Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microsatellite Instability (MSI) as an Independent Predictor of Pathologic Complete Response (PCR) in Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer: A National Cancer Database (NCDB) Analysis.

OBJECTIVE The relationship between microsatellite instability (MSI) and response to neoadjuvant chemoradiation in rectal cancer is not well understood. BACKGROUND We utilized the National Cancer Database (NCDB) to investigate the association between MSI and pathologic complete response (pCR) in this patient population. METHODS We analyzed 5086 patients between 2010 and 2015 with locally advanced rectal cancer who were tested for MSI and treated definitively with chemoradiation followed by surgery. Primary comparison groups were between 4450 MSI-negative(-) and 636 MSI-positive(+) patients. Multivariable regression analysis was conducted to identify demographic, therapeutic, and clinical characteristics predictive of pCR. Cox proportional-hazard ratios were used for survival. RESULTS All patients were treated with definitive chemoradiation (median dose 50.4 Gy) followed by resection within 4 months. MSI(+) patients were associated with earlier year of diagnosis and higher-grade tumors (P < 0.05). The overall pCR rate was 8.6%, including 8.9% for MSI(-) and 5.9% for MSI(+) tumors (P = 0.01). Along with lower T stage, MSI(+) cases were significantly associated with a reduced pCR rate (odds ratio 0.65, 95% confidence interval 0.43-0.96) with multivariable analysis. The 5-year survival for patients with pCR was 93% compared with 73% without it (<0.001). CONCLUSION Microsatellite instability was independently associated with a reduction in pCR for locally advanced rectal cancer after neoadjuvant chemoradiation in this NCDB-based analysis.
A New Concept to Secure Food Safety Standards against Fusarium Species and Aspergillus Flavus and Their Toxins in Maize

Commercial maize hybrids are exposed to different degrees of ear infection by toxigenic fungal species and toxin contamination. Their resistance to different fungi and toxin relationships are largely unknown. Without this knowledge, screening and breeding are not possible for these pathogens. Seven- to tenfold differences were found in resistance to Fusarium spp. , and there was a five-fold difference in ear coverage (%) in response to A. flavus. Three hybrids of the twenty entries had lower infection severity compared with the general means for toxigenic species. Three were highly susceptible to each, and 14 hybrids reacted differently to the different fungi. Differences were also observed in the toxin content. Again, three hybrids had lower toxin content in response to all toxigenic species, one had higher values for all, and 16 had variable resistance levels. Correlations between infection severity and deoxynivalenol (DON) content were 0.95 and 0.82 (p = 0.001) for F. graminearum and F. culmorum, respectively. For fumonisin and F. verticillioides ear rot, the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) was 0.45 (p = 0.05). Two independent isolates with different aggressiveness were used, and their mean X values better described the resistance levels. This increased the reliability of the data. With the introduction of this methodological concept (testing the resistance levels separately for different fungi and with two isolates independently), highly significant resistance differences were found. The resistance to different fungal species correlated only in certain cases; thus, each should be tested separately. This is very useful in registration tests and post-registration screening and breeding. This would allow a rapid increase in food and feed safety.
Adults’ Markers of Face Processing Are Present at Age 6 and Are Interconnected Along Development

Recent studies on the development of face processing argue for a late, quantitative, domain-specific development of face processing, and face memory in particular. Most previous findings were based on separately tracking the developmental course of face perception skills, comparing performance across different age groups. Here, we adopted a different approach studying the mechanisms underlying the development of face processing by focusing on how different face skills are interrelated over the years (age 6 to adulthood). Specifically, we examined correlations within and between different categories of tasks: face domain-specific skills involving face recognition based on long-term representations (famous face), and short-term memory retention (Cambridge Face Memory Test), perceptual face-specific marker (inversion effect), global effects in scene perception (global–local task), and the perception of facial expressions. Factor analysis revealed that face identity skills have a similar pattern of interrelations throughout development, identifying two factors: a face domain-specific factor comprising adultlike markers of face processing and a general factor incorporating related, but nonspecific perceptual skills. Domain-specific age-related changes in face recognition entailing short- and long-term retention of face representations were observed, along with mature perceptual face-specific markers and more general perceptual effects predicting face perception skills already at age 6. The results suggest that the domain-specific changes in face processing are unlikely to result from developmental changes in perceptual skills driving face recognition. Instead, development may either involve improvement in the ability to retain face representations in memory or changes in the interactions between the perceptual representations of faces and their representations in long-term memory.
Functional Proteomics and Deep Network Interrogation Reveal a Complex Mechanism of Action of Midostaurin in Lung Cancer Cells*

Phenotypic drug screening identified the clinical PKC inhibitor midostaurin to have potent activity in several lung cancer cells independently of inhibiting PKC. Network-based integration of chemo- and phosphoproteomics data highlighted multiple midostaurin targets and signaling pathways. Functional validation determined a complex polypharmacology mechanism involving the midostaurin targets TBK1, PDPK1 and AURKA and the downstream node PLK1. Combination of midostaurin with the potent PLK1 inhibitor BI2536 further enhanced the cells’ network vulnerability and resulted in strong synergy. Graphical Abstract Highlights Anticancer activity of midostaurin but not other PKC inhibitors in NSCLC cells. Mechanism of action by network-based integration of chemo- and phosphoproteomics. Midostaurin polypharmacology by simultaneous inhibition of TBK1, PDPK1 and AURKA. Design of synergistic drug combination with PLK1 inhibitor by pathway validation. Lung cancer is associated with high prevalence and mortality, and despite significant successes with targeted drugs in genomically defined subsets of lung cancer and immunotherapy, the majority of patients currently does not benefit from these therapies. Through a targeted drug screen, we found the recently approved multi-kinase inhibitor midostaurin to have potent activity in several lung cancer cells independent of its intended target, PKC, or a specific genomic marker. To determine the underlying mechanism of action we applied a layered functional proteomics approach and a new data integration method. Using chemical proteomics, we identified multiple midostaurin kinase targets in these cells. Network-based integration of these targets with quantitative tyrosine and global phosphoproteomics data using protein-protein interactions from the STRING database suggested multiple targets are relevant for the mode of action of midostaurin. Subsequent functional validation using RNA interference and selective small molecule probes showed that simultaneous inhibition of TBK1, PDPK1 and AURKA was required to elicit midostaurin's cellular effects. Immunoblot analysis of downstream signaling nodes showed that combined inhibition of these targets altered PI3K/AKT and cell cycle signaling pathways that in part converged on PLK1. Furthermore, rational combination of midostaurin with the potent PLK1 inhibitor BI2536 elicited strong synergy. Our results demonstrate that combination of complementary functional proteomics approaches and subsequent network-based data integration can reveal novel insight into the complex mode of action of multi-kinase inhibitors, actionable targets for drug discovery and cancer vulnerabilities. Finally, we illustrate how this knowledge can be used for the rational design of synergistic drug combinations with high potential for clinical translation.
Primary Debulking Surgery Versus Primary Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for High Grade Advanced Stage Ovarian Cancer: Comparison of Survivals

Abstract Background The aim of the study was to analyze the overall survival (OS) and progression free survival (PFS) of patients with high grade and advanced stage epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) with at least 60 months of follow-up treated in a single gynecologic oncology institute. We compared primary debulking surgery (PDS) versus neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus interval debulking surgery (NACT + IDS) stratifying data based on residual disease with the intent to identify the rationale for therapeutic option decision and the role of laparoscopic evaluation of resectability for that intention. Patients and methods This is observational retrospective study on consecutive patients with diagnosis of high grade and International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage III/IV EOC referred to our center between January 2008 and May 2012. We selected only patients with a follow-up of at least 60 months. Primary endpoint was to compare PDS versus NACT + IDS in term of progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Secondary endpoints were PFS and OS stratifying data according to residual disease after surgery in patients receiving PDS versus NACT + IDS. Finally, through Cox hazards models, we tested the prognostic value of different variables (patient age at diagnosis, residual disease after debulking, American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) stage, number of adjuvant-chemotherapy cycles) for predicting OS. Results A total number of 157 patients were included in data analysis. Comparing PDS arm (108 patients) and NACT + IDS arm (49 patients) we found no significant differences in term of OS (41.3 versus 34.5 months, respectively) and PFS (17.3 versus 18.3 months, respectively). According to residual disease we found no significant differences in term of OS between NACT + IDS patients with residual disease = 0 and PDS patients with residual disease = 0 or residual disease = 1, as well as no significant differences in PFS were found comparing NACT + IDS patients with residual disease = 0 and PDS patients with residual disease = 0; contrarily, median PFS resulted significantly lower in PDS patients receiving optimal debulking (residual disease = 1) in comparison to NACT + IDS patients receiving complete debulking (residual disease = 0). PDS arm was affected by a significant higher rate of severe post-operative complications (grade 3 and 4). Diagnostic laparoscopy before surgery was significantly associated with complete debulking. Conclusions We confirm previous findings concerning the non-superiority of NACT + IDS compared to PDS for the treatment of EOC, even if NACT + IDS treatment was associated with significant lower rate of post-operative complications. On the other hand, selecting patients for NACT + IDS, based on laparoscopic evaluation of resectabilty prolongs the PFS and does not worse the OS compared to the patients not completely debulked with PDS.
Factors Determining the Use of E-Government Services: An Empirical Study on Russian Students in China

E-government adoption studies have often focused on predictors determining the use of e-government services from a citizen-specific country without considering other foreign nationals domiciling in such countries. This study, therefore, sought to investigate the willingness of Russian students in China to use e-government services. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used as the theoretical framework while the data capture and analysis were done with SPSS. The results indicate that perceived ease of use, perceived service quality, trust, and language were significant in determining the willingness to use e-government services. Language also had a positive impact on the perceived service quality and perceived ease of use. Perceived usefulness was however not significant in influencing the willingness to use. Age, gender and education had a significant direct impact on the perceived ease of use of e-government services. These demographic factors were not significant in deciding the perceived usefulness. The implications of these findings are discussed.
The Causative Fault of the 2016 Mwp 6.1 Petermann Ranges Intraplate Earthquake (Central Australia) Retrieved by C- and L-Band InSAR Data

On 21 May 2016, an Mwp 6.1 earthquake occurred along the Petermann Ranges in Central Australia. Such a seismic event can be classified as a rare intraplate earthquake because the affected area presents low seismicity, being at the center of the Indo-Australian plate. Also, the architecture and kinematics of shear zones in the Petermann Orogen are largely unknown. We used Sentinel-1 C-band descending data and ALOS-2 L-band ascending data to constrain the causative fault. Our analysis revealed that the earthquake nucleated along an unmapped secondary back-thrust of the main feature of the area, namely the Woodroffe thrust.
Assessing the Pattern Differences between Satellite-Observed Upper Tropospheric Humidity and Total Column Water Vapor during Major El Niño Events

As part of the activities for the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) water vapor assessment project, the consistency of satellite-observed upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) and total column water vapor (TCWV) is examined. The examination is focused on their respective patterns during major El Niño events. The analysis shows that the two datasets, consisting of one measurement of vertically averaged relative humidity in the upper troposphere and one of absolute water vapor integrated over the atmospheric vertical column with dominant contribution from the lower troposphere, are consistent over the equatorial central–eastern Pacific, both showing increases of water vapor during major El Niño events as expected. However, the magnitude of drying in the TCWV field over the western Pacific is much weaker than that of moistening over the central–eastern Pacific, while the UTH field exhibits equivalent magnitude of drying and moistening. Furthermore, the drying in the UTH field covers larger areas in the tropics. The difference in their patterns results in an opposite phase in the time series during a major El Niño event when a tropical average is taken. Both UTH and TCWV are closely correlated with major climate indices. However, they have significantly different lag correlations with the Niño 3.4 index in both the sign (positive or negative) and lag time over tropical oceans.
Prevalence of BRAF, NRAS and c-KIT Mutations in Slovenian Patients with Advanced Melanoma

Abstract Background BRAF, NRAS and c-KIT mutations are characteristics of tumour tissues that influence on treatment decisions in metastatic melanoma patients. Mutation frequency and their correlation with histological characteristics in Slovenian population have not been investigated yet. Patients and methods In our retrospective analysis we analysed mutational status of BRAF, NRAS and c-KIT in 230 pathological samples of patients who were intended to be treated with systemic therapy due to metastatic disease at the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana between 2013 and 2016. We collected also histological characteristics of primary tumours and clinical data of patients and correlated them with mutational status of tumour samples. Results The study population consisted of 230 patients with a mean age 59 years (range 25−85). 141 (61.3%) were males and 89 (38.7%) females. BRAF mutations were identified in 129 (56.1%), NRAS in 31 (13.5%) and c-KIT in 3 (1.3%) tissue samples. Among the 129 patients with BRAF mutations, 114 (88.4%) patients had V600E mutation and 15 (11.6%) had V600K mutation. Patients with BRAF mutations tended to be younger at diagnosis (52 vs. 59 years, p < 0.05), patients with NRAS mutations older (61 vs. 55 years, p < 0.05). Number of c-KIT mutations were too low for any statistical correlation, but there was one out of 3 melanoma located in mucus membranes. Conclusions The analysis detected high rate of BRAF mutations, low NRAS mutations and low c-KIT mutations compared to previously published studies in Europe and North America. One of the main reasons for this observation is specific characteristics of study population.
Detection of Temporary Flooded Vegetation Using Sentinel-1 Time Series Data

The C-band Sentinel-1 satellite constellation enables the continuous monitoring of the Earth’s surface within short revisit times. Thus, it provides Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) time series data that can be used to detect changes over time regardless of daylight or weather conditions. Within this study, a time series classification approach is developed for the extraction of the flood extent with a focus on temporary flooded vegetation (TFV). This method is based on Sentinel-1 data, as well as auxiliary land cover information, and combines a pixel-based and an object-oriented approach. Multi-temporal characteristics and patterns are applied to generate novel times series features, which represent a basis for the developed approach. The method is tested on a study area in Namibia characterized by a large flood event in April 2017. Sentinel-1 times series were used for the period between September 2016 and July 2017. It is shown that the supplement of TFV areas to the temporary open water areas prevents the underestimation of the flood area, allowing the derivation of the entire flood extent. Furthermore, a quantitative evaluation of the generated flood mask was carried out using optical Sentinel-2 images, whereby it was shown that overall accuracy increased by 27% after the inclusion of the TFV.
Fabrication of high-quality copper nanowires flexible transparent conductive electrodes with enhanced mechanical and chemical stability

Copper nanowires (Cu NWs) become a potential functional material in future optoelectronic devices owing to their high optical transmittance, super electrical conductivity, and good flexibility as well as low cost. However, the drawbacks of Cu NWs with large contact resistance and poor stability make them far from the practical implementations. Herein we report a robust method to fabricate high-quality Cu NWs transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs) with enhanced mechanical and chemical stability at room temperature. Firstly, we used a sodium borohydride (NaBH4) treatment to remove the organics and oxides on surface of Cu NWs and thus greatly improved the conductivity of Cu NWs TCEs. Subsequently, followed by decorating a dense hydrophobic dodecanethiol (DT) protective layer, the formed Cu NWs TCEs showed superior mechanical and chemical stability compared to the raw ones. The optimized Cu NWs TCEs exhibit a sheet resistance of ∼38 Ω/sq at an optical transmittance of 83% (550 nm). Unlike the bare Cu NWs, the DT-decorated Cu NWs showed good stability under humid conditions at (85% RH) at 85 °C for 12 h. Moreover, the DT-decorated Cu NW TCEs were tested as transparent heaters, showing the fast response time and high saturation temperature under a low DC voltage. Our studies demonstrate that the proper post treatments for Cu NWs TCEs would make them more competitive in application of next-generation electronic and optoelectronic devices.
Therapeutic agency, in-session behavior, and patient-therapist interaction.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate associations between patients' subjective agency, their observable in-session behavior, and the patient-therapist interaction during the early phase of psychotherapy. METHODS The sample included 52 depressed patients in psychodynamic psychotherapy. After Session 5, the patients' agency and the quality of the therapeutic alliance were assessed. Based on session recordings, two independent observers rated the patients' involvement, their interpersonal behavior, and the therapists' directiveness. RESULTS Higher agency was associated with stronger therapeutic alliances. Patients who indicated higher agency in their therapy participated more actively in the session and showed less hostile impact messages. Patients' agency was not related to therapists' directiveness. CONCLUSIONS Patients' sense of agency in psychotherapy was associated with more active involvement and affiliative interaction. The findings support the idea that patients need to feel capable of acting within and having an influence on their therapy to benefit from it.
Multiscale and Multifeature Segmentation of High-Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using Superpixels with Mutual Optimal Strategy

High spatial resolution (HSR) image segmentation is considered to be a major challenge for object-oriented remote sensing applications that have been extensively studied in the past. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient framework for multiscale and multifeatured hierarchical image segmentation (MMHS). First, the HSR image pixels were clustered into a small number of superpixels using a simple linear iterative clustering algorithm (SLIC) on modern graphic processing units (GPUs), and then a region adjacency graph (RAG) and nearest neighbors graph (NNG) were constructed based on adjacent superpixels. At the same time, the RAG and NNG successfully integrated spectral information, texture information, and structural information from a small number of superpixels to enhance its expressiveness. Finally, a multiscale hierarchical grouping algorithm was implemented to merge these superpixels using local-mutual best region merging (LMM). We compared the experiments with three state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms, i.e., the watershed transform segmentation (WTS) method, the mean shift (MS) method, the multiresolution segmentation (MRS) method integrated in commercial software, eCognition9, on New York HSR image datasets, and the ISPRS Potsdam dataset. Computationally, our algorithm was dozens of times faster than the others, and it also had the best segmentation effect through visual assessment. The supervised and unsupervised evaluation results further proved the superiority of the MMHS algorithm.
Phase-Aware Web Browser Power Management on HMP Platforms

Over the last years, web browsing has been steadily shifting from desktop computers to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. However, mobile browsers available today have mainly focused on performance rather than power consumption, although the battery life of a mobile device is one of the most important usability metrics. This is because many of these browsers have originated in the desktop domain and have been ported to the mobile domain. Such browsers have multiple power hungry components such as the rendering engine, and the JavaScript engine, and generate high workload without considering the capabilities and the power consumption characteristics of the underlying hardware platform. Also, the lack of coordination between a browser application and the power manager in the operating system (such as Android) results in poor power savings. In this paper, we propose a power manager that takes into account the internal state of a browser -- that we refer to as a phase -- and show with Google's Chrome running on Android that up to 57.4% more energy can be saved over Android's default power managers. We implemented and evaluated our technique on a heterogeneous multiprocessing (HMP) ARM big.LITTLE platform such as the ones found in most modern smartphones.