Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of mitral valve haemodynamics after mitral valve repair for degenerative mitral regurgitation

Objective Intraoperative predictors of functional mitral valve (MV) stenosis after surgical repair of mitral regurgitation (MR) caused by prolapse remain poorly characterised. This study evaluated the effect of annuloplasty size on postoperative MV haemodynamics during exercise and evaluated predictors of MV hemodynamics. Methods 104 patients were randomly assigned to leaflet resection or preservation for surgical repair of MR in the Canadian Mitral Research Alliance CardioLink-2 study. In this post hoc analysis, we compared MV haemodynamics between the two surgical groups and examined the relationship between annuloplasty size and MV haemodynamics 1 year after repair in the combined groups. Echocardiograms were performed at baseline and intraoperatively. Exercise transthoracic echocardiography was performed 1 year postoperatively. Multivariable linear regression analysis was used to identify predictors of exercise MV gradients at follow-up. Results Mean age of participants was 65±10 years, and 83% were male. Median annuloplasty size was 34 (IQR 32–36). Dividing by the median, 48 (46%) had annuloplasty size of <34 mm and 56 (54%) had ≥34 mm. Mean and peak exercise gradients at 1 year were 11±5 mm Hg and 22±9 mm Hg in <34, and 6±3 mm Hg and 14±5 mm Hg in ≥34 (p<0.001). Rate of residual MR was similar in both groups. In multivariable analyses, annuloplasty size of ≥34 mm was associated with lower mean and peak exercise gradients at 12 months, after adjustment for repair type, age, sex, heart rate and body surface area (β −4.1, 95% CI −6 to –3, p<0.001, and β −7 95% CI −10 to –4, p<0.001, respectively). Intraoperative mean and peak MV gradients by transesophageal echocardiography independently predicted mean and peak resting and exercise gradients at follow-up (p<0.001). Similar results were obtained in both leaflet resection and preservation. Conclusion Annuloplasty size of ≥34 mm is associated with a 4 and 7 mm Hg reduction in mean and peak exercise MV gradients, respectively, 1 year post MV repair regardless of the repair strategy used. Intraoperative TEE MV gradients predict exercise MV gradients 1 year post repair. Trial registration number NCT02552771.
Healing from Trauma through Psychoeducation: Understanding Young Adult Client Group Experiences

ABSTRACT Young adults with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) face greater risks for health complications, homelessness, and court involvement. However, research on trauma interventions for young adults is minimal. Thus, this study examines the experiences of young adults participating in a six-week trauma psychoeducation group to explore aspects of group experience that could potentially increase the benefits and efficacy of such intervention. The group combined trauma psychoeducational content on ACEs and resilience, practice of coping skills during sessions, and traditional group processing techniques. Participants were asked to respond to open-ended questions on the most helpful aspects of the group and any insights gleaned. Qualitative results suggest that the therapeutic group context is vital in effectively presenting psychoeducational content. These findings indicate that this group model, which integrates psychoeducation and traditional group techniques, has the potential to help young adults develop the resilience needed to reverse the negative impacts of ACEs and prevent future adversity.
The Contingent Effect of IT Use on Product Innovation in the Transition Economy: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

ABSTRACT Scholars have developed a large and robust literature examining the impact of IT on firm innovation. However, this literature often produces divergent, likely context-dependent, results and tends to be limited to developed economies. As a result, we have only partial knowledge about how IT use impacts product innovation. This study rectifies that deficiency and resolves prior divergent findings by employing fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to investigate the contingent effects of IT use for exploration and exploitation on product innovation in China, which is transitioning from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. We draw on a unique sample of 262 Chinese manufacturing firms that responded to the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey and developed several configurations of conditions where IT use fostered product innovation depending on the institutional characteristics of a transitional economy, specifically its degree of market competitiveness and legal enforcement. Our findings share similarities to prior studies set in developed economies, while demonstrating features unique to a transition economy. Using a configurational approach reveals the combinational and asymmetric relationships among IT use, the institutional environment, and resultant product innovation. This helps understand situational characteristics often unexamined in prior studies and complements the findings from regression-based studies.
Electoral rules and voter bias against female candidates in Brazilian congressional elections

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether and how electoral rules moderate the effect of voter bias on candidate choice. Voter bias against female candidates follows a pattern known as aversive sexism, which denotes that voters discriminate when the choice structure does not make the bias clear to others and to themselves. As a result, voters are less likely to vote for women when they can substitute ideologically close female candidates with male co-partisans. The paper uses survey data and a ballot experiment in Brazil to investigate why, contrary to conventional wisdom on the topic, voters are more likely to elect women running in plurality races for the Senate than in proportional races for the Chamber of Deputies. The results shed light on how institutions can produce voting patterns that harm the electoral prospects of female candidates.
Probing Relational Knowledge in Language Models via Word Analogies

Understanding relational knowledge plays an integral part in natural language understanding. When it comes to pre-trained language models (PLMs), prior work has been focusing on probing relational knowledge by filling the blanks in pre-defined prompts such as "The capital of France is —". However, these probes may be affected by the co-occurrence of target relation words and entities (e.g. "capital", "France" and "Paris") in the pre-training corpus. In this work, we extend these probing methodologies leveraging analogical proportions as a proxy to probe relational knowledge in transformer-based PLMs without directly presenting the desired relation. In particular, we analysed the ability of PLMs to understand (1) the directionality of a given relation (e.g. Paris-France is not the same as France-Paris ); (2) the ability to distinguish types on a given relation (both France and Japan are countries); and (3) the relation itself (Paris is the capital of France, but not Rome). Our results show how PLMs are extremely accurate at (1) and (2), but have room for improvement for (3). To better understand the reasons behind this behaviour and the types of mistake made by PLMs, we provide an extended quantitative analysis.
Semantic Dependency Parsing with Edge GNNs

Second-order neural parsers have obtained high accuracy in semantic dependency parsing. Inspired by the factor graph representation of second-order parsing, we propose edge graph neural networks (E-GNNs). In an E-GNN, each node corresponds to a dependency edge, and the neighbors are defined in terms of sibling, co-parent, and grandparent relationships. We conduct experiments on SemEval 2015 Task 18 English datasets, showing the superior performance of E-GNNs 1 .
From autopoiesis to self-optimization: Toward an enactive model of biological regulation

The theory of autopoiesis has been influential in many areas of theoretical biology, especially in the fields of artificial life and origins of life. However, it has not managed to productively connect with mainstream biology, partly for theoretical reasons, but arguably mainly because deriving specific working hypotheses has been challenging. The theory has recently undergone significant conceptual development in the enactive approach to life and mind. Hidden complexity in the original conception of autopoiesis has been explicated in the service of other operationalizable concepts related to self-individuation: precariousness, adaptivity, and agency. Here we advance these developments by highlighting the interplay of these concepts with considerations from thermodynamics: reversibility, irreversibility, and path-dependence. We interpret this interplay in terms of the self-optimization model, and present modeling results that illustrate how these minimal conditions enable a system to re-organize itself such that it tends toward coordinated constraint satisfaction at the system level. Although the model is still very abstract, these results point in a direction where the enactive approach could productively connect with cell biology.
Estimation of poromechanical and thermal conductivity properties of unsaturated isotropically microcracked cement pastes

This study focuses on the estimation of mechanical, hydromechanical and thermal conduction parameters of isotropic microcracked hydrated cement pastes in unsaturated conditions. The prediction of these parameters is obtained as a function of saturation degree and isotropic microcrack density parameter by applying an explicit effective medium approximation scheme on the basis of a simple microstructure description of the material. This latter is supposed to be composed of a homogeneous matrix in which are distributed ellipsoidal particles and penny‐shaped inclusions representing pores and microcracks, respectively. These two types of inclusions are assumed to be of well‐separated sizes so that a two‐step homogenization procedure is employed. The effects of the pore shape and both open and close microcracks on the considered physical properties are investigated in partially saturated conditions by adopting a simplified desaturation–resaturation scenario. It is shown that the saturation degree repercussions on these properties increase when the pores have an oblate shape with low aspect ratio. Moreover, while Biot coefficient and thermal conductivity are significantly affected by saturation degree, undrained mechanical parameters appear to be only moderately modified by this factor. Besides, as expected microcracks induce important changes in all properties. The effects of the adsorbed water layers covering the surface of desaturated pores on the Biot coefficient are investigated by making use of the disjoining pressure concept, and results show only a moderate influence for very small pores. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An integrated map of cell type-specific gene expression in pancreatic islets

Pancreatic islets are comprised of multiple endocrine cell types that produce hormones required for glucose homeostasis, and islet dysfunction is a major factor in the development of type 1 and type 2 diabetes (T1D, T2D). Numerous studies have generated gene expression profiles in individual islet cell types using single cell assays. However, there is no canonical reference of gene expression in islet cell types in both health and disease that is also easily accessible for researchers to access, query, and use in bioinformatics pipelines. Here we present an integrated reference map of islet cell type-specific gene expression from 192,203 cells derived from single cell RNA-seq assays of 65 non-diabetic, T1D autoantibody positive (Aab+), T1D, and T2D donors from the Human Pancreas Analysis Program. We identified 10 endocrine and non-endocrine cell types as well as sub-populations of several cell types, and defined sets of marker genes for each cell type and sub-population. We tested for differential expression within each cell type in T1D Aab+, T1D, and T2D states, and identified 1,701 genes with significant changes in expression in any cell type. Most changes were observed in beta cells in T1D, and, by comparison, there were almost no genes with changes in T1D Aab+. To facilitate user interaction with this reference, we provide the data using several single cell visualization and reference mapping tools as well as open-access analytical pipelines used to create this reference. The results will serve as a valuable resource to investigators studying islet biology and diabetes.
Developmental and molecular contributions to contextual fear memory emergence in mice

Cognitive impairment is a common phenotype of neurodevelopmental disorders, but how these deficits arise remains elusive. Determining the onset of discrete cognitive capabilities facilitates studies in probing mechanisms underlying their emergence. The present study analyzed the emergence of contextual fear memory persistence (7-day memory retention) and remote memory (30-day memory retention). There was a rapid transition from postnatal day (P) 20 to P21, in which memory persistence emerged in C57Bl/6J male and female mice. Remote memory was present at P23, but expression was not robust compared to pubertal and adult mice. Previous studies reported that following deletion of the MET receptor tyrosine kinase (MET), there are fear memory deficits in adult mice and the timing of critical period plasticity is altered in the developing visual cortex, positioning MET as a regulator for onset of contextual fear memory. Sustaining Met past the normal window of peak cortical expression or deleting Met, however, did not alter the timing of emergence of persistence or remote memory capabilities during development. Fear memory in young adults, however, was disrupted. Remarkably, compared to homecage controls, the number of FOS-expressing infragranular neurons in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) did not increase from contextual memory formation recall of fear conditioning at P35 but exhibited enhanced activation at P90 in male and female mice. Additionally, MET-expressing neurons were preferentially recruited at P90 compared to P35 during fear memory expression. The studies demonstrate a developmental profile of contextual fear memory capabilities. Further, developmental disruption of Met leads to a delayed functional deficit that arises in young adulthood, correlated with an increase of mPFC neuron activation during fear memory recall.
Region-specific impact of aging on cortical myelination and thickness

Healthy aging affects both grey and white matter. However, the trajectories of regional specific degeneration are not fully understood. Here we investigate the effects of aging on cortical thickness and myelin concentration in a large cohort of healthy participants (N = 610) aged between 18 and 89 years’ old who underwent single-site T1-weighted, T2-weighted and MTI sequences in the context of the Cam-CAN project. Participants were subdivided in three age groups representative of young, middle and late adulthood. The large size of the dataset allowed us to minimize the impact of sample variance without relying on multi-site acquisition protocols. We assessed linear changes in cortical thickness and cortical myelin concentration; the latter was assessed using both T1w/T2w ratio and MTR proxies, to evaluate which is the most stable metrics. Our results do not fit with either the anterior-posterior gradient or the last-in/first-out hypothesis. We demonstrate that aging patterns are more complex than just depending on a spatial gradient or the temporally reversed order of regional development. Moreover, we show a dissociation in aging patterns between somatosensory and motor regions both in terms of cortical thickness and myelin concentration. Finally, comparing T1w/T2w and MTR results of cortical myelination, we found the latter being a more stable and reliable proxy. Highlights Cortical thickness and myelo-architecture changes must be jointly considered in investigating brain aging trajectories. We assessed linear changes in cortical thickness and myelination in a large, homogeneous and single site MRI dataset. Motor and sensory regions show a dissociation in their aging trajectories both in terms of cortical thickness and myelin concentration. Sensory processing regions show similar aging trajectories in both cortical thickness and myelin concentration. MTR is a more reliable proxy for myelin concentration compared to T1w/T2w ratio.
One does not simply grow well: Performance of grassland plants in home and foreign soil and climate

Plant-soil feedbacks (PSF) play a substantial role in determining plant performance in native and foreign habitats. Yet, PSF strength may be altered by climatic parameters, creating synergies. Here, we assess performance of alpine grassland species in their native and in foreign soils in an experiment including different climates. Using soil and seeds sampled from six alpine grassland sites spreading in a gradient from Northern Africa to Northern Europe, we compared plant performance in home soil and in five foreign soils, as well as home and foreign climates (simulated temperature and photoperiod in growth chambers). We found that despite a high variability in plant performance between sites, plants generally performed better in their home soil and home climate, than in foreign soil or in foreign climate. However, an interaction between soil and climate effect caused this better performance in home soil to occur only when in foreign climate. Similarly, performance improved in home climate only when plants were also placed in foreign soil. Synthesis: In contrast to predictions from the literature, no benefit from growing in foreign soils are indicated. At least on the short term, climate change alone is not suggested to affect native grassland plant performance. However, when introduced to a habitat with a similar climate to their native habitat, plants may perform as well as in their native range, but when introduced both to a new soil and climate, plants will do poorly. This finding sheds light on the interactive effect of climate and soil origin, as well as the possible success of plant introductions under a changing climate.
Comprehensive and Comparative Transcriptional Profiling of the Cell Wall Stress Response in Bacillus subtilis

The bacterial cell wall (CW) is an essential protective barrier and the frontline of cellular interactions with the environment and also a target for numerous antimicrobial agents. Accordingly, its integrity and homeostasis are closely monitored and rapid adaptive responses by transcriptional reprogramming induce appropriate counter-measures against perturbations. Here, we report a comprehensive and comparative transcriptional profiling of the primary cell envelope stress responses (CESR), based on combining RNAseq and high-resolution tiling array studies of the Gram-positive model bacterium Bacillus subtilis exposed to a range of antimicrobial compounds that interfere with cytoplasmic, membrane-coupled or extracellular steps of peptidoglycan (PG) biosynthesis. It revealed the complexity of the CESR of B. subtilis and unraveled the contribution of extracytoplasmic function sigma factors (ECFs) and two-component signal transduction systems (TCSs) to protect the cell envelope. While membrane-anchored steps are tightly controlled, early cytoplasmic and late extracellular steps of PG biosynthesis are hardly monitored at all. The ECF σ factors σW and particularly σM provide a general CESR, while σV is almost exclusively induced by lysozyme, against which it provides specific resistance. Remarkably, σX was slightly repressed by most antibiotics, pointing towards a role in envelope homeostasis rather than CESR. It shares this role with the WalRK TCS, which balances CW growth with controlled autolysis. In contrast, all remaining TCSs are envelope stress-inducible systems. LiaRS is induced by a wide range of PG synthesis inhibitors, while the three paralogous systems BceAB, PsdRS and ApeRS are more compound-specific detoxification modules. Induction of the CssRS TCS by all antibiotics interfering with membrane-anchored steps of PG biosynthesis points towards a physiological link between CESR and secretion stress. Based on the expression signatures, a suite of CESR-specific B. subtilis whole cell biosensors were developed and carefully evaluated. This is the first comprehensive transcriptomic study focusing exclusively on the primary effects of envelope perturbances that shall provide a reference point for future studies on Gram-positive CESR.
Accuracy of Critical Care Ultrasonography Plus Arterial Blood Gas Analysis Based Algorithm in Diagnosing Aetiology of Acute Respiratory Failure

Abstract Introduction Lung ultrasound when used in isolation, usually misses out metabolic causes of dyspnoea and differentiating acute exacerbation of COPD from pneumonia and pulmonary embolism is difficult, hence we thought of combining critical care ultrasonography (CCUS) with arterial blood gas analysis (ABG). Aim of the study The objective of this study was to estimate accuracy of Critical Care Ultrasonography (CCUS) plus Arterial blood gas (ABG) based algorithm in diagnosing aetiology of dyspnoea. Accuracy of traditional Chest X-ray (CxR) based algorithm was also validated in the following setting. Methods It was a facility based comparative study, where 174 dyspneic patients were subjected to CCUS plus ABG and CxR based algorithms on admission to ICU. The patients were classified into one of five pathophysiological diagnosis 1) Alveolar( Lung-pneumonia)disorder ; 2) Alveolar (Cardiac-pulmonary edema) disorder; 3) Ventilation with Alveolar defect (COPD) disorder ;4) Perfusion disorder; and 5) Metabolic disorder. We calculated diagnostic test properties of CCUS plus ABG and CXR based algorithm in relation to composite diagnosis and correlated these algorithms for each of the defined pathophysiological diagnosis. Results The sensitivity of CCUS and ABG based algorithm was 0.85 (95% CI-75.03-92.03) for alveolar (lung) ; 0.94 (95% CI-85.15-98.13) for alveolar (cardiac); 0.83 (95% CI-60.78-94.16) for ventilation with alveolar defect; 0.66 (95% CI-30-90.32) for perfusion defect; 0.63 (95% CI-45.25-77.07) for metabolic disorders.Cohn’s kappa correlation coefficient of CCUS plus ABG based algorithm in relation to composite diagnosis was 0.7 for alveolar (lung), 0.85 for alveolar (cardiac), 0.78 for ventilation with alveolar defect, 0.79 for perfusion defect and 0.69 for metabolic disorders. Conclusion CCUS plus ABG algorithm is highly sensitive and it’s agreement with composite diagnosis is far superior. It is a first of it’s kind study, where authors have attempted combining two point of care tests and creating an algorithmic approach for timely diagnosis and intervention.