Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Meta-analysis of Increases in Micronuclei in Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes after Angiography or Excretory Urography

Abstract Norman, A. , Cochran, S. T. and Sayre, J. W. Meta-analysis of Increases in Micronuclei in Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes after Angiography or Excretory Urography. Radiat. Res. 155, 740–743 (2001). Meta-analysis of 10 studies confirms a significant increase in the frequency of micronuclei in peripheral blood lymphocytes after angiography or excretory urography; the weighted average increase is 4.2 (95% confidence interval 2.8–5.6) per 1000 binucleate lymphocytes, about the same increase in micronuclei as that produced in vitro by a diagnostic X-ray dose of 4 cGy. The analysis failed to reveal a significant effect of the specific contrast medium used in the X-ray examinations on the increased frequency of micronuclei. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the effect of the contrast media is limited to the enhancement, by the photoelectric effect, of the X-ray dose absorbed by the lymphocytes irradiated while suspended in the contrast medium. Therefore, an estimate of increased cancer risk based on elevated frequencies of micronuclei or chromosome aberrations in peripheral blood lymphocytes may be greatly exaggerated whenever the radiation damage is largely confined to the cells circulating in the blood, as it is in people who have recently had X-ray examinations that use intravenous injections of contrast medium. Such examinations include angiography, excretory urography and CT scans, which are received annually by millions of people.
Remote Sensing Image Classification with Multiple Classifiers Based on Support Vector Machines

Classification accuracy is one of major factors influencing the application of classified image. This Paper proposes a SVM-based multiple classifiers fusion method for remote sensing image classification. We use both spatial Gabor wavelet texture feature and spectral feature to construct SVM classifier separately. then taking advantage of characteristic of SVM, namely for a given sample, the larger is the distance to the hyper plane, the more reliable is the class label. so the most reliable classification result is thus the one that gives the largest distance. This is our decision fusion rule. Using Landsat ETM+ satellite image as test data, the experimental results indicate that all classes including water, mountain, gobi, vegetation, desert and resident area could be well classified, and the overall accuracy achieved 86.5%, more than other each separate SVM classifier.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Comparative Efficacy and Safety Study of Two Chondroitin Sulfate Preparations from Different Origin (avian and Bovine) in Symptomatic Osteoarthritis of the Knee

Introduction: Some argued that clinical efficacy of Chondroitin Sulfate (CS) could vary upon the product origin. The objective of this trial is to compare the effect of 2 CS medicinal products from different origin: Structum ® (avian, 1000mg/day) and Chondrosulf ® (bovine, 1200mg/day). Methods: This was a randomized, double-blind, double placebo, active-controlled, parallel-group study using a non-inferiority design. Symptomatic osteoarthritis of the knee patients, according to American College of Rheumatology criteria, aged 50-80 years received either Structum ® (500mg BID) or Chondrosulf ® (400mg TID) during 24 weeks. Inclusion criteria were: global pain in the target knee 40mm on a Visual Analog Scale (VAS 0-100), a Lequesne's Algofunctional Index (LFI) score 7 (range: 0-24) and a radiological Kellgren-Lawrence grade 2 or 3. Primary outcome was the mean change over 24 weeks of pain VAS and LFI score. Secondary outcomes were patient's and physician's global assessments, Outcome Measures in Rheumatology Clinical Trials and Osteoarthritis Research Society International responders rate, analgesics intake and Medical Outcomes Survey Short-Form 12 (SF-12). Safety was assessed by recording adverse events. A non-inferiority test was performed on the Structum ®-Chondrosulf ® difference for VAS and LFI score changes. Predefined non inferiority limit was settled as the lower limit of the 95% CI above-5mm and-1pt for pain VAS and LFI score respectively. Results: 837 patients were randomized: 817 available for the full analysis dataset (FAS), 692 for the per protocol (PP) analysis. No statistical and clinical differences were observed for demographics and disease characteristics between the 2 groups. PP analysis showed no difference between groups on mean variations of pain VAS or LFI scores over 24 weeks. Mean Pain VAS decreased by 23.9mm (17.5) in Structum ® group and 23.8mm (17.2) in Chondrosulf ® group (difference: 0.012 [CI95%:-2.6 ; 2.6]). Mean LFI score decreased by 3.2 (2.4) and 3.1 (2.4) respectively (difference: 0.139 [CI95%:-0.2 ; 0.5]). The lower limits of the 2 CI were above predefined non inferiority margin, which demonstrated the non inferiority of Structum ® in comparison with Chondrosulf ®. FAS analysis gave similar results. Secondary efficacy outcomes analysis showed the same trends. Responders rate were 76.3% and 73.8% respectively (PP, W24). Treatments were well tolerated: 2.4% in Structum ® group and 4.5% in Chondrosulf ® group withdrew from the study for safety reasons. Conclusion: Structum ® and Chondrosulf ® were equally effective in reducing functional impairment and relieving pain over 6 months in knee osteoarthritis …
Minimum Time Maneuver for a Nonholonomic Car with Acceleration Constraints: Preliminary Results

The aim of this paper is twofold: to introduce a minimum time optimal control problem and to provide a preliminary result on a simplified and slightly different version of it. In the specific, we are interested to find a minimum time maneuver for a nonholonomic car which is constrained to remain within a specified track. The vehicle has to be driven as fast as possible to reach a target position while also satisfying a constraint on the lateral and longitudinal accelerations. This general problem is related to the simplified problem of finding a minimum time control for steering a bidimensional double integrator with input constraints from an initial to a final condition
Experimentally Derived δ13C and δ15N Discrimination Factors for Gray Wolves and the Impact of Prior Information in Bayesian Mixing Models

Stable isotope analysis of diet has become a common tool in conservation research. However, the multiple sources of uncertainty inherent in this analysis framework involve consequences that have not been thoroughly addressed. Uncertainty arises from the choice of trophic discrimination factors, and for Bayesian stable isotope mixing models (SIMMs), the specification of prior information; the combined effect of these aspects has not been explicitly tested. We used a captive feeding study of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to determine the first experimentally-derived trophic discrimination factors of C and N for this large carnivore of broad conservation interest. Using the estimated diet in our controlled system and data from a published study on wild wolves and their prey in Montana, USA, we then investigated the simultaneous effect of discrimination factors and prior information on diet reconstruction with Bayesian SIMMs. Discrimination factors for gray wolves and their prey were 1.97‰ for δ13C and 3.04‰ for δ15N. Specifying wolf discrimination factors, as opposed to the commonly used red fox (Vulpes vulpes) factors, made little practical difference to estimates of wolf diet, but prior information had a strong effect on bias, precision, and accuracy of posterior estimates. Without specifying prior information in our Bayesian SIMM, it was not possible to produce SIMM posteriors statistically similar to the estimated diet in our controlled study or the diet of wild wolves. Our study demonstrates the critical effect of prior information on estimates of animal diets using Bayesian SIMMs, and suggests species-specific trophic discrimination factors are of secondary importance. When using stable isotope analysis to inform conservation decisions researchers should understand the limits of their data. It may be difficult to obtain useful information from SIMMs if informative priors are omitted and species-specific discrimination factors are unavailable.
Photoplethysmography technology and its feature visualization for cognitive stimulation assessment

Therapeutic communication is recognized as an alternative cognitive stimulation for people with mental disorders. It is important to measure the effectiveness of such therapeutic treatments. In this paper, we present the use of photoplethysmography (PPG) technology to synchronize communication signals between the care-giver and people with dementia. To gain insights into the communication effect, the largest Lyapunov exponents are extracted from the PPG signals, which are then analyzed by multidimensional scaling to visualize the signal similarity/dissimilarity between the care-giver and participants. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is promising as a useful tool for visual assessment of the influence of the therapy over participants.
Reversible middle cerebral artery occlusion without craniectomy in rats.

To develop a simple, relatively noninvasive small-animal model of reversible regional cerebral ischemia, we tested various methods of inducing infarction in the territory of the right middle cerebral artery (MCA) by extracranial vascular occlusion in rats. In preliminary studies, 60 rats were anesthetized with ketamine and different combinations of vessels were occluded; blood pressure and arterial blood gases were monitored. Neurologic deficit, mortality rate, gross pathology, and in some instances, electroencephalogram and histochemical staining results were evaluated in all surviving rats. The principal procedure consisted of introducing a 4-0 nylon intraluminal suture into the cervical internal carotid artery (ICA) and advancing it intracranially to block blood flow into the MCA; collateral blood flow was reduced by interrupting all branches of the external carotid artery (ECA) and all extracranial branches of the ICA. In some groups of rats, bilateral vertebral or contralateral carotid artery occlusion was also performed. India ink perfusion studies in 20 rats documented blockage of MCA blood flow in 14 rats subjected to permanent occlusion and the restoration of blood flow to the MCA territory in six rats after withdrawal of the suture from the ICA. The best method of MCA occlusion was then selected for further confirmatory studies, including histologic examination, in five additional groups of rats anesthetized with halothane. Seven of eight rats that underwent permanent occlusion of the MCA had resolving moderately severe neurologic deficits (Grade 2 of 4) and unilateral infarcts averaging 37.6 +/- 5.5% of the coronal sectional area at 72 hours after the onset of occlusion. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Genome Sequence of the Multiple-β-Lactam-Antibiotic-Resistant Bacterium Acidovorax sp. Strain MR-S7

ABSTRACT Acidovorax sp. strain MR-S7 was isolated from activated sludge in a treatment system for wastewater containing β-lactam antibiotic pollutants. Strain MR-S7 demonstrates multidrug resistance for various types of β-lactam antibiotics at high levels of MIC. The draft genome sequence clarified that strain MR-S7 harbors unique β-lactamase genes.
Structure-Smoothing Bessel Filter for Finite Element Mesh - Application on 3D Elastic FWI

Summary Smoothing filters are extremely important tools in seismic imaging and especially in full waveform inversion. For complex geological structures with variable heterogeneities, these filters should be able to incorporate efficiently geological prior information of the target medium, through coherent lengths and 3D orientation, which are expected to vary in space. In this study, we introduce a novel smoothing strategy based on the Bessel filter, for which we are able to design a highly efficient implementation. Its application is performed by solving the elliptic partial differential equation associated to its sparse inverse operator. The development of this equation in any discretization method naturally yields a symmetric and well-conditioned linear system. We develop this smoothing strategy within an elastic spectral-element-based full-waveform-inversion framework. The associated linear system can be solved efficiently through a parallel conjugate-gradient algorithm, in which the matrix-vector product is factorized and optimized in a similar way as the one used for solving the elastodynamic system. By doing so, we avoid expensive explicit-windowed-convolution over the finite element mesh. The efficiency and the flexibility of the proposed smoothing method are illustrated through various schematic examples, and on a more realistic elastic full waveform inversion problem on the SEAM II benchmark model.
Potential Applications of Low Altitude Remote Sensing for Monitoring Jellyfish

Jellyfish (cnidarian) are conspicuous in many marine ecosystems when in bloom. Despite their importance for the ecosystem structure and function, very few sampling programs are dedicated to sample jellyfish because they are patchily distributed and easily clogged plankton net. Although satellite remote sensing is an excellent observing tool for many phenomena in the ocean, their uses for monitoring jellyfish are not possible due to the coarse spatial resolutions. Hence, we developed the low altitude remote sensing platform to detect jellyfish in high resolutions, which allow us to monitor not only horizontal, but also vertical migration of them. Using low altitude remote sensing platform, we measured the jellyfish from the pier at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Chesapeake Bay. The patterns observed included discrete patches, in rows that were aligned with waves that propagated from deeper regions, and aggregation around physical objects. The corresponding areas of exposed jellyfish on the sea surface were 0.1×104 pixel2, 0.3×104 pixel2, and 2.75×104 pixel2, respectively. Thus, the research result suggested that the migration of the jellyfish was related to the physical forcing in the sea surface.
How the Cislunar Station can support refueling of a high-power electric spacecraft for Moon-Mars cargo transfers

The thesis work deals with the analysis of Moon-Mars cargo transfers scenarios with the aim of supporting a future Mars orbital station. The presence of a Mars outpost poses the issue of its maintenance and sustainment: for these purposes, an electric space tug could be involved in cargo transportation missions. The scenarios describe the transfer of a multi-tons Cargo Module from the NearRectilinear Halo Orbit to 1-sol Mars Orbit, and vice versa. To support multiple transfers, dedicated refueling operations at Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway are envisaged. The thesis work starts from an overview of the possible transportation mission concepts exploiting high-power solar electric propulsion; a brief system and mission analysis methodology is introduced. Then it focuses on the detailed definition of the mission objectives and constraints, and on the functional analyses at various levels. The most important results of these analyses are the functional architecture and the physical block diagram. The thesis work continues with the description of the Concept of Operations, from the mission phases analyses to the Modes of Operations definition, through an iterative refinement process. The overall mission scenarios have been derived from trade-off analyses that have been performed to choose the mission architecture that, most of all, cost-effectively satisfy stakeholder expectations. The most important features of these analyses and their results are described within the study. Eventually, in the last part of the study main conclusions are drawn on the selected mission scenarios.
HeapMon: A helper-thread approach to programmable, automatic, and low-overhead memory bug detection

The ability to detect and pinpoint memory-related bugs in production runs is important because in-house testing may miss bugs. This paper presents HeapMon, a heap memory bug-detection scheme that has a very low performance overhead, is automatic, and is easy to deploy. HeapMon relies on two new techniques. First, it decouples application execution from bug monitoring, which executes as a helper thread on a separate core in a chip multiprocessor system. Second, it associates a filter bit with each cached word to safely and significantly reduce bug checking frequency--by 95% on average. We test the effectiveness of these techniques using existing and injected memory bugs in SPEC®2000 applications and show that HeapMon effectively detects and identifies most forms of heap memory bugs. Our results also indicate that the HeapMon performance overhead is only 5%, on average--orders of magnitude less than existing tools. Its overhead is also modest: 3.1% of the cache size and a 32-KB victim cache for on-chip filter bits and 6.2% of the allocated heap memory size for state bits, which are maintained by the helper thread as a software data structure.
Higher-order corrections to instantons

The energy levels of the double-well potential receive, beyond perturbation theory, contributions which are non-analytic in the coupling strength; these are related to instanton effects. For example, the separation between the energies of odd- and even-parity states is given at leading order by the one-instanton contribution. However to determine the energies more accurately multi-instanton configurations have also to be taken into account. We investigate here the two-instanton contributions. First we calculate analytically higher-order corrections to multi-instanton effects. We then verify that the difference betweeen numerically determined energy eigenvalues and the generalized Borel sum of the perturbation series can be described to very high accuracy by two-instanton contributions. We also calculate higher-order corrections to the leading factorial growth of the perturbative coefficients and show that these are consistent with analytic results for the two-instanton effect and with exact data for the first 200 perturbative coefficients.
A Procedure for Testing Speech Intelligibility in a Virtual Listening Environment

Objective: The development of a test of virtual speech intelligibility in noise that enables assessment in typical, everyday listening situations. To eliminate extraneous confounding factors, digital signal processing was incorporated to simulate listening environments and source locations and allow presentation of stimuli via earphones. Design: Source‐to‐eardrum transfer functions measured on KEMAR for various source locations in anechoic and reverberant environments were used to process monosyllabic words and speech‐spectrum noise. Speech intelligibility was measured for three speech and noise configurations in two environments using an adaptive procedure to determine the signal‐to‐noise (S/N) ratio for 50% intelligibility. Results: Normal‐hearing listeners achieved 50% intelligibility of monosyllabic words at significantly lower S/N ratios in a virtual anechoic environment than in a virtual reverberant environment. Speech intelligibility improved significantly in both environments when the speech and noise sources were separated, but the intelligibility gain in the anechoic environment was four times larger than in the reverberant environment. Conclusions: This test is easy to administer and score, and it provides a means for measuring: 1) the effects of separating speech and noise sources and 2) the effects of reverberation on speech intelligibility in noise while eliminating confounding factors such as calibration.
Identifying mechanisms that underlie links between COMT genotype and aggression in male adolescents with ADHD

Background There is a known strong genetic contribution to aggression in those with ADHD. In a previous investigation of a large population cohort, impaired ‘emotional/social cognitive’ processing, assessed by questionnaire, was observed to mediate the link between COMT Val158Met and aggression in individuals with ADHD. We set out to replicate and extend this finding in a clinical sample, using task‐based and physiological assessments of emotional and cognitive processing. Our aim was to test the hypothesis that directly assessed emotional processing mediates the link between COMT Val158Met and aggression in young people with ADHD. Methods Males aged 10–17 years with ADHD were recruited from UK community clinics (n = 194). Research diagnostic interviews (parent and child) were used to assess psychopathology and generate DSM‐IV Conduct Disorder symptom scores. Participants completed tasks assessing executive function (response inhibition and set shifting), empathy for fear, sadness and happiness, and fear conditioning [measured using skin conductance responses (SCR) to aversive stimuli]. Results COMT Val allele carriers showed poorer response inhibition (F = 5.27, p = .02) and set shifting abilities (F = 6.45, p = .01), reduced fear empathy (F = 4.33, p = .04) and reduced autonomic responsiveness (lower SCRs) to the conditioned aversive stimulus (F = 11.74, p = .001). COMT Val158Met did not predict impairments in recognising others' emotions or affective empathy for happiness or sadness. Mediation analysis revealed that impaired fear‐related mechanisms indirectly mediated the link between COMT Val158Met and aggression. Conclusion Our findings suggest fear mechanisms as possible targets for psychological interventions to disrupt links between genetic risk and aggressive outcomes in ADHD. Our findings also reveal the potential of hypothesis‐driven approaches for identifying neuropsychological mechanisms that mediate genetic risk effects on behaviour and psychopathology.
Knorpelregeneration

Zusammenfassung Die Behandlung von Schäden des Gelenkknorpels stellt große Anforderungen an die Medizin. Für den Patienten bedeutet ein Knorpelschaden Schmerzen, Funktionseinschränkung und eine verminderte Lebensqualität, aber auch ein erhöhtes Risiko für einen frühzeitigen Gelenkersatz. Heute gibt es eine Vielzahl an Therapiemöglichkeiten, die eine Verbesserung der Situation für den Patienten erlauben. Mosaikplastik, knochenmarkstimulierende und zellbasierte Verfahren stehen seit Jahren in klinischer Anwendung. In diesem Artikel werden die Klassifikation und Abklärung von Knorpelschäden sowie verschiedene Knorpelreparaturverfahren und deren Indikationen dargestellt.