Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Darbepoetin alfa for anemia with myelodysplastic syndrome

The myelodysplastic syndromes are characterized by refractory cytopenias that lead to symptomatic anemia, bleeding, and increased risk for infections. For almost two decades, the use of darbepoetin and other erythropoietin stimulating agents to treat symptomatic anemia in lower-risk myelodysplastic syndromes has been a standard of care. This practice is supported by numerous Phase I/II studies and one Phase III study demonstrating the benefit of using erythropoietin stimulating agents alone, or in combination with granulocyte colony stimulating factor, for treatment of symptomatic anemia with the goal of decreasing red blood cell transfusion requirements. This review summarizes the published experience regarding the use of erythropoietin stimulating agents, with a special focus on darbepoetin, in patients with myelodysplastic syndrome and symptomatic anemia.
Converting relational to graph databases

Graph Database Management Systems provide an effective and efficient solution to data storage in current scenarios where data are more and more connected, graph models are widely used, and systems need to scale to large data sets. In this framework, the conversion of the persistent layer of an application from a relational to a graph data store can be convenient but it is usually an hard task for database administrators. In this paper we propose a methodology to convert a relational to a graph database by exploiting the schema and the constraints of the source. The approach supports the translation of conjunctive SQL queries over the source into graph traversal operations over the target. We provide experimental results that show the feasibility of our solution and the efficiency of query answering over the target database.
Pharmaceutical Care Preceptor Training and Assessment in Community Pharmacy Clerkship Sites 1

This training model used self-study, home-based therapeutics instruction and a clerkship strategy to train rural community pharmacy preceptors in pharmaceutical care (PC). Specific aims were to: (i) provide intensive instruction in clinical and managerial aspects of setting up a PC model in a rural community pharmacy setting, and (ii) assess effectiveness of the instruction through post-training assessment of PC activities. Through this training, ten rural community pharmacy externship sites are being converted to PC sites that can support experiential training. Following a therapeutics course of study, faculty members conducted a case-study review for primary care disease states (i.e., diabetes, hypertension and asthma) and patient assessment skills were demonstrated and practiced. Preceptors enhanced their skills in documenting patient interventions and computer usage. Preceptors toured two rural community pharmacies with ongoing PC programs with an accompanying interactive session. Action plans (business plans) were presented on the last day of training, revised and submitted by each preceptor. Each preceptor was mailed a follow-up survey at 18 months post-training. All ten preceptors completed the survey. Three of ten preceptors directly charge patients for PC. “Time” followed by “lack of reimbursement” was rated the most problematic obstacles in implementing PC into their practice. Areas of the program rated most favorably by preceptors were the therapeutic reviews, case presentations, and monitoring techniques. Most have implemented some component of the training, although each preceptor stated they were at an early stage. As pharmacy schools struggle to integrate PC into their experiential training, this project provides a model that can be transferred to other colleges/schools of pharmacy.
Clinical monitoring and management of complications related to chelation therapy in patients with β-thalassemia

ABSTRACT Iron chelating agents – deferoxamine (DFO), deferiprone (DFP), and deferasirox (DFX) – are used to treat chronic iron overload in patients with β-thalassemia in an attempt to reduce morbidity and mortality related to siderosis. Each of the approved iron chelating agents has its own advantages over the others and also has its own risks, whether related to over-chelation or not. In this review, we briefly discuss the methods to monitor the efficacy of iron chelation therapy (ICT) and the evidence behind the use of each iron chelating agent. We also portray the risks and complications associated with each iron chelating agent and recommend strategies to manage adverse events.
LCARS: a location-content-aware recommender system

Newly emerging location-based and event-based social network services provide us with a new platform to understand users' preferences based on their activity history. A user can only visit a limited number of venues/events and most of them are within a limited distance range, so the user-item matrix is very sparse, which creates a big challenge for traditional collaborative filtering-based recommender systems. The problem becomes more challenging when people travel to a new city where they have no activity history. In this paper, we propose LCARS, a location-content-aware recommender system that offers a particular user a set of venues (e.g., restaurants) or events (e.g., concerts and exhibitions) by giving consideration to both personal interest and local preference. This recommender system can facilitate people's travel not only near the area in which they live, but also in a city that is new to them. Specifically, LCARS consists of two components: offline modeling and online recommendation. The offline modeling part, called LCA-LDA, is designed to learn the interest of each individual user and the local preference of each individual city by capturing item co-occurrence patterns and exploiting item contents. The online recommendation part automatically combines the learnt interest of the querying user and the local preference of the querying city to produce the top-k recommendations. To speed up this online process, a scalable query processing technique is developed by extending the classic Threshold Algorithm (TA). We evaluate the performance of our recommender system on two large-scale real data sets, DoubanEvent and Foursquare. The results show the superiority of LCARS in recommending spatial items for users, especially when traveling to new cities, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.
Transfusion-related acute lung injury: transfusion, platelets and biological response modifiers

ABSTRACT Transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI) may be induced by plasma, platelet concentrates and red blood cell concentrates. The mechanism leading to TRALI is thought to involve two steps. The priming step consists of previous inflammatory pathological conditions or external factors attracting leukocytes to lung vessels and creating conditions favorable for the second step, in which anti-HLA or anti-HNA antibodies or biologically active lipids, usually in transfused blood products, stress leukocytes and inflame lung epithelia. Platelets may be involved in the pathogenesis of TRALI because of their secretory potential and capacity to interact with other immune cells. There is no drug based-prophylaxis, but transfusion strategies are used to mitigate the risk of TRALI.
Patients with a history of arson admitted to medium security: characteristics on admission and follow-up postdischarge

Patients who set fires are a perennial cause of concern with psychiatric services although perhaps rather neglected in the clinical research literature. The current study considered the characteristics on admission of 129 patients, 93 men and 36 women, with a known history of arson who had been admitted to a medium secure psychiatric hospital. The distinguishing characteristics of the sample were high numbers of patients with extensive criminal histories, most probably due to high levels of prison transfer and a higher occurrence of mental illness than psychopathic disorder. Aside from return to prison, most patients were discharged either to another psychiatric hospital or directly to the community. There was a high rate of re-conviction after discharge, mainly for minor offences, with about one in 10 of discharged patients committing arson. It was established, however, that not all incidents of arson led to a prosecution. It is concluded that there are weaknesses in the areas of both risk assessment and evidence-based treatment for arsonists.
Assessing team strategy using spatiotemporal data

The "Moneyball" revolution coincided with a shift in the way professional sporting organizations handle and utilize data in terms of decision making processes. Due to the demand for better sports analytics and the improvement in sensor technology, there has been a plethora of ball and player tracking information generated within professional sports for analytical purposes. However, due to the continuous nature of the data and the lack of associated high-level labels to describe it - this rich set of information has had very limited use especially in the analysis of a team's tactics and strategy. In this paper, we give an overview of the types of analysis currently performed mostly with hand-labeled event data and highlight the problems associated with the influx of spatiotemporal data. By way of example, we present an approach which uses an entire season of ball tracking data from the English Premier League (2010-2011 season) to reinforce the common held belief that teams should aim to "win home games and draw away ones". We do this by: i) forming a representation of team behavior by chunking the incoming spatiotemporal signal into a series of quantized bins, and ii) generate an expectation model of team behavior based on a code-book of past performances. We show that home advantage in soccer is partly due to the conservative strategy of the away team. We also show that our approach can flag anomalous team behavior which has many potential applications.
The role of thiopurine metabolite monitoring in inflammatory bowel disease

Thiopurines are the mainstay of medical management in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), especially in the maintenance of disease remission. Given the limited IBD armamentarium it is important to optimize each therapy before switching to an alternative drug. Conventional weight based dosing of thiopurines in IBD leads to intolerance or inefficacy in many patients. More recently increased knowledge of their metabolism has allowed for dose optimization using thiopurine metabolite levels, namely 6-thioguanine nucleotides and 6-methylmercaptopurine, with the potential for improved outcomes in patients with IBD. This review will outline the current understanding of thiopurine metabolism and pharmacogenomics and will describe the clinical application of this knowledge in the optimization of thiopurines in individual patients.
Non-invasive prediction of development of hepatocellular carcinoma using transient elastography in patients with chronic liver disease

Prognosis of patients with chronic liver disease is determined by the extent and progression of liver fibrosis, which may ultimately lead to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Liver biopsy (LB) is regarded as the gold standard to estimate the extent of liver fibrosis. However, because LB has several limitations, the foremost being its invasiveness, several non-invasive methods for assessing liver fibrosis have been proposed. Of these, transient elastography (TE) provides an accurate representation of the extent of liver fibrosis. Furthermore, recent studies have focused on the usefulness of TE for assessing the risk of HCC development and HCC recurrence after curative treatment, and developed novel models to calculate the risk of HCC development based on TE findings. These issues are discussed in this expert review.
Variation in the dynamic stiffness index of different types of medical elastic compression stockings

Abstract Objectives To calculate the dynamic stiffness index (DSI) of 18 different brands of medical elastic compression stockings (MECS). Methods In all, 18 different brands of MECS that were divided into five categories (class II round-knitted, class II flat-knitted, class III round-knitted, class III flat-knitted and class IV flat-knitted MECS) were tested. The static pressure and dynamic pressure pulsations at the B1 level were measured with a newly developed dynamic pressure-determining device. The DSI was calculated. Results The DSI of all 18 brands of MECS showed higher values compared with the static stiffness. A wide range of dynamic stiffness indices was observed not only between all brands of MECS, but also within the five categories. Conclusions The DSI of MECS is independent of the compression class and the type of knit. The variation in the DSIs between MECS is not because of any measurement error and would indicate that different therapeutic effectiveness may be expected within one compression class. Therefore, a refinement in the current classification system for MECS with other characteristics such as the DSI is warranted.
Chronic Active EBV Infection and Hypersensitivity to Mosquito Bites: Pathophysiology and Pharmacology

Hypersensitivity to mosquito bites (HMB) is characterized clinically by intense skin reactions at mosquito bite sites with severe systemic symptoms. Another important feature is the high mortality rate due to complications, such as malignant NK cell-lineage granular lymphoproliferative disorder (NK-GLPD) and hemophagocytic syndrome (HPS). Previous studies have indicated that chronic active Epstein-Barr virus infection (CAEBV) is closely associated with HMB and its malignant complications. We and other groups have recently shown the abnormal oligoclonal expansion of EBV-infected NK cells in the periphery of HMB patients, which contributes to the pathogenesis of pleiotropic symptoms in HMB. To explore the therapeutic possibility, we have examined the anti-viral drugs on the symptoms, and some drugs have been emerging as the candidates for the treatment for HMB. In this brief review, we show the recent progresses in the studies elucidating the intricate web among CAEBV, NK-GLPD and HMB. The pathophysiol ogy and pharmacology regarding CAEBV and HMB should also be generally important in viral-associated rheumatic diseases and their therapeutics.
Participation in drug treatment court and time to rearrest

This study uses an experimental design to assess the impact of a drug treatment court on nonviolent felony offenders. The drug court program combines intensive supervision, judicial monitoring, drug testing, and drug treatment to reduce recidivism and other problem behaviors. Survival analyses showed that the drug court sample had a significantly longer time to first rearrest than the control sample. Assignment to the drug court also significantly reduced the risk of drug crime failure during the follow-up period. The drug court and control samples had identical failure rates during the first 4 months of the follow-up, after which the drug court appeared to have its greatest impact on the risk of failure. Further analyses suggested that compliance with various drug court components, particularly early and continued drug treatment attendance, reduced the risk of failure among this sample.
A comparative analysis of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications

Nowadays, native mobile applications (mobile apps) are targeted at specific mobile platforms. This phenomenon imposes severe constraints, such as the use of different development environments, technologies, and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for each mobile platform, leading inevitably to a waste of development time and effort, and an increased maintenance cost. The paper focuses on the current trends in developing cross-platform mobile apps. Our analysis focuses primarily on three areas. In the first place, we clarify the cross-platform development landscape by exploring the most important cross-platform app types, which are web, hybrid, interpreted and generated apps. Secondly, key issues for each app type are presented and a comparative analysis is performed to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Thirdly, taking into account the current status in cross-platform mobile app development we identify a promising cross-platform app type and we investigate its effectiveness in practice. Finally, we draw some conclusions regarding cross-platform mobile app development approaches and make proposals for further research on the field.
An evaluation study of art therapy provision in a residential Addiction Treatment Programme (ATP)

Abstract This evaluation study explores art therapy provision in a residential addiction treatment programme. The study comprises a literature review followed by an empirical study. The literature review outlines the main theoretical writing relating to art therapy in the treatment of addictive patients. In addition literature concerning contrasting treatment perspectives for the treatment of substance abuse is considered, as is brief therapy in inpatient settings. The empirical study is divided into three parts. The first section is the initial definition of service to patients and staff, which resulted in the production of a leaflet defining service. The second section explores art therapy from a clinical perspective. In the third section consideration is given to patients’ assessment of service in response to an evaluation questionnaire introduced in order to assist quality of service. Although this study locates the art therapy provision in the particular treatment context described, I hope to clarify how art therapy might benefit patients suffering from addiction, irrespective of the treatment setting.
Mining succinct predicated bug signatures

A bug signature is a set of program elements highlighting the cause or effect of a bug, and provides contextual information for debugging. In order to mine a signature for a buggy program, two sets of execution profiles of the program, one capturing the correct execution and the other capturing the faulty, are examined to identify the program elements contrasting faulty from correct. Signatures solely consisting of control flow transitions have been investigated via discriminative sequence and graph mining algorithms. These signatures might be handicapped in cases where the effect of a bug is not manifested by any deviation in control flow transitions. In this paper, we introduce the notion of predicated bug signature\/ that aims to enhance the predictive power of bug signatures by utilizing both data predicates and control-flow information. We introduce a novel ``discriminative itemset generator'' mining technique to generate succinct\/ signatures which do not contain redundant or irrelevant program elements. Our case studies demonstrate that predicated signatures can hint at more scenarios of bugs where traditional control-flow signatures fail.
Facteurs pronostiques de la leucémie lymphoïde chronique : apport des marqueurs biologiques récents

La leucemie lymphoide chronique (LLC) est l’hemopathie lymphoide la plus frequente du sujet âge. Dans la majorite des cas, le diagnostic de LLC est facilement pose grâce a l’hemogramme et a l’immunophenotypage mais on note une heterogeneite dans l’evolution. A l’heure actuelle, les decisions therapeutiques sont basees sur les classifications de Rai ou de Binet. Ces classifications ne permettent pas de distinguer les patients ayant une evolution rapide de la maladie et qui devraient beneficier d’un traitement precoce. Afin de depister ces patients, il est important de posseder des marqueurs pertinents predictifs de l’evolutivite de la maladie. Cet article passe en revue les marqueurs biologiques recents pouvant etre utilises pour evaluer le pronostic a long terme de patients atteints de LLC.
An investigation of the division between espoused and actual practice in infection control and of the knowledge sources that may underpin this division

Aims: This paper aims to provide a better understanding of divisions between the espoused and actual infection control practice of staff working within a renal unit and to investigate the sources of knowledge used to underpin practice. Background: Healthcare associated infection continues to be a major problem for health services. It has been claimed that healthcare associated infections may be reduced by around a third through the use of effective infection control measures. The effectiveness of these measures will rely upon the learning and skills of those implementing them. Methods: The study employed a primarily qualitative approach using participant observation and semi structured interviews over a six month period on a renal unit within a district general hospital. Results: Results gained provided some indication of a gap between espoused and actual compliance with infection control policy in practice while also indicating that tacit knowledge and learning in practice may offer an effective means of gaining and implementing infection control knowledge. Conclusions: This study highlights divisions between espoused and actual infection control practice, it also emphasises the role of tacit learning and how tacit knowledge may be gained and employed in practice.
ProfileRank: finding relevant content and influential users based on information diffusion

Understanding information diffusion processes that take place on the Web, specially in social media, is a fundamental step towards the design of effective information diffusion mechanisms, recommendation systems, and viral marketing/advertising campaigns. Two key concepts in information diffusion are influence and relevance. Influence is the ability to popularize content in an online community. To this end, influentials introduce and propagate relevant content, in the sense that such content satisfies the information needs of a significant portion of this community. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying influential users and relevant content in information diffusion data. We propose ProfileRank, a new information diffusion model based on random walks over a user-content graph. ProfileRank is a PageRank inspired model that exploits the principle that relevant content is created and propagated by influential users and influential users create relevant content. A convenient property of ProfileRank is that it can be adapted to provide personalized recommendations. Experimental results demonstrate that ProfileRank makes accurate recommendations, outperforming baseline techniques. We also illustrate relevant content and influential users discovered using ProfileRank. Our analysis shows that ProfileRank scores are more correlated with content diffusion than with the network structure. We also show that our new modeling is more efficient than PageRank to perform these calculations.