Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Awareness of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury—Preventive Training Programs among Saudi Athletes

Background: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear is a common medical condition that entails a stretch or sprain of the ACL, which is present in the knee joint. The incidence of ACL injury in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is estimated to be 31.4%. Prevention training programs (PTPs) can be used to reduce ACL injuries sustained during physical activity, as they primarily focus on improving strength, balance, and lower limb biomechanics and reducing landing impact. This study aimed to assess Saudi athletes’ awareness of ACL injury PTPs. Methods: A cross-sectional survey in the form of a self-administered questionnaire in the Arabic language was carried out from 22 December 2022 to 7 March 2023 and included 1169 Saudi athletes. Statistical analyses were performed on the collected data using frequency and percentages. Binary logistic regression was used for the adjusted analysis and determining associations between athletes playing high- and low-risk sports. Results: Overall, 52% of participants were female athletes, and 48% were male athletes. The western region of the country had the highest response rate (28.9%). The most common sport played was football at 36.6%. Most participants (70.97%) reported that their information on ACL injury was taken by their coaches. When assessing whether participants were familiar with the concept of an ACL injury PTP, the majority of the participants answered no, representing 971 (662 high-risk, 309 low-risk), compared to those who answered yes, representing only 198 (167 high-risk, 31 low-risk), with a statistically significant difference (adjusted OR: 2.106; 95% confidence interval: 1.544–2.873; p-value < 0.001). Conclusion: In general, the level of awareness of ACL injury PTPs among Saudi athletes was poor.
Deep-sea-derived viridicatol relieves allergic response by suppressing MAPK and JAK-STAT signalling pathways of RBL-2H3 cells

ABSTRACT Our previous studies reported that viridicatol isolated from the deep-sea-derived fungus Penicillium griseofulvum could regulate the stabilisation of mast cells to relieve food allergy. To understand the molecular role of viridicatol in stabilising mast cells, transcriptomes of viridicatol-treated RBL-2H3 cells were analysed by RNA-sequencing. There were 128 differentially expressed genes in activated RBL-2H3 cells with or without viridicatol treatment. The mast cell activation-related genes were significantly reduced by treatment with viridicatol through RT-qPCR analysis. Moreover, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment analysis indicated that viridicatol was important in mast cell stabilisation by affecting MAPK and JAK-STAT signalling pathways. Additionally, molecular docking and western blot analysis revealed that the phosphorylated JNK, ERK, P38, and STAT6 proteins were inhibited by viridicatol. Taken together, viridicatol has the potential to be used as a new type of anti-food allergic functional material via controlling MAPK and JAK-STAT signalling pathways of mast cells.
Study of Plant Growth and Essential Oil of Nepeta cataria L. in Kazakhstan

: The genus Nepeta exhibits a wide spectrum of biological activity in medicine, agriculture, and the food industry. The purpose of the research is to develop the optimal agricultural technology for plantation cultivation of Nepeta cataria L . with the preservation of useful properties and to increase the content of essential oil in the conditions of Northern Kazakhstan. The objects of research are annual plants N. cataria L. growing on a plantation in the Akmola region. It has been reliably proven that the increase in the growth of N. cataria L. , the biomass, and the yield is positively affected by the application of complex fertilizer N 100 P 80 K 120 . The essential oil yield was 0.52% in the experiment without fertilizers and 0.57% in the experiment with fertilizers. The main components of the essential oil of N. cataria L. grown in the experimental plots (plot #1 and plot #2) were 4aα7α7aα-Nepetalactone (76.5612 and 79.3200%), β-caryophyllene (4.0001 and 4.0351%) and caryophyllene oxide (1.9789 and 2.5969%). The remaining components were contained in the essential oil in small quantities. The composition of the essential oil of plants from Kazakhstan was similar to the composition of the essential oil of plants from central Iran, Egypt, and Korea, because the main substance was nepetalactone. The conducted studies prove the success of growing catnip in the conditions of Northern Kazakhstan.
A Convergent Proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Conic Programming with 4-Block Constraints

The objective of this paper is to design an efficient and convergent ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers) type method for finding a solution of medium accuracy to conic programming problems whose constraints consist of linear equalities, linear inequalities, a nonpolyhedral cone and a polyhedral cone. For this class of problems, one may apply the directly extended ADMM to their dual, which can be written in the form of convex programming of four separate blocks in the objective function with a coupling linear equation constraint. Indeed, the directly extended ADMM, though may diverge in theory, performs much better numerically than many of its variants with theoretical convergence guarantee. Ideally, one should find a convergent version that performs at least as efficiently as the directly extended ADMM in practice. We achieve this goal by proposing a convergent (proximal) ADMM first for convex programming problems of three separate blocks in the objective function with the third part being linear and then extend it to the general case. Our extensive numerical tests on the important class of doubly non-negative semidefinite programming (SDP) problems with linear equality and/or inequality constraints demonstrate that our convergent method is at least 20% faster than the directly extended ADMM with unit step-length for the vast majority of about 550 large scale problems tested. This confirms that our ADMM type algorithm can have both theoretical convergence guarantee and superior numerical efficiency over the directly extended ADMM.
Sensitivity analysis of numerical model parameters for optimized PEH responses

With the increasing popularity of wearable devices, typically employed in fitness and health monitoring, there is an evident need to extend their autonomy and replace the conventional power sources with environmentally friendly alternatives. Piezoelectric energy harvesting systems, optimized for collecting kinetic energy from random human motion and transduce it into electrical energy, represent a viable option for powering autonomous wearables. Since established analytical methods are unable to model the behaviour of piezoelectric harvesters with complex optimized geometries, suitable numerical models need to be employed for their design. This implies the need of a thorough study focused on the mechanical engineering design optimization purposes of how the finite element type and mesh density affect the uncoupled modal and coupled transient responses of a new class of optimised design configurations of the studied devices.
Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Swin-Transformer

The ability of machines to understand human subjective emotions is an essential link to realize artificial intelligence. How to extract and utilize information from audio signals is still a challenging task. By transforming acoustic signals into time-domain information represented by spectrograms, advanced algorithms in the field of computer vision can be applied to the field of acoustics. In this paper, we propose a Speech Emotion Recognition(SER) system based on Swin-Transformer(Swin). In addition to verifying the feasibility of Swin in SER task, we also compared the effectiveness of various spectrum maps under the same model parameters. Our model is validated on the IEMOCAP dataset and achieves competitive performance.
Validation of a Lattice Boltzmann Solver Against Wind Turbine Response and Wake Measurements

Two of the major limitations facing the adoption of large-eddy simulation (LES) to the industry today are a lack of validation against full-scale measurements and the high computational cost. The lattice Boltzmann method is an approach to conduct LES that is suitable for parallelization on graphics processing units, leading to reduction in energy-to-solution by multiple orders of magnitude compared to Navier-Stokes solvers. We validate the lattice Boltzmann solver VirtualFluids against the measurements published in the SWiFT benchmark and the results obtained with LES by the participants in the benchmark. We compare inflow, turbine response and wake quantities and show that our method yields similar results. While the other LES methods vary in the required energy by one order of magnitude, our methodology is always about one to two orders of magnitude more efficient. The benchmark allows for a comparison to a large number of models, however, the scale of the turbine is not representative of modern turbines and therefore important challenges of modern turbines, such as blade deflection, could not be validated.
Robust Control Design for Systems with Discrete Time Delay of 1,3-PD Fermentation

A disturbed model with discrete time delay for the continuous fermentation of glycerol bio-dissimilation to 1,3-propanediol by Klebsiella pneumoniae is presented in this paper. The biochemistry process cannot refrain from the disturbances caused by both time delay and exogenous disturbance. The above negative factors may restrict and undermine the accomplishment performance of the dynamic system, and even lead to unstable oscillations. In consideration of multiplicity phenomena, the stability behaviors of multiply equilibriums have been analyzed. In order to reduce the disturbance effect, we propose an H∞ controller through LMIs method. The simulation results indicate that the closed-loop system can be assured to be internal stable and to achieve the H∞ performance. The controller might be practicable for the continuous culture.
Antibiotic prescribing practices for prophylaxis and therapy of oral/dental infections in pediatric patients – results of a cross-sectional study in Turkey

Aim: Antibiotics are often prescribed for the treatment of various infections and prophylactic purposes in dental practice. Their improper use can cause microbial resistance to antibiotics, which poses a world-wide threat. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of dentists and dentistry students about antibiotic prescription practices for prophylaxis and the treatment of dental infections in pediatric patients. Methods: A questionnaire was e-mailed to 2,100 dentists and 300 senior dentistry students. The questionnaire was filled out by the participants within a 2-month period (May–June 2020). A 30-point scoring system was developed to assess the knowledge levels of the dentists according to the guidelines. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed. One-way ANOVA test and the Chi-Squared test were used to compare qualitative variables. Results: The response rate was found to be 24.2% for dentists and 49% for senior dentistry students. 19.4% of the participants were found to be moderately knowledgeable and 80.6% of them were highly knowledgeable. Students’ knowledge scores were found to be higher than the general dentists and other specialists (p<0.05). There was no significant difference between students and pedodontists. Conclusion: Dentists were found to have sufficient knowledge about the usage of antibiotics in children, but there is still a lack of information about circumstances under which antibiotics should not be prescribed. Dentists and dentistry students should attend continuing education programs to keep their information up-to-date and should also prescribe antibiotics in adherence with the current guidelines to prevent antibiotic resistance.
Flexor tendon degeneration affects short-term outcomes of open trigger digit release

We aimed to investigate the association between flexor tendon degeneration and outcome of open trigger digit release. We recruited 162 trigger digits (136 patients) who had open trigger digit release from February 2017 to March 2019. Intraoperatively, six features of tendon degenerations were identified: irregular tendon surface, tendon fraying, intertendinous tear, synovial thickening, hyperaemia of sheath and tendon dryness. Longer duration of preoperative symptoms was associated with worsening tendon surface irregularity and fraying; increased number of steroid injections was associated with worsening tendon surface irregularity and dryness; higher DASH score was associated with severe tendon fraying, dryness and intertendinous tear; limited proximal interphalangeal joint (PIPJ) motion was associated with severe tendon dryness. At 1-month post-surgery, DASH score remained high in severe intertendinous tear group while PIPJ motion remained limited in severe tendon dryness group. In conclusion, the severity of various flexor tendon degenerations influenced the outcome of open trigger digit release at 1-month but did not affect the outcome at 3- and 6-months post-surgery.
A successful antenatal outcome in a patient with refractory Takayasu’s arteritis treated with tocilizumab throughout pregnancy—a case report

Abstract Takayasu’s arteritis (TA) is a rare form of large-vessel vasculitis for which tocilizumab (TCZ) may be administered in resistant or refractory disease. Current British Society of Rheumatology advice is to stop TCZ 3-months pre-conception. We report the case of a 33-year-old woman with extensive TA treated with TCZ, azathioprine and glucocorticoids in pregnancy. She was closely monitored with MDT input and TCZ was continued throughout pregnancy as the benefits were thought to outweigh the risks. Our case also highlights the importance of accurate blood pressure monitoring in an appropriate anatomical location, given the extent of her disease. Our patient’s disease remained stable throughout the antenatal and post-partum period with a successful pregnancy outcome and no maternal or foetal complications. TCZ is suitable for select cases of refractory TA during pregnancy.
Single-channel blind separation performance bound of two co-frequency modulated signals

Separabilities of mixed signals and algorithms for single-channel blind separation(SCBS) are evaluated using the blind separation performance bound.This paper focuses on the theoretical SCBS bound for two co-frequency modulated signals,the multiphase phase-shift keying(MPSK) signal and the quadrature amplitude modulated(QAM) signal.An upper bound of the symbol error rate was derived in a closed form using Forney's method and the maximum-likelihood criterion for the joint symbol sequence detection of two signals.Simulations show that the upper bound agrees well with the Viterbi result in ideal situation and that the parameter differences between the two source signals remarkably affect the SCBS performance,with the performance being better when the parameter differences become larger and with the delay difference being the main factor affecting the separation performance.
Mutual repression between JNK/AP-1 and JAK/STAT stratifies senescent and proliferative cell behaviors during tissue regeneration

Epithelial repair relies on the activation of stress signaling pathways to coordinate tissue repair. Their deregulation is implicated in chronic wound and cancer pathologies. Using TNF-α/Eiger-mediated inflammatory damage to Drosophila imaginal discs, we investigate how spatial patterns of signaling pathways and repair behaviors arise. We find that Eiger expression, which drives JNK/AP-1 signaling, transiently arrests proliferation of cells in the wound center and is associated with activation of a senescence program. This includes production of the mitogenic ligands of the Upd family, which allows JNK/AP-1-signaling cells to act as paracrine organizers of regeneration. Surprisingly, JNK/AP-1 cell-autonomously suppress activation of Upd signaling via Ptp61F and Socs36E, both negative regulators of JAK/STAT signaling. As mitogenic JAK/STAT signaling is suppressed in JNK/AP-1-signaling cells at the center of tissue damage, compensatory proliferation occurs by paracrine activation of JAK/STAT in the wound periphery. Mathematical modelling suggests that cell-autonomous mutual repression between JNK/AP-1 and JAK/STAT is at the core of a regulatory network essential to spatially separate JNK/AP-1 and JAK/STAT signaling into bistable spatial domains associated with distinct cellular tasks. Such spatial stratification is essential for proper tissue repair, as coactivation of JNK/AP-1 and JAK/STAT in the same cells creates conflicting signals for cell cycle progression, leading to excess apoptosis of senescently stalled JNK/AP-1-signaling cells that organize the spatial field. Finally, we demonstrate that bistable separation of JNK/AP-1 and JAK/STAT drives bistable separation of senescent signaling and proliferative behaviors not only upon tissue damage, but also in RasV12, scrib tumors. Revealing this previously uncharacterized regulatory network between JNK/AP-1, JAK/STAT, and associated cell behaviors has important implications for our conceptual understanding of tissue repair, chronic wound pathologies, and tumor microenvironments.
The normalization model predicts responses in the human visual cortex during object-based attention

Divisive normalization of the neural responses by the activity of the neighboring neurons has been proposed as a fundamental operation in the nervous system based on its success in predicting neural responses recorded in primate electrophysiology studies. Nevertheless, experimental evidence for the existence of this operation in the human brain is still scant. Here, using functional MRI, we examined the role of normalization across the visual hierarchy in the human visual cortex. Using stimuli form the two categories of human bodies and houses, we presented objects in isolation or in clutter and asked participants to attend or ignore the stimuli. Focusing on the primary visual area V1, the object-selective regions LO and pFs, the body-selective region EBA, and the scene-selective region PPA, we first modeled single-voxel responses using a weighted sum, a weighted average, and a normalization model and demonstrated that although the weighted sum and weighted average models also made acceptable predictions in some conditions, the response to multiple stimuli could generally be better described by a model that takes normalization into account. We then determined the observed effects of attention on cortical responses and demonstrated that these effects were predicted by the normalization model, but not by the weighted sum or the weighted average models. Our results thus provide evidence that the normalization model can predict responses to objects across shifts of visual attention, suggesting the role of normalization as a fundamental operation in the human brain.
Cervical cancer screening utilization and associated factors among female health workers in public health facilities of Hossana town, southern Ethiopia: A mixed method approach

Backgrounds Worldwide, a substantial proportion of women have low cervical cancer screening services utilization. There is a paucity of evidence in utilization of cervical cancer screening services among female health workers and inconsistent findings in Ethiopia. This study aimed to assess the utilization of cervical cancer screening services and associated factors among female health workers in public health facilities of Hossana town, Southern Ethiopia. Methods Facility-based cross-sectional study design complemented with the qualitative inquiry was conducted among randomly selected 241 study participants in Hossana town from June 1 to July 1, 2021. Logistic regression models were used to determine the association between dependent and independent variables with the assumption of a variable with a p-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Qualitative data were transcribed verbatim then translated to English and analyzed using open code version 4.03. Results Out of the total study participants, 19.6% was screened for cervical cancer. Having a diploma level of education (AOR = 0.48;95%CI:0.24,0.98), having three or more children (AOR = 3.65;95%CI:1.44,9.21), having multiple sexual partners(AOR = 3.89;95%CI: 1.38,11.01), and knowledge of cervical cancer screening (AOR = 2.66;95% CI:1.19,5.95) were statistically significantly associated with cervical cancer screening utilization. In-depth interviews suggested additional barriers for low screening utilization including lack of health educational materials, limitation of service to a specific area, service interruption, provider incompetency, and miss-trust and lack of attention by a trained provider. Conclusion Utilization of cervical cancer screening service among female health workers is low. Having a diploma level of education, having three or more children, a history of multiple sexual partners, and knowledge about cervical cancer were predictors of cervical cancer screening utilization. Contextualized health talks and promotion through training with a special focus on low level of knowledge, had lower educational level, and the availability of cervical cancer screening services are critical.
Patients’ experience of undergoing maintenance hemodialysis. An interview study from Ethiopia

Background People with kidney failure require renal replacement therapy in the form of dialysis or a kidney transplant for survival. Many facets of their life, both within and outside the dialysis unit, are impacted by the management of this disease. It is important to comprehend the experiences of people undergoing hemodialysis in order to improve the care provided to them. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the experiences of patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis in Ethiopia. Methods A qualitative descriptive study was conducted at two healthcare facilities in Ethiopia. Individual interviews with 15 participants (men and women aged 19–63), undergoing hemodialysis in Ethiopia, were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results The analysis resulted in five themes: Feeling grateful, Facing a restricted life, a Supportive environment, Dreaming of a transplant, and Leading a hassled life. The subthemes include Trust in treatment, Faith in God, Challenging fluid and dietary restrictions, Being too fatigued to socialize, Being stigmatized, Family and social support, Supportive healthcare, Lacking a donor and sponsor, COVID-19 as a barrier, Financial constraints, Inaccessibility to care and transport and Access line implantation. Despite being dependent on a machine and having to deal with food and fluid restrictions as well as financial challenges, participants were hopeful and dreamed of a transplant. Conclusion From the study’s participants, it was discovered that the experiences of people with kidney failure undergoing hemodialysis were generally, considerably negative narratives. Based on the results we recommend development of multidisciplinary teams to better meet patients’ physical, emotional, and social needs while undergoing hemodialysis. Such a team should also involve the patient’s family members when caring for patients on hemodialysis.