Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laser-assisted surgical removal of mucocele in a 12-Year-Old female patient

Mucoceles are common salivary gland disorders which can be seen in the oral cavity. They occur most commonly in the lower lip region followed by the tongue, buccal mucosa, and the soft palate region. Two histological types are seen: extravasation and retention. Retentive types of mucoceles are found less commonly in children. Several treatment modalities have been put forth for excision of such cysts including the use of a scalpel, CO2laser, and cryosurgery. The present case report depicts a combination of surgical and laser-assisted approaches adapted for the excision of a small retentive type of mucocele in a 12-year-old female child.
New-graduate Physical Therapists' Self-efficacy to Perform Patient Education Is Influenced by Entry-level Training Experiences

Introduction. Patient education is an integral component of physical therapy practice. Little is known about the factors that influence new-graduate physical therapists' preparedness to perform patient education. Self-efficacy is an important construct in understanding how graduates will engage in this professional role. The purpose of this study was to investigate new-graduate physical therapists' self-efficacy across patient education competencies and to explore the relationship between self-efficacy and entry-level training experiences. Methods. New-graduate physical therapists completed a survey with four components: 1) a self-efficacy scale derived from patient education competencies; 2) questions about their training experiences; 3) an open response question relating to their perception of their patient education ability; and 4) demographic questions. Self-efficacy data were compared between groups based on training experiences and demographic groups. Open response data were subject to qualitative framework analysis. Results. A total of 121 new-graduate physical therapists (84.6%) completed the survey. One third of new graduates reported having high self-efficacy in relation to all patient education competencies. Nearly all respondents perceived that performing patient education during clinical placements (96%) and receiving feedback (93%) had a significant influence on their confidence to perform patient education. Most respondents (89.3%) reported having previous experiences representing all sources of self-efficacy during their entry-level training. These respondents had significantly higher self-efficacy scores than those who were lacking one or more experiences (P = .045). Half of all respondents (52%) reported all training experiences as “significant” in contributing to their confidence and had significantly higher self-efficacy scores than those who did not perceive all experiences as “significant” (P < .001). Emerging themes relating to the most meaningful influences on ability to perform patient education were 1) direct clinical practice, 2) observation of others, 3) feedback, and 4) rehearsal. Discussion and Conclusion. These findings support the mediating effects of Bandura's main sources of self-efficacy on new graduates' self-efficacy regarding patient education. Considerations for physical therapy curricular aimed at enhancing development of self-efficacy related to patient education is outlined.
Cerebral blood flow and intracranial pulsatility in cerebral small vessel disease

s screened (n = 78) Records excluded through titles (n = 418) Full-text articles assessed for eligibility (n = 49) 19 articles excluded: Review (3); Drug trial (2); Non-SVD (6); Use stimulus (2); No intra-cranial pulsatility measures (6) Studies included (n = 30) MRI studies (n = 7) Ultrasound studies (n = 22) Conference abstracts (n = 29)
Role of PET/CT in Monitoring Response in Treatment of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Patients

Aim of the work: positron emission tomography (PET) response assessment of residual nodal masses in patients with lymphoma after completion of therapy is performed visually using Douveille as the reference. The primary objective of this study was to define the role of PET in response assessment of Non Hodgkin Lymphoma patients and define various response criteria. Patients and methods: our prospective study included 40 patients with Non Hodgkin’s lymphoma diffuse large B cell type assessed for response assessment after completion of therapy, two readers independently assessed response by IHP and Deauville criteria. The addition of morphological parameters on CT was assessed in relation to therapy response. Results: Non Hodgkin lymphoma is one of chemosensitive tumors with high ability of nodal and extranodal spread and PET /CT is more sensitive than CT in monitoring response to treatment in non Hodgkin lymphoma diffuse large B cell type patients. Conclusions: PET/CT is the best tool for evaluation of the response to treatment in patients with Non Hodgkin lymphoma diffuse large B cell type, as well as Douveille criteria represent the accurate indicator of response categories determination.PET/CT has an obvious impact on clinical practice according to the response results and activity of residual lesion.
Bioceramic Cements in Endodontics

New bioceramic calcium silicate endodontic cements have been recently introduced in the market. They are biocompatible materials that stimulate min-eralization. Its dimensional stability is similar to the Fillapex MTA with greater thickness and solubility than AH Plus (Dentsply, DeTrey, Konstanz, Germany) as it is water based. Stored in dispensed syringe, it has a pre-mixed consistency. They are used with the single cone obturation technique because they have properties that are changed when heated. They were developed by inducing bioactivity on the surface of the material when in contact with tissue fluids. An improvement in the osteoblastic differentiation of the cells of the periodontal ligament, induction of remineralization of the dentin, and excellent antimicrobial properties have also been associated with these cements. These properties make these cements an excellent alternative in the attempt to obtain a three-dimensional obturation of the Root Canal System (SCR).
Secondary treated wastewater as a support strategy for tree crops irrigation: nutritional and physiological responses on apple trees

Wastewater for irrigating tree crops may act both as water and mineral nutrients source, offering potential agronomical and environmental advantages. This work investigated the effect of an entire season supply of secondary treated wastewater (STW) on the nutritional and physiological responses of 3 year old apple trees. Trees (Gala /M9) were individually grown on 40-L pots filled with a sandy-loamy soil and drip irrigated with: 1)Tap water (TW) (without any mineral fertilizer inputs); 2) Tap water plus mineral fertilized inputs (TW+MF) and 3) STW (without any mineral fertilizer inputs). Each treatment was applied to five individual trees. Daily leaf carbon assimilation rates were promoted by STW, compared to TW trees, although TW+MF trees showed the highest values. Although STW provided a fertigation-like effect, the tree nutrient demand was only partially fulfilled. Leaf mineral concentration resulted mostly in the optimal range for STW and TW+MF, except TW, which showed nutritional deficiencies, especially on leaf rather than on fruit tissues. No heavy metal contamination was recorded in STW leaves nor in fruit tissues. A decrease in STW-irrigated tree stem water potentials suggested a moderate salinity stress that indirectly improved fruit quality parameters. Irrigating with STW did not enhance shoot growth compared to TW+MF, promoting instead fruit yield. Results indicate how STW may be suitably reused as a precious resource for supporting the traditional fresh-water supplies in irrigating fruit tree crops. Moreover, the application of STW could allow to partially save tree mineral fertilization needs, thanks to its nutritional inputs.
Intra-arterial thrombolysis: Is ICU admission necessary?

Background: Intra-arterial thrombolysis is an effective and safe method for treating acute limb ischaemia. However, during thrombolysis, patients are at risk of life-threatening haemorrhagic complications. In the literature there is no consensus on how patients should be monitored during treatment. Patients in our hospital are admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) during treatment even though ICU beds are scarce and ICU admission is a stressful event. This raises the question: is ICU admission necessary to prevent major bleeding complications? Methods: A retrospective study was conducted where all patients having received intra-arterial thrombolysis between January 2015 and February 2017 were included. Patients' files were reviewed for adverse events, laboratory results, information about transfusion of blood products and additional interventions. Results: In total 52 procedures were analysed. No major complications and no haemodynamic instability occurred; 11 minor complications occurred in nine individual patients (18.8%). No transfusions of fresh frozen plasma or packed red blood cells were given during thrombolysis. In three patients packed red blood cells were given within one week of thrombolysis. No other additional treatment was necessary. Conclusions: Treatment outside of the ICU during peripheral intra-arterial thrombolysis should be considered a safe option on the condition that continuous patient monitoring for local and systemic complications is carried out. A protocol for escalation of treatment in case a complication occurs is mandatory.
Complexity, diplomatic relationships and business creation : a cross-regional analysis of the development of productive knowledge, trade facilitation and firm entry in regional markets

This thesis takes a cross-regional analytical approach of three distinct economic areas to evaluate productive knowledge and diplomacy in the context of regional integration alongside determinants of business creation. From the angle of European integration, we introduce a new synthetic control methodology to evaluate the impact of EU accession on the economic complexity index of new CEE member states its results indicating that accession to the EU acted as a catalyst for the productive knowledge of countries with low levels of complexity before accession, allowing a higher rate of development in the sophistication of their product export space. Expanding our analysis to include all European countries and North African states, we proceed in a second stage to analyse institutional and logistical infrastructure determinants of trade by extending the traditional Gravity model to incorporate elements of diplomacy (including the presence of embassies and ambassadors). Our results demonstrate the benefits of soft and hard infrastructure as well as diplomatic activity on the bilateral trade fixed effect CEE and North African countries, validating their importance of these variables as powerful drivers of regional integration. In a final part, we turn our analysis to the Russian Federation as a regional geography with a panel regression analysis of the determinants of firm entry and exit. The empirical evaluation concludes that institutional failures and the politico-economic environment exhibit statistically significant and economically meaningful effects both on the creation and destruction of Russian firms, with a robust estimate of the world oil price (irrespective of the difference in target regions) suggesting a possible high exposure of each Russian region to a global crisis.
Impact of temperature and moisture on the tensile strain of asphalt concrete layers

ABSTRACT Moisture in unbound layers and temperature in asphalt layers affect the structural response of pavements, such as the tensile strain at the bottom of asphalt concrete layers. Previous studies have proposed relationships for estimating tensile strain at the bottom of an asphalt layer from Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) surface deflection measurements. These relationships have been developed based on theoretical calculations of strains and surface deflections. The main objective of this study was to evaluate these relationships using measured FWD deflections and tensile strains at the bottom of asphalt concrete layers. Three instrumented test structures were considered in the study. FWD and strain measurements were conducted at varying groundwater levels in the subgrade and temperatures in the asphalt concrete layers. The results revealed that the relationships have poor agreement with measured strains. A new relationship is proposed that incorporates the volumetric water content in the subgrade and the temperature in the asphalt layers in addition to the surface FWD deflections.
Torrefaction Characteristics of Japanese Cedar Sawdust with a Mechanical Compression in Air Atmosphere

In this study, biochars were prepared from Japanese cedar sawdust with a mechanical compression at different tempera- tures in an air atmosphere. The compression pressure at a given constant value was applied to the raw material during the torrefaction process. Experimental results indicated that the compression positively improved the fuel properties of the biochar obtained. The carbon content in biochar increased; whereas the oxygen and hydrogen contents decreased. The H/C ratio of biochar was generally proportional to its O/C ratio, and biochars prepared at temperatures of more than 300°C were in proximity to bituminous or sub-bituminous coals in the van Krevelen diagram. Torrefaction at 300°C and 3 MPa gave biochar with a higher heating value of 29.8 MJ/kg and an energy yield of 0.85. Furthermore, the differential thermal analyses showed that the peaks corresponding to the release of volatile matters from biochar decreased with an increase in the compressive load. Consequently, torrefaction of Japanese cedar sawdust with compression in an air atmo- sphere would be a promising method to produce biochars as an alternative fuel.
Cancer support groups and group therapies : Part I. Historical and theoretical background and research on effectiveness

This two-part review of support groups and group therapies provides a perspective on the continuum of groups for patients with cancer: from open-ended, drop-in groups that provide supportive, educational, or self-help group experiences to time-limited or closed groups such as supportive-expressive group therapy based on the principles of existentialism. Part I reviews the history and theoretical background of support groups and group therapies and explores the breakthroughs in mental health research showing how these groups enhance patients' quality of life. Part II will address issues regarding group process, group organization and leadership, and the curative aspects of groups for patients.
Assessment of additional relative plaque removing efficacy of a newly available toothbrush

Aim: To confirm claimed additional efficacy of Sensodyne Expert tooth brush over other commonly used commercially available tooth brushes. Methods and Materials: This was a single use randomized double blind study for the assessment of plaque remaining after tooth brushing with Sensodyne Expert tooth brush to that remaining after brushing with the. Forty subjects were enrolled in the study. Only the right-handed subjects were chosen for the study. One side of the subjects' oral cavity was randomly assigned to be brushed with Sensodyne Expert toothbrush while the other was brushed using the already in use subject's regular tooth brush for one minute each side. Two tone disclosing agent was then used to identify and score post-brushing plaque remaining after tooth brushing on the selected teeth. Plaque was scored using the Turesky et al. Modified Quigley-Hein Plaque Index (TQHPI) on selected teeth on both sides of the oral cavity. Results: The mean post brushing plaque score for assessed teeth brushed with Sensodyne Expert tooth brush was 1.283 ± 0.39, while that with already in use subject's regular tooth brush was and 1.153±0.71. Student t-test was used for analysis of results. There was an nonsignificant difference in post brushing plaque scores of both groups at assessed p value (P = 0.078). This suggests that subjects of this study were able to equally effectively remove plaque using their own and Sensodyne Expert tooth brushes. Conclusion: The plaque removing efficacy of Sensodyne Expert tooth brush was comparable to that of other tooth brusheswhen plaque on the selected teeth remaining after tooth brushing was assessed. Additional plaque removing efficacy of Sensodyne Expert tooth brushover subjects' other already in use toothbrushes was not found.
Expert Systems With Applications

Expert systems for automatic processing of ﬁnancial news commonly operate at the document-level by counting positive and negative term-frequencies. This, however, limits their usefulness for investors and ﬁnancial practitioners seeking speciﬁc positive and negative information on a more ﬁne-grained level. For this purpose, this paper develops a novel machine learning approach for the prediction of sentence-level polarity labels in ﬁnancial news. The method uses distributed text representations in combination with multi-instance learning to transfer information from the document-level to the sentence-level. This has two key advantages: (1) it captures semantic information of the textual data and thereby prevents the loss of information caused by bag-of-words approaches; (2) it is solely trained based on historic stock market reactions following the publication of news items without the need for any kind of manual labeling. Our experiments on a manually-labeled dataset of sentences from ﬁnancial news yield a predictive accuracy of up to 71.20%, exceeding the performance of alternative approaches signiﬁcantly by at least 5.10 percentage points. Hence, the proposed approach provides accurate decision support for investors and may assist investor relations departments in communicating their messages as intended. Furthermore, it presents promising avenues for future research aiming at studying communication patterns in ﬁnancial news.
Volunteered geographic information research in the first decade: a narrative review of selected journal articles in GIScience

ABSTRACT More than 10 years have passed since the coining of the term volunteered geographic information (VGI) in 2007. This article presents the results of a review of the literature concerning VGI. A total of 346 articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 2007 and 2017 have been reviewed. The review has uncovered varying levels of popularity of VGI research over space and time, and varying interests in various sources of VGI (e.g. OpenStreetMap) and VGI-related terms (e.g. user-generated content) that point to the multi-perspective nature of VGI. Content-wise, using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), this study has extracted 50 specific research topics pertinent to VGI. The 50 topics have been subsequently clustered into 13 intermediate topics and three overarching themes to allow a hierarchical topic review. The overarching VGI research themes include (1) VGI contributions and contributors, (2) main fields applying VGI, and (3) conceptions and envisions. The review of the articles under the three themes has revealed the progress and the points that demand attention regarding the individual topics. This article also discusses the areas that the existing research has not yet adequately explored and proposes an agenda for potential future research endeavors.
Collegiate Football Attendance in El Paso: 1967-2014*

This study examines potential determinants of American football game attendance for the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Miners program. Time series data are utilized to analyze UTEP attendance from 1967 to 2014. Parameter estimation is carried out using two-staged least squares regression analysis. Among the more notable outcomes, ticket sales are not strongly affected by the local business cycle and are not inversely correlated with unemployment. Demand for tickets is also found to be upward sloping. Forecasts are generated for the 2015 season and several quantitative metrics indicate that good out-of-sample simulation performance is attained. Replication of this study for football teams in more traditional “college towns” provides an intriguing opportunity for further research. JEL Categories: Z20, Sports Economics; M21, Business Economics; R15, Regional Econometric Models
Capsaicin in attenuating metabolic syndrome

Capsaicin, the primary active constituent of chilli, has recognised potential health benefits including analgesia but has also been investigated in studies focusing on obesity, hypertension, glucose impairment and altered blood lipid profiles. These physiological changes are the clustering of risk factors comprising the metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of developing diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and cardiovascular disease. Current clinical treatments demonstrate poor compliance and do not target the range of risk factors. Hence, the aim of this study is to determine whether low-dose dietary capsaicin attenuates the cardiovascular, liver and metabolic changes in a diet-induced rat model that mimics the human syndrome. Firstly, capsaicin was extracted from Capsicum annum cultivars with a yield of 1.42%. The extract contained an estimated ratio of 86% capsaicin and 14% dihydrocapsaicin by 1H-NMR spectroscopy. Secondly, 8-9 weeks old normotensive male Wistar rats were divided into 4 groups (n=8-12). Two groups were fed a cornstarch (C) diet and two were fed a high-carbohydrate, high-fat (H) diet, rich in saturated and trans fatty acids and simple sugars, thus mimicking the westernised-diet in humans. One group of each of the two diets was supplemented with dietary capsaicin (CC and HC; 13.3 and 7.3 mg/kg body weight/day) as a treatment for the final 8 weeks of the 16 week protocol. The H diet induced obesity, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, cardiovascular and liver damage and glucose intolerance by week 8 of the protocol. HC rats showed reduced abdominal circumference (24.3±0.5 cm to 19.0±0.2 cm), body weight gain (276±36 g to 186±9 g) and plasma concentrations of triglycerides (2.1±0.2 mmol/L to 1.4±0.2 mmol/L) compared to H rats. Capsaicin treatment reduced inflammation within the heart and liver, reduced cardiac collagen deposition and decreased liver fat vacuole enlargement. This decreased ventricular stiffness and reversed liver damage in HC rats. Endothelial dysfunction and hypertension were normalised in HC rats, following a decrease in systolic blood pressure (153±2 mmHg to 132±2 mmHg). Finally, low-dose dietary capsaicin reversed glucose intolerance in H-fed rats. Hence, the present findings suggest that low-dose dietary capsaicin could be a potential therapeutic option for the reversal of obesity and metabolic syndrome in humans.