Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Blood parameter analysis after short term exposure to weightlessness in parabolic flight.

BACKGROUND Parabolic flights offer a unique platform for human experiments in short-term weightlessness. It is generally known that human organ systems react to changes of gravity. Yet, little is known about alterations of blood parameters under these conditions with special emphasis on blood rheology. OBJECTIVE We investigated the alterations of distinct blood parameters after exposure to weightlessness. METHODS 14 healthy volunteers underwent short-term phases of weightlessness induced by parabolic flight. At different time points (baseline, t2:1 hour after landing, and t3:24 hours after baseline), venous blood was drawn and analyzed. RESULTS Analysis of red blood count revealed significant decreases of hemoglobin and hematocrit post flight. While total white blood counts were unaltered, differential subset analysis revealed significant decreases of eosinophil granulocytes and monocytes. Cortisole levels were unchanged and lacked physiologic circadian decrease. Parameters of renal function were found significantly improved (GFR (ml/min/1,73m2): Baseline: 105 [89;109], t2:117 [98;125], t3:110 [102;119]; p = 0.0013. In the sense of mild myocytolysis, levels of myoglobin were significantly elevated post-flight with fast recovery to baseline levels. CONCLUSIONS In the current analysis, significant alterations of blood parameters after exposure to weightlessness could be detected. These results contribute to the understanding of physiologic adaptations of the human body to weightlessness.
Efficacy of Ceritinib After Alectinib for ALK-positive Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Background: Alectinib is a new standard treatment for treatment-naïve anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC); however, resistance ultimately develops in almost all patients, and data regarding the efficiency of ceritinib for such patients are insufficient. Patients and Methods: Patients with ALK-positive NSCLC treated at the Kyoto University Hospital from January 2012 to March 2017 were reviewed. Patients who were treated with ceritinib after alectinib were identified, and the efficacy of ceritinib after alectinib was retrospectively evaluated. Results: There were 35 patients with ALK-positive NSCLC, nine of whom received ceritinib after alectinib. The overall response rate to ceritinib was 44%. It was 16% in patients who received ceritinib immediately after alectinib, and 100% in patients who received chemotherapy before ceritinib. The median progression-free survival for patients treated with ceritinib was 4.4 months (95% confidence interval(CI)=1.1-6.5 months). Conclusion: Ceritinib demonstrated a modest clinical benefit after failure of alectinib. Ceritinib may be a reasonable treatment option in this setting.
Physical Activity Across Adulthood and Bone Health in Later Life: The 1946 British Birth Cohort

Leisure‐time physical activity (LTPA) is widely recommended for the prevention of osteoporosis and fractures in older populations. However, whether the beneficial effects of LTPA on bone accumulate across life and are maintained even after reduction or cessation of regular PA in later life is unknown. We examined whether LTPA across adulthood was cumulatively associated with volumetric and areal bone mineral density (vBMD, aBMD) at ages 60 to 64 and whether associations were mediated by lean mass. Up to 1498 participants from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development were included in analyses. LTPA was self‐reported at ages 36, 43, 53, and 60 to 64, and responses summed to generate a cumulative score (range 0 = inactive at all four ages to 8 = most active at all four ages). Total and trabecular vBMD were measured at the distal radius using pQCT and aBMD at the total hip and lumbar spine (L1 to L4) using DXA. Linear regression was used to test associations of the cumulative LTPA score with each bone outcome. After adjustment for height and weight, a 1‐unit increase in LTPA score (95% CI) in men was associated with differences of 1.55% (0.78% to 2.31%) in radial trabecular vBMD, 0.83% (0.41% to 1.25%) in total hip aBMD, and 0.97% (0.44% to 1.49%) in spine aBMD. Among women, positive associations were seen for radial trabecular vBMD and total hip aBMD, but only among those of greater weight (LTPA × weight interaction p ≤ 0.01). In men, there was evidence to suggest that lean mass index may partly mediate these associations. These findings suggest that there are cumulative benefits of LTPA across adulthood on BMD in early old age, especially among men. The finding of weaker associations among women suggests that promotion of specifıc types of LTPA may be needed to benefit bone health in women. © 2018 The Authors. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Clinical and Laboratory Profile of Dengue Fever in a North Indian Tertiary Hospital.

Objectives The present study was done to ascertain the presentations of dengue fever in a North Indian tertiary care Hospital, and to compare the clinical and laboratory features among patients with and without warning signs in dengue fever. Methods A total of 600 patients of dengue admitted to medical wards were included in the study. A detailed history as well as a general and systemic clinical examination were carried out. Haematological profiles and biochemical investigations were done at the time of admission and were followed daily or at times twice a day. Signs of plasma leakage were assessed by chest radiograph and abdominal ultrasonography, serum albumin etc. Patients were classified as dengue fever without warning signs and with warning signs and laboratory diagnosis of dengue was established by demonstration of NS1 antigen and specific antibodies to dengue in serum. Results Of the 600 dengue positive patients, 421 (70.2%) were males and 179 (29.8%) were females. Mean age of the patients was 27.35±11.43 years. Among all patients of dengue, 21 (3.5%) presented with bleeding from any site. Out of these, only 7 of those presenting without warning signs had bleeding episodes whereas, 22 (34.3%) of patients presenting with warning signs had bleeding and this difference was statistically significant (p=0.01). Haematocrit was an important factor to predict severity of dengue. Whereas the mean haematocrit among all patients was 39.79±3.23%, it was 39.49±4.25% among those without warning signs and 42.22±3.54% among those with warning signs of dengue, and this was significant statistically, with a p-value of 0.002. Conclusion Early diagnosis, monitoring and prompt supportive management can reduce mortality in dengue. In the present study, it was found that newer signs and symptoms are emerging and may cause delay in the diagnosis. It was found that the mortality rate was significantly higher in patients of dengue with warning sign.
Involvement of family environmental, behavioral, and social functional factors in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Background The objective of this study was to investigate relationships among family environmental characteristics, behavior problems, and social function impairments in children with ADHD. Methods Among children from four primary schools in Shantou city of China, 132 who were diagnosed with ADHD were selected and 138 typically developing children were recruited from the same schools. These children were evaluated using the self-designed questionnaire, FES-CV, CPRS, CTRS, and WFIRS-P for familial environment, behavioral problems, and social function impairment measures. In addition, children’s behavioral problems and functional impairments were evaluated using self-established field behavior observation method. Logistic regression model was used to estimate ORs and 95% CIs for ADHD risk with family environmental factors. Results In the unconditional logistic model, ADHD risk in children was increased with parents’ worse educational level, occupational status, and emotional stability with trend. Children with ADHD had lower scores on most subscales of FES-CV (P<0.01) but higher scores on Conflict subscale (P<0.001). Children with ADHD showed impairments on all the six WFIRS-P subscales tests (all P<0.001), and higher scores on the CPRS and CTRS scale subscales representing behavioral symptoms (all P<0.001 except Somatic Complaints), and more behavioral problems and functional impairments. Conclusion Compared with typically developing children, children with ADHD had worse family environment. Family characteristics especially parents’ emotional unstability, lower education levels, and worse occupation status may increase ADHD risk in children. In addition, the behavioral problems and social functional impairments may interact with adverse family environmental factors in children with ADHD. Therefore, early interventions with focus onto the compromising factors can be useful for improving the social-behavioral functions of children with ADHD.
The Sum of It All

This concluding chapter reviews the long road to quantification, drawing especially on ideas introduced in Chapter 1, but also mentioning highlights from the other chapters. It considers two thought experiments, where a thought experiment is defined as an investigation into a scientific question that is carried out only in the imagination. The first is, suppose quantification had not taken place and we had not transformed our worldview to it. The second is, from our current quantified worldview, how we might evolve in the future? The chapter concludes with a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear is given, describing a state of internal happiness.
Immune Protection of SIV Challenge by PD-1 Blockade During Vaccination in Rhesus Monkeys

Though immune correlates for protection are still under investigation, potent cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses are desirable for an ideal HIV-1 vaccine. PD-1 blockade enhances SIV-specific CD8+ T cells. However, little information has been reported about how it affects the immunogenicity and protection of prophylactic SIV vaccines in nonhuman primates. Here, we show that PD-1 blockade during vaccination substantially improved protective efficacy in SIV challenged macaques. The PD-1 pathway was blocked using a monoclonal antibody specific to human PD-1. Administration of this antibody effectively augmented and sustained vaccine-induced SIV-specific T cell responses for more than 42 weeks after first immunization in rhesus monkeys, as compared with SIV vaccination only. Importantly, after intrarectally repeated low-dosage challenge with highly pathogenic SIVmac239, monkeys with PD-1 blockade during vaccination achieved full protection against incremental viral doses of up to 50,000 TICD50. These findings highlight the importance of PD-1 blockade during vaccination for the development of HIV vaccines.
A Longitudinal Multilevel Study of the “Social” Genotype and Diversity of the Phenotype

Sociability and social domain-related behaviors have been associated with better well-being and endogenous oxytocin levels. Inspection of the literature, however, reveals that the effects between sociability and health outcomes, or between sociability and genotype, are often weak or inconsistent. In the field of personality psychology, the social phenotype is often measured by error-prone assessments based on different theoretical frameworks, which can partly explain the inconsistency of the previous findings. In this study, we evaluated the generalizability of “sociability” measures by partitioning the population variance in adulthood sociability using five indicators from three personality inventories and assessed in two to four follow-ups over a 15-year period (n = 1,573 participants, 28,323 person-observations; age range 20–50 years). Furthermore, we tested whether this variance partition would shed more light to the inconsistencies surrounding the “social” genotype, by using four genetic variants (rs1042778, rs2254298, rs53576, rs3796863) previously associated with a wide range of human social functions. Based on our results, trait (between-individual) variance explained 23% of the variance in overall sociability, differences between sociability indicators explained 41%, state (within-individual) variance explained 5% and measurement errors explained 32%. The genotype was associated only with the sociability indicator variance, suggesting it has specific effects on sentimentality and emotional sharing instead of reflecting general sociability.
Detecting Abnormality without Knowing Normality: A Two-stage Approach for Unsupervised Video Abnormal Event Detection

Abnormal event detection in video surveillance is a valuable but challenging problem. Most methods adopt a supervised setting that requires collecting videos with only normal events for training. However, very few attempts are made under unsupervised setting that detects abnormality without priorly knowing normal events. Existing unsupervised methods detect drastic local changes as abnormality, which overlooks the global spatio-temporal context. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised approach, which not only avoids manually specifying normality for training as supervised methods do, but also takes the whole spatio-temporal context into consideration. Our approach consists of two stages: First, normality estimation stage trains an autoencoder and estimates the normal events globally from the entire unlabeled videos by a self-adaptive reconstruction loss thresholding scheme. Second, normality modeling stage feeds the estimated normal events from the previous stage into one-class support vector machine to build a refined normality model, which can further exclude abnormal events and enhance abnormality detection performance. Experiments on various benchmark datasets reveal that our method is not only able to outperform existing unsupervised methods by a large margin (up to 14.2% AUC gain), but also favorably yields comparable or even superior performance to state-of-the-art supervised methods.
EBV reduces autophagy, intracellular ROS and mitochondria to impair monocyte survival and differentiation

ABSTRACT EBV has been reported to impair monocyte in vitro differentiation into dendritic cells (DCs) and reduce cell survival. In this study, we added another layer of knowledge to this topic and showed that these effects correlated with macroautophagy/autophagy, ROS and mitochondrial biogenesis reduction. Of note, autophagy and ROS, although strongly interconnected, have been separately reported to be induced by CSF2/GM-CSF (colony stimulating factor 2) and required for CSF2-IL4-driven monocyte in vitro differentiation into DCs. We show that EBV infects monocytes and initiates a feedback loop in which, by inhibiting autophagy, reduces ROS and through ROS reduction negatively influences autophagy. Mechanistically, autophagy reduction correlated with the downregulation of RAB7 and ATG5 expression and STAT3 activation, leading to the accumulation of SQSTM1/p62. The latter activated the SQSTM1-KEAP1- NFE2L2 axis and upregulated the anti-oxidant response, reducing ROS and further inhibiting autophagy. ROS decrease correlated also with the reduction of mitochondria, the main source of intracellular ROS, achieved by the downregulation of NRF1 and TFAM, mitochondrial biogenesis transcription factors. Interestingly, mitochondria supply membranes and ATP required for autophagy execution, thus their reduction may further reduce autophagy in EBV-infected monocytes. In conclusion, this study shows for the first time that the interconnected reduction of autophagy, intracellular ROS and mitochondria mediated by EBV switches monocyte differentiation into apoptosis, giving new insights into the mechanisms through which this virus reduces immune surveillance. Abbreviations: ACTB: actin beta; ATG5: autophagy related 5; BAF: bafilomycin A1; BECN1: beclin 1; CAT: catalase; CSF2: colony stimulating factor 2; CT: control; CYCS (cytochrome C: somatic); DCs: dendritic cells; EBV: Epstein-Barr virus; GSR: glutathione-disulfide reductase; KEAP1: kelch like ECH associated protein 1; IL4: interleukin 4; MAP1LC3/LC3: microtubule associated protein 1 light chain 3; MET: metformin; NAC: N-acetylcysteine; NFE2L2/NRF2 nuclear factor: erythroid 2 like 2; NRF1 (nuclear respiratory factor 1); clPARP1: cleaved poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase; Rapa: Rapamycin; ROS: reactive oxygen species; SQSTM1/p62: sequestosome 1; TFAM: (transcription factor A: mitochondrial); TUBA1A: tubulin alpha 1a.
Design Challenges of Multi-UAV Systems in Cyber-Physical Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently rapidly grown to facilitate a wide range of innovative applications that can fundamentally change the way cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are designed. CPSs are a modern generation of systems with synergic cooperation between computational and physical potentials that can interact with humans through several new mechanisms. The main advantages of using UAVs in CPS application is their exceptional features, including their mobility, dynamism, effortless deployment, adaptive altitude, agility, adjustability, and effective appraisal of real-world functions anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, from the technology perspective, UAVs are predicted to be a vital element of the development of advanced CPSs. Therefore, in this survey, we aim to pinpoint the most fundamental and important design challenges of multi-UAV systems for CPS applications. We highlight key and versatile aspects that span the coverage and tracking of targets and infrastructure objects, energy-efficient navigation, and image analysis using machine learning for fine-grained CPS applications. Key prototypes and testbeds are also investigated to show how these practical technologies can facilitate CPS applications. We present and propose state-of-the-art algorithms to address design challenges with both quantitative and qualitative methods and map these challenges with important CPS applications to draw insightful conclusions on the challenges of each application. Finally, we summarize potential new directions and ideas that could shape future research in these areas.
Updates in Diagnosis and Treatment of Acromegaly

Abstract Acromegaly is a rare disease, caused largely by a growth hormone (GH) pituitary adenoma. Incidence is higher than previously thought. Due to increased morbidity and mortality, if not appropriately treated, early diagnosis efforts are essential. Screening is recommended for all patients with clinical features of GH excess. There is increased knowledge that classical diagnostic criteria no longer apply to all, and some patients can have GH excess with normal GH response to glucose. Treatment is multifactorial and personalised therapy is advised.
The Mediating Effect of Self-concept Clarity: Anonymity and Online Public Communication

This study1 aims to explore the association among anonymity, online public communication and self-concept clarity. The results showed that the online anonymity positively predicted the online public communication, but negatively predicted the self-concept clarity; self-concept clarity had a negative prediction to the online public communication. This study concluded that the self-concept clarity had a mediating effect between online anonymity and online public communication.
Sickle related events following cardiac catheterisation: risk implication for other invasive procedures

patients who undergo autologous stem cell transplant. Blood, 112, 4017–4023. Rawstron, A.C. , Child, J.A. , de Tute, R.M. , Davies, F.E. , Gregory, W.M. , Bell, S.E. , Szubert, A.J., Navarro-Coy, N. , Drayson, M.T. , Feyler, S. , Ross, F.M. , Cook, G. , Jackson, G.H. , Morgan, G.J. & Owen, R.G. (2013) Minimal residual disease assessed by multiparameter flow cytometry in multiple myeloma: impact on outcome in the Medical Research Council Myeloma IX Study. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 31, 2540–2547. Rawstron, A.C. , Gregory, W.M. , de Tute, R.M. , Davies, F.E. , Bell, S.E. , Drayson, M.T. , Cook, G. , Jackson, G.H. , Morgan, G.J., Child, J.A. & Owen, R.G. (2015) Minimal residual disease in myeloma by flow cytometry: independent prediction of survival benefit per log reduction. Blood, 125, 1932–1935.
Open field and a behavior score in PNT model for neuropathic pain in pigs

Background Rodent models are frequently used in the research of pain and continue to provide valuable data on the mechanisms driving pain, although they are criticized due to limited translational ability to human conditions. Previously we have suggested pigs as a model for development of drugs for neuropathic pain. In this study, we investigate the spontaneous behavior of pigs following peripheral neuritis trauma (PNT)-induced neuropathic pain. Methods A computerized monitoring system was used to evaluate the changes in open field test in addition to applying a composite behavior scoring system. The data suggest that the PNT operation did not affect the animal’s ability to walk as the total distance walked by PNT animals was not significantly different from the total distance walked by sham-operated animals. However, PNT animals expressed a significant change in the pattern of walking. This effect was unrelated to the time that the animals spent in the open field. Following treatment with different drugs (morphine, buprenorphine, or gabapentin), the walking pattern of the animals in the open field changed in a drug-specific manner. In addition, the detailed behavior score revealed drug-specific changes following treatment. Results Pharmacokinetic analysis of the drug concentration in blood and cerebrospinal fluid correlated with the behavioral analysis. Conclusion The data of this study suggest that the open field test together with the detailed behavior score applied in this model are a powerful tool to assess the spontaneous behavior of pigs following PNT-induced neuropathic pain.
Beyond the Product: Discovering Image Posts for Brands in Social Media

Brands and organizations are using social networks such as Instagram to share image or video posts regularly, in order to engage and maximize their presence to the users. Differently from the traditional advertising paradigm, these posts feature not only specific products, but also the value and philosophy of the brand, known as brand associations in marketing literature. In fact, marketers are spending considerable resources to generate their content in-house, and increasingly often, to discover and repost the content generated by users. However, to choose the right posts for a brand in social media remains an open problem. Driven by this real-life application, we define the new task of content discovery for brands, which aims to discover posts that match the marketing value and brand associations of a target brand. We identify two main challenges in this new task: high inter-brand similarity and brand-post sparsity; and propose a tailored content-based learning-to-rank system to discover content for a target brand. Specifically, our method learns fine-grained brand representation via explicit modeling of brand associations, which can be interpreted as visual words shared among brands. We collected a new large-scale Instagram dataset, consisting of more than 1.1 million image and video posts from the history of 927 brands of fourteen verticals such as food and fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that our model can effectively learn fine-grained brand representations and outperform the closest state-of-the-art solutions.