Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development and Evaluation of a Manual Multi - crop Planter for Peasant Farmers

Farming today has gone beyond subsistence farming that produces for the farmer and his household. Research shows that the consumption of grains or cereal crops is at an alarming rate in the world, so to encourage small farm holders a manually operated multi-crop hand push planter with changeable metering devices for cowpea, maize and soybean was designed, fabricated and evaluated to improve planting efficiency and reduce drudgery involved in manual planting method. The laboratory and field tests were conducted to determine weight of seeds discharged from the planter, seed percentage damage, field capacity, average depth of placement of seeds in furrow, average inter-row spacing of seeds and the emergence of the seedlings. Results revealed that the planter had field efficiency and field capacity of 76.3% and 0.39 ha/hr with seed rate of 0.25 kg/ha, 0.18 kg/ha and 0.21kg/ha respectively for cowpea, maize and soybean. Percentage difference between the seed damage of 3.54%, 2.32% and 1.32% of cowpea, maize and soybean respectively obtained was from an average spacing of 40.8cm and depth of 3.98cm. The single-row multi-crop planter is very simple to use and it is maintenance free, except for the bearings which needs to be lubricated from time to time to allow the planter's ground wheel to move freely. For this design, the drive shaft directly controls the seed metering mechanism which eliminates completely attachments such as pulleys, belt systems, and gears thereby eliminating complexities which increase cost, and increasing efficiency at a highly reduced cost which is the focus of this project work. The planter can be easily maintained without any technicality and all materials used for the fabrication are locally available in the case of worn - out parts.
ANTI- INFLAMMATORY EFFECTS OF BUCHHOLZIA CORIACEA ETHANOL LEAF-EXTRACT AND FRACTIONS IN FREUND ’ S ADJUVANT-INDUCED RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIC ALBINO RATS

: The anti-inflammatory effects of Buchholzia coriacea ethanol leaf-extract, aqueous and ethylacetate fractions in Freund ’ s adjuvant-induced rheumatoid arthritic albino rats were investigated. The phytochemical constituents of the extract and fractions were analyzed using standard methods. A total of 216 albino rats were used for this study. Rats used for acute toxicity using Lorke method were 36, while 180 rats were randomly divided into 12 groups, each containing 15 rats for the sub-acute study. Group 1 served as normal control. Rheumatoid arthritis was induced in groups 2 to 12 by intradermal administration of 0.1 ml complete Freund ’ s adjuvant into the left hind paws of the albino rats. Group 2 (positive control) received normal saline while group 3 (standard control) received 5 mg/Kg indomethacin TM (standard drug). Groups 4 to 12 were given ethanol leaf-extract, aqueous and ethylacetate fractions of Buchholzia coriacea at doses of 200, 400 and 800 mg/Kg body weight via oral intubation for 31 days. The inflammatory parameters were measured by standard laboratory procedures. Phytochemical constituents (mg/100g) in all samples were in the order of: Terpenoids>phenols>alkaloids>flavonoids>tannins>saponins>steroids>glycosides. Some phytochemicals were significantly (P<0.05) higher in the extract than fractions. The acute toxicity study showed that the ethanol leaf-extract caused no death to the rats even at 5000 mg/Kg body weight. Adjuvant administration significantly (P<0.05) increased the paw sizes and decreased the body weight of rats. In the arthritic rats, the levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin- 1β (IL - 1β), tumor necrosis factor -alpha (TNF- α), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C -reactive protein (CRP), rheumatoid factor (RF), as well as the activity of adenosine deaminase (AD) were significantly (P<0.05) higher than the normal group. Treatment with standard drug and varied doses of the ethanol leaf-extract and fractions significantly (P<0.05) reduced these parameters to levels comparable to the normal control in a time and dose-dependent manner. The aqueous fraction had most significant (P<0.05) positive effect on most of the parameters studied at a dose of 800mg/Kg. The results show that Buchholzia coriacea possesses some phytochemicals which could be responsible for the anti-inflammatory potentials of the leaf extract and fractions. Therefore, this study provides scientific evidence that Buchholzia coriacea ethanol leaf-extract and fractions may be useful in the management of inflammation which is very common in rheumatoid arthritis.
Characterization of cotJ , a (cid:115) E -Controlled Operon Affecting the Polypeptide Composition of the Coat of Bacillus subtilis Spores

The outermost protective structure found in endospores of Bacillus subtilis is a thick protein shell known as the coat, which makes a key contribution to the resistance properties of the mature spore and also plays a role in its interaction with compounds able to trigger germination. The coat is organized as a lamellar inner layer and an electron-dense outer layer and has a complex polypeptide composition. Here we report the cloning and characterization of an operon, cotJ , located at about 62 (cid:38) on the B. subtilis genetic map, whose inactivation results in the production of spores with an altered pattern of coat polypeptides. The cotJ operon was identiﬁed by screening a random library of lacZ transcriptional fusions for a conditional (inducer-dependent) Lac (cid:49) phenotype in cells of a strain in which the structural gene ( spoIIGB ) for the early-acting, mother-cell-speciﬁc transcriptional factor (cid:115) E was placed under the control of the IPTG (isopropyl- (cid:98) - D -thiogalactopyranoside)-inducible P spac promoter. Sequence analysis of cloned DNA from the cotJ region complemented by genetic experiments revealed a tricistronic operon preceded by a strong (cid:115) E -like promoter. Expression of an SP (cid:98) -borne cotJ-lacZ fusion commences at around h 2 of sporulation, as does expression of other (cid:115) E -dependent genes, and shows an absolute requirement for (cid:115) E . Studies with double-reporter strains bearing a cotJ-gusA fusion and lacZ fusions to other cot genes conﬁrmed that expression of cotJ is initiated during sporulation prior to activation of genes known to encode coat structural proteins (with the sole exception of cotE ). An in vitro-constructed insertion-deletion mutation in cotJ resulted in the formation of spores with no detectable morphological or resistance deﬁciency. However, examination of the proﬁle of electrophoretically separated spore coat proteins from the null mutant revealed a pattern that was essentially identical to that of a wild-type strain in the range of 12 to 65 kDa, except for polypeptides of 17 and 24 kDa, the putative products of the second ( cotJB ) and third ( cotJC ) cistrons of the operon, that were missing or reduced in amount in the coat of the mutant. Polypeptides of the same apparent sizes are detected in spores of a cotE null mutant, on which basis we infer that the products of the cotJ operon are required for the normal formation of the inner layers of the coat or are themselves structural components of the coat. Because the onset of cotJ transcription is temporally coincident with the appearance of active (cid:115) E , we speculate that cotJ -encoded products may be involved in an early stage of coat assembly.
Does Omega-3 Supplementation have Beneficial Effects on Blood Pressure, Left Ventricular Geometry and Arterial Function and Arterial Properties in Patients with Chronic Renal Disease Stage 1-3?

Background: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is characterized by unfavorable cardiac and vascular remodeling. The study aimed at evaluating effects of 6-month supplementation with omega-3 on blood pressure, left ventricular geometry and function, and arterial properties in patients with CKD 1-3. Methods: Six-month supplementation with omega-3 acids (2 g/day) was completed in 87 CKD patients, and in 27 individuals without CKD, hypertension or overt cardiovascular disease. At baseline and after supplementation, an echocardiographic examination was performed, evaluating left ventricular mass index (LVMI), left ventricular relative wall thickness (RWT), and ejection fraction (EF). Ultrasound imaging of the common carotid artery with intima media thickness (IMT), aortic pulse wave velocity measurement (PWV) and 24-hour blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) were performed. Serum concentration of omega-3 acids: eicosapentaenoic (EPA), docosahexaenoic (DHA), and alpha linolenic (ALA) was determined using gas chromatography. Results: After six-month omega-3 supplementation, ALA concentration increased in CKD patients and in reference group, while EPA and DHA did not change. PWV and IMT values did not change significantly. Posterior wall thickness (PWd) (p=0.018) and RWT decreased (p=0.035), while LVMI and EF did not change in CKD group. ABPM did not change. Conclusion: Supplementation with omega-3 acid resulted in beneficial left ventricular remodeling, despite the absence of changes in ABPM and arterial properties. Trial registration: The study was registered in Clinical Trials.gov. Identifier: NCT 02147002.
BUSINESS STRATEGY IN INNOVATIVE AND NON-INNOVATIVE COMPANIES OF VARIOUS SIZES

The influence of innovation upon the competitive advantage of companies seems to be an actual issue worth examining. That’s why it is interesting to investigate the various aspects of the strategies pursued by companies classified as innovative or non-innovative. The aim of the research was to check whether the differences between enterprises can be traced back to their sizes or should rather be derived from their unique characteristics. In order to test the hypotheses, the correlations (established on the basis of the Kendall’s tau-b correlation coefficient) between specified research areas and the size of the company were calculated for the two groups of companies (innovative and non-innovative). The study was conducted using the PAPI technique and the 5-point Likert scale. The research sample included two groups of companies – innovative (88 companies) and non-innovative (34 enterprises). The respondents in the survey included company managing staff. Presenting the findings of the research, it can be pointed out that in a group of innovative companies no distinctness regarding the primary objectives of strategy could be demonstrated. Only the correlations between the size and risk of the business and the implementation of global expansion strategy can be considered. Companies that are not oriented to innovation, however, significantly differ only regarding to strategy formalisation, which increases with the organisation’s growth. The main research findings proved that there is a lack of noticeable differences in the strategies of innovative and non-innovative companies analysed in terms of their size.
CommitmentProgenitors Participates in Their T-Lineage Lymphoid Gene Upregulation on Circulating

Extrathymic T cell precursors can be detected in many tissues and represent an immediately competent population for rapid T cell reconstitution in the event of immunodeﬁciencies. Blood T cell progenitors have been detected, but their source in the bone marrow (BM) remains unclear. Prospective puriﬁcation of BM-resident and circulating progenitors, together with RT-PCR single-cell analysis, was used to evaluate and compare multipotent progenitors (MPPs) and common lymphoid progenitors (CLPs). Molecular analysis of circulating progenitors in comparison with BM-resident progenitors revealed that CCR9 + progenitors are more abundant in the blood than CCR7 + progenitors. Second, although Flt3 2 CLPs are less common in the BM, they are abundant in the blood and have reduced Cd25 + -expressing cells and downregulated c-Kit and IL-7R a intensities. Third, in contrast, stage 3 MPP (MPP3) cells, the unique circulating MPP subset, have upregulated Il7r , Gata3 , and Notch1 in comparison with BM-resident counterparts. Evaluation of the populations’ respective abilities to generate splenic T cell precursors (Lin 2 Thy1.2 + CD25 + IL7R a + ) after grafting recipient nude mice revealed that MPP3 cells were the most effective subset (relative to CLPs). Although several lymphoid genes are expressed by MPP3 cells and Flt3 2 CLPs, the latter only give rise to B cells in the spleen, and Notch1 expression level is not modulated in the blood, as for MPP3 cells. We conclude that CLPs have reached the point where they cannot be a Notch1 target, a limiting condition on the path to
Final Degree Project Biomedical Engineernig Degree “Validation of the Guide XT software for patients with Parkinson’s Disease undergoing STN-DBS in Hospital Clínic of Barcelona“

Parkison’s Disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder worldwide and its prevalence is expected to grow as population ages. Deep brain stimulation is a well-established surgical treatment used as an alternative when medication is not effective. This neurosurgical procedure consists of the implantation of electrodes into specific targets within certain areas of the brain and on the electrical stimulation of these targets through the application of constant or intermittent electricity from an implantable pulse generator (IPG) to treat the movement disorders associated with Parkinson’s Disease. Stimulation parameters setting is highly important in this surgical treatment. Programming deep brain stimulation is a challenging and time-consuming process since there is a huge number of possible parameters combinations. Guide XT (Boston Scientific) is a 3-dimensional neuroanatomic visual software that automatically detects the position of the electrodes in the anatomy of the patient. It enables the visualization of the volume of tissue activated by simulating the stimulation field output. This can help to efficiently determine the most appropriate settings for each patient. The objective of this project is to compare the stimulation settings of the traditional trial-and-error method versus the Guide XT-assisted selection of parameters, to determine software reliability as a supporting tool in deep brain stimulation programming. For the study, data from 37 patients who underwent bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation was collected. Stimulation settings from the first programming session and from the one month after the surgery visit was obtained. All patients were implanted with the Vercise Cartesia directional leads and the comparison and statistical analysis with respect to the stimulation parameters selected with Guide XT was performed in a jupyter notebook. The highest value of the Cohen’s kappa coefficient used to assess inter-rater agreement for the left side contact selection for those patients who did not present side effects in the first programming session was k=0.26. Nevertheless, the percentage of correspondence between contacts selection for both electrodes in the two programming sessions and selection based on software simulations was over 50% in all cases. Thus, it was concluded that the software is a reliable tool to be used in the clinical practice, even though a further analysis testing results in patients would be of interest.
Deep Inverse Cooking

Medical images are widely used in hospitals for the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases, such as skin cancer or diabetic retinopathy. Machine learning algorithms have recently been shown to outperform human doctors in a broad variety of diagnosis tasks. A diagnosis is often posed as a semantic segmentation problem where models are trained to classify each pixel of an image or as a multi-label classification task where the output is a set of tags. However, both types of outputs are hard to interpret due to the lack of reasoning about how the decisions were achieved. In contrast, a diagnosis made by a medical doctor is different. When a family doctor refers a patient to a specialist, he will expect a medical report in which the specialist explains her diagnosis. Likewise, the output of a neural network would be more useful if augmented by a medical report written in a natural language. Recently, there has been much progress in the development of image-to-text models that the task of automatically generating medical reports can now be considered feasible. However, such models require a large amount of paired data, i.e. images paired with medical reports. To the author’s best knowledge, there is no publicly available dataset of such paired data. In order to experiment with image-to-text models, domains were switched from medicine to cooking, where such data is prolific. A dataset consisting of 0.9M recipes and 1.3M images was acquired through crawling five different cooking platforms. Since the majority of the recipes originate from community cooking websites, an extensive data cleaning pipeline had to be implemented. This allowed the number of unique ingredients to be reduced from 1M to 1.3k at the cost of dropping some recipes. Using this dataset, a multi-task neural network model was implemented, trained and evaluated. It generates a list of ingredients (cf. medical features), a title and cooking instructions (cf. medical report) based on an image of a dish. The model consists of a VGG-16 encoder to extract image features. Given these features, a transformer-based decoder generates a list of ingredients. Finally, an additional transformer decoder generates the recipe title as well as the cooking instructions by processing the image and ingredients features simultaneously. Evaluation on unseen test data showed that the model achieves an F1 score of 38.62% for the ingredients prediction, a BLEU1 score of 7.17% for generating the title and a BLEU4 score of 6.15% for the instructions text generation task. Comparing the architecture of the inverse cooking model to medical image captioning systems from the literature shows several similarities. Therefore, it is expected that the proposed model can be adapted and extended for generating medical reports in the future.
Nutrient Augmentation of Ca 2 1 -Dependent and Ca 2 1 -Independent Pathways in Stimulus-Coupling to Insulin Secretion Can Be Distinguished by Their Guanosine Triphosphate Requirements: Studies on Rat Pancreatic Islets*

To delineate the underlying mechanisms by which glucose aug- ments both Ca 2 1 -dependent and Ca 2 1 -independent insulin release, the latter induced by the simultaneous activation of protein kinases A and C, we examined the effects of GTP depletion by mycophenolic acid (MPA), an inhibitor of GTP synthesis, on the augmentation of insulin release from rat pancreatic islets. MPA treatment reduced GTP content by 30–40% and completely abolished glucose-induced augmentation of Ca 2 1 -independent insulin release. Thus, this pathway is extremely sensitive to a decrease in cellular GTP content. glucose utilization nor glucose oxidation was affected by MPA. The augmentation of Ca 2 1 -independent insulin release by several other metabolizable nutrients including a -ketoisocaproic acid (KIC) was also inhibited by MPA. In sharp contrast, augmentation of Ca 2 1 dependent insulin release by KIC was resistant to GTP depletion, indicating that nutrient-induced augmentation of the Ca 2 1 -depen-dent-andCa 2 1 -independentsecretorypathwayscanbedifferentiated by GTP dependency. We interpret these data in accord with current knowledge concerning the two known stimuli for exocytosis, Ca 2 1 and GTP (independently of Ca 2 1 ). We propose that both Ca 2 1 -dependent and Ca 2 1 -independent augmentation occurs via one metabolic pathway acting upon Ca 2 1 - and upon GTP-stimulated exocytosis. Activa- tion of PKA and PKC stimulates the GTP-sensitive exocytosis. ( Endocrinology These results show that the inhibitory effect of MPA treatment on KIC-induced augmentation of Ca 2 1 -independent insulin release was also due to the depletion of GTP content rather than to any nonspecific effects. Comparison of the effects of MPA treatment on KIC-induced augmentation of Ca 2 1 -induced insulin release and on KIC-induced augmentation of Ca 2 1 -independent insulin release
LIVER BIOPSY IN CHRONIC HEPATITIS C: AN ASSESSMENT OF INTER AND INTRA-OBSERVER’S VARIABILITY

Objective : To evaluate the inter and intraobserver variability in the histological grading and staging according to modified Knodell scoring system. Design : A cross-sectional comparative study. Place and Duration of study : Histopathology department Army Medical College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan from June 2006 to December 2006, at the Materials and Methods : Slides and original reports of already reported chronic hepatitis C cases were retrieved from the case files. A total of 52 liver biopsies of patients were reevaluated by two pathologists. The inter and intraobserver reproducibility for grade of necroinflammation and stage of fibrosis were calculated by using kappa statistics. Results: For grades of necroinflammation a substantial level of interobserver (kappa=0.802) and intra-observer (kappa= 0.749) reproducibility was found. Disagreement in the interobserver results was detected in 11.5 % cases, with difference of only one grade in all the cases. Disagreement in the intraobserver diagnosis was noted in 15.4% cases, again with the difference of only one grade of necroinflammation. Similarly for the stage of fibrosis, a substantial level of interobserver (kappa= 0.66) and intra-observer (kappa=0.77) reproducibility was present. Main disagreement for interobserver results was of stage 2 and 3 fibrosis. For intraobserver stage of fibrosis, disagreement was found in 9 cases (17.3%). There was disagreement in 6 of the 9 cases with fibrosis stage 3, where original histological stage was reported 4. There were 3 (5.8 %) cases where presence of steatosis was missed (all in non-tabulated form of reports). Conclusion : Substantial level of inter and intra-observer agreement can be achieved, both for the necroinflammatory grade and stage of fibrosis, if the scoring system of chronic hepatitis is strictly followed.
PATTERN OF EXPRESSION OF HUMAN HOMOLOGUE OF DROSOPHILA PATCHED1 PROTEIN IN FOUR DIFFERENT SALIVARY GLAND TUMORS

Salivary gland tumors are a comparatively rare and diverse group of tumors with variable clinical and histopathological pictures. Pleomorphic adenoma (PA) & papillary cystadenoma lymphatosum (PCL) are common benign tumors and Mucoepidermoid carcinoma (MEC) & adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) are common malignant tumors with the respect of order. The human homologue of the Drosophila segment polarity gene Patched 1 (PTCH 1) is a member of hedgehog pathway encoding a receptor for the morphogen Sonic Hedgehog and it is the candidate gene for Gorlin’s syndrome. Interestingly it is considered as a one of the tumor a suppressor gene which is associ-ated with different neoplasms and cystic lesions. In this study the pattern of expression of PTCH1 in PA, PCL, MEC, and ACC tumors will be explored to reveal if there is any possible correlation between PTCH1 expression and these four different salivary gland entities. Twenty paraffin embed-ded blocks of salivary gland tumors was chosen as follow (five cases PA, five cases PCL, five cases MEC (two high grades, two low grades, 1 moderate grade) and five cases ACC (4 cribriform pattern, one tubular pattern). immunohistochemistry technique using PTCH 1 primary antibody was done to investigate the level of expression of PTCH 1 protein in our samples. Our results revealed that PTCH1 is expressed with various intensities from light to heavy in the four studied salivary gland tumors. Furthermore, PTCH1 expression was confined to the epithelial cells component of the tumors with cytoplasmic and membranous staining. PCL & MEC (low & moderate grade), ACC (cribriform pattern) cases showed the highest immunoreactivity. While PA, high grade MEC, ACC (tubular pattern) showed the lowest. It can be conclude that PTCH1 might has a role in the development of salivary gland tumors with main components epithelium as PCL, MEC, ACC and to a lesser extent PA as a mixed tumor. Finally, it is recommended that researchers should target SHH pathway genes including PTCH1 in most tumors for further investigations and possible gene therapies