Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Germ Cells Apoptosis during Spermatogenesis in Mammals

Cellular apoptosis is one of the prominent processes observed in testicular development and normal spermatogenesis. This is essential because mammalian spermatogenesis is a complex process that requires precise homeostasis of different cell types. Sertoli cells, which tightly regulate germ cell proliferation and differentiation, are implicated in the control of germ cell apoptosis. A lot of information is available on different cellular (morphological including ultra-structure), molecular, endocrine, biochemical and genetic regulation of germ cell apoptosis in testis that has inspired researchers and biologists to explore greater details in the intricacies of this finely tuned phenomenon. Various endocrine, exocrine factors, toxins, drugs, metabolites and peptides triggering the cascade of events leading to activation of specific genes and their up and down interplay has been discussed in detail. The important aspect of this review is that detailed morphology of testicular tissue and apoptotic cells has been analyzed by light as well as by electron microscopy. The significance of apoptosis in germ cell differentiation and screening vis-à-vis various selection criterions have been analyzed to specify the positive and negative selective pressures (environmental, nutritional) towards evolving reproductive success.
Moral distress in the resuscitation of extremely premature infants

Objective: To increase our understanding of moral distress experienced by neonatal registered nurses when directly or indirectly involved in the decision-making process of resuscitating infants who are born extremely premature. Design: A secondary qualitative analysis was conducted on a portion of the data collected from an earlier study which explored the ethical decision-making process among health professionals and parents concerning resuscitation of extremely premature infants. Setting: A regional, tertiary academic referral hospital in Ontario offering a perinatal program. Participants: A total of 15 registered nurses were directly or indirectly involved in the resuscitation of extremely premature infants. Methods: Interview transcripts of nurses from the original study were purposefully selected from the original 42 transcripts of health professionals. Inductive content analysis was conducted to identify themes describing factors and situations contributing to moral distress experienced by nurses regarding resuscitation of extremely premature infants. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval was obtained from the research ethics review board for both the initial study and this secondary data analysis. Results: Five themes, uncertainty, questioning of informed consent, differing perspectives, perceptions of harm and suffering, and being with the family, contribute to the moral distress felt by nurses when exposed to neonatal resuscitation of extremely premature infants. An interesting finding was the nurses’ perceived lack of power and influence in the neonatal resuscitation decision-making process. Conclusion: Moral distress continues to be a significant issue for nursing practice, particularly among neonatal nurses. Strategies are needed to help mediate the moral distress experienced by nurses, such as debriefing sessions, effective communication, role clarification, and interprofessional education and collaboration.
KPCA Embeddings: An Unsupervised Approach to Learn Vector Representations of Finite Domain Sequences

Most of the well-known word embeddings from the last few years rely on a predeﬁned vocabulary so that out-of-vocabulary words are usually skipped when they need to be processed. This may cause a signiﬁcant quality drop in document representations that are built upon them. Additionally, most of these models do not incorporate information about the morphology of the words within the word vectors or if they do, they require labeled data. We propose an unsupervised method to generate continuous vector representations that can be applied to any sequence of ﬁnite domain (such as text or DNA sequences) by means of kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). We also show that, apart from their potential value as a preprocessing step within a more complex natural language processing system, our KPCA embeddings also can capture valuable linguistic information without any supervision, in particular word morphology of German verbs. When they are applied to DNA sequences, they also encode enough information to detect splice junctions.
A Fast Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm Based on a New Archive Updating Mechanism

Multi-objective optimization has received increasing attention over the past few decades, and a large number of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms have been developed to solve multi-objective problems. An external archive is often used to store elite solutions in multi-objective algorithms. Since the archive size is limited, it must be truncated when the number of nondominated solutions exceeds its maximum size. Thus, the archive updating strategy is crucial due to its influence in the performance of the algorithm. However, achieving a fast convergence speed while assuring diversity of the obtained solutions is always a challenging task. In this paper, a novel multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm based on a new archive updating mechanism which depends on the nearest neighbor approach, called MOPSONN, is proposed. Two archive updating strategies are adopted to update nondominated solutions in the archive, which are beneficial to accelerate the convergence speed and maintain diversity of the swarm. The performance of MOPOSNN is evaluated on several benchmark problems and compared with seven state-of-the-art multi-objective algorithms, including four multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithms and three multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the significant effectiveness of MOPSONN in terms of convergence speed and spread of solutions.
Type A-B Behavior and Incidence of Infectious Mononucleosis in College Students

To further test the hypothesis that Type A behavior is associated with a variety of stress-linked diseases, 280 university students responded to the Jenkins Activity Survey and the question “Have you ever had infectious mononucleosis? ”. Compared to the Type B students in this group, the Type A students were 3.75 times more likely to report that they had experienced infectious mononucleosis.
The Human Papillomavirus Type 16 E6 Gene Alone Is Sufficient To Induce Carcinomas in Transgenic Animals

ABSTRACT High-risk human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are the causative agents of certain human cancers. HPV type 16 (HPV16) is the papillomavirus most frequently associated with cervical cancer in women. The E6 and E7 genes of HPV are expressed in cells derived from these cancers and can transform cells in tissue culture. Animal experiments have demonstrated that E6 and E7 together cause tumors. We showed previously that E6 and E7 together or E7 alone could induce skin tumors in mice when these genes were expressed in the basal epithelia of the skin. In this study, we investigated the role that the E6 gene plays in carcinogenesis. We generated K14E6 transgenic mice, in which the HPV16 E6 gene was directed in its expression by the human keratin 14 promoter (hK14) to the basal layer of the epidermis. We found that E6 induced cellular hyperproliferation and epidermal hyperplasia and caused skin tumors in adult mice. Interestingly, the tumors derived from E6 were mostly malignant, as opposed to the tumors from E7 mice, which were mostly benign. This result leads us to hypothesize that E6 may contribute differently than E7 to HPV-associated carcinogenesis; whereas E7 primarily contributes to the early stages of carcinogenesis that lead to the formation of benign tumors, E6 primarily contributes to the late stages of carcinogenesis that lead to malignancy.
Multiple User Cooperative Mobility in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: An Interaction Position Game

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been widely used by individuals for residential or commercial usage in small-scale areas depending on fifth-generation (5G) and device-to-device (D2D) advancements. MANET demands extremely high system throughput, low latency, and best quality of service (QoS) maintenance. The current user mobility approaches only analyze the single movable user and use intuitive methods but cannot fundamentally solve multiple user cooperative mobility in practical applications. In this paper, we first jointly consider multiple user mobility and different geographical places and distances among all users. Then, we propose an interaction position game (IPG) to achieve high throughput and decrease computational cost. In this game, cooperative behaviors among movable users are proposed instead of assumed selfishness, as in traditional game models. In addition, we also present the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem as a performance comparison. Finally, we evaluate the performance of this proposed game in various position cases. The results show that this game method improves the maximum throughput ratio evidently by 57.35% and 27.27% compared with the conventional intuitive method and SA algorithm, respectively. Compared with the exhaustive algorithm, this game reduces the computation cost by 82.79%.
Bronchial hyperreactivity, increased endotoxin lethality and melanocytic tumorigenesis in transgenic mice overexpressing platelet‐activating factor receptor

Although platelet‐activating factor (PAF) has been shown to exert pleiotropic effects on isolated cells or tissues, controversy still exists as to whether it plays significant pathophysiological roles in vivo. To answer this question, we established transgenic mice overexpressing a guinea‐pig PAF receptor (PAFR). The transgenic mice showed a bronchial hyperreactivity to methacholine and an increased mortality when exposed to bacterial endotoxin. An aberrant melanogenesis and proliferative abnormalities in the skin were also observed in the transgenic mice, some of which spontaneously bore melanocytic tumors in the dermis after aging. Thus, PAFR transgenic mice proved to be a useful model for studying the basic pathophysiology of bronchial asthma and endotoxin‐induced death, and screening of therapeutics for these disorders. Furthermore, our findings provide new insights regarding the role of PAF in the morphogenesis of dermal tissues as well as the mitogenic activity of PAF and PAFR in vivo.
Lux vs. wavelength in light treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder

Objective: Published dosing guidelines for treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) refer to photopic lux, which is not appropriate for short‐wavelength light. Short wavelengths are most potent for many non‐visual responses to light. If SAD therapy were similarly mediated, standards utilizing lux risk overestimating necessary dose. We investigated antidepressant responses to light using two light‐emitting diode (LED) sources, each emitting substantial short‐wavelength light, but <2500 lux.
Preclinical prediction of Alzheimer's disease using SPECT

Background Regional cerebral perfusion measured by single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) was examined as a preclinical predictor of the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Methods Singular value decomposition was used to produce 20 SPECT factors (known as vectors) (n = 152). Vector scores were then computed for four groups (n = 136), differing in cognitive status: Group 1-normal controls at both baseline and follow-up; Group 2-subjects with “questionable” AD at both baseline and follow-up; Group 3-subjects with questionable AD at baseline who converted to AD on follow-up (Converters); Group 4-subjects with AD at baseline. All SPECT data in the analyses were gathered at baseline. Results The four groups could be distinguished on the basis of their baseline SPECT data (p < 0.00005; hit rate = 83%). Regional decreases in perfusion were most prominent among Converters in the hippocampal-amygdaloid complex, the posterior cingulate, the anterior thalamus, and the anterior cingulate. Inclusion of apolipoprotein E status did not significantly improve the discrimination. Conclusions SPECT data gathered and analyzed in this manner may be useful as one aspect of the preclinical prediction of AD. Three of the four brain regions important for discriminating Converters from normal controls involve a distributed brain network pertaining to memory, suggesting that this network may be selectively affected in the earliest stages of AD.
Prostaglandins versus oxytocin for prelabour rupture of membranes at term.

BACKGROUND The conventional method of induction of labour is with intravenous oxytocin. More recently, induction with prostaglandins, followed by an infusion of oxytocin if necessary, has been used. OBJECTIVES The objective of this review was to assess the effects of induction of labour with prostaglandins versus oxytocin for prelabour rupture of membranes at term. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group trials register. SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised and quasi-randomised trials of early stimulation of uterine contractions with prostaglandins (with or without oxytocin) versus with oxytocin alone (not combined with prostaglandins) in women with spontaneous rupture of membranes at term (37 weeks or more gestation). DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two reviewers assessed trial quality and extracted data. MAIN RESULTS Eight trials were included. Based on three trials, prostaglandins compared to oxytocin were associated with increased chorioamnionitis (odds ratio of 1.51, 95% confidence interval 1.07 to 2.12) and neonatal infections (odds ratio 1.63, 95% confidence interval 1.00 to 2.66). Based on four trials, prostaglandins were associated with a decrease in epidural analgesia (odds ratio of 0.86, 95% confidence interval 0.73 to 1.00) and internal fetal heart rate monitoring (based on one trial). Caesarean section, endometritis and perinatal mortality were not significantly different between the groups. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS Women with prelabour rupture of membranes at term having their labour induced with prostaglandins appear to have a lower risk of epidural analgesia and fetal heart rate monitoring. However there appears to be an increased risk of chorioamnionitis and neonatal infections after prostaglandin induction compared to oxytocin.
[Cosmetic results after breast conserving carcinoma treatment in patients with intramammarian seromas].

INTRODUCTION There were 373 patients irradiated after breast conserving carcinoma treatment. A planning computed tomography revealed in 97 of these patients seromas and tissue defects exceeding 2cm in diameter. The cosmetic results in those patients and the impact of seromas herein had to be evaluated. PATIENTS AND METHODS Mean age was 59 years. A quadrant resection was performed in 17.5 percent of the patients, a segmental resection in 27.8 percent and a tumour excision in 54.6 percent. Radiation therapy was applied with the Linear accelerator and 6 MeV photons up to a total dose in the residual breast of 50 Gy followed by a boost dose to the former tumour bed of 10 Gy. A distinct evaluation and documentation of therapy related side effects and the resulting cosmesis was done in 51 patients. RESULTS In all the examined seroma patients there were moderate acute skin reactions grade 1 to 3. As late effects in 82.3 percent scar indurations were noticed. At the skin 51 percent showed enhanced pigmentation, 68.6 percent atrophia and only 11 percent teleangiectasia. Subcutaneous fibrosis occurred in 56,9 percent of the patients, 78.4 percent of the women had breast asymmetries. In 41.2 percent there were a lymphedema subcutaneously, in 72.5 percent impaired sensibility. The overall cosmetic result documented with a 5 point score was "very good" (score 1) in 19.6 percent and "good" (score 2) in 33.3 percent, 37.3 percent were "satisfactory" (score 3) and 9.8 percent "bad" (score 4) respectively. No "very bad" results (score 5) were seen. CONCLUSIONS The cosmetic results in the examined group of seroma and hematoma patients were inferior to those reported in the literature. We conclude that postoperative seroma and hematoma have an adverse effect on the resulting cosmesis and that their frequency and extent have to be reduced in future by the responsible surgeons.
Using Quantitative Literacy to Enhance Critical Thinking Skills in Undergraduate Nursing Students.

BACKGROUND Critical thinking and quantitative literacy (QL) are similarly grounded: both focus on analyzing and evaluating evidence, identifying implications and consequences, drawing inferences, and communicating information. This teaching strategy was based on those commonalities and was designed so that undergraduate nursing students would enhance their critical thinking skills as they used their QL skills. METHOD QL skills are most effective when taught, learned, and used to solve significant, pertinent problems. Using the principles of learner-centered, team-based learning, QL was integrated into the curriculum of the Maternal-Newborn Nursing course at an urban community college with a diverse student population. RESULTS Students were engaged and demonstrated enhanced and ongoing development of their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. They also reported a better understanding of data interpretation and use. CONCLUSION The positive outcome of this project revealed further opportunities for incorporating QL into nursing curricula and highlighted the need for research on the use of QL in nursing education. [J Nurs Educ. 2017;56(4):240-242. ].
New Public Management: Challenge for Sri Lanka

This article reviews the history of public sector reforms in Sri Lanka and examines Sri Lanka’s recent experiments with NPM. Interviews with ministers, former ministers and senior bureaucrats focused on their level of understanding of NPM, the extent of implementation, the impact on the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians, and related issues for Sri Lanka. The evidence shows that some elements of NPM are already apparent in Sri Lanka and further elements are likely to be adopted. These reforms will demand new skills and attitudes on the part of both bureaucrats and politicians. New initiatives to improve transparency in public sector management need to be developed and implemented, but it is questionable whether the necessary political commitment exists for such reforms.
Fault ride-through capabilities of siemens full-converter wind turbines

Over the past decade, interconnection authorities have imposed fault ride-through capability requirements for wind farms. Both low voltage ride-through (LVRT) and 9-cycle zero-voltage ride-through requirement are included in FERC Order 661A This paper describes the solution developed by a major manufacturer that helped pioneer the application of type 4 (variable-speed full-converter) wind turbines. The paper will also briefly compare the LVRT characteristics of the type 4 machine with that of the more commonly used type 3 (DFAG) machine.
A Granular Level Feature Extraction Approach to Construct HR Image for Forensic Biometrics Using Small Training DataSet

In forensic biometrics old x-ray images are often used for identification and verification. The number of homicide cases has increased manyfold along with population growth. Forensic odontology is a less expensive method to solve these cases. In forensic odontology, the old dental x-ray images of a victim are used as ante mortem data to compare the pattern for identification. The success of this post mortem biometrics process totally depends on the brain perception of forensic odontologist. Low resolution (LR) image may create human brain perception error at the time of making decision both in case of disease diagnosis and forensic biometrics. In such context, a software solution could help to reconstruct high resolution (HR) image from LR medical x-ray image. However, methods like convolution neural network (CNN) require high volume of training images to reconstruct HR images. Unfortunately, the available medical x-ray image repository does not offer a large volume of training dataset. This work aims to overcome this data related issue and presents a granular level feature based HR grayscale medical x-ray image reconstruction mechanism from LR image. This method uses machine learning for HR image reconstruction. The proposed granular level feature extraction method generates adequate amount of training set from limited amount of training image sets. These granular level features contain the influence of neighboring points separately and its direction. These features are highly immune to noises and preserve important properties like edges. Polynomial regression model is used for HR value reconstruction. This image reconstruction provides satisfactory results for image database like dental radiographs datasets and the average structural similarity index (SSIM) metric reaches 0.9326.
Women and migration: the social consequences of gender.

"This paper reviews the literature on the neglected role of women in migration. It argues that focusing on gender and the family can provide the necessary linkage of micro and macro levels of analyses. Striving to contribute to a gendered understanding of the social process of migration, the review organizes the literature along these major issues: How is gender related to the decision to migrate--i.e. what are the causes and consequences of female or male-dominated flows of migration? What are the patterns of labor market incorporation of women immigrants--i.e. what accounts for their participation in the labor force and their occupational concentration? What is the relationship of the public and the private--i.e. what is the impact of work roles on family roles and of the experience of migration on the immigrants themselves? Throughout, the necessity to understand how ethnicity, class, and gender interact in the process of migration and settlement is stressed. "
Commercial Vehicle-Based Robust Control of Seated Whole-Body Vibration Using Adaptive Indirect Type-2 Fuzzy Neural Network

Drivers of commercial vehicles are invariably subject to chronic diseases such as back pain as a result of exposure to severe cabin excitations. In this paper, a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) coupled human-body and seat suspension system is modeled in order to reduce the vibrations transmitted to the head, seat, and the relative seat and cabin floor displacement. The contributions of the present paper are: 1) two significant but inherently conflicting control objectives are employed, namely the seat acceleration and the relative displacement between seat and cabin floor to account for the effect of seat endstops, 2) A novel learning rate gradient descent based neural network approximator algorithm coupled to an adaptive indirect type-2 fuzzy neural network (T2FNN) controller to converge the controller to the ideal parameters of the uncertain model. 3) The controller model takes into account the seat suspension nonlinearities due to the nonlinear asymmetric piecewise damper and the cubic hardening of the suspension spring. The proposed controller employs the principle of type-2 fuzzy systems with interval membership function and unknown specifications. The effectiveness of the closed-loop system is validated regarding the uncertainties compared to observer-based sliding mode controller (SMC) and a high-fidelity virtual lab MSC.ADAMS-Simulink platform to validate the results in practical scenarios.