Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-term outcomes of hepatitis C virus infected renal allograft recipients

Background and Aim: This study aims to study the long-term outcomes of hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected renal allograft recipients, which is still debatable. Materials and Methods: In this study (study period - January 2003 to December 2013), we studied long-term outcomes of 106 living donor renal allograft recipients - 53 HCV-infected (33 genotype 3 and 20 genotype 1) and 53 age- and gender-matched HCV-noninfected patients. Results: Thirty-nine (73.6%) patients detected HCV positive during dialysis, while 14 (26.4%) before the start of dialysis. Forty (75.5%) patients were positive for both anti-HCV and HCV RNA, while 13 (24.5%) were HCV RNA positive and anti-HCV negative. Twelve and nine patients died among HCV positive and negative groups, respectively. Major cause of death was sepsis in both groups. Hepatic failure contributed to mortality in four HCV-positive patients, two of them also had graft failure. Patient and death noncensored graft survival rates at 1, 5, and 10 years of follow-up in HCV-positive group were 100% and 100%; 79.8% and 70.8%; 58.9% and 37.8%; respectively; and in HCV-negative group were 100% and 100%; 95.9% and 91.8%; 58.9% and 27.4%; respectively. Conclusions: The long-term survival of HCV-positive renal transplant recipients was not inferior to that of HCV-negative recipients.
Assessment of the Soil Erosion Response to Land Use and Slope in the Loess Plateau—A Case Study of Jiuyuangou

Soil erosion is a serious environmental problem in the Loess Plateau, China. Therefore, it is important to understand and evaluate soil erosion process in a watershed. In this study, the Chinese Soil Loss Equation (CSLE) is developed to evaluate the soil loss and analyze the impact of land use and slope on soil erosion in Jiuyuangou (JYG) watershed located in the hilly-gullied loess region of China 1970–2015. The results show that the quantities of soil erosion decreased clearly from 1977 to 2015 in the study area, which from 2011 (t/km²·a) in 1977 to 164 (t/km²·a) in 2004 and increased slowly to 320 (t/km²·a) in 2015. No significant soil erosion (<300 t/km²·a) changed in JYG watershed, which increased dramatically from 8.93% to 69.34% during 1977–2015. The area of farmland in this study area has been reduced drastically. Noting that the annual average soil erosion modulus of grassland was also showing a dropped trend from 1977 to 2015. In addition, the study shows that the annual average soil erosion modulus varied with slope gradient and the severe soil erosion often existed in the slope zone above 25°, which accounted for 4657 (t/km²·a) in 1977 and 382.27 (t/km²·a) in 2015. Meanwhile, soil erosion of different land-use types presented the similar changing trend (declined noticeably and then increased slowly) with the change of slope gradient from 1977 to 2015. Combined the investigations of extreme rainfall on 26 July 2015 for JYG watershed, the study provides the scientific support for the implementation of soil and water conservation measures to reduce the soil erosion and simplify Yellow River management procedures.
Urinary tract infection at presentation of nephrotic syndrome: A clinical evaluation

Aims: The aim was to study the incidence, etiology, clinical features and the antibiotic sensitivity pattern of urinary tract infections (UTI) in children at presentation of nephrotic syndrome (NS) (first or recurrent episodes before starting immunosuppressive therapy). Methods: This was a prospective hospital-based study carried out in Basaveshwara hospital, Chitradurga. Fifty children with a diagnosis of NS were studied from June 2010 to October 2014. The cases with recurrence of NS or those with the first episode of NS were evaluated before placing on immunosuppressive therapy. A clean-catch midstream urine specimen was collected from all children to avoid contamination. For younger children, where collection of urine was difficult in the manner described above, suprapubic aspiration was done. Prompt plating of the urine specimen, within 1-h of a collection, was ensured. Identification of the organism and antibiotic sensitivity patterns was determined. Results: Among the fifty children studied, boys were affected more than the girls with a ratio of 1.5:1. The mean age was 4.75 years. Pyuria was noted in 64% of the patients. The most common organism isolated was Escherichia coli in 10 cases, followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae in 4 cases. About 75% of the organisms were sensitive to third-generation cephalosporins. Conclusions: UTI is a common infection accompanying NS. A high index of suspicion and early institution of appropriate antibiotics will help in attenuating morbidity and mortality. Key words: Escherichia coli, Nephrotic syndrome, Pyuria, Urinary tract infections
Comparison of the Economic Outcomes of Neuroaxial and General Anesthesia for Lumbar Spine Operations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Context Lumbar spine operations can be safely performed under general or neuroaxial anesthesia, but there are controversies as to the clinical outcomes and cost benefits of each method. The goal of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to determine the advantages of each technique (i.e., regional or general anesthesia) for lumbar spine surgery with regards to cost, duration of surgery, duration of post anesthesia care unit, and duration of hospital stay.Data Sources: We conducted a systematic search for articles comparing regional anesthesia (RA) versus general anesthesia (GA) for lumbar spine surgery using three major databases (i.e., PubMed, EMBASE, and Google Scholar), without limitation for date and language of publication. We also manually double checked the references of all the related articles to detect missed articles by electronic searching. The last search was performed before September 2018; the quality of the included articles was assessed by different checklists according to the type of the article. STATA software (V. 10) was used for performing meta-analysis.ResultsTwenty-eight articles were included in this meta-analysis. Cost data were presented in seven studies and reported a significant decrease in the cost of treatment in RA patients compared with GA patients. The standard mean difference (SMD) (95% CI) for cost was 1.64 (1.53 to 1.75); z = 29.17; P < 0.001; I2 = 98.9. Surgical time data were presented in 25 studies, which reported significant reduction in the surgery time in RA patients compared with GA patients, the SMD (95% CI) for surgery time was 0.77 (0.71 to -0.84); z = 23.9; P < 0.001; I2 = 97.9. Post anesthesia care unit (PACU) stay data were presented in 16 studies and reported significant increase in PACU stay in RA patients compared with GA patients. The SMD (95% CI) for PACU stay time was -0.4 (-0.49 to -0.31); z = 8.65; P < 0.001; I2 = 99.2. Hospital stay data were presented in 18 studies and reported significant decrease in hospital stay time in RA patients compared with GA patients. The SMD (95% CI) for hospital stay time was 0.76 (0.68 to 0.84); z = 18.81. ; P < 0.001; I2 = 98.3. Egger and Begg’s tests showed no significant publication bias.ConclusionsThis comprehensive systematic review showed that RA has several advantages over GA with respect to cost, surgery time, and duration of hospital stay in patients undergoing lumbar spine surgery, while increase in PACU stay time was observed in RA patients.
Simultaneous Episodes of Heavy Rainfall in Morocco and Southern Alps: 1. Mesoscale Simulations and Episode Climatology (1979–2016)

The torrential rain and southerly föhn episode on 14–16 November 2002 in the Alpine southside, which affected the Piedmont region, was concurrent with heavy rains in the northwest flanks of the Middle and High Atlas in Morocco. Both simultaneous rainfalls are analyzed, as well as the recent climatology of similar episodes. A mesoscale modelling system is used first to simulate the relevant atmospheric processes and then to map the evaporative sources of both targets. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer water vapor products, National Centers for Environmental Prediction reanalysis data sets, radiosondes, wind profilers, and surface rain gauges are used to substantiate the simulations. The evaporative source estimation is discussed in a companion article. The simultaneous episodes originated after the development of a narrow meridionally elongated upper level trough extending southward from the British Islands into Iberia, associated with a semi‐stationary large amplitude wave. A total of 43 similar episodes have been identified during the 38‐year period 1979–2016, averaging one episode per year. However, there is a large interannual variability, with several years with no episodes and, others, which can accumulate up to four episodes. The episode length shows also a high variability, from 2 to 7–8 days. The longest episodes usually include an enlarged “Mediterranean phase” for the rainfalls in the Alps. With respect to their seasonal variability, the largest fraction concentrates in autumn (60%), and no episodes are found from June to August. November accumulates the highest case occurrence (37%) and the observed variability cannot be explained by changes in the phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation.
Studies on sustainable sugarcane initiative (SSI) technology in north eastern agro climate zone of Tamil Nadu

Field experiments were conducted at North-eastern Agro Climatic Zone of Tamil Nadu to find out the influence two methods of sugarcane cultivation on cane productivity. The experiments were conducted in farmer’s holdings in hands with sugar factory during 2012 to 2014. Each experimental plot is large sized with more than 0.40 ha nonreplicated with sub surface drip irrigation system. The results indicated higher plant height at harvest stage under SSI method (276cm) than conventional system (Sett) of sett planting (247cm). Study found that sugarcane yield was higher under SSI method (143 t ha) as compared to conventional method (126 t ha) in main crop. Likewise, SSI registered higher sugar yield (15.30 t ha) than conventional system (11.48 t ha). Total water consumption and water productivity of SSI method showed less water consumption of 1669 mm and more water productivity of 8.57 kg/m as compared to conventional system of planting (1787 mm and 7.04 kg/m respectively). SSI method of crop establishment also recorded Rs.33,100 as additional income than conventional method with a B: C ratio of in the main crop of 1.97 and 1.80 respectively. Similar trend was also noticed in sugarcane ratoon crop yield, water productivity and net profit.
Preventive psychiatry: Current status in contemporary psychiatry

Preventive psychiatry is one of the most ignored subdiscipline of psychiatry, which has got important role to play in the contemporary psychiatry. Mental disorders are very common with lifetime prevalence of about 25%, and tend to be chronic. Due to the stigma associated with mental disorders, lack of awareness, and also lack of adequate mental health resources, nearly 60%–80% of the persons suffering from mental disorders do not access mental health care services. Mental and substance use disorders have been identified as one of the major contributors to the disease-related burden and disability-adjusted life years. In this background, preventive psychiatry has an important role to play in public health sector. Since etiology of most of the mental disorders is not known, it is not possible to follow here the standard model of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of public health. A concept of universal, selective, and indicated prevention has been proposed in primary prevention. Preventive approaches in psychiatry focus on evidence-based risk and protective factors, promoting quality of life, reducing stressors, and improving resilience. Such interventions, when planned targeting at specific mental disorders, have a potential to prevent mental disorders. Thus, preventive psychiatry has a crucial role to play in mental health, considering the high prevalence of mental disorders, the associated disability and burden, and a great drain on human resources.
Determination of Risk Factors for Pre–Eclampsia in aTertiary Hospital of Bangladesh

Background: Pre-eclampsia is an idiopathic disorder of pregnancy characterized by proteinuric hypertention and still one of the important causes of maternal and fetal mortality.The identification of its predisposing factors before and during early stage of pregnancy will help in reducing the mortality.Objective:The objective of the present study is to determine the risk factors for pre-eclampsia among pregnant women in a tertiary level hospital.Methods: This study was conducted in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of a tertiary care hospital in Chittagong, Bangladesh, from January to June 2015.A total number of 50 pregnant women with pre-eclampsia who admitted in this hospital were selected as study group.This was hospital based descriptive study.Results: Most of the partcipants were within 21-30 years of age group and mean age 24.06 ± 3.71. The factors that were found to be significant predictors of risk for development of PE were primigravida, low socioeconomic condition,family history of PE & hypertension, past history of PE and hypertention, past history of diabetes mellitus was also associated with development of PE.Chatt Maa Shi Hosp Med Coll J; Vol.16 (1); Jan 2017; Page 29-32
Using Cell Phone Pictures of Sheet Music To Retrieve MIDI Passages

This article investigates a cross-modal retrieval problem in which a user would like to retrieve a passage of music from a MIDI file by taking a cell phone picture of several lines of sheet music. This problem is challenging for two reasons: it has a significant runtime constraint since it is a user-facing application, and there is very little relevant training data containing cell phone images of sheet music. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel feature representation called a bootleg score which encodes the position of noteheads relative to staff lines in sheet music. The MIDI representation can be converted into a bootleg score using deterministic rules of Western musical notation, and the sheet music image can be converted into a bootleg score using classical computer vision techniques for detecting simple geometrical shapes. Once the MIDI and cell phone image have been converted into bootleg scores, we can estimate the alignment using dynamic programming. The most notable characteristic of our system is that it has no trainable weights at all — only a set of about 40 hyperparameters. With a training set of just 400 images, we show that our system generalizes well to a much larger set of 1600 test images from 160 unseen musical scores. Our system achieves a test F measure score of 0.89, has an average runtime of 0.90 seconds, and outperforms baseline systems based on music object detection and sheet–audio alignment. We provide extensive experimental validation and analysis of our system.
A Systematic Review of Technology-Supported Peer Assessment Research

With the advancement of information and communication technologies, technology-supported peer assessment has been increasingly adopted in education recently. This study systematically reviewed 134 technology-supported peer assessment studies published between 2006 and 2017 using a developed analysis framework based on activity theory. The results found that most peer assessment activities were implemented in social science and higher education in the past 12 years. Acting assignments such as performance, oral presentations, or speaking were the least common type of assignments assessed across the studies reviewed. In addition, most studies conducted peer assessment anonymously and assessors and assessees were randomly assigned. However, most studies implemented only one round of peer assessment and did not provide rewards for assessors. Across studies, it was more often the case that students received unstructured feedback from their peers than structured feedback. Noticeably, collaborative peer assessment did not receive enough attention in the past 12 years. Regarding the peer assessment tools, there were more studies that adopted general learning management systems for peer assessment than studies that used dedicated peer assessment tools. However, most tools used within these studies only provide basic functionalities without scaffolding. Furthermore, the results of cross analysis reveal that there are significant relationships between learning domains and anonymity as well as learning domains and assessment durations. Significant relationships also exist between assignment types and learning domains as well as assignment types and assessment durations.
Identification and Review of the Research Gaps Preventing a Realization of Optimal Energy Management Strategies in Vehicles

The development of new vehicle control strategies that achieve improved fuel economy (FE) is an active subject of research due to the economic, environmental, and societal impact of transportation. These control strategies can be classified as either driving behavior modifications (e.g., Eco-Driving, Eco-Routing) or powertrain operation modifications (e.g., an Optimal Energy Management Strategy, or Optimal EMS). This literature review is focused on the Optimal EMS and seeks to develop a novel understanding of the current research gaps and to provide a novel comprehensive overview of initial studies addressing the identified research gaps. Research gaps are derived by utilizing a systems-level viewpoint of an Optimal EMS realization in vehicles and studying the subsystem integration readiness levels (IRLs). Identified research gaps include (1) incorporation of both perception and planning subsystems, (2) studying the effects of mispredictions on the planning subsystem, and (3) physical demonstrations of the planning subsystem. Studies which have begun to fill each research gap are identified, and recommendations are presented for future research to bridge each research gap. It is the authors’ contention that once the identified research gaps are closed by future studies, Optimal EMS will be achievable in modern vehicles resulting in improved transportation sustainability. Downloaded from SAE International by Zachary Asher, Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Improved likelihood ratio statistic-based cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is a technique where multiple cognitive radio users cooperate among themselves to make binary decisions about the presence of a primary user. The single cognitive user often faces the hidden terminal problem. However, CSS tackles this problem by sending local sensing-based decisions to the fusion centre. A major drawback of conventional energy detection is the poor performance at low SNR regime. In this work, likelihood ratio statistics is considered as a test-statistic due to its highest statistical power. An improved likelihood ratio statistic-based CSS scheme is proposed by considering several past sensing events. The proposed scheme mitigates the poor detection at low SNR regime and misdetections arising due to sudden drops in signal energy. Furthermore, the generalised Byzantine attack is taken into account considering a security aspect. The proposed scheme is also shown to outperform Anderson Darling-based malicious user detection in CSS at a low SNR regime. The proposed scheme is verified and validated over empirical spectrum data. The performance improvement is at the cost of computational time, which in practice is very low and is justified by the significant performance improvements of the proposed scheme at low SNR regime.
Selenium and lung cancer: A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression

Lung cancer is the most common cause of death in the world. Selenium is one of the elements that are recommended for the treatment of lung cancer. Therefore, in this study by carrying out a systematic review and a meta-analysis we tried to evaluate the relationship between selenium in serum, toenail and supplements and the risk of lung cancer. After searching the databases SID, Irandoc, Scopus, Pubmed and ISI Web of Science with the check-list of STROBE, 15 studies were estimated by meta-analysis. The variables affecting the heterogeneity of studies were determined by the method of moment base. The heterogeneity of studies was moderate (I2= 70.5, P value <0.001). Hence the metaanalysis was conducted on the basis of the random effect model. The mean of ratio of lung cancer in studies of selenium supplements was equal to OR = 0.82 (95 CI: 0.47-1.42, P value = 0.5), in the studies of selenium in serum it was equal to OR=0.7 (95 CI: 0.45-1.07, P value = 0.1) and in the studies of selenium in the toenail it was equal to OR= 0.59 (95 CI: 0.28-1.24, P value = 0.17). Generally speaking, the risk of lung cancer is significantly reduced by selenium OR = 0.71 (95% CI: 0.52-0.97, p value = 0.03). In fact the selenium reduces29% of the risk of lung cancer, significantly. There was not observed any publication error in studies (Beggar’s test: z- value = 0.24; P value = 0.8). The meta-regression showed that the studylocation, the measurement of selenium and the type of study have a significant effect on heterogeneity. The results supported the lowering effect of selenium on the risk of lung cancer. © 2016, International Journal Of Pharmacy and Technology. All rights reserved.
Conditional analysis of elite beach handball according to specific playing position through assessment with GPS

ABSTRACT Beach handball needs to continue to develop. For this reason, observational studies that analyse competitive demands are necessary. Therefore, our objective in this work was to carry out performance assessment of the beach handball players regarding specific playing positions during competition, without modifying the specific structure of the game. The study included 57 elite beach handball players. The results showed that significant differences were found in most of the variables studied when the specific playing positions were compared. Our work has led us to conclude that the assessment of the conditional demands of beach handball players in competition must be done considering the specific playing positions.
Determining the relationship between the attitudes of private teaching institution teachers towards lifelong learning and their competence

This research has been conducted to determine the relationship between the attitudes of teachers working in private teaching institutions, preparing students for university exams, and their lifelong learning competencies. In this study correlational survey model has been used. The research universe consists of 286 teachers working in 21 officially registered private teaching institutions in Northern Cyprus in the 2018-2019 academic year. The sample of the study is composed of 185 private teaching institution teachers selected by random sampling method. In the study, attitudes to lifelong learning and lifelong learning adequacy scales were used. As a result of the research, it can be said that teachers working in the private teaching institution have high attitudes towards lifelong learning and good lifelong learning competencies. As the attitudes of teachers regarding the lifelong learning approach increase, their lifelong learning competencies also increase. The attitudes of female and male teachers to the lifelong learning approach, whether full-time or not, and lifelong learning competencies are at the same level. Teachers taking courses in the past year have a higher attitude towards the lifelong learning approach. Keywords: teachers, lifelong learning, Northern Cyprus, private teaching