Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serial Clinical Scoring to Assess Transported Pediatric Patients

Objectives The objective of this study was to evaluate serial Transport Risk Assessment in Pediatrics (TRAP) scoring during pediatric critical care transport as a potential measure for specialized pediatric transport teams (PTTs). Methods This was a retrospective study with a provincial PTT from a tertiary hospital pediatric intensive care unit. All acutely ill children who were transported by the PTT between 2018 and 2019 were included in the study. The TRAP scores were measured at time of transport team arrival (TRAP1), time at arrival to tertiary center (TRAP2), and 4 hours postarrival to tertiary center (TRAP3). Results A total of 300 transports were included. Patients' mean age was 54 months, with lower respiratory tract infection (40.7%) as the most common diagnosis. There were significant differences between TRAP1-TRAP2 (P < 0.01) and TRAP1-TRAP3 (P < 0.01), but not between TRAP2-TRAP3 (P = 0.67). The most significant improvements of ΔTRAP1-TRAP2 scores were seen in septic shock (mean, 2.0; SD, 1.7). Conclusions The TRAP scores improved following the PTTs' arrival to acutely ill children, particularly with sepsis. Serial TRAP scoring may present a system for evaluation of team performance and/or characterize disease states that are positively impacted by PTTs. Future prospective evaluation is needed to validate TRAP for this purpose.
Bilateral Deficit and Bilateral Performance: Relationship with Sprinting and Change of Direction in Elite Youth Soccer Players

The purpose of the study was to examine the differences in bilateral deficit (BLD) at different loadings during the half-squat jump (SJ) and horizontal countermovement jump (HCMJ) to determine if there is a relationship with linear sprint or change of direction (COD). The second goal was to check if fast players were more powerful in SJ and HCMJ than slow players in bilateral performance (BP). Twenty-seven male youth soccer players participated in the study. Players were divided in two groups, faster and slower, according to their sprint performance (10 and 40 m). BLD average power with body weight (BW) and 25%BW were significantly higher than 50%BW (p < 0.01). BLD during HCMJ was significantly higher than BLD during SJ with BW, 25%BW and 50%BW (p < 0.01). There were no statistical relationships between BLD and sprint or COD performance (p > 0.05). Fast players showed significantly higher SJ power with all the different loads and HCMJ than slow players (p < 0.01), and fast players lost more time executing COD-90° than slow players (p < 0.01). There were no statistical differences between fast and slow players in BLD. BLD seems to be dependent on motor task, contraction type and load and could not be a proper measure to estimate sprint and COD performance. Faster players are confirmed to be more powerful players than slow players, and decrements in COD could be a key benchmark to identify deficit between linear and COD performance.
An improved model to predict the effects of changing biodiversity levels on ecosystem function

The development of models of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) has advanced rapidly over the last 20 years, incorporating insights gained through extensive experimental work. We propose Generalised Diversity‐Interactions models that include many of the features of existing models and have several novel features. Generalised Diversity‐Interactions models characterise the contribution of two species to ecosystem function as being proportional to the product of their relative abundances raised to the power of a coefficient θ. A value of θ < 1 corresponds to a stronger than expected contribution of species' pairs to ecosystem functioning, particularly at low relative abundance of species. Varying the value of θ has profound consequences for community‐level properties of BEF relationships, including: (i) saturation properties of the BEF relationship; (ii) the stability of ecosystem function across communities; (iii) the likelihood of transgressive overyielding. For low values of θ, loss of species can have a much greater impact on ecosystem functioning than loss of community evenness. Generalised Diversity‐Interactions models serve to unify the modelling of BEF relationships as they include several other current models as special cases. Generalised Diversity‐Interactions models were applied to seven data sets and three functions: total biomass (five grassland experiments), community respiration (one bacterial experiment) and nitrate leaching (one earthworm experiment). They described all the nonrandom structure in the data in six experiments, and most of it in the seventh experiment and so fit as well or better than competing BEF models for these data. They were significantly better than Diversity‐Interactions models in five experiments. Synthesis. We show that Generalized Diversity‐Interactions models quantitatively integrate several methods that separately address effects of species richness, evenness and composition on ecosystem function. They describe empirical data at least as well as alternative models and improve the ability to quantitatively test among several theoretical and practical hypotheses about the effects of biodiversity levels on ecosystem function. They improve our understanding of important aspects of the relationship between biodiversity (evenness and richness) and ecosystem function (BEF), which include saturation, effects of species loss, the stability of ecosystem function and the incidence of transgressive overyielding.
Cortisol and Dehydroepiandrosterone Response to ACTH and Frailty in Older Women.

BACKGROUND The response to adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) is poorly characterized in old-old adults and may provide insight into the physiologic response to stress. METHODS We performed a standard 250 mcg ACTH stimulation test in a home-based substudy of 51 women aged 85-96 years enrolled in the Women's Health and Aging Study II who were not taking corticosteroids. We examined the cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) responses at 0, 30, 60, and 120 minutes, overall and by frailty status. RESULTS The peak cortisol response to ACTH could not be determined, with the highest levels at the 120 minute time point. Pre- and post-ACTH stimulated cortisol levels did not differ by frailty status over this time frame, with no difference in the characteristics of the dose-response curves. Pre- and post-ACTH stimulated DHEA levels also did not differ by frailty status, though the dose-response curves suggested divergence after stimulation, with a more rapid DHEA response with increasing frailty. CONCLUSIONS Our data demonstrate a robust cortisol response to ACTH challenge testing, but inadequate negative feedback in old-old women, resulting in prolonged exposure to cortisol. Future studies should examine dynamic cortisol and DHEA responses in this age group, using a less potent ACTH stimulus and longer collection period.
The Droguing of Meddy Pinball and Seeding with Alace Floats

This paper reports the results of a hydrographic survey and the successful deliberate deep droguing of a meddy (Pinball) and the seeding of its core with two ALACE floats. The drogued buoy results give important kinematic properties of the eddy core in real timesemicolon the ALACE have allowed the position of the meddy to be tracked for seven months. Pinball was found against the continental slope near Lisbon canyon. The maximum core salinity was 36·564 psu, at a depth of 1260 m, but the maximum rotation rate with period ~2·5 d was in the upper core near 700 m, where temperatures reached 13·2°C. The azimuthal transport to a radius of 50 km was ~13 Sv. Pinball moved from the continental slope near Lisbon to the central Tagus Abyssal Plain, returned towards the continental slope and then moved westwards crossing the central Tagus Abyssal Plain a second time. At times it had a marked remote sensing infra-red sea-surface signature. It moved ~550 km over 204 d and the near real-time data meant that, in principle, this eddy could have been re-surveyed, redrogued or reseeded with floats during this period.
100 Days of COVID-19 Prevention and Control in China

Abstract The epidemic of novel coronavirus diseases was first reported in China in late December 2019 and has been brought under control after some two months in China. However, it has become a global pandemic and the number of cases and deaths continues to increase outside of China. We describe the emergence of the pandemic, detail the first 100 days of China’s response as a Phase 1 Containment followed by Phase 2 Containment strategy, and briefly highlight areas of focus for the future. Specific, simple, and pragmatic strategies used in China for risk assessment, prioritization, and deployment of resources are described. Details of implementation, at different risk levels, of the traditional public health interventions are shared. Involvement of society in mounting a whole country response and challenges experienced with logistics and supply chains are described. Finally, the methods China is employing to cautiously re-start social life and economic activity are outlined.
Lack of association between IRF6 polymorphisms and nonsyndromic oral clefts in South Indian population

Objective: This present study is aimed to investigate the association between interferon regulatory factor 6 ( IRF6 ), single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and nonsyndromic cleft lip without without cleft palate (NSCLP) in the South Indian population. Subject and Methods: For this study, 190 unrelated NSCLP patients and 189 controls without clefts were genotyped with rs2235371 (V2741) and rs642961 SNPs using PCR-RFLP. The associations between NSCLP groups and IRF6 gene polymorphisms, as well as haplotypes, were analyzed using chi-squared test and 95% confidence interval (95%CI) of the odds ratios were calculated with the control groups as reference. Results: For controls, the minor allele frequencies of both variants, V2741 and rs642961, were 7.1% and 21.1%, respectively. Genotype data for both variants in control and cleft groups follow the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium. Between cases with NSCLP and controls, the two SNPs showed no differences in frequencies of the genotypes or alleles. The pairwise linkage disequilibrium (LD) values (D’=1 and r 2 =0.027) between V2741 and rs642961 revealed that these two SNPs are not in strong LD. Haplotype G-T showed a significantly reduced risk for oral clefts (p<0.001) and haplotype A-T increased the risk for oral clefts (p=0.043). Gene-gene interaction showed that the higher risk group contains more GG-CC combination of cases that the controls, but this model was not significantly associated with cleft status (p=0.136) Conclusion: In conclusion, while IRF6 is strongly associated in other populations, this study demonstrated that variants in IRF6 may play a role in NSCLP in a South Indian population, but other genes are expected to play a role in this population as well.
Evaluation of Deep Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Prostate in T2W MRI

In this paper, we present an evaluation of four encoder–decoder CNNs in the segmentation of the prostate gland in T2W magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image. The four selected CNNs are FCN, SegNet, U-Net, and DeepLabV3+, which was originally proposed for the segmentation of road scene, biomedical, and natural images. Segmentation of prostate in T2W MRI images is an important step in the automatic diagnosis of prostate cancer to enable better lesion detection and staging of prostate cancer. Therefore, many research efforts have been conducted to improve the segmentation of the prostate gland in MRI images. The main challenges of prostate gland segmentation are blurry prostate boundary and variability in prostate anatomical structure. In this work, we investigated the performance of encoder–decoder CNNs for segmentation of prostate gland in T2W MRI. Image pre-processing techniques including image resizing, center-cropping and intensity normalization are applied to address the issues of inter-patient and inter-scanner variability as well as the issue of dominating background pixels over prostate pixels. In addition, to enrich the network with more data, to increase data variation, and to improve its accuracy, patch extraction and data augmentation are applied prior to training the networks. Furthermore, class weight balancing is used to avoid having biased networks since the number of background pixels is much higher than the prostate pixels. The class imbalance problem is solved by utilizing weighted cross-entropy loss function during the training of the CNN model. The performance of the CNNs is evaluated in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and our experimental results show that patch-wise DeepLabV3+ gives the best performance with DSC equal to 92.8%. This value is the highest DSC score compared to the FCN, SegNet, and U-Net that also competed the recently published state-of-the-art method of prostate segmentation.
A 2,5-Dihydroxybenzoic Acid–Gelatin Conjugate Inhibits the Basal and Hsp90-Stimulated Migration and Invasion of Tumor Cells

The extracellular cell surface-associated and soluble heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) is known to participate in the migration and invasion of tumor cells. Earlier, we demonstrated that plasma membrane-associated heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs) bind the extracellular Hsp90 and thereby promote the Hsp90-mediated motility of tumor cells. Here, we showed that a conjugate of 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid with gelatin (2,5-DHBA–gelatin), a synthetic polymer with heparin-like properties, suppressed the basal (unstimulated) migration and invasion of human glioblastoma A-172 and fibrosarcoma HT1080 cells, which was accompanied by the detachment of a fraction of Hsp90 from cell surface HSPGs. The polymeric conjugate also inhibited the migration/invasion of cells stimulated by exogenous soluble native Hsp90, which correlated with the inhibition of the attachment of soluble Hsp90 to cell surface HSPGs. The action of the 2,5-DHBA–gelatin conjugate on the motility of A-172 and HT1080 cells was similar to that of heparin. The results demonstrate a potential of the 2,5-DHBA–gelatin polymer for the development of antimetastatic drugs targeting cell motility and a possible role of extracellular Hsp90 in the suppression of the migration and invasion of tumor cells mediated by the 2,5-DHBA–gelatin conjugate and heparin.
Trypanosomes have divergent kinesin-2 proteins that function differentially in flagellum biosynthesis and cell viability

ABSTRACT Trypanosoma brucei, the causative agent of African sleeping sickness, has a flagellum that is crucial for motility, pathogenicity, and viability. In most eukaryotes, the intraflagellar transport (IFT) machinery drives flagellum biogenesis, and anterograde IFT requires kinesin-2 motor proteins. In this study, we investigated the function of the two T. brucei kinesin-2 proteins, TbKin2a and TbKin2b, in bloodstream form trypanosomes. We found that, compared to kinesin-2 proteins across other phyla, TbKin2a and TbKin2b show greater variation in neck, stalk and tail domain sequences. Both kinesins contributed additively to flagellar lengthening. Silencing TbKin2a inhibited cell proliferation, cytokinesis and motility, whereas silencing TbKin2b did not. TbKin2a was localized on the flagellum and colocalized with IFT components near the basal body, consistent with it performing a role in IFT. TbKin2a was also detected on the flagellar attachment zone, a specialized structure that connects the flagellum to the cell body. Our results indicate that kinesin-2 proteins in trypanosomes play conserved roles in flagellar biosynthesis and exhibit a specialized localization, emphasizing the evolutionary flexibility of motor protein function in an organism with a large complement of kinesins. Summary: Kinesin-2 proteins in Trypanosoma brucei perform a conserved role in flagellum biosynthesis and also have a specialized localization, emphasizing the evolutionary flexibility of kinesin function in trypanosomes.
Injectable calcium sulfate vs mixed bone graft of autologous iliac bone and allogeneic bone

Abstract Unicameral bone cyst (UBC) is a benign fluid-filled lesion, mainly located in the metaphyses of long bones in children and adolescents. Elastic stable intramedullary nail (ESIN) is adopted in our institute for UBCs since 2010, and bone grafting was performed simultaneously. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of ESIN decompression combined with different bone graft materials. All patients with the diagnoses of UBCs of the humerus, treated with ESINs and bone grafting between January 2010 and June 2018, were analyzed retrospectively. The bone grafting included injectable calcium sulfate, a mixture of the autologous iliac bone and allogeneic bone. All patients were categorized into 2 groups: ICS (injectable calcium sulfate) group and MIX (a mixture of the autologous iliac bone and allogeneic bone, ratio: 1:3) group. All the information was collected from the Hospital Database. In all, 17 patients (8.8 ± 2.3-year-old, male 8, female 9) in the ICS group and 19 patients (8.9 ± 1.9-year-old, male 10, female 9) in the MIX group were included in this study. Patients in both groups were followed up for more than 2 years (average, 3.4 ± 1.3 years). No recurrence was observed in either group. There was no significant difference between the two groups concerning the patient's demographic parameters, including sex, age, and affected side. All patients in both groups displayed excellent and good shoulder function, and there was no significant difference between the 2 groups (P = .29). As for the Capanna classification, there was no significant difference between these 2 groups (P = .78). Intramedullary nailing has the advantage of a minimally invasive procedure, immediate stability, and continuous decompression. ICS showed similar results as a mixture of the autologous iliac bone and allogeneic bone.
Effect of salt stress on growth and cation compartmentation in leaves of two plant species differing in salt tolerance

Summary Salinity can cause toxic symptoms, especially in mature leaves after long-term exposure. Thus, Na + accumulation in leaves could be responsible for salt toxicity. The infiltration-centrifugation technique was employed for the isolation of apoplastic washing fluids (AWF) from leaves and the detection of Na + , K + and Ca 2+ was carried out by ion chromatography. The Na + concentrations in the leaf apoplast of salt-sensitive corn and salt-tolerant cotton plants significantly increased with higher Na + supply. Nevertheless, the apoplastic Na + concentration did not exceed 10 and 30 mmol/L, respectively, after salt exposure up to 150 mmol/L in the medium in short- and long-term salt treatments. Higher Na + concentrations were found in the leaf apoplast of salt-tolerant cotton in comparison to those of salt-sensitive corn, particularly in fully expanded leaves. No bound Na + was found in the leaf apoplast. The Na + concentration in the leaf apoplast did not reach high enough concentrations to be responsible for the decline in leaf growth under salinity. Supplemental Ca 2+ did not affect Na + concentration in the leaf apoplast under salinity. Apoplastic Ca 2+ concentration remained constant, while K + concentrations increased in the leaf apoplast under salinity. Our results do not support the hypothesis by Oertli (1968) who proposed that salt accumulation in the leaf apoplast could be responsible for the death of leaves in plants exposed to salinity.
Inverted Papilloma of the Orbit and Nasolacrimal System.

PURPOSE Periocular inverted papilloma (IP) is a rare, locally aggressive tumor with a propensity for recurrence and malignant transformation. Historically treated via wide excision, this study examines the characteristics and management of periocular IP, comparing those confined to the nasolacrimal system with those invading the orbit. METHODS An Institutional Review Board-approved, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant retrospective, comparative case series was conducted in patients with IP of the orbit or nasolacrimal system across 15 clinical sites. RESULTS Of 25 patients, 22 met inclusion criteria with 9 limited to the nasolacrimal system and 13 invading the orbit. Mean age was 60.4 years, 55% were women, all were unilateral. Mean follow-up was 48 months. Rates of smoking, dust and/or aerosol exposure, human papillomavirus (HPV) status, and inflammatory polyps were elevated compared to rates in the general population (45%, 18%, 18%, and 14%, respectively). Bony erosion on computed tomography scans was statistically significantly associated with orbit-invading IP (p = 0.002). Treatment involved all confined IP undergoing surgery alone while 39% of orbit-invading IP also received radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy (p = 0.054). Orbit-invading IP was more likely to be excised with wide margins than IP confined to the nasolacrimal system (85% vs. 22%, p = 0.007). Overall rates of malignancy, recurrence, and patient mortality from IP were found to be 27%, 23%, and 9%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS IP invading the orbit typically requires aggressive therapy, while IP confined to the nasolacrimal system may be treated more conservatively. Using risk factors, characteristics, and outcomes, a treatment algorithm was created to guide management.
The effect of dexamethasone on the occurrence and ultrastructure of rodlet cells in goldfish

In the bulbus arteriosus of goldfish Carassius auratus a subendothelial ‘reticular space’ was comprised of reticular-like cells, neutrophils, medium-sized granular leucocytes, phagocytes, endothelial cells and reticulo-endothelial cells; herein, rodlet cells (RCs) accumulated and probably matured. Four classes of RCs were identified: (1) Those occurring in the reticular space and contacting reticular-like cells; (2) those present in the reticular space contacting reticular-like and endothelial cells; here the RCs were discharging; (3) those occurring in the bulbar lumen anchored to lining endothelial cells or other RCs; (4) those free in the bulbar lumen. There was no significant difference in the number of RCs among control and saline- and dexamethasone-treated fish, but significant differences were found in RCs' class partition and in their discharge modality. In dexamethasone-treated goldfish class (3) RCs were almost absent (2%v. 10% of the other experimental groups), moreover 35% of the RCs developed a ‘bleb’ discharge modality rather than the most typical ‘koronenartigen konfiguration’ which developed in the vast majority (90%) of the other experimental groups.