Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early Warning Information for Severe and Critical Patients With COVID-19 Based on Quantitative CT Analysis of Lung Segments

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak is spreading rapidly around the world. Purpose: We aimed to explore early warning information for patients with severe/critical COVID-19 based on quantitative analysis of chest CT images at the lung segment level. Materials and Methods: A dataset of 81 patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) treated at Wuhan Wuchang hospital in Wuhan city from 21 January 2020 to 14 February 2020 was retrospectively analyzed, including ordinary and severe/critical cases. The time course of all subjects was divided into four stages. The differences in each lobe and lung segment between the two groups at each stage were quantitatively analyzed using the percentage of lung involvement (PLI) in order to investigate the most important segment of lung involvement in the severe/critical group and its corresponding time point. Results: Lung involvement in the ordinary and severe/critical groups reached a peak on the 18th and 14th day, respectively. In the first stage, PLIs in the right middle lobe and the left superior lobe between the two groups were significantly different. In the second stage and the fourth stage, there were statistically significant differences between the two groups in the whole lung, right superior lobe, right inferior lobe and left superior lobe. The rapid progress of the lateral segment of the right middle lobe on the second day and the anterior segment of the right upper lobe on the 13th day may be a warning sign for severe/critical patients. Age was the most important demographic characteristic of the severe/critical group. Conclusion: Quantitative assessment based on the lung segments of chest CT images provides early warning information for potentially severe/critical patients.
Enhancing Cystic Fibrosis Immune Regulation

In cystic fibrosis (CF), sustained infection and exuberant inflammation results in debilitating and often fatal lung disease. Advancement in CF therapeutics has provided successful treatment regimens for a variety of clinical consequences in CF; however effective means to treat the pulmonary infection and inflammation continues to be problematic. Even with the successful development of small molecule cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) correctors and potentiators, there is only a modest effect on established infection and inflammation in CF patients. In the pursuit of therapeutics to treat inflammation, the conundrum to address is how to overcome the inflammatory response without jeopardizing the required immunity to manage pathogens and prevent infection. The key therapeutic would have the capacity to dull the inflammatory response, while sustaining the ability to manage infections. Advances in cell-based therapy have opened up the avenue for dynamic and versatile immune interventions that may support this requirement. Cell based therapy has the capacity to augment the patient’s own ability to manage their inflammatory status while at the same time sustaining anti-pathogen immunity. The studies highlighted in this manuscript outline the potential use of cell-based therapy for CF. The data demonstrate that 1) total bone marrow aspirates containing Cftr sufficient hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) provide Cftr deficient mice >50% improvement in survival and improved management of infection and inflammation; 2) myeloid cells can provide sufficient Cftr to provide pre-clinical anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial benefit; 3) hMSCs provide significant improvement in survival and management of infection and inflammation in CF; 4) the combined interaction between macrophages and hMSCs can potentially enhance anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial support through manipulating PPARγ. These data support the development of optimized cell-based therapeutics to enhance CF patient’s own immune repertoire and capacity to maintain the balance between inflammation and pathogen management.
Postmortem Studies of Fetal Grafts in Parkinson’s Disease: What Lessons Have We Learned?

Neural transplantation is a potential therapeutic method for Parkinson’s disease (PD). Fetal dopaminergic (DA) neurons have been important transplantation cell sources in the history of replacement therapy for PD. Several decades of preclinical animal experiments and clinical trials using fetal DA neuron transplantation in PD therapy have shown not only promising results but also problems. In order to reveal possible factors influencing the clinical outcomes, we reviewed fetal DA neuron transplantation therapies from 1970s to present, with a special focus on postmortem studies. Firstly, we gave a general description of the clinical outcomes and neuroanatomy of grafted cases; secondly, we summarized the main available postmortem studies, including the cell survival, reinnervation, and pathology development. In the end, we further discussed the link between function and structure of the grafts, seeking for the possible factors contributing to a functional graft. With our review, we hope to provide references for future transplantation trials from a histological point of view.
Expectation and Evaluation of Spouse’s Filial Piety and Marital Satisfaction in China

The present study examined the effect of expectation and evaluation of spouse’s filial piety on marital satisfaction among young Chinese couples. We administered scales assessing gender role attitude, marital satisfaction, and expectation and evaluation of spouse’s filial piety on 422 married participants and explored the relationships among these variables. The results showed the following: (1) gender role attitude mediated the relationship between participants’ gender and evaluation of their spouse’s filial piety. There was no significant gender difference in the evaluation of spouse’s filial piety; however, men were more likely to have a traditional gender role attitude, and a traditional gender role attitude leads to lower evaluation of spouse’s filial piety. Furthermore, it was found that the wife’s sibling condition influenced the participants’ expectation and evaluation of spouse’s filial piety as compared to the husband’s; (2) the evaluation of spouse’s filial piety was significantly positively correlated with marital satisfaction; and (3) women’s expectations of their husband’s filial piety moderated this relationship. The positive effects of the evaluation of spouse’s filial piety on marital satisfaction were significantly stronger when they had high expectations in this regard.
Facilitators and barriers to the delivery of palliative care to children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions: a qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of healthcare professionals

Objective To understand healthcare system facilitators and barriers to the delivery of palliative care for children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions and their family members. Design Focus groups with children’s palliative care professionals. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Setting Four regions of England (West Midlands, South West, Yorkshire and Humber, and London) from December 2017 to June 2018. Participants Healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses and allied healthcare professionals) working in children’s palliative care services. Findings A total of 71 healthcare professionals participated in the focus groups. Three overarching themes were identified which influenced whether and when children were referred to and started to receive palliative care: (1) the unspoken background of clinical uncertainty which often delayed palliative care; (2) the cultural ‘collusion of immortality’, where conversations about the possibility of dying can be avoided or deferred; and (3) the role of paediatric palliative care teams in ‘illuminating the blind spot’ of palliative care as well as providing hands-on care. Conclusions Palliative care is a holistic approach to care that focuses on quality of life for people living with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions that can be delivered alongside active treatment. There is a need to prioritise and integrate this into healthcare services for children more effectively if improvements in care are to be realised. While more specialist paediatric palliative care services are needed, the unspoken background of clinical uncertainty needs to be addressed together with the collusion of immortality within healthcare culture and organisations. Interviews with healthcare professionals explored facilitators and barriers to the use of palliative care. Implications for future practice are discussed.
A Lightweight Deep Learning-Based Pneumonia Detection Approach for Energy-Efficient Medical Systems

Early detection of pneumonia disease can increase the survival rate of lung patients. Chest X-ray (CXR) images are the primarily means of detecting and diagnosing pneumonia. Detecting pneumonia from CXR images by a trained radiologist is a challenging task. It needs an automatic computer-aided diagnostic system to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Developing a lightweight automatic pneumonia detection approach for energy-efficient medical systems plays an important role in improving the quality of healthcare with reduced costs and speedier response. Recent works have proposed to develop automated detection models using deep learning (DL) methods. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of these models need to be improved because they depend on the values of the models’ hyperparameters. Choosing suitable hyperparameter values is a critical task for constructing a lightweight and accurate model. In this paper, a lightweight DL approach is proposed using a pretrained DenseNet-121-based feature extraction method and a deep neural network- (DNN-) based method with a random search fine-tuning technique. The DenseNet-121 model is selected due to its ability to provide the best representation of lung features. The use of random search makes the tuning process faster and improves the efficiency and accuracy of the DNN model. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on a public dataset of CXR images using a set of evaluation metrics. The experiments show that the approach achieved 98.90% accuracy with an increase of 0.47% compared to the latest approach on the same dataset. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate the approach that the average execution time for detection is very low, confirming its suitability for energy-efficient medical systems.
A systematic review of automated pre-processing, feature extraction and classification of cardiotocography

Context The interpretations of cardiotocography (CTG) tracings are indeed vital to monitor fetal well-being both during pregnancy and childbirth. Currently, many studies are focusing on feature extraction and CTG classification using computer vision approach in determining the most accurate diagnosis as well as monitoring the fetal well-being during pregnancy. Additionally, a fetal monitoring system would be able to perform detection and precise quantification of fetal heart rate patterns. Objective This study aimed to perform a systematic review to describe the achievements made by the researchers, summarizing findings that have been found by previous researchers in feature extraction and CTG classification, to determine criteria and evaluation methods to the taxonomies of the proposed literature in the CTG field and to distinguish aspects from relevant research in the field of CTG. Methods Article search was done systematically using three databases: IEEE Xplore digital library, Science Direct, and Web of Science over a period of 5 years. The literature in the medical sciences and engineering was included in the search selection to provide a broader understanding for researchers. Results After screening 372 articles, and based on our protocol of exclusion and inclusion criteria, for the final set of articles, 50 articles were obtained. The research literature taxonomy was divided into four stages. The first stage discussed the proposed method which presented steps and algorithms in the pre-processing stage, feature extraction and classification as well as their use in CTG (20/50 papers). The second stage included the development of a system specifically on automatic feature extraction and CTG classification (7/50 papers). The third stage consisted of reviews and survey articles on automatic feature extraction and CTG classification (3/50 papers). The last stage discussed evaluation and comparative studies to determine the best method for extracting and classifying features with comparisons based on a set of criteria (20/50 articles). Discussion This study focused more on literature compared to techniques or methods. Also, this study conducts research and identification of various types of datasets used in surveys from publicly available, private, and commercial datasets. To analyze the results, researchers evaluated independent datasets using different techniques. Conclusions This systematic review contributes to understand and have insight into the relevant research in the field of CTG by surveying and classifying pertinent research efforts. This review will help to address the current research opportunities, problems and challenges, motivations, recommendations related to feature extraction and CTG classification, as well as the measurement of various performance and various data sets used by other researchers.
BMC-SDN: Blockchain-Based Multicontroller Architecture for Secure Software-Defined Networks

Multicontroller software-defined networks have been widely adopted to enable management of large-scale networks. However, they are vulnerable to several attacks including false data injection, which creates topology inconsistency among controllers. To deal with this issue, we propose BMC-SDN, a security architecture that integrates blockchain and multicontroller SDN and divides the network into several domains. Each SDN domain is managed by one master controller that communicates through blockchain with the masters of the other domains. The master controller creates blocks of network flow updates, and its redundant controllers validate the new block based on a proposed reputation mechanism. The reputation mechanism rates the controllers, i.e., block creator and voters, after each voting operation using constant and combined adaptive fading reputation strategies. The evaluation results demonstrate a fast and optimal detection of fraudulent flow rule injection.
Specific Cation Diffusion across the (La,Sr)MnO3 (Ce,Gd)O2 interface in SOFCs

Oxide interfaces play very important roles for the physical and chemical properties of nanostructured materials, such as an ionic conductivity, superconductivity, and magnetism. Gadolinia-doped Ceria (GDC) is commonly selected as the interlayer between (La,Sr)MnO3 and Y2O3-stabilized ZrO2 in fuel cells. The chemical expansions across the oxide interlayer were carefully examined at the atomic resolution in order to understand the cation diffusion and existence of oxygen deficiency at the interfaces.
Evaluation and Improvement of Coagulation Properties of Milk fro Manufacturing

A rugged and sensitive instrument "Vatimer" was developed to evaluate the coagulation properties of milk in cheese vats. Microvolt signals from the instrument varied with standing-wave motion of milk, forces arising from coagulation, curd firming, curd syneresis and also clean-in-place spray forces. Curd firmness at cutting varied three to four fold in commercial Cheddar cheesemaking operations. The Formagraph instrument was used to select individual cow milk samples with good and poor chymosin-coagulation characteristics from the Utah State University Holstein herd. Blending 50% good-, and 50% poor-coagulating samples did not improve average coagulation properties of poor samples. Higher chymosin concentration caused curd disintegration in poor samples. It was not necessary to add more than . 02 rennin units per milliliter of milk, or . 02% CaC1 2 to produce adequate curd firmness 30 min after chymosin addition if milk pH was reduced to at least 6.4 before coagulation. Hydroxyapatite chromatography and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of whole casein from milk samples with good and poor chymosin-coagulation characteristics showed abnormally high contents of y - and para-K-caseins and lower K- and 8 -casein concentrations in poor-coagulating samples. Poor samples showed higher deterioration in curd firmness than the good samples on chymosin coagulation after storage of milk samples at 4°C for 24, 48, and 72 h with and without added . 02% CaCl2. Prolonged storage for 30 days at -1°C caused 7.6% and 68.2% losses in curd firmness for good and poor samples respectively. Cheddar cheese was made in 9 liter laboratory cheese vats with various proportions of blended, and coagulation modified poor-, and good chymosin-coagulating milk. One hundred percent poor-coagulating milk produced cheese with significantly higher moisture, lower yield, and very bitter flavor.
Temporal and subcellular distributions of Cy5.5-labeled hyaluronic acid nanoparticles in mouse organs during 28 days as a drug carrier

Temporal and subcellular distributions of hyaluronic acid (HA) as a degradable nanoparticle (NP) in animals were investigated to determine if HA-NP could be utilized as an appropriate drug delivery system. After mice were intravenously injected with 5 mg/kg of Cy5.5-labeled HA-NP sized 350–400 nm or larger HA-polymers, the fluorescence intensity was measured in all homogenized organs from 0.5 h to 28 days. HA-NP was greatly detected in spleen, liver and kidney until day 28, while it was maintained at low levels in other organs. HA-polymer was observed at low levels in all organs. HA-NP quantities in spleen and liver were reduced until day 3, but increased sharply between days 3 and 7, then decreased again, while their HA-polymers were maintained at low levels until day 28. In kidneys, both HA-NP and HA-polymer showed high levels after 0.5 h of administration, but steadily decreased until day 28. According to ultrastructural analyses, HA-NP was engulfed in Kupffer cells of liver and macrophages of spleen and kidney at day 1 and was accumulated in the cytoplasm of kidney tubular cells at day 7. Overall, these findings suggest that HA-NP could be considered a desirable drug carrier in the liver, kidney, or spleen.
Determinants of Unemployment in Selected Developing Countries: A Panel Data Analysis

Article history Received: March 04, 2021 Revised: March 23, 2021 Accepted: March 24, 2021 This research gives a new glimpse on determinants of unemployment in developing countries. Unemployment is not only a burning issue in developing countries but also in developed countries, but in this study, the case is related to developing countries. For this purpose data of ten selected developing countries has been taken for the period of 2000 to 2019 from the World Bank. Stationarity has been checked through the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and the result showed that all variables were stationary at 1st difference except the variable of inflation. The Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) model has been applied and results show that all variables are statistically significant. GDP, inflation, remittances, exchange rate, and expenditure on education has a negative impact on unemployment while population and external debt has a positive impact on unemployment. Policy recommendations are that if developing economies want to reduce unemployment they have to control population, remove deficit in the balance of payment, control the inflation rate, raise their GDP, earn the exchange rate due to increase in exports, and gain the foreign remittance and have to allocate the more budget on expenditure on education. In light of these recommendations, all economies can achieve economic efficiency and economic development.
Impacts of Probiotic feeding on Behavior and Welfare related parameters of Heat Stressed Broilers

This study was performed to investigate the efficacy of probiotic (PROBAC plus) to counteract the adverse effects of heat stress (32-35oc) on the behaviors and welfare related parameters of broiler chickens. One-hundred and twenty chicks were divided into 4 groups. The first group was control (basal diet), second group was broilers reared at high temperature (basal diet), third group was broilers reared at high temperature and fed probiotic (basal diet + Probiotic) and fourth group was probiotic group (basal diet + probiotic). Behavioral patterns of broilers were recorded at week 4, 5 and 6. At d 42 of age, 10 birds from each group were slaughtered to collect blood samples. Blood films were stained for measuring heterophils / lymphocytes (H / L) ratio. Serum cortisol was also measured. The overall mean frequency of feeding behavior is significantly (P = 0.045) reduced for birds reared at high temperature (32-35oC) compared with other experimental groups. The overall mean frequency of drinking behavior was significantly (P = 0.053) increased due to higher temperature. Walking behavior was significantly (P = 0.051) decreased for birds reared at higher temperature. Running activity did not significantly (P > 0.05) affected by higher temperature. However, probiotic addition to birds reared under control or high temperature significantly elevated the running activity of broilers (P = 0.050). The mean frequency of shaking is significantly (P = 0.054) lower for heat stressed birds with or without probiotic feeding than control. Moreover, the overall mean frequency of behavioral patterns such as crouching, huddling, standing, stretching, and preening did not show any significant differences between experimental groups (P > 0.05). Heat-stressed birds showed a significant (P ≤ 0.05) elevation of serum cortisol and higher (P ≤ 0.05) H / L ratio compared with control birds. In conclusion, probiotic feeding for birds reared at high temperature resulted in a reduced H / L ratio and a decreased serum cortisol concentration suggesting that probiotic can be a useful tool to counteract the adverse effects of high temperature rearing.
MULTILINGUAL THEMATIC PICTURE DICTIONARY: ASSISTING YOUNG LEARNERS’ LITERACY

This study aimed at developing a media, named a multilingual thematic picture dictionary to support the development of fourth grade elementary school students’ literacy. This study applied Design and Development research with Analysis, Design, Development, and Evaluation model proposed by Richey and Klein (2007). The subjects of the research were the fourth grade elementary school students who studied in Singaraja city as rural area and Busungbiu village as urban area. The data in this study were obtained from observation, interview, questionnaire, document analysis, content validity judgment, and quality judgment. The data obtained were collected by using four instruments, namely; observation sheet, interview guide, questionnaire, and expert judgment sheet. The data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The results showed that the multilingual thematic picture dictionary contents were relevant to the criteria of a good multilingual thematic picture dictionary and was categorized as an excellent category.