Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pain-related behaviors associated with persistence of mechanical hyperalgesia post antigen-induced arthritis in rats.

Upon transient musculoskeletal diseases, some patients develop persistent pain while others recover from pain. Here we studied whether such heterogeneity also occurs in rats after recovery from unilateral antigen-induced arthritis (AIA) in the knee joint, and which pain phenotype may predict the course of pain. Typically inflammatory swelling lasts about three weeks. Pain-related behaviors were monitored for 84 days after AIA induction. Unbiased cluster analysis of intra-group-differences at day 84 of AIA revealed that about one third of the rats (cluster 1) showed persistent mechanical hyperalgesia at the injected knee joint, whereas the other rats (cluster 2) had recovered from pain. Retrograde analysis of pain-related behaviors revealed that cluster 1 rats exhibited more severe mechanical hyperalgesia at the injected knee from day 3 of AIA, and mechanical hyperalgesia at the contralateral knee. Cluster 1 and 2 rats did not show different inflammatory swelling, secondary mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia at the ipsilateral hindpaw, guarding score and asymmetry of weight bearing during AIA. Thus in particular early severe mechanical hyperalgesia in the inflamed joint and segmental contralateral mechanical hyperalgesia seem to be a risk factor for the development of persistent mechanical hyperalgesia pointing to the importance of spinal mechanisms. However, none of the rats showed an expression of ATF3 in DRG neurons, nor morphological spinal microglia activation thus not suggesting development of neuropathic pain. Both clusters showed a persistent upregulation of pCREB in DRG neurons, inversely correlated with mechanical hyperalgesia at the knee. The role of pCREB needs to be further explored.
Dengue Fever- Awareness And Knowledge Among People In A Dengue Prevalent Area

Dengue is a disease of public health importance. This study was conducted to assess the level of knowledge, attitude and practices regarding dengue fever in dengue prevalent areas. A structured questionnaire was administered through a face-to-face unprompted interview to 252 people. The questionnaire had four parts- socio-demographic characteristics, awareness, knowledge and preventive practices. The study revealed that only (53.2%) were aware of dengue fever, Relatives and friends were the source of information (41.8% of those who are aware). 28.6% had good 46.8% average, and 24.6% poor knowledge. Preventive practices focused towards prevention of mosquito bites 67.5%, rather than eradication of mosquito.Based on statistical analysis it is found that males and urban population are comparatively more aware than femalesand rural population. Conclusion: Majority of the respondents had only average knowledge and did not adapt any preventive practices highlighting the need for dengue awareness programs.
Propulsive nanomachines: the convergent evolution of archaella, flagella, and cilia.

Echoing the repeated convergent evolution of flight and vision in large eukaryotes, propulsive swimming motility has evolved independently in microbes in each of the three domains of life. Filamentous appendages-archaella in Archaea, flagella in Bacteria, and cilia in Eukaryotes-wave, whip, or rotate to propel microbes, overcoming diffusion and enabling colonization of new environments. The implementations of the three propulsive nanomachines are distinct, however: archaella and flagella rotate, while cilia beat or wave; flagella and cilia assemble at their tips, while archaella assemble at their base; archaella and cilia use ATP for motility, while flagella use ion-motive force. These underlying differences reflect the tinkering required to evolve a propulsive molecular machine, in which pre-existing machines in the appropriate contexts were iteratively co-opted for new functions, and whose origins are reflected in the resultant mechanisms. Contemporary homologies suggest that archaella evolved from a non-rotary pilus, flagella from a non-rotary appendage or secretion system, and cilia from a passive sensory structure. Here we review the structure, assembly, mechanism, and homologies of the three distinct solutions as a foundation to better understand how propulsive nanomachines evolved three times independently and to highlight principles of molecular evolution.
Factors affecting employee safety productivity: an empirical study in an OHSAS 18001-certified organization

Objective. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationships between safety behaviours (safety compliance and safety participation), their determinants (safety motivation and knowledge of safety) and their antecedent (safety training) affecting employee safety productivity, an economic benefit of occupational health and safety (OHS). Methods. The study was carried out with employees participating in the basic OHS training, which is mandatory every 2 years for all personnel due to the related legal obligation. The data required for the research purpose were collected by surveying 453 employees. The collected data were then tested using the methods of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Results. The findings of the analyses showed that safety training, safety knowledge, safety motivation and safety compliance affect the improvement of employee safety productivity, one of the economic benefits of OHS. The study also suggested that safety participation does not influence the improvement of employee productivity. Furthermore, a new scale concerning employee safety productivity has been brought to the safety literature. Conclusion. It is suggested that organizational managers wishing to increase employee safety productivity focus particularly on training regarding the safety knowledge, skills, motivation and compliance of employees.
Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Support for Pediatric Burn Patients: Is It Worth the Risk?*

Objectives: Examine the outcomes of pediatric burn patients requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to determine whether extracorporeal membrane oxygenation should be considered in this special population. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: All extracorporeal membrane oxygenation centers reporting to the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization. Subjects: Pediatric patients (birth to younger than 18 yr) who were supported with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation with a burn diagnosis between 1990 and 2016. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: A total of 113 patients were identified from the registry by inclusion criteria. Patients cannulated for respiratory failure had the highest survival (55.7%, n = 97) compared to those supported for cardiac failure (33.3%, n = 6) or extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (30%, n = 10). Patients supported on venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for respiratory failure had the best overall survival at 62.2% (n = 37). Important for the burn population, rates of surgical site bleeding were similar to other surgical patients placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation at 22.1%. Cardiac arrest prior to cannulation was associated with increased hospital mortality (odds ratio, 3.41; 95% CI, 0.16–1.01; p = 0.048). Following cannulation, complications including the need for inotropes (odds ratio, 2.64; 95% CI, 1.24–5.65; p = 0.011), presence of gastrointestinal hemorrhage (p = 0.049), and hyperglycemia (glucose > 240 mg/dL) (odds ratio, 3.42; 95% CI, 1.13–10.38; p = 0.024) were associated with increased mortality. Of patients with documented burn percentage of total body surface area (n = 19), survival was 70% when less than 60% total body surface area was involved. Conclusions: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation could be considered as an additional level of support for the pediatric burn population, especially in the setting of respiratory failure. Additional studies are necessary to determine the optimal timing of cannulation and other patient characteristics that may impact outcomes.
Surgeons’ Interactions With and Attitudes Toward E-Patients: Questionnaire Study in Germany and Oman

Background Doctors’ interactions with and attitudes toward e-patients have an overall impact on health care delivery. Objective This study aimed to gauge surgeons’ interactions with e-patients, their attitudes toward those e-patient activities, the possible impact on the delivery of health care, and the reasons behind those activities and attitudes. Methods We created a paper-based and electronic survey form based on pertinent variables identified in the literature, and from March 2018 to July 2018 we surveyed 49 surgeons in Germany and 59 surgeons in Oman, asking them about their interactions with and attitudes toward e-patients. Data were stored in Microsoft Excel and SPSS, and descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and chi-square tests were performed on the data. Results Of our sample, 71% (35/49) of the German surgeons and 56% (33/59) of the Omani surgeons communicated electronically with their patients. Although the German surgeons spent a greater percentage of Internet usage time on work-related activities (χ218=32.5; P=.02) than the Omani surgeons, there were many similarities in their activities. An outstanding difference was that the German surgeons used email with their patients more than the Omani surgeons (χ21=9.0; P=.003), and the Omani surgeons used social media, specifically WhatsApp, more than the German surgeons (χ21=18.6; P<.001). Overall, the surgeons were equally positive about the most common e-patient activities such as bringing material from the internet to the consultation (mean 4.11, SD 1.6), although the German surgeons (mean 3.43, SD 1.9) were more concerned (P=.001) than the Omani surgeons (mean 2.32, SD 1.3) about the potential loss of control and time consumption (German: mean 5.10, SD 1.4 and Omani: mean 3.92, SD 1.6; P<.001). Conclusions The interactions show a high degree of engagement with e-patients. The differences between the German and the Omani surgeons in the preferred methods of communication are possibly closely linked to cultural differences and recent historical events. These differences may, moreover, indicate e-patients’ desired method of electronic communication to include social media. The low impact of surgeons’ attitudes on the activities may also result from a normalization of many e-patient activities, irrespective of the doctors’ attitudes and influences.
Educational Selectivity of Migrants and Current School Enrollment in Four Sub-Saharan African Countries

Migration may impact children in sending households but the direction and consistency of the association between migration and children’s schooling remains unclear. Taking advantage of comparable data across four settings of labor migration in Africa, this paper addresses the extent to which children’s school enrollment is higher in households engaged in labor migration than in non-migrant households. We hypothesize that educational selection into migration may explain differential outcomes among children in migrant sending households. The results suggest that higher school enrollment in migrant sending households is related to the educational selectivity of migrants. Children in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Senegal who live in households where migrants are positively selected are more likely to be enrolled in school than their peers in nonmigrant households. Nigeria is the only country where no association exists between educational selectivity of migrants and current school enrollment.
A Residual Based Attention Model for EEG Based Sleep Staging

Sleep staging is to score the sleep state of a subject into different sleep stages such as Wake and Rapid Eye Movement (REM). It plays an indispensable role in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. As manual sleep staging through well-trained sleep experts is time consuming, tedious, and subjective, many automatic methods have been developed for accurate, efficient, and objective sleep staging. Recently, deep learning based methods have been successfully proposed for electroencephalogram (EEG) based sleep staging with promising results. However, most of these methods directly take EEG raw signals as input of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) without considering the domain knowledge of EEG staging. Apart from that, to capture temporal information, most of the existing methods utilize recurrent neural networks such as LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) which are not effective for modelling global temporal context and difficult to train. Therefore, inspired by the clinical guidelines of sleep staging such as AASM (American Academy of Sleep Medicine) rules where different stages are generally characterized by EEG waveforms of various frequencies, we propose a multi-scale deep architecture by decomposing an EEG signal into different frequency bands as input to CNNs. To model global temporal context, we utilize the multi-head self-attention module of the transformer model to not only improve performance, but also shorten the training time. In addition, we choose residual based architecture which makes training end-to-end. Experimental results on two widely used sleep staging datasets, Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) and sleep-EDF datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness and significant efficiency (up to 12 times less training time) of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art.
Magnitude or Direction? Seasonal Variation of Interlimb Asymmetry in Elite Academy Soccer Players

Abstract Bishop, C, Read, P, Chavda, S, Jarvis, P, Brazier, J, Bromley, T, and Turner, A. Magnitude or direction? Seasonal variation of interlimb asymmetry in elite academy soccer players. J Strength Cond Res 36(4): 1031–1037, 2022—Previous research has highlighted a distinct lack of longitudinal data for asymmetry. The aims of this study were to provide seasonal variation data for the magnitude and direction of asymmetry. Eighteen elite male academy soccer players (under-23) performed unilateral countermovement jumps (CMJs) and unilateral drop jumps (DJs) during pre-season, mid-season, and end of season time points. Recorded metrics for asymmetry included jump height and concentric impulse for the CMJ, and jump height and reactive strength index for the DJ. The magnitude of asymmetry showed trivial to small changes throughout the season (CMJ effect size [ES] range = −0.43 to 0.05; DJ ES range = −0.18 to 0.41). However, Kappa coefficients showed poor to substantial levels of agreement for the direction of asymmetry during the CMJ (Kappa = −0.06 to 0.77) and DJ (Kappa = −0.10 to 0.78) throughout the season. These data show that when monitoring asymmetry, the magnitude alone may provide a false impression of consistent scores over time. By contrast, monitoring the direction of asymmetry highlights its task and variable nature and is suggested as a useful tool for practitioners who wish to monitor asymmetry over the course of a competitive soccer season.
Activation of EphB receptors contributes to primary sensory neuron excitability by facilitating Ca2+ influx directly or through Src kinase-mediated NMDA receptor phosphorylation.

EphrinB-EphB receptor tyrosine kinases have been demonstrated to play important roles in pain processing after peripheral nerve injury. We have previously reported that ephrinB-EphB receptor signaling can regulate excitability and plasticity of neurons in spinal dorsal horn, and thus contribute to spinal central sensitization in neuropathic pain. How EphB receptor activation influences excitability of primary neurons in dorsal root ganglion (DRG), however, remains unknown. Here we report that EphB receptor activation facilitates calcium influx through NMDA receptor dependent and independent manners. In cultured DRG cells from adult rats, EphB1 and EphB2 receptors were expressed in neurons, but not the glial cells. Bath application of EphB receptor agonist ephrinB2-Fc induced NMDA-independent Ca influx, which was from the extracellular space rather than endoplasmic reticulum. EphB receptor activation also greatly enhanced NMDA-dependent Ca influx and NR2B phosphorylation, which was prevented by pre-treatment of Src kinase inhibitor PP2. In nerve-injured DRG neurons, elevated expression and activation of EphB1 and EphB2 receptors contributed to the increased intracellular Ca concentration and NMDA-induced Ca influx. Repetitive intrathecal administration of EphB2-Fc inhibited the increased phosphorylation of NR2B and Ca-dependent subsequent signals Src, ERK, and CaMKII as well as behaviorally expressed pain after nerve injury. These findings demonstrate that activation of EphB receptors can modulate DRG neuron excitability by facilitating Ca influx directly or through Src kinase activation-mediated NMDA receptor phosphorylation and that EphB receptor activation is critical to DRG neuron hyperexcitability, which has been considered critical to the subsequent spinal central sensitization and neuropathic pain.
The single-cell eQTLGen consortium

In recent years, functional genomics approaches combining genetic information with bulk RNA-sequencing data have identified the downstream expression effects of disease-associated genetic risk factors through so-called expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis. Single-cell RNA-sequencing creates enormous opportunities for mapping eQTLs across different cell types and in dynamic processes, many of which are obscured when using bulk methods. Rapid increase in throughput and reduction in cost per cell now allow this technology to be applied to large-scale population genetics studies. To fully leverage these emerging data resources, we have founded the single-cell eQTLGen consortium (sc-eQTLGen), aimed at pinpointing the cellular contexts in which disease-causing genetic variants affect gene expression. Here, we outline the goals, approach and potential utility of the sc-eQTLGen consortium. We also provide a set of study design considerations for future single-cell eQTL studies.
Is Cochlear Length Related to Congenital Sensorineural Hearing Loss: Preliminary Data.

OBJECTIVES This study used the data from patients with congenital sensorineural hearing loss (CSNHL) and those with normal hearing to measure and compare the length of the cochlea with high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT). MATERIALS AND METHODS HRCT images of patients who were diagnosed with CSNHL and were candidates for cochlear implantation were evaluated retrospectively. Sixty-three ears of 33 patients were included in the study. The control group comprised 66 ears of 33 individuals. The measurements were conducted by an experienced radiologist, using three-dimensional curved multiplanar reconstruction. All the measurements were performed thrice, and the average was calculated. RESULTS The data were distributed normally. The lengths of the cochlear components for the CSNHL and control groups were as follows: basal turn 21.66±1.01 (21.30-22.02) and 22.57±0.68 (22.32-22.81) mm, middle turn 11.58±0.69 (11.34-11.83) and 12.39±0.46 (12.23-12.56) mm, and apical turn 6.45±0.92 (6.12-6.77) and 7.12±0.65 (6.89-7.35) mm, respectively. The mean cochlear lateral wall (LW) length was significantly shorter in the CSNHL patients [39.71±1.32 (39.25-40.18) mm] than in the controls [42.09±1.17 (41.67-42.51) mm], (p<0.001). The intra-rater reliability was 0.878 (confidence interval 95%: 0.841-0.908 p<0.001). The cut-off value was 40.81 mm (sensitivity: 0.91, specificity: 0.94, and accuracy: 0.90). CONCLUSION There were microanatomic dissimilarities between the length of the cochlea in subjects from the CSNHL group and those from the control group.
Therapeutic Effects of Bilateral Anodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Prefrontal and Motor Cortical Areas in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Pilot Study

Dysfunctional frontal cortical areas associated with clinical features are observed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study attempted to identify any potential therapeutic effects of bilateral anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied over the left and right prefrontal and motor areas on the clinical characteristics of children with ASD. Fifty children with confirmed ASD medical diagnoses were divided equally and randomly into a tDCS treatment group and a control group. The tDCS treatment group underwent 10 sessions (20‐min durations, five per week) of bilateral anodal tDCS stimulation applied simultaneously over the left and right prefrontal and motor areas, whereas the control group underwent the same procedures but with the use of sham tDCS stimulation. Total scores and sub‐scores of autism treatment evaluation checklist (ATEC) (language and communication; sociability; sensory awareness; and behavioral, health, and physical conditions) were measured before and after the tDCS treatment sessions of both groups. There were significant decreases in total ATEC scores (P = 0.014), sociability sub‐scores (P = 0.021), and behavioral, health, and physical condition sub‐scores (P = 0.011) in the tDCS treatment group. No significant changes were observed in total ATEC scores and sub‐scores in the control group. In conclusion, compared to the control group, bilateral anodal tDCS showed potential therapeutic effects on children with ASD in terms of improvements in sociability, behavior, health, and physical conditions with no reported side effects. Autism Res 2020, 13: 828–836. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Color Image Demosaicing Using Progressive Collaborative Representation

In this paper, a progressive collaborative representation (PCR) framework is proposed that is able to incorporate any existing color image demosaicing method for further boosting its demosaicing performance. Our PCR consists of two phases: (i) offline training and (ii) online refinement. In phase (i), multiple training-and-refining stages will be performed. In each stage, a new dictionary will be established through the learning of a large number of feature-patch pairs, extracted from the demosaicked images of the current stage and their corresponding original full-color images. After training, a projection matrix will be generated and exploited to refine the current demosaicked image. The updated image with improved image quality will be used as the input for the next training-and-refining stage and performed the same processing likewise. At the end of phase (i), all the projection matrices generated as above-mentioned will be exploited in phase (ii) to conduct online demosaicked image refinement of the test image. Extensive simulations conducted on two commonly-used test datasets (i.e., IMAX and Kodak) for evaluating the demosaicing algorithms have clearly demonstrated that our proposed PCR framework is able to constantly boost the performance of any image demosaicing method we experimented, in terms of objective and subjective performance evaluations.