Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adherence to HEI-2010 and odds of breast cancer according to the menopause status: Evidence from Middle Eastern Country

Background Majority of earlier studies have assessed the association between individual healthy eating index-2010 (HEI-2010) and the odds of breast cancer (BC). However, no study has been conducted on the effect of compliance with HEI-2010 and the odds of BC in the Iranian population with a large sample size. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the relationship between the HEI-2010 and the odds of BC in the Iranian population. Method This population-based case-control study included 350 newly diagnosed cases of BC and 700 healthy controls randomly selected from adult women. HEI-2010 was examined using validated questionnaires. The adherence to HEI-2010 among the participants was divided into four categories. The general characteristics of the participants in the quartiles of the HEI score for categorical variables and continuous variables were evaluated using chi-square and one-way analysis of variance, respectively. Also, using logistic regression analysis, dietary intakes were evaluated in HEI score quartiles. Also, confounding variables were adjusted in different models. Result People with the highest HEI score had 60% lower odds of BC (OR: 0.40; 95% CI: 0.27, 0.57) than those with the lowest score among post-menopause women. After controlling for age and energy intake, individuals with the highest HEI score were 78% less likely to have BC compared with those with the lowest score (OR: 0.22; 95% CI: 0.14, 0.33). Adjustments for other potential confounders including demographic factors made the association stronger (OR: 0.21; 95% CI: 0.13, 0.32). This association remained significant even after taking BMI into model (OR: 0.27; 95% CI: 0.17, 0.43). Conclusion Finally, in this study we found an association between HEI-2010 and odds of breast cancer. This association was particularly seen in postmenopausal women. No significant association was found between adherence to HEI-2010 and odds of BC among pre-menopausal.
In vitro activity of selected antimicrobials against methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius of canine origin in Poland

Abstract Background Methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (MRSP) is an important veterinary pathogen. In general, only a few antimicrobials show in vitro activity against MRSP isolates. Objectives The objective of this study was to determine the in vitro activity of selected antimicrobials, including last‐choice drugs, against clinical MRSP isolates of canine origin. The activity of 10 selected agents was evaluated against 41 clinical MRSP isolates. Methods The disk diffusion method and minimal inhibitory concentration values were used for antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST). The guidelines for staphylococci of canine or human origin were employed for the interpretation of the results. Results Among the examined MRSP isolates, resistance to enrofloxacin and clindamycin was the most prevalent (n = 40; 97.6%). Resistance to doxycycline and gentamicin was observed in 83.0% (n = 34) and 68.3% (n = 28) of the isolates, respectively. Single isolates were resistant to chloramphenicol (n = 5; 12.2%) and rifampicin (n = 3; 7.3%), whereas all showed susceptibility to amikacin, vancomycin, mupirocin and linezolid. Predominantly, the results of AST obtained by both methods were consistent. Some discrepancies were observed for gentamicin; however, clinical breakpoints for staphylococci of human origin were used. Conclusions Amikacin and chloramphenicol constitute potential treatment options in infections caused by MRSP and may be included in extended susceptibility testing in our geographical region. The determination of clinical breakpoints for some antimicrobials not incorporated in the recommendations should be a high priority in the veterinary diagnostics.
National-scale spatiotemporal patterns of vegetation fire occurrences using MODIS satellite data

As the risk of climate change increases, robust fire monitoring methods become critical for fire management purposes. National-scale spatiotemporal patterns of the fires and how they relate to vegetation and environmental conditions are not well understood in Zimbabwe. This paper presents a spatially explicit method combining satellite data and spatial statistics in detecting spatiotemporal patterns of fires in Zimbabwe. The Emerging Hot Spot Analysis method was utilized to detect statistically significant spatiotemporal patterns of fire occurrence between the years 2002 and 2021. Statistical analysis was done to determine the association between the spatiotemporal patterns and some environmental variables such as topography, land cover, land use, ecoregions and precipitation. The highest number of fires occurred in September, coinciding with Zimbabwe’s observed fire season. The number of fires significantly varied among seasons, with the hot and dry season (August to October) recording the highest fire counts. Additionally, although June, July and November are not part of the official fire season in Zimbabwe, the fire counts recorded for these months were relatively high. This new information has therefore shown the need for revision of the fire season in Zimbabwe. The northern regions were characterized by persistent, oscillating, diminishing and historical spatiotemporal fire hotspots. Agroecological regions IIa and IIb and the Southern Miombo bushveld ecoregion were the most fire-prone areas. The research findings also revealed new critical information about the spatiotemporal fire patterns in various terrestrial ecoregions, land cover, land use, precipitation and topography and highlighted potential areas for effective fire management strategies.
Atom Scattering Picks Out the Heavyweights Atomic-beam diffraction emerges as a viable approach to separating isotopes within the beam . by

M any great discoveries in science and technology have come from researchers who realized that a tangential finding of their experiment had potential for an entirely different purpose. Such serendipitous findings have brought us penicillin, superglue, microwave ovens, Viagra, and pacemakers—to name just a few. With the same ability to look beyond disciplinary silos, Kevin Nihill, Jacob Graham, and Steven Sibener at the University of Chicago, Illinois, have used diffraction of a beam of gaseous atoms—an approach traditionally employed to characterize the structure of surfaces—as a tool for separating the different isotopes within the beam gas itself [1].
OXIDATIVE study: A pilot prospective observational cohort study protocol examining the influence of peri-reperfusion hyperoxemia and immune dysregulation on early allograft dysfunction after orthotopic liver transplantation

Early allograft dysfunction (EAD) is a functional hepatic insufficiency within a week of orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) and is associated with morbidity and mortality. The etiology of EAD is multifactorial and largely driven by ischemia reperfusion injury (IRI), a phenomenon characterized by oxygen scarcity followed by paradoxical oxidative stress and inflammation. With the expanded use of marginal allografts more susceptible to IRI, the incidence of EAD may be increasing. This necessitates an in-depth understanding of the innate molecular mechanisms underlying EAD and interventions to mitigate its impact. Our central hypothesis is peri-reperfusion hyperoxemia and immune dysregulation exacerbate IRI and increase the risk of EAD. We will perform a pilot prospective single-center observational cohort study of 40 patients. The aims are to determine (1) the association between peri-reperfusion hyperoxemia and EAD and (2) whether peri-reperfusion perturbed cytokine, protein, and hypoxia inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1α) levels correlate with EAD after OLT. Inclusion criteria include age ≥ 18 years, liver failure, and donation after brain or circulatory death. Exclusion criteria include living donor donation, repeat OLT within a week of transplantation, multiple organ transplantation, and pregnancy. Partial pressure of arterial oxygen (PaO2) as the study measure allows for the examination of oxygen exposure within the confines of existing variability in anesthesiologist-administered fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) and the inclusion of patients with intrapulmonary shunting. The Olthoff et al. definition of EAD is the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes include postoperative acute kidney injury, pulmonary and biliary complications, surgical wound dehiscence and infection, and mortality. The goal of this study protocol is to identify EAD contributors that could be targeted to attenuate its impact and improve OLT outcomes. If validated, peri-reperfusion hyperoxemia and immune perturbations could be targeted via FiO2 titration to a goal PaO2 and/or administration of an immunomodulatory agent by the anesthesiologist intraoperatively.
Nonrigid Registration of Lung CT Images Based on Tissue Features

Nonrigid image registration is a prerequisite for various medical image process and analysis applications. Much effort has been devoted to thoracic image registration due to breathing motion. Recently, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) has been used in medical image registration and obtained promising results. However, SIFT is apt to detect blob features. Blobs key points are generally detected in smooth areas which may contain few diagnostic points. In general, diagnostic points used in medical image are often vessel crossing points, vascular endpoints, and tissue boundary points, which provide abundant information about vessels and can reflect the motion of lungs accurately. These points generally have high gradients as opposed to blob key points and can be detected by Harris. In this work, we proposed a hybrid feature detection method which can detect tissue features of lungs effectively based on Harris and SIFT. In addition, a novel method which can remove mismatched landmarks is also proposed. A series of thoracic CT images are tested by using the proposed algorithm, and the quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method is statistically significantly better than conventional SIFT method especially in the case of large deformation of lungs during respiration.
Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses

The evolution of the electronic age has led to the development of numerous medical databases on the World Wide Web, offering search facilities on a particular subject and the ability to perform citation analysis. We compared the content coverage and practical utility of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The official Web pages of the databases were used to extract information on the range of journals covered, search facilities and restrictions, and update frequency. We used the example of a keyword search to evaluate the usefulness of these databases in biomedical information retrieval and a specific published article to evaluate their utility in performing citation analysis. All databases were practical in use and offered numerous search facilities. PubMed and Google Scholar are accessed for free. The keyword search with PubMed offers optimal update frequency and includes online early articles; other databases can rate articles by number of citations, as an index of importance. For citation analysis, Scopus offers about 20% more coverage than Web of Science, whereas Google Scholar offers results of inconsistent accuracy. PubMed remains an optimal tool in biomedical electronic research. Scopus covers a wider journal range, of help both in keyword searching and citation analysis, but it is currently limited to recent articles (published after 1995) compared with Web of Science. Google Scholar, as for the Web in general, can help in the retrieval of even the most obscure information but its use is marred by inadequate, less often updated, citation information. —Falagas, M. E. , Pitsouni, E I. , Malietzis, G. A. , and Pappas, G. Comparison of Pub Med, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses. FASEB J. 22, 338–342 (2008)
A practical criterion for positivity of transition densities

We establish a simple criterion for locating points where the transition density of a degenerate diffusion is strictly positive. Throughout, we assume that the diffusion satisfies a stochastic differential equation (SDE) on Rd with additive noise and polynomial drift. In this setting, we will see that it is often the case that local information of the flow, e.g. the Lie algebra generated by the vector fields defining the SDE at a point x ∈ Rd, determines where the transition density is strictly positive. This is surprising in that positivity is a more global property of the diffusion. This work primarily builds on and combines the ideas of Arous and Léandre (1991 Décroissance exponentielle du noyau de la chaleur sur la diagonale. II Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 90 377–402) and Jurdjevic and Kupka (1985 Polynomial control systems Math. Ann. 272 361–8).
Language classification using prosodic features: Comparing intensity and pitch

The performance of Human Language Technology systems is known to be severely impacted by language variations. Distance measures have been used in several applications of speech processing to analyze different varying speech attributes. However, not much work has been done on language distance measures, and even less work has been done involving South African languages. Prosodic information-such as intonation and stress which are primarily encoded in pitch and intensity-have been known to lend language-specific variations to human language. We explore the use of intensity and pitch characteristics of languages for measuring the linguistic distance of six South African languages. Both methods are acoustic based and compare accumulative mean differences between pairs of languages to generate difference matrices. It is shown that cluster analysis resulting from the pitch distance matrix correlates closely with human perceptual distances and existing literature about the six languages whereas intensity distances show no distinct patterns of correlation.
Effects of anti-rheumatic herbal medicines on cellular adhesion molecules

OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis whether herbal medicines ameliorate inflammatory diseases via the modulation of cellular adhesion molecules (CAMs). METHODS Human neutrophils, synovial fibroblasts, and endothelial cells were incubated with different concentrations of Tripterygium Wilfordii Hook-f (TWH-f) or Tetrandrine in the presence or absence of interleukin 1 (IL1). The amount of soluble E-selectin, intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) and vascular cellular adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) secreted by cells were determined by ELISA. The cell surface expression of these three CAMs was detected by flow cytometry. RESULTS TWH-f at high concentration (50 ng/ml) has a significant (p<0.05) inhibitory effect on both the secretion and the expression of the cellular adhesion molecules. However, Tetrandrine did not demonstrate the same effects. CONCLUSIONS The cellular adhesion molecules of the endothelium and leucocytes may constitute excellent targets for the development of new anti-inflammation medicines. These results indicate that TWH could be a potential therapeutic agent in the treatment of inflammatory diseases.
Clinical inquiries. Do dietary interventions improve ADHD symptoms in children?

234 ThE JourNal oF FamIly PracTIcE | aPrIl 2010 | Vol 59, No 4 The quality of studies of diet and ADHD is limited by small sample sizes, subjective outcome measures, and nonstandardized intervention protocols. Evidence summary ADHD affects 7% to 8% of school-age children, and the prevalence is increasing. The quality of studies investigating the link between diet and ADHD is limited by small sample sizes, subjective outcome measures, and nonstandardized intervention protocols.
Design and Test of Object Aligning Grippers for Industrial Applications

In this paper we present a new concept for gripping objects in industrial applications. We assume that a priori, the object pose is only known with a relative low accuracy. Despite this, our method can lead to high accuracy gripping suitable for e.g. industrial assembly. Our concept is to augment a simple parallel gripper by mounting a set of object specific jaws. Given the right shapes these jaws enable the gripper to automatically align the object, and thereby compensate for errors in the original object pose estimation. We introduce a couple of automatic and semi-automatic design strategies for deriving these shapes and describe how these can be verified by simulations using rigid body dynamics. The output of our system is a CAD model for the jaws. We prove our concept with a number of experiments, which are also used to verify the coherence between the simulation and real world
Soft metal constructs for large strain sensor membrane

Thin gold films on silicone display large reversible change in electrical resistance upon stretching. Eutectic liquid metal conductors maintain bulk metal conductivity, even upon extensive elongation. When integrated together, the soft metals enable multidirectional, large strain sensor skin. Their fabrication process combines thermal evaporation of thin gold film patterns through stencil mask with microplotting of eutectic gallium indium microwires, and packaging in silicone rubber. Using three-element rectangular rosettes, we demonstrate a sensor skin that can reliably and locally quantify the plane strain vector in surfaces subject to stretch (up to 50% strain) and indentation. This hybrid technology will find applications in soft robotics, prosthetics and wearable health monitoring systems.
Resource Allocation for Secure OFDMA Networks with Imperfect CSIT

In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem for resource allocation and scheduling in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. Our problem formulation takes into account artificial noise generation to combat a passive multiple antenna eavesdropper and the effects of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) in slow fading. The optimization problem is solved by dual decomposition which results in an iterative resource allocation algorithm with a fast speed of convergence. The packet data rate, secrecy data rate, power, and subcarrier allocation policies are optimized to maximize the average secrecy outage capacity (bit/s/Hz securely and successfully delivered to the users). Simulation results illustrate that our proposed iterative algorithm converges to the optimal solution in a small number of iterations and guarantees a non-zero secrecy data rate for given target secrecy outage and channel outage probability requirements.
G protein–coupled receptor/arrestin3 modulation of the endocytic machinery

Nonvisual arrestins (arr) modulate G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) desensitization and internalization and bind to both clathrin (CL) and AP-2 components of the endocytic coated pit (CP). This raises the possibility that endocytosis of some GPCRs may be a consequence of arr-induced de novo CP formation. To directly test this hypothesis, we examined the behavior of green fluorescent protein (GFP)-arr3 in live cells expressing beta2-adrenergic receptors and fluorescent CL. After agonist stimulation, the diffuse GFP-arr3 signal rapidly became punctate and colocalized virtually completely with preexisting CP spots, demonstrating that activated complexes accumulate in previously formed CPs rather than nucleating new CP formation. After arr3 recruitment, CP appeared larger: electron microscopy analysis revealed an increase in both CP number and in the occurrence of clustered CPs. Mutant arr3 proteins with impaired binding to CL or AP-2 displayed reduced recruitment to CPs, but were still capable of inducing CP clustering. In contrast, though constitutively present in CPs, the COOH-terminal moiety of arr3, which contains CP binding sites but lacks receptor binding, did not induce CP clustering. Together, these results indicate that recruitment of functional arr3-GPCR complexes to CP is necessary to induce clustering. Latrunculin B or 16 degrees C blocked CP rearrangements without affecting arr3 recruitment to CP. These results and earlier studies suggest that discrete CP zones exist on cell surfaces, each capable of supporting adjacent CPs, and that the cortical actin membrane skeleton is intimately involved with both the maintenance of existing CPs and the generation of new structures.
Modeling Disease Vector Occurrence When Detection Is Imperfect II: Drivers of Site-Occupancy by Synanthropic Triatoma brasiliensis in the Brazilian Northeast

Background Understanding the drivers of habitat selection by insect disease vectors is instrumental to the design and operation of rational control-surveillance systems. One pervasive yet often overlooked drawback of vector studies is that detection failures result in some sites being misclassified as uninfested; naïve infestation indices are therefore biased, and this can confound our view of vector habitat preferences. Here, we present an initial attempt at applying methods that explicitly account for imperfect detection to investigate the ecology of Chagas disease vectors in man-made environments. Methodology We combined triplicate-sampling of individual ecotopes (n = 203) and site-occupancy models (SOMs) to test a suite of pre-specified hypotheses about habitat selection by Triatoma brasiliensis. SOM results were compared with those of standard generalized linear models (GLMs) that assume perfect detection even with single bug-searches. Principal Findings Triatoma brasiliensis was strongly associated with key hosts (native rodents, goats/sheep and, to a lesser extent, fowl) in peridomestic environments; ecotope structure had, in comparison, small to negligible effects, although wooden ecotopes were slightly preferred. We found evidence of dwelling-level aggregation of infestation foci; when there was one such focus, same-dwelling ecotopes, whether houses or peridomestic structures, were more likely to become infested too. GLMs yielded negatively-biased covariate effect estimates and standard errors; both were, on average, about four times smaller than those derived from SOMs. Conclusions/Significance Our results confirm substantial population-level ecological heterogeneity in T. brasiliensis. They also suggest that, at least in some sites, control of this species may benefit from peridomestic rodent control and changes in goat/sheep husbandry practices. Finally, our comparative analyses highlight the importance of accounting for the various sources of uncertainty inherent to vector studies, including imperfect detection. We anticipate that future research on infectious disease ecology will increasingly rely on approaches akin to those described here.
Orientation tracking control of mobile robot with three trailers

The orientation tracking control problem of a mobile robot with three on-axle trailers in backward motion is addressed in this paper. Due to the fact that the trailer system is not open-loop stable, it is a challenging work even for experienced drivers to reverse the robot stably. The control law is designed based on a reformed cascade and interconnected system. By introducing the input-to-state stability, the proposed control law is proven to be asymptotically stable. Numerical simulation results shows that the proposed control law can successfully reverse the robot stably to track the desired orientation angle with asymptotic convergence.