Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prediction of Thrombotic and Bleeding Events After Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: CREDO‐Kyoto Thrombotic and Bleeding Risk Scores

Background Prediction of thrombotic and bleeding risk is important to optimize antithrombotic therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods and Results We developed the prediction rules for thrombotic and bleeding events separately in Japanese patients. Derivation and validation cohorts consisted of 4778 patients from CREDO‐Kyoto (Coronary Revascularization Demonstrating Outcome Study in Kyoto) registry cohort 2 and 4669 patients from RESET (Randomized Evaluation of Sirolimus‐Eluting Versus Everolimus‐Eluting Stent Trial) and NEXT (Nobori Biolimus‐Eluting Versus Xience/Promus Everolimus‐Eluting Stent Trial). Primary thrombotic and bleeding events were a composite of myocardial infarction, definite or probable stent thrombosis or ischemic stroke, and GUSTO (Global Utilization of Streptokinase and Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Occluded Coronary Arteries) moderate or severe bleeding. The prediction rule for thrombosis assigned 2 points for severe chronic kidney disease, atrial fibrillation, peripheral vascular disease, and anemia and 1 point for age ≥75 years, heart failure, diabetes mellitus, and chronic total occlusion. The prediction rule for bleeding assigned 2 points for thrombocytopenia, severe chronic kidney disease, peripheral vascular disease, and heart failure and 1 point for prior myocardial infarction, malignancy, and atrial fibrillation. In derivation and validation cohorts, area under the curve was 0.68 and 0.64, respectively, for thrombosis and 0.66 and 0.66, respectively, for bleeding. In the validation cohort, a high thrombosis risk score (≥4, n=682) was associated with higher 3‐year incidence of thrombotic events than a score that was intermediate (2–3, n=1178) or low (0–1, n=2809) (7.6%, 3.7%, versus 2.4%, respectively; P<0.0001). A high bleeding risk score (≥3, n=666) was associated with higher incidence of bleeding than scores that were intermediate (1–2, n=1802) or low (0, n=2201) (8.8%, 4.1%, versus 2.3%, respectively; P<0.0001). Among 682 patients at high thrombotic risk, only 39 (5.7%) had low bleeding risk, whereas 401 (58.8%) had high bleeding risk with very high incidence of bleeding (11.6%). Conclusions CREDO‐Kyoto thrombotic and bleeding risk scores demonstrated modest accuracy in stratifying thrombotic and bleeding risks; however, a large proportion of patients at high thrombotic risk also had high bleeding risk.
Arc Flash in Large Energy Storage Systems—Hazard Calculation and Mitigation

This paper deals with the arc flash hazard calculation in large energy storage systems (ESSs), with specific reference to battery energy storage systems (BESSs) and supercapacitor energy storage systems (SESSs). Due to the lack of international harmonized standards and the growing use of large ESSs, the evaluation of arc flash hazard associated with BESS maintenance operation is an interesting subject. In this study, battery circuit models, based on experimental short-circuit tests carried out by TERNA (the Italian transmission system operator) and a simplified supercapacitor circuit model, both coupled with a nonlinear arc resistance model, are used to assess the incident energy related to arc flash in BESSs and SESSs, respectively. Efficient and cost-effective solutions, able to reduce incident energy below the safe value 8 cal/cm2 and based on the installation of fast-acting fuses, are then proposed and discussed.
A mutual-information-based registration algorithm for ultrasound-guided computer-assisted orthopaedic surgery

This paper presents a novel approach and its preliminary laboratory results for the employment of ultrasound (US) imaging in intraoperative guidance of computer-assisted orthopaedic surgeries (CAOS). The goal is to register live intraoperative US images with preoperative surgical planning data using minimal number of images. Preoperatively, a set of 2D US images are acquired with the corresponding positional information of the US probe provided by an optical tracking system. Using calibration parameters, the position of every pixel in the acquired images is transformed into the world coordinate frame to construct a 3D volumetric representation of the targeted anatomy for surgical planning. Intraoperatively, the surgeon takes live US images from the patient with the position of the US probe tracked in real time. A mutual-information-based registration algorithm is then used to find the closest match to the live image in the preoperative US image database. Because the position of the preoperative image inside the US volume is known, we are able to register the preoperative US volume to the live image, thus to the patient. Experiments have shown the registration algorithm has sub-millimeter accuracy in localizing the best match between the intraoperative and pre-operative images, demonstrating great potential for orthopaedic surgery applications. This method has some significant advantages over the previously reported US-guided CAOS techniques: it requires no segmentation, and employs only a few intraoperative images to accurately and robustly localize the patient. Preliminary laboratory results on both a Sawbones model of a radius bone and human subjects are presented.
Trends and variation in prescribing of low-priority treatments identified by NHS England: a cross-sectional study and interactive data tool in English primary care

Objectives NHS England recently announced a consultation seeking to discourage the use of treatments it considers to be low-value. We set out to produce an interactive data resource to show savings in each NHS general practice and to assess the current use of these treatments, their change in use over time, and the extent and reasons for variation in such prescribing. Design Cross-sectional analysis. Setting English primary care. Participants English general practices. Main outcome measures We determined the cost per 1000 patients for prescribing of each of 18 treatments identified by NHS England for each month from July 2012 to June 2017, and also aggregated over the most recent year to assess total cost and variation among practices. We used mixed effects linear regression to determine factors associated with cost of prescribing. Results Spend on low-value treatments was £153.5 m in the last year, across 5.8 m prescriptions (mean, £26 per prescription). Among individual treatments, liothyronine had the highest prescribing cost at £29.6 m, followed by trimipramine (£20.2 m). Over time, the overall total number of low-value prescriptions decreased, but the cost increased, although this varied greatly between treatments. Three treatment areas increased in cost and two increased in volume, all others reduced in cost and volume. Annual practice level spending varied widely (median, £2262 per thousand patients; interquartile range £1439 to £3298). Proportion of patients over 65 was strongly associated with low-value prescribing, as was Clinical Commissioning Group. Our interactive data tool was deployed to OpenPrescribing.net where monthly updated figures and graphs can be viewed. Conclusions Prescribing of low-value treatments is extensive but varies widely by treatment, geographic area and individual practice. Despite a fall in prescription numbers, the overall cost of prescribing for low-value items has risen. Prescribing behaviour is clustered by Clinical Commissioning Group, which may represent variation in the optimisation efficiency of medicines, or in some cases access inequality.
Efficacy and absorption of topical sirolimus for the treatment of vascular anomalies in children: A case series

Efficacy of topical sirolimus has recently been described in lymphatic anomalies but not in other types of vascular anomalies. To our knowledge, systemic absorption of topical sirolimus in these lesions has not yet been reported. The objective was to evaluate the efficacy, tolerance, and absorption of topical sirolimus 0.1% with different types of vascular anomalies in children.
Predicting Drug-Induced Liver Injury Using Ensemble Learning Methods and Molecular Fingerprints

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major safety concern in the drug-development process, and various methods have been proposed to predict the hepatotoxicity of compounds during the early stages of drug trials. In this study, we developed an ensemble model using 3 machine learning algorithms and 12 molecular fingerprints from a dataset containing 1241 diverse compounds. The ensemble model achieved an average accuracy of 71.1 ± 2.6%, sensitivity (SE) of 79.9 ± 3.6%, specificity (SP) of 60.3 ± 4.8%, and area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.764 ± 0.026 in 5-fold cross-validation and an accuracy of 84.3%, SE of 86.9%, SP of 75.4%, and AUC of 0.904 in an external validation dataset of 286 compounds collected from the Liver Toxicity Knowledge Base. Compared with previous methods, the ensemble model achieved relatively high accuracy and SE. We also identified several substructures related to DILI. In addition, we provide a web server offering access to our models (http://ccsipb.lnu.edu.cn/toxicity/HepatoPred-EL/).
Opinion-Driven App Recommender System (ODARS)

Currently, there are no decent ways for the users to quickly determine what people are thinking about the specific application and its features, or which application is better than the other. Users mainly rely on the ratings, some articles or reviews before downloading the application. Unfortunately, it is really difficult for the human to go through all reviews in order to get an impression on an application, to see how positively or negatively people have been thinking about the specific features. Recently, a SAFE approach was proposed for app feature extraction from user reviews and app description. The approach has shown its superiority over the previous techniques. However, there is no tool that that uses the recent SAFE approach to analyze user sentiments mentioned in user reviews at app feature-level. The intention of this study is to develop a tool to analyze user sentiments mentioned on app features in user reviews. The tool enables to perform analysis at single app or multiple apps levels. The app features are extracted from the user reviews and app description together. A survey is conducted to evaluate the developed tool based on its ease of use, usefulness and future use.
Transitions, Losses, and Re-parameterizations: Elements of Prediction Games

This thesis presents some geometric insights into three different types of two player prediction games – namely general learning task, prediction with expert advice, and online convex optimization. These games differ in the nature of the opponent (stochastic, adversarial, or intermediate), the order of the players’ move, and the utility function. The insights shed some light on the understanding of the intrinsic barriers of the prediction problems and the design of computationally efficient learning algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees (such as generalizability, statistical consistency, and constant regret etc.). The main contributions of the thesis are: • Leveraging concepts from statistical decision theory, we develop a necessary toolkit for formalizing the prediction games mentioned above and quantifying the objective of them. • We investigate the cost-sensitive classification problem which is an instantiation of the general learning task, and demonstrate the hardness of this problem by producing the lower bounds on the minimax risk of it. Then we analyse the impact of imposing constraints (such as corruption level, and privacy requirements etc.) on the general learning task. This naturally leads us to further investigation of strong data processing inequalities which is a fundamental concept in information theory. Furthermore, by extending the hypothesis testing interpretation of standard privacy definitions, we propose an asymmetric (prioritized) privacy definition. • We study efficient merging schemes for prediction with expert advice problem and the geometric properties (mixability and exp-concavity) of the loss functions that guarantee constant regret bounds. As a result of our study, we construct two types of link functions (one using calculus approach and another using geometric approach) that can re-parameterize any binary mixable loss into an exp-concave loss. • We focus on some recent algorithms for online convex optimization, which exploit the easy nature of the data (such as sparsity, predictable sequences, and curved losses) in order to achieve better regret bound while ensuring the protection against the worst case scenario. We unify some of these existing techniques to obtain new update rules for the cases when these easy instances occur together, and analyse the regret bounds of them.
Lipid Droplet, a Key Player in Host-Parasite Interactions

Lipid droplets (lipid bodies, LDs) are dynamic organelles that have important roles in regulating lipid metabolism, energy homeostasis, cell signaling, membrane trafficking, and inflammation. LD biogenesis, composition, and functions are highly regulated and may vary according to the stimuli, cell type, activation state, and inflammatory environment. Increased cytoplasmic LDs are frequently observed in leukocytes and other cells in a number of infectious diseases. Accumulating evidence reveals LDs participation in fundamental mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions, including cell signaling and immunity. LDs are sources of eicosanoid production, and may participate in different aspects of innate signaling and antigen presentation. In addition, intracellular pathogens evolved mechanisms to subvert host metabolism and may use host LDs, as ways of immune evasion and nutrients source. Here, we review mechanisms of LDs biogenesis and their contributions to the infection progress, and discuss the latest discoveries on mechanisms and pathways involving LDs roles as regulators of the immune response to protozoan infection.
Intrinsic Motivation and Real Individual Piecewise Linear Wages

This paper presents a simple framework for understanding the prevalence of basic piecewise linear wages in the real world. It extends the analysis of individual piecewise linear wages to environments in which the participation constraint is reinforced by intrinsic motivations. It identifies a class of “acceptable” piecewise linear wages verifying both this reinforced participation constraint and the adverse selection constraint. Among them, it restricts the characterization to a class of real-world wages. Through the advantages and drawbacks of certain acceptable piecewise linear wages, it helps explaining why they are common in the real world even if they are not optimal.
Joint Image Captioning and Question Answering

Answering visual questions need acquire daily common knowledge and model the semantic connection among different parts in images, which is too difficult for VQA systems to learn from images with the only supervision from answers. Meanwhile, image captioning systems with beam search strategy tend to generate similar captions and fail to diversely describe images. To address the aforementioned issues, we present a system to have these two tasks compensate with each other, which is capable of jointly producing image captions and answering visual questions. In particular, we utilize question and image features to generate question-related captions and use the generated captions as additional features to provide new knowledge to the VQA system. For image captioning, our system attains more informative results in term of the relative improvements on VQA tasks as well as competitive results using automated metrics. Applying our system to the VQA tasks, our results on VQA v2 dataset achieve 65.8% using generated captions and 69.1% using annotated captions in validation set and 68.4% in the test-standard set. Further, an ensemble of 10 models results in 69.7% in the test-standard split.
Exploiting Switching of Transistors in Digital Electronics for RFID Tag Design

A novel RFID tag and a backscattering channel created by switching transistors in digital electronic circuits have been introduced. The proposed RFID tag is highly reconfigurable, can operate at carrier frequencies from 1 to 20 GHz and reach a maximum distance of 2 m. RFID tags with 6 bits and 36 bits were implemented at 5.8 GHz and 17.46 GHz, respectively, providing up to 68.7 billion (2) combinations of unique IDs.
Polyamine Modulation of Anticonvulsant Drug Response: A Potential Mechanism Contributing to Pharmacoresistance in Chronic Epilepsy

Despite the development of numerous novel anticonvulsant drugs, ∼30% of epilepsy patients remain refractory to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Many established and novel AEDs reduce hyperexcitability via voltage- and use-dependent inhibition of voltage-gated Na+ channels. For the widely used anticonvulsant carbamazepine (CBZ), use-dependent block of Na+ channels is significantly reduced both in experimental and human epilepsy. However, the molecular underpinnings of this potential cellular mechanism for pharmacoresistance have remained enigmatic. Here, we describe the mechanism that leads to the emergence of CBZ-resistant Na+ channels. We focused on the endogenous polyamine system, which powerfully modulates Na+ channels in a use-dependent manner. We had shown previously that the intracellular polyamine spermine is reduced in chronic epilepsy, resulting in increased persistent Na+ currents. Because spermine and CBZ both bind use-dependently in spatial proximity within the Na+ channel pore, we hypothesized that spermine loss might also be related to diminished CBZ response. Using the pilocarpine model of refractory epilepsy in male rats and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings, we first replicated the reduction of use-dependent block by CBZ in chronically epileptic animals. We then substituted intracellular spermine via the patch pipette in different concentrations. Under these conditions, we found that exogenous spermine significantly rescues use-dependent block of Na+ channels by CBZ. These findings indicate that an unexpected modulatory mechanism, depletion of intracellular polyamines, leads both to increased persistent Na+ currents and to diminished CBZ sensitivity of Na+ channels. These findings could lead to novel strategies for overcoming pharmacoresistant epilepsy that target the polyamine system. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Pharmacoresistant epilepsy affects ∼18 million people worldwide, and intense efforts have therefore been undertaken to uncover the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms. One of the key known candidate mechanisms of pharmacoresistance has been a loss of use-dependent Na+ channel block by the anticonvulsant carbamazepine (CBZ), both in human and experimental epilepsies. Despite intense scrutiny, the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not been elucidated. We now show that a loss of intracellular spermine in chronic epilepsy is a major causative factor leading to the development of CBZ-resistant Na+ currents. This finding can be exploited both for the screening of anticonvulsants in expression systems, and for novel strategies to overcome pharmacoresistance that target the polyamine system.
The way is the goal: how SecA transports proteins across the cytoplasmic membrane in bacteria

Abstract In bacteria, translocation of most soluble secreted proteins (and outer membrane proteins in Gram-negative bacteria) across the cytoplasmic membrane by the Sec machinery is mediated by the essential ATPase SecA. At its core, this machinery consists of SecA and the integral membrane proteins SecYEG, which form a protein conducting channel in the membrane. Proteins are recognised by the Sec machinery by virtue of an internally encoded targeting signal, which usually takes the form of an N-terminal signal sequence. In addition, substrate proteins must be maintained in an unfolded conformation in the cytoplasm, prior to translocation, in order to be competent for translocation through SecYEG. Recognition of substrate proteins occurs via SecA—either through direct recognition by SecA or through secondary recognition by a molecular chaperone that delivers proteins to SecA. Substrate proteins are then screened for the presence of a functional signal sequence by SecYEG. Proteins with functional signal sequences are translocated across the membrane in an ATP-dependent fashion. The current research investigating each of these steps is reviewed here.
Comparing Different Methods of Measuring Accommodative Amplitude with Hofstetter’s Normative Values in a Ghanaian Population

ABSTRACT Aim: Amplitude of accommodation (AoA) can be determined clinically using different methods. Some methods are known to be more reliable than others for measuring AoA in different age categories. The purpose of this study was to compare Hofstetter’s age-expected norms with five recommended methods of measuring AoA in order to determine age-appropriate techniques for a Ghanaian population. Materials and methods: AoA was measured using four subjective methods (push-up, push-down, minus lens, and modified push-up) and one objective method, the modified dynamic retinoscopy. The amplitudes obtained by each technique were compared to each other and also compared to the age-expected amplitudes as predicted by Hofstetter’s equations. Results: 352 non-presbyopes aged 10–39 years were included in this study. All five methods except the push-up (p = 0.089) and modified push-up (p = 0.081) differed significantly from Hofstetter’s data, while the modified dynamic retinoscopy recorded the strongest agreement with Hofstetter’s average (ICC = 0.78, p ˂ 0.001). With reference to Hofstetter’s expected AoA, the minus lens, push-down, modified dynamic retinoscopy, and modified push-up methods underestimated AoA by −4.18D, −1.99D, −0.48D, and −0.43D, respectively. As age increased, underestimated AoA values by the minus lens (10–19 years: −5.57D, 20–29 years: −3.50D, 30–39 years: −2.39D), modified push-up (10–19 years: −1.51D, 20–29 years: +0.40D, 30–39 years: +0.56D), and push-down (10–19 years: −2.90D, 20–29 years: −1.07D, 30–39 years: −1.46D) methods decreased but the modified push-up in relation to Hofstetter’s expected was most accurate for the older age. The push-up, on the other hand, overestimated accommodation in all age categories by +0.42D (10–19 years: +0.01D, 20–29 years: +0.82D, 30–39 years: 0.67D). Thus, the push-up method became more accurate as age decreased. Conclusion: This study suggested that Hofstetter’s formulae could be used to predict the amplitudes of Ghanaian non-presbyopes aged 10–39 years using the push-up and modified push-up. With regard to Hofstetter’s data, the push-up method was more accurate for the younger age-group 10–19 years while the modified push-up was more accurate for the older age-group 20–39.