Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trends in RA patients’ adherence to subcutaneous anti-TNF therapies and costs

ABSTRACT Objective: To examine adherence to adalimumab (ADA) and etanercept (ETA) and health care costs in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, and to explore the association between adherence, utilization and costs. Research design and methods: Using administrative claims data from a large managed health care plan, RA patients treated with etanercept or adalimumab during the period from 01/01/2005 through 12/31/2005 were identified. The first dispensing date was defined as the index date. Patient adherence and costs were assessed during the 1 year post-index period. Main outcome measures: Nonadherence (medication possession ratio <80%) was modeled using logistic regression. Hazard ratios (HR) comparing time to discontinuation were estimated using Cox proportional hazard (PH) models. Propensity score matching with multivariate generalized linear modeling adjustment was done to assess cost difference between ADA and ETA. Results: Of 3829 eligible RA patients, 1292 (765 existing, 527 naïve) and 2537 (1834 existing, 703 naïve) patients used ADA and ETA, respectively. Compared with ADA users, ETA users had longer average treatment duration (316 vs. 291 days; p < 0.0001). Unadjusted adherence rates for naïve and existing users were 63% and 70% (ADA), and 65% and 73% (ETA). Logistic regression analysis indicated that compared with ETA users, ADA users were more likely to be nonadherent (OR, naïve 1.24; existing; 1.25). Cox PH models indicated that existing ADA users were more likely to discontinue (HR = 1.11; p = 0.06) their medication than existing ETA users. Compared with ADA users, ETA users had significantly lower RA-related pharmacy costs (naïve: $10,892 vs. $12,534, p < 0.01; existing: $12,192 vs. $13,752, p < 0.01) and RA-related total costs (naïve: $11,976.42 vs. $13,511.99, p < 0.05; existing: $14,031 vs. $15,454, p < 0.05). Conclusions: ETA users had longer treatment duration, were more likely to adhere to their medication regimen and had lower RA-related pharmacy and RA-related total costs compared with ADA users. These findings must be considered within the limitations of this database analysis.
An End-to-End Steel Surface Defect Detection Approach via Fusing Multiple Hierarchical Features

A complete defect detection task aims to achieve the specific class and precise location of each defect in an image, which makes it still challenging for applying this task in practice. The defect detection is a composite task of classification and location, leading to related methods is often hard to take into account the accuracy of both. The implementation of defect detection depends on a special detection data set that contains expensive manual annotations. In this paper, we proposed a novel defect detection system based on deep learning and focused on a practical industrial application: steel plate defect inspection. In order to achieve strong classification ability, this system employs a baseline convolution neural network (CNN) to generate feature maps at each stage, and then the proposed multilevel feature fusion network (MFN) combines multiple hierarchical features into one feature, which can include more location details of defects. Based on these multilevel features, a region proposal network (RPN) is adopted to generate regions of interest (ROIs). For each ROI, a detector, consisting of a classifier and a bounding box regressor, produces the final detection results. Finally, we set up a defect detection data set NEU-DET for training and evaluating our method. On the NEU-DET, our method achieves 74.8/82.3 mAP with baseline networks ResNet34/50 by using 300 proposals. In addition, by using only 50 proposals, our method can detect at 20 ft/s on a single GPU and reach 92% of the above performance, hence the potential for real-time detection.
Behçet Uveitis

Department of Ophthalmology, California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, California, USA, Department of Ophthalmology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA, The Francis I. Proctor Foundation, UCSF School of Medicine, San Francisco, California, USA, Department of Ophthalmology, Istanbul Faculty of Medicine, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey, Department of Ophthalmology, Fattouma Bourguiba University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, University of Monastir, Monastir, Tunisia, Department of Ophthalmology, Kyorin University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan, Ophthalmology Department, DHU View Maintain, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Paris, France, and Centre for Ophthalmology, University Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
Cerebral and Systemic Hemodynamics Changes During Upright Tilt in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Background and Purpose. During head‐up tilt (HUT), patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have higher rates of neurally mediated hypotension (NMH) and postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) than healthy controls. The authors studied whether patients with CFS were also more likely to have abnormal cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) compared with controls in response to orthostatic stress. Methods. Transcranial Doppler monitoring of middle cerebral artery (MCA) CBFV was performed during 3‐stage HUT prospectively in 26 patients with CFS and 23 healthy controls. At the same time, continuous monitoring of arterial blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), end‐tidal CO2 (ET‐CO2) were performed. Results are reported as mean ± SD. Results. NMH developed in 21 patients with CFS and in 14 controls (P = .22). POTS was present in 9 CFS patients and 7 controls (P = .76). Supine HR was higher in CFS patients, but all other hemodynamics and CBFV measures were similar at baseline. The median time to hypotension did not differ, but the median time to onset of orthostatic symptoms was shorter in those with CFS (P < .001). The CBFV did not differ between groups in the supine posture, at 1 or 5 minutes after upright tilt, at 5 or 1 minute before the end of the test, or at termination of the test. Mean CBFV fell at termination of tilt testing in those with CFS and controls. ET‐CO2 was lower at termination of the test in those with CFS versus controls (P = .002). Conclusions. The results of this study are not consistent with the hypothesis that patients with CFS have a distinctive pattern of MCA CBFV changes in response to orthostatic stress.
Regulation of nicotinic receptors in rat brain following quasi‐irreversible nicotinic blockade by chlorisondamine and chronic treatment with nicotine

1 Chronic administration of nicotinic agonists in vivo increases the density of brain nicotinic binding sites. It has been proposed that this up‐regulation results from agonist‐induced functional blockade of nicotinic receptors. This hypothesis was tested by examining post mortem [3H]‐nicotine and [125I]‐α‐bungarotoxin ([125I]‐αBTX) binding following treatment in vivo with the quasi‐irreversible and insurmountable CNS nicotinic blocker chlorisondamine, given either alone or in combination with chronic nicotine administration. 2 In rats that had not received chlorisondamine pretreatment, chronic nicotine administration (0.6 mg kg−1 s.c, twice daily for 12 days) increased [3H]‐nicotine binding density (Bmax) in forebrain tissue sections by 19%, with no change in the apparent dissociation constant (KD). Chlorisondamine (10 mg kg−1, s.c), given once prior to the chronic treatment phase, neither increased [3H]‐nicotine binding by itself, nor altered the extent of nicotine‐induced up‐regulation. Nevertheless, chlorisondamine pretreatment resulted in a persistent blockade of CNS nicotinic receptors, as demonstrated by complete block of acute locomotor responses to nicotine. 3 In a second experiment, [3H]‐nicotine and [125I]‐αBTX binding was measured in tissue homogenates prepared from several brain regions. In the absence of chlorisondamine pretreatment, chronic nicotine administration (1 mg kg−1 s.c, twice daily for 12 days) increased the Bmax of [3H]‐nicotine binding in the cerebral cortex (by 34%), striatum (by 28%), midbrain (by 16%) and hippocampus (by 36%); KD was unchanged. As before, this up‐regulation was neither mimicked nor blocked by chlorisondamine pretreatment (10 mg kg−1, s.c, given twice), despite persistent blockade of acute locomotor responses to nicotine. Chronic nicotine treatment also increased the Bmax (but not KD) of [125I]‐αBTX binding in cerebral cortex (by 35%), hippocampus (by 46%) and midbrain (by 35%). Chlorisondamine altered neither Bmax nor KD when given alone, but significantly attenuated the nicotine‐induced up‐regulation of toxin binding sites in midbrain, with a similar trend in the other two regions. 4 The finding that chronic receptor blockade neither mimicked nor blocked the agonist‐induced up‐regulation of [3H]‐nicotine binding sites suggests that up‐regulation of these receptors is not determined by their functional status. In contrast, it appears that chronic nicotine‐induced up‐regulation of [125I]‐αBTX binding sites may result from receptor activation.
Mutual Fund Holdings of Credit Default Swaps: Liquidity Management and Risk Taking

Using a comprehensive dataset of mutual funds’ quarterly holdings of credit default swap (CDS) contracts during 2007-2011, we analyze the motives for and consequences of mutual funds’ participation in the CDS market pre- and post-financial crisis. Consistent with theoretical work, funds resort to CDS (especially selling) when they face unpredictable liquidity needs and when the CDS securities are liquid, relative to the underlying bonds. Funds also take advantage of the negative basis between CDS and bond yields, especially for the relatively illiquid bonds. Smaller funds follow leading funds in initiating CDS contracts on new reference entities. Moreover, the reference entities that attracted the highest-selling interests from the largest mutual funds are disproportionately firms that were perceived to be “too large to fail” or “too systemic to fail. ”
Crash severity, injury patterns, and helmet use in adolescent motorcycle riders.

BACKGROUND This study examined crash severity and injury patterns between helmeted and unhelmeted adolescent motorcycle riders. METHODS Among an initial population of 4,721 junior college students, 1,284 students were involved in 1,889 motorcycle crashes during a 20-month follow-up period. Crash severity was measured by both the type of collision object and the repair cost of motorcycle damage. RESULTS The incidence rates of crash, injury, hospitalization, and deaths per 1,000 person-years in the cohort were 358, 104, 14, and 1.3, respectively. Compared with helmeted riders, unhelmeted riders had more noncollisions and fewer collisions with a moving car but there was no significant difference in repair cost of motorcycle damage between these groups. More injuries to the external skin, face, and head and more severe injuries occurred in unhelmeted than in helmeted riders. Among crashes resulting in hospitalization/death, more injuries to the face and head occurred in unhelmeted riders than in helmeted riders. CONCLUSION Crashes involving unhelmeted riders were not more severe but more frequently involved face and head injuries than crashes involving helmeted riders.
Influence of larval density or food variation on the geometry of the wing of Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti

Background and Method Variation in wing length among natural populations of Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (L.) (Diptera: Culicidae) is associated with different vectorial capacities. Geometric morphometrics allowed us to use a more powerful estimator of wing size (‘centroid size’), as well as to visualize the variation of wing shape, to describe the effects of density or food variation at larval stage on 20 anatomical landmarks of the wing of A. aegypti.
Natural language processing tools for reading level assessment and text simplification for bilingual education

Reading proficiency is a fundamental component of language competency. However, finding topical texts at an appropriate level for foreign and second language learners is a challenge for teachers. We address this problem using natural language processing technology to assess reading level and simplify text. In the context of foreign- and second-language learning, existing measures of reading level are not well-suited to this task. Related work has shown the benefit of using statistical language processing techniques; we extend these ideas and include other potential features to measure readability. In the first part of this dissertation we combine features from statistical language models, traditional reading level measures, and other language processing tools to produce a better method of detecting reading level. We discuss the performance of human annotators and evaluate results for our detectors with respect to human ratings. A key contribution is that our detectors are trainable; with training and test data from the same domain, our detectors outperform more general reading level tools (Flesch-Kincaid and Lexile). Trainability will allow performance to be tuned to address the needs of particular groups or students. Next, these tools are extended to enable teachers to more effectively take advantage of the large amounts of text available on the World Wide Web. The tools are augmented to handle web pages returned by a search engine, including filtering steps to eliminate "junk" pages with little or no text. These detectors are manually evaluated by elementary school teachers, the intended audience. We also explore adapting the detectors to the opinions of individual teachers. In the second part of the dissertation we address the task of text simplification in the context of language learning. We begin by analyzing pairs of original and manually simplified news articles to learn what people most often do when adapting text. Based on this analysis, we investigate two steps in simplification: choosing sentences to keep and splitting sentences. We study existing summarization and syntactic simplification tools applied to these steps and discuss other data-driven methods which in the future could be tuned to particular corpora or users.
Optimal Power Flow With the Consideration of Flexible Transmission Line Impedance

This letter presents an optimal power flow model with the consideration of flexible transmission line impedance. By the use of big-M based complementary constraints, the original non-convex model can be transformed into a mixed integer quadratic programming that can be solved by branch and bound method. Numerical results from several test systems show that flexible transmission lines can provide better economic dispatch and reduce the total generation cost. Moreover, some infeasible optimal power flow scenarios can become solvable with optimal adjustment of the flexible transmission line impedance.
SALIVARY IMMUNOGLOBULIN ARESPONSE TO A COLLEGIATE RUGBY GAME

Transient fluctuations in immune function after heavy exercise have been linked to an increased incidence of infection in athletes. Several parameters of immunity, including salivary immunoglobulin A (IgA), are affected by heavy exercise in the laboratory setting. However, few observations have been made during true competition. We tested the hypothesis that salivary IgA levels will be decreased after a collegiate rugby game. Saliva samples obtained from 16 men's college rugby players before and after an 80-minute regulation rugby game were analyzed for total volume, IgA, total protein content, and osmolality. Salivary IgA was expressed relative to secretion rate (s-IgA), osmolality (IgA-Osm), and total protein (IgA-Pro). No significant pregame-postgame changes in salivary IgA were observed (s-IgA: −13%, IgA-Osm: −16%, IgA-Pro: +10%). These data indicate that strenuous physical activity, such as a competitive rugby game, does not affect IgA levels. More study on the immune response to athletic competition is needed.
Blastocyst complementation generates exogenic pancreas in vivo in apancreatic cloned pigs

In the field of regenerative medicine, one of the ultimate goals is to generate functioning organs from pluripotent cells, such as ES cells or induced pluripotent stem cells (PSCs). We have recently generated functional pancreas and kidney from PSCs in pancreatogenesis- or nephrogenesis-disabled mice, providing proof of principle for organogenesis from PSCs in an embryo unable to form a specific organ. Key when applying the principles of in vivo generation to human organs is compensation for an empty developmental niche in large nonrodent mammals. Here, we show that the blastocyst complementation system can be applied in the pig using somatic cell cloning technology. Transgenic approaches permitted generation of porcine somatic cell cloned embryos with an apancreatic phenotype. Complementation of these embryos with allogenic blastomeres then created functioning pancreata in the vacant niches. These results clearly indicate that a missing organ can be generated from exogenous cells when functionally normal pluripotent cells chimerize a cloned dysorganogenetic embryo. The feasibility of blastocyst complementation using cloned porcine embryos allows experimentation toward the in vivo generation of functional organs from xenogenic PSCs in large animals.
Riscos ocupacionais entre trabalhadores de um serviço de atendimento móvel de urgência

OBJETIVO: Identificar os riscos ocupacionais entre trabalhadores do Servico de Atendimento Movel de Urgencia (SAMU) do municipio de Caxias-MA. METODOLOGIA: Trata-se de um estudo descritivo de abordagem quantitativa realizado com 48 profissionais. Os dados foram coletados com a utilizacao de um questionario estruturado e analisado no software SPSS, versao 21. RESULTADOS: Os principais riscos encontrados foram: contato com sangue (87,5%), contato com doencas infecciosas (81,3%), agressoes (77,1%), falta de seguranca (72,9%), acidentes com perfurocortantes (68,8%), calor (68,8%), trabalho fisico pesado (66,7%), contato com outros fluidos corporais (64,6%), trabalho noturno (64,6%), posturas incorretas (62,5%), violencia moral (60,4%) tensao/estresse com pacientes (58,3%), ruidos (56,3%) e contato com produtos quimicos (54,2%). CONCLUSAO: Diante disso, algumas intervencoes importantes sao: elaboracao de mapa de risco, cursos de atualizacao frequentes sobre a importância do uso dos equipamentos de protecao individual e prevencao de riscos ergonomicos, acompanhamento psicologico, dentre outras.
Video synopsis generation using spatio-temporal groups

Millions of surveillance cameras operate at 24×7 generating huge amount of visual data for processing. However, retrieval of important activities from such a large data can be time consuming. Thus, researchers are working on finding solutions to present hours of visual data in a compressed, but meaningful way. Video synopsis is one of the ways to represent activities using relatively shorter duration clips. So far, two main approaches have been used by researchers to address this problem, namely synopsis by tracking moving objects and synopsis by clustering moving objects. Synopses outputs, mainly depend on tracking, segmenting, and shifting of moving objects temporally as well as spatially. In many situations, tracking fails, thus produces multiple trajectories of the same object. Due to this, the object may appear and disappear multiple times within the same synopsis output, which is misleading. This also leads to discontinuity and often can be confusing to the viewer of the synopsis. In this paper, we present a new approach for generating compressed video synopsis by grouping tracklets of moving objects. Grouping helps to generate a synopsis where chronologically related objects appear together with meaningful spatio-temporal relation. Our proposed method produces continuous, but a less confusing synopses when tested on publicly available dataset videos as well as in-house dataset videos.
Functional and Cognitive Aspects in Linguistic Modelling

The paper focuses on the issues of establishing transferable language phrase structures. The approach employed is based on generalized cognitive entities manifested in the categorial systems of the English and Russian languages and functional roles of language units in a sentence. The formalism developed for presentation of syntactic structures for the English-Russian machine translation is a variant of unification grammar and comprises about three hundred rules. A number of declarative modules of linguistic processors were designed and implemented w i t h i n t h e f r a m e w o r k o f m a c h i n e t r a n s l a t i o n system“Cognitive Translator” and knowledge extraction systems.
Prevalence and prognostic role of microsatellite instability in patients with rectal carcinoma.

BACKGROUND Association between microsatellite instability (MSI) and favorable postoperative survival in patients with colorectal cancer receiving adjuvant chemotherapy has been indicated. To evaluate whether an analogous positive prognostic role of MSI could be present in rectal carcinoma (RC; most RC patients receive adjuvant radiotherapy), PCR-based microsatellite analysis of archival RCs and statistical correlation with clinico-pathological parameters were performed. PATIENTS AND METHODS DNA from paraffin-embedded paired samples of tumors and corresponding normal tissue from 91 RC patients was analyzed for MSI using five microsatellite markers (tumors were classified as MSI(+) when two or more markers were unstable). RESULTS Seventeen (19%) RC patients exhibited a MSI(+) phenotype. Prevalence of instability was found in patients with earlier RC onset (28% in cases with diagnosis age < or =55 years versus 15% in cases >55 years), whereas similar MSI frequencies were observed in patients with different disease stage or receiving different adjuvant therapies. While MSI was detected in seven (64%) of 11 familial patients, a remarkably lower MSI incidence was observed in sporadic cases (10/80; 12.5%). A significant association with better disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) was found for MSI(+) patients (median DFS/OS, 30/32 months) in comparison to MSI(-) ones (median DFS/OS, 18/21 months) (P <0.001). CONCLUSIONS MSI was demonstrated to be a strong molecular prognostic marker in rectal carcinoma, independent of the administered treatment (radiotherapy, chemotherapy or both).
Epithelial cell proliferation during organogenesis of rat colon

Between the 16th to the 20th day of gestation, the mucosa of the colon of fetal rats changes from a simple tube with a tiny lumen lined by stratified epithelium to a much more complex structure with a large lumen and well‐developed crypts lined by a single layer of columnar epithelium. Autoradiographic studies with 3H‐thymidine show that cell proliferation is present throughout the stratified epithelium but becomes confined to the lower half of colonic crypts immediately on their formation. The number of epithelial cells shown to be proliferating after exposure to a single pulse of 3H‐thymidine is high during this period of organogenesis but decreases rapidly after the 20th day of gestation once the adult mucosal pattern has formed.