Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Age at First Calving on Productive and Reproductive Performance in Dairy Cattle

This retrospective study evaluated the effect of age at first calving on the productive and reproductive performance in Holstein dairy cattle. Data were collected on 2,297 lactations from 19 dairy farms, including dates of birth, insemination, pregnancy, calving, and lactation and milk production (305-day milk yield at first lactation and lifetime milk yield). Lactation data were grouped based on age at first calving into the early ( 28 months, n = 615) groups. The 305-day milk yield at first lactation was higher (p < 0.005) in the late group (8,461.9 kg) than in the early (8,130.8 kg) and moderate (8,261.9 kg) groups. Lifetime days in milk were shorter (p < 0.01) in the early group (1,045.7) than in the moderate (1,143.1) and late (1,110.7) groups, whereas the lifetime milk yield was higher (p < 0.05) in the moderate group (34,171.8 kg) than in the early group (31,791.6 kg). The second calving interval (days) differed (p < 0.0001) between the early (416.9), moderate (438.9), and late (455.3) groups. The culling rate at the first and second lactations tended to be higher (p = 0.08) in the early group (31.2%) than in the moderate group (26.0%), whereas it was intermediate in the late group (29.3%). In conclusion, dairy heifers aged 24-28 months at first calving showed a higher productive performance through an increased lifetime milk yield and a decreased culling rate.
Biliary tract surgery.

: Postoperative wound infection rates after biliary tract surgery vary tremendously from 2% after uncomplicated cholecystectomy to 20% in series including many jaundiced patients. Almost all such infections arise from organisms growing in the diseased biliary tract, since infection rate of 1% are achieved when the bile is sterile. A history of cholangitis identifies only one third of the patients with infected bile, but four easily recognized clinical factors point to positive bile cultures in 60% to 75% of patients: (1) age over 70, (2) obstructive jaundice, (3) common duct stones without jaundice, and (4) emergent acute cholecystitis. These selected high-risk patients have postoperative infection rates of 20% to 27%. Preoperative administration of cephaloridine reduced this high rate of infection to 5% in a prospective randomized but not blinded trial. The initially reported experience of 84 patients has been extended to 140 and continues to confirm the efficacy of prophylactic antibiotics in selected high-risk patients. In contrast, there is no present evidence supporting the use of antibiotic prophylaxis in low-risk patients under 70 years of age undergoing uncomplicated cholecystectomy.
Outcome of laparoscopic colectomy in colorectal cancer at South Egypt Cancer Institute: a randomized controlled study

Background: The short and long-term results of a laparoscopic resection for colorectal cancer have been reported in several studies, but reports on the results of laparoscopic surgery for rectal cancer are limited. Aim of the study: This study aimed to assess the short term outcomes of laparoscopic assisted colorectal resections in comparison with conventional open resections. Methods: 20 patients assigned to undergo elective laparoscopic assisted resection of primary colon and rectal cancer matched with 20 cases of colorectal cancer patients with the same epidemiological data (age, site, stage and histological grade) to whom conventional open resections was done in the period from March 2010 to September 2013.The following data were collected and analyzed: preoperative data (individual patient data, indication for surgery), intraoperative data (conversion to open surgery, operative time, complication rate), postoperative data (oncological parameters: length of removed specimen; safety margin; retrieved lymph nodes, post operative pain, recovery of gastrointestinal tract functions, morbidity, mortality and length of hospital stay) Results: There were significant decrease in postoperative pain, rapid recovery of pulmonary and GIT functions, decreased hospital stay in the laparoscopic group compared to the conventional group. Conclusion: Laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer is a good alternative for open surgery with favorable short term outcomes of surgery and reasonable oncologic results.
ETRI-Activity3D: A Large-Scale RGB-D Dataset for Robots to Recognize Daily Activities of the Elderly

— Deep learning, based on which many modern algorithms operate, is well known to be data-hungry. In particular, the datasets appropriate for the intended application are difficult to obtain. To cope with this situation, we introduce a new dataset called ETRI-Activity3D, focusing on the daily activities of the elderly in robot-view. The major characteristics of the new dataset are as follows: 1) practical action categories that are selected from the close observation of the daily lives of the elderly; 2) realistic data collection, which reflects the robot’s working environment and service situations; and 3) a large-scale dataset that overcomes the limitations of the current 3D activity analysis benchmark datasets. The proposed dataset contains 112,620 samples including RGB videos, depth maps, and skeleton sequences. During the data acquisition, 100 subjects were asked to perform 55 daily activities. Additionally, we propose a novel network called four-stream adaptive CNN (FSA-CNN). The proposed FSA-CNN has three main properties: robustness to spatio-temporal variations, input-adaptive activation function, and extension of the conventional two-stream approach. In the experiment section, we confirmed the superiority of the proposed FSA-CNN using NTU RGB+D and ETRI-Activity3D. Further, the domain difference between both groups of age was verified experimentally. Finally, the extension of FSA-CNN to deal with the multimodal data was investigated.
Comparison of therapeutic touch and casual touch in stress reduction of hospitalized children.

PURPOSE: To compare the effectiveness of therapeutic touch and causal touch for stress reduction of hospitalized children aged 2 weeks to 2 years old. METHODOLOGY: Stress reduction was measured by pulse, peripheral skin temperature, and galvanic skin response as observed on the GSR-II biofeedback instrument. RESULTS: An ANOVA measured effectiveness of the interventions of causal touch and therapeutic touch at 3 and 6 minute intervals. The results demonstrated a significant difference with the critical value of F = 4.18 p less than . 05. The computed value of F = 26.98 at 3 minutes and F = 26.94 at 6 minutes. CONCLUSION: Therapeutic touch reduced time needed to calm children after stressful experiences.
Diagnostic significance of serum galectin-3 levels in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction

Objective Galectin-3, reflecting cardiac fibrosis, is a promising biomarker in early detection of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). We aimed to clarify the clinical utility of galectin-3 levels in the diagnosis of HFpEF and to compare galectin-3 with N-terminal pro-brain-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) levels. Methods and results The study included 44 HFpEF patients (mean age 60 ± 6.78 years, 24 men) and 38 control subjects (mean age 57 ± 8.98 years, 20 men). Galectin-3 and NT-proBNP levels were assessed by the ELISA kits. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve was used to examine the diagnostic performance of galectin-3 and NT-proBNP in HFpEF. Galectin-3 and NT-proBNP levels were significantly increased in patients with HFpEF compared to controls [5.35 ng/ml (0.86 – 14.90) vs 0.51 ng/ml (0.15 – 1.71) P< 0.0001, 617.75 ± 271.30 pg/ml vs 66.35 ± 54.01 pg/ml P< 0.0001, respectively]. Galectin-3 correlated with NT-proBNP, left atrial volume index, left ventricular mass index, and E/E’ (r = 0.90, P< 0.0001; r = 0.75, P= 0.0001; r = 0.86, P= 0.0001; r = 0.80, P= 0.0001; respectively). The area under the ROC curve was 0.98 for galectin-3 and 1.0 for NT-proBNP. Conclusions Our results support that, in addition to NT-proBNP, galectin-3 is also a valuable biomarker for the diagnosis of patients with HFpEF.
GP attitudes towards health, prevention and poverty in deprived communities : does working with capitation or fee-for-service make a difference?

Objectives: To explore general practitioners' attitudes towards health, poverty and prevention and to examine if payment system or practice setting plays a role. Design: a qualitative study using semistructured interviews. Setting: two neighbouring deprived inner-city areas in Ghent, Belgium. Participants: 20 general practitioners. Main outcome measures: practice and payment type. Respondents' definitions of health and poverty, attitudes towards poverty and preventive medicine. Reasons for not practising preventive medicine. Results: Concerning the definition of health and disease, illness provoking factors, attitudes towards other cultures, identifying thresholds in access to primary care, no differences were noted between the different payment systems or practice settings. Attitudes towards poverty did show differences. Preventive medicine was viewed as an important part of general practice, although solo GPs were more negative about their own role in prevention. A gradient was found in the extent to which preventive medicine was practised from single-handed practice over group to health centre. Conclusions: The findings of this small sample study suggest it does make a difference whether you work alone or in group as a GP, in order to fulfil the complex task of primary care in a deprived city area. Whether working in group has a positive effect on your attitudes or vice versa remains unclear. Working with capitated or fee-for-service reimbursement seems less important.
Benedict Delisle Burns. 22 February 1915—6 September 2001

Ben Burns was a pioneer of operations research and of the statistical analysis of neuronal activity. During the war, Ben served in Solly Zuckermann's operations research unit, which included a period of active service in the Mediterranean. After the war he worked with G. L. Brown at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), where he investigated the effects of agents that affected neuromuscular transmission. In 1950 he moved to the Physiology Department of McGill University in Montreal, where he explored the properties of neural networks in neurologically isolated slabs of cerebral cortex and established the mechanisms responsible for maintaining rhythmic periods of excitation in isolated nerve networks. He subsequently provided evidence that self-re-exciting neural networks were implicated in establishing the respiratory rhythm. While at McGill, Ben initiated a number of highly original cross-disciplinary studies concerning the physiological bases of learning, memory and attention. He returned to NIMR in 1966 to head the Division of Physiology and Pharmacology, where he continued his investigations of visual perception. Ben was an ingenious experimenter and devised a number of mechanical and electronic devices for the statistical analysis of nerve cell activity at a time when digital computers were largely unavailable for biological work. In his 1968 book, The uncertain nervous system, he expressed his view that the interdisciplinary nature of central neurophysiology required of those who studied it a knowledge of classical physiology, experimental psychology, applied mathematics and electronic engineering. His broad view of the subject inspired a generation of students.
User Guided Digital Artwork Colorization

In this paper, we present a user-guided digital artwork colorization approach. We propose a novel network structure for this task. Our network takes grayscale artworks along with sparse user-specified color points as input and outputs color artworks using a convolutional neural network (CNN). We train our network on ten thousand digital paintings collected from the internet with simulated user inputs. The experiment result shows that our network outperforms other networks in the task of interactive digital artwork colorization and can produce artistic and convincing color artworks.
Towards Transforming OpenFlow Rulesets to Fit Fixed-Function Pipelines

OpenFlow feature support differs between devices due to device-specific hardware constraints. OpenFlow places the burden of addressing these differences on the controller, which increases development cost and restricts device interoperability. This paper investigates reducing this burden by algorithmically transforming an existing ruleset to fit an incompatible fixed-function pipeline to improve device interoperability. Existing rule-fitting schemes in the literature require metadata to link rules between tables into a path through the pipeline, but not all pipelines support metadata. We developed a novel approach that does not rely on any particular pipeline features, like metadata, and considers the pipeline's constraints, including both the matches and actions available. This paper presents our implementation, including ruleset preprocessing techniques, methods of transforming rules, and how we use a partially constrained boolean satisfiability problem to select from these transformations and build the final ruleset. While future work remains towards real-world deployment, our approach demonstrates fitting rulesets to fixed-function pipelines without metadata is feasible, and our techniques to reduce the size of the problem are beneficial.
Effects of Activation Functions and Optimizers on Stock Price Prediction using LSTM Recurrent Networks

In stock exchange market, investors need to decide which shares to buy based on their future market value. Because of the variable market, it is obligatory to have a reliable prediction of the values of the stocks. Now-a-days the machine learning system can forecast well than the contemporary stock prediction methods. Machine learning system provides a scientific demonstration based on sample data to forecast. In this work, Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms are used to predict stock market prediction. Among the several features, the most important feature has been selected by using the feature selection algorithm, which is closing price. The effects of different activation functions and optimizers are experimented on stock price prediction using LSTM networks.
Dynamic word recommendation to obtain diverse crowdsourced paraphrases of user utterances

Building task-oriented bots requires mapping a user utterance to an intent with its associated entities to serve the request. Doing so is not easy since it requires large quantities of high-quality and diverse training data to learn how to map all possible variations of utterances with the same intent. Crowdsourcing may be an effective, inexpensive, and scalable technique for collecting such large datasets. However, the diversity of the results suffers from the priming effect (i.e. workers are more likely to use the words in the sentence we are asking to paraphrase). In this paper, we leverage priming as an opportunity rather than a threat: we dynamically generate word suggestions to motivate crowd workers towards producing diverse utterances. The key challenge is to make suggestions that can improve diversity without resulting in semantically invalid paraphrases. To achieve this, we propose a probabilistic model that generates continuously improved versions of word suggestions that balance diversity and semantic relevance. Our experiments show that the proposed approach improves the diversity of crowdsourced paraphrases.
What is "intelligent" in intelligent user interfaces?: a meta-analysis of 25 years of IUI

This reflection paper takes the 25th IUI conference milestone as an opportunity to analyse in detail the understanding of intelligence in the community: Despite the focus on intelligent UIs, it has remained elusive what exactly renders an interactive system or user interface "intelligent", also in the fields of HCI and AI at large. We follow a bottom-up approach to analyse the emergent meaning of intelligence in the IUI community: In particular, we apply text analysis to extract all occurrences of "intelligent" in all IUI proceedings. We manually review these with regard to three main questions: 1) What is deemed intelligent? 2) How (else) is it characterised? and 3) What capabilities are attributed to an intelligent entity? We discuss the community's emerging implicit perspective on characteristics of intelligence in intelligent user interfaces and conclude with ideas for stating one's own understanding of intelligence more explicitly.
Extended spectrum beta-lactamase and AmpC producing Klebsiella pneumoniae: A therapeutic challenge

Klebsiella pneumoniae accounts for substantial proportion of nosocomial infections. Increasing multidrug resistance of these bacteria is posing a great threat to hospitalized patients as it results into limitation of therapeutic options. Therefore, the present study was undertaken with the following Aim and Objective :To know the burden of extended spectrum beta lactamase (ESBL) producing K. pneumoniae and coexistence of AmpC in these isolates using phenotypic methods in a newly established teaching hospital in Punjab, India. Materials and Methods: ESBL and AmpC screening and confirmation was done using phenotypic methods as per the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guidelines in 200 clinical isolates of K. pneumoniae. Results: Out of 200 isolates of K. pneumoniae, 116 (58%) were ESBL producer and 84 (42%) were ESBL nonproducer. Of these 116 ESBL-positive isolates, 29 (25%) were coproducer of AmpC beta-lactamase. ESBL producing isolates were significantly more resistant to other group of antibiotics as compared to ESBL nonproducers. Discussion: High prevalence rate of ESBL producing K. pneumoniae was observed in our institute. MDR in these isolates was frequent, indicating the extensive injudicious use of antibiotics. Conclusion: Increasing prevalence of ESBL producing K. pneumoniae need to be checked to reduce the mortality and morbidity due to the infections caused by these strains.
Outcomes of Cranioplasty from a Tertiary Hospital in a Developing Country

Introduction: Although cranioplasty (CP) is a straightforward procedure, it may result in a significant number of complications. These include infections, seizures, intracranial hematomas, and others. Many reports have stated that early CP is associated with higher complications; however, more recent articles have contradicted this opinion. We intend to share our experience and results on outcomes of CP from our university hospital. Materials and Methods: This is a 3-year retrospective analysis of patients undergoing CP. Demographic profile, etiology of decompressive craniectomy (DC), DC-CP interval, operative details, complications, and follow-up data were analyzed. Correlation of complications with timing of CP and other factors was studied to look for statistical significance. Results: A total of 93 cases were analyzed. The majority were traumatic and ischemic stroke etiologies. There were eight open/compound head injuries (HIs). Eleven were bilateral and the rest unilateral cases. The mean and median CP interval were 8.5 weeks (range 4–28 weeks) and 8 weeks, respectively. All patients received 48 h to up to 5 days of postoperative antibiotics. Ten complications (10.7%) were noted (including one death). Poor Glasgow Outcome Scale at CP was the only statistically significant factor associated with higher complication rates. There was no statistical difference with respect to gender, CP material, and etiology; however, early CP had slightly fewer complications. Conclusion: Patients with poor neurological condition at the time of CP have a significantly higher risk of complications. Contrary to earlier reports, early CP (<12 weeks) was not associated with higher complications but rather fewer complications than delayed procedures. Adherence to a few simple steps may help reduce these complications.
EndoN treatment allows neuroblasts to leave the rostral migratory stream and migrate towards a lesion within the prefrontal cortex of rats

The binding properties of neural cell adhesion molecule are modulated by a polysialic acid moiety. This plays an important role in the migration of adult born neuroblasts from their area of origin, the subventricular zone, towards the olfactory bulb. Polysialisation increases the migration speed of the cells and helps to prevent the neuroblasts from leaving their migration route, the rostral migratory stream. Here, we evaluated the potential of intraventricular application of endoneuraminidase-N, an enzyme that specifically cleaves polysialic acid from neural cell adhesion molecule, in a rat model for structural prefrontal cortex damage. As expected, endoneuraminidase-N caused the rostral migratory stream to become wider, with a less uniform cellular orientation. Furthermore, endoneuraminidase-N treatment caused the neuroblasts to leave the rostral migratory stream and migrate towards the lesioned tissue. Despite the neuroblasts not being differentiated into neurons after a survival time of three weeks, this technique provides a solid animal model for future work on the migration and differentiation of relocated neuroblasts and might provide a basis for a future endogenous stem cell-based therapy for structural brain damage. The experiments were approved by the local animal care committee (522-27-11/02-00, 115; Senatorin für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Verbraucherschutz, Bremen, Germany) on February 10, 2016.
Dissecting Aneurysm of the Basilar Artery—A Rare Complication of Bacterial Meningitis in a Postoperative Case of CSF Rhinorrhea

Basilar artery dissections are rare events which present with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), brain ischemia, and usually have a fatal outcome. Few case reports of mycotic dissections are published in literature. We report a case of a young male who underwent surgical treatment for post-traumatic CSF rhinorrhea. He presented 3 years later with signs of bacterial meningitis. During medical management with antibiotic therapy, he developed basilar artery aneurysm in a span of 2 days, had subarachnoid hemorrhage and deteriorated. CSF culture grew alpha hemolytic streptococci. Despite medical management, he developed brain stem infarcts and succumbed. This report highlights a rare fatal complication of mycotic dissecting aneurysm of the basilar artery following meningitis, which developed acutely in hospital, while on treatment. Antibiotic therapy had not altered the course of disease. It is advisable to investigate for presence of ruptured mycotic aneurysms or dissection in cases of bacterial meningitis leading to SAH.