Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of del Nido's cardioplegia with St. Thomas's cardioplegia for myocardial protection in adult open-heart surgery

Objective: The del Nido cardioplegia solution provides a long period of arrest with single dose as compare to St. Thomas cardioplegia solution. In our study we compared outcomes of del Nido and St. Thomas cardioplegia in adult open cardiac surgeries. Methods: Sixty patients were studied between January 2017 to December 2017. Out of which 30 patients were operated on St. Thomas cardioplegia and 30 patients were on del Nido cardioplegia solution. Outcome was compared in both group in relation to demographic, cardiac enzymes level, cardiopulmonary bypass data and post operative results. Results: Total cardiopulmonary bypass time (111.27 ± 40.791 vs. 131.77 ± 37.97, P = 0.049), Aortic cross clamp time (71.67 ± 27.68 vs. 87.00 ± 30.95, P = 0.048), Time taken for return of cardiac contraction after de-clamping the aorta (2.40 ±1.453 vs. 3.67 ± 1.971, P = 0.006), dose of cardioplegia required (1361.67 ± 362.388 vs. 2716.67 ± 927.021, P=0.001) repetition of Cardioplegia needed (1.37±0.490 vs. 4.07±1.437, P=0.001), time to wean off from bypass (21.93±4.934 vs. 32.67±10.535 , P=0.001) and intraoperative cardioversion requirement (p=0.001) were significantly lower in del Nido group as compared to St. Thomas group. Postoperative PRO BNP level (2269.8 ±2098.97 pg/mL vs. 10220.0 ± 8343.62 pg/mL, P= 0.001) was significantly lower in the DN group. While troponin T levels (P= 0.314), CPK-MB level (P=0.111) were comparable in between groups. Conclusion: Del Nido cardiplegia is associated with lower bypass and cross clamp time, less dose and repetition of cardioplegia and early return of cardiac activity as compared to ST Thomas solution. There is better myocardial protection with del Nido cardioplegia as assessed with less increase in PRO BNP level.
A review on wound healing

A wound is disruption of the anatomic structure and its useful continuity of residing tissue. Healing is the system of repair that follows damage to the skin and other soft tissues. Wound recovery is basically, a survival mechanism to restore shape and feature. The ability of a wound to heal depends partly on its intensity, as well as on the general fitness and dietary status of the man or woman. Clinically, wound may be categorized as acute or persistent primarily based at the timeliness of recuperation. The intense wound is a breakdown of the integrity of the gentle tissue envelope surrounding any part of the frame. Chronic wound is described, as ones wounds that fail to progress through orderly and timely sequence of restore or wounds that bypass through the restore system without restoring anatomic and useful effects. Although some additives of the recovery process have regenerative elements, pores and skin are the example of tissues in which the response to injury is predominantly certainly one of repair. Phases of wound healing are hemostasis, irritation, proliferation, epithelization, and maturation remodeling.
Functional Linking Between Negative and Positive ERPs for Syntactic Processing in Japanese: Mutual Enhancement, Syntactic Prediction, and Working Memory Constraints

This study attempts to detect the differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with two syntactic processes: the syntactic integration of discontinuous dependency and the detection of a violation of the syntactic island constraint. We recorded the electroencephalogram elicited by complex sentences in Japanese that included a dependency between a quantifier and its head noun, in which we changed the word order of the two words to manipulate the presence and absence of a syntactic integration and a syntactic island violation while keeping the lexical items and construction unchanged. We found significant negative and positive deflections for the syntactic integration only when a quantifier preceded its head noun. We also observed significant negative and positive deflections for the syntactic island violation, for which the negativity was more salient when a quantifier preceded its head noun. This study is the first to report a late positive ERP for a violation of the syntactic island constraints in Japanese, and the results showed that the ERP elicited by syntactic integration and that by syntactic island violation were different in terms of their latency, topography, and duration. More importantly, the ERPs elicited by the two syntactic processes were biphasic, and the amplitudes of the negative ERP and of the positive ERP were positively correlated. This positive correlation could be a characteristic of syntactic processing because it contrasted with the negative correlation reported for the ERP elicited by semantic anomalies in English. Furthermore, the amplitude of the ERP for syntactic integration was negatively correlated with the individual capacity of working memory (WM). That is, a reader with greater WM capacity showed smaller negativity and positivity for the syntactic integration, whereas the amplitude for the syntactic island violation showed no significant correlation with the individual capacity of WM. Our results suggested that linguistic ERPs functionally interacted with each other and that the ERP involving the retention and the retrieval of a distant word could be constrained by the individual differences in WM capacity. We discuss the possible reasons for the contrast between English and Japanese on the basis of the cross-linguistic differences in the two languages.
Developing the Path Signature Methodology and its Application to Landmark-based Human Action Recognition

Landmark-based human action recognition in videos is a challenging task in computer vision. One key step is to design a generic approach that generates discriminative features for the spatial structure and temporal dynamics. To this end, we regard the evolving landmark data as a high-dimensional path and apply non-linear path signature techniques to provide an expressive, robust, non-linear, and interpretable representation for the sequential events. We do not extract signature features from the raw path, rather we propose path disintegrations and path transformations as preprocessing steps. Path disintegrations turn a high-dimensional path linearly into a collection of lower-dimensional paths; some of these paths are in pose space while others are defined over a multiscale collection of temporal intervals. Path transformations decorate the paths with additional coordinates in standard ways to allow the truncated signatures of transformed paths to expose additional features. For spatial representation, we apply the signature transform to vectorize the paths that arise out of pose disintegration, and for temporal representation, we apply it again to describe this evolving vectorization. Finally, all the features are collected together to constitute the input vector of a linear single-hidden-layer fully-connected network for classification. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrated that the proposed feature set with only a linear shallow network and Dropconnect is effective and achieves comparable state-of-the-art results to the advanced deep networks, and meanwhile, is capable of interpretation.
Teachers' Implicit Attitudes Toward Students From Different Social Groups: A Meta-Analysis

Teachers' attitudes toward their students have been associated with differential teachers' expectations and, in turn, with students' educational pathways. Theories of social cognition can explain the link between attitudes and behavior. In this regard, the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes is worth to be considered, whereby implicit attitudes are automatically activated when the attitude object is present and guide automatic behavior. In contrast, explicit attitudes infer deliberation and reflection, hence affecting controlled behavior. As teachers often are required to act immediately in situations that do not allow for thoughtful reflection due to time restraints, teachers' implicit attitudes concerning different student groups with shared characteristics, such as gender or ethnicity, may be especially important when considering teachers' behavior in relation to students' educational pathways. This notion is reflected by an increased interest in adopting implicit methodology in the educational domain. Over the last 10 years, several studies have been conducted in different countries, involving in- and pre-service teachers and investigating their attitudes toward different student groups. Estimates of effects have varied and may be affected by sampling bias. To systematically review and integrate data from different studies, this meta-analysis focuses on teachers' implicit attitudes. Following the systematic search of the database and initial screening, 43 articles were identified from which 22, describing 34 studies, were retained for the meta-analysis after further inspection. First analyses revealed an estimated average effect size of 0.56 for implicit attitudes in favor of non-marginalized groups. As there was a large extent of heterogeneity between studies, several moderator variables were investigated. Results showed that the employed implicit measure and stimulus materials as well as the student target group affected the effect sizes. Low or non-significant relationships were reported between implicit and explicit attitudes. Findings are discussed in terms of theory and future research.
Fetal hemoglobin level and its relationship with spleen size and malaria parasite density in Nigerian children with sickle cell anemia

Background: Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a major global public health concern. Fetal hemoglobin level (HbF) is a major modulating factor of the clinical manifestation of the disease. In Nigeria, data on HbF level of children with SCA and its relationship with the spleen, a major reticuloendothelial organ, are scanty. Methods: In this cross-sectional comparative study, we determined steady-state HbF levels of children with SCA aged 1–15 years by high-performance liquid chromatography and compared with their age-, sex-, and socioeconomic class-matched HbAA controls. The spleen size was determined clinically and sonographically. Relationships between HbF level and spleen size and malaria parasite density were also determined. Results: About two-thirds of children with SCA had HbF level of <10%. However, they had significantly higher mean HbF level (9.6% ± 5.9%) compared with matched controls (0.5% ± 0.7%; P< 0.001). Higher proportion (9.8%) of children with SCA who were ≥8 years developed autosplenectomy compared to none of those <8 years (P = 0.012). There was no significant relationship between HbF levels and spleen size, although children with autosplenectomy had significantly lower mean HbF levels compared with those without autosplenectomy (3.5% ± 1.4% vs. 8.3% ± 3.5%, 95% confidence interval = 1.1–8.4, P = 0.012). HbF levels had no significant correlation with malaria parasite density, P > 0.05. Conclusion: Children with SCA had higher HbF levels compared with matched controls. Furthermore, patients with autosplenectomy had significantly lower HbF levels. Further studies exploring the roles of foetal haemoglobin on spleen functions in children with SCA are advocated, since spleen dysfunction is central to morbidity and mortality in this group of patients.
Spatial Organization in Self-Initiated Visual Working Memory

Ample research in visual working memory (VWM) has demonstrated that the memorized items are maintained in integrated spatial configurations, even when the spatial context is task irrelevant. These insights were obtained in studies in which participants were provided with the information they memorized. However, the encoding of provided information is only one aspect of memory. In everyday life, individuals often construct their own memory representations, an aspect of memory we have previously termed self-initiated (SI) working memory. In this study, we employed a SI VWM task in which participants selected the visual targets they memorized. The spatial locations of the targets were task irrelevant. Nevertheless, we were interested to see whether participants would construct spatially structured memory representations, which would suggest that they intended to maintain the visual targets as integrated spatial configurations. The results of two experiments demonstrated that participants constructed spatially structured configurations relative to random displays. Specifically, participants selected visual targets in close spatial proximity and constructed spatial sequences with short distances and fewer path crossings. When asked to construct configurations for a hypothetical competitor in a memory contest, participants disrupted the spatial structure by selecting visual targets that were further apart and by increasing the distances between them, which suggests that these characteristics were under their control. At the end of each experiment, participants provided verbal descriptions of the strategies they used to construct the memory displays. While the spatial structure of the SI memory representations was robust, it was absent from the participants’ explicit descriptions, which focused on non-spatial strategies. Participants reported selecting items based, most frequently, on semantic categories and visual features. Taken together, these results demonstrated that participants had access to the metacognitive knowledge on the spatial structure of VWM representations, knowledge they manipulated to construct memory representations that enhanced or disrupted memory performance. While having a profound impact on behavior, this metacognitive knowledge on spatial structure remained implicit, as it was absent from the participants’ verbal reports. Viewed from a larger perspective, this study explores how individuals interact with the world by actively structuring their surroundings to maximize cognitive performance.
T Follicular Helper Cell Subsets and the Associated Cytokine IL-21 in the Pathogenesis and Therapy of Asthma

For many decades, T helper 2 (TH2) cells have been considered to predominantly regulate the pathogenic manifestations of allergic asthma, such as IgE-mediated sensitization, airway hyperresponsiveness, and eosinophil infiltration. However, recent discoveries have significantly shifted our understanding of asthma from a simple TH2 cell-dependent disease to a heterogeneous disease regulated by multiple T cell subsets, including T follicular helper (TFH) cells. TFH cells, which are a specialized cell population that provides help to B cells, have attracted intensive attention in the past decade because of their crucial role in regulating antibody response in a broad range of diseases. In particular, TFH cells are essential for IgE antibody class-switching. In this review, we summarize the recent progress regarding the role of TFH cells and their signature cytokine interleukin (IL)-21 in asthma from mouse studies and clinical reports. We further discuss future therapeutic strategies to treat asthma by targeting TFH cells and IL-21.
Glycan Microarrays as Chemical Tools for Identifying Glycan Recognition by Immune Proteins

Glycans and glycan binding proteins (GBPs or lectins) are essential components in almost every aspect of immunology. Investigations of the interactions between glycans and GBPs have greatly advanced our understanding of the molecular basis of these fundamental immunological processes. In order to better study the glycan-GBP interactions, microscope glass slide-based glycan microarrays were conceived and proved to be an incredibly useful and successful tool. A variety of methods have been developed to better present the glycans so that they mimic natural presentations. Breakthroughs in chemical biology approaches have also made available glycans with sophisticated structures that were considered practically impossible just a few decade ago. Glycan microarrays provide a wealth of valuable information in immunological studies. They allow for discovery of detailed glycan binding preferences or novel binding epitopes of known endogenous immune receptors, which can potentially lead to the discovery of natural ligands that carry the glycans. Glycan microarrays also serve as a platform to discover new GBPs that are vital to the process of infection and invasion by microorganisms. This review summarizes the construction strategies and the immunological applications of glycan microarrays, particularly focused on those with the most comprehensive sets of glycan structures. We also review new methods and technologies that have evolved. We believe that glycan microarrays will continue to benefit the growing research community with various interests in the field of immunology.
The study of prevalence and determinants of white-coat hypertension in medical personnel: A prospective study

Context: White-coat hypertension (WCH) has variable prevalence with prognostic significance, and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is a reliable method for its identification. Assessment of WCH is necessary to prevent overtreatment. Aims: The objective was to study the prevalence and determinants of WCH in medical personnel. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional observational study was performed on young medical students. Duration was 23 months. Subjects and Methods: A total of 354 medical students were screened for hypertension, and those who were found hypertensive were then subjected to ABPM using CONTEC-06C monitor. Baseline characteristics were compared between white-coat hypertensive and true hypertensive groups. Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale was used for anxiety assessment. Patients with target organ damage were excluded from the study. Statistical Analysis: Continuous groups were compared by independent Student's t-test, whereas categorical groups were compared using Chi-square test. P < 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: Among 50 hypertensive patients on ABPM, the prevalence WCH was 66% and true hypertension was 34%. Mild anxiety (Hamilton anxiety rating score (HRS) <18) was found to be significantly high (54.5%) among WCH group, while severe anxiety (HRS 25–30) was associated with true hypertensive group (41.2%). A significantly high reverse dipping is found in hypertensive group patients as compared to WCH group (9.1% vs. 23.5%; P = 0.03). Overall, nondippers were found to be in highest percentage in the study. Conclusions: WCH is high in young population, especially among medical professionals. The prevalence of WCH is 66% which is significantly high as compared to the literature available. Reverse dipping on ABPM is strongly associated with true hypertension.
Transverse Sinus Stenosis in Refractory Chronic Headache Patients: An Observational Study

Background: Transverse sinus stenosis is a common brain MRI finding in chronic migraine (CM) and chronic tension-type headache (CTTH) patients in clinical practice; however, its clinical and diagnostic role is unclear. The aim of the study is to determine the frequency of transverse sinus stenosis in these headache patients resistant to preventive treatments and to verify whether this is a useful finding for identifying patients with intracranial hypertension. Methods: This is an observational study. Patients with refractory CM and CTTH underwent a 3T-magnetic resonance venography (MRV) before cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) opening pressure measurement. Transverse sinus stenosis was determined using the combined conduit score. Patients with opening pressure >200 repeated MRV study 1 month after CSF withdrawal to evaluate changes in neuroimaging findings. Results: We analyzed MRV studies of 40 patients (32 F, 8 M; mean age, 49.4 ± 10.8; mean body mass index, 26.7 ± 6.4; 39 CM and 1 CTTH with concomitant episodic migraine). Nineteen cases (47.5%) had evidence of transverse sinus stenosis: bilateral in seven patients (17.5%) and unilateral in 12 cases (30%). No statistically significant differences in transverse sinus stenosis distribution were found between patients with opening pressure <200 mmH2O and those with opening pressure >200 mmH2O. On Spearman bivariate test, there was no correlation between opening pressure and combined conduit score. No changes in neuroimaging findings were found 1 month after CSF withdrawal. Conclusion: Transverse sinus stenosis is a frequent radiological finding (47.5%) in CM and CTTH patients refractory to preventive treatments. However, this finding is not suggestive of intracranial hypertension. Whether transverse sinus stenosis may be a possible risk factor for chronic headache or a comorbidity needs to be evaluated in larger epidemiological studies.
Bone marrow examination in geriatric patients—An institutional experience from the north Himalayan region of India

Background: The surge of the geriatric population has led to design research studies related to health problems in this age group worldwide. Bone marrow examination which is an important diagnostic tool for various diseases may vary in geriatric population in comparison to younger groups. The present study was, therefore, conducted to study the indications and morphological features of bone marrow examination in geriatric population in north Himalayan region of India. It was also intended to study if there is any variation in these findings from elderly populations in other parts of the world. Material and Methods: Study was conducted in an institute situated in north Himalayan Uttarakhand state of India over a period of two years including patients above 60 years of age who underwent bone marrow examination. Results: Total 156 cases underwent bone marrow examination with most common indication being suspicion of lymphoma (18.5%) followed by cytopenia (17.3%). Nutritional anaemia was most common pathological diagnosis in 16.6% cases. Diagnostic discordance between aspirate and biopsy was observed in 5.7% of total cases with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) being the most common misdiagnosis on aspirate. Conclusion: Nutritional anaemia particularly iron deficiency anaemia is the most common diagnosis of bone marrow examination indicating the importance of nutritional therapy in the elderly population of this region. Bone marrow biopsy proves to be an important adjunct to aspiration in precise diagnosis with minimal complications. The awareness of bone marrow findings would not only be helpful to clinicians and pathologists but also provide valuable information to the policymakers to improve the quality of health in the geriatric population of this area.