Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cancer incidence and risk factors in dialysis patients with human immunodeficiency virus: a cohort study

Abstract Background Patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or end-stage renal disease receiving dialysis have an increased risk of developing malignancies, but few data are available on cancer in patients with both conditions. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the incidence of selected malignancies and identify their potential risk factors in HIV-infected dialysis patients. Methods This study was a nationwide cohort analysis using the US Renal Data System. Participants included all HIV-infected patients starting dialysis from 2005 to 2011. HIV status, comorbidities and malignancies were identified using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes. Descriptive statistics and generalized linear models quantifying risk factors were performed for the overall cohort and the three most common malignancies. Results Overall, 6641 HIV-infected dialysis patients were identified, with 543 (8.2%) carrying a malignancy diagnosis. The most common malignancies were non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL, 25%), Kaposi sarcoma (KS, 16%) and colorectal cancer (13%). Factors increasing the risk of any malignancy diagnosis included: history of cancer [adjusted relative risk (aRR) = 5.37], two or more acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-defining opportunistic infections (ADOIs) (aRR = 3.11), one ADOI (aRR = 2.23), cirrhosis (aRR = 2.20), male sex (aRR = 1.54) and hepatitis B (aRR = 1.52). For NHL and colorectal cancer, history of cancer (aRR = 7.05 and 9.80, respectively) was the most significant risk factor. For KS, two or more ADOIs (aRR = 6.78) was the largest risk factor. Conclusions Over 8% of HIV-infected dialysis patients developed a malignancy. History of cancer and ADOIs were major risk factors, underscoring the significance of immune dysregulation in malignancy development.
dNEMO: a tool for quantification of mRNA and punctate structures in time-lapse images of single cells

Many biological processes are regulated by single molecules and molecular assemblies within cells that are visible by microscopy as punctate features, often diffraction limited. Here we present detecting-NEMO (dNEMO), a computational tool optimized for accurate and rapid measurement of fluorescent puncta in fixed-cell and time-lapse images. The spot detection algorithm uses the à trous wavelet transform, a computationally inexpensive method that is robust to imaging noise. By combining automated with manual spot curation in the user interface, fluorescent puncta can be carefully selected and measured against their local background to extract high quality single-cell data. Integrated into the workflow are segmentation and spot-inspection tools that enable almost real-time interaction with images without time consuming pre-processing steps. Although the software is agnostic to the type of puncta imaged, we demonstrate dNEMO using smFISH to measure transcript numbers in single cells in addition to the transient formation of IKK/NEMO puncta from time-lapse images of cells exposed to inflammatory stimuli.
Job satisfaction among Occupational Therapists

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify whether occupational therapists in the Durban metropolitan area were satisfied with their jobs and to identify dimensions that influence levels of job satisfaction. Methods: A quantitative descriptive study was undertaken using a survey. Data was collected using a validated measure, the Job Satisfaction Survey, which measures nine dimensions of job satisfaction. Questionnaires were distributed to occupational therapists (N=95) selected via purposive sampling, with a final response rate of 51.5% (n=49). Results and Conclusions: The total job satisfaction levels fell within an ambivalent (unsure) range. Occupational therapists were most satisfied with their nature of work followed by the operating procedures and their co-workers. No significant correlations were found between demographic variables and job satisfaction. Occupational therapists experienced the lowest levels of satisfaction in the areas of salary and promotional opportunities. The results of this study may provide insight to managers of occupational therapy services to assist with staff recruitment and retention.
Exemestane (E) vs tamoxifen (T) as neoadjuvant endocrine therapy for postmenopausal women with ER+ breast cancer (T2N1–2, T3N0–1, T4N0M0)

530 Background: There is considerable evidence that aromatase inhibitors are superior to T as first line endocrine therapy for metastatic disease. E an aromatase inactivator, is effective in women whose tumor has progressed despite T therapy. Methods: 151 PM women with ER+ breast cancer (BC) were randomly assigned once-daily treatment with either E alone 25 mg (n=76), or T alone (n=75) for 3 months. The primary endpoint was clinical objective response (OR). Secondary endpoints were OR determined by mammography and ultrasound, and number of pts who underwent breast conserving surgery (BCS). Result: Clinical, mammography, BCS rate are shown in the table. A pathological CR was shown in two pts in the E group and 2 pts in the T group. Response to any type of endocrine treatment was more likely in pts with higher levels of ER expression. Median time to response was 57 days in the E group and 70 days in the T group (p<0.05). All pts with disease progression after endocrine treatment were recommended to receive .
Type 2 Diabetes in the Elderly: Challenges in a Unique Patient Population

In the older patient population, rates of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and obesity are reaching epidemic proportions. In fact, older patients will soon constitute the majority of patients with T2D in most developed countries. The higher prevalence of T2D in older individuals is seen in both men and women and across racial and ethnic groups. However, certain ethnic groups are disproportionately affected and successful strategies must account for these fundamental differences. T2D in old age is associated with traditional diabetes-associated complications including micro- and macro vascular disease, but is also closely related to numerous other comorbidities including cognitive impairment, urinary incontinence, sarcopenia, and increased fall risk. An overall state of chronic inflammation and dysregulated immune system may underlie these increased risks; yet our understanding of immunometabolism during the aging process remains incomplete. In addition, optimal recognition and treatment of diabetes in the elderly is hampered by a lack of relevant, high-quality studies, as the majority of clinical trial data establishing risk profiles, glycemic targets, and therapeutic interventions for T2D are not applicable for large segments of the older patient population. Simply acknowledging this gap is inadequate. We need strong evidence-based data upon which to successfully identify diabetic patients and then intervene in ways that are targeted to specific individuals within a heterogeneous group of elderly patients with T2D.
Blockchain Technology Adoption Behavior and Sustainability of the Business in Tourism and Hospitality SMEs: An Empirical Study

This paper investigates the factors influencing the intention to adopt cryptocurrency payments among small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in tourism and hospitality through the lens of the technology acceptance model (TAM). This paper uses an original sample of 101 SMEs employing a total of 15,831 people in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling is used to examine the joint effect of both internal and external factors influencing the intention to use cryptocurrency payments. Results show that (1) strategic orientation, owner/managers personal characteristics (self-efficacy and innovativeness) and social influence have a strong effect on the intention to adopt new technology; (2) perceived usefulness mediates the effects of strategic orientation and social influence; and (3) perceived ease of use mediates the effect of self-efficacy on the intention to adopt cryptocurrency payments. The present study is one of few empirical inquiries about cryptocurrency payment adoption among SMEs. This study extends the theoretical foundations of the TAM into the specific characteristics of SMEs. Limitations of the study are sample size and a single survey design. However, findings of this research on the cryptocurrency payment adoption offer practical implications for tourism stakeholders towards supporting SMEs competitiveness. The originality of this study is based on the fact that cryptocurrency payment is a new technology, and on the potential of cryptocurrency payments to disrupt the traditional way of operating tourism and hospitality SMEs. Hence the importance to consider major factors influencing SMEs’ intentions to adopt this technology.
An assessment of antihypertensive drug prescription patterns and adherence to joint national committee-8 hypertension treatment guidelines among hypertensive patients attending a tertiary care teaching hospital -

Background: The new guidelines issued by the joint national committee on prevention, detection, evaluation, and treatment of high blood pressure (JNC-8) emphasize that aggressive blood pressure (BP) control is essential to reducing morbidity and mortality. Patient non-adherence is a serious obstacle to the effective treatment of many acute and chronic disorders. Successful treatment and outcome of a chronic disease such as hypertension depend on many factors, including resources (e.g., funds, space, and people), avoidance of serious adverse events, patient adherence with treatment plans, and the availability of effective therapies. The aim of this study is to assess the antihypertensive drug prescription patterns and adherence to joint national committee (JNC-8) hypertension (HT) treatment recommendations among hypertensive patients attending a tertiary care teaching hospital. Methods: An observational and cross-sectional prospective prescription audit study was carried over a period of 1 year in ambulatory patients attending medicine OPD. A total of 500 prescriptions prescribed to diagnose HT were analyzed. Drug prescription patterns, and their adherence to JNC-8 report was assessed. Results: Out of 500 patients, 299 (59.8%) were male and 201 (40.2%) were female. Mean age of male and female patients were found to be 57.68±15.32 and 61.29±12.65 years respectively. As per present study, most of the physicians prescribed single drug (monotherapy, 34.6%) to control BP followed by two-drug combination (18.4%), three-drug combination (11.8%) and four-drug combination (3%). Two drugs regimen was prescribed in 18.4% of the hypertensive patients. Angiotensin receptor blocker + diuretic combination (4.4%) was mostly used in two drug combination therapy followed by Angiotensin receptor blockers + Diuretics (3.6%) and Calcium channel blocker + ACEIs combination (2.6%). No combination of ACEIs + ARBs was prescribed in any prescription. The overall rate of adherence was 16.5 % (Pre-hypertension); 87.90% (Stage 1 hypertension); and 68.20% (Stage 2 hypertension). Conclusions: In conclusion, present study demonstrated that physicians are not completely adhering to standard guidelines while treating hypertension with comorbid conditions.
Detection and Monitoring of Osteoporosis in a Rat Model by Thermoacoustic Tomography

Objectives: Osteoporosis is a bone disease associated with decreased bone mineral density (BMD) and bone quality factors. Tissue dielectric properties, which can be obtained by thermoacoustic tomography (TAT), are considered as potential parameters correlated with both BMD and bone quality. Therefore, here we propose to use TAT to detect osteoporosis and to monitor the formation of osteoporosis over a long period. Technology or Method: This study used the bilateral ovariectomy to obtain an osteoporotic rat model (n = 4) along with a sham control. During the 100 days after the operation, the right tibia of each rat was in vivo thermoacoustically imaged at 5 time points. After the last TAT imaging, micro computed tomography (Micro-CT) was performed on each rat to validate the TAT findings. Visual observation and semi-quantitative methods were used to analyze the thermoacoustic data. Results: During the monitoring period, the thermoacoustic signal intensity of the tibia of the sham-operated rat continued to increase, while the thermoacoustic signal intensities of the tibia of osteoporotic model rats showed fluctuations. The TAT findings were verified by Micro-CT. Conclusions: Osteoporosis can be clearly detected by TAT. Significant differences in thermoacoustic signal intensities between normal bone growth and osteoporotic bone formation are observed. Clinical or Biological Impact: This study provides initial facts that TAT may become a new tool for noninvasive detection and monitoring of osteoporosis.
Research on Multi-satellite Observation Multi-region Task Planning based on Genetic Algorithm

Space-based resources play an important role in the observation and handling of emergency events, and are widely used in national economic activities. In recent years, the large increase in the number of orbital spacecraft and the strategic transformation of the aerospace equipment application model have made the practical task planning for multi-type satellites of practical significance. The research and application of space-based regional reconnaissance algorithms are of great significance for improving the comprehensive application efficiency of spacecraft, forming uniform coverage of key areas, and improving the uniformity of satellite resource utilization and situational awareness. Based on the actual background of engineering application, this paper describes the scheduling problem of Earth observation satellites. Under the constraints of satellite resource capability, observable time, conversion time between reconnaissance missions, energy, etc., a multi-satellite multi-target reconnaissance mission is established. Planning model. With the most resource-saving and high situational awareness uniformity as the optimization index, the optimized satellite reconnaissance mission planning scheme is obtained based on genetic algorithm.
The Effects of Prior Beliefs and Stimulus Prevalence on Self-Other Prioritization

Although self-relevance is widely acknowledged to enhance stimulus processing, the exclusivity of this effect remains open to question. In particular, in commonly adopted experimental paradigms, the prioritization of self-relevant (vs. other-relevant) material may reflect the operation of a taskspecific strategy rather than an obligatory facet of social-cognitive functioning. By changing basic aspects of the decisional context, it may therefore be possible to generate stimulus-prioritization effects for targets other than the self. Based on the demonstration that ownership facilitates object categorization (i.e., self-ownership effect), here we showed that stimulus prioritization is sensitive to prior expectations about the prevalence of forthcoming objects (owned-by-self vs. owned-byfriend) and whether these beliefs are supported during the task. Under conditions of stimulus uncertainty (i.e., no prior beliefs), replicating previous research, objects were classified more rapidly when owned-by-self compared to owned-by-friend (Expt. 1). When, however, the frequency of stimulus presentation either confirmed (Expt. 2) or disconfirmed (Expt. 3) prior expectations, stimulus prioritization was observed for the most prevalent objects regardless of their owner. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis further revealed that decisional bias was underpinned by differences in the evidential requirements of response generation. These findings underscore the flexibility of ownership effects (i.e., stimulus prioritization) during object processing.
PREPROCESSING THE EGYPTIAN ARABIC DIALECT FOR PERSONALITY TRAITS PREDICTION

Each individual has his own distinct character, making his own decisions which is based on his personality. Researchers in computer science field have tried to reach a model for extracting personality traits relying on user’s profiles on social network sites as an input. Content created by users such as text posts, photos and shared activities in social network sites are considered as a huge source of data. Regarding user-created text, it has been proved that text pre-processing has a great impact if was applied to text before using it in research. In this paper, the effect of pre-processing (stemming and stop word removal) and adding numerical features is tested on the performance of Arabic personality prediction using AraPersonality dataset, which yielded 3.0% and 6.7% overall improvement to baseline experiments in binary representation and multiclass representation respectively
Learning Embeddings for Academic Papers

Academic papers contain both text and citation links. Representing such data is crucial for many downstream tasks, such as classification, disambiguation, duplicates detection, recommendation and influence prediction. The success of Skip-gram with Negative Sampling model (hereafter SGNS) has inspired many algorithms to learn embeddings for words, documents, and networks. However, there is limited research on learning the representation of linked documents such as academic papers. This dissertation first studies the norm convergence issue in SGNS and propose to use an L2 regularization to fix the problem. Our experiments show that our method improves SGNS and its variants on different types of data. We observe improvements upto 17.47% for word embeddings, 1.85% for document embeddings, and 46.41% for network embeddings. To learn the embeddings for academic papers, we propose several neural network based algorithms that can learn high-quality embeddings from different types of data. The algorithms we proposed are N2V (network2vector) for networks, D2V (document2vector) for documents, and P2V (paper2vector) for academic papers. Experiments show that our models outperform traditional algorithms and the state-of-the-art neural network methods on various datasets under different machine learning tasks. With the high quality embeddings, we design and present four applications on real-world datasets, i.e., academic paper and author search engines, author name disambiguation, and paper influence prediction.
A controlled study of sexual function in men with cannabis use disorder: A brief report

ABSTRACT Background: Studies about the effects of cannabis on male sexual function have contradictory results. This contradiction is thought to depend on the subjective assessment of the patient or on the use of non-validated questionnaires. Aims: The objective of this study was to evaluate the sexual function of male patients with cannabis use disorder by a validated questionnaire and to compare them with a healthy control group. Methods: 47 male patients with cannabis use disorder and without any comorbid psychiatric disorders were included in this study. The education level and age of the patients were matched with 33 healthy male participants. In addition to the sociodemographic characteristics, the pattern of cannabis use and sexual life were also questioned. Sexual function was evaluated by International Index of Erectile Function. Results: The scores of erectile function and orgasmic function in the patient group were found significantly lower than the control group. Erectile dysfunction was significantly more frequently reported in the patient group than the control group. Sexual desire, intercourse satisfaction, and overall satisfaction scores did not differ significantly between groups. Conclusions: Our findings indicated that sexual function should be inquired in men with cannabis use disorder. These findings could be used in prevention studies focused on cannabis use disorder.
Air Pollution and Internal Migration: Evidence from Iranian Household Survey

This paper uncovers the reason why social networks are used in a job market. The data are novel: a nationally representative matched employer-employee data set in Bangladesh with detailed information, including direct measures of the use of social networks. The empirical analysis shows that compared with those who used open channels to find jobs, the employees who used social networks found jobs more easily, have lower observable abilities, and achieved lower employment outcomes conditional on observable and unobservable abilities. These results are robust whether firm-occupation fixed effects are controlled for or not. By comparing these findings with theoretical predictions, the paper concludes that social networks play the role as fast and easy but narrow-spectrum matching. That is, social networks allow job seekers to find jobs quickly and easily and thereby reduce search costs, but the types of jobs available from social networks are narrower than those from open channels. As a consequence, those who choose to use social networks are more likely to end up having mismatched jobs, that is jobs in which they cannot take advantage of their specialties. In the context of developing countries, a considerable number of poor job seekers may use social networks out of necessity even if the returns to finding good-match jobs through open channels are sufficiently high.
Elusive Alpha and Beta Control in a Multicausal World

Abstract Virtually all scientific outlets, including the most prestigious journals, have implemented strict rules of α and (1–β) control, supposed to quantify the probability of a significant result assuming H0 and H1, respectively. However, estimation of α and β rests on the untenable assumption that a systematic effect ΔY in the dependent variable cannot be brought about by any other causal influence than the influence ΔX stated in H1 and negated in H0. Yet, in a given study, empirical evidence on ΔY related to ΔX can always reflect extraneous causal influences, because no treatment or measurement tool affords a pure measure of X and Y, respectively. Consequently, α and β cannot quantify error probabilities in specific studies.
Current treatment of Langerhans cell histiocytosis

ABSTRACT Introduction: Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (LCH) is caused by clonal expansion of CD1a+/CD207+ cells and is characterized by a spectrum of organ involvement and dysfunction. The pathogenic cells are defined by activation of the MAPK signaling pathway. Treatment of LCH is risk-adapted; patients with single lesions may respond well to local treatment, whereas patients with multi-system disease require systemic therapy. The combination of steroids and vinblastine given for a total duration of a year is the standard of care. While survival for patients without organ dysfunction is excellent, mortality rates for patients with organ dysfunction may reach 20%. Despite progress made in the treatment of LCH, disease reactivation rates remain above 30%, and standard second-line treatment is yet to be established. Treatment with BRAF inhibitors is a very promising alternative to current therapies, although prospective validation is required. Areas covered: This article describes the biology, disease characteristics, treatment modalities, and new directions in the treatment of LCH. Expert opinion: The pathogenesis of LCH has been redefined by the universal activation of the RAF/MEK/ERK signaling pathway. Therapies designed to target this pathway are promising. New technology for detection of cell free DNA may be used for monitoring response and early detection of recurrence.