Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knockdown of STAT3 targets a subpopulation of invasive melanoma stem‐like cells

Transcription factor signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) is constitutively activated in many cancers, including melanomas. Active, phosphorylated STAT3 contributes to tumor growth and formation of the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Recent evidence suggests an important role of STAT3 in self‐renewal of cancer stem‐like cells (CSCs). In the present study, we aimed to determine the expression and role of active STAT3 in melanoma CSCs. We found the increased levels of phosphorylated (Y705) STAT3 in CSC sphere cultures derived from three human and murine melanoma cells. Knockdown of STAT3 did not affect basal proliferation, but reduced sphere forming capacity of two human melanoma cell lines. Moreover, the level of active STAT3 was elevated in rhodamine 123 negative subpopulations of CSCs sorted from three melanoma cell lines. We found that focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and AKT signaling pathways, implicated in the regulation of cell migration and invasion, were up‐regulated in melanoma CSCs. Moreover, expression of SERPINA3, which regulates melanoma invasion, was increased in melanoma CSCs sphere cultures, which correlated with augmented cell invasion in Matrigel. Our findings show that STAT3 is activated and supports maintenance of melanoma CSCs. It suggests that STAT3 could serve as a potential target to impair tumor progression or recurrence.
Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting using Automatic Patch Optimization

Image inpainting has a wide range of applications in image processing. Exemplar-based technique can inpaint texture and structure regions simultaneously. However, the size of patch influences the result of inpainting. So far, there is no easy way to automatically determine the size of patch. Structure tensor can be used to determine priority, because it is able to determine the properties of a local area. In the paper, the size of patch is computed by structure tensor when adopting exemplar-based technique. To reduce blockiness, boundary constraints is added for searching for similar patches. The experiments show our proposed method can inpaint texture, flat, structure images. Adding boundary constraints can eliminate blockiness to a certain extent.
Right and Left Ventricular Strain Patterns After the Atrial Switch Operation for D-Transposition of the Great Arteries—A Magnetic Resonance Feature Tracking Study

Introduction: Adult survivors of the atrial switch operation for transposition of the great arteries present with a systemic morphologic right ventricle and a subpulmonary morphologic left ventricle. This physiology can be considered a model for the effects of long-term right ventricular pressure overload and of decreased left ventricular afterload. We aimed to determine the impact of these chronically altered loading conditions on myocardial deformation of the ventricles. Materials and methods: Two-dimensional steady state free precession cine images of 29 patients after atrial repair (age 29 ± 7 years) and 19 controls (24 ± 10 years; n.s.) were post-processed with feature tracking software (TomTec 2D CPA). Volumes, ejection fractions, global and free wall longitudinal and circumferential strains of both ventricles were compared between both groups. Results: Systemic right ventricular global longitudinal strain was decreased in patients compared to controls (−12.9 ± 3.3% vs. −18.9 ± 4.6%, p < 0.001), while right ventricular circumferential strain was unchanged (−15.8 ± 3.4% vs. −15.1 ± 5%; n.s.). Left ventricular longitudinal strain was similar in both groups (−17 ± 5.6% vs. −17.5 ± 4.6%; n.s.), but global left ventricular circumferential strain was lower in patients (−20.7 ± 4.1% vs. −27.3 ± 4.5%, p < 0.001). The systemic right ventricle, compared to the systemic left ventricle, showed decreased global longitudinal (p < 0.001) and circumferential strain (p < 0.001). The subpulmonary left ventricle, compared to the subpulmonary right ventricle, demonstrated similar longitudinal (p = 0.223) but higher circumferential strain (p < 0.001). Conclusions: In patients after atrial switch repair for transposition of the great arteries, the systemic right ventricle shows poor longitudinal strain, but maintains normal right ventricular circumferential strain. The left ventricle shows higher circumferential strain than the right ventricle, in both systemic and subpulmonary positions.
Development of internal quality assurance model in higher education institution

Development of Internal Quality Assurance Model in Higher Education Institution will provide guidelines to the achievement of organizational goals. The purpose of this article is to provide an Internal Quality Assurance Model in the Higher Education of Teacher Training and Education Singkawang (STKIP Singkawang). This paper uses a qualitative approach with multiple case study design. The data collection techniques used is interviews, observation, and documentation. There are two strategic management practices which are applied and appear in STKIP Singkawang's Internal Quality Assurance Model; (1) the existence of a factual model of STKIP Singkawang, and (2) types of innovative model decisions which are implemented in STKIP Singkawang. The research result give information about (1) System of Internal Quality Assurance of STKIP Singkawang have 30 quality standards; and (2) Model of Internal Quality Assurance have been developed is DIECU Model. DIECU Model is Deciding, Implementation, Evaluation, Check and Upgrading cycle. DIECU is model of continuous improvement for sustainable quality assurance.
CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling contributes to neuropathic pain via central sensitization mechanisms in a rat spinal nerve ligation model

Previous studies have demonstrated that the CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling axis is involved in the regulation of neuropathic pain (NP). Here, we performed experiments to test whether the CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling pathway contributes to the pathogenesis of neuropathic pain after spinal nerve ligation (SNL) via central sensitization mechanisms.
When and How to Diagnose and Treat Vitamin D Deficiency in Adults: A Practical and Clinical Update

Abstract Vitamin D deficiency is considered a major public health concern. Inadequate sun exposure, limited oral intake, and impaired intestinal absorption are common risk factors for vitamin D deficiency. An increasing amount of research is aimed at answering questions regarding the most convenient test that can assess vitamin D status, the indications for screening, and finally the utility of treatments for vitamin D deficiency. Our review outlines practical strategies to diagnose and treat vitamin D deficiency in adults. This study was undertaken in the PubMed and the Google Scholar databases in April 2018 without limitation as to the publication period. Vitamin D status is determined by measuring the 25-hydroxyvitamin D serum concentration. However, this technique has several limitations. Determining the accurate thresholds for vitamin D deficiency is still a matter of debate. Only individuals at risk for vitamin D deficiency should be screened. The symptoms of vitamin D deficiency are unspecific and very common. Therefore, physicians may easily suspect vitamin D deficiency, measure 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, and sometimes overprescribe supplementation. Hypovitaminosis D could rarely be treated by increasing consumption of foods naturally containing and fortified with vitamin D. Special attention should be given to vitamin D supplementation to prevent adverse effects. No safe and well-defined threshold of ultraviolet exposure allows adequate vitamin D synthesis without increasing the risk of skin cancer. Unanimous and decisive guidelines are urgently needed to improve knowledge and practices related to vitamin D deficiency.
The role of social and behavioral risk factors in explaining racial disparities in age-related cognitive impairment: a structured narrative review

ABSTRACT Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a growing public health concern with large disparities in incidence and prevalence between African Americans (AAs) and non-Hispanic whites (NHWs). The aim of this review was to examine the evidence of association between six modifiable risk factors (education, smoking, physical inactivity, obesity, social isolation, and psychosocial stress) and Alzheimer’s disease risk in AAs and NHWs. We identified 3,437 studies; 45 met inclusion criteria and were included in this review. Of the examined risks, education provided the strongest evidence of association with cognitive outcomes in AAs and NHWs. This factor may operate directly on Alzheimer’s disease risk through the neurocognitive benefits of cognitive stimulation or indirectly through social status.
Current Epidemiology, Etiology, and Burden of Acute Skin Infections in the United States

Abstract The US burden of acute skin infections is substantial. While Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus spp. are the most common causes, gram-negative bacteria and mixed infections can occur in some settings. These mixed infections are more likely to result in inappropriate empiric antibiotic therapy. Important challenges remain in diagnosing and treating acute skin infections.
Achalasia diagnosed despite normal integrated relaxation pressure responds favorably to therapy

Achalasia diagnosis requires elevated integrated relaxation pressure (IRP; manometric marker of lower esophageal sphincter [LES] relaxation). Yet, some patients exhibit clinical features of achalasia despite normal IRP and have LES dysfunction demonstrable by other means. We hypothesized these patients to exhibit equivalent therapeutic response compared to standard achalasia patients.
Percutaneous injection of autologous platelet-rich fibrin versus platelet-rich plasma in sacroiliac joint dysfunction: An applied comparative study.

BACKGROUND Sacroiliac joint dysfunction is a common cause of low back pain. Injection of autologous platelet rich fibrin (PRF) and platelet rich plasma (PRP) in the affected joint is a new option in this disorder management. OBJECTIVE To compare platelet concentrates (PRP and PRF) in injectable form in sacroiliac joint dysfunction. METHODS This is a non-randomized controlled trial between two groups (124 PRF patients and 62 PRP patients). All cases are treated by sacroiliac joint injection for sacroiliac joint pain. RESULTS Over 6 months of follow-up, there were statistically significant improvements in participants who received SIJ PRF injection with regards to pain measured by the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), in comparison to PRP. In the two groups (PRF and PRP), there was significant difference in the post 2 VAS (6 months after the procedure) as the P value was 0.045. There was no significant difference in the pre VAS (P value of 0.909) and post 1 VAS (one month after the procedure) as the P value was 0.154. No adverse events of infection, neurologic injury, or any other complication were reported following the injection. CONCLUSIONS Participants who received SIJ PRF experienced significant clinical improvement compared to those who received PRP in the late follow-up.
New statistical prediction scheme for monthly precipitation variability in the rainy season over northeastern China

This study focused on seasonal prediction for monthly precipitation over Northeast China (NEC) in the rainy season. A statistical method combining empirical orthogonal function (EOF) decomposition and multi‐linear regression was developed and tested. For each EOF mode of each month in summer, the relationship between the EOF and SSTs in the previous winter was investigated and indices were constructed to be used as predictors. The predictors were required to be physically connected to the predictand and to perform well in cross validation. Monthly rainfall was reconstructed from the predicted time series and the observed spatial load of the first three EOF modes. The results of the leave‐one‐out cross‐validation for 1982–2010, and of the independent validation for 2011–2018, indicate that this new method provides good predictions of monthly precipitation over NEC. There was good agreement between the observed and predicted monthly precipitation, with correlation coefficients of 0.45, 0.40 and 0.55, and hit rates of 73, 62 and 73% for June, July and August precipitation, respectively, for the period 1982 to 2018.
IL-17 inhibition in axial spondyloarthritis: current and future perspectives

ABSTRACT Introduction: Interleukin (IL)-17 is a proinflammatory cytokine considered to play a significant role in the immunopathogenesis of ankylosing spondylitis (AS)/axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) as well as of other spondyloarthritides. There is a number of substances targeting IL-17, which are at different stages of development in the axSpA indication. Areas covered: This review summarizes the current evidence on the role of IL-17 in the pathophysiology of axSpA and provided a comprehensive review of clinical and radiographic outcomes as well as of safety data from studies with IL-17A inhibitors secukinumab and ixekizumab. Ongoing studies on other IL-17 inhibitors (bimekizumab, brodalumab and BCD-085) that are being developed are also summarized. Expert opinion: The development of the IL-17 inhibitors has expanded AS treatment with effective options and confirmed the pathophysiological role of IL-17 in axSpA. IL-17 inhibition showed sufficient efficacy against signs and symptoms of the disease even after the failure of tumor necrosis factor inhibitors, being at the same time reasonably safe.
Adipose-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells Applied in Fibrin Glue Stimulate Peripheral Nerve Regeneration

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) hold a great promise for cell therapy. To date, they represent one of the best choices for the treatment of post-traumatic injuries of the peripheral nervous system. Although autologous can be easily transplanted in the injured area, clinical advances in this filed have been impaired by lack of preservation of graft cells into the injury area after transplantation. Indeed, cell viability is not retained after injection into the blood stream, and cells injected directly into the area of injury either are washed off or inhibit regeneration through scar formation and neuroma development. This study proposes a new way of MSCs delivery to the area of traumatic injury by using fibrin glue, which not only fixes cells at the site of application but also provides extracellular matrix support. Using a sciatic nerve injury model, MSC derived from adipose tissue embedded in fibrin glue were able to enter the nerve and migrate mainly retrogradely after transplantation. They also demonstrated a neuroprotective effect on DRG L5 sensory neurons and stimulated axon growth and myelination. Post-traumatic changes of the sensory neuron phenotype were also improved. Importantly, MSCs stimulated nerve angiogenesis and motor function recovery. Therefore, our data suggest that MSC therapy using fibrin glue is a safe and efficient method of cell transplantation in cases of sciatic nerve injury, and that this method of delivery of regeneration stimulants could be beneficial for the successful treatment of other central and peripheral nervous system conditions.
Study of Some Histopathological and Immunological Analysis in Patients with Chronic Tonsillitis

Several histopathological and immunological changes that occur in patients with palatine tonsillitis. Blood and tonsil samples were collected from patients with palatine tonsillitis and (healthy peoples) in Ramadi city. The results of histopathological analysis showed the percent of immunopositive cells for the proliferation marker was low while the percent of immunpositive cells for the apoptosis marker was high. Serum was used to know the effect of palatine tonsillitis on some assays CRP, RF, IL-6 and IgM. The results were showed the following: Significant increase in the levels of CRP and RF in patients compared with control group. Significant increase in the levels of IL-6 and IgM compared with control group. We conclude that patients in Ramadi city have several pathological changes in palatine tonsils.
AcMC 2: Accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms for Probabilistic Models

Probabilistic models (PMs) are ubiquitously used across a variety of machine learning applications. They have been shown to successfully integrate structural prior information about data and effectively quantify uncertainty to enable the development of more powerful, interpretable, and efficient learning algorithms. This paper presents AcMC2, a compiler that transforms PMs into optimized hardware accelerators (for use in FPGAs or ASICs) that utilize Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to infer and query a distribution of posterior samples from the model. The compiler analyzes statistical dependencies in the PM to drive several optimizations to maximally exploit the parallelism and data locality available in the problem. We demonstrate the use of AcMC2 to implement several learning and inference tasks on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. AcMC2-generated accelerators provide a 47-100× improvement in runtime performance over a 6-core IBM Power8 CPU and a 8-18× improvement over an NVIDIA K80 GPU. This corresponds to a 753-1600× improvement over the CPU and 248-463× over the GPU in performance-per-watt terms.
Evaluating Characteristics of CUDA Communication Primitives on High-Bandwidth Interconnects

Data-intensive applications such as machine learning and analytics have created a demand for faster interconnects to avert the memory bandwidth wall and allow GPUs to be effectively leveraged for lower compute intensity tasks. This has resulted in wide adoption of heterogeneous systems with varying underlying interconnects, and has delegated the task of understanding and copying data to the system or application developer. No longer is a malloc followed by memcpy the only or dominating modality of data transfer; application developers are faced with additional options such as unified memory and zero-copy memory. Data transfer performance on these systems is now impacted by many factors including data transfer modality, system interconnect hardware details, CPU caching state, CPU power management state, driver policies, virtual memory paging efficiency, and data placement. This paper presents Comm|Scope, a set of microbenchmarks designed for system and application developers to understand memory transfer behavior across different data placement and exchange scenarios. Comm|Scope comprehensively measures the latency and bandwidth of CUDA data transfer primitives, and avoids common pitfalls in ad-hoc measurements by controlling CPU caches, clock frequencies, and avoids measuring synchronization costs imposed by the measurement methodology where possible. This paper also presents an evaluation of Comm|Scope on systems featuring the POWER and x86 CPU architectures and PCIe 3, NVLink 1, and NVLink 2 interconnects. These systems are chosen as representative configurations of current high-performance GPU platforms. Comm|Scope measurements can serve to update insights about the relative performance of data transfer methods on current systems. This work also reports insights for how high-level system design choices affect the performance of these data transfers, and how developers can optimize applications on these systems.
Augmented reality in science classroom: perceived effects in education, visualization and information processing

Technology in education has evolved over the decades and has provided more opportunities for technologies such as Augmented Reality to find its way into the pedagogy of teachers in science. In this paper, an AR app was used in facilitating a lesson on chemical bonding and simple compounds. The effects of such innovation were studied using observation and various data gathering methods in an action research design. Results show that AR is a tool that enhances visualization of concepts through elements of virtual and real images, allows students to map physical characteristics easily and aids them in developing mental images for further discourse. Results also show that AR does not only improve motivation but triggers more student-student interaction and teacher-student interaction as well. Students learning attitudes towards chemistry improved in terms of their appreciation of the subject, their perception of its relation to real life and of their meaning-making processes. The teacher indicated that AR apps can innovate the classroom and can provide opportunities for implementation as they are easy to use. However, findings also show that teachers may have a hard time looking for free resources of apps that will meet their needs, and that there is challenge in ensuring that misconceptions are avoided from AR apps' oversimplification of visualization. This study also presents some action plans for further use of AR apps in teaching science.
The Role of Instructional Scaffolding to Facilitate Problem Solving Skills in Music Improvisation

This study aims to investigate the role of instructional scaffolding in developing problem-solving skills in melodic improvisation among beginner piano students. Three action research cycles were implemented to identify the effectiveness of scaffolding instructions. The process of measuring students’ problem-solving skills in improvisation is audio-recorded and further transcribed onto music scores in the third action research cycle for data analysis. The findings showed a positive development and improvement in the students’ problem-solving skills and filled the knowledge void for music teachers to plan and teach music improvisation progressively. These findings were helpful for music teachers to implement future musical tasks in creative activities.
Industrial robot-based system design of thickness scanning measurement using ultrasonic

Abstract. Wall thickness is one of the core indicators for measuring the quality of large thin-walled parts such as rocket siding and aircraft skin. However, the traditional handheld thickness measurement method has high labor intensity, low efficiency and poor accuracy consistency. Therefore, an in situ ultrasonic automatic scanning thickness measurement method for large thin-walled parts based on industrial robots is proposed. This “industrial robot + ultrasound” integrated function is a compact system, and a set of innovative methodological or technical solutions is presented, such as (i) TCP and UDP communication protocols being constructed to realize a high-speed and stable communication relationship between the upper computer, robot motion controller and ultrasonic thickness measurement unit; (ii) a coupling gap adjustment method based on eddy-current sensors being adopted to ensure the adaptability of the ultrasonic probe to surface topography of the measured part during scanning measurement; and (iii) a multi-sensor coordinate unified model and coupling gap state discrimination model being established for robot-aided thickness measurement. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, a series of calibrations and experiments were designed based on the KUKA robot platform and the developed ultrasonic pulse measurement system. Finally, the industrial robot-based ultrasonic thickness scanning measurement has been built and tested for performing the measurement of a rocket tank wall.