Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hospital Readmissions among Patients who are Homeless in Toronto

Despite high interest in examining hospital readmissions, few studies have focused on readmissions among individuals experiencing homelessness, a population with complex health challenges. A cohort of 1,165 homeless adults recruited from homeless shelters and meal programs in Toronto were observed from December 6, 2004 to March 31, 2009 using administrative health care databases. Multivariate analyses were used to i) compare the 30-day readmission rate between the homeless participants and a cohort of low-income controls; ii) to compare the readmission rate between hospitalized homeless participants and hospitalized low-income controls, matched on age, sex and case mix group; and iii) to determine risk factors associated with readmission among the homeless participants. Homeless participants were substantially more likely to be readmitted within 30-days as compared to low-income controls, even after accounting for the primary reason for admission. Further research is needed to assess practices and interventions to reduce readmissions in this patient population.
Time-lining computer evidence

In the investigation of a criminal case involving a computer or computers, the time-line of "computer events" may provide a critical piece of information relating to the prosecution of involved persons. This information can help to pinpoint the location of certain individuals, can assist with the determination of alibis, can undercover conversations and correspondences, and can possibly help to ultimately determine the guilt or innocence of those facing criminal charges. The following computer events or evidence may provide direct clues to not only the means, but also the motive, of a criminal act: contents or update time of electronic documents and files; time and content of e-mail communications and messages; information about system logon and logoff events; indications of access to specific Internet documents or sites; contents of communication with known individuals in chat rooms or other collaborative means; evidence of document destruction or hiding; knowledge of the forwarding of messages to external devices such as pagers, voice mail accounts or fax machines. Extracting this information from computer systems, network infrastructures, backup media, or peripheral devices is a time consuming and tedious process. It can prove, however, to be a worthwhile endeavor. The paper describes a process to not only identify and extract this information, but to correlate it into a time-line with external events such as phone records, witness testimony, and physical evidence. This time-line can become an integral part of the historical road map that provides detailed information pertinent to an investigation.
Use of color Doppler ultrasonography for evaluating vascularity of small intestinal lesions in Crohn's disease: correlation with endoscopic and surgical macroscopic findings

Abstract Objective. Ultrasonography (US) is a simple, inexpensive and minimally invasive method. We evaluated the vascularity of small intestinal lesions in Crohn's disease using color Doppler US (CD-US) and retrospectively compared them with endoscopic and surgical macroscopic findings. Material and methods. In order to compare CD-US and endoscopic findings, 108 Crohn's disease patients who underwent examination of the terminal ileum by both colonoscopy and CD-US were included in the study. Vascularity was evaluated in CD-US using a semiquantitative method, the Limberg score. We analyzed correlations between Limberg score and simple endoscopic score for Crohn's disease (SES-CD), an index reflecting endoscopic activity. Scores of SES-CD 3 and higher were defined as endoscopically active. For comparison with surgical macroscopic findings, 22 Crohn's disease patients who received CD-US and subsequent iliectomies were included. Lesions with apparent open ulcers were defined as active, and those without as non-active. These findings were compared with the Limberg score. Results. A substantial positive correlation was observed between Limberg scores and SES-CD (ρ = 0.709 [p < 0.001]). Notably, all 27 cases with a Limberg score of 3 or 4 were classified as endoscopically active. Compared to surgical macroscopic activity, Limberg scores of active lesions were significantly higher than those of non-active lesions (p = 0.005). In particular, all 11 cases with a Limberg score of 3 or 4 were classified as active lesions. Conclusion. Vascularity of small intestinal lesions of Crohn's disease evaluated by CD-US with Limberg score is well correlated with endoscopic and surgical macroscopic findings.
Extending the Response-Time “Guilty Knowledge” Test

Sometimes it is important to determine another’s familiarity with privileged information despite their intention to conceal this knowledge. Following previous work showing that recognition memory can be used to index knowledge activation (Farwell & Donchin, 1991; Lykken, 1981), Seymour, Seifert, Mosmann, & Shafto (2000) proposed a new “Guilty Knowledge” Test (GKT) based on the response-time (RT) and accuracy to critical information. In the GKT paradigm, participants are first exposed to critical “Probe” or crime information. Following a delay, and in an ostensibly novel task, participants learn a new set of “Target” phrases (e.g., “Blue Coat”) and are given a speeded recognition task. When presented with Targets, participants are to press a button indicating “Old. ” When presented with new “Filler” phrases as well as familiar Probes, participants are to respond with a button indicating “New. ” If Probes are familiar, participants may respond differentially to Probes and Fillers. However, when Probes are unfamiliar no differential response is expected. Despite being motivated to respond identically to Probes and Filler, and thus masking their knowledge of the Probes, participants’ responses to Probes were reliably slower and less accurate than to Filler items. This “Guilty Knowledge Effect” (GKE) did not occur when participants responded during a block where Probes are unfamiliar (Seymour et al., 2000). This differential pattern of results for Probes and Fillers led to a high hit rate and low false alarm rate when compared to other test using physiological measures such as heart rate, or more direct measures such as EEG (Farwell & Donchin, 1991).
Diabetes Health Care and Education — The Challenge of Isolation

: Many rural diabetes educators feel isolated professionally. Access to resources, skilled peers and opportunities for ongoing education may be lacking or not known. Rural diabetes educators often have multiple roles and may be confused about their responsibilities in specific areas. Geographic and professional isolation and lack of role definition may prevent appropriate diabetes care. Some sole educators in metropolitan hospitals also experience lack of support and interaction with their peers, A survey was designed to identify and address the issues facing isolated educators, determine the proportion of diabetes educators who consider themselves isolated, identify the reasons for isolation and the difficulties which result from isolation, and elicit suggestions for addressing the problems identified. Reasons given for isolation included professional isolation, distance, lack of resources and lack of network/support. The most frequently suggested methods of decreasing isolation were networking, regional meetings, teleconferences, distance education and provision of a practice manual. Professionals working in isolated areas of Australia need organised continuing medical education, quality assurance programs, systems for networking and access to expert advice. Modem information technology, distance education programs and models for effective networking offer the potential to meet these needs.
Information transfer in dynamical systems

Causality analysis has been a topic of research from the days of Aristotle. However, there has not been an universal definition of causality, with different researchers providing different definitions and measures of causality. In this work, we provide a new definition of causality in a dynamical system setting. In particular, we quantify how a state (or subspace) of a dynamical system influence any other state (or subspace). The quantification is in terms of what we call information transfer. Intuitively, information transfer quantifies how the entropy of a state (say y) changes due to evolution of any other state (say x) and this characterizes the causal structure and influence in a dynamical system. We show that the information transfer measure satisfies intuitions of causality and influence. In particular, we show our information transfer measure satisfy (a) zero influence, (b) transfer asymmetry and (c) information conservation. The one step information transfer is generalized to define n-step information transfer and this enables us to clearly distinguish between direct and indirect influence. With this, we show how in a dynamical system setting, when previous measures of causality fail to capture the true causal structure, our information transfer measure do capture the true causal structure in a dynamical system. Apart from identification of causal structure, we use the information transfer measure to characterize influence and demonstrate how this can be used to characterize stability in a power network. In particular, we show how to identify the states and generators which are responsible for instability of a power network. Moreover, we show how the connection between stability and information transfer can be used to predict phase transitions in complex systems. We also provide two algorithms to compute information transfer from time series data and show how this can be used for topology identification of linear networks and stability analysis of power networks. Finally, as a separate application, we characterize influence in a stock market and also show how the information transfer measure can be used to predict stock market crashes.
Illicit drug availability in rural areas and attitudes toward their use - young people talking

Two hundred and seventy-four young people from a variety of back grounds throughout Lincolnshire took part in 35 focus groups to discuss the availability of illicit drugs in the area and attitudes towards their use. They reported that many drugs were freely available and accessible throughout the county, especially cannabis, LSD, ecstasy and am phetamines. For many young people, use of drugs especially cannabis was regarded as the norm among their peers, and was mostly considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Risks of drug use were acknowledged but considered acceptable by many young people. The development of drug prevention strategies should pay heed to these views.
“Style” Transfer for Musical Audio Using Multiple Time-Frequency Representations

Neural Style Transfer has become a popular technique for generating images of distinct artistic styles using convolutional neural networks. This recent success in image style transfer has raised the question of whether similar methods can be leveraged to alter the “style” of musical audio. In this work, we attempt long time-scale high-quality audio transfer and texture synthesis in the time-domain that captures harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral elements related to musical style, using examples that may have different lengths and musical keys. We demonstrate the ability to use randomly initialized convolutional neural networks to transfer these aspects of musical style from one piece onto another using 3 different representations of audio: the log-magnitude of the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), the Mel spectrogram, and the Constant-Q Transform spectrogram. We propose using these representations as a way of generating and modifying perceptually significant characteristics of musical audio content. We demonstrate each representation's shortcomings and advantages over others by carefully designing neural network structures that complement the nature of musical audio. Finally, we show that the most compelling “style” transfer examples make use of an ensemble of these representations to help capture the varying desired characteristics of audio signals.
A General Analysis Framework for Soft Real-Time Tasks

Much recent work has been conducted on supporting soft real-time tasks on multiprocessors due to the multicore revolution. While most earlier works focus on the traditional sporadic task model with deterministic worst-case specification, several recent works investigate the stochastic nature of many workloads seen in practice, specifying task execution times using average-case provisioning instead of the worst case. Unfortunately, all the existing work on supporting soft real-time workloads ignores a simple practical fact that the job inter-arrival time (or task period) is also stochastic for many real-world applications. Adopting a fixed worst-case period to model all the arriving pattern is rather pessimistic and may result in significant capacity loss in practice. Based on these observations, we present a general soft real-time multiprocessor schedulability analysis framework in this paper for practical sporadic task systems specified by stochastic period and execution demand, following probability distributions. Our analysis can be generally applied to global tunable priority-based schedulers, which allow any job's priority to be changed dynamically at runtime within a priority window of constant length. We have extensively evaluated the analysis framework using a MPEG video decoding case study and simulation-based experiments. Experimental results demonstrate significant advantages of our analysis, which yields over 200 and 50 percent improvements compared to existing analysis assuming worst-case task periods in terms of schedulability and magnitude of the derived tardiness bound, respectively.
A COMPARISON OF SERUM HOMOCYSTEINE, FOLATE AND VITAMIN B12 IN POSTMENOPAUSAL WOMEN WITH LOW AND NORMAL BONE MINERAL DENSITY

Background and Objective: Osteoporotic fractures are major health problems in contemporary societies which are associated with increased morbidity and mortality and substantial economic costs. Recently, increased plasma homocysteine (Hcy) level has been suggested as an independent risk factor for osteoporotic fractures. This study aimed to compare the level of plasma homocysteine, folate and vitamin B12 in Iranian postmenopausal women with low and normal bone mineral density (BMD). Materials and Methods: In this case-control study which was performed from August 2006 to May 2007, BMD of 130 Iranian postmenopausal women were measured by dual energy X- ray absorbtiometry (DXA). The subjects were assigned to one of the two groups of case (BMD less-than -1 n= 67) and control (BMD ≥ -1 n=63). Fasting plasma Homocysteine, folate and vitamin B12 were also determined. BMD at the neck of femur and lumbar spine, together with other collected data were analyzed with SPSS and T- test. Results: The mean age of the subjects was 58.1 ± 6 years. The mean of Hcy level in the case group was 16.98±9.4 and in the control group was 12.39 M mol/L. The mean of vit-B12 in the case group was 598± 801 and in the control group was 551.2±410 Pg/L. Mann-Whitney test exibited a significant difference. The mean of serum folate level in the case group was 5.2±2.9 and in the control group was 6.5±2.9 Ng/L. Hcy, folate and B12 were significantly related to low BMD. LS –T score was negatively related to Hcy level and FN T-score had a positive relation with folate and B12 (p=0.002, p=0.017 and p=0.007, respectively). There was a relationship between folate and B12 and with increasing serum folate level, B12 level increased, too. Conclusion: The results suggest an association of vitamin B12 and folate with BMD. Whether this relationship is causal, remains unclear and demands further study.
Disseminating clot burden post- craniotomy: The difficult balancing act of clot versus haemorrhage post-neurosurgery

Abstract Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the most common complication following craniotomy for neoplastic disease. Its occurrence is associated with a significant morbidity and mortality, and balancing the risks for the subsequent development of VTE versus intracranial haemorrhage (ICH) can lead to difficult management decisions for treating clinicians. We present a case of VTE following craniotomy for meningioma complicated by ICH in the presence of a disseminating clot burden that included pulmonary, intra-cardiac and paradoxical arterial embolic sequelae. Management strategies incorporated pharmacological, radiological and surgical methods. We discuss the evidence for VTE prevention and treatment, as well as the role of inferior vena cava filters and thrombectomy. We finally highlight the use of desmopressin as a potential risk factor for VTE, and encourage the need for an individualised approach to peri-operative risk stratification in the neurosurgical intensive care population.
Evaluation of pelvic lymph node coverage of conventional radiotherapy fields based on bony landmarks in high risk prostate cancer patients using virtual simulation : peer reviewed original article

Virtual simulation refers to a method of delineating the tumour or treatment field. Field placement has resulted in more irregular shaped smaller fields as compared to conventional radiotherapy treatment fields for prostate cancer. The aim of this study was to evaluate pelvic lymph node coverage of conventional radiotherapy fields based on bony landmarks in high risk prostate cancer patients using virtual simulation based nodal mapping by using blood vessels as surrogate markers. Materials and methods Forty patients with high risk stage T3N1 prostate cancer underwent virtual simulation using a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Gross tumor volume (GTV), clinical target volume (CTV) and planning target volume (PTV) were outlined on the unenhanced CT images. Unenhanced images were used as part of the institutional protocol. All pelvic lymph nodes were contoured by using pelvic vessels as surrogate markers. The vessel contours were hidden by an option available in the planning software of the CT scanner. Thereafter conventional radiotherapy fields were drawn on digital reconstructed images (DRIs). The hidden vessel-contours were made visible again and distances were measured at different points of antero-posterior (AP) and lateral fields. Distances > 5 mm or more between the contoured nodes and the field borders were considered acceptable. Results The antero-posterior (AP) fields showed inadequate coverage of the obturator lymph nodes at the level of the acetabulum (mean distance 2.0 mm p value 0.002). The lateral fields showed inadequate coverage of the sacral lymph nodes at the level of the second sacral vertebra (mean distance -0.47 mm p value 0.003). Conclusion The conventional pelvic fields for high risk prostate cancer do not give optimal nodal coverage. It is of utmost importance that the blocks to shield the rectum and femoral heads are fabricated with precision in order to achieve optimal nodal coverage.
Effects of different swing patterns of interferential currents on patients with low back pain: a single control trial

Address correspondence to: Rufus A. Adedoyin, Department of Medical Rehabilitation, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria E-mail: radedoyi@yahoo.com Purpose: The effect of interferential current (IFC) swing patterns in pain modulation is currently unknown. This study was therefore designed to examine the effects of IFC swing patterns in the management of low back pain. Subjects and methods: Thirty-nine subjects with clinically and radiographically confirmed degenerative low back pain were recruited for the study. Subjects were randomly assigned into three intervention groups based on three patterns of IFC: 1 integral 1, 6 integral 6, 6 wedge 6. Each patient received 40 minutes of one out of three IFC interventions two times a week for a period of three weeks. The currents were administered via two electrodes using amplitude-modulated frequencies of 50 to 100 Hz. Results: The results of two-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed a significance of time (p<0.001), but no statistical effect of experimental groups (p=0.89) or interaction (p=0.79). Conclusion: All three swing patterns decreased pain perception over a 3-week treatment. However, none of the three treatment parameters has superiority in pain modulation over each other.
Pharmacokinetics of chloramphenicol in calves during the first weeks of life

The pharmacokinetics of chloramphenicol, either administered as the monosuccinate ester or as a veterinary formulation, were studied in calves from the first day of life to the age of 10–12 weeks and compared with the results obtained in adult cattle. (1) After intravenous injection of 0.15 mmol/kg chloramphenicol monosuccinate, the plasma elimination half life of intact ester fell from a value of 33 min on the first day of life to 15 min at the age of 10–12 weeks (value in cows = 14 min). Free chloramphenicol reached maximal plasma concentrations after 2–3 h on the first day of life, but in less than 15 min in cows. The elimination half-life fell from about 15 h on day 1 to 4.8 h at the age of 10–12 weeks (4.2 h in cows). The bioavailability of the ester was more than 90% on Day 1, but declined to 50–60% from Day 7 on account of rapid renal excretion: 21–28% of the total dose was excreted as intact ester in a 2 h period following injection in calves aged 10–12 weeks. (2) The veterinary formulation of chloramphenicol proved toxic when administered intravenously at a dose of 0.15 mmol/kg, and even a dose of 0.093 mmol/kg was less well tolerated than 0.15 mmol/kg of the monosuccinate ester. (3) The pharmacokinetics of chloramphenicol fitted an open two-compartment model, the half-life of the elimination phase corresponded well to the values determined in the experiments with the monosuccinate ester. (4) The intramuscular injection of 0.15 mmol/kg of the ester or 0.093 mmol/kg of chloramphenicol provided ‘therapeutic’ plasma concentrations (≥ 5 μg/ml) within 15–30 min and for about 24 h in calves aged 7 days. (5) Chloramphenicol crossed the placenta when given to cows shortly before a Caesarian section, but equilibrium was not reached within 50–100 min. (6) The binding of chloramphenicol to serum proteins was dependent both on total protein and drug concentrations. It rose from less than 30% on day 1 to about 40% in adult cattle. (7) Recommendations for a dosage regime for chloramphenicol in calves are made on the basis of the pharmacokinetic data.
Depression in dementia sufferers

A large number of studies concerning depression in dementia sufferers have appeared in the literature over the last few years and have added to our knowledge considerably. The prevalence rate of concurrent depression and dementia among clinical samples is approximately 20% with lower rates in the community. There is relatively little information available regarding patients in nursing homes, which is a priority for research along with the study of milder depression. Although there have been a number of interesting developments regarding possible neurochemical associations of depression among these patients, there has been little study of psychosocial factors. The symptoms of depression are similar to those seen in patients without cognitive impairment. Concurrent depression creates considerable excess disability. More information is required about the natural course of these disorders and treatment strategies.