Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resolution of abnormal MR signal intensity in patients with stress fractures of the femoral neck.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to describe the natural evolution of abnormal MR signal intensity after the diagnosis of a stress fracture of the femoral neck and to ascertain the time to resolution of that abnormal signal intensity. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Ten patients who had been previously diagnosed with stress fractures of the femoral neck after positive MR scans of the hip were examined with MR imaging at regular intervals. In each patient T1-weighted and short inversion time inversion recovery (STIR) sequences were obtained until the abnormally bright, diffuse MR signal intensity (representing edema) disappeared from the STIR images. Time to resolution was correlated with each patient's age and presence or absence of a fatigue line on MR imaging. Statistical analysis was done using Fisher's exact test. RESULTS Edema resolved in seven patients within 3 months of initial diagnosis, in two patients within 6 months, and in the remaining patient within 12 months. We found no statistically significant correlation between time to resolution and patient age or the presence of a fatigue line on MR imaging. Residual sclerosis occurred in five patients, all of whom had a fatigue line. Two of these patients developed bright T1 signal (fatty marrow conversion) around the area of sclerosis. In the remaining three patients, STIR images revealed a brightened fatigue line, which we presumed was caused by granulation tissue. CONCLUSION In this study, 90% of patients showed resolution of abnormal MR signal intensity on STIR imaging within 6 months of the initial diagnosis of stress fracture of the femoral neck. Such data may prove helpful in examining patients with recurrent symptoms who undergo repeated MR scanning. When an abnormally bright, diffuse MR signal intensity on STIR imaging is seen more than 6 months after an original injury, such abnormal signal intensity is likely to represent new injury.
Assessment of metal concentrations in commercially important fish species in Black Sea

In the present study, concentrations of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), cobalt (Co), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), nickel (Ni), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn) were measured in the muscle, gill, and gonads of the pelagic fish species Trachurus mediterraneus, Engraulis encrasicolus ponticus, and Sprattus sprattus that are important both commercially and for the ecosystems in the Black Sea. The samples were collected during 2011. The metals were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) following an acid digestion. The highest concentrations of As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Pb, and Zn were found in E. encrasicolus ponticus, whereas the greatest concentrations of Ni were found in T. mediterraneus and Mn in S. sprattus. Results showed that average metal concentrations in the tissues of T. mediterraneus, E. encrasicolus ponticus, and S. sprattus decreased in the order gill > gonad > muscle, gonad > gill > muscle, and gill > gonad > muscle, respectively, for the three species. When metal concentrations of fish tissues were compared between fish gender, there were only statistical differences in the gonads of the studied fish species (p < 0.05). The present study demonstrated that the metals have different correlations with condition factor (CF) and gonadosomatic index (GSI) of the fish species. Cr showed statistically important positive correlation to the GSI in male T. mediterraneus. Co showed statistically important positive correlation to CF in female E. encrasicolus ponticus, and also Co and Cd showed correlation to CF in male T. mediterraneus. Cd concentrations in the muscle tissues of the fish species were above the maximum acceptable concentration for human consumption.
Polyethylene glycol immediately repairs neuronal membranes and inhibits free radical production after acute spinal cord injury

Membrane disruption and the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) are important factors causing immediate functional loss, progressive degeneration, and death in neurons and their processes after traumatic spinal cord injury. Using an in vitro guinea pig spinal cord injury model, we have shown that polyethylene glycol (PEG), a hydrophilic polymer, can significantly accelerate and enhance the membrane resealing process to restore membrane integrity following controlled compression. As a result of PEG treatment, injury‐induced ROS elevation and lipid peroxidation (LPO) levels were significantly suppressed. We further show that PEG is not an effective free radical scavenger nor does it have the ability to suppress xanthine oxidase, a key enzyme in generating superoxide. These observations suggest that it is the PEG‐mediated membrane repair that leads to ROS and LPO inhibition. Furthermore, our data also imply an important causal effect of membrane disruption in generating ROS in spinal cord injury, suggesting membrane repair to be an effective target in reducing ROS genesis.
Iterative Pre-Conditioning for Expediting the Gradient-Descent Method: The Distributed Linear Least-Squares Problem

This paper considers the multi-agent linear least-squares problem in a server-agent network. In this problem, the system comprises multiple agents, each having a set of local data points, that are connected to a server. The goal for the agents is to compute a linear mathematical model that optimally fits the collective data points held by all the agents, without sharing their individual local data points. This goal can be achieved, in principle, using the server-agent variant of the traditional iterative gradient-descent method. The gradient-descent method converges linearly to a solution, and its rate of convergence is lower bounded by the conditioning of the agents' collective data points. If the data points are ill-conditioned, the gradient-descent method may require a large number of iterations to converge. We propose an iterative pre-conditioning technique that mitigates the deleterious effect of the conditioning of data points on the rate of convergence of the gradient-descent method. We rigorously show that the resulting pre-conditioned gradient-descent method, with the proposed iterative pre-conditioning, achieves superlinear convergence when the least-squares problem has a unique solution. In general, the convergence is linear with improved rate of convergence in comparison to the traditional gradient-descent method and the state-of-the-art accelerated gradient-descent methods. We further illustrate the improved rate of convergence of our proposed algorithm through experiments on different real-world least-squares problems in both noise-free and noisy computation environment.
Regadenoson — Overview of Applications in Cardiology

Coronary artery disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in developed countries. According to a Center for Disease Control report, one out of four deaths is attributed to coronary artery disease. It costs the United States human lives, produc‐ tivity, and more than 100 billion dollars each year. Due to increased incidence in both men and women and all ethnicities, risk stratification of patients at risk for developing myocardial infarction and death is of paramount importance. Various tests are available for diagnosis and prognosis in coronary heart disease such as exercise treadmill testing, coronary calcium scoring, dobutamine stress echocardiography, exercise, dipyridamole, adenosine or dobutamine stress nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), and dobutamine or adenosine stress cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. Since 2008 a new vasodilator, regadenoson (REG), has become available and is now widely used for nuclear perfusion imaging. Pharmacologic stress testing challenges the coronary flow reserve to evaluate the hyperemic capacity of the heart, which can be impaired in significant epicardial stenosis or microvascular dysfunction. In the presence of either of these conditions, ischemia induced by hyperemia manifests as wall motion abnormalities on echocardiography or as perfusion defects in nuclear perfusion imaging. REG is a selective adenosine A2A receptor agonist, and due to its targeted coronary vasodilator properties and bolus administration of a standard dose in all patients, it has rapidly gained popularity as the preferred MPI stress agent. In this chapter we will review the basis of pharmacologic vasodilator stress imaging starting with a brief discussion of the various adenosine receptors and their function, the structure and mechanism of action of REG, and its development and approval. It will be compared with other myocardial perfusion pharmacologic stress agents like adenosine and © 2015 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. dipyridamole in terms of safety, efficacy, and side effect profile. We will also address the utility of REG in special situations like renal disease, chronic obstructive pulmo‐ nary disease, heart transplant, left bundle branch block, and paced rhythms. The prognostic value of REG MPI in the general population, its effectiveness with and without exercise, and the emerging applications of REG in other modalities of imaging such as positron emission tomography and stress echocardiography will be discussed.
Incidence, risk factors, and prognosis of gastrointestinal hemorrhage complicating acute renal failure.

BACKGROUND Few prospective data are currently available on acute gastrointestinal hemorrhage (AGIH) as a complication of acute renal failure (ARF). The aim of the present study was to define incidence, sources, risk factors, and outcome of AGIH in patients with ARF. METHODS We performed a prospective study on an inception cohort of 514 patients admitted for ARF to a nephrology intermediate care unit. Data on clinical risk factors for bleeding, frequency of occurrence of AGIH, length of hospital stay, and in-hospital mortality were collected. Independent predictors of AGIH were identified. The relative odds of death and the relative increase in length of hospital stay associated with AGIH were calculated after adjusting for baseline comorbidities. RESULTS Sixty-nine patients out of 514 [13.4% (95% CI, 10.6 to 16.7)] had AGIH as a complication of ARF; 59 were upper AGIH. Forty patients had clinically important bleeding. Erosions and/or ulcers accounted for 71% of cases of upper AGIH. Independent baseline predictors of AGIH were represented by severity of illness [odds ratio 1.45 (95% CI, 1.05 to 2.01) for every 10 point increase in APACHE II score], low platelet count [<50,000 mm3; 3.71 (1.70 to 8.11)], noncirrhotic chronic hepatic disease [2.22 (1.09 to 4.55)], liver cirrhosis [3.38 (1.50 to 7.60)], de novo ARF [2.77 (1.30 to 5.90)], and severe ARF [2.07 (1.10 to 3.88)]. In-hospital mortality was 63.8% in patients with AGIH and 34.2% in the other patients; after adjusting for baseline confounders, AGIH remained significantly associated with an increase in both mortality [2.57 (1.30 to 5.09), P = 0.006] and length of hospital stay [37% (1 to 87%), P = 0.047]. CONCLUSIONS AGIH and clinically important bleeding are frequent complications of ARF. In this clinical condition, AGIH is more often due to upper gastrointestinal bleeding and is associated with a significantly increased risk of death and length of hospital stay. Both renal and extrarenal risk factors are related to the occurrence of AGIH.
Revisiting Mid-Level Patterns for Distant-Domain Few-Shot Recognition

Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods usually assume known classes and novel classes are from the same domain (in-domain setting). However in practice, it may be infeasible to collect sufficient training samples for some special domains to construct known classes. To solve this problem, cross-domain FSL (CDFSL) is proposed very recently to transfer knowledge from general-domain known classes to special-domain novel classes. Existing CDFSL works mostly focus on transferring between close domains, while rarely consider transferring between distant domains, which is even more challenging. In this paper, we study distant-domain FSL, a challenging subset of CDFSL, by revisiting the mid-level features, which are more transferable yet under-explored in main stream FSL work. To boost the discriminability of mid-level features, we propose a residual-prediction task to encourage mid-level features to learn discriminative information of each sample. Notably, such mechanism also benefits the in-domain FSL. Therefore, we provide two types of features for both distant- and in-domain FSL respectively, under the same training framework. Experiments under both settings on six public datasets, including two challenging medical datasets, validate the rationale of the proposed method and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
Anisotropic ultrafast spin dynamics in epitaxial cobalt

We investigate the ultrafast spin dynamics in an epitaxial hcp(1100) cobalt thin film. By performing pump-probe magneto-optical measurements with the magnetization along either the easy or hard magnetic axis, we determine the demagnetization and recovery times for the two axes. We observe a 35% slower dynamics along the easy magnetization axis, which we attribute to magneto-crystalline anisotropy of the electron-phonon coupling, supported by our ab initio calculations. This points towards an unambiguous and previously undisclosed role of anisotropic electron-lattice coupling in ultrafast magnetism.
Clinical features and treatment outcomes in large granular lymphocytic leukemia (LGLL)

Abstract Large granular lymphocytic leukemia (LGLL) represents a clonal/oligoclonal lymphoproliferation of cytotoxic T and natural killer cells often associated with STAT3 mutations. When symptomatic, due to mostly anemia and neutropenia, therapy choices are often empirically-based, because only few clinical trials and systematic studies have been performed. Incorporating new molecular and flow cytometry parameters, we identified 204 patients fulfilling uniform criteria for LGLL diagnoses and analyzed clinical course with median follow-up of 36 months, including responses to treatments. While selection of initial treatment was dictated by clinical features, the initial responses, as well as overall responses to methotrexate (MTX), cyclosporine (CsA), and cyclophosphamide (CTX), were similar at 40–50% across drugs. Sequential use of these drugs resulted in responses in most cases: only 10–20% required salvage therapies such as ATG, Campath, tofacitinib, splenectomy or abatacept. MTX yielded the most durable responses. STAT3-mutated patients required therapy more frequently and had better overall survival.
Mesh sampling and weighting for the hyperreduction of nonlinear Petrov–Galerkin reduced‐order models with local reduced‐order bases

The energy‐conserving sampling and weighting (ECSW) method is a hyper‐reduction method originally developed for accelerating the performance of Galerkin projection‐based reduced‐order models (PROMs) associated with large‐scale finite element models, when the underlying projected operators need to be frequently recomputed as in parametric and/or nonlinear problems. In this paper, this hyper‐reduction method is extended to Petrov–Galerkin PROMs where the underlying high‐dimensional models can be associated with arbitrary finite element, finite volume, and finite difference semi‐discretization methods. Its scope is also extended to cover local PROMs based on piecewise‐affine approximation subspaces, such as those designed for mitigating the Kolmogorov n‐width barrier issue associated with convection‐dominated flow problems. The resulting ECSW method is shown in this paper to be robust and accurate. In particular, its offline phase is shown to be fast and parallelizable, and the potential of its online phase for large‐scale applications of industrial relevance is demonstrated for turbulent flow problems with O(107) and O(108) degrees of freedom. For such problems, the online part of the ECSW method proposed in this paper for Petrov–Galerkin PROMs is shown to enable wall‐clock time and CPU time speedup factors of several orders of magnitude while delivering exceptional accuracy.
Stereo Darkfield Interferometry : a versatile localization method for subnanometer force spectroscopy of single molecules and 3D-tracking of single cells

Super-resolutive 3D tracking, such as PSF engineering or evanescent field imaging has long been used to track microparticles and to enhance the throughput of single molecules force spectroscopic measurements. However, current methods present two drawbacks. First, they lack precision compared with optical tweezers or AFM. Second, the dependence of their signal upon the position is complex creating the need for a time-consuming calibration step. Here, we introduce a new optical technique that circumvents both issues and allows for a simple, versatile and efficient 3D tracking of diluted particles while offering a sub-nanometer frame-to-frame precision in all three spatial directions. The principle is to combine stereoscopy and interferometry, such that the z (axial) position is measured through the distance between two interferometric fringe patterns. The linearity of this stereoscopy technique alleviates the need for lookup tables while the structured interferometric pattern enhances precision. On the other hand, the extended spatial footprint of this PSF maximizes the number of photons detected per frame without the need of fancy cameras, nor the need for complex hardware. Hence, thanks to its simplicity and versatility, we believe that SDI (Stereo Darkfield Interferometry) technology has the potential to significantly enhance the spreading of 3D tracking. We demonstrate the efficiency of this technique on various single-molecule measurements thanks to magnetic tweezers. In particular we demonstrate the precise quantification of two-state dynamics involving axial steps as short as 1 nm. We then show that SDI can be directly embedded in a commercial objective providing a means to track multiple single cells in 3D .
Role of Physical Chemical Properties in Drug Relay into Skin Compartments

The ability of a drug to reach the interstitial fluid is an important aspect of drug efficacy – as a possible indicator of skin and cell compartment concentration. This overview addresses the relationship of the physical properties of several antibiotics to their ability to enter the interstitial fluid utilizing a cantharidin blister model. By collecting pharmacokinetic data for 12 antibiotics administered orally and 11 intravenously, we compared the fraction of drug that reaches the interstitial fluid (AUCblister/AUCserum) to partition coefficients. Following data analysis, we found no correlation (p = 0.98 and 0.09, respectively) between hydrophobicity and the ability to reach the interstitium. Both orally and intravenously administered antibiotics display a strong linear correlation (p < 0.001 and p = 0.006, respectively) in the total concentration found in the serum and interstitial fluid indicating that serum concentration may be an important factor in dictating interstitial fluid concentration. This correlation may prove useful in clinical application as a means of determining interstitial fluid concentration by measuring only serum levels.
Pentoxifylline and CD14 antibody additively inhibit priming of polymorphonuclear leukocytes for enhanced release of superoxide by lipopolysaccharide: possible mechanism of these actions

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) primes human polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) for enhanced O2- production in response to stimulation by N-formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine (fMet-Leu-Phe). Serum factor is essential for priming at lower concentrations of LPS. Complexes of LPS and LPS-binding protein are recognized by CD14 on PMN. We investigated the effects of a monoclonal antibody against CD14 (MY4) and of pentoxifylline (POF), a membrane fluidizer, alone and in combination, on LPS-LPS-binding protein activation of phospholipase D evidenced by increased phosphatidic acid formation. Phosphatidic acid formation and O2- production were inhibited by MY4 and POF. Our results suggest that the actions of these agents occur at an early step in the excitation-response sequence. In the absence of a second stimulus, LPS plus serum caused an increase in the amount of Gi alpha 2 associated with the membrane via CD14. POF, however, had no effect on Gi alpha 2 in the membrane. POF alone significantly changed the affinity (KD) of the fMet-Leu-Phe receptor of PMN (from 25.2 +/- 4.5 nM to 15.2 +/- 2.4 nM [P < 0.01; n = 4]) at 37 degrees C. The differences between the sites of action of MY4 and POF may lead to cooperation by these agents for inhibition of priming by LPS plus serum for enhanced O2- production. Clinical use of the antibody and POF may diminish tissue damage caused by PMN in clinical endotoxic shock.
An Analytical Framework for Delay Optimal Mobile Edge Deployment in Wireless Networks

The emerging edge caching provides an effective way to reduce service delay for mobile users. However, due to high deployment cost of edge hosts, a practical problem is how to achieve minimum delay under a proper edge deployment strategy. In this letter, we provide an analytical framework for delay optimal mobile edge deployment in a partially connected wireless network, where the request files can be cached at the edge hosts and cooperatively transmitted through multiple base stations. In order to deal with the heterogeneous transmission requirements, we separate the entire transmission into backhaul and wireless phases, and propose average user normalized delivery time (AUNDT) as the performance metric. On top of that, we characterize the trade-off relations between the proposed AUNDT and other network deployment parameters. Using the proposed analytical framework, we are able to provide the optimal mobile edge deployment strategy in terms of AUNDT, which provides a useful guideline for future mobile edge deployment.
Branching principles of animal and plant networks identified by combining extensive data, machine learning and modelling

Branching in vascular networks and in overall organismic form is one of the most common and ancient features of multicellular plants, fungi and animals. By combining machine-learning techniques with new theory that relates vascular form to metabolic function, we enable novel classification of diverse branching networks—mouse lung, human head and torso, angiosperm and gymnosperm plants. We find that ratios of limb radii—which dictate essential biologic functions related to resource transport and supply—are best at distinguishing branching networks. We also show how variation in vascular and branching geometry persists despite observing a convergent relationship across organisms for how metabolic rate depends on body mass.
Encouraging IS developers to learn business skills: an examination of the MARS model

Purpose – Though prior research has recognized business skills as one of the keys to successful information system development, few studies have investigated the determinants of an IS developer’s behavioral intention to learn such skills. Based on the motivation-ability-role perception-situational factors (i.e. the MARS model), the purpose of this paper is to argue that the intention of IS developers to acquire business skills is influenced by learning motivation (M), learning self-efficacy (A), change agent role perception (R), and situational support (S). Design/methodology/approach – Data collected from 254 IS developers are analyzed using the partial least squares technique. Findings – Results show that a developer’s intention to learn business skills is positively influenced by intrinsic learning motivation and both absolute and relative learning self-efficacy. Furthermore, in comparison to two other change agent roles, the advocate role leads to a significantly higher level of learning intention. Fi.