Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrocardiographic findings in 130 hospitalized neonatal calves with diarrhea and associated potassium balance disorders

Background Hyperkalemia in neonatal diarrheic calves can potentially result in serious cardiac conduction abnormalities and arrhythmias. Objectives To document electrocardiographic (ECG) findings and the sequence of ECG changes that are associated with increasing plasma potassium concentrations (cK+) in a large population of neonatal diarrheic calves. Animals One hundred and thirty neonatal diarrheic calves (age ≤21 days). Methods Prospective observational study involving calves admitted to a veterinary teaching hospital. Results Hyperkalemic calves (cK+: 5.8‐10.2, blood pH: 6.55‐7.47) had significantly (P < .05) longer QRS durations as well as deeper S wave, higher T wave, and higher ST segment amplitudes in lead II than calves, which had both venous blood pH and cK+ within the reference range. The first ECG changes in response to an increase in cK+ were an increase in voltages of P, Ta, S, and T wave amplitudes. Segmented linear regression indicated that P wave amplitude decreased when cK+ >6.5 mmol/L, S wave amplitude voltage decreased when cK+ >7.4 mmol/L, QRS duration increased when cK+ >7.8 mmol/L, J point amplitude increased when cK+ >7.9 mmol/L, and ST segment angle increased when cK+ >9.1 mmol/L. P wave amplitude was characterized by a second common break point at cK+ = 8.2 mmol/L, above which value the amplitude was 0. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Hyperkalemia in neonatal diarrheic calves is associated with serious cardiac conduction abnormalities. In addition to increased S and T wave amplitude voltages, alterations of P and Ta wave amplitudes are early signs of hyperkalemia, which is consistent with the known sensitivity of atrial myocytes to increased cK+.
Motion Estimation, 3D Reconstruction and Navigation with Range Sensors

In this thesis we leverage range sensors, namely depth cameras and laser scanners, to solve fundamental problems that lie at the interface between computer vision and robotics. Concretely, new algorithms are proposed for sensor tracking (odometry), scene flow estimation, 3D Reconstruction of objects and autonomous navigation of mobile robots. Besides the theoretical contributions described herein, fast implementations of these algorithms are available online for public use.
Lipid and Non-lipid Factors Affecting Macrophage Dysfunction and Inflammation in Atherosclerosis

Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease and a leading cause of human mortality. The lesional microenvironment contains a complex accumulation of variably oxidized lipids and cytokines. Infiltrating monocytes become polarized in response to these stimuli, resulting in a broad spectrum of macrophage phenotypes. The extent of lipid loading in macrophages influences their phenotype and consequently their inflammatory status. In response to excess atherogenic ligands, many normal cell processes become aberrant following a loss of homeostasis. This can have a direct impact upon the inflammatory response, and conversely inflammation can lead to cell dysfunction. Clear evidence for this exists in the lysosomes, endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria of atherosclerotic macrophages, the principal lesional cell type. Furthermore, several intrinsic cell processes become dysregulated under lipidotic conditions. Therapeutic strategies aimed at restoring cell function under disease conditions are an ongoing coveted aim. Macrophages play a central role in promoting lesional inflammation, with plaque progression and stability being directly proportional to macrophage abundance. Understanding how mixtures or individual lipid species regulate macrophage biology is therefore a major area of atherosclerosis research. In this review, we will discuss how the myriad of lipid and lipoprotein classes and products used to model atherogenic, proinflammatory immune responses has facilitated a greater understanding of some of the intricacies of chronic inflammation and cell function. Despite this, lipid oxidation produces a complex mixture of products and with no single or standard method of derivatization, there exists some variation in the reported effects of certain oxidized lipids. Likewise, differences in the methods used to generate macrophages in vitro may also lead to variable responses when apparently identical lipid ligands are used. Consequently, the complexity of reported macrophage phenotypes has implications for our understanding of the metabolic pathways, processes and shifts underpinning their activation and inflammatory status. Using oxidized low density lipoproteins and its oxidized cholesteryl esters and phospholipid constituents to stimulate macrophage has been hugely valuable, however there is now an argument that only working with low complexity lipid species can deliver the most useful information to guide therapies aimed at controlling atherosclerosis and cardiovascular complications.
CD10, TDAG51, CK20, AR, INSM1, and Nestin Expression in the Differential Diagnosis of Trichoblastoma and Basal Cell Carcinoma

Background. Trichoblastoma (TB) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC) are 2 different neoplasms composed of basaloid cells and have overlapping histopathological features. We compared the immunoexpression of CD10, T-cell death-associated gene 51 (TDAG51), cytokeratin 20 (CK20), androgen receptor (AR), insulinoma-associated protein 1 (INSM1), and nestin for the differential diagnosis of these tumors. Materials and Methods. We assessed a total of 27 BCC and 27 TB cases, including 4 TB lesions in nevus sebaceous and 3 malignant TB lesions for CD10, TDAG51, CK20, AR, INSM1, and nestin expression. Results. Staining for CK20, TDAG51, INSM1, and stromal CD10 was significantly more common in TB cases than in BCC cases (P < .001). Epithelial CD10 and AR staining was significantly more common in BCC cases than in TB cases (P < .001). The difference between the groups for nestin staining was not significant (P > .05). Stromal CD10 staining was the most sensitive marker (96.3%) and INSM1 the least sensitive (55.6%) marker for TB. TDAG51 showed 100% specificity for TB. A larger number of CK20 positive cells was found in the cases associated with nevus sebaceous than in the other TBs. Conclusion. All the selected markers except nestin were useful for the differential diagnosis between TB and BCC. CD10 and TDAG51 were more useful than the other markers. The use of CK20 could be preferred in nevus sebaceous lesions. INSM1 was less effective in highlighting Merkel cells within the lesion than CK20.
Detecting Misflagged Duplicate Questions in Community Question-Answering Archives

In this paper we introduce the task of misflagged duplicate question detection for question pairs in community question-answer (cQA) archives and compare it to the more standard task of detecting valid duplicate questions. A misflagged duplicate is a question that has been erroneously hand-flagged by the community as a duplicate of an archived one, where the two questions are not actually the same. We find that form is flagged duplicate detection, meta data features that capture user authority, question quality, and relational data between questions, outperform pure text-based methods, while for regular duplicate detection a combination of meta data features and semantic features gives the best results. We show that misflagged duplicate questions are even more challenging to model than regular duplicate question detection, but that good results can still be obtained.
Clebsch-Gordan Nets: a Fully Fourier Space Spherical Convolutional Neural Network

Recent work by Cohen \emph{et al.} has achieved state-of-the-art results for learning spherical images in a rotation invariant way by using ideas from group representation theory and noncommutative harmonic analysis. In this paper we propose a generalization of this work that generally exhibits improved performace, but from an implementation point of view is actually simpler. An unusual feature of the proposed architecture is that it uses the Clebsch--Gordan transform as its only source of nonlinearity, thus avoiding repeated forward and backward Fourier transforms. The underlying ideas of the paper generalize to constructing neural networks that are invariant to the action of other compact groups.
Curcumin supplementation and motor-cognitive function in healthy middle-aged and older adults

BACKGROUND: Recent studies suggest curcumin is a promising nutraceutical for improving important clinical and physiological markers of healthy aging, including motor and cognitive function. OBJECTIVE: To determine if curcumin supplementation improves motor and cognitive function in healthy middle-aged and older adults. METHODS: 39 healthy men and postmenopausal women (45–74 yrs) were randomized to 12 weeks of placebo (n = 19) or curcumin supplementation (2000 mg/day Longvida®; n = 20) with motor and cognitive function assessed at week 0 and 12. RESULTS: Using measures of the NIH Toolbox and other standardized tests, there were no changes in muscle strength and rate of torque development, dexterity, fatigability, mobility, endurance, and balance between the placebo and curcumin groups after 12 weeks (all P > 0.05). Additionally, there were no changes after 12 weeks of placebo and curcumin supplementation in measures of fluid cognitive ability, a cognitive domain that declines with age, including processing speed, executive function, working memory, and episodic memory (all P > 0.3). There were marginal changes in language, a measure of crystallized cognitive ability that is stable with age, following the intervention, wherein reading decoding increased 3% in the curcumin group (post: 2428±35 vs. pre: 2357±34, P = 0.003), but was unchanged in the placebo group (post: 2334±39 vs. pre: 2364±40, P = 0.07). CONCLUSIONS: Overall, 12 weeks of curcumin supplementation does not improve motor and cognitive functions in healthy middle-aged and older adults. It is possible that curcumin may enhance these functions in groups with greater baseline impairments than those studied here, including adults greater than 75 years of age and/or patients with clinical disorders.
Knowledge, Decision-Making and Acceptance of Human Papilloma Virus Vaccination among Parents of Primary School Students in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia

Background: The incidence of cervical cancer in younger women remains high. This is worrisome as it affects future generations. Therefore Malaysia implements human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination as a national vaccination program. Parents play an important role in determining the success of this HPV vaccination program among school-aged girls by their compliance. Objective: To assess parental knowledge, decision-making and acceptance of HPV vaccination. Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted among 280 randomly selected parents of primary school students aged 11 in Kota Bharu using a pre-validated self-administered questionnaire to assess knowledge and decision-making with regard to HPV vaccination. Results: Most parents (62%) were shown to have poor knowledge while most decision-making was shared. Age of respondents (adjusted odds ratio ‘AOR’= 1.09; 95% confidence interval ‘CI’= 1.04-1.14; p <0.001) and good knowledge of HPV vaccination (AOR= 16.32; 95% CI= 7.32-36.4; p <0.001) were significantly associated with HPV vaccine acceptance. conclusion: The majority of parents exhibited poor knowledge which may affect their decision-making and uptake of HPV vaccination among their children. This highlights the need to better educate parents on HPV vaccination.
Evolving Convolutional Neural Network and Its Application in Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Fine-grained visual categorization is one of the challenges in computer vision due to the high intra-class but low inter-class variances. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used to solve this problem. However, a huge number of clearly labeled images are usually required to train a CNN model for a high precision, which may be quite costly and time consuming. To overcome this problem, in this paper, a novel evolving CNN (ECNN) is proposed, which can efficiently utilize the limited clearly labeled images and a large number of weakly labeled images. The overall framework contains two parts: one for collecting the weakly labeled images from the Internet by Web crawlers; and the other for updating the CNN classifier. Specifically, several different search engines are adopted to collect the weakly labeled images, in order to get relatively comprehensive results. The proposed method is demonstrated on several datasets, including CIFAR-10, Oxford pets, and Chinese food dataset. The results show that ECNN outperforms the traditional CNN and achieves the state-of-the-art in most cases.
Gene Therapy for Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Injury

Recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) injury has considerable clinical implications, including voice and swallowing dysfunction, which may considerably impair the patient’s quality of life. Recovery of vocal fold movement is an essential novel treatment option for RLN injury. The potential of gene therapy for addressing this issue is highly promising. The target sites for RLN gene therapy are the central nervous system, nerve fibers, laryngeal muscles, and vocal cord mucosa. Gene transduction has been reported in each site using viral or non-viral methods. The major issues ensuing after RLN injury are loss of motoneurons in the nucleus ambiguus, degeneration and poor regeneration of nerve fibers and motor end plates, and laryngeal muscle atrophy. Gene therapy using neurotrophic factors has been assessed for most of these issues, and its efficacy has been reported. Another important matter for functional vocal fold movement recovery is misdirected regeneration, in which the wrong neurons may innervate other laryngeal muscles, where even if innervation is reestablished, proper motor function is not restored. Novel strategies involving gene therapy bear promise for overcoming this issue and further investigations are underway.
Health literacy and digital media use: Assessing the Health Literacy Skills Instrument – Short Form and its correlates among African American college students

Improving health literacy is increasingly seen as a solution to health problems and inequalities. This study assesses how one of the more recent measures of health literacy, the Health Literacy Skills Instrument – Short Form, performs among African American college students, and ascertains if and how media use relates to health literacy. Results indicate that both the use of health-related websites and apps as well as overall time spent with the media were positively, but conditionally, linked to health literacy. However, findings also pointed to the need for further test development.
Towards a Definition for Health Care–Associated Infection

Abstract Background Health care–associated infection (HcAI) is a term frequently used to describe community-onset infections likely to be caused by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). The most frequently used definition was developed at Duke University Medical Center in 2002 (Duke-2002). Although some professional societies have based management recommendations on Duke-2002 (or modifications thereof), neither Duke-2002 nor other variations have had their performance measured. Methods A case–control study was conducted at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center (AHMC) of consecutive adult bloodstream infections (BSIs). A multivariable model was used to develop a prediction score for HcAI, measured by the presence of MDRO infection on admission. The performances of this new score and previously developed definitions at predicting MDRO infection on admission were measured. Results Of the 504 BSI patients enrolled, 315 had a BSI on admission and 189 had a nosocomial BSI. Patients with MDRO-BSI on admission (n = 100) resembled patients with nosocomial infections (n = 189) in terms of epidemiological characteristics, illness acuity, and outcomes more than patients with non-MDRO-BSI on admission (n = 215). The performances of both the newly developed score and the Duke-2002 definition to predict MDRO infection on admission were suboptimal (area under the receiver operating characteric curve, 0.76 and 0.68, respectively). Conclusions Although the term HcAI is frequently used, its definition does not perform well at predicting MDRO infection present on admission to the hospital. A validated score that calculates the risk of MDRO infection on admission is still needed to guide daily practice and improve patient outcomes.
Outage Analysis of Relay-Assisted mmWave Cellular Systems Employing JSDM

In this paper, the outage probabilities of relay-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular systems employing joint spatial division and multiplexing (JSDM) are investigated. It is assumed that the macro base station (BS) equipped with a large number of antennas serves the single antenna relay and users simultaneously and that the relay is located at the edge of the macro cell. Theoretical analysis of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) outage probabilities of each user with and without the second stage precoding is first obtained, respectively. The cell SINR outage probabilities are then derived. Under the noise-limited assumption, simplified closed-form expressions of the outage probabilities are given as well. The simulation results demonstrating the performance improvement due to the relay are provided. Overall, the impact of deploying a relay in the mmWave cellular systems on the outage probabilities is characterized.
The impact of rheumatoid arthritis on the risk of adverse events following joint replacement: a real-world cohort study

Purpose To assess whether rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is associated with a greater risk of adverse events following total knee replacement (TKR) and total hip replacement (THR) than osteoarthritis (OA). Patients and methods Individuals with a diagnosis of RA or OA were identified using primary care records. TKR and THR following diagnosis were identified using linked hospital records. Myocardial infarction (MI), prosthetic joint infection (PJI), venous thromboembolism (VTE), and death were identified within 90 days following surgery, and revision procedures over 10 years following surgery. The impact of RA compared to OA on the risk for these adverse events was assessed using Cox proportional hazard models. Univariable models, with diagnosis as the only explanatory variable, and multivariable models, with age, gender, and year of surgery first added and then a measure of other comorbidities also included, were estimated. Results In all 20,763 individuals, with 10,260 TKR and 10,961 THR, were included in the analysis. Compared to those with OA, individuals with a diagnosis of RA had a greater incidence of MI over 90 days following TKR (OA: 0.28%, RA: 0.75%) and revision over 10 years following THR (OA: 5.55%, RA: 8.68%). Both of these differences were statistically significant with, for example, hazard ratios of 3.54 (1.44 to 8.73) for MI and 1.61 (1.06 to 2.46) for revision after controlling for age, gender, year of surgery, and other comorbidities. Conclusion These findings suggest that, compared to individuals with OA, those with RA have an increased short-term risk of MI following TKR. While risk of MI remains below 1%, this does underline the importance of the management of cardiovascular risk factors for those with RA. RA was also associated with an increased long-term risk of revision following THR, which strengthens the argument for investing in therapies which may prevent the need for joint replacement.
Low-dose Rituximab therapy in resistant idiopathic membranous nephropathy: single-center experience

ABSTRACT Background Persistent significant proteinuria has been associated with increased risk of progression to end-stage kidney disease in patients with idiopathic membranous nephropathy (IMN). Rituximab (RTX) therapy has given encouraging results in IMN, but most of the studies have used a higher dose, which is limited by the high cost as well as a potential increased risk of infections. Our study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of low-dose RTX in patients with immunosuppression-resistant IMN. Methods A total of 21 patients with treatment-resistant IMN treated with RTX from 2015 to 2016 at our center were included in the study. They received two doses of RTX (500 mg each) infusion 7 days apart. CD19 count was performed after 4 weeks. A single dose of RTX was repeated after 4–6 weeks if CD19 count was not depleted. Results The mean standard deviation age of patients was 33.3 ± 12.3 years and 33.3% were females. Mean proteinuria before RTX therapy was 6.2 ± 2.2 g/day, serum creatinine was 0.9 ± 0.3 mg/dL and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was 95.8 ± 26.9 mL/min/1.73 m2. All the patients were non-responders to prior immunosuppressive treatment. Twenty (95.2%) patients achieved targeted CD19 depletion with two doses of RTX. One patient required one additional RTX dose due to inadequate B-cell suppression. A total of 13 (61.9%) patients achieved remission with RTX therapy: 4 (19.0%) complete and 9 (42.9%) partial remission. Patients who did not respond to RTX had a significantly lower baseline eGFR compared with those who achieved remission (P = 0.022). One patient developed respiratory tract infection following RTX during the follow-up, which responded to a course of oral antibiotics. During median follow-up of 13.1 (10–23.9) months, four (19%) patients had deterioration in renal function and one patient relapsed after achieving partial remission. Renal survival was significantly better in patients who responded to RTX therapy as compared with those who did not achieve remission (P = 0.0037). Conclusion Low-dose RTX therapy is effective and safe in immunosuppression-resistant IMN.
Pulmonary function tests in Egyptian schoolchildren in rural and urban areas.

Background Previous studies have shown a negative association between urban environments and pulmonary function. Objectives This longitudinal study examined the effect of an urban environment on pulmonary function tests of children by comparing children from an urban and a rural area in Egypt. The effect of other factors on pulmonary function, including obesity, breastfeeding and parental atopy, was also examined. Methods Children aged 7-12 years from rural Shibin El-Kom and urban Cairo were enrolled in the study. Forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV1), forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory rate and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) were measured 5 times over a period of 2 years, at 6-monthly intervals. Factorial repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the differences in the rate of change in FEV1 predicted%, FVC predicted% and PEFR between the children in Cairo and Shibin El-Kom. Generalized linear mixed models were used to analyse factors associated with pulmonary function test results. Results Generalized linear regression showed that living in Cairo decreased log(FVC), log(FEV1) and log(PEFR). Significant differences were found in the changes occurring between the 2 locations in the last 3 visits; children in Cairo showed a smaller increase in pulmonary function. Conclusions Differences in pulmonary function in the 2 locations increased significantly with time, indicating a negative effect on lung function of living in urban Cairo. The findings could be used to help in the development of policies in Egypt and other developing countries to improve respiratory health, including promoting breastfeeding and reducing outdoor air pollution.