Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender-Specific Coagulation Profiles of Peripheral and Portal Blood May Help to Differentiate Malignant from Benign Pancreatic Tumour—Pilot Study

Objective: Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and mass forming chronic pancreatitis (CP) can be easily misdiagnosed due to their resemblances in clinical, radiological, and biochemical criteria. In our previous study, we reported a very high concentration of D-Dimers in portal blood in patients with pancreatic cancer which may help to differentiate malignant from benign pancreatic tumours. In this study, we aim to describe other portal and peripheral coagulation profiles of PDAC in comparison to CP patients, as well to test the hypothesis; thus, it is possible to distinguish pancreatic malignancy and benign tumour based on these parameters. Methods: We included retrospectively 115 patients with the absence of venous thromboembolism (VTE), qualified to surgical treatment due to pancreatic tumours, both PDAC and CP. Patients underwent surgery in General and Transplant Surgery Unit of Medical University of Lodz between December 2011 and February 2014. Patients with distant metastases diagnosed before or during the surgery were excluded. The coagulation profile, which includes fibrinogen, activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT), prothrombin time (PT), and thrombin time (TT), was determined in blood samples from the portal and peripheral vein taken intraoperatively. Results: The fibrinogen level was higher and the aPTT index shortened in the peripheral and portal blood of the PDAC group, which reflects the well-known link between PDAC and general hypercoagulability. Furthermore, these effects are sex-specific. The mean age in the CP group was lower than in the PDAC group (54.63 ± 12.37 vs. 63.77 ± 3.23, p < 0.001) and correlated with the fibrinogen distribution in male patients with CP (portal r = 0.34; p = 0.07; peripheral r = 0.39; p = 0.04). We calculated sex-specific logistic regression models (male: peripheral aPTT and age, AUC: 0.795, female: portal fibrinogen and age, AUC: 0.805), both maintaining the good discrimination properties after V-fold cross validation (0.759, 0.742). Conclusions: Our study shows that the differences between coagulation profiles in PDAC and CP patients not only seems to be a reflection of gender-specific biological features, but also helps to discriminate between them. The main goal of the study was to explore the biology of pancreatic cancer and lay a solid base for further investigations of PDAC biomarkers. This paper is the first to describe the detailed coagulation profile in portal blood in patients with pancreatic solid tumors. At present, the clinical application of our results is not clear; however, we hope that it may improve our understanding of this complex disease.
COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance among Low- and Lower-Middle-Income Countries: A Rapid Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Widespread vaccination against COVID-19 is critical for controlling the pandemic. Despite the development of safe and efficacious vaccinations, low-and lower-middle income countries (LMICs) continue to encounter barriers to care owing to inequitable access and vaccine apprehension. This study aimed to summarize the available data on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rates and factors associated with acceptance in LMICs. A comprehensive search was performed in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science from inception through August 2021. Quality assessments of the included studies were carried out using the eight-item Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal tool for cross-sectional studies. We performed a meta-analysis to estimate pooled acceptance rates with 95% confidence intervals (CI). A total of 36 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. A total of 83,867 respondents from 33 countries were studied. Most of the studies were conducted in India (n = 9), Egypt (n = 6), Bangladesh (n = 4), or Nigeria (n = 4). The pooled-effect size of the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rate was 58.5% (95% CI: 46.9, 69.7, I2 = 100%, 33 studies) and the pooled vaccine hesitancy rate was 38.2% (95% CI: 27.2–49.7, I2 = 100%, 32 studies). In country-specific sub-group analyses, India showed the highest rates of vaccine acceptancy (76.7%, 95% CI: 65.8–84.9%, I2 = 98%), while Egypt showed the lowest rates of vaccine acceptancy (42.6%, 95% CI: 16.6–73.5%, I2 = 98%). Being male and perceiving risk of COVID-19 infection were predictors for willingness to accept the vaccine. Increasing vaccine acceptance rates in the global south should be prioritized to advance global vaccination coverage.
Genetic diversity and population structure of Androctonus crassicauda (Scorpiones: Buthidae) in different ecogeographical regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran

The genetic structure of four populations of Androctonus crassicauda (Olivier, 1807) from different ecogeographical regions of Saudi Arabia was studied. To detect genetic differences among populations, the sequences of the cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene of 21 individuals of A. crassicauda from Saudi Arabia, and 11 sequences from Iran were utilised. The nucleotide and haplotype diversity were constructed. The results revealed a high level of haplotype and nucleotide diversity within all populations. A total of eighteen haplotypes were identified, 17 of which were unique. Molecular variance analysis (AMOVA) indicated a high genetic diversity reflecting differences between the populations. Fixation indices revealed significant genetic structure among all populations from Saudi Arabia and Iran. Also, the phylogenetic tree and the haplotype network analyses show the existence of three distinct clusters of A. crassicauda in Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Analysis of Hemoglobin Levels among Oral Cancer Patients: An Institutional Study

Background: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide. It is estimated that approximately half of all the tumors affecting the head and neck region commonly affect the oral cavity. Premalignant lesions can manifest as leukoplakia, erythroplakia, keratosis or even oral candidiasis. Hemoglobin (Hb) is a protein contained in the red blood cells of the body and plays an important role in delivery of oxygen to the tissues. A sufficient level of Hemoglobin is required to maintain oxygenation of the tissues. Anemia is defined as a reduction in hemoglobin levels below the lower limit pertaining to a particular age group. Treating anemia by increasing the levels of hemoglobin has proven to increase the quality of life of cancer patients. The aim of the present study is to analyze the Hb level in OSCC patients attending our institution. Materials and Methods: The present retrospective institutional study was conducted after obtaining ethical clearance from the Institutional Ethical Approval Board to access patient records and data. A total of 5, 00,000 case sheets were analyzed from June 2019 to February 2021. Suitable inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied and case sheets were shortlisted. The data were entered in MS Excel spreadsheet and further statistical analysis was carried out using SPSS. All results were displayed as graphs and pie charts. Results: 64 cases of OSCC were included in the present study with a male predominance. 45% of the study population had a level between 9-11 mg/dl. 60.3% of the population belonged to the age group of 50 and above. Conclusion: Anemia in cancer can be precipitated due to various factors. It can be caused or exacerbated by the cancer itself due to immunosuppression or due to chemotherapy. Anemia can also be pre existing due to underlying conditions. It was found that hemoglobin levels are found to be higher in males and higher in ages 50+ when compared to ages 30-40. Low levels of hemoglobin and anemic conditions in oral cancer patients can cause excessive fatigue and can significantly affect quality of life and hence, hemoglobin therapy is widely administered to oral cancer patients.
A Hedonic Analysis of Processed Tomato Prices Using Italian Regional Markets Data

The Italian market of processed tomatoes (whole peeled and unpeeled tomatoes, chopped tomato pulp, tomato purée, and concentrated tomato paste) rose, thanks to the Italian tradition of using such products in many recipes of cuisine, until early 2000; since then, it has declined to date. Moreover, such products are traditionally considered low-price products, and their market is characterized by intense price competition. Thus, recently, producers have started to differentiate their products as a way to achieve higher margins, and escape from competition in price. By using the sales data of Italian processed tomatoes sold in several retail stores and a hedonic price model, we estimated the implicit prices associated with several attributes that are currently available in processed tomato products on the market. We find that a protected designation of origin, organic certification, and flavoring, as well as the indication of tomato variety, are the most valuable features of processed tomato products sold in the Italian market. This implies that product differentiation strategies that could be suggested to producers as the most effective are those aimed at enhancing the territorial link of the product, the environmental sustainability of the production process, and organoleptic product features, as well as its convenience.
Recent advance on machine learning of MXenes for energy storage and conversion

Transition metal carbide/nitride (MXene) is an emerging two‐dimensional (2D) material in the field of energy storage and conversion due to the unique 2D structure and high ionic conductivity property, which has been extensively focused. However, the MXenes family possesses tremendous species variety and element composition with more than 90% of unknown family members. The traditional experimental methods always focused on single species, which is time‐consuming and not systematic enough. Currently, machine learning, as an emerging computer technology, provided an advanced technique to boost the application of the MXene family comprehensively. In this review, we comprehensively summarize and comment on the latest application progress of machine learning in the development of MXene materials, focusing on the internal mechanism between machine learning and material development. Applications of MXene in the field of battery, supercapacitor, biological, and catalysis were fully reviewed. It can open up a new road map for the development of MXene materials in the new era.
Aesthetic Reactions to Violations in Contemporary Art: The Role of Expertise and Individual Differences

ABSTRACT This study investigated the role of expertise and personality in reactions to challenges in contemporary paintings, here operationalized as violations in syntax and semantics. Thirty-eight expert and 56 naïve art viewers appraised 20 paintings (divided into four groups, i.e. no violation, only syntactic or semantic violation, and both semantic-syntactic violations) on scales of valence, activation, sense-making, understanding and appreciation. Viewing time was also recorded and participants filled in questionnaires measuring the Big Five model of personality and Need for Closure. Separate mixed linear models were fit for each outcome variable (rating scales and viewing time) with the type of violations, expertise and personality measures as predictors. It was found that syntactically violated paintings predicted best viewers’ reaction to art. Such paintings were viewed longer and evoked reactions modulated by individual differences and expertise. Expertise was found to be a positive predictor of understanding and appreciation of paintings with syntactic violations. Conversely, need for closure turned out to be a negative predictor of sense-making, understanding, and liking those types of art. Similarly, people high in neuroticism liked syntactically violated artworks less. Only openness to experience turned out to be a positive predictor of sense-making and activation in all types of stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of elevated challenge, which syntactically violated paintings present, and different strategies of viewers to cope with this.
Internet of things in the management of chronic diseases during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A systematic review

The use of new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) in the management of chronic diseases, especially in the COVID pandemics, could be a life‐saving appliance for public health practice. The purpose of the current study is to identify the applications and capability of IoT and digital health in the management of the COVID‐19 pandemic.
Earnings Premium from Education in the Context of Educational Expansion

Education can be seen as an investment that brings higher incomes to individuals. People with higher levels of education collect important earnings premium in the labour market. On the other hand, the expansion of education is a major trend that characterizes evolution of societies, with important positive effects at the level of social and economic development. This paper aims to explore the influence of educational attainment on subjective incomes of individuals, while taking into account other relevant personal factors, as well as the phenomenon of education expansion at national level. We build our analysis on data from the World Values Survey Wave 7 (Haerpfer et al., 2020) collected from individuals around the world in various national settings. Our results are useful for better understand the influences of increasing participation to education on the earnings structure at both individual and national levels.
Perubahan Pola Pengeluaran Makanan Masyarakat Indonesia Akibat Pandemi Covid-19

The Covid-19 had an impact on contraction of Indonesia’s GDP growth and declined income of many establishment and community. Declining economic conditions and activity restrictions are thought to have an impact on food expenditure pattern. This study aims to observe changes in food expenditure patterns before and after the Covid-19 pandemic by using the percentage of average expenditure on groceries, percentage of average expenditure on prepared food and tobacco, also the percentage of average expenditure on food.By using the paired test analysis method, (consist of paired t test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test), this study found that the Covid-19 pandemic did not have a significant effect on proportion of average food expenditure. However, the Covid-19 pandemic had a significant effect on food expenditure pattern, specifically the increase on percentage of average groceries expenditure and decrease on percentage of prepared food and tobacco.With an increase in the average expenditure on foodstuffs, it is suggested to the government to keep the supply of food ingredients available, especially in areas experiencing an increase in food expenditures. Then to business actors in the food and beverage sector, it is recommended to diversify products in the form of ready-to-cook food.
Comparison of single copy gene-based duplex quantitative PCR and digital droplet PCR for monitoring of expansion of CD19-directed CAR T cells in treated patients

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy with axicabtagene ciloleucel, tisagenlecleucel and brexucabtagen ciloleucel has been adopted as the standard of care for patients with refractory and/or relapsed CD19-positive lymphoid malignancies. Monitoring of kinetics of CAR T cells after administration is crucial for patient follow-up and important to guide clinical decisions for patients subjected to CAR T cell therapy. Information of transgene copies within a CAR T cell product prior to administration, i.e. vector copy numbers, is of high importance to warrant patient safety. However, experimental assays for quantitative CAR T cell monitoring in the open domain are currently lacking. Several institutions have established in-house assays to monitor CAR T cell frequencies. In the present study, the quantitative (q)PCR assay established at the Heidelberg University Hospital (Heidelberg, Germany), i.e. single copy gene-based duplex qPCR, was compared with the digital droplet PCR assay established at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (Hamburg, Germany). Both methods that were independently developed enable accurate and comparable CAR T cell frequency assessment and are useful in the clinical setting.
Associations Between the Digital Clock Drawing Test and Brain Volume: Large Community-Based Prospective Cohort (Framingham Heart Study)

Background The digital Clock Drawing Test (dCDT) has been recently used as a more objective tool to assess cognition. However, the association between digitally obtained clock drawing features and structural neuroimaging measures has not been assessed in large population-based studies. Objective We aimed to investigate the association between dCDT features and brain volume. Methods This study included participants from the Framingham Heart Study who had both a dCDT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and were free of dementia or stroke. Linear regression models were used to assess the association between 18 dCDT composite scores (derived from 105 dCDT raw features) and brain MRI measures, including total cerebral brain volume (TCBV), cerebral white matter volume, cerebral gray matter volume, hippocampal volume, and white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume. Classification models were also built from clinical risk factors, dCDT composite scores, and MRI measures to distinguish people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from those whose cognition was intact. Results A total of 1656 participants were included in this study (mean age 61 years, SD 13 years; 50.9% women), with 23 participants diagnosed with MCI. All dCDT composite scores were associated with TCBV after adjusting for multiple testing (P value <.05/18). Eleven dCDT composite scores were associated with cerebral white matter volume, but only 1 dCDT composite score was associated with cerebral gray matter volume. None of the dCDT composite scores was associated with hippocampal volume or WMH volume. The classification model for differentiating MCI and normal cognition participants, which incorporated age, sex, education, MRI measures, and dCDT composite scores, showed an area under the curve of 0.897. Conclusions dCDT composite scores were significantly associated with multiple brain MRI measures in a large community-based cohort. The dCDT has the potential to be used as a cognitive assessment tool in the clinical diagnosis of MCI.
In Vitro Comparative Study of Platelets Treated with Two Pathogen-Inactivation Methods to Extend Shelf Life to 7 Days

Background and Objectives: Since 2015, platelet products have been pathogen-inactivated (PI) at the Luxemburgish Red Cross (LRC) using Riboflavin and UV light (RF-PI). As the LRC should respond to hospital needs at any time, platelet production exceeds the demand, generating a discard rate of 18%. To reduce this, we consider the extension of storage time from 5 to 7 days. This study’s objective was to evaluate the in vitro 7-day platelet-storage quality, comparing two PI technologies, RF-PI and amotosalen/UVA light (AM-PI), for platelet pools from whole-blood donations (PPCs) and apheresis platelets collected from single apheresis donation (APCs). Materials and Methods: For each product type, 6 double-platelet concentrates were prepared and divided into 2 units; one was treated with RF-PI and the other by AM-PI. In vitro platelet-quality parameters were tested pre- and post-PI, at days 5 and 7. Results: Treatment and storage lesions were observed in PPCs and APCs with both PI methods. We found a higher rate of lactate increase and glucose depletion, suggesting a stronger stimulation of the glycolytic pathway, a higher Annexin V binding, and a loss of swirling in the RF-PI-treated units from day 5. The platelet loss was significantly higher in the AM-PI compared with the RF-PI units. Conclusions: Results suggest that RF-PI treatment has a higher deleterious impact on in vitro platelet quality compared to AM-PI, but we observed higher loss of platelets with AM-PI due to the post-illumination amotosalen adsorption step. If 7-day storage is needed, it can only be achieved with AM-PI, based on our quality criteria.
Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Convolutional Network: A Novel Framework for Taxi Demand Forecasting

Taxi demand forecasting plays an important role in ride-hailing services. Accurate taxi demand forecasting can assist taxi companies in pre-allocating taxis, improving vehicle utilization, reducing waiting time, and alleviating traffic congestion. It is a challenging task due to the highly non-linear and complicated spatial-temporal patterns of the taxi data. Most of the existing taxi demand forecasting methods lack the ability to capture the dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies among regions. They either fail to consider the limitations of Graph Neural Networks or do not efficiently capture the long-term temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Convolutional Network (ST-DCN) for taxi demand forecasting. The dynamic spatial dependencies are efficiently captured through a two-phase graph diffusion convolutional network where the attention mechanism is introduced. Moreover, a novel temporal convolution module is designed to learn various ranges of temporal dependencies, including recent, daily, and weekly periods. Inside the module, convolution layers are stacked to handle very long sequences. Experimental results on two large-scale real-world taxi datasets from New York City (NYC) and Chengdu demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms seven state-of-the-art baseline methods.
The Impact of CEOs’ Social Capital on China’s Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors’ Holdings

ABSTRACT The phenomenon of underinvestment in foreign equity securities is widely acknowledged as equity home bias. Relying on China’s sociological characteristics to explain this equity home bias, this research investigates whether CEOs’ social capital is a factor affecting the investment decisions of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs). The empirical results show that CEOs’ elite university network (i.e., CEOs’ elite networks from the top 2 universities in China – Peking University & Tsinghua University) are significantly negatively related to QFIIs’ holdings whereas CEOs’ political connections (i.e., CEOs’ formal position interlock & political background) are significantly positively related to QFIIs’ investment. The findings also show that QFIIs prefer to invest in cross-listed firms with higher capitalization and enhanced performance. Our research confirms the central view of social capital theory that social networks have value, but also supplements the literature by finding that social capital may have greater benefit for CEOs rather than shareholders.
A preliminary firesetting offence chain for adults with intellectual and other developmental disabilities

ABSTRACT Background The theoretical understanding of firesetting behaviour has predominantly been developed with men in prisons or psychiatric hospitals without neurodevelopmental disabilities. Consequently, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of current theory when applied to adults with intellectual disabilities and/or autism. Method Thirteen adults in England with intellectual and other developmental disabilities were interviewed about the affective, cognitive, behavioural, and contextual factors leading up to and surrounding a recorded firesetting incident. Interviews were analysed using a Grounded Theory approach. Results The resulting model consists of four phases: (1) background, (2) early adulthood, (3) pre-offence period, and (4) offence, and post offence period. Conclusion The model accounts for unique precursors to firesetting including mental health deterioration, poor problem solving, and new motivations for firesetting. Unlike other offence chain theories, the significance of post-offence behaviour and cognitions are highlighted.