Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perioperative Mortality for Management of Hepatic Neoplasm: A Simple Risk Score

Objectives:To develop a population-based risk score for stratifying patients by risk of in-hospital mortality following procedural intervention for hepatic neoplasm. Background:There has been growing support for the value of surgical management of hepatic neoplastic disease, both primary and metastatic. Advances in surgical and ablative technologies have contributed to a decrease in the mortality associated with these procedures. However, multiple patient-, disease- and treatment-related factors can contribute to perioperative morbidity and mortality. Methods:Using the Nationwide Inpatient Sample from 1998 to 2005, a retrospective cohort of patient-discharges for hepatic procedures with a concurrent diagnosis of hepatic primary or metastatic neoplasm to the liver was assembled. Procedures were categorized as lobectomy, wedge resection, or enucleation/ablation. Logistic regression and bootstrap methods were used to create an integer score for estimating the risk of in-hospital mortality using patient demographics, comorbidities, procedure type, tumor type, and hospital characteristics. A randomly selected sample of 80% of the cohort was used to create the risk score. Testing was conducted in the remaining 20% validation-set. Results:In total, 12,969 patient-discharges were identified. Overall in-hospital mortality was 3.45%. Predictive characteristics incorporated into the model included: age, sex, Charlson comorbidity score, procedure type, hospital type, and type of neoplasm. Integer values were assigned to these, and used to calculate an additive score. Five clinically relevant groups were assembled to stratify risk, with a 36-fold gradient in mortality. Rates in the groups were as follows: 0.9%, 2.5%, 6.8%, 17.6%, and 35.9%. In the derivation set, as well as in the validation set, the simple score discriminated well, with c-statistics of 0.76 and 0.70, respectively. Conclusions:An integer-based risk score can be used to predict in-hospital mortality after hepatic procedure for neoplasm, and may be useful for preoperative risk stratification and patient counseling.
Genetic control of epithelial cell polarity: Lessons from Drosophila

The cell biology of polarized epithelial cells is a field of major interest to cell and developmental biologists. In addition to the study of epithelial cells in tissue culture, genetically tractable systems have been employed to examine the functional importance of individual molecules. Here I review recent progress that has been made using Drosophila as a model system to study apical‐basal epithelial cell polarity. In this system, a large number of genes have been identified that are essential for the development and maintenance of the apical‐basal polarity of epithelial cells in different developmental contexts. In this article, the recent progress in three models, i.e., establishment of the ectoderm and midgut epithelia during embryogenesis, epithelial polarity of imaginal discs, and epithelial development of the follicle cells during oogenesis will be discussed. Dev Dyn;218:52–67. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Brain network connectivity assessed using graph theory in frontotemporal dementia

Objective: To investigate whether brain functional network connectivity is disrupted in patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Methods: Graph theoretical analysis was applied to resting state functional MRI data from 18 patients with probable bvFTD and 50 healthy individuals. Functional connectivity between 90 cortical and subcortical brain regions was estimated using bivariate correlation analysis and thresholded to construct a set of undirected graphs. Correlations between network properties and cognitive variables were tested. Results: Global topologic organization of the functional brain network in bvFTD was significantly disrupted as indicated by reduced mean network degree, clustering coefficient, and global efficiency and increased characteristic path length and assortativity relative to normal subjects. Compared to controls, bvFTD data showed retention of major “hub” regions in the medial parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes, but cortical hubs were not noted in the frontal lobes. Medial and dorsal frontal regions, left caudate nucleus, left insular cortices, and some regions of the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes showed decreased nodal centrality. BvFTD patients showed the greatest decrease in inter-regional connectivity between the frontal and occipital regions, and the insular cortices and occipital, temporal, subcortical, and frontal regions. In bvFTD, altered global network properties correlated with executive dysfunction. Conclusions: Global and local functional networks are altered in bvFTD, suggesting a loss of efficiency in information exchange between both distant and close brain areas. Altered brain regions are located in structures that are closely associated with neuropathologic changes in bvFTD. Aberrant topology of the functional brain networks in bvFTD appears to underlie cognitive deficits in these patients.
Satisficing and Selection in Electoral Competition

We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that winners satisfice (the winning party in period t keeps its platform in t + 1) while losers search. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers’ search rules, we show that the sequence of winning platforms is absorbed into the top cycle of the (finite) set of feasible platforms with probability one. This implies that if there is a majority rule winner then ultimately the incumbent party will espouse it. However, our model, unlike Downs–Hotelling or Kollman–Miller–Page, does not predict full convergence: we show, under weak assumptions about the out-party’s search, that losing parties do not stabilize at the majority rule winner (should it exist). We also establish, both analytically and computationally, that the adaptive process is robust: if a majority rule winner “nearly” exists then the trajectory of winning platforms tends to be “close” to the trajectory of a process which actually has such a winner.
Studies on African Pygmies. IV. A comparative study of the HL-A polymorphism in the Babinga Pygmies and other African and Caucasian populations.

Population studies of complex polymorphisms such as the Rhesus and Gm system have contributed substantially to an understanding of their genetics. They have also helped in delineating the relationships between the various human races, and in studying microevolutionary differentiation in human populations. The high degree of variability and the complexity of the human HL-A tissue antigen polymorphism make this an especially interesting subject for population studies. In this paper we describe the results of a study of the distribution of the HL-A antigens in the Babinga Pygmies of West Africa and compare this with the distribution in Bantu (generic name used for non-Pygmy Africans in the area we studied), American black, and Caucasian populations.
Ulnar styloid fracture has no impact on the outcome but decreases supination strength after conservative treatment of distal radial fracture

Bloom JMP, Khouri JS, Hammert WC. Current concepts in the evaluation and treatment of mallet finger injury. Plast Reconstr Surg. 2013, 132: 560e–6e. Elson RA. Rupture of the central slip of the extensor hood of the finger. A test for early diagnosis. J Bone Joint Surg Br. 1986, 68: 229–31. Smillie IS. Mallet finger.Br J Surg. 1937, 24: 439–45. Wehbé MA, Schneider LH. Mallet fractures. J Bone Joint Surg Am. 1984, 66: 658–9.
Evaluation of biliary tract disease by ultrasonic B‐mode scanning

To establish the value of diagnostic ultrasound (sonar) in the diagnosis of bilitary tract disease, 140 patients were scanned and also had a plain film of the biliary tract. of these, 105 had contrast radiography and 123 were subjected to laparotomy. The results obtained suggest that in the absence of jaundice, sonar compares well with oral cholecystography in demonstrating the gallbladder, but is not as good as intravenous cholangiography in showing the duct system. In the presence of jaundice, however, sonar is considered the imaging investigation of choice.
The impact of a complex care clinic in a children's hospital.

BACKGROUND The number of medically complex and fragile children (MCFC) cared for in children's hospitals is growing, necessitating the need for optimal care co-ordination. The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of a nurse practitioner/paediatrician-run complex care clinic in a tertiary care hospital on healthcare utilization, parental and primary care provider (PCP) perceptions of care and parental quality of life. METHODS MCFC and their parents were recruited for ambulatory follow-up by the hospital team to complement care provided by the PCP in this mixed methods single centre pre- or post-evaluative study. Parents participated in semi-structured interviews within 48 h of discharge; further data were collected at 6 and 12 months. Healthcare utilization was compared with equal time periods pre-enrolment. Parental health was assessed with the SF-36; parental perceptions of care were assessed using the Larsen's Client Satisfaction Questionnaire and the Measure of Processes of Care; PCPs completed a questionnaire at 12 months. Parental and PCP comments were elicited. Comparisons were made with baseline data. RESULTS Twenty-six children and their parental caregivers attended the complex care clinic. The number of days that children were admitted to hospital decreased from a median of 43 to 15 days, and outpatient visits increased from 2 to 8. Mean standardized scores on the SF-36 increased (improved) for three domains related to mental health. A total of 24 PCPs responded to the questionnaire (92% response); most found the clinic helpful for MCFC and their families. Parents reported improvements in continuity of care, family-centredness of care, comprehensiveness and thoroughness of care, but still experienced frustrations with access to services and miscommunication with the team. CONCLUSION A collaborative medical home focused on integrating community- and hospital-based services for MCFC is a promising service delivery model for future controlled evaluative studies.
Cross layer performance improvements in Multi-hop Ad-hoc networks

The multi hop architecture can provide greater range, spatial efficiency and throughput with lower power consumption than a traditional point coordinated design. In addition, the self-configuring, self-healing characteristics of this architecture enable previously infeasible network scenarios and applications. These benefits have motivated a significant volume of research. Unfortunately, the ISO networking model was not designed for multi hop ad hoc networks and subsequently, some cross layer interactions are necessary to provide adequate performance. This thesis develops and evaluates solutions to multiple performance problems. It makes contributions in the areas of routing, multi-hop contention and acknowledgement efficiency. The results are captured using a real world testbed. The first study evaluates three popular mesh routing protocols. The second contribution creates a novel channel selection mechanism that operates with multiple radios to overcome multi hop performance degradations. The final study shows the extent of the 802.11 acknowledgement overhead. A novel distributed proxy is created to eliminate this overhead in multi hop ad hoc networks.
Research on a Novel Folded Monopole With Ultrawideband Bandwidth

In this letter, a novel folded monopole antenna with an ultrawideband (UWB) bandwidth and omnidirectional radiation performance has been proposed. An inverted “S”-type structure was formed by folding the planar monopole, which not only realizes dimension reduction, but also contributes to a decrease in the size of the ground plane; the proposed monopole antenna, meanwhile, has a more circular radiation pattern with the frequency ratio of 3.4:1, compared to the planar monopole antenna. Simulation has been carried out together with the measurement of the fabricated antenna. Good agreement between the measured and simulated results can be observed, showing that the antenna is capable of working in the frequency range from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with return loss less than -10 dB.
Virtual keyboard layout optimization

The use of virtual keyboards is becoming ubiquitous with increasing use in mobile devices and touch-screens. Till now the research has mainly focused on developing layouts which support high typing speed, but the error aspect has been largely ignored. This research aims at developing a novel error model which relates accuracy with a given layout using the distance between keys. The main idea here is that the error model should predict the error rate by the layout specification alone.
Factors affecting mass transfer during osmotic dehydration of fruits.

Research applications of osmotic dehydration to food processing in technology and in component transfer mechanisms are being carried out in several countries. Osmotic dehydration is a traditional process applied to food dewatering. It leads to attractive products that are ready to eat or can be applied as a pretreatment to the next process such as drying or freezing. The new osmotically dehydrated products and industrial applications require appropriate manufacturing procedures at the industrial level. Thus, an understanding of factors affecting mass transfer during osmotic dehydration is required for the process optimisation. In this review, the mechanism of osmotic dehydration is described. In addition, some factors that affect on mass transfer during osmotic dehydration such as types of osmotic agent, concentrations of osmotic agent, processing temperatures, agitation or stirring process, pretreatment methods and edible coating were reviewed.
Age-related alterations in the response of hepatic lipogenic enzymes to altered thyroid states in the rat.

To determine the age-related alterations in tissue-responsiveness to thyroid hormone action, the mRNA levels and the enzyme activities of hepatic cytosolic malate dehydrogenase (ME) and mitochondrial alpha-glycerophosphate dehydrogenase (alpha-GPD) were determined in groups of euthyroid, hypothyroid and hyperthyroid male Fischer 344 rats at various ages. The basal alpha-GPD level (change in optical density/min per mg) in 2-month-old rats (0.163 +/- 0.003) (S.E.M.) was significantly (P less than 0.001) higher than that in 6-month-old and 26-month-old rats (0.116 +/- 0.012 and 0.098 +/- 0.013 respectively). The basal ME activity (mU/mg) was significantly (P less than 0.001) reduced in aged rats (9.2 +/- 0.89) compared with younger rats (54.2 +/- 3.4 and 17.1 +/- 2.3 for 2-month-old and 6-month-old rats respectively). The response of ME to tri-iodothyronine (T3) in aged rats compared with young rats was reduced approximately 50%. This age-related reduction in ME response to T3 could not be attributed to reduced food intake with ageing. Northern blot analysis showed that ME mRNA levels in hyperthyroid aged rats were 50% of those of young hyperthyroid rats. There were no significant differences in either basal or T3-stimulated alpha-GPD mRNA levels. The proportional reduction in steady-state ME mRNA levels and ME activity in aged rats indicates that this age-related change is modulated at a pretranslational level.
Selective web information retrieval

This thesis proposes selective Web information retrieval, a framework formulated in terms of statistical decision theory, with the aim to apply an appropriate retrieval approach on a per-query basis. The main component of the framework is a decision mechanism that selects an appropriate retrieval approach on a per-query basis. The selection of a particular retrieval approach is based on the outcome of an experiment, which is performed before the final ranking of the retrieved documents. The experiment is a process that extracts features from a sample of the set of retrieved documents. This thesis investigates three broad types of experiments. The first one counts the occurrences of query terms in the retrieved documents, indicating the extent to which the query topic is covered in the document collection. The second type of experiments considers information from the distribution of retrieved documents in larger aggregates of related Web documents, such as whole Web sites, or directories within Web sites. The third type of experiments estimates the usefulness of the hyperlink structure among a sample of the set of retrieved Web documents. The proposed experiments are evaluated in the context of both informational and navigational search tasks with an optimal Bayesian decision mechanism, where it is assumed that relevance information exists. This thesis further investigates the implications of applying selective Web information retrieval in an operational setting, where the tuning of a decision mechanism is based on limited existing relevance information and the information retrieval system’s input is a stream of queries related to mixed informational and navigational search tasks. First, the experiments are evaluated using different training and testing query sets, as well as a mixture of different types of queries. Second, query sampling is introduced, in order to approximate the queries that a retrieval system receives, and to tune an ad-hoc decision mechanism with a broad set of automatically sampled queries.
Characterization of Phenotypes in Gstm1-null Mice by Cytosolic and in Vivo Metabolic Studies Using 1,2-Dichloro-4-Nitrobenzene

Glutathione S-transferase Mu 1 (GSTM1) has been regarded as one of the key enzymes involved in phase II reactions in the liver, because of its high expression level. In this study, we generated mice with disrupted glutathione S-transferase Mu 1 gene (Gstm1-null mice) by gene targeting, and characterized the phenotypes by cytosolic and in vivo studies. The resulting Gstm1-null mice appeared to be normal and were fertile. Expression analyses for the Gstm1-null mice revealed a deletion of Gstm1 mRNA and a small decrease in glutathione S-transferase alpha 3 mRNA. In the enzymatic study, GST activities toward 1,2-dichloro-4-nitrobenzene (DCNB) and 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene (CDNB) in the liver and kidney cytosols were markedly lower in Gstm1-null mice than in the wild-type control. Gstm1-null mice had GST activities of only 6.1 to 21.0% of the wild-type control to DCNB and 26.0 to 78.6% of the wild-type control to CDNB. After a single oral administration of DCNB to Gstm1-null mice, the plasma concentration of DCNB showed larger AUC0–24 (5.1–5.3 times, versus the wild-type control) and higher Cmax (2.1–2.2 times, versus the wild-type control), with a correspondingly lower level of glutathione-related metabolite (AUC0–24, 9.4–17.9%; and Cmax, 9.7–15.6% of the wild-type control). In conclusion, Gstm1-null mice showed markedly low ability for glutathione conjugation to DCNB in the cytosol and in vivo and would be useful as a deficient model of GSTM1 for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion/toxicology studies.
Seasonal Variation in Occurrence of Pulmonary Embolism: Analysis of the Database of the Emilia‐Romagna Region, Italy

Seasonal variation in the occurrence of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, including pulmonary embolism (PE), has been reported; however, recent large‐scale, population‐based studies conducted in the United States did not confirm such seasonality. The aim of this large‐scale population study was to determine whether a temporal pattern in the occurrence of PE exists. The analysis considered all consecutive cases of PE in the database of all hospital admissions of the Emilia Romagna region in Italy at the Center for Health Statistics between January 1998 and December 2005. PE cases were first grouped according to season of occurrence, and the data were analyzed by the χ2 test for goodness of fit. Then, inferential chronobiologic (cosinor and partial Fourier) analysis was applied to monthly data, and the best‐fitting curve for the annual variation was derived. The total sample consisted of 19,245 patients (8,143 male, mean age 71.6±14.1 yrs; 11,102 female, mean age 76.1±13.7 yrs). Of these, 2,484 were <65 yrs, 5,443 were between 65 and 74, and 11,318 were ≥75 yrs. There were 4,486 (23.3%) fatal‐case outcomes. PE occurred least frequently in spring (n=4,442 or 23.1%) and most frequent in winter (n=5,236 or 27.2%, goodness of fit χ2=75.75, p<0.001). Similar results were obtained for subgroups formed by gender, age, fatal/non‐fatal outcome, presence/absence of major underlying co‐morbid conditions, and specific risk factors. Inferential chronobiological analysis identified a significant annual pattern in PE, with the peak between November and December for the total sample of cases (p<0.001), males (p<0.001), females (p=0.002), fatal and non‐fatal cases (p<0.001 for both), and subgroups formed by age (<65 yrs, p=0.012; 65–74 yrs, p<0.001; ≥75 yrs, p=0.012). This pattern was independent of the presence/absence of hypertension (p=0.003 and p<0.001, respectively), pulmonary disease (p<0.001 and p<0.001, respectively), stroke (p<0.001 and p=0.004, respectively), neoplasms (p=0.005 and p=0.001, respectively), heart failure (p=0.022 and p<0.001, respectively), and deep vein thrombosis (p=0.002 and p<0.001, respectively). However, only a non‐statistically significant trend was found for subgroups formed by cases of diabetes mellitus, infections, renal failure, and trauma.
Residential patterning at Angkor Wat

Considerable attention has been devoted to the architecture and art history of Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple in the last century. There has, however, been little research on the functions and internal organisation of the large rectangular enclosure surrounding the temple. Such enclosures have long been assumed to have been sacred precincts, or perhaps ‘temple-cities’: work exploring the archaeological patterning for habitation within them has been limited. The results of LiDAR survey and excavation have now revealed evidence for low-density residential occupation in these areas, possibly for those servicing the temple. Recent excavations within the enclosure challenge our traditional understanding of the social hierarchy of the Angkor Wat community and show that the temple precinct, bounded by moat and wall, may not have been exclusively the preserve of the wealthy or the priestly elite.
Comparison of Corrupted Sensor Data Detection Methods in Detecting Stealthy Attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems

Effectiveness of seven methods for detecting stealthy attacks on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) was investigated using an experimental study. The Amigobot robot was used as the CPS. The experiments were conducted in simulation as well as on the physical robot. Three types of stealthy attacks were implemented: surge, bias, and geometric. Two variations of Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) method for detecting attacks were evaluated: partial and full physics. Four attack scenarios were implemented. Results from the experiments indicate that stealthy attacks could remain undetected by the CUSUM methods for some attack scenarios. In addition to the CUSUM-based methods, a set of five methods to complement CUSUM were implemented and their effectiveness assessed. While the additional methods do improve the effectiveness of CUSUM-based methods, some attacks remained undetected regardless of which method, or a combination of methods, was used for detection due to the amount of variation in sensor measurements between different runs in simulation and in the physical robot.