Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feasibility of radical hysterectomy in women with FIGO stage IIB cervical cancer: an observation study of 10-year experience in a tertiary center

Purpose Although definitive chemoradiotherapy is considered as a standard of care for FIGO stage IIB cervical cancer in many countries, the role of surgery remains controversial. We aimed to evaluate the feasibility and outcomes of patients with FIGO stage IIB cervical cancer who received radical surgery in China. Patients and methods A total of 74 women with FIGO stage IIB cervical cancer were treated with radical hysterectomy, with or without adjuvant radio/chemoradiotherapy, at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University between 2004 and 2015. Medical charts and clinical data were retrospectively reviewed. The Kaplan–Meier method and Cox regression models were used for survival analyses. In addition, prognostic nomograms predicting overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were constructed. Results Pathological parametrial involvement (PMI) was only identified in 28.3% (21/74) of all patients and 47.3% (9/19) of patients without neoadjuvant treatment. Major surgical complications, including bladder fistula, intestinal obstruction and ureteral injury, were found in 6.8% (5/74) of patients. Although the use of imaging technologies including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)/positron emission tomography–computed tomography (PET–CT) has increased after 2010 compared to that prior to 2010, the accuracy of MRI/PET–CT in detecting pathological PMI was lower than that of physical examination under anesthesia (P<0.05). Neoadjuvant treatment was the only risk factor affecting the accuracy of pre- and postoperative accordance of PMI (OR: 3.283 [95% CI: 1.363–7.908], P=0.008). The 2- and 5-year OS rates were 84.1% and 68.9%, respectively, while the 2- and 5-year cumulative recurrence rates were 26.9% and 39.9%, respectively. Cox regression analyses indicated that pre- and postoperative accordance of PMI, common iliac lymph node metastasis and major surgical complications were significant prognostic factors for both OS and PFS. Conclusion Radical hysterectomy might be a feasible alternative for FIGO stage IIB cervical cancer. As pre- and postoperative accordance of PMI is relatively low, strategies to appropriately select patients who will benefit from surgery via pretreatment evaluation need to be further investigated.
Multi-Controller Placement Towards SDN Based on Louvain Heuristic Algorithm

The separation of the forwarding and control planes of software-defined networking brings a lot of flexibility to network management. However, with the increase in network capacity, network structure becomes more and more complicated. The controller placement problem in a large-scale network is still a hard nut to crack because of high complexity and difficulty in the tradeoff between performance. In this paper, a novel approach named community detection controller deployment is proposed. With the aid of theory of complex network analysis, the network topology of the controller to be deployed is regarded as a network composed of multiple communities, and then a suitable position is selected in each community to place the controller, which is capable of avoiding the complexity of global deployment. In order to balance the number of switches managed by the controller in each community, the scale constraint factor is introduced into Louvain heuristic algorithm to limit the number of nodes in each community and balance the differences in the number of nodes among different communities. Distinct from the existing clustering-based approaches, this method can independently identify partitions with community attributes according to the network structure without manual intervention. On the other hand, it can adjust the number of nodes within communities on demand to achieve topological equilibrium partition. Experiments are performed on real network topologies, and corresponding results show that the proposed method is more suitable for networks with plenty of nodes and can effectively balance the controllers’ load while keeping latency at a lower level.
A 12-Year Retrospective Study of Invasive Amoebiasis in Western Sydney: Evidence of Local Acquisition

In Australia, amoebiasis is thought to occur in travellers, immigrants from endemic areas, and among men who have sex with men. Prevalence of amoebiasis in communities with immigrants from Entamoeba histolytica-endemic countries is unknown. The present study is a retrospective case series analysis of patients with laboratory-confirmed amoebiasis from Western Sydney Local Health District, Australia, between years 2005 and 2016. Forty-nine patients with amoebiasis were identified, resulting in an estimated annual incidence of up to 1.1 cases per 100,000 adults. Many were born in Australia (15/47) and India (12/47). Three patients (3/37) had no history of overseas travel, two others had not travelled to an endemic country, and an additional two had a very remote history of overseas travel; one died of fulminant amoebic colitis. Three patients (3/16) were employed in the food industry and one had a history of colonic irrigation in an Australian ‘wellness clinic’. Patients had invasive amoebiasis with either liver abscess (41/48) or colitis (7/48), diagnosed most commonly by serology. Invasive procedures were common, including aspiration of liver abscess (28/41), colonoscopy (11/49), and partial hepatectomy (1/49). Although rare, local acquisition of amoebiasis occurs in Western Sydney and contributes to significant morbidity and hospital admissions.
Unikernels as Processes

System virtualization (e.g., the virtual machine abstraction) has been established as the de facto standard form of isolation in multi-tenant clouds. More recently, unikernels have emerged as a way to reuse VM isolation while also being lightweight by eliminating the general purpose OS (e.g., Linux) from the VM. Instead, unikernels directly run the application (linked with a library OS) on the virtual hardware. In this paper, we show that unikernels do not actually require a virtual hardware abstraction, but can achieve similar levels of isolation when running as processes by leveraging existing kernel system call whitelisting mechanisms. Moreover, we show that running unikernels as processes reduces hardware requirements, enables the use of standard process debugging and management tooling, and improves the already impressive performance that unikernels exhibit.
Enhancing Multiparty Cooperative Movements: A Robotic Wheelchair that Assists in Predicting Next Actions

When an automatic wheelchair or a self-carrying robot moves along with human agents, prediction for the next possible actions by the participating agents, play an important role in realization of successful cooperation among them. In this paper, we mounted a robot to a wheelchair body so that it provides embodied projective signals to the human agents, indicating the next possible action to be performed by the wheelchair. We have analyzed how human participants, particularly when they are in a multiparty interaction, would respond to such a system in experiments. We designed two settings for the robot's projective behavior. The first design allows the robot to face towards the human agents (Face-to-Face model), and the other allows it to face forward as the human agents do, then turn around to the human agents when it indicates where the wheelchair will move to (Body-Torque model). The analysis examined reactions by the human agents to the wheelchair, his/her accompanying human agent, and others who pass by them in the experiment's setting. The results show that the Body-Torque model seems more effective in enhancing cooperative behavior among the human participants than the Face-to-Face model when they are moving to a forward direction together.
Improving the Generalization of Adversarial Training with Domain Adaptation

By injecting adversarial examples into training data, adversarial training is promising for improving the robustness of deep learning models. However, most existing adversarial training approaches are based on a specific type of adversarial attack. It may not provide sufficiently representative samples from the adversarial domain, leading to a weak generalization ability on adversarial examples from other attacks. Moreover, during the adversarial training, adversarial perturbations on inputs are usually crafted by fast single-step adversaries so as to scale to large datasets. This work is mainly focused on the adversarial training yet efficient FGSM adversary. In this scenario, it is difficult to train a model with great generalization due to the lack of representative adversarial samples, aka the samples are unable to accurately reflect the adversarial domain. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Adversarial Training with Domain Adaptation (ATDA) method. Our intuition is to regard the adversarial training on FGSM adversary as a domain adaption task with limited number of target domain samples. The main idea is to learn a representation that is semantically meaningful and domain invariant on the clean domain as well as the adversarial domain. Empirical evaluations on Fashion-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that ATDA can greatly improve the generalization of adversarial training and the smoothness of the learned models, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmark datasets. To show the transfer ability of our method, we also extend ATDA to the adversarial training on iterative attacks such as PGD-Adversial Training (PAT) and the defense performance is improved considerably.
Gasless Robot-Assisted Nipple-Sparing Mastectomy: A Case Report

Robotic surgical systems enhance surgical accuracy and efficiency by applying advanced technologies such as artificial arm joints to provide higher degrees of freedom of movement and high-quality three-dimensional images. However, the application of robotic surgical systems to breast surgery has not been widely attempted. The robotic system would improve cosmesis by enabling surgery using a single small incision. We report the first case of a gasless robot-assisted nipple-sparing mastectomy and immediate reconstruction in a patient with early breast cancer.
Genetic Variation and Alleviation of Salinity Stress in Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.)

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) represents one of the most important cereals cultivated worldwide. Investigating genetic variability and structure of barley is important for enhancing the crop productivity. This study aimed to investigate the diversity and structure of 40 barley genotypes originated from three European countries (France, the Netherlands, Poland) using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). It also aimed to study 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) effect on salinity tolerance of six barley genotypes. The expected heterozygosity (He) diverged from 0.126 to 0.501, with a mean of 0.348. Polymorphic information content (PIC) diverged from 0.103 to 0.482 across barley genotypes, with a mean of 0.316, indicating that barley genotypes are rich in a considerable level of genetic diversity. The 40 barley genotypes were further studied based on their geographical origin (Western Europe and Eastern Europe). The Eastern European region (Poland) has a higher barley variability than the Western European region (France and the Netherlands). Nei’s distance-based cluster tree divided the 40 barley accessions into two major clusters; one cluster comprised all the varieties originated from the Eastern European region, while the other major cluster included all accessions originated from the Western European region. Structure analysis results were in a complete concordance with our cluster analysis results. Slaski 2, Damseaux and Urbanowicki genotypes have the highest diversity level, whereas Carmen, Bigo and Cambrinus genotypes have the lowest level. The response of these six varieties to NaCl stress was also investigated. Salt stress (100 mM NaCl) slightly decreased levels of chlorophyll, carotenoid and osmolytes (proteins, soluble sugars, phenolics and flavonoids) in the leaves of Slaski 2, Damseaux and Urbanowicki genotypes at non-significant level, as compared to control samples. However, pigment contents and osmolytes in leaves of Carmen, Bigo and Cambrinus genotypes were significantly decreased by salt stress. Antioxidant enzyme activities were significantly increased in Slaski 2 genotype, but non-significantly increased in Carmen by salt stress. Priming Slaski 2 and Carmen cultivars with ALA under salt stress significantly induced pigment contents, antioxidants enzymes activity and stress-responsive genes expression, relative to NaCl-stressed plants. In conclusion, this study suggested a correlation between variability percentage and degree of salinity resistance. ALA improved salt tolerance in barley.
Enhancing structural diversity in social networks by recommending weak ties

Contact recommendation has become a common functionality in online social platforms, and an established research topic in the social networks and recommender systems fields. Predicting and recommending links has been mainly addressed to date as an accuracy-targeting problem. In this paper we put forward a different perspective, considering that correctly predicted links may not be all equally valuable. Contact recommendation brings an opportunity to drive the structural evolution of a social network towards desirable properties of the network as a whole, beyond the sum of the isolated gains for the individual users to whom recommendations are delivered -global properties that we may want to assess and promote as explicit recommendation targets. In this perspective, we research the definition of relevant diversity metrics drawing from social network analysis concepts, and linking to prior diversity notions in recommender systems. In particular, we elaborate on the notion of weak tie recommendation as a means to enhance the structural diversity of networks. In order to show the signification of the proposed metrics, we report experiments with Twitter data illustrating how state of the art contact recommendation methods compare in terms of our metrics; we examine the tradeoff with accuracy, and we show that diverse link recommendations result in a corresponding diversity enhancement in the flow of information through the network, with potential implications in mitigating filter bubbles.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy ameliorates osteonecrosis in patients by modulating inflammation and oxidative stress

Abstract Early stages of avascular necrosis of the femoral head (AVNFH) can be conservatively treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). This study investigated how HBOT modulates inflammatory markers and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in patients with AVNFH. Twenty-three male patients were treated with two cycles of HBOT, 30 sessions each with a 30 days break between cycles. Each session consisted of 90 minutes of 100% inspired oxygen at 2.5 absolute atmospheres of pressure. Plasma levels of tumor necrosis factor alfa (TNF-α), interleukin 6 (IL-6), interleukin 1 beta (IL-1β) and ROS production were measured before treatment (T0), after 15 and 30 HBOT sessions (T1 and T2), after the 30-day break (T3), and after 60 sessions (T4). Results showed a significant reduction in TNF-α and IL-6 plasma levels over time. This decrease in inflammatory markers mirrored observed reductions in bone marrow edema and reductions in patient self-reported pain.
Saudi EFL University Instructors’ Barriers to Teaching the Speaking Skills: Causes and Solutions

The aim of this study was to investigate the causes and the solutions of Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill. The sample of the study consisted of 132 randomly-selected EFL preparatory year instructors at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, and King Saud University in Riyadh city. Three instruments were utilized to collect data for the study: the first one was a questionnaire, the second was semi-structured interviews, and the third one was lectures observations. The researcher designed a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to collect the data of the study which was validated by a panel of raters consisting of ten university professors and instructors. To ensure reliability, Cronbach Alpha formula was calculated. Besides, The findings of the study revealed that the causes of Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill in the preparatory year were as follows: students’ use of L1 during group work or pair work, lack of vocabulary, fear of making mistakes, lack of self-confidence, and lack of motivation. Furthermore, the study results advocated the following solutions to Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill: enhancing students’ self-confidence to speak without fear, correcting students’ mistakes kindly, meeting students’ needs in speaking textbooks, and adopting recent motivating techniques, increasing the motivating speaking activities in textbooks, and testing the speaking skill. Finally, the study concluded that teacher training and preparation programs should help EFL instructors overcome and avoid such teaching barriers in teaching the speaking skills
Physical Activity, Not Sedentary Time, Predicts Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry–measured Adiposity Age 5 to 19 Years

Purpose To examine the associations among physical activity (PA), sedentary time (SED), and TV viewing (TV) with fat mass (FAT) and visceral adipose tissue mass (VAT) from childhood through adolescence (5–19 yr). Methods Participants in the Iowa Bone Development Study (n = 230 males and 233 females) were examined at ages 5, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19 yr. Accelerometers measured moderate- or vigorous-intensity PA (MVPA; min·d−1), light-intensity PA (LPA; min·d−1), and SED (h·d−1). Parent-proxy report (5 and 8 yr) and child-report (11, 13, 15, 17, and 19 yr) measured TV (h·d−1). X-ray absorptiometry scans measured FAT (kg) and VAT (g). Sex-specific growth models were used to create FAT and VAT growth curves for individual participants (level 1), and to test the effect of MVPA, LPA, SED, and TV (level 2) after adjusting for weight, height, linear age, nonlinear age, and maturity. Results Growth models indicated that low levels of MVPA were associated with high levels of FAT and VAT for males and high levels of FAT for females. TV viewing was positively associated with FAT and VAT for males and females. LPA was positively associated with FAT in males. Sedentary time was not associated with FAT or VAT for males or females (P > 0.05). Conclusions This study supports current PA guidelines focusing on MVPA rather than SED. The contribution of high TV, but not high SED, to high levels of adiposity suggests that TV’s contribution to obesity is not just a function of low energy expenditure.
Transcriptional Profile of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in an in vitro Model of Intraocular Tuberculosis

Background: Intraocular tuberculosis (IOTB), an extrapulmonary manifestation of tuberculosis of the eye, has unique and varied clinical presentations with poorly understood pathogenesis. As it is a significant cause of inflammation and visual morbidity, particularly in TB endemic countries, it is essential to study the pathogenesis of IOTB. Clinical and histopathologic studies suggest the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells. Methods: A human retinal pigment epithelium (ARPE-19) cell line was infected with a virulent strain of M. tuberculosis (H37Rv). Electron microscopy and colony forming units (CFU) assay were performed to monitor the M. tuberculosis adherence, invasion, and intracellular replication, whereas confocal microscopy was done to study its intracellular fate in the RPE cells. To understand the pathogenesis, the transcriptional profile of M. tuberculosis in ARPE-19 cells was studied by whole genome microarray. Three upregulated M. tuberculosis transcripts were also examined in human IOTB vitreous samples. Results: Scanning electron micrographs of the infected ARPE-19 cells indicated adherence of bacilli, which were further observed to be internalized as monitored by transmission electron microscopy. The CFU assay showed that 22.7 and 8.4% of the initial inoculum of bacilli adhered and invaded the ARPE-19 cells, respectively, with an increase in fold CFU from 1 dpi (0.84) to 5dpi (6.58). The intracellular bacilli were co-localized with lysosomal-associated membrane protein-1 (LAMP-1) and LAMP-2 in ARPE-19 cells. The transcriptome study of intracellular bacilli showed that most of the upregulated transcripts correspond to the genes encoding the proteins involved in the processes such as adherence (e.g., Rv1759c and Rv1026), invasion (e.g., Rv1971 and Rv0169), virulence (e.g., Rv2844 and Rv0775), and intracellular survival (e.g., Rv1884c and Rv2450c) as well as regulators of various metabolic pathways. Two of the upregulated transcripts (Rv1971, Rv1230c) were also present in the vitreous samples of the IOTB patients. Conclusions: M. tuberculosis is phagocytosed by RPE cells and utilizes these cells for intracellular multiplication with the involvement of late endosomal/lysosomal compartments and alters its transcriptional profile plausibly for its intracellular adaptation and survival. The findings of the present study could be important to understanding the molecular pathogenesis of IOTB with a potential role in the development of diagnostics and therapeutics for IOTB.
Accelerometric Trunk Sensors to Detect Changes of Body Positions in Immobile Patients

Mobilization, verticalization and position change are mandatory for severely affected neurological patients in early neurorehabilitation in order to improve neurological status and prevent complications. However, with the exception of hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, this activity is not usually monitored and so far the automated monitoring of position changes in immobile patients has not been investigated. Therefore, we investigated whether accelerometers on the upper trunk could reliably detect body position changes in immobile patients. Thirty immobile patients in early neurorehabilitation (Barthel Index ≤ 30) were enrolled. Two tri-axial accelerometers were placed on the upper trunk and on the thigh. Information on the position and position changes of the subject were derived from accelerometer data and compared to standard written documentation in the hospital over 24 h. Frequency and duration of different body positions (supine, sidelying, sitting) were measured. Data are presented as mean ± SEM. Groups were compared using one-way ANOVA or Kruskal-Wallis-test. Differences were considered significant if p < 0.05. Trunk sensors detected 100% and thigh sensors 66% of position changes (p = 0.0004) compared to standard care documentation. Furthermore, trunk recording also detected additional spontaneous body position changes that were not documented in standard care (81.8 ± 4.4% of all position changes were documented in standard care documentation) (p < 0.0001). We found that accelerometric trunk sensors are suitable for recording position changes and mobilization of severely affected patients. Our findings suggest that using accelerometers for care documentation is useful for monitoring position changes and mobilization frequencies in and outside of hospital for severely affected neurological patients. Accelerometric sensors may be valuable in monitoring continuation of care plans after intensive neurorehabilitation.