, meticulously performed to preserve hypothalamic and optic functions. In patients with unfavorable tumor involvement, optimal therapy is limited hypothalamus-sparing surgical strategy, followed by judicious irradiation dosage to minimize recurrences and progression. Surgical lesions and/or anatomical involvement of posterior hypothalamic areas result in serious sequelae, mainly hypothalamic syndrome. Craniopharyngioma is a chronic disease and must be managed as such, providing ongoing care of pediatric and adult patients by experienced multidisciplinary teams in the context of multicenter trials.
CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO EN ESPAÑA Y RIESGO DE ENFERMEDADES INFECCIOSAS Y PARASITARIAS TRANSMITIDAS POR ARTRÓPODOS Y ROEDORES

Due to Spain's being located near Africa, being a stopping-off point for migrating birds and individuals and due to its climate conditions, nearing those of areas where there are vector-borne diseases, this is a country where this type of diseases could taken on greater importance due to the climate change. The possible risk would result from the geographical spread of already established vectors or due to subtropical vectors adapted to surviving in cooler, dried climates being imported and taking up residence. Hypothetically, the vector-borne diseases subject to be influenced by the climate change in Spain would be those transmitted by dipterans, such as dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, malaria and leishmaniasis; tick-transmitted diseases, such as Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, tick-borne encephalitis, Lyme disease, spotted fever and endemic relapsing fever; and rodent-transmitted diseases. But the greatest, most viable threat would be the Aedes albopictus mosquito, which would be capable of transmitting viral diseases such as West Nile encephalitis or dengue fever, taking up residence. But, for actual areas of endemia being established, a combination of other factors, such as the massive, simultaneous influx of animal or human reservoirs and the deterioration of the social healthcare conditions and of the Public Health services.
Adapted Choi response criteria for prediction of clinical outcome in locally advanced gastric cancer patients following preoperative chemotherapy

Background Tumor response to chemotherapy has traditionally been assessed by using Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) based on changes in tumor size alone. However, adapted Choi criteria, which incorporate volumetric tumor attenuation in addition to tumor size, have been reported more predictive of chemotherapeutic efficacy than RECIST in some studies. Purpose To examine the usefulness of adapted Choi criteria in predicting clinical survival in locally advanced gastric cancer patients treated with cytotoxic drugs. Material and Methods A total of 48 histologically proven gastric cancer patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy and surgery were involved. Pre- and post-chemotherapy short-axis diameter and volumetric mean tumor attenuation of target lymph nodes on contrast-enhanced CT images were measured. Tumor response was assessed by using both RECIST and adapted Choi criteria, and was correlated with progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Results Significant decrease was observed in the sum of short-axis diameters and tumor attenuation of metastatic lymph nodes between baseline and post-chemotherapy CT images. The inter-observer agreement for both parameters was good. The PFS and OS of 17 RECIST responders were identical with that of 28 adapted Choi responders (P = 0.855 and 0.913, respectively). PFS and OS of 31 RECIST non-responders were significantly prolonged compared to that of 20 adapted Choi non-responders (P = 0.018 and 0.042, respectively). To the 11 RECIST stable disease (SD) but adapted Choi partial response (PR) patients, the PFS and OS were similar to the survival of 17 RECIST PR patients (P = 0.785 and 0.838, respectively), but significantly prolonged compared to that of the 12 both RECIST and adapted Choi criteria SD patients (P < 0.001 and P = 0.004, respectively). Conclusion Adapted Choi criteria might be helpful to predict PFS and OS in locally advanced gastric cancer patients following chemotherapy.