Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reversal of Multidrug Resistance in an Epirubicin-Resistant Gastric Cancer Cell Subline

Background: Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. Epirubicin (EPI) is used extensively in the treatment of multiple cancers despite its tendency to induce multidrug resistance though overexpression of the ABCB1 efflux pump. However, this overexpression can be disrupted using short interfering RNAs (siRNAs). Objective and Methods: The aim of this study was to explore approaches to reverse EPI resistance and thus increase the success of chemotherapy treatment in an EPI-resistant gastric cancer cell subline (AGS/EPI). Methods: The study focused on effects of ABCB1 knockdown by siRNA technology using TaqMan gene expression assays with quantitative real-time reverse-transcription PCR (qRT-PCR). MTT assays were performed to evaluate viability and prolifer in subline. ABCB1 protein localization and EPI intracellular fluorescence intensity in AGS/EPI cells were detected by confocal microscopy. Results: The siRNA efficiently downregulated ABCB1 mRNA in AGS/EPI cells. Thus MDR reversal was clearly demonstrated in the AGS/EPI cells, offering the possibility of future in vitro chemoresistance assays for the GC field. Conclusions: ABCB1 knockdown decreased EPI efflux and increased EPI sensitivity in AGS/EPI cells. This result provides a novel strategy for targeted gene therapy to reverse EPI resistance in gastric cancer.
R(+)-Thioctic Acid Effects on Oxidative Stress and Peripheral Neuropathy in Type II Diabetic Patients: Preliminary Results by Electron Paramagnetic Resonance and Electroneurography

Objectives Diabetic neuropathy is the most common complication of diabetes. The idea of alterations in energy metabolism in diabetes is emerging. The biogenic antioxidant R(+)-thioctic acid has been successfully used in the treatment of diabetic polyneuropathic (DPN) patients. Methods The effects of R(+)-thioctic acid (1 tablet, 1.6 g) administration were evaluated in 12 DPN patients at baseline and at 15, 30, 60, and 120 administration days throughout the assessment of oxidative stress (OxS); ROS production rate by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) technique; and oxidative damage biomarkers (thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and protein carbonyls (PC)), electroneurography (ENG) and visual analogue scale. Results Supplementation induced significant changes (p < 0.05) at 30 and 60 days. ROS production rate up to −16%; TBARS (−31%), PC (−38%), and TAC up to +48%. Motor nerve conduction velocity in SPE and ulnar nerves (+22% and +16%) and sensor conduction velocity in sural and median nerves (+22% and +5%). Patients reported a general wellness sensation improvement (+35%) at 30 days: lower limb pain sensation (−40%) and upper limbs (−23%). Conclusion The results strongly indicate that an increased antioxidant capacity plays an important role in OxS, nerve conduction velocity, pain, and general wellness improvement. Nevertheless, the effects of the antioxidant compound were found positive up to 60 days. Then, a hormesis effect was observed. Novelty of the research would be a challenge for investigators to carefully address issues, including dose range factors, appropriate administration time, and targeting population to counteract possible “boomerang effects. ” The great number of monitored parameters would firmly stress these conclusions.
Acoustic SLAM

An algorithm is presented that enables devices equipped with microphones, such as robots, to move within their environment in order to explore, adapt to, and interact with sound sources of interest. Acoustic scene mapping creates a three-dimensional (3D) representation of the positional information of sound sources across time and space. In practice, positional source information is only provided by Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimates of the source directions; the source-sensor range is typically difficult to obtain. DoA estimates are also adversely affected by reverberation, noise, and interference, leading to errors in source location estimation and consequent false DoA estimates. Moreover, many acoustic sources, such as human talkers, are not continuously active, such that periods of inactivity lead to missing DoA estimates. Withal, the DoA estimates are specified relative to the observer's sensor location and orientation. Accurate positional information about the observer therefore is crucial. This paper proposes Acoustic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (aSLAM), which uses acoustic signals to simultaneously map the 3D positions of multiple sound sources while passively localizing the observer within the scene map. The performance of aSLAM is analyzed and evaluated using a series of realistic simulations. Results are presented to show the impact of the observer motion and sound source localization accuracy.
Composite Visual Mapping for Time Series Visualization

In the information visualization reference model, visual mapping is the most crucial step in producing a visualization from a data set. The conventional visual mapping maps each data attribute onto a single visual channel (e.g. the year of production of a car to the position on the horizontal axis). In this work, we investigate composite visual mapping: mapping single data attributes onto several visual channels, each one representing one aspect of the data attribute (e.g. its order of magnitude, or its trend component). We first propose a table which allows us to explore the design space of composite mappings by offering a systematic overview of channel combinations. We expect that using more than one visual channel for communicating a data attribute increases the bandwidth of information presentation by displaying separable information on different aspects of data. In order to evaluate this point, we compare horizon graph, an existing technique which successfully adopts a composite visual mapping, with a selection of alternative composite mappings. We show that some of those mappings perform as well as –and in some cases even better than– horizon graph in terms of accuracy and speed. Our results confirm that the benefits of composite visual mapping are not limited to horizon graph. We thus recommend the use of composite visual mapping when users are simultaneously interested in several aspects of data attributes.
Arithmetic Properties of Integers in Chains and Reflections of g-ary Expansions

Abstract Recently, there has been a sharp rise of interest in properties of digits primes. Here we study yet another question of this kind. Namely, we fix an integer base g ⩾ 2 and then for every infinite sequence of g-ary digits we consider the counting function of integers n ⩽ N for which ∑n − 1i = 0digi is prime. We construct sequences for which grows fast enough, and show that for some constant ϑg < g there are at most O(ϑNg) initial elements (d0, …, dN − 1) of for which . We also discuss joint arithmetic properties of integers and mirror reflections of their g-ary expansions.
Principled Selection of Hyperparameters in the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a well known topic model that is often used to make inference regarding the properties of collections of text documents. LDA is a hierarchical Bayesian model, and involves a prior distribution on a set of latent topic variables. The prior is indexed by certain hyperparameters, and even though these have a large impact on inference, they are usually chosen either in an ad-hoc manner, or by applying an algorithm whose theoretical basis has not been firmly established. We present a method, based on a combination of Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling, for estimating the maximum likelihood estimate of the hyperparameters. The method may be viewed as a computational scheme for implementation of an empirical Bayes analysis. It comes with theoretical guarantees, and a key feature of our approach is that we provide theoretically-valid error margins for our estimates. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show good performance of our methodology.
Steroid hormones modulate galectin-1 in the trophoblast HTR-8/SVneocell line

The effects of steroids on galectin-1 (gal-1) were studied in HTR-8/SVneo cells by immunocytochemistry, cell-based ELISA, the MTT proliferation test and the Matrigel TM invasion test. Dexamethasone (DEX), progesterone (PRG), and mifepristone (RU486) were used. Gal-1 was modulated in a steroid- and dose-dependent manner by DEX, which mildly but significantly stimulated production at low concentrations (0.1-10 nM), and inhibited it at 100 nM, while the effects of PRG and RU486 were opposite. HTR-8/SVneo cell invasion of Matrigel was significantly decreased in the presence of DEX and lactose. The obtained data support the proposed regulatory role of steroids in trophoblast gal-1 production.
Gastric Partitioning Bypass Procedure: A Novel Technique in Bariatric Surgery

Morbid obesity as a chronic condition remains one of the major health problems of the present generation. In 2012, over onethird of US adults were identified as obese and the prevalence has been growing since, such that currently, obesity is considered as an epidemic [1]. In addition to developed countries, obesity has recently become a health concern in developing nations as well. For example, a recent study reported that the total prevalence of obesity in 1999-2001 was 15.8% and 31.3% in Iranian men and women, respectively. The prevalence has increased to 21.1% in men and 38.6% in women in 2006 through 2008 [2,3]. Obesityrelated comorbidities include a wide range of conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, coronary artery disease, dyslipidemia, hypertriglyceridemia, obstructive sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, social isolation, and depression [4]. Studies have shown that obesity is associated with increased risk of various neoplasms such as breast, colorectal, esophageal, hepatobiliary and prostate cancer [1,5]. While lifestyle modifications and exercise have been shown to be effective as first line intervention in obese individuals, these modalities have little effect on morbidly obese patients and bariatric surgery remains the most efficient treatment option in this patient population [6,7]. Abstract
Enhanced microalgal lipid production with media engineering of potassium nitrate as a nitrogen source

ABSTRACT Algal biofuels are far from a commercial reality due to the technical challenges associated with their growth and lipid extraction procedures. In this study, we investigated the effect of 4 different media and 5 different nitrogen sources at 5 levels on the growth, biomass and lipid productivity of Scenedesmus sp and Chlorella sp The hypothesis was that a nitrogen source can be identified that provides enough stress to accumulate lipids without compromising significantly on biomass and lipid productivity. A maximum specific growth rate and doubling per day have been observed with algal species using modified BG-11 medium. Among the tested nitrogen sources, 2.5 mM potassium nitrate as a nitrogen constituent of modified BG-11 medium resulted in higher lipid content and productivity in the case of S. dimorphus (29.15%, 15.449 mg L−1day−1). Another noteworthy outcome of the present study lies in the usage of a smaller amount of the nitrogen source, i.e., 2.5 mM, which is found to be 7 times less than the standard BG11 media (17.60 mM sodium nitrate).
Characterizing task-evoked and intrinsic functional networks from task-based fMRI data via two-stage sparse dictionary learning

Recently, increasing studies suggest that task-evoked brain networks and intrinsic connectivity networks are concurrent during task performance in the architecture of functional brain organization. However, it remains challenging to identify and quantitatively characterize these mixtures of networks from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. In this paper, we propose a two-stage sparse dictionary learning method by establishing spatial correspondences among the brain networks of multiple subjects and automatically categorize these networks into task-evoked, intrinsic and uncertain ones. The proposed framework is applied to Human Connectome Project (HCP) task-based fMRI data. Experimental results demonstrate that this method can effectively identify group-wise task-evoked and intrinsic networks simultaneously. Our study provides a novel data-driven method to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the functional brain architecture.
Local Rule-Based Explanations of Black Box Decision Systems

The recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure decision systems which hide the logic of their internal decision processes to the users. The lack of explanations for the decisions of black box systems is a key ethical issue, and a limitation to the adoption of machine learning components in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. %Therefore, we need explanations that reveals the reasons why a predictor takes a certain decision. In this paper we focus on the problem of black box outcome explanation, i.e., explaining the reasons of the decision taken on a specific instance. We propose LORE, an agnostic method able to provide interpretable and faithful explanations. LORE first leans a local interpretable predictor on a synthetic neighborhood generated by a genetic algorithm. Then it derives from the logic of the local interpretable predictor a meaningful explanation consisting of: a decision rule, which explains the reasons of the decision; and a set of counterfactual rules, suggesting the changes in the instance's features that lead to a different outcome. Wide experiments show that LORE outperforms existing methods and baselines both in the quality of explanations and in the accuracy in mimicking the black box.
Female directors ’ relationship to financial performance

Gender diversity within the boardroom is an important theme in the research of corporate governance. The lack of female directors during recent years have raised attention where the prejudice against women have been a central theme. Especially, in a gender egalitarian country as Sweden. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between female directors and financial performance, but also the presence of the “glass cliff” theory. The study is based on companies listed on Large Cap in Sweden, where data are collected from annual reports and a database. The collected data are analyzed by several statistical methods. The findings show that female directors do have a positive impact on a company’s financial performance, in terms of accounting-based measurements. However, the market-based measurement does not a provide a significant relationship to female directors, indicating that the Swedish stock market does neither positively or negatively react to a more gender diverse board. As no differences in performance are seen preceding the appointments of females compared to males, no evidence for the “glass cliff” is found. The findings suggest that female directors may enhance the performance of a company and disproves the prejudice against women. Further, the findings indicate that the Swedish boards are becoming more diverse, where precarious situations are not the reason for women to be appointed to the board.
Prognostic nomogram for patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma incorporating hematological biomarkers and clinical characteristics

Predictive models for survival prediction in individual cancer patients following the tumor, node, and metastasis (TNM) staging system are limited. The survival rates of patients who share TNM stage diseases are diversified. Therefore, we established a nomogram in which hematological biomarkers and clinical characteristics for predicting the overall survival (OS) of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients were incorporated. The clinicopathological and follow-up data of 690 NPC patients who were histologically diagnosed histologically at the Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center between July 2007 and December 2011 were retrospectively reviewed. Data was randomly divided into primary (n = 460) and validation groups (n = 230). Cox regression analysis was used to identify prognostic factors for building the nomogram in primary cohorts. The predictive accuracy and discriminative ability of the nomogram were measured by the concordance index (C-index) and decision curve, and were compared with the TNM staging system, Epstein-Barr virus DNA copy numbers (EBV DNA), or TMN stage plus EBV DNA. The results were internally validated by assessment of discrimination and calibration using the validation cohorts at the same institution. Independent factors selected into the nomogram for OS included age [hazard ratio (HR): 1.765; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.008-3.090)], TNM stage (HR: 1.899; 95% CI: 1.023-3.525), EBV DNA (HR: 1.322; 95% CI: 1.087-1.607), lactate dehydrogenase level (LDH) (HR: 1.784; 95% CI: 1.032-3.086), high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) (HR: 1.840; 95% CI: 1.039-3.258), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) (HR: 0.503; 95% CI: 0.282-0.896), hemoglobin (HGB) (HR: 0.539; 95% CI: 0.309-0.939) and lymphocyte to lymphocyte ratio (LMR) (HR:0.531; 95% CI: 0.293-0.962). The C-index in the primary cohort and validation cohort were 0.800 and 0.831, respectively, and were statistically higher when compared to C-index values for TNM stage (0.672 and 0. 716), EBV DNA (0.668 and 0.688), and TNM stage+ EBV DNA (0. 732 and 0. 760), P < 0.001 for all. Moreover, the decision curve analyses demonstrated that the nomogram model had a higher overall net benefit compared to the TNM staging system, EBV DNA and TNM stage+ EBV DNA. Next, patients were divided into three distinct risk groups for OS based on total points (TPs) of the nomogram: a low-risk group (TPs ≤ 19.0), an intermediate risk group (19.0 < TPs ≤ 25.5) and a high risk group (TPs > 25.5), respectively. The nomogram predicting prognosis generated for NPC patients had a higher predictive power compared to the TNM staging system, EBV DNA, and TNM stage+ EBV DNA.
Quercetin protects against ox-LDL-induced injury via regulation of ABCAl, LXR-α and PCSK9 in RAW264.7 macrophages

Quercetin is a flavonoid that has anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and lipid metabolic effects. It has also been reported to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. The present study measured the effects of quercetin on the expression of ATP-binding cassette transporter 1 (ABCAl), ATP-binding cassette sub-family G member 1 (ABCG1), liver X receptor-α (LXR-α), proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), p53, p21 and p16 induced by oxidized low density lipoprotein (ox-LDL). RAW264.7 macrophages were exposed to ox-LDL with or without 20 µmol/l quercetin and cell proliferation and senescence were quantified using β-gal staining. Superoxide dismutase (SOD), malondialdehyde (MDA) and lipid droplets were measured in the cytoplasm using oil red staining, while intracellular and total cholesterol (TC) were measured using filipin staining and a TC kit. Immunofluorescent studies and western blot analysis were performed to quantify the expression of ABCAl, ABCG1, LXR-α, PCSK9, p53, p21 and p16. Quercetin increased RAW264.7 cell viability and reduced lipid accumulation, senescence, lipid droplets, intracellular cholesterol and TC. It was concluded that quercetin inhibits ox-LDL-induced lipid droplets in RAW264.7 cells by upregulation of ABCAl, ABCG1, LXR-α and downregulation of PCSK9, p53, p21 and p16.
Context Sensitive Neural Lemmatization with Lematus

The main motivation for developing contextsensitive lemmatizers is to improve performance on unseen and ambiguous words. Yet previous systems have not carefully evaluated whether the use of context actually helps in these cases. We introduce Lematus, a lemmatizer based on a standard encoder-decoder architecture, which incorporates character-level sentence context. We evaluate its lemmatization accuracy across 20 languages in both a full data setting and a lower-resource setting with 10k training examples in each language. In both settings, we show that including context significantly improves results against a context-free version of the model. Context helps more for ambiguous words than for unseen words, though the latter has a greater effect on overall performance differences between languages. We also compare to three previous context-sensitive lemmatization systems, which all use pre-extracted edit trees as well as hand-selected features and/or additional sources of information such as tagged training data. Without using any of these, our context-sensitive model outperforms the best competitor system (Lemming) in the fulldata setting, and performs on par in the lowerresource setting.
Whole-Body Vibration Does Not Seem to Affect Postural Control in Healthy Active Older Women

Objective This study investigated the acute residual effects induced by different frequencies of whole-body vibration (WBV) on postural control of elderly women. Design Thirty physically active elderly women (67 ± 5 years) were randomly divided into three groups: two experimental groups (high WBV frequency: 45 Hz and 4 mm amplitude, n = 10; low WBV frequency: 30 Hz and 4 mm amplitude, n = 10) and one control group (n = 10), with no treatment. The participants were first subjected to stabilometry tests and were then guided through three sets of isometric partial squats for 60 s while the WBV stimulation was applied. The control group was subjected to the same conditions but without the WBV stimulation. The participants were again subjected to body balance tests immediately following the end of the intervention period and again at 8, 16, and 24 min. To measure body sway control, three 60 s tests were performed at 10 s intervals for each of the following experimental conditions: (1) eyes opened and (2) eyes closed. The following variables were investigated: the average velocity of the displacement of the centre of pressure in the anterior-posterior and medial-lateral planes as well as in the elliptical area. Results A 3 (condition) × 5 (test) two-way repeated-measures ANOVA did not identify significant differences in the stabilometric variables, regardless of group, time, or experimental condition. Conclusions The effect of WBV, regardless of the stimulation frequency, did not have a significant effect immediately after or up to 24 minutes after vibration cessation, on the variables involved in the control of postural stability in physically active elderly women.
An Active Matrix Micro-Pixelated LED Display Driver for High Luminance Uniformity Using Resistance Mismatch Compensation Method

This brief proposes an active matrix micro-pixelated light-emitting diode (AMLED) display driver to achieve a high luminance uniformity. The proposed AMLED display driver enhances the forward current uniformity of micro-LEDs by compensating for resistance mismatch between the micro-pixel circuits. The proposed AMLED display driver ICs were fabricated using a standard 0.18-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS process with 6-V high voltage devices. They were assembled with a micro-LED array having a resolution of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16 \times 16 \times \text{RGB}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and measured to verify the luminance uniformity of the AMLED display. The measured average deviation of the micro-LED forward current over all 768 pixels was 0.91% with an average current of 12.03 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{A}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, indicating that the proposed display driver achieved highly uniform luminance. Therefore, the proposed AMLED display driver is suitable for high-end display applications, offering high image quality.