Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pre‐operative fluid bolus for improved haemodynamic stability during minor surgery: A prospectively randomized clinical trial

Haemodynamic instability during the induction of anaesthesia and surgery is common and may be related to hypovolaemia caused by pre‐operative fasting or chronic diuretic therapy. The aim of our prospective, controlled, randomized study was to test the hypothesis that a predefined fluid bolus given prior to general anaesthesia for minor surgery would increase haemodynamic stability during anaesthetic induction.
An update on efflux and uptake transporters as determinants of statin response

ABSTRACT Introduction: Statins are used in the treatment of dyslipidemia promoting primary and secondary prevention against detrimental cardiovascular events. ATP-binding cassette (ABC) and solute carrier (SLC) membrane transporters transport statins across the cell membrane. Differences in drug transporter tissue expression and activity contribute to variability in statin pharmacokinetics (PK) and response. Areas covered: The purpose of this review is to discuss factors impacting transporter expression and the effect this has on statin efficacy and safety. Previous studies have demonstrated that genetic polymorphisms, drug–drug interactions (DDI), nuclear receptors, and microRNAs affect statin PK and pharmacodynamics. Expert opinion: Genetic variants of ABCG2 and SLCO1B1 transporters affect statin PK and, as a result, the intended lipid-lowering response. However, the effect size is small, limiting its applicability in clinical practice. Furthermore, genetic variants do not totally explain the observed intervariability in statin response. Thus, it is likely that transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of drug transporters are also highly involved. Further studies are required to understand the contribution of each of these new factors in statin disposition and toxicity.
Same-different problems strain convolutional neural networks

The robust and efficient recognition of visual relations in images is a hallmark of biological vision. We argue that, despite recent progress in visual recognition, modern machine vision algorithms are severely limited in their ability to learn visual relations. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that visual-relation problems strain convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The networks eventually break altogether when rote memorization becomes impossible, as when intra-class variability exceeds network capacity. Motivated by the comparable success of biological vision, we argue that feedback mechanisms including attention and perceptual grouping may be the key computational components underlying abstract visual reasoning. \
Infection and Rerupture After Surgical Repair of Achilles Tendons

Background: Surgical repair of an Achilles tendon rupture has been shown to decrease rerupture rates. However, surgery also increases the risk of complications, including infection. Purpose: To determine the risk factors for infection and rerupture after primary repair of Achilles tendon ruptures. Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: A retrospective review was performed on 423 patients who underwent operative treatment of Achilles tendon ruptures between the years 2008 and 2014. The primary outcome of interest was the total rate of infection, and the secondary outcome of interest was the incidence of rerupture within 2 years of operation. Results: A total of 423 patients were analyzed, with a mean age of 46 years (range, 16-83 years) and a mean body mass index of 31.4 kg/m2 (range, 17-55 kg/m2). The overall infection rate was 2.8%, and the rerupture rate was 1%. The median time between surgery and superficial surgical site infection was 30 days, and the median time between surgery and rerupture was 38 days. Longer tourniquet times (100.3 ± 34.7 minutes vs 69.9 ± 21.4 minutes; P = .04) and greater estimated blood loss (15.0 ± 9.1 mL vs 5.1 ± 12.0 mL; P = .01) were associated with an increased rate of deep surgical site infections. Patients who had longer operation and tourniquet times trended toward higher rerupture rates (P = .06 and .08, respectively). When compared with nonsmokers, current and previous smokers had an increased incidence of superficial or deep surgical site infections (6.25% vs 1.42%; P = .02). Age, sex, race, body mass index, alcohol use, diabetes, past steroid injections, and mechanism of injury did not contribute to complication rates. Conclusion: Achilles tendon repairs were associated with a low risk of infection and rerupture. Patients with longer tourniquet times, higher estimated blood loss, and a history of smoking were at increased risk for surgical site infections. Patients with longer operative times had increased rates of rerupture.
Evaluating Perceived Naturalness of Facial Expression After Fillers to the Nasolabial Folds and Lower Face With Standardized Video and Photography

BACKGROUND Hyaluronic acid (HA) fillers are commonly used in treating facial wrinkles and folds but have not been studied with standardized methodology to include assessment of standard facial expressions. OBJECTIVE To assess perceived naturalness of facial expression after treatment with 2 HA fillers manufactured with XpresHAn Technology (also known as Optimal Balance Technology). MATERIALS AND METHODS Treatment was directed to the nasolabial folds (NLFs) and at least 1 additional lower face wrinkle or fold. Maintenance of naturalness, attractiveness, and age at 1 month after optimal treatment were assessed using video recordings and photographs capturing different facial animations. Global aesthetic improvement, subjects' satisfaction, and safety were also evaluated. RESULTS The treatment was well tolerated. Naturalness of facial expression in motion was determined to be at least maintained in 95% of subjects. Attractiveness was enhanced in 89% of subjects and 79% of subjects were considered to look younger. Most subjects assessed their aesthetic appearance as improved and were satisfied with their treatment. CONCLUSION Naturalness and attractiveness can be assessed using video recordings and photographs capturing different facial animations. XpresHAn Technology HA filler treatments create natural-looking results with high subject satisfaction.
Distributed Fault-Tolerant Time-Varying Formation Control for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems With Actuator Failures and Directed Topologies

This brief investigates the distributed fault-tolerant time-varying formation control problems for second-order multi-agent systems with directed interaction topologies in the presence of both bias and loss of effectiveness actuator failures. Using the adaptive updating mechanism and the boundary layer theory, a continuous fault-tolerant formation control protocol is constructed to compensate for the actuator failures and the derivative of the time-varying formations. The proposed protocol is totally distributed without requiring any global knowledge about the interaction topologies or the bounds of the actuator failures. The formation feasible condition is provided, and it is proved that the formation errors are uniformly bounded and can converge to an adjustable small neighborhood of zero by the proposed continuous protocol under the influences of actuator failures.
A holistic approach to healthy ageing: how can people live longer, healthier lives?

BACKGROUND Although lifespan is increasing, there is no evidence to suggest that older people are experiencing better health in their later years than previous generations. Nutrition, at all stages of life, plays an important role in determining health and wellbeing. METHODS A roundtable meeting of UK experts on nutrition and ageing considered key aspects of the diet-ageing relationship and developed a consensus position on the main priorities for research and public health actions that are required to help people live healthier lives as they age. RESULTS The group consensus highlighted the requirement for a life course approach, recognising the multifactorial nature of the impact of ageing. Environmental and lifestyle influences at any life stage are modified by genetic factors and early development. The response to the environment at each stage of life can determine the impact of lifestyle later on. There are no key factors that act in isolation to determine patterns of ageing and it is a combination of environmental and social factors that drives healthy or unhealthy ageing. Too little is known about how contemporary dietary patterns and sedentary lifestyles will impact upon healthy ageing in future generations and this is a priority for future research. CONCLUSIONS There is good evidence to support change to lifestyle (i.e. diet, nutrition and physical) activity in relation to maintaining or improving body composition, cognitive health and emotional intelligence, immune function and vascular health. Lifestyle change at any stage of life may extend healthy lifespan, although the impact of early changes appears to be greatest.
Supporting child witnesses during identification lineups: Exploring the effectiveness of registered intermediaries

Summary Performance at identification lineup was assessed in eighty‐five 6‐ to 11‐year‐old typically developing children. Children viewed a live staged event involving 2 male actors, and were asked to identify the perpetrators from 2 separate lineups (one perpetrator‐present lineup and one perpetrator‐absent lineup). Half the children took part in lineups adapted by a registered intermediary (an impartial, trained professional who facilitates understanding and communication between vulnerable witnesses and members of the justice system), and half took part in “best‐practice” lineups, according to the current guidance for eyewitness identification in England and Wales. Children receiving assistance from a registered intermediary (relative to children who received best‐practice lineups) were more accurate in their identifications for perpetrator‐present lineups, and there was some evidence that they were also more accurate for perpetrator‐absent lineups. This provides the first empirical evidence for the effectiveness of registered intermediary support during identification lineups.
Recording and Modulation of Epileptiform Activity in Rodent Brain Slices Coupled to Microelectrode Arrays

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most common partial complex epileptic syndrome and the least responsive to medications. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a promising approach when pharmacological treatment fails or neurosurgery is not recommended. Acute brain slices coupled to microelectrode arrays (MEAs) represent a valuable tool to study neuronal network interactions and their modulation by electrical stimulation. As compared to conventional extracellular recording techniques, they provide the added advantages of a greater number of observation points and a known inter-electrode distance, which allow studying the propagation path and speed of electrophysiological signals. However, tissue oxygenation may be greatly impaired during MEA recording, requiring a high perfusion rate, which comes at the cost of decreased signal-to-noise ratio and higher oscillations in the experimental temperature. Electrical stimulation further stresses the brain tissue, making it difficult to pursue prolonged recording/stimulation epochs. Moreover, electrical modulation of brain slice activity needs to target specific structures/pathways within the brain slice, requiring that electrode mapping be easily and quickly performed live during the experiment. Here, we illustrate how to perform the recording and electrical modulation of 4-aminopyridine (4AP)-induced epileptiform activity in rodent brain slices using planar MEAs. We show that the brain tissue obtained from mice outperforms rat brain tissue and is thus better suited for MEA experiments. This protocol guarantees the generation and maintenance of a stable epileptiform pattern that faithfully reproduces the electrophysiological features observed with conventional field potential recording, persists for several hours, and outlasts sustained electrical stimulation for prolonged epochs. Tissue viability throughout the experiment is achieved thanks to the use of a small-volume custom recording chamber allowing for laminar flow and quick solution exchange even at low (1 mL/min) perfusion rates. Quick MEA mapping for real-time monitoring and selection of stimulating electrodes is performed by a custom graphic user interface (GUI).
THU_NGN at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Tweet Irony Detection with Densely connected LSTM and Multi-task Learning

Detecting irony is an important task to mine fine-grained information from social web messages. Therefore, the Semeval-2018 task 3 is aimed to detect the ironic tweets (subtask A) and their ironic types (subtask B). In order to address this task, we propose a system based on a densely connected LSTM network with multi-task learning strategy. In our dense LSTM model, each layer will take all outputs from previous layers as input. The last LSTM layer will output the hidden representations of texts, and they will be used in three classification task. In addition, we incorporate several types of features to improve the model performance. Our model achieved an F-score of 70.54 (ranked 2/43) in the subtask A and 49.47 (ranked 3/29) in the subtask B. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our system.
Effects of Interim Assessments Across the Achievement Distribution

We use data from a large-scale experiment conducted in Indiana in 2009-2010 to examine the impact of two interim assessment programs (mCLASS and Acuity) across the mathematics and reading achievement distributions. Specifically, we focus on whether the use of interim assessments has a particularly strong effect on improving outcomes for low achievers. Quantile regression is used to estimate treatment effects across the entire achievement distribution (i.e., provide estimates in the lower, middle, or upper tails). Results indicate that in Grades 3 to 8 (particularly third, fifth, and sixth) lower achievers seem to benefit more from interim assessments than higher achieving students.
Stem cells as delivery vehicles for regenerative medicine-challenges and perspectives

The use of stem cells as carriers for therapeutic agents is an appealing modality for targeting tissues or organs of interest. Combined delivery of cells together with various information molecules as therapeutic agents has the potential to enhance, modulate or even initiate local or systemic repair processes, increasing stem cell efficiency for regenerative medicine applications. Stem-cell-mediated delivery of genes, proteins or small molecules takes advantage of the innate capability of stem cells to migrate and home to injury sites. As the native migratory properties are affected by in vitro expansion, the existent methods for enhancing stem cell targeting capabilities (modified culture methods, genetic modification, cell surface engineering) are described. The role of various nanoparticles in equipping stem cells with therapeutic small molecules is revised together with their class-specific advantages and shortcomings. Modalities to circumvent common challenges when designing a stem-cell-mediated targeted delivery system are described as well as future prospects in using this approach for regenerative medicine applications.
The Roles of 27 Genera of Human Gut Microbiota in Ischemic Heart Disease, Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, and Their Risk Factors: A Mendelian Randomization Study

Manipulation of the gut microbiota presents a new opportunity to combat chronic diseases. Randomized controlled trials of probiotics suggest some associations with adiposity, lipids, and insulin resistance, but to our knowledge no trials with "hard" outcomes have been conducted. We used separate-sample Mendelian randomization to obtain estimates of the associations of 27 genera of gut microbiota with ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, adiposity, lipid levels, and insulin resistance, based on summary data from CARDIoGRAAMplusC4D and other consortia. Among the 27 genera, a 1-allele increase in single nucleotide polymorphisms related to greater abundance of Bifidobacterium was associated with lower risk of ischemic heart disease (odds ratio = 0.985, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.971, 1.000; P = 0.04), a 0.011-standard-deviation lower body mass index (95% CI: -0.017, -0.005), and a 0.026-standard-deviation higher low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level (95% CI: 0.019, 0.033), but the findings were not robust to exclusion of potential pleiotropy. We also identified Acidaminococcus, Aggregatibacter, Anaerostipes, Blautia, Desulfovibrio, Dorea, and Faecalibacterium as being nominally associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus or other risk factors. Results from our study indicate that these 8 genera of gut microbiota should be given priority in future research relating the gut microbiome to ischemic heart disease and its risk factors.
Dispositional mindfulness mediates the relationships of parental attachment to posttraumatic stress disorder and academic burnout in adolescents following the Yancheng tornado

ABSTRACT Background: Previous studies have shown that parental attachment is associated with low severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and low academic burnout in individuals who have experienced traumatic events. Objective: The present study investigated the ways in which parental attachment is related to PTSD symptoms and academic burnout in Chinese traumatized adolescents by considering the role of dispositional mindfulness. Method: A total of 443 Chinese adolescents who had experienced a severe tornado one year prior to this study completed measures of parental attachment, dispositional mindfulness, PTSD and academic burnout. Results: The results showed that our model fitted the data well [χ2/df = 2.968, CFI = 0.971, TLI = 0.955, RMSEA (90% CI) = 0.067 (0.052–0.082)] and revealed that dispositional mindfulness partially mediates the relationship between parental attachment, PTSD severity and academic burnout. Conclusions: The findings suggested that dispositional mindfulness and parental attachment may be two critical resources in dealing with traumatization and academic burnout.
New Optic Nerve Sonography Quality Criteria in the Diagnostic Evaluation of Traumatic Brain Injury

Background New sonographic quality criteria to optimize optic nerve sheath diameter (ONSD) measurements were suggested. The latter were correlated to elevated intracranial pressure (ICP) in traumatic brain injury (TBI). Aim We investigated whether ONSD measurements were correlated to simultaneous ICP measurements in severe TBI. Methods Forty patients with severe TBI (Marshall Scale ≥II and GCS ≤8) participated in the study. All patients had an intraparenchymal ICP catheter inserted, while ONSD was measured bilaterally, upon admission and over the next 48 hours, based on the new sonographic criteria. A total of 400 ONSD measurements were performed, while mean ONSD values of both eyes were used in the analysis. Results ONSD measurements were strongly correlated to ICP values (r=0.74, p < 0.0001). Receiver operator curve (ROC) analysis revealed that the ONSD cutoff value for predicting elevated ICP was 6.4 mm when using the mean of both eyes (AUC = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.80 to 0.95; sensitivity = 85.3%, specificity = 82.6%). Linear regression analysis nested models revealed that sex (p=0.006) and height (p=0.04) were significant predictors of ONSD values. Conclusion When applying the new sonographic quality criteria, ONSD is strongly correlated to ICP in severe TBI. Whether to use such criteria to monitor ONSD as a proxy for ICP trend in TBI remains to be further explored.
A new species of Mantidactylus from the East Coast of Madagascar and its molecular phylogenetic relationships within the subgenus Guibemantis

We describe a new species of arboreal frog of the genus Mantidactylus from low altitude sites on the eastern coast of Madagascar. Mantidactylus timidus sp. n. has hitherto been considered as Mantidactylus tornieri, but some of the characters that distinguish it from typical populations of this species from mid-altitude localities had already been detected. The new species mainly differs from M. tornieri and all related species in the subgenus Guibemantis by a shorter relative hand length. Furthermore, it has shorter hind limbs, a smaller tympanum diameter and – at least in some populations – green egg pigmentation (as opposed to brown or white). Vocalizations of M. timidus were irregular and unstructured blasts and moans but the available recordings may not represent the real advertisement calls. A molecular phylogeny based on analysis of 539 nucleotides of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene placed the new species sister to a clade containing M. tornieri, M. depressiceps and M. kathrinae. Genetic differentiation from these related species was large, with uncorrected pairwise divergences of more than 8% in all cases. We discuss the recently increasing use of mitochondrial genetic markers to draw taxonomic conclusions and suggest that mitochondrial differentiation should not be used as an exclusive character to describe new amphibian taxa. Instead, phylogenetic placement of populations and morphological, ecological and behavioural arguments need to be carefully evaluated in each case to understand whether a population merits the status of a separate species.
The Effect of Automatic vs. Reflective Emotions on Cognitive Control in Antisaccade Tasks and the Emotional Stroop Test

The article presents two studies based on the assumption that the effectiveness of cognitive control depends on the subject’s type of emotional state. Inhibitory control is taken into account, as the basic determinant of the antisaccade reactions and the emotional Stroop effect. The studies deal with differentiation of emotions on the basis of their origin: automatic (due to primary affective reactions) vs. refl ective (due to deliberative evaluation). According to the main assumption, automatic emotions are diffusive, and decrease the effectiveness of cognitive control. The hypothesis predicted that performance level of both the Antisaccade Task and the Emotional Stroop Test would be lower in the automaticemotion eliciting condition than in the refl ective-emotion eliciting condition. In two experimental studies, positive and negative (automatic vs. refl ective) emotions were elicited. The results support the predictions, regardless of the valence of emotions.