Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of Escherichia coli Isolated from Bovine Mastitis Exposed to Subminimum Inhibitory Concentrations of Cefalotin or Ceftazidime

Escherichia coli is a major udder pathogen causing clinical mastitis in dairy cattle and its heat stable endotoxin in powdered infant formula milk is a potential risk factor in neonatal infections. Cephalosporins are frequently used for treatment of mastitis caused by mastitis; however, use of these antimicrobials may induce antimicrobial resistance in E. coli. The objective of this study was to explore the in vitro effect of subminimum inhibitory concentrations (sub-MIC) of cefalotin (CF) and ceftazidime (CAZ) on the morphology, antimicrobial resistance, and endotoxin releasing characteristics of 3 E. coli isolates recovered from bovine clinical mastitis. The parent E. coli isolates, which were susceptible to CF and CAZ, were exposed to CF or CAZ separately at sub-MIC levels to produce 9 generations of induced isolates. Colonies of the CAZ-induced isolates from all 3 parent E. coli were smaller on blood agar and the bacteria became filamentous, whereas the CF-induced isolates did not demonstrate prominent morphological changes. After induction by CF or CAZ, many induced isolates showed resistance to cefoxitin, CAZ, CF, kanamycin, ampicillin, and amoxicillin/clavulanic acid while their parent isolates were susceptible to these antimicrobials. Notably, 5 CAZ-induced isolates from the same parent isolate were found to produce extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) though none of the tested ESBL related genes could be detected. All CAZ-induced isolates released more endotoxin with a higher release rate, whereas endotoxin release of CF-induced E. coli isolates was not different from parent isolates. The exposure of cephalosporins at sub-MIC levels induced resistant Escherichia coli. We inferred that cephalosporins, especially CAZ, should be used prudently for treatment of clinical E. coli mastitis.
Task-Agnostic Continual Learning Using Online Variational Bayes With Fixed-Point Updates

Abstract Catastrophic forgetting is the notorious vulnerability of neural networks to the changes in the data distribution during learning. This phenomenon has long been considered a major obstacle for using learning agents in realistic continual learning settings. A large body of continual learning research assumes that task boundaries are known during training. However, only a few works consider scenarios in which task boundaries are unknown or not well defined: task-agnostic scenarios. The optimal Bayesian solution for this requires an intractable online Bayes update to the weights posterior. We aim to approximate the online Bayes update as accurately as possible. To do so, we derive novel fixed-point equations for the online variational Bayes optimization problem for multivariate gaussian parametric distributions. By iterating the posterior through these fixed-point equations, we obtain an algorithm (FOO-VB) for continual learning that can handle nonstationary data distribution using a fixed architecture and without using external memory (i.e., without access to previous data). We demonstrate that our method (FOO-VB) outperforms existing methods in task-agnostic scenarios. FOO-VB Pytorch implementation is available at https://github.com/chenzeno/FOO-VB.
Effect of Long-term Carbamazepine Therapy on Bone Health

Introduction: Recent research reported that prolonged use of AET is associated with changes in bone metabolism, with consequent reduction in bone mineral density (BMD) and increased risk of fractures. Objectives: Therefore, the aim of our study was to investigate the effects of carbamazepine on serum levels of 25 -hydroxyvitamin D and on biomarker of bone formation and resorption (serum levels of osteocalcin). Material and methods: We measured serum levels of 25-OHD and osteocalcin (OCLN) in normal controls (n=30) and in epilepsy patients taking carbamazepine (CBZ) (n=50) in monotherapy for a period of at least twelve months. For each participant, mineral density (BMD) was evaluated by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry method. Results: The average value of vitamin D in serum was significantly lower in CBZ group than in control group (Vit D 17.03+12.86 vs. 32.03+6.99, p=0.0001). The average value of osteocalcin in serum was significantly higher in CBZ group than in control group (26.06+10.78 vs. 19.64+6, 54, p=0.004). BMD value in CBZ group was significantly lower than in control group (T. score CBZ: 0.08+1.38 vs. T. score control: 0.73+ 1.13, p=0.031; Z score CBZ:-0.05+1.17 vs. Z. score control: 0.55+0.79, p=0.015). Conclusion: AEDs are associated with bone disease, as evidenced by biochemical abnormalities and decreased BMD. Patients on long-term antiepileptic therapy, especially with enzyme-inducing agents, could benefit of routine measurement of biochemical markers of bone turnover, and BMD measurement as part of osteoporosis investigation.
Fruit and vegetable intakes in relation to behavioral outcomes associated with a nutrition education intervention in preschoolers

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Although a lot of effort has been put into increasing fruit and vegetable intakes in preschool children, vegetable intake in this group is still low. This study investigated whether nutrition education focusing on fruit and vegetable intakes can affect preschoolers' fruit and vegetable intakes as well as their behavioral outcomes. SUBJECTS/METHODS Thirty-five preschoolers (54.3% boys, n = 19) aged 4–6 years residing in Seoul underwent weekly nutrition education intervention (8 sessions) between May and July 2016. Intakes of fruits and vegetables were measured during pre and post-intervention. At snack time, fresh fruit (150 g) and vegetable (120 g) snacks were distributed to each child by teachers. The remaining portions of the snacks were weighed and recorded for each child. Behavioral outcomes were measured by applying Child behavior checklist 1.5–5 and the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. RESULTS During post intervention, vegetable intake increased from 36.15 ± 30.64 g to 48.01 ± 31.23 g (P = 0.010). Among the emotional and behavioral problems measured by parents, levels of total problems (P = 0.001), internalizing (P = 0.004), externalizing (P = 0.003), anxiety and depression (P = 0.001), and aggressive behavior (P = 0.005) decreased. Anxiety (P = 0.026) score, as measured by teachers, also decreased. CONCLUSIONS Nutrition education of preschoolers regarding the intakes of fruits and vegetables had a positive effect on preschoolers' vegetable intake as well as on their emotional and behavioral outcomes. A long-term, large-scale study with a broader study design is warranted to further investigate the role of fruit and vegetable intake in cognitive development and behavior of preschoolers.
Oxidative Stress and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Hemodialysis Patients

Introduction Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is becoming more common around the world and it may progress to cirrhosis and liver failure, increasing mortality risk. In hemodialysis (HD) patients, NAFLD may be a novel risk factor for their high cardiovascular mortality. Heightened oxidative stress is highly prevalent in HD patients. However, the relationship between oxidative stress and NAFLD in HD patients is not well defined. Methods We studied seventy-one stable nondiabetic HD patients. Nineteen patients had the diagnosis of NAFLD by ultrasonography. Blood levels of oxidative stress markers were measured in each patient, including thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), free thiols, superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities, and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity. The copy numbers of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in peripheral leukocytes were also determined. Demographic, biochemistry, and hemogram data were recorded. The two groups of patients were compared in order to determine the factors associated with NAFLD in HD patients. Findings Compared to those without NAFLD, nondiabetic HD patients with NAFLD had significantly higher mtDNA copy number and GPx levels. The two groups did not differ significantly in dialysis adequacy, hemoglobin, serum calcium, phosphorus, albumin, liver function tests, or lipid profiles. Regression analysis confirmed mtDNA copy numbers and GPx levels as two independent factors associated with NAFLD. Compared to those with polysulfone, patients dialyzed with cellulose membrane have significantly higher levels of TBARS. However, patients with or without NAFLD did not differ in their use of either dialysis membrane. Discussion Oxidative stress (represented by antioxidant defense, GPx) and mitochondrial DNA copy numbers are independently associated with fatty liver disease in nondiabetic HD patients. The diagnostic and therapeutic implications of this key observation warrant further exploration.
The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio is associated with multiple sclerosis

Background Subtypes of white blood cell counts are known biomarkers of systemic inflammation and a high neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has been associated with several autoimmune diseases. Few studies have investigated the NLR in multiple sclerosis (MS). Objective To examine the association between NLR, MS and disability measured by the MS severity score (MSSS). Methods Patients were included from the Danish Multiple Sclerosis Biobank. Information on patient NLR was obtained just before their first treatment and clinical information was provided by the Danish Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Register. Information on NLR from controls was collected from the Danish Blood Donor Study. Patients and controls were 1:2 propensity score matched by baseline confounders. Results Propensity score matching left 740 of 743 MS patients and 1420 of 4691 controls for further analyses. Odds-ratio (OR) was 3.64 (95% confidence interval 2.87–4.60, p < 0.001) for MS disease per unit increase of logarithmically transformed NLR (ln-NLR), corresponding to an OR of 2.68 for each doubling of NLR. Mean NLR was 2.12 for patients and 1.72 for controls (p < 0.001). Ln-NLR correlated weakly with patient MSSS (R2 = 0.019, p = 0.008). Conclusion Patients with early MS had increased levels of NLR compared to healthy controls and NLR was weakly correlated with MSSS.
Pharmacogenomics of Medications Commonly Used in the Intensive Care Unit

In the intensive care unit (ICU) setting, where highly variable and insufficient drug efficacies, as well as frequent and unpredictable adverse drug reactions (ADRs) occur, pharmacogenomics (PGx) offers an opportunity to improve health outcomes. However, PGx has not been fully evaluated in the ICU, partly due to lack of knowledge of how genetic markers may affect drug therapy. To fill in this gap, we conducted a review to summarize the PGx information for the medications commonly encountered in the ICU.
QSMatching vs Vector model: comparing effectiveness in questionnaires retrieval

Elaborating an useful questionnaire represents an important task for descriptive research. Poorly elaborated questions can lead to answers with meaningless brased or naive interpretations. Therefore, it may be interesting to reuse, partially or totally, questionnaires already created with the same purpose. In this paper we compare QSMatching with the vector model to calculate the similarity between questionnaires and consequently to obtain a ranking of questionnaires according to the user's query. In order to verify the effectiveness, an experiment was carried out comparing QSMatching and the vector model. The result of the analysis of the experiment shows that QSMatching is more effective than the vector model for questionnaires retrieval.
Multiagent Fully Decentralized Value Function Learning With Linear Convergence Rates

This article develops a fully decentralized multiagent algorithm for policy evaluation. The proposed scheme can be applied to two distinct scenarios. In the first scenario, a collection of agents have distinct datasets gathered by following different behavior policies (none of which is required to explore the full state space) in different instances of the same environment and they all collaborate to evaluate a common target policy. The network approach allows for efficient exploration of the state space and allows all agents to converge to the optimal solution even in situations where neither agent can converge on its own without cooperation. The second scenario is that of multiagent games, in which the state is global and rewards are local. In this scenario, agents collaborate to estimate the value function of a target team policy. The proposed algorithm combines off-policy learning, eligibility traces, and linear function approximation. The proposed algorithm is of the variance-reduced kind and achieves linear convergence with $O(1)$ memory requirements. The linear convergence of the algorithm is established analytically and simulations are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.
Rigid Foldability is NP-Hard

In this paper, we show that deciding rigid foldability of a given crease pattern using all creases is weakly NP-hard by a reduction from Partition, and that deciding rigid foldability with optional creases is strongly NP-hard by a reduction from 1-in-3 SAT. Unlike flat foldability of origami or flexibility of other kinematic linkages, whose complexity originates in the complexity of the layer ordering and possible self-intersection of the material, rigid foldability from a planar state is hard even though there is no potential self-intersection. In fact, the complexity comes from the combinatorial behavior of the different possible rigid folding configurations at each vertex. The results underpin the fact that it is harder to fold from an unfolded sheet of paper than to unfold a folded state back to a plane, frequently encountered problem when realizing folding-based systems such as self-folding matter and reconfigurable robots.
LibPM

Persistent Memory devices present properties that are uniquely different from prior technologies for which applications have been built. Unfortunately, the conventional approach to building applications fail to either efficiently utilize these new devices or provide programmers a seamless development experience. We have built LibPM, a Persistent Memory Library that implements an easy-to-use container abstraction for consuming PM. LibPM’s containers are data hosting units that can store arbitrarily complex data types while preserving their integrity and consistency. Consequently, LibPM’s containers provide a generic interface to applications, allowing applications to store and manipulate arbitrarily structured data with strong durability and consistency properties, all without having to navigate all the myriad pitfalls of programming PM directly. By providing a simple and high-performing transactional update mechanism, LibPM allows applications to manipulate persistent data at the speed of memory. The container abstraction and automatic persistent data discovery mechanisms within LibPM also simplify porting legacy applications to PM. From a performance perspective, LibPM closely matches and often exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art application libraries for PM. For instance, LibPM ’s performance is 195× better for write intensive workloads and 2.6× better for read intensive workloads when compared with the state-of-the-art Pmem.IO persistent memory library.
Anthropometric Indicators of Adiposity Related to Body Weight and Body Shape as Cardiometabolic Risk Predictors in British Young Adults: Superiority of Waist-to-Height Ratio

Frequently reported poor dietary habits of young adults increase their risk of metabolic syndrome (MetS). Excess adiposity is the most established predictor of MetS, and numerous anthropometric measures have been proposed as proxy indicators of adiposity. We aimed to assess prevalence of MetS in young adult population and to make comparison between weight- and shape-oriented measures of adiposity to identify the best index in association with measured body fat and as a risk predictor for MetS. Healthy males and females aged 18–25 years from the Northwest of England were recruited using convenience sampling (n=550). As part of the assessment of the overall health of young adults, the biochemical variables and adiposity measures BMI, waist circumference (WC), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), new BMI, Body Adiposity Index (BAI), Clinica Universidad de Navarra-Body Adiposity Estimator (CUN-BAE), and A Body Shape Index (ABSI) were assessed. Linear regression analysis was used to investigate the association between the proxy indices of adiposity and measured percentage body fat. The odds ratio with 95% confidence interval was used to investigate the relationship between cardiometabolic (CM) risk factors and proxy measures of adiposity. The discriminatory power of these measures for diagnosis of MetS was investigated using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Body weight-related indicators of adiposity, particularly CUN-BAE, had stronger association with measured body fat compared with body shape-related indices. In relation with MetS, body shape-related indices, particularly elevated WC and WHtR, had stronger associations with CM risk compared with body weight-related measures. Amongst all indices, the best predictor for CM risk was WHtR, while ABSI had the weakest correlation with body fat, MetS, and CM risk. Indices directly associated with WC and specifically WHtR had greater diagnostic power in detection of CM risk in young adults.
Recent advances in the management of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Over the last few years, certain areas in the management nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) that have an impact on the care of these patients have evolved, particularly with regard to liquid biopsies, minimally invasive surgery, and advances in chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Beyond its proven role in the diagnostics, surveillance, and treatment of NPC, liquid biopsy with plasma Epstein–Barr virus DNA in the screening of high-risk populations for NPC is strongly supported by recent evidence. Surgery of the nasopharynx is reserved for locally recurrent NPC, and in recent years there have been great strides in minimally invasive techniques with survival rates similar to those of open techniques in treating NPC. Induction chemotherapy in a recent pooled analysis was shown to be superior to concurrent chemotherapy alone for locoregionally advanced NPC. Finally, immunotherapy with a PD-1 inhibitor in NPC has been shown to have 1-year overall survival rates comparable to those of other patients with heavily pre-treated metastatic or recurrent NPC. In this commentary, we discuss these recent advances and their potential in the clinical management of patients with NPC.
A Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting Attack

In a Website Fingerprinting (WF) attack, a local, passive eavesdropper utilizes network flow information to identify which web pages a user is browsing. Previous researchers have extensively demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of WF, but only under the strong Single Page Assumption: the network flow extracted by the adversary always belongs to a single page. In other words, the WF classifier will never be asked to classify a network flow corresponding to more than one page, or part of a page. The Single Page Assumption is unrealistic because people often browse with multiple tabs. When this happens, the network flow induced by multiple tabs will overlap, and current WF attacks fail to classify correctly. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of WF with the relaxed Single Page Assumption: we can attack a client who visits more than one pages simultaneously. We propose a multi-tab website fingerprinting attack that can accurately classify multi-tab web pages if they are requested and sequentially loaded over a short period of time. In particular, we develop a new BalanceCascade-XGBoost scheme for an attacker to identify the start point of the second page such that the attacker can accurately classify and identify these multi-tab pages. By developing a new classifier, we only use a small chunk of packets, i.e., packets between the first page's start time to the second page's start time, to fingerprint website. Our experiments demonstrate that in the multi-tab scenario, WF attacks are still practically effective. We have an average TPR of 92.58% on SSH, and we can also averagely identify the page with a TPR of 64.94% on Tor. Specially, compared with previous WF classifiers, our attack achieves a significantly higher true positive rate using a restricted chunk of packets.
An Azole-Resistant Candida parapsilosis Outbreak: Clonal Persistence in the Intensive Care Unit of a Brazilian Teaching Hospital

The incidence of candidemia by the Candida parapsilosis complex has increased considerably in recent decades, frequently related to use of indwelling intravascular catheters. The ability of this pathogen to colonize healthcare workers (HCW)' hands, and to form biofilm on medical devices has been associated with the occurrence of nosocomial outbreaks and high mortality rates. Fluconazole has been the leading antifungal drug for the treatment of invasive candidiasis in developing countries. However, azole-resistant C. parapsilosis isolates are emerging worldwide, including in Brazil. Few studies have correlated outbreak infections due to C. parapsilosis with virulence factors, such as biofilm production. We thus conducted a microbiological investigation of C. parapsilosis complex isolates from a Brazilian teaching hospital. Additionally, we identified a previously unrecognized outbreak caused by a persistent azole-resistant C. parapsilosis (sensu stricto) clone in the intensive care unit (ICU), correlating it with the main clinical data from the patients with invasive candidiasis. The molecular identification of the isolates was carried out by PCR-RFLP assay; antifungal susceptibility and biofilm formation were also evaluated. The genotyping of all C. parapsilosis (sensu stricto) was performed by microsatellite analysis and the presence of ERG11 mutations was assessed in the azole non-susceptible isolates. Fourteen C. parapsilosis (sensu stricto) isolates were recovered from patients with invasive candidiasis, eight being fluconazole and voriconazole-resistant, and two intermediate only to fluconazole (FLC). All non-susceptible isolates showed a similar pattern of biofilm formation with low biomass and metabolic activity. The A395T mutation in ERG11 was detected exclusively among the azole-resistant isolates. According to the microsatellite analysis, all azole non-susceptible isolates from the adult ICU were clustered together indicating the occurrence of an outbreak. Regarding clinical data, all patients infected by the clonal non-susceptible isolates and none of the patients infected by the susceptible isolates had been previously exposed to corticosteroids (p = 0.001), while the remaining characteristics showed no statistical significance. The current study revealed the persistence of an azole non-susceptible C. parapsilosis clone with low capacity to form biofilm over two years in the adult ICU. These results reinforce the need of epidemiological surveillance and monitoring antifungal susceptibility of C. parapsilosis isolates in hospital wards.