Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical, Socioeconomic, and Psychosocial Factors Associated with Blood Pressure Control and Adherence: Results from a Multidisciplinary Cardiovascular National Program Providing Universal Coverage in a Developing Country

Background Limited information exists on blood pressure (BP) control factors and adherence to antihypertensive drug therapy (Rx) in developing countries. Methods Cross-sectional study in randomly selected 992 hypertensive patients under a Chilean national comprehensive Cardiovascular Health Program (CVHP). Association of education, income, diabetes, obesity, physical activity, psychosocial characteristics, smoking, and alcohol abuse with BP control and adherence were evaluated by multivariate logistic regression. Results BP control (<140/90 mmHg) was achieved in 63.1% of patients, with 38.4% adherent to Rx. Uncontrolled BP significantly associated with male sex (OR: 1.73 [95% CI 1.35-2.22]), low family income, high emotional-stress-depression score, body mass index, no adherence (OR: 1.83 [95% CI 1.44 - 2.32]), multiple Rx, baseline systolic BP value, and sedentary life style. Males (OR: 1.54 [95% CI 1.23 - 1.93]), low family income, high emotional stress-depression score (OR: 2.15 [95% CI 1.68 - 2.76]), low social support, and uncontrolled BP (OR: 1.52 [95% CI 1.22-1.90]) associated with no adherence. Conclusions Comparable BP control (63.1%) to higher-income societies was observed. Uncontrolled BP associated significantly to no adherence and both to male sex, socioeconomic, and psychosocial factors. Global low adherence (38.4%) and improved BP control and adherence in diabetics were noted.
Comparison of 4 Pediatric Intraosseous Access Devices

Background Obtaining intravascular access can be challenging or even impossible in several clinical situations. As an alternative, medications and fluids can be administered via the intraosseous (IO) route, which is a well-tolerated and established alternative, especially in the emergency setting. Methods Seventy-five novice physicians participated in this randomized simulation study. After a single educational session and 6 months without any clinical application, participants were asked to identify the correct puncture site and obtain IO access using 3 widely used mechanical devices (BIG Pediatric, Arrow EZ-IO, NIO Pediatric) and a manual device (Jamshidi needle) on a pediatric manikin and turkey bone, respectively. Results Sixty-eight participants correctly identified the puncture site and performed IO cannulations. First placement attempt success rate was similar with mechanical devices (NIO Pediatric, 100%; Arrow EZ-IO, 97%; and BIG Pediatric, 90%), whereas was only 43% using the manual Jamshidi device. Also, procedure time was much faster using mechanical devices (ranging between 18 and 23 seconds) compared with the manual Jamshidi device (34 seconds). Conclusions Although the efficacy of devices was demonstrated in simulated environment in novice users, further studies are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of devices in clinical comparative settings. With more experienced users, the success rate may differ considerably as compared with naive users.
Blind Digital Modulation Identification for MIMO Systems in Railway Environments With High-Speed Channels and Impulsive Noise

In order to improve on existing radio communications for railways, cognitive radio (CR) is a promising concept, allowing the combination of artificial intelligence and software-defined radios. To ensure the best environmental awareness, as required by CR receivers, automatic modulation identification is a key feature for promoting efficient and secure communications in the CR context. This paper deals with blind modulation identification in the railway transmission environment and specifically considers its two major constraints: the high-speed and the impulsive nature of the noise. To achieve this goal, we propose a feature-based process of blind identification, which is made up of three subsystems: impulsive noise mitigation (which is the main contribution of this paper), feature extraction, and classification. For the purpose of mitigating the impulsive noise, we introduce a blind filtering myriad-based approach, which, in turn, requires the estimation of the noise parameters. Simulation results prove that the developed filtering approach provides a good filtering performance, and consequently, high identification performances of the overall identification system.
Detection of Vertical Root Fractures Using Cone-Beam Computed Tomography in the Presence and Absence of Gutta-Percha

Background Vertical root fractures (VRFs) can significantly reduce dental prognosis. Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) offers better visualization of VRF than conventional radiography. However, gutta-percha creates artifacts in cone-beam CT (CBCT) images and reduces the diagnosis quality. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of CBCT in detection of VRF in presence and absence of gutta-percha in canals. Materials and Methods In this cross-sectional study, 50 extracted mandibular premolars were selected. After preparing the access cavity, canals were instrumented using step-back method, and gutta-percha #40 was placed afterwards. The fractures were created using electromechanical universal testing machine on 25 teeth. The teeth were randomly placed in dry mandibular dental sockets, and the first CBCTs were taken. Then the gutta-percha was removed, and the second CBCTs were taken. Results The results of Kappa coefficient between two observers in roots with and without gutta-percha were 0.644 and 0.830, respectively (p value ≤ 0.001). The sensitivity and specificity of VRF diagnosis in assessing gutta-percha filled canals were 32% and 68% for the first observer, respectively (Kappa < 0.000, p value = 1.000), and 40% and 68% for the second observer, respectively (Kappa = 0.080, p value = 0.556). The sensitivity and specificity of VRF diagnosis in assessing the empty canals (without gutta-percha) were 72% and 96% for the first observer, respectively (Kappa = 0.680, p value ≤ 0/001), and 72% and 96% for the second observer, respectively (Kappa = 0.680, p value ≤ 0/001). Conclusion The intracanal filling materials such as gutta-percha reduce the diagnostic ability of vertical root fractures. Hence, it is recommended to remove those materials from root canals before imaging to improve the diagnostic potential of CBCT.
Evolution of ERP Systems in the Cloud: A Study on System Updates

Cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems emerged around the new millennium, and since then there has been a lack of research regarding the evolution and update processes of these systems. From the users’ perspective, updates in a traditional on-premise ERP system are carried at their own request; while cloud-based ERPs are compulsory updated. Through an established ERP lifecycle framework, this study investigates how the process of updates is conducted in a cloud ERP context, from both the users’ and vendors’ perspectives. A multiple case study was conducted in Norway at 10 client organizations, as well as a cloud ERP vendor. Our main findings suggest that the vendor and the users view the process of updates differently. The main challenges with the process of updates from the users’ perspective are the size and date of the updates, lack of information and communication during the process, and extinction of certain functionalities. Yet, the main advantages are that all system users will always have the same version of the system, users do not need to spend time on updating the system and paying attention to the ERP market, which leads to more focus on their core competences instead.
Explaining Queries Over Web Tables to Non-experts

Designing a reliable natural language (NL) interface for querying tables has been a longtime goal of researchers in both the data management and natural language processing (NLP) communities. Such an interface receives as input an NL question, translates it into a formal query, executes the query and returns the results. Errors in the translation process are not uncommon, and users typically struggle to understand whether their query has been mapped correctly. We address this problem by explaining the obtained formal queries to non-expert users. We introduce novel query explanations that provide a graphic representation of the query cell-based provenance (in its execution on a given table). Our solution augments a state-of-the-art NL interface over web tables, enhancing it in both its training and deployment phase. Experiments, including a user study conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, show our solution to improve both the correctness and reliability of the NL interface.
Knock-Down of Arabidopsis PLC5 Reduces Primary Root Growth and Secondary Root Formation While Overexpression Improves Drought Tolerance and Causes Stunted Root Hair Growth

Phospholipase C (PLC) is a well-known signaling enzyme in metazoans that hydrolyzes phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) to produce inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate and diacylglycerol as second messengers involved in mutiple processes. Plants contain PLC too, but relatively little is known about its function there. The model system Arabidopsis thaliana contains nine PLC genes. Reversed genetics have implicated several roles for PLCs in plant development and stress signaling. Here, PLC5 is functionally addressed. Promoter-β-glucuronidase (GUS) analyses revealed expression in roots, leaves and flowers, predominantly in vascular tissue, most probably phloem companion cells, but also in guard cells, trichomes and root apical meristem. Only one plc5-1 knock-down mutant was obtained, which developed normally but grew more slowly and exhibited reduced primary root growth and decreased lateral root numbers. These phenotypes could be complemented by expressing the wild-type gene behind its own promoter. Overexpression of PLC5 (PLC5-OE) using the UBQ10 promoter resulted in reduced primary and secondary root growth, stunted root hairs, decreased stomatal aperture and improved drought tolerance. PLC5-OE lines exhibited strongly reduced phosphatidylinositol 4-monophosphate (PIP) and PIP2 levels and increased amounts of phosphatidic acid, indicating enhanced PLC activity in vivo. Reduced PIP2 levels and stunted root hair growth of PLC5-OE seedlings could be recovered by inducible overexpression of a root hair-specific PIP 5-kinase, PIP5K3. Our results show that PLC5 is involved in primary and secondary root growth and that its overexpression improves drought tolerance. Independently, we provide new evidence that PIP2 is essential for the polar tip growth of root hairs.
Obesity, metabolic abnormalities, and mortality in older men

Background Older adults are prone to obesity and metabolic abnormalities and recommended to pursue a normal weight especially when obesity and metabolic abnormalities are co-existed. However, few studies have reported the possible differences in the effect of obesity on outcomes between older adults with metabolic abnormalities and those without metabolic abnormalities. Methods A total of 3485 older men were included from 2000 to 2014. All-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality were obtained during a mean follow-up of five years. Metabolic abnormalities were defined as having established hypertension, diabetes, or dyslipidemia and taking the disease-related medications. All participants were stratified by the presence or absence of metabolic abnormalities. Results In the non-metabolic abnormalities group, all-cause and cardiovascular deaths were lowest in overweight participants and highest in obese participants. In the metabolic abnormalities group, mortality was also lowest in overweight participants but highest in participants with normal weight. After adjustment for covariates, hazard ratios (95% CI) for all-cause death and cardiovascular death were 0.68 (0.51, 0.92) and 0.59 (0.37, 0.93), respectively, in overweight participants with metabolic abnormalities. Furthermore, obesity was not associated with mortality risk in both groups. These findings were unchanged in stratified analyses. Conclusions Overweight was negatively associated with mortality risk in older men with metabolic abnormalities but not in those without metabolic abnormalities. Obesity did not increase death risk regardless of metabolic abnormalities. These findings suggest that the recommendation of pursuing a normal weight may be wrong in overweight/obese older men, especially for those with metabolic abnormalities.
Genome-wide association study identifies novel recessive genetic variants for high TGs in an Arab population[S]

Abnormal blood lipid levels are influenced by genetic and lifestyle/dietary factors. Although many genetic variants associated with blood lipid traits have been identified in Europeans, similar data in Middle Eastern populations are limited. We performed a genome-wide association study with Arab individuals (discovery cohort: 1,353; replication cohort: 1,176) from Kuwait to identify possible associations of genetic variants with high lipid levels. We used Illumina HumanOmniExpress BeadChip and candidate SNP genotyping in the discovery and replication phases, respectively. For association tests, we used genetic models that were based on additive and recessive modes of inheritance. High triglycerides (TGs) were recessively associated with six risk variants (rs1002487/RPS6KA1, rs11805972/LAD1) rs7761746/Or5v1, rs39745/CTTNBP2-LSM8, rs2934952/PGAP3, and rs9626773/RP11-191L9.4-CERK) at genome-wide significance (P  6.12E-09), and another six variants (rs10873925/ST6GALNAC5, rs4663379/SPP2-ARL4C, rs10033119/NPY1R, rs17709449/LINC00911-FLRT2, rs11654954/CDK12-NEUROD2, and rs9972882/STARD3) were associated at borderline significance (P  5.0E-08). High TG was also additively associated with rs11654954. All of the 12 identified markers are novel and are harbored in runs of homozygosity. Literature evidence supports the involvement of these gene loci in lipid-related processes. This study in an Arab population augments international efforts to identify genetic regulation of lipid traits.
Analyzing chinese-english mixed language queries in a web search engine

With the increasing number of multilingual web pages on the Internet, multilingual information retrieval has become an important research issue. While queries are the key element of information retrieval process, mixed-language queries have not yet been adequately studied. This study investigates the search topics and user intents of Chinese-English mixed language queries submitted to a Chinese web search engine, and develops a typology of English terms used in those mixed language queries. The preliminary findings show that the category of search topics and distribution of user intents differ from those of monolingual queries reported in previous studies, suggesting a specific searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed language queries users. The findings of this study could provide useful insights in understanding specific searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed language queries users, and inform the construction of controlled vocabularies and cross-lingual query expansion.
The effect of domestication on post-conflict management: wolves reconcile while dogs avoid each other

Highly cooperative social species are expected to engage in frequent reconciliation following conflicts in order to maintain pack cohesiveness and preserve future cooperation. By contrast, in social species with low reliance on cooperation, reconciliation is expected to be less frequent. Here, we investigate the pattern of reconciliation in four captive wolf packs and four captive dog packs. We provide evidence for reconciliation in captive wolves, which are highly dependent on cooperation between pack members, while domestic dogs, which rely on conspecific cooperation less than wolves, avoided interacting with their partners after conflicts. Occurrence, intensity, latency, duration and initiation of wolf reconciliations appeared to vary as a consequence of a compromise between the costs (e.g. risk of further aggression) and the benefits (e.g. restoring relationship with opponents) of such interactions. Our results are in line with previous findings on various wolf packs living under different social and ecological conditions, suggesting that reconciliation is an important strategy for maintaining functional relationships and pack cohesiveness. However, current results on dogs are in contrast to the only other study showing that reconciliation can occur also in this species. Therefore, the occurrence of reconciliation in dogs may be influenced by social and environmental conditions more than in wolves. Which factors promote and modulate reconciliation in dogs needs to be further investigated.
Citation role labeling via local, pairwise, and global features

The citation relationship between scientific publications has been successfully used for bibliometrics, information retrieval and data mining tasks, and citation-based recommendation algorithms are well documented. While previous studies investigated citation relationships from various viewpoints, most of them share the same assumption that, if paper1 cites paper2 (or author1 cites author2), they are connected, regardless of citation importance, sentiment, reason, topic, or motivation. However, this assumption is oversimplified. In this study, we propose a novel method to automatically label the massive citations in the scientific repository with different roles, a.k. a. citation role labeling. Unlike earlier studies, we employ pairwise features (similarity between citing and cited paper) and global features (citing and cited paper proximity on the heterogeneous graph), in addition to local features (information extracted solely from the citing paper, e.g. citation textual context). Evaluation result shows pairwise and global features, if properly used, can be very helpful to enhance the citation role labeling performance, especially when full-text data is not readily available.
Clumped Nuclei Segmentation with Adjacent Point Match and Local Shape based Intensity Analysis for Overlapped Nuclei in Fluorescence In-Situ Hybridization Images

Highly clumped nuclei clusters captured in fluorescence in situ hybridization microscopy images are common histology entities under investigations in a wide spectrum of tissue-related biomedical investigations. Due to their large scale in presence, computer based image analysis is used to facilitate such analysis with improved analysis efficiency and reproducibility. To ensure the quality of downstream biomedical analyses, it is essential to segment clustered nuclei with high quality. However, this presents a technical challenge commonly encountered in a large number of biomedical research, as nuclei are often overlapped due to a high cell density. In this paper, we propose an segmentation algorithm that identifies point pair connection candidates and evaluates adjacent point connections with a formulated ellipse fitting quality indicator. After connection relationships are determined, we recover the resulting dividing paths by following points with specific eigenvalues from Hessian in a constrained searching space. We validate our algorithm with 560 image patches from two classes of tumor regions of seven brain tumor patients. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results suggest that our algorithm is promising for dividing overlapped nuclei in fluorescence in situ hybridization microscopy images widely used in various biomedical research.
Dielectric properties of fluoronitriles/CO2 and SF6/N2 mixtures as a possible SF6-substitute gas

Perfluoronitriles (PFN) and their mixtures have garnered much attention as a great potential SF<sub>6</sub>-substitute gas, owing to their excellent dielectric strengths and minimal impacts on the environment. The dielectric properties of C4-PFN/CO<sub>2</sub> and SF<sub>6</sub>/N<sub>2</sub> mixtures are investigated and compared by experiments and calculations, with taking into account the limitations of saturated vapor pressure on the mixed ratio at certain ambient temperatures. The saturated vapor pressures of these two mixtures are determined by combining the Antoine Equation and the basic law of vapor liquid equilibrium. Then, the 50% breakdown voltages V50% of the C4-PFN/CO<sub>2</sub> and SF<sub>6</sub>/N<sub>2</sub> mixtures are determined by tests with up-and-down method, and the values of E/p are deduced. Finally, the dielectric properties of these two mixtures are analyzed by combining the saturated vapor pressure characteristics and the breakdown electric field strengths. The results show that a proper choice of the mixed ratio and gas pressure of the C4-PFN/CO<sub>2</sub> mixture can provide a stronger DS than the SF<sub>6</sub>/N<sub>2</sub> mixture and pure SF<sub>6</sub>. This indicates a great potential of the C4-PFN/CO<sub>2</sub> mixture as a SF<sub>6</sub>-substitute gas for high voltage apparatus.
Active cushing syndrome patients have increased ectopic fat deposition and bone marrow fat content compared to cured patients and healthy subjects: a pilot 1H-MRS study.

OBJECTIVE Glucocorticoid excess is one of the most important causes of bone disorders. Bone marrow fat (BMF) has been identified as a l new mediator of bone metabolism. Cushing syndrome (CS), is a main regulator of adipose tissue distribution but its impact on BMF is unknown. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect of chronic hypercortisolism on BMF. DESIGN This was a cross-sectional study. Seventeen active and seventeen cured ACTH-dependent CS patients along with seventeen controls (matched with the active group for age and sex) were included. METHODS the BMF content of the femoral neck and L3 vertebrae were measured by 1H-MRS on a 3-Tesla wide-bore magnet. BMD was evaluated in patients using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. RESULTS Active CS patients had higher BMF content both in the femur (82.5±2.6%) and vertebrae (70.1±5.1%) compared to the controls (70.8±3.6%, p=0.013 and 49.0±3.7% p=0.005, respectively). In cured CS patients (average remission time of 43 months), BMF content was not different from controls at both sites (72.3±2.9% (femur) and 46.7%±5.3% (L3)). BMF content was positively correlated with age, fasting plasma glucose, HbA1c, triglycerides and visceral adipose tissue in the whole cohort and negatively correlated with BMD values in the CS patients . CONCLUSIONS Accumulation of BMF is induced by hypercortisolism. In remission patients BMF reached values of controls. Further studies are needed to determine whether this increase in marrow adiposity in CS is associated with bone loss.