Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of CD4+ T-Cell Immune Activation and Interleukin 10 Levels Among HIV, Hepatitis C Virus, and HIV/HCV-Coinfected Patients

Background:HIV/hepatitis C virus (HCV)–coinfected patients have accelerated liver disease compared with HCV monoinfection. In HIV-positive patients with viral suppression, data comparing inflammatory cytokines and immune activation between HIV/HCV coinfection with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) to HIV/HCV-seropositive patients with cleared HCV are limited. Methods:Fifty-nine age- and sex-matched patients were stratified: (1) HIV monoinfection (n = 15); (2) HCV monoinfection with CHC (n = 15); (3) HIV/HCV coinfection with CHC (n = 14); and (4) HIV/HCV seropositive with cleared HCV (n = 15). All HIV-positive patients had undetectable HIV viremia, and median CD4 was 420 cells per microliter. Liver fibrosis was assessed in each subject using transient elastography. Cells were collected for CD4 and CD8 immune activation (CD38/HLA-DR) markers via flow cytometry and plasma for luminex–multiplex cytokine assays. Results:CD38+HLA-DR+ expression on CD4+ T cells was significantly increased in HIV/HCV coinfection with CHC (7%) versus HCV monoinfection (4%) (P = 0.012). CD4+ total HLA-DR+ expression was significantly increased in HIV/HCV coinfection with CHC (43%) versus HIV monoinfection (31%) (P = 0.010) and HIV/HCV seropositive with cleared HCV (38%) (P = 0.046). Total CD4+CD38+ and CD4+CD38+HLA-DR− expression was significantly higher in HIV monoinfection (23% and 18%) than HCV moninfection (13%, P = 0.002% and 9%, P = 0.001, respectively). Interleukin 10 levels were significantly lower in HIV monoinfection versus HIV/HCV coinfection with CHC (P = 0.0002). In multivariate analysis, severe fibrosis was associated with lower expression of CD4+CD38+HLA-DR+ and CD4+ total CD38+ than mild-moderate fibrosis (P = 0.03 and 0.03, respectively). Conclusions:CD4 immune activation with HLA-DR+ expression in HIV/HCV coinfection with well-controlled HIV may arise from chronic HCV viremia. Conversely, CD4+CD38+ expression may be driven by underlying HIV infection. CD4 immune activation was unexpectedly found to be associated with decreased liver fibrosis.
Mobility patterns analysis of Beijing residents based on call detail records

Human mobility pattern analysis are interesting and important topic which has become feasible nowadays by the flashing development of data collection and analysis platform technology. This paper leverages Call Detail Records(CDRs) data to analyze the mobility patterns of samples from Beijing residents. First, collective mobility and commuting patterns shows that Beijing residents are much busier than those in Portugal and Ivory Coast due to its fast-paced lifestyle. Second, the convex hull analysis on individual's daily trajectory shows that the convex hull area follows power-law distribution. The travel distance, radius of gyration and the area of convex hull are found weakly correlated with the calling intensity. Finally, the vector and direction analysis demonstrates the tidal phenomenon of migration with a return point at around 13:00 to 15:00 everyday. Our work gives new insight on human mobility research using CDRs for future related research on wireless networks, human dynamics and other possible fields.
Administration of Moderate and High Doses of Gonadotropins to Female Rats Increases Ovarian Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) and VEGF Receptor-2 Expression that Is Associated to Vascular Hyperpermeability1

Abstract Convincing evidence supports the role of ovarian-origin vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in inducing vascular permeability (VP) and ascites associated with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) in mammals, including humans. A circulatory dysfunction has been described in every woman treated with gonadotropins for in vitro fertilization. It is not known, however, whether the action of gonadotropins also includes up-regulation of the VEGF receptor-2 (VEGFR-2) and whether increased VP is also found when milder stimulation is used. Thus, we applied an OHSS animal model to answer these questions. Immature female rats were stimulated with saline (control group) or with high (10 IU of eCG × 4 days + 30 IU hCG, OHSS group) or mild (10 IU of eCG + 10 IU of hCG, mild-stimulation group) doses of gonadotropins. The VP and the expression of whole-VEGF and VEGFR-2 mRNAs were analyzed through time-course experiments (0, 24, 48, and 96 h after hCG). Although eCG increased VP and the expression of VEGF and VEGFR-2 mRNAs in the ovaries of both mild- and OHSS-stimulated animals, hCG further augmented these parameters and produced the highest values after 48 h. A linear correlation was found between increased expression of VEGF and VEGFR-2 mRNAs and enhanced VP in both mild and OHSS groups. Immunohistochemistry showed the presence of VEGF and VEGFR-2 in the granulosa-lutein and endothelial cells of the entire corpus luteum. These studies confirm that in hyperstimulated animals as well as in mildly treated rats, VEGF and VEGFR-2 are overexpressed and associated with an increase in VP, which may be responsible for the accumulation of ascitic fluid in the syndrome.
Analgesic Effect of Essential Oil (EO) from Carum Copticum in Mice

The purpose of this study was to examine anti nociceptive effect of essential oil from fruit of Carum Copticum which is a plant in ambelliferea family grow as a herb with anti cholinergic and anti histaminic activities. The major components in the fruit of this plant are an essence containing thymol and some other chemical components and essential oil. In this study formalin test was used as a standard pain inducing test and the analgesic effect of intrapritonial injection of 20 mg kg of essential oil (prepared by steam distillation) 1 pain sensation in inflammatory phase of formalin test and it is may be due to the presence of thymol in essential oil and it seems that mechanisms other than opioid receptors involved in the analgesic activities because Naloxon an opioid antagonist could not reverse the analgesic effect observed in the formalin test.
Suppression of Viremia and Evolution of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Drug Resistance in a Macaque Model for Antiretroviral Therapy

ABSTRACT Antiretroviral therapy (ART) in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected patients does not clear the infection and can select for drug resistance over time. Not only is drug-resistant HIV-1 a concern for infected individuals on continual therapy, but it is an emerging problem in resource-limited settings where, in efforts to stem mother-to-child-transmission of HIV-1, transient nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) therapy given during labor can select for NNRTI resistance in both mother and child. Questions of HIV-1 persistence and drug resistance are highly amenable to exploration within animals models, where therapy manipulation is less constrained. We examined a pigtail macaque infection model responsive to anti-HIV-1 therapy to study the development of resistance. Pigtail macaques were infected with a pathogenic simian immunodeficiency virus encoding HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT-SHIV) to examine the impact of prior exposure to a NNRTI on subsequent ART comprised of a NNRTI and two nucleoside RT inhibitors. K103N resistance-conferring mutations in RT rapidly accumulated in 2/3 infected animals after NNRTI monotherapy and contributed to virologic failure during ART in 1/3 animals. By contrast, ART effectively suppressed RT-SHIV in 5/6 animals. These data indicate that suboptimal therapy facilitates HIV-1 drug resistance and suggest that this model can be used to investigate persisting viral reservoirs.
Sympathetic Skin Response: A New Biological Signal that can be used in Diagnosis of Fibromyalgia Instead of Beck Depression Inventory

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain syndrome that generally appears with prevalent muscular pain, sleep disorder and fatigue. Its diagnosis is very difficult. It is diagnosed in a long time after evaluating variety of psychological test scores along with physiological and laboratory tests. Psychological tests are thought not to be as reliable as laboratory test results since they depend on oral reports of the patients, and can differ from patient to patient. Beck depression inventory is one of the psychological test scores. In this study, a new biological signal that could be used instead of Beck depression inventory is introduced. For this purpose, sympathetic skin responses were used along with physiological and laboratory test results that were collected both from diagnosed fibromyalgia patients and healthy patients. A relationship based on classification was aimed to be established between the data and Beck depression inventory by using artificial neural networks. Three different artificial neural network training algorithm were used in the study. According to the results, physiological and laboratory test results and back depression inventory were estimated with the accuracy rate of 77.70\%. When all the data were used with Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation training algorithm, this rate went up to 90.91\%. According to these results, sympathetic skin responses can be safely used instead of Beck depression inventory when they were used along with other parameters that were used in fibromyalgia diagnosis.
Conformal symmetry and pion form-factor: Soft and hard contributions

We discuss a constraint of conformal symmetry in the analysis of the pion form factor. The usual power-law behavior of the form factor obtained in the perturbative QCD analysis can also be attained by taking negligible quark masses in the nonperturbative quark model analysis, confirming the recent AdS/CFT correspondence. We analyze the transition from soft to hard contributions in the pion form factor considering a momentum-dependent dynamical quark mass from an appreciable constituent quark mass at low momentum region to a negligible current quark mass at high momentum region. We find a correlation between the shape of nonperturbative quark distribution amplitude and the amount of soft and hard contributions to the pion form factor.
Evaluation of hormone receptor expression for use in predicting survival of female dogs with malignant mammary gland tumors.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prognostic potential of expression of hormone receptors in malignant mammary gland tumors of dogs. Design-Cohort study. ANIMALS 89 female dogs with malignant mammary gland tumors and 24 female dogs with benign mammary gland tumors. PROCEDURES Female dogs with malignant (n = 89 dogs) and benign (24) mammary gland tumors were evaluated to determine the prognostic value of the expression of estrogen receptor (ER)A or the progesterone receptor (PR), as determined by use of immunohistochemical methods. RESULTS In this study, 68 (60.2%) and 88 (77.9%) of the 113 dogs with mammary gland tumors had expression of ERA and PR, respectively. Expression of ERA and PR was detected proportionately more frequently in benign tumors (23/24 [95.8%] and 24/24 [100%], respectively) than in malignant tumors (45/89 [50.6%] and 64/89 [71.9%]). Percentage of tumors with positive results for ERA and PR was significantly higher in tumors < 5 cm in diameter; as clinical stage I, II, or III; and without metastasis to lymph nodes or distant metastasis. However, only PR expression in tumor cells was significantly associated with 1-year survival after surgical removal of the tumor. Moreover, dogs with malignant tumors expressing ERA and PR had a significantly higher survival rate, compared with the rate for dogs with malignant tumors expressing ERA but not PR. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE These findings strongly suggested that expression of PR could be used as a prognostic factor for survival, especially in female dogs with malignant mammary gland tumors with ERA expression.
Intonation and procedural encoding : The case of Spanish interrogatives

L'A. suggere ici que la notion d'encodage procedural developpee par Sperber et Wilson (1993) peut etre etendue de maniere fructueuse a l'analyse des contours intonatifs. Certains traits suprasegmentaux peuvent en effet etre consideres comme des marqueurs encodant des restrictions sur les interpretations possibles, c-a-d comme des procedes linguistiques vehiculant des instructions (information computationnelle) sur la maniere dont le contenu conceptuel de l'enonce doit etre compris. En se basant sur les patrons intonatifs des questions en espagnol europeen, il tente de montrer que chaque patron contribue a l'interpretation de l'enonce dans lequel il apparait d'une maniere constante et systematique. Le large eventail des classes fonctionnelles des questions peut ainsi etre reduit a une caracterisation plus simple et motivee linguistiquement
Is Texture Denoising Efficiency Predictable?

Images of different origin contain textures, and textural features in such regions are frequently employed in pattern recognition, image classification, information extraction, etc. Noise often present in analyzed images might prevent a proper solution of basic tasks in the aforementioned applications and is worth suppressing. This is not an easy task since even the most advanced denoising methods destroy texture in a more or less degree while removing noise. Thus, it is desirable to predict the filtering behavior before any denoising is applied. This paper studies the efficiency of texture image denoising for different noise intensities and several filter types under different visual quality criteria (quality metrics). It is demonstrated that the most efficient existing filters provide very similar results. From the obtained results, it is possible to generalize and employ the prediction strategy earlier proposed for denoising techniques based on the discrete cosine transform. Accuracy of such a predicti.
Duodenal cancer in patients with familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP): results of a 10 year prospective study

Background: Duodenal cancer is one of the leading causes of death in familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) patients. An endoscopic surveillance programme was therefore initiated in 1988, the outcome of which is described in this paper. Methods: We report the 10 year follow up of 114 patients with FAP who were prospectively screened for the presence and severity of duodenal adenomas. Results: Six of 114 patients (median age 67 years) developed duodenal adenocarcinoma. Four of these were from 11 patients who originally had Spigelman stage IV disease (advanced duodenal polyposis), which gives a 36% risk within this group of developing cancer. One case of duodenal cancer arose from 41 patients who originally had stage III disease (2%) and one cancer arose from 44 patients with original stage II disease (2%). All six patients have died: five were inoperable and one had recurrence three years after a pancreaticoduodenectomy. There was no association between duodenal cancer and site of germline mutation of the APC gene. Conclusions: Surveillance for duodenal adenocarcinoma and subsequent early referral for curative surgery has not been effective. Selection of patients with advanced but benign (Spigelman stage IV) duodenal polyposis for prophylactic pancreaticoduodenectomy should therefore be considered and can now be justified on the basis of these results. More comprehensive endoscopic surveillance of high risk (stage III and IV) patients is needed in an attempt to avoid underestimating the severity of duodenal polyposis, and to evaluate the role of endoscopic therapy in preventing advanced disease.
Acute mountain sickness score and hypoxemia.

BACKGROUND Hypoxemia is the immediate consequence of hyobaric hypoxia, which is the crucial starting mechanism of acute mountain sickness (AMS). The AMS is generally a benign and self-limiting condition which can be prevented by gradual ascent. However, ascent rates recommended for prophylaxis of AMS are far slower than those attempted during military operations and by climbers. OBJECTIVE The current study was carried out to quantify the relationship between AMS and hypoxemia alongwith evaluating the benefits of acetazolamide-dexamethasone chemoprophylaxis during acute ascent. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Twenty-four low lander male adults (age mean +/- SE 27.8 +/- 1.24 years) were selected. They were grouped in a double-blind fashion into four groups and each group (n = 6) received placebo (multivitamin) or acetazolamide (250 mg) or dexamethasone (4 mg) or a combined regimen of the two drugs twice daily for 5 days, commencing 24 hours before ascent. The volunteers reached the altitude of 4578 meters within a span of one day. Their AMS symptoms were recorded on modified environmental symptoms questionnaire (ESQ), after 24 and 72 hours of ascent. Arterial PO2, SO2 and PCO2 were measured by GEMSTAT blood-gas analyzer (Mallincrodt-USA). RESULTS The ESQ, AMS-C (cerebral) and AMS-R (respiratory) scores of combined therapy group were significantly lower as compared to the other groups on the symptom rating scale. The significant finding amongst the volunteers taking acetazolamide was mild to moderate diuresis whereas severity of headache was markedly less in dexamethasone group. The commonest feature of combined therapy was that none of the volunteers complained of headache, dysponea, irritability and more than mild disturbance of sleep. The ESQ scores of volunteers were inversely correlated to PaO2 and SaO2 after 24 hours of ascent to 4578 meters. CONCLUSION The study concludes that severity of AMS is closely related to hypoxemia and combination therapy of acetazolamide-dexamethasone may be effective in preventing AMS.
Occupationally related respiratory symptoms in trout‐processing workers

All eight production workers from a small trout‐processing factory were studied because of respiratory or rhinitis symptoms when working next to the automatic gutting machine. Seven of the eight had positive histamine provocation tests. Four patients had elevated total IgE levels while one had a slightly elevated eosinophil count. All workers had either weakly or moderately positive RAST against contaminated water from the outlet drain of the gutting machine. This water contained 1 μg endotoxin/ml. We concluded that five of the workers had probably developed occupationally related asthma from inhalation of contaminated aerosol from the gutting machine. Inhalation of endotoxin from gram‐negative bacteria may be the cause of this disorder. An alternative explanation is a Type I allergy caused by fish or bacterial protein with or without a simultaneous effect of endotoxin.
MMP-9 (Gelatinase B) Expression is Associated With Disease-Free Survival and Disease-Specific Survival in Colorectal Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT Extracellular matrix degradation is required for invasion and metastasis formation in colorectal carcinoma (CRC), therefore, we have examined matrix metalloproteinases MMP-9 expression in tumors from patients with CRC. The study comprises of 360 patients who underwent bowel resection for stage II, III, IV tumors. Paraffin-embedded CRC tissue samples were used for immunohistochemical staining. Negative MMP-9 expression levels correlated with longer survival time as evaluated by disease-free survival and disease-specific survival (p =.023, p =.006). In multivariate survival (Cox) analysis, MMP9 was a significant independent predictor of DFS (p =.014), but not of DSS, which was independently predicted by disease recurrence, stage and localization. The detection of MMP-9 expression may be valuable in finding patients who are at high risk of developing disease recurrence.
ACR Appropriateness Criteria® Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma

The management of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma depends on the initial diagnosis including molecular and immunophenotypic characteristics, Ann Arbor staging, and International Prognostic Index (IPI score). Treatment approaches with different chemotherapy regimens used is discussed in detail. The role of radiation as a consolidation is discussed including: (1) the prerituximab randomized trials that challenged the role of radiation, (2) recent prospective studies (UNFOLDER/RICOVER-60), and (3) retrospective studies; the last 2 showed a potential benefit of radiation both for early and advanced stage. The document also discusses the role of positron emission tomography/computed tomography for predicting outcome and potentially guiding therapy. The American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria are evidence-based guidelines for specific clinical conditions that are reviewed every 3 years by a multidisciplinary expert panel. The guideline development and review include an extensive analysis of current medical literature from peer-reviewed journals and the application of a well-established consensus methodology (modified Delphi) to rate the appropriateness of imaging and treatment procedures by the panel. In those instances where evidence is lacking or not definitive, expert opinion may be used to recommend imaging or treatment.
Lipreading using convolutional neural network

In recent automatic speech recognition studies, deep learning architecture applications for acoustic modeling have eclipsed conventional sound features such as Mel-frequency cepstral co-efﬁcients. However, for visual speech recognition (VSR) studies, handcrafted visual feature extraction mechanisms are still widely utilized. In this paper, we propose to apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) as a visual feature extraction mechanism for VSR. By training a CNN with images of a speaker’s mouth area in combination with phoneme labels, the CNN acquires multiple convolutional ﬁlters, used to extract visual features essential for recognizing phonemes. Further, by modeling the temporal dependencies of the generated phoneme label sequences, a hidden Markov model in our proposed sys-tem recognizes multiple isolated words. Our proposed system is evaluated on an audio-visual speech dataset comprising 300 Japanese words with six different speakers. The evaluation re-sults of our isolated word recognition experiment demonstrate that the visual features acquired by the CNN signiﬁcantly out-perform those acquired by conventional dimensionality compression approaches, including principal component analysis.
Evaluation of takayasu arteritis with delayed contrast-enhanced MR imaging by a free-breathing 3D IR turbo FLASH

Abstract The primary aim of our case-control study was to observe delayed contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) in patients with Takayasu arteritis (TA) in comparison with magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). Twenty-seven patients including 15 with active TA and 12 with stable TA who underwent both aortic MRA and DCE-MRI were included. A total of 27 sex- and age-matched healthy volunteers were enrolled as the control group. MRA were obtained with T1WI-volume-interpolated breath-hold examination sequence or fast low-angle shot (FLASH) sequence. DCE-MRI was acquired with a free-breathing three-dimensional inversion recovery Turbo fast low-angle shot (3D IR Turbo FLASH). Neither stenosis nor delayed enhancement of arterial wall was shown in the control group. In patients with stable TA, arterial stenosis was observed on MRA. On DCE-MR, delayed enhancement of arterial walls could be observed in the active TA group but not in the stable TA group or the control group. Stenotic arteries on MRA were comparable in the active TA and stable TA (&khgr;2 = 2.70, P = .259); however, delayed enhancement of arterial walls in the active-TA group were more than those in the stable group (&khgr;2 = 27.00, P < .001). Our results suggest that DCE-MRI with the free-breathing 3D IR Turbo FLASH sequence could assess TA and delayed enhancement on DCE-MRI is one characteristics of the active TA.