Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dose adaptation of drugs in patients with liver disease

In my thesis I defined strategies for dosage adaptation of drugs in patients with liver disease. The major goal of the thesis was to classify antineoplastic drugs and central nervous agents according to pharmacokinetic principles (hepatic extraction and bioavailability) and to provide recommendations for their use in patients with liver disease. The antineoplastic drugs and central nervous agents available on the market in Switzerland were therefore studied. In a second time a clinical study was planned in patients with liver cirrhosis to define methods of dose adaptation for high-extraction drugs. The dose adaptation of drugs in patients with liver disease is more difficult than in patients with renal disease. The dosage may have to be adjusted but the problem is to quantify the required changes. Ideally, there should be a predictive liver function test that allows a more precise dosing in patients with liver disease analogous to the creatinine clearance for patients with renal dysfunction. Unfortunately, no such practical system is available as yet. Despite the absence of such a test, kinetic parameters and clinical studies can both help determining the kinetic behavior of a drug and providing dosage adjustments.
Fully physical , time-dependent thermal modelling of complex 3-dimensional systems for device and circuit level electrothermal CAD

An original spectral domain decomposition approach, to solution of the time-dependent heat diffusion equation in complex volumes, is introduced. Its application to device and circuit level electro-thermal simulation on CAD timescales is outlined. The first full treatment in coupled electro-thermal CAD, of thermal non linearity due to temperature dependent diffusivity, is described. Original thermal solutions are presented in the form of analytically exact thermal impedance matrix expressions for thermal subsystems. These include time domain expressions for MMICs, found to be rapidly convergent for all times, and original double Fourier series solutions for the case of arbitrarily distributed volume heat sources and sinks, constructed without the use of Green’s function techniques. The time-independent thermal resistance matrix approach is illustrated by a fully physical, coupled electro-thermal device study of the interaction of substrate thickness and surface convection in power HEMTs. The thermal timedependent implementation is illustrated by circuit level transient simulation of a 3×3 MMIC amplifier array.
Pre-proof From action to abstraction : The sensorimotor grounding of metaphor in Parkinson ’ s disease

Embodied cognition theories propose that the semant ic representations engaged in during language comprehension are partly supported by perc e tual and motor systems, via simulation. Activation in modality-specific regions of cortex i s associated with the comprehension of literal language that describes the analogous modalities, b ut studies addressing the grounding of nonliteral or figurative language, such as metaphors, have yielded mixed results. Differences in the psycholinguistic characteristics of sentence stimul i across studies have likely contributed to this lack of consensus. Furthermore, previous studies ha ve been largely correlational, whilst patient studies are a critical way of determining if intact sensorimotor function is necessary to understand language drawing on sensorimotor informa tion. We designed a battery of metaphorical and literal sentence stimuli using act ion and sound words, with an unprecedented level of control over critical psycholinguistic var i bles, to test hypotheses about the grounding of metaphorical language. In this Registered Report, w e assessed the comprehension of these sentences in 41 patients with Parkinson’s disease, who were predicted to be disproportionately affected by the action sentences relative to the so und sentences, and compared their performance to that of 39 healthy age-matched controls who were predicted to show no difference in performance due to sensory modality. Using preregis t red Bayesian model comparison methods, we found that PD patients’ comprehension of literal action sentences was not impaired, while there was some evidence for a slowing of responses to action metaphors. Follow up exploratory analyses suggest that this response time modality e ffect was driven by one type of metaphor (predicate) and was absent in another (nominal), de spite the fact that the action semantics were similar in both syntactic forms. These results sugg est that the conditions under which PD patients demonstrate hypothesized embodiment effects are lim ited. We offer a critical assessment of the PD action language literature and discuss implicati ons for the embodiment debate. In addition, we suggest how future studies could leverage Bayesi n statistical methods to provide more convincing evidence for or against embodied cogniti o effects.
Estimating Potential Output and the Output GapAn Application to Brazil

This work attempts to estimate potential output and the output gap for Brazil using the following methods: Hodrick-Prescott lter, Band-Pass Filter, Moving Average, Deterministic Trend, BeveridgeNelson decomposition, Univariate Unobserved Components Model, Production Function Method, and Structural VAR approach by Blanchard and Quah. Measures of potential output and output gap are essential in assessing a non-in ationary and sustainable growth, guiding macroeconomic policies with supported forecasts. The estimates of potential output help in determining sustainable growth and output gaps indicate in ationary or disin ationary pressures. Comparing all results it is concluded that policymakers should not rely on one single measure of ∗I am grateful to CNPq for the nancial support.
INFLUENCE OF EFFECTIVE STRATEGIC PLANNING ON PERFORMANCE OF FIRMS IN THE ENERGY SECTOR IN KENYA

This study examined the influence of effective strategic planning on performance of firms in the energy sector in Kenya. The specific objectives were to establish how participative decision-making, communication on planning, organizational culture and innovation influence performance. The theories that guided this study were decision participation theory, organizational information theory, Schein theory of organizational culture, and the diffusion theory of innovation. This study used descriptive design with questionnaire as the instrument for data collection. The target population was 197 firms in the energy sector from three subsectors namely renewable energy, electricity and petroleum. The unit of observation was one operations manager from each energy firm. The study conducted a census on all the firms. Data collected was analyzed using SPSS version 21. to produce frequencies, descriptive and inferential statistics were used to derive conclusions. The study conducted a multiple regression analysis to determine the relationship between effective strategic planning and performance. The study findings revealed that all the four factors that is organizational culture, communication of planning, participative decision making and innovation had a positive significant influence on performance of firms in the energy sector. Based on the study findings, the study recommends that managers in the energy firms should focus on improving the four practices so as to record an improvement in their performance since strategic planning account for 63.4% of the variation in performance of energy firms.
Revisit Recurrent Attention Model from an Active Sampling Perspective

The RAM, instead of processing the input image for classification in full, only takes a glimpse at a small patch of the image at a time. The recurrent attention mechanism learns where to look at to obtain new information based on the internal state of the network. After a pre-defined number of glimpses, RAM finally makes a prediction as output. Compared with the attention mechanism which now dominates the AI/NLP research such as Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), this recurrent attention mechanism is fundamentally different, as it is used to obtain new information (active sampling of information), rather than processing information that is already fully observed.
Critical roles of PI3K/Akt/NF-κB survival axis in angiotensin II-induced podocyte injury

Numerous studies have reported that angiotensin (Ang) II, nephrin, and podocin serve pivotal roles in podocyte injury, and thus can lead to the occurrence of proteinuria and the progression of kidney diseases. This study aimed to investigate the effects of Ang II on the production of nephrin and podocin, and their relationship with podocyte injury. We also aimed to determine whether nephrin, podocin and caspase-9 production depends on the PI3K/Akt/nuclear factor (NF)-κB signaling pathway in cultured mouse podocytes. We treated mouse podocytes with different doses of Ang II (10−9, 10−8, 10−7 and 10−6 mol/l) for 12, 24, and 48 h to analyse cell viability, and at 10−6 mol/l Ang II for 12, 24, and 48 h to evaluate cell apoptosis. Cells were treated with 10−6 mol/l of Ang II and/or LY294002 (inhibitor of Akt) or 740Y-P (activator of PI3K) for 48 h to detect Akt, phosphorylated (phospho)-Akt, p65 NF-κB, and phospho-p65 NF-κB, nephrin, podocin and caspase-9 expression, and podocyte apoptosis. Treatment with Ang II suppressed the viability and promoted the apoptosis of podocytes in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Ang II decreased phospho-Akt, phospho-p65 NF-κB, nephrin, and podocin and increased caspase-9 expression, while podocyte apoptosis was promoted. LY294002 further enhanced Ang II-induced downregulation of Akt and p65 NF-κB activation, as well as upregulation of caspase-9 mRNA and protein, and promoted the apoptosis of podocytes. Of note, 740Y-P restored Ang II-induced downregulation of Akt and p65 NF-κB activation, and upregulation of caspase-9, and decreased podocyte apoptosis. Interestingly, LY294002 and 740Y-P were determined to have no notable effects on the expression of nephrin and podocin. The data suggested that Ang II could regulate the expression of nephrin, podocin and caspase-9. Collectively, our findings suggested that the PI3K/Akt/NF-κB survival axis may serve a pivotal role in podocyte injury.
Phytochemical Screening and Nutritional Quality of Yam Species Susceptible and Resistant to Damage by Yam Beetle , Heteroligus meles Bilb ( Coleoptera : Dynastinae ) *

Yam species including Dioscorea rotundata (white), D. cayenesis (yellow) and D. dumetorum (Trifoliate or bitter yam) were evaluated for damage caused by H. meles in biological sciences laboratory and undamaged and damaged tubers were evaluated for their phytochemical, mineral element and nutrient quantities in the tubers in order to determine possible traits for resistance, nutrient value and nutritional loss in susceptible species ,The phytochemical analysis ,proximate nutrient and elemental analysis were conducted in the biochemistry laboratory in Kogi State University Anyigba. The results of damage assessment showed significant (P<0.05) higher damage indices in D. rotundata (white yam) compared with D. Cayenesis,(yellow yam), and there was no damage on tubers of D. dumetorum (bitter yam ) by yam beetle. The phytochemical results indicated the quantities of saponins, flavonoids, tannins, alkaloids and phenol present in all the tubers. However, D. dumetorum (yellow bitter yam) recorded significant (P<0.05) higher content of saponin (15mg/5g sample), flavonoid (15.7mg/5g samples) followed by D. cayenesis containing 17mg/5g saponin and 6.8mg/5g flavonoid. Thus, saponin and flavonoid are the major secondary metabolites in D. dumetorum resisting the feeding damage by H. meles. The results also showed significant reduction of CHO, Fat, Ca, Mg, Fe, Zn, vitamin C, vitamin A in damaged white yam that is most preferred and consumed species. This study suggests saponin and flavonoid as good sources of plant metabolites for control of H.meles.
Chapter 2 The Distribution and Origins of Ancient Leprosy

Human leprosy is primarily caused by Mycobacterium leprae, but also by the related ‘M. lepromatosis’. Ancient leprosy can be recognised in archaeological materials by the paleopathology associated with multi-bacillary or lepromatous forms of the disease. Whole M. leprae genomes have been obtained from human skeletons, and diagnostic aDNA fragments have been recovered. The derived M. leprae phylogenies, based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, mirror past human migrations, as M. leprae is usually an obligate pathogen. The detection of M. leprae in historical leprosy cases is assisted by the hydrophobic M. leprae cell envelope, which is composed of unusual lipids that can be used as specific biomarkers. Lipid biomarkers are more stable than aDNA and can be detected directly without amplification. Indigenous human leprosy is extinct in Western Europe, but recently, both M. leprae and ‘M. lepromatosis’ were found in British red squirrels. Leprosy may also be found in ninebanded armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) where it can cause a zoonotic human infection. Certain leprosy-like diseases, caused by uncultivable species in cats, for example, may be related to M. leprae. The closest extant relatives of leprosy bacilli are probably members of the M. haemophilum taxon, emerging pathogens with genomic and lipid biomarker similarities.
Olfactory and behavioural responses of tabanid horseflies to octenol , phenols and aged horse urine

Electrophysiological and behavioural responses of females of two tabanid species, Tabanus bromius L. and Atylotus quadrifarius (Loew) (Diptera: Tabanidae), to ammonia, octenol (1-octen-3-ol), phenols and aged horse urine were compared. Electroantennogram (EAG) responses in both species to octenol, 4-methylphenol (4MP), 3-propylphenol (3PP) and a phenol mixture (4MP and 3PP at a ratio of 16 : 1) increased in a dose-dependent fashion. The most effective stimulus was 4MP and synergism between the two phenols may exist. Aged horse urine also elicited strong EAG responses in both species. Using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis, we identified 29 compounds in horse urine, which included, in particular, ketones, fatty alcohols and phenols, among which 4MP was the most abundant component (∼ 80%). Trapping experiments were carried out using Nzi traps baited with various odours. Octenol and the phenol mixture in combination with ammonia increased catches of tabanids by 1.8–2.8 times relative to ammonia alone. Aged horse urine increased catches of T. bromius and A. quadrifarius by 2.2 and 4.1 times, respectively. The high attractiveness of aged horse urine, especially for A. quadrifarius , is not likely to derive from 4MP alone, but from the mixture of various active compounds used in host location.
1 The effects of exchange rate volatility on exports : Some new evidence for regional ASEAN countries

The paper investigates empirically the impact of bilateral exchange rate volatility on the export flow of five regional ASEAN countries, namely Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, to the United States, over the period January, 1990 to December, 2010. Estimates of the cointegration relations are obtained using methods proposed by Johansen and Juselius (1990). Furthermore, the short-run and long-run dynamic relationships between the variables are obtained for each country utilizing error correction modelling. In general, the real bilateral exchange rate volatility has a significant impact on exports at least for all the countries considered in our sample, and the impact overall is negative except for Indonesia.
ClueNet : A Deep Framework for Occluded Pedestrian Pose Estimation

Pose estimation of a pedestrian helps to gather information about the current activity or the instant behaviour of the subject. Such information is useful for autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, video surveillance, etc. Although a large volume of pedestrian detection studies are available in the literature, detection of the same in situations of signiﬁcant occlusions still remains a challenging task. In this work, we take a step further to propose a novel deep learning framework, called ClueNet, to detect as well as estimate the entire pose of occluded pedestrians in an unsupervised manner. ClueNet is a two stage framework where the ﬁrst stage generates visual clues for the second stage to accurately estimate the pose of occluded pedestrians. The ﬁrst stage employs a multi-task network to segment the visible parts and predict a bounding box enclosing the visible and occluded regions for each pedestrian. The second stage uses these predictions from the ﬁrst stage for pose estimation. Here we propose a novel strategy, called Mask and Predict , to train our ClueNet to estimate the pose even for occluded regions. Additionally, we make use of various other training strategies to further improve our results. The proposed work is ﬁrst of its kind and the experimental results on CityPersons and MS COCO datasets show the superior performance of our approach over existing methods.
The Effect of Korean Soysauce and Soypaste Making on Soybean Protein Quality

Cooked soybean, soybean curd, soymilk residue and fermented soybean Meju products were prepared in the laboratory and the protein supplementary effect of these foods to the rice diet was determined by the rat feeding experiments. The soybean products providing 20% of the dietary protein were added to steamed rice and the protein digestibility (TD), Biological Value(BV), NPU, PER and Partial Carcass Nitrogen Value of the diets were measured. The protein supplementary effect of soybean products indicated that the non-fermented products generally improved the protein quality of the rice diet, whereas the fermented products did not but reduced it in some cases. There was observed a possible antinutritional effect for the diet supplemented with Home-made Meju. This growth retarding effect of Home-made Meju disappeared during the subsequent ripening in the brine for 6 months.
LuminescenceNanothermometry Based on Pr 3 + : LaF 3 Single Core and Pr 3 + : LaF 3 / LaF 3 Core / Shell Nanoparticles

Core Pr : LaF3 (CPr � 1%) plate-like nanoparticles (nanoplates), core/shell Pr : LaF3 (CPr � 1%)/LaF3 nanoplates, core Pr : LaF3 (CPr � 1%) sphere-like nanoparticles (nanospheres), and core/shell Pr : LaF3 (CPr � 1%)/LaF3 nanospheres were synthesized via the coprecipitation method of synthesis. ,e nanoparticles (NPs) were characterized by means of transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and optical spectroscopy. ,e formation of the shell was proved by detecting the increase in physical sizes, sizes of coherent scattering regions, and luminescence lifetimes of core/shell NPs comparing with single core NPs. ,e average physical sizes of core nanoplates, core/shell nanoplates, core nanospheres, and core/shell nanospheres were 62.2± 0.9, 74.7± 1.2, 13.8± 0.9 and 22.0± 1.2 nm, respectively. ,e formation of the NP shell led to increasing of effective luminescence lifetime τeff of the P0 state of Pr ions for the core nanoplates, core/shell nanoplates, core nanospheres, and core/ shell nanospheres the values of τeff were 2.3, 3.6, 3.2, and 4.7 μsec, respectively (at 300K). ,e values of absolute sensitivity Sa for fluorescence intensity ratio (FIR) thermometry was 0.01K 1 at 300K for all the samples. ,e FIR sensitivity can be attributed to the fact that P1 and P0 states share their electronic populations according to the Boltzmann process. ,e values of Sa for lifetime thermometry for core nanoplates, core/shell nanoplates, core nanospheres, and core/shell nanospheres were (36.4± 3.1) · 10 , (70.7± 5.9) · 10 , (40.7± 2.6) · 10 , and (68.8± 2.4) · 10 4 K , respectively.
Analysis of piecewise polynomial DDFV solutions for subsurface flow problems Analysis of DDFV solutions to flow problems

RÉSUMÉ. L’objectif de cette communication est de présenter les concepts de solutions approchées localement P1 (i.e. linéaire), Q1 (i.e. bilinéaire) et Q2 (i.e. biquadratique) dans le cadre d’une analyse volumes finis des problèmes de diffusion en milieux poreux hétérogènes anisotropes. L’introduction de ces concepts est inspirée par l’interpolation lagrangienne utilisée en théorie d’éléments finis. On déduit certaines estimations d’erreur pour ces solutions approchées à partir d’estimations d’erreur sur la solution du problème discrèt.
Clostridioides dif fi cile ( including epidemiology ) The engulfasome in C . dif fi cile : Variations on protein machineries

Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) continues to be a substantial healthcare burden, and the changing disease profile raises new challenges in CDI management, both in clinical settings and in the community. CDI is transmitted by spores, which are formed by a subset of the cell population where an asymmetric septum is formed. A full copy of the chromosome is transported into the smaller compartment which is then engulfed by the mother cell. After engulfment, multiple metabolic and morphological changes occur, eventually resulting in the release of the mature spore. Whilst studies in the model organism Bacillus subtilis have demonstrated the importance of the DMP and Q:AH machineries in engulfment, it is becoming clear that there are fundamental differences in the way the two organisms organise these machineries. As spores are the infectious agent in CDI, it is crucial to understand how these dormant cells are formed, and how sporulation can be prevented or disrupted with the view of reducing CDI. Here, we review the current literature on the DMP and Q:AH machineries in C. difficile, and how they compare and contrast to those of B. subtilis. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
ajor complications of operative gynecologic laparoscopy n Southern Taiwan : A follow-up study

rom the Department of Surgery (Drs. Tian and Shih), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Drs. Lin, Chia, uang, Chung, Tsai, Chao, and Wu), Section of Statistical Analysis, Department of Medical Research (Miss Lu), epartment of Urology (Dr. Shen), Chi Mei Foundation Hospital, Tainan, Taiwan; and the Department of Obstetrics and ynecology, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University (Dr. Wu), Taipei, Taiwan.
Accelerated Similarity Self-Join for Multi-Dimensional Data

e self-join nds all objects in a dataset that are within a search distance, ε , of each other; therefore, the self-join is a building block of many algorithms. We advance a GPU-accelerated self-join algorithm targeted towards high dimensional data. e massive parallelism aorded by the GPU and high aggregate memory bandwidth makes the architecture well-suited for data-intensive workloads. We leverage a grid-based, GPU-tailored index to perform range queries. We propose the following optimizations: (i) a trade-o between candidate set ltering and index search overhead by exploiting properties of the index; (ii) reordering the data based on variance in each dimension to improve the ltering power of the index; and (iii) a pruning method for reducing the number of expensive distance calculations. Across most scenarios on real-world and synthetic datasets, our algorithm outperforms the parallel state-of-the-art approach. Exascale systems are converging on heterogeneous distributed-memory architectures. We show that an entity partitioning method can be utilized to achieve a balanced workload, and thus good scalability for multi-GPU or distributed-memory self-joins.