Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two-Year Follow-Up Study of Patients with Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration Undergoing Anti-VEGF Treatment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: regular intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) treatment is crucial for patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), and delayed treatment can exacerbate disease progression. Methods: we compared the outcomes of on-time versus delayed intravitreal anti-VEGF treatment for patients with nAMD. This study was conducted during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with a 2-year follow-up period. The best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and anatomical findings were evaluated before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and at 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-months post-pandemic. Results: The delayed and on-time groups comprised 54 and 72 patients, respectively. After the pandemic, the injection interval increased by 0.65 ± 1.51 months (p = 0.003), with 22.2% of the patients in the delayed group switching to the treat-and-extended regimen (p < 0.001). The delayed group showed greater mean BCVA deterioration (p = 0.027) and central subfield thickness (p = 0.037) at 6 months and worse maximum subretinal fluid height (p = 0.022) at 18 months than the on-time group. No difference was observed between the groups in the second year. Conclusion: the negative effects of delaying anti-VEGF treatment because of the COVID-19 pandemic can be ameliorated by changing the treatment regimen and shortening treatment intervals.
Role of Culture Free Rapid ImmunoAssay (ELISA) and Genexpert (MTB/RIF) Technology in the Diagnosis of Tuberculosis

Introduction: Prolonged laboratory processes are major hurdles in the early diagnosis of tuberculosis. Prompt management of this disease is utmost necessary to control its spread. For this purpose, use of rapid and reliable laboratory testing methods for the diagnosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are crucial alongwith timely infection management and preventing its transmission to the close contact population. Aims and Objective: The aim of this study was to establish a diagnostic-connection between culture free cost effective rapid immuno-assay (IgG and IgM) and GeneXpert (MTB/RIF) technology for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis within the shortest possible turnaround time. Place and Duration of Study: This cross-sectional study was carried out at Institute of Microbiology and Molecular Genetic, University of the Punjab, Pakistan in collaboration with the Department of Pulmonology and TB Outpatient Department (OPD) at Jinnah Hospital, Lahore over the time of one year (2019-2020). Material and Methods: To achieve the aim, a total of 180 (pulmonary and extra-pulmonary) samples along with blood samples were collected from clinical suspects of Tuberculosis. All collected samples were subjected to AFB microscopy, GeneXpert (MTB/RIF) assay and Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) for IgG and IgM. The diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of both methods were determined by using the solid culture as the gold standard.Study data collected through questionnaire was entered and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 20). p value of ? 0.05 was considered significant. Results: The overall sensitivity and specificity of GeneXpert (MTB/RIF) assay were 98.2 % and 82.4% respectively, whereas, for IgG (ELISA) antibodies, it was 50.0% and 76.4% and for IgM (ELISA) antibodies 50.4% and 97.1% respectively. Conclusion: It was concluded that with fully automated GeneXpert (MTB/RIF) technology, maximum sensitivity and specificity can be achieved for diagnosis of tuberculosis within 2 hours.
To Study the Effect of Pinching on Yield and Quality of Carnation Varieties Grown under Protected Condition

An experiment was conducted to study the effect of pinching methods on carnation under protected condition. The results of present investigation revealed that the variety Liberty (V 2 ) recorded significantly the highest number of flowers per plant (6.23), number of flowers per square meter (205.70) and flower yield per hectare (2077778 Numbers). As per quality point of view the variety Farida (V 3 ) recorded significantly the highest vase life (12.33 days) and longevity of flowers (16.98 days). The treatment P 3 (Double pinch) resulted in significantly the highest number of flowers per plant (6.75), number of flowers per square meter (222.75) and flower yield per hectare (2250000 Numbers). The treatment P 1 (Single pinch) recorded significantly the highest vase life (11.94 days) and longevity of flowers (15.61 days).
Evaluation of results of physical therapy v/s intra articular steroid injection in periarthritis of shoulder: a comparative prospective study

Background: Frozen shoulder or adhesive capsulitis is a condition where the patient experience stiffness and pain in joint of the shoulder. It is an enigma as till now its etiology is unknown. It affects both the genders of the middle and elderly age. A retrospective, comparative study was to evaluate the effects of physical therapy versus intra-articular steroid injection in periarthritis of shoulder.Methods: 30 patients each with frozen shoulder who were treated either using physical therapy (Group 1) and intra-articular steroid injection (Group 2). The data was collected at baseline and at different follow-up periods and analyzed.Results: There were 3 lost to follow-up in physiotherapy group and 4 in intra-articular injection group. Slight male preponderance (51.9% vs. 48.1%) was seen in physiotherapy group. Left side more affected in both the groups. Literacy (p=0.064), socioeconomic status (p=0.22), occupation (p=0.866), comorbidities (p=0.974), abnormal x-ray (p=0.34) were all comparable between the two groups. Mean duration of shoulder pain and restriction of shoulder motion were also comparable (p>0.05). Side effects– 46.2% were higher in intra-articular injection group. Response to treatment, disability score and SPADI index showed significant reduction in both the groups, but significantly more reduction in intra-articular injection was seen in comparison to the physiotherapy group.Conclusions: The overall treatment outcome in intra-articular injection group is much better in comparison to the physiotherapy group, but with higher side effects. Intra-articular injection of steroid will prove to be a boon after effective management of side effects.
Self-attention CNN for retinal layer segmentation in OCT

The structure of the retinal layers provides valuable diagnostic information for many ophthalmic diseases. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) obtains cross-sectional images of the retina, which reveals information about the retinal layers. The U-net based approaches are prominent in retinal layering methods, which are usually beneficial to local characteristics but not good at obtaining long-distance dependence for contextual information. Furthermore, the morphology of retinal layers with the disease is more complex, which brings more significant challenges to the task of retinal layer segmentation. We propose a U-shaped network combining an encoder-decoder architecture and self-attention mechanisms. In response to the characteristics of retinal OCT cross-sectional images, a self-attentive module in the vertical direction is added to the bottom of the U-shaped network, and an attention mechanism is also added in skip connection and up-sampling to enhance essential features. In this method, the transformer’s self-attentive mechanism obtains the global field of perception, thus providing the missing context information for convolutions, and the convolutional neural network also efficiently extracts local features, compensating the local details the transformer ignores. The experiment results showed that our method is accurate and better than other methods for segmentation of the retinal layers, with the average Dice scores of 0.871 and 0.820, respectively, on two public retinal OCT image datasets. To perform the layer segmentation of retinal OCT image better, the proposed method incorporates the transformer’s self-attention mechanism in a U-shaped network, which is helpful for ophthalmic disease diagnosis.
Annulus Fibrosus Injury Induces Acute Neuroinflammation and Chronic Glial Response in Dorsal Root Ganglion and Spinal Cord—An In Vivo Rat Discogenic Pain Model

Chronic painful intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration (i.e., discogenic pain) is a major source of global disability needing improved knowledge on multiple-tissue interactions and how they progress in order improve treatment strategies. This study used an in vivo rat annulus fibrosus (AF) injury-driven discogenic pain model to investigate the acute and chronic changes in IVD degeneration and spinal inflammation, as well as sensitization, inflammation, and remodeling in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and spinal cord (SC) dorsal horn. AF injury induced moderate IVD degeneration with acute and broad spinal inflammation that progressed to DRG to SC changes within days and weeks, respectively. Specifically, AF injury elevated macrophages in the spine (CD68) and DRGs (Iba1) that peaked at 3 days post-injury, and increased microglia (Iba1) in SC that peaked at 2 weeks post-injury. AF injury also triggered glial responses with elevated GFAP in DRGs and SC at least 8 weeks post-injury. Spinal CD68 and SC neuropeptide Substance P both remained elevated at 8 weeks, suggesting that slow and incomplete IVD healing provides a chronic source of inflammation with continued SC sensitization. We conclude that AF injury-driven IVD degeneration induces acute spinal, DRG, and SC inflammatory crosstalk with sustained glial responses in both DRGs and SC, leading to chronic SC sensitization and neural plasticity. The known association of these markers with neuropathic pain suggests that therapeutic strategies for discogenic pain need to target both spinal and nervous systems, with early strategies managing acute inflammatory processes, and late strategies targeting chronic IVD inflammation, SC sensitization, and remodeling.
The Misprediction of Helpers in Comforting Situations and Its Mechanism

Background As a prosocial behavior, comforting behavior can prompt individuals to provide emotional support to others. After the comforting behavior, the comforter may estimate the consoled individual’s reaction, and this prediction will influence their future behavior. According to social cognition theory, competence dominates self-cognition, and warmth dominates the cognition of others, which impacts the prediction accuracy of comforters. They may overestimate the negative reaction of the consoled. This misprediction has also been confirmed for other prosocial behaviors, such as helping behavior and sharing behavior. Methods In this study, 337 Chinese college students were investigated by convenience sampling. Through one real-world experiment and three imaginary-situation experiments, this study explored the phenomenon, effects and causes of the comforter’s misprediction in the comfort condition. Results SPSS 23.0 and statistical methods such as analysis of variance, an independent sample t-test and an intermediary test were used. The comforters overestimated the negative responses and underestimated the positive responses of the recipients, and the intensity of this misprediction increased in the comfort failure condition. The comforters’ misprediction arose because the recipients were more concerned with the warmth dimension of the comforters, whereas the comforters were more inclined to focus on their own competence dimension. Conclusion The comforter’s prediction of the consoled’s response was more negative than the actual situation, and this misprediction was more obvious when the consolation failed, which can be explained by social cognition theory. This study provides an understanding of how to relieve the psychological stress of comforters.
Forest composition, structure, and disturbance history of the Alan Seeger Natural Area, Huntington County, Pennsylvania

on wet stream bottoms, Tsuga-Pinus on wet to mesic stream terraces, mixed mesophytic species within a mesic upland cove, and mixed Quercus on mesic to dry upland slopes. Based on tree recruitment and radial growth patterns, low-intensity exogenous disturbances occurred every 30-60 yr during the presettlement era. Extensive logging during the mid- I 840s was evident throughout the area, and, along with subsequent disturbances, had a profound effect on current forest composition and structure. Tree species responded differently to major anthropogenic disturbance, in terms of growth rate and canopy positioning. In general, Pinus strobus L. , Liriodendron tulipifera L. and Quercus responded favorably to disturbance, whereas Acer, Betula alleghaniensis Britton and Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr recovered more slowly. Current forest age structures reflect different disturbance patterns and rates of recovery, and were categorized as either even-aged, uneven-aged consisting of 2 distinct even-aged cohorts, or uneven-aged with extended recruitment (multiple small-scale disturbances). Successional patterns currently exhibited in all forests may be drastically altered in the future from overbrowsing by whitetailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and/or intense shrub competition on tree regeneration.
Empirical Investigation of Abnormal Returns through Technical Analysis in the Nepalese Stock Market

This study comprehensively assesses the potential superiority of a technical trading strategy compared to the conventional buy and hold approach in the Nepalese stock market, where prior research is limited. It investigates the effectiveness of three widely recognized technical analysis indicators, both individually and in combination, using a 12-year historical dataset of 75 stocks, and 25.65-year NEPSE (Nepal Stock Exchange) index data. The back testing procedure evaluates the profitability and viability of the technical analysis strategy relative to buy and hold. The results show that, when factoring in trading-related costs, the technical trading strategy does not consistently outperform buy and hold. However, when trading fees are excluded, the technical strategy exhibits statistically significant outperformance. Future research can explore alternative technical rules and strategies to gain a more nuanced understanding of trading dynamics.
Performance Comparison of Keccak, Skein, Grøstl, Blake and JH: SHA-3 Final Round Candidate Algorithms on ARM Cortex A8 Processor

Taking cognizance of various attacks on MDx family of Hash function including SHA-0 and SHA-1, National Institute of Standards and Technology came up with a public competition for new Hash standard SHA-3 to augment or replace the current Hash standard SHA-2. NIST provided a reference platform (Wintel machines) and compiler (Microsoft Visual Studio) on which the submitted algorithms were to be evaluated. The five algorithms that reached the final round of SHA-3 public competition were evaluated by us on ARM Cortex A8 architecture (architecture other than the reference platform). Performance evaluation of these final round candidate algorithms were done on Cortex-A8 based OpenBoard AM335x from PHYTEC running Linux 3.2. 0. The results in Cycles consumed per byte are shared in this paper.
Longer Photoperiod Substantially Increases Indoor-Grown Cannabis’ Yield and Quality: A Study of Two High-THC Cultivars Grown under 12 h vs. 13 h Days

Indoor-grown Cannabis sativa is commonly transitioned to a 12 h daily photoperiod to promote flowering. However, our previous research has shown that some indoor-grown cannabis cultivars can initiate strong flowering responses under daily photoperiods longer than 12 h. Since longer photoperiods inherently provide higher daily light integrals (DLIs), they may also increase growth and yield. To test this hypothesis, two THC-dominant cannabis cultivars, ‘Incredible Milk’ (IM) and ‘Gorilla Glue’ (GG), were grown to commercial maturity at a canopy level PPFD of 540 µmol·m−2·s−1 from white LEDS under 12 h or 13 h daily photoperiods, resulting in DLIs of 23.8 and 25.7 mol·m−2·d−1, respectively. Both treatments were harvested when the plants in the 12 h treatment reached maturity according to established commercial protocols. There was no delay in flowering initiation time in GG, but flowering initiation in IM was delayed by about 1.5 d under 13 h. Stigma browning and trichome ambering also occurred earlier and progressed faster in the 12 h treatment in both cultivars. The vegetative growth of IM plants in the 13 h treatment was greater and more robust. The inflorescence yields were strikingly higher in the 13 h vs. 12 h treatment, i.e., 1.35 times and 1.50 times higher in IM and GG, respectively, which is 4 to 6 times higher than the relative increase in DLIs. The inflorescence concentrations of major cannabinoids in the 13 h treatment were either higher or not different from the 12 h treatment in both cultivars. These results suggest that there may be substantial commercial benefits for using photoperiods longer than 12 h for increasing inflorescence yields without decreasing cannabinoid concentrations in some cannabis cultivars grown in indoor environments.
Genetic characterization of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli harboring colistin-resistant gene isolated from food animals in food supply chain

Colistin is widely used for the prophylaxis and treatment of infectious disease in humans and livestock. However, the global food chain may actively promote the dissemination of colistin-resistant bacteria in the world. Mobile colistin-resistant (mcr) genes have spread globally, in both communities and hospitals. This study sought to genomically characterize mcr-mediated colistin resistance in 16 Escherichia coli strains isolated from retail meat samples using whole genome sequencing with short-read and long-read platforms. To assess colistin resistance and the transferability of mcr genes, antimicrobial susceptibility testing and conjugation experiments were conducted. Among the 16 isolates, 11 contained mcr-1, whereas three carried mcr-3 and two contained mcr-1 and mcr-3. All isolates had minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for colistin in the range 1–64 μg/mL. Notably, 15 out of the 16 isolates demonstrated successful transfer of mcr genes via conjugation, indicative of their presence on plasmids. In contrast, the KK3 strain did not exhibit such transferability. Replicon types of mcr-1-containing plasmids included IncI2 and IncX4, while IncFIB, IncFII, and IncP1 contained mcr-3. Another single strain carried mcr-1.1 on IncX4 and mcr-3.5 on IncP1. Notably, one isolate contained mcr-1.1 located on a chromosome and carrying mcr-3.1 on the IncFIB plasmid. The chromosomal location of the mcr gene may ensure a steady spread of resistance in the absence of selective pressure. Retail meat products may act as critical reservoirs of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance that has been transmitted to humans.
Mass extinction in planktic Foraminifera at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in subtropical and temperate latitudes

The high resolution sampling across the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary of the most expanded and continuous sections located in Spain and Tunisia allows us to test and elucidate the extinction model of Cretaceous planktic foraminifera in subtropical and temperate latitudes. The planktic foraminiferal extinction occurred over a short period, with 5% of the species disappearing in the late Maastrichtian, 70% of the species became extinct at the K/T boundary and about 25% of the species are ranging into the early Danian. The species that became extinct at the K/T boundary were large, complex tropical and subtropical forms that dwelled in deep and intermediate water depths. Their disappearance constitutes the largest and most sudden extinction event in the history of planktic foraminifera. Nevertheless, the small cosmopolitan surface dwellers with simple morphologies appear to have survived and the last of them gradually disappeared in the early Danian. The planktic foraminiferal extinction model can be interpreted as a catastrophic mass extinction that was centred at the K/T boundary, and was superimposed on a less evident and controversial gradual mass extinction which apparently began in the late Maastrichtian and continued into the early Danian. The catastrophic pattern of extinction of 70% of the species at the K/T boundary is very compatible with the effect of a large asteroid impact.
Breaking the Law: Is It Correct to Use the Converse Bergmann Rule in Ceroglossus chilensis? An Overview Using Geometric Morphometrics

Simple Summary Understanding the prevalence of the converse Bergmann’s rule for ectotherm animals and how often this rule is broken is of utmost importance to understand the underlying mechanisms allowing organisms to adapt to different environments and the selective pressures they face. By using the ground beetle Ceroglossus chilensis as a biological model, we provide a practical example of testing the converse Bergmann rule in an ectotherm with a narrow geographical distribution in Chile. Abstract The converse Bergmann’s rule is a pattern of body size variation observed in many ectothermic organisms that contradicts the classic Bergmann’s rule and suggests that individuals inhabiting warmer climates tend to exhibit larger body sizes compared to those inhabiting colder environments. Due to the thermoregulatory nature of Bergmann’s rule, its application among ectotherms might prove to be more complicated, given that these organisms obtain heat by absorbing it from their habitat. The existence of this inverse pattern therefore challenges the prevailing notion that larger body size is universally advantageous in colder climates. Ceroglossus chilensis is a native Chilean beetle that has the largest latitudinal range of any species in the genus, from 34.3° S to 47.8° S. Within Chile, it continuously inhabits regions extending from Maule to Aysen, thriving on both native and non-native forest species. Beyond their remarkable color variation, populations of C. chilensis show minimal morphological disparity, noticeable only through advanced morphological techniques (geometric morphometrics). Based on both (1) the “temperature–size rule”, which suggests that body size decreases with increasing temperature, and (2) the reduced resource availability in high-latitude environments that may lead to smaller body sizes, we predict that C. chilensis populations will follow the converse Bergmann’s rule. Our results show a clear converse pattern to the normal Bergmann rule, where smaller centroid sizes were found to be measured in the specimens inhabiting the southern areas of Chile. Understanding the prevalence of the converse Bergmann’s rule for ectotherm animals and how often this rule is broken is of utmost importance to understand the underlying mechanisms allowing organisms to adapt to different environments and the selective pressures they face.