Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Function of the Acromioclavicular and Coracoclavicular Ligaments in Shoulder Motion

Background: Scapulothoracic dyskinesis is an important consequence of acromioclavicular joint dislocations. However, no reports have described changes in 3-dimensional motions of the scapula and clavicle with respect to the thorax caused by acromioclavicular joint dislocation. Hypothesis: Sectioning of the acromioclavicular (AC) and coracoclavicular (CC) ligaments affects scapular and clavicular motion in a whole-cadaver model. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: We evaluated shoulder girdle motion (scapula, clavicle, and humerus) relative to the thorax of 14 shoulders from 8 whole cadavers after sequential sectioning of the AC and CC ligaments (trapezoid and conoid ligaments). An electromagnetic tracking device measured 3-dimensional kinematics of the scapula and clavicle during humerothoracic elevation in the coronal and sagittal planes and adduction in the horizontal plane. Results: Sectioning of the AC ligament increased clavicular retraction during sagittal plane elevation and horizontal plane adduction. Sectioning of the trapezoid ligament decreased scapular external rotation during sagittal plane elevation and horizontal plane adduction. Sectioning of the conoid ligament decreased scapular posterior tilting during sagittal plane elevation and horizontal plane adduction. Acromioclavicular and CC ligament sectioning also delayed clavicular posterior rotation and increased clavicular upward rotation during coronal plane elevation. Conclusion: Our study revealed that AC and CC ligament disruption affected in vitro shoulder girdle kinematics in the whole-cadaver model. Clinical Relevance: The results of this cadaveric study revealed that AC and CC ligament disruption could cause dyskinesis of the scapula and clavicle. The kinematic changes could be a potential source of pain and dysfunction in the shoulder with AC joint dislocation, and therefore surgical reconstruction may be indicated in certain patients.
Right Atrial Appendage to Right Ventricle Accessory Atrioventricular Connection: A Case Report

Atrial and ventricular attachments of accessory atrioventricular connections have classically been localized to adjacent atrial and ventricular tissues, and this principle is responsible for the widespread success of radiofrequency catheter ablation. We present anatomical evidence of an unusually located accessory atrioventricular connection, which bridged the atrioventricular ring epicardially, directly from the base of the right atrial appendage to the right ventricle. This observation might offer a new insight into unusual accessory atrioventricular connection locations and may explain why some endocardial radiofrequency catheter ablation procedures might fail.
Treating mood disorders in patients with a history of intestinal surgery: a systematic review

Bariatric surgery is increasingly being performed, with the intended benefits of significant and durable weight loss. Radical surgical resection can result in short bowel syndrome (SBS), a rare and devastating condition. Psychological distress is common in these patients. Relevant articles were identified by searching Pubmed and EMBASE databases with the following keywords: ‘Bariatrics’[Mesh] OR ‘Short Bowel Syndrome’ AND ‘Antidepressive Agents’ OR ‘Psychotropic Drugs’[Mesh]. One in-vitro study, four clinical studies and six relevant case reports were identified. Most clinical studies on antidepressant focused on the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB); [ZERO WIDTH SPACE][ZERO WIDTH SPACE]these results are somewhat conflicting for a variety of reasons including different methodologies and small sample sizes. One month after RYGB, in patients receiving serotonin or serotonin/noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, antidepressant levels decrease to 50% of preoperative levels and return to baseline (or greater) by 6 months in almost all patients. Other pharmacokinetic studies have shown that, 1 year after RYGB, duloxetine and sertraline levels are significantly reduced in comparison with the control population. Paradoxically, in patients with SBS and a few years after surgery, high concentration to dose ratios have been reported for citalopram and escitalopram; this may be because of an intestinal adaptation. Surgery of the intestine is likely to modify absorption and first-pass metabolism of drugs; managing the treatment of depression and anxiety in bariatric and SBS patients therefore presents a major challenge. Close clinical follow-up, associated with therapeutic drug monitoring when available, should enable the optimization of treatment response and modulate the risk of adverse events.
Advances in the Diagnosis of HIV-Associated Tuberculosis

HIV-associated tuberculosis (HIV-TB) remains a global public health challenge, with the major burden being borne by countries in low-resource settings. If World Health Organization targets to reduce TB deaths by 95% and new cases by 90% are to be met by 2035, major improvements in diagnostic strategies are among the most pressing needs. HIV coinfection presents particular challenges in the diagnosis of TB due, for example, to the relatively low mycobacterial burden in sputum specimens and rapid dissemination beyond the lungs. Low and middle-income countries still typically rely on traditional diagnostics such as chest radiology and sputum microscopy, which lack sufficient accuracy. Desired characteristics for an HIV-TB diagnostic test are well described and include the ability to test a wide variety of clinical samples, diagnose extra-pulmonary TB, have good accuracy to detect low mycobacterial burden disease, and be deployable at the peripheries of healthcare systems. Following a long period of under-investment in TB research, development of TB diagnostics has progressed rapidly over the past decade and the technology landscape looks much more promising. This article will summarise advances in diagnostics that are particularly relevant to HIV-TB. The Xpert® MTB/RIF and Determine™ TB LAM assays have the most evidence assessing their use in HIV-TB. In addition to nucleic-acid amplification tests and antigen detection we will review new diagnostic technologies. Finally, we discuss whether use of empirical TB treatment offsets the potential impact and reduces the need for new diagnostics.
Physiological time series retrieval and prediction with locality-sensitive hashing

The amount of time series data collected in the medical community has recently been exploding due to widespread affordable sensors and storage devices. However, while the massive repositories of such physiological time series data provide enormous opportunities for machine learning to make significant impacts, they are largely under-utilized due to their granular detail, overwhelming size, and lack of proper tools. Besides scale, fast yet accurate processing of physiological waveform data is desired in medical practice, especially in time-critical settings such as the intensive care unit (ICU). Efficiently leveraging these massive datasets is a key challenge that, when resolved, will support a new paradigm of scientific discovery and operational innovation in medicine. In this thesis, we develop highly efficient similarity-based methods that make it practical to search massive physiological time series repositories to rapidly identify waveforms similar to those from a given individual. We call this concept “patients with trajectories like mine. ” Our goal is to exploit rapid similar waveform retrieval to enable critical event prediction in the ICU setting. In order to achieve this goal, we propose to apply locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), which supports a very fast approximate nearest neighbor search in high dimensions. We empirically demonstrate that LSH based retrieval and prediction methods vastly speed up querying time while sacrificing only a trivial amount of accuracy as a cost. Despite being fast and accurate, the generic LSH has two shortcomings. First, it is capable of utilizing only one similarity measure at a time. To overcome this limit, we introduce Stratified LSH (SLSH) which finds similarity among the data from a more integrated perspective by employing multiple distance metrics in one framework. SLSH is essentially a dual-level hierarchical LSH where each LSH layer is associated with a distinct distance metric capturing a unique facet of similarity. The second shortcoming and the main bottleneck of the generic LSH is that it involves exhaustive distance calculations as a subroutine when short-listing the candidate set to find the final nearest neighbors. To surmount this, we propose Collision Frequency LSH (CFLSH) which short-lists the candidate set by simply counting the frequency
A modified technique to treat subdural hematomas: the subdural evacuating port system.

BACKGROUND The Subdural Evacuating Port System (SEPS) is intended for drainage of subdural fluid collections such as hygromas and hematomas. Unlike other subdural fluid drainage systems, no drain is placed in the subdural space. This paper describes the technique and reports our experience thus far. METHODS We treated 20 patients for 22 subdural hematomas. One or two ports were inserted for drainage of each subdural collection. Follow-up ranged from six to 24 months. RESULTS Follow-up CT obtained at approximately one month postprocedure showed complete or near complete resolution of 18 of the subdural collections. Failure of the SEPS was noted in four patients and was related to plugging of the drainage system by clots secondary to the presence of fresh blood in the subdural collection. CONCLUSIONS The Subdural Evacuating Port System (SEPS) permits the neurosurgeon to drain subacute or chronic hematomas by a method which is minimally invasive, simple and safe.
Addition of anti-leukotriene agents to inhaled corticosteroids for chronic asthma.

BACKGROUND Anti-leukotriene (AL) agents are being considered as "add-on" therapy to inhaled corticosteroids (ICS), in chronic asthma. OBJECTIVES To examine the safety and efficacy of daily AL plus ICS compared to ICS alone, and determine the corticosteroid-sparing effect of AL when added to ICS in chronic asthma. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched Medline, Embase, Cinahl (until September 2001), reference lists of review articles and trials, contacted international headquarters of AL manufacturers and ATS meeting abstracts (1998-2000). SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised placebo-controlled trials of asthmatics aged 2 years and older with at least one month intervention. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two reviewers assessed quality and extracted data independently. Trials were grouped by asthma control at baseline (symptomatic or well-controlled) and dose of ICS in the control group (same or double). MAIN RESULTS Of 438 citations, 13 (12 adult and 1 paediatric) trials met inclusion criteria. Seven were published in full-text. In symptomatic patients, addition of licensed doses of anti-leukotrienes to ICS resulted in a non-significant reduction in the risk of exacerbations requiring systemic steroids: Relative Risk (RR) 0.61; 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 0.36,1.05). A modest improvement group difference in PEF was seen (Weighted Mean Difference (WMD) 7.71 L/min; 95%CI 2.98, 12.44 L/min) together with beta2-agonist use (WMD= -0.32 puffs/day; 95%CI -0.0.08, -0.56). No trials that compared the use of licensed doses of anti-leukotrienes with doubling-dose of inhaled glucocorticoids could be pooled. In ICS-sparing studies in patients who were well controlled at baseline, addition of anti-leukotrienes produced no overall difference in dose of inhaled glucocorticoids (WMD -44.4 mcg/d, 95%CI -147.9, 59.0 mcg/d), but it was associated with fewer withdrawals due to poor asthma control (RR= 0.56, 95%CI 0.35, 0.89). REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS There is insufficient evidence to firmly support the use of licensed doses of anti-leukotrienes as add-on therapy to inhaled glucocorticoids. Addition of anti-leukotrienes to inhaled glucocorticoids may slightly improve asthma control, but the available data do not permit this strategy to be recommended as a substitute for increasing the dose of inhaled glucocorticoids. Addition of anti-leukotrienes may be associated with superior asthma control after glucocorticoid tapering, but a glucocorticoid-sparing effect cannot be quantified at present.
Half-space kinetic equations with general boundary conditions

We study half-space linear kinetic equations with general boundary conditions that consist of both given incoming data and various type of reflections, extending our previous work [LLS14] on half-space equations with incoming boundary conditions. As in [LLS14], the main technique is a damping adding-removing procedure. We establish the well-posedness of linear (or linearized) half-space equations with general boundary conditions and quasi-optimality of the numerical scheme. The numerical method is validated by examples including a two-species transport equation, a multi-frequency transport equation, and the linearized BGK equation in 2D velocity space.
Protein Structure and Fold Prediction Using Tree-augmented Naïve Bayesian Classifier

Due to the large volume of protein sequence data, computational methods to determine the structure class and the fold class of a protein sequence have become essential. Several techniques based on sequence similarity, Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), etc. have been applied. Since most of these classifiers use binary classifiers for multi-classification, there may be (N) c2 classifiers required. This paper presents a framework using the Tree-Augmented Bayesian Networks (TAN) which performs multi-classification based on the theory of learning Bayesian Networks and using improved feature vector representation of (Ding et al., 2001). In order to enhance TAN's performance, pre-processing of data is done by feature discretization and post-processing is done by using Mean Probability Voting (MPV) scheme. The advantage of using Bayesian approach over other learning methods is that the network structure is intuitive. In addition, one can read off the TAN structure probabilities to determine the significance of each feature (say, hydrophobicity) for each class, which helps to further understand the complexity in protein structure. The experiments on the datasets used in three prominent recent works show that our approach is more accurate than other discriminative methods. The framework is implemented on the BAYESPROT web server and it is available at http://www-appn.comp.nus.edu. sg/~bioinfo/bayesprot/Default.htm. More detailed results are also available on the above website.
What Drives Security Issuance Decisions: Market Timing, Pecking Order, or Both?

We study market timing and pecking order in a sample of debt and equity issues and share repurchases of Canadian firms from 1998 to 2007. We find that only when firms are not financially constrained is there evidence that firms issue (repurchase) equity when their shares are overvalued (undervalued) and evidence that overvalued issuers earn lower postannouncement long-run returns. Similarly, we find that only when firms are not overvalued do they prefer debt to equity financing. These findings highlight an interaction between market timing and pecking order effects.
Pair programming and secondary school girls’ enjoyment of programming and the subject Information Technology (IT)

This paper reports on a qualitative study that examined how pair programming shapes the experience of secondary school girls taking IT as a subject, with respect to their enjoyment of programming and the subject itself. The study involved six Grade 11 girls who were doing solo programming in Grade 10 and pair programming in their following Grade. The results showed that the girls enjoyed the subject more when programming in pairs due to improved comprehension of the task. They especially enjoyed the socialization and communication brought about by pair programming. The assistance, support, motivation, focus and encouragement they received from partners when stuck or while fixing errors made the programming experience more enjoyable for them. The increased enjoyment brought about by pair programming resulted in the perception of greater learning in the subject IT and also to greater interest in it. It also led to greater persistence in dealing with problems. Pair programming should be implemented right from the start of Grade 10 since it may lead to greater enjoyment of programming and the subject IT in general. The approach may also lead to more girls being attracted to the subject.
Sharing a Home: The Experiences of American Women and Their Parents over the Twentieth Century

Trends and determinants of daughter-parent coresidence over the twentieth century are examined by using the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households. Young women from more recent birth cohorts leave their parents’ homes for the first time at earlier ages, but are more likely to make return trips home than those born earlier. Thus cohorts show remarkable consistency in the proportion of life lived in the parental home. For the 1900-1929 birth cohorts, daughters’ lifetime probability that a parent will move in with them is approximately 15%; younger cohorts show similar age-specific probabilities to date. Explanations for these trends are considered.
ADVANCES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF CYTOTOXIC DRUG‐INDUCED NAUSEA AND VOMITING

I N T R O D U C T I O N The use of combinations of antineoplastic drugs and the development of agents such as cisplatin have resulted in significant advances in the treatment of many cancers. However, these advances have brought enhanced drug toxicity such as nausea and vomiting. This side-effect is ranked by patients as the worst aspect of cancer treatment (1). Emesis can be so severe that patients refuse to continue with potentially curative treatment. Moreover, chemotherapy is often used as palliative therapy, where the control of nausea and vomiting is essential for such treatment to be a tolerable prospect. This article reviews recent advances in the understanding and treatment of chemotherapyand radiotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.
Choking under pressure: self-consciousness and paradoxical effects of incentives on skillful performance.

Choking under pressure is defined as performance decrements under circumstances that increase the importance of good or improved performance. A model for choking on coordination and skill tasks is proposed, holding that the pressure increases the conscious attention to the performer's own process of performance and that this increased conscious attention disrupts the automatic or overlearned nature of the execution. Six experiments provided data consistent with this model. Three studies showed that increased attention to one's own process of performance resulted in performance decrements. Three other studies showed similar decrements produced by situational manipulations of pressure (i.e., implicit competition, a cash incentive, and audience-induced pressure). Individuals low in dispositional self-consciousness were shown to be more susceptible to choking under pressure than those high in it.
The PASAT performance among patients with multiple sclerosis: analyses of responding patterns using different scoring methods

The Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) is widely used in the evaluation of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients’ cognitive performance, and also used as the sole measure of cognition in a recently developed assessment tool for MS clinical trials, the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite (MSFC). We analysed if MS patients and healthy controls have different patterns of responding in the PASAT, and whether different scoring methods influence the PASAT’s sensitivity and specificity in detecting disease-associated cognitive impairment. Forty-five relapsing-remitting MS patients and 48 healthy controls were evaluated using the PASAT and a comprehensive neuropsychological examination. Cognitively deteriorated MS patients compensated for their difficulties in PASAT by omitting rather than guessing answers. They skipped items intermittently, which reduces the difficulty of the task. Furthermore, towards the end of the PASAT’s 60-item series MS patients’ performance had a trend to fade whereas controls’ performance was more even throughout the task. The dyad score or the percent dyad score did not essentially improve the sensitivity or the specificity, but the accuracy improved when the answers at the end of the PASAT series were specifically emphasized. Using the combined score, 73% of the patients were correctly classified as cognitively impaired or unimpaired.
Phase I study of nonpegylated liposomal doxorubicin plus trastuzumab in patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

BACKGROUND This was an open-label, nonrandomized, multicenter, 2-stage phase I trial of safety and preliminary efficacy of nonpegylated liposomal doxorubicin (NLD) in combination with trastuzumab in advanced breast cancer, with emphasis on cardiac toxicity. PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty patients (median age, 48 years; range, 30-74 years) with HER2/neu 2+ or 3+ tumors (by immunohistochemistry) were recruited December 1999 to November 2002. Patients were eligible if they received <or= 1 previous trastuzumab regimen, <or= 2 cytotoxic regimens for advanced breast cancer, and lifetime cumulative anthracycline doses <or= 240 mg/m2. The study regimen comprised NLD 60 mg/m2 every 3 weeks and trastuzumab loading dose 4 mg/kg followed by 2 mg/kg weekly. Treatment cycles lasted 21 days. Clinical cardiac assessments were performed with multigated acquisition scans every 2 cycles. Patients were evaluated for cardiac toxicity after receiving >or= 1 cycle. Cardiac safety was assessed after completing >or= 4 full treatment cycles. RESULTS Thirty out of 40 patients (75%) received >or= 4 treatment cycles and were evaluable for cardiac safety. Five patients (13%), 4 who were doxorubicin pretreated, developed left ventricular ejection fraction reductions to < 50%, and 2 (5%) of these patients experienced clinical cardiac toxicity. Fifty percent of the patients had objective tumor responses; median progression-free survival was approximately 21 weeks. Twenty-six patients (65%) had grade 3/4 neutropenia; 2 patients experienced febrile neutropenia. CONCLUSION Nonpegylated liposomal doxorubicin plus trastuzumab is active in HER2-positive patients with advanced breast cancer and is associated with a lower risk of cardiac toxicity than conventional doxorubicin plus trastuzumab.