Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of SARS‐CoV‐2‐mediated thromboinflammation by CLEC2.Fc

Thromboinflammation is the major cause of morbidity and mortality in COVID‐19 patients, and post‐mortem examination demonstrates the presence of platelet‐rich thrombi and microangiopathy in visceral organs. Moreover, persistent microclots were detected in both acute COVID‐19 and long COVID plasma samples. However, the molecular mechanism of SARS‐CoV‐2‐induced thromboinflammation is still unclear. We found that the spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk)‐coupled C‐type lectin member 2 (CLEC2), which was highly expressed in platelets and alveolar macrophages, interacted with the receptor‐binding domain (RBD) of SARS‐CoV‐2 spike protein (SARS‐CoV‐2 RBD) directly. Unlike the thread‐like NETs, SARS‐CoV‐2‐induced aggregated NET formation in the presence of wild‐type (WT), but not CLEC2‐deficient platelets. Furthermore, SARS‐CoV‐2 spike pseudotyped lentivirus was able to induce NET formation via CLEC2, indicating SARS‐CoV‐2 RBD engaged CLEC2 to activate platelets to enhance NET formation. Administration of CLEC2.Fc inhibited SARS‐CoV‐2‐induced NET formation and thromboinflammation in AAV‐ACE2‐infected mice. Thus, CLEC2 is a novel pattern recognition receptor for SARS‐CoV‐2, and CLEC2.Fc and may become a promising therapeutic agent to inhibit SARS‐CoV‐2‐induced thromboinflammation and reduced the risk of post‐acute sequelae of COVID‐19 (PASC) in the future.
The robustness of individual differences in gaze preferences toward faces and eyes across face-to-face experimental designs and its relation to social anxiety

Humans rely heavily on the visual and oculomotor systems during social interactions. This study examined individual differences in gaze behavior in two types of face-to-face social interactions: a screen-based interview and a live interview. The study examined how stable these individual differences are across scenarios and how it relates to individuals’ traits of social anxiety, autism, and neuroticism. Extending previous studies, we distinguished between individuals’ tendency to look at the face, and the tendency to look at the eyes if the face was fixated. These gaze measures demonstrated high internal consistencies (correlation between two halves of the data within a scenario) within both the screen-based and live interview scenarios. Furthermore, individuals who had a tendency to look more at the eyes during one type of interview tended to display the same behavior during the other interview type. More socially anxious participants looked less at faces in both scenarios, but no link with social anxiety was observed for the tendency to look at the eyes. This research highlights the robustness of individual variations in gaze behavior across and within interview scenarios, as well as the usefulness of measuring the tendency to look at faces separately from the tendency to look at eyes.
Screening for pancreatic cancer has the potential to save lives, but is it practical?

ABSTRACT Introduction Most patients with pancreatic cancer present with advanced stage, incurable disease. However, patients with high-grade precancerous lesions and many patients with low-stage disease can be cured with surgery, suggesting that early detection has the potential to improve survival. While serum CA19.9 has been a long-standing biomarker used for pancreatic cancer disease monitoring, its low sensitivity and poor specificity have driven investigators to hunt for better diagnostic markers. Areas covered This review will cover recent advances in genetics, proteomics, imaging, and artificial intelligence, which offer opportunities for the early detection of curable pancreatic neoplasms. Expert opinion From exosomes, to circulating tumor DNA, to subtle changes on imaging, we know much more now about the biology and clinical manifestations of early pancreatic neoplasia than we did just five years ago. The overriding challenge, however, remains the development of a practical approach to screen for a relatively rare, but deadly, disease that is often treated with complex surgery. It is our hope that future advances will bring us closer to an effective and financially sound approach for the early detection of pancreatic cancer and its precursors.
Using a Clinical Data Warehouse to Calculate and Present Key Metrics for the Radiology Department: Implementation and Performance Evaluation

Background Due to the importance of radiologic examinations, such as X-rays or computed tomography scans, for many clinical diagnoses, the optimal use of the radiology department is 1 of the primary goals of many hospitals. Objective This study aims to calculate the key metrics of this use by creating a radiology data warehouse solution, where data from radiology information systems (RISs) can be imported and then queried using a query language as well as a graphical user interface (GUI). Methods Using a simple configuration file, the developed system allowed for the processing of radiology data exported from any kind of RIS into a Microsoft Excel, comma-separated value (CSV), or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file. These data were then imported into a clinical data warehouse. Additional values based on the radiology data were calculated during this import process by implementing 1 of several provided interfaces. Afterward, the query language and GUI of the data warehouse were used to configure and calculate reports on these data. For the most common types of requested reports, a web interface was created to view their numbers as graphics. Results The tool was successfully tested with the data of 4 different German hospitals from 2018 to 2021, with a total of 1,436,111 examinations. The user feedback was good, since all their queries could be answered if the available data were sufficient. The initial processing of the radiology data for using them with the clinical data warehouse took (depending on the amount of data provided by each hospital) between 7 minutes and 1 hour 11 minutes. Calculating 3 reports of different complexities on the data of each hospital was possible in 1-3 seconds for reports with up to 200 individual calculations and in up to 1.5 minutes for reports with up to 8200 individual calculations. Conclusions A system was developed with the main advantage of being generic concerning the export of different RISs as well as concerning the configuration of queries for various reports. The queries could be configured easily using the GUI of the data warehouse, and their results could be exported into the standard formats Excel and CSV for further processing.
A Numerical Study of the 6 May 2012 Tsukuba City Supercell Tornado. Part II: Mechanisms of Tornadogenesis

AbstractIn Part I, the vorticity sources of midlevel and low-level mesocyclones in the 6 May 2012 Tsukuba City, Japan, tornadic supercell were investigated by using high-resolution simulation results with a 50-m horizontal grid spacing. In Part II, the analyses are extended to the mechanisms of tornadogenesis. The tornado was generated at the leading edge of a rear-flank downdraft (RFD) outflow surge. Backward-trajectory and vortex line analyses revealed that the RFD outflow surge was a triggering factor for tornadogenesis and that horizontal vorticity around the strong RFD outflow region was ingested into the tornado. To identify the vorticity source of the tornado, the evolution of circulation along a material circuit surrounding the tornado was investigated. Owing to baroclinity at the tip of a hook-shaped distribution of hydrometeors (hereafter hook echo), the circulation increased rapidly from a negative value when the core of the hydrometeors was descending, about 10 min prior to tornadogenesis. Ana.
Associations among stressors across the lifespan, disability, and relapses in adults with multiple sclerosis

Stress and adversity during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood could impact the present and future health and well‐being of people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS); however, a lifespan approach and nuanced stressor data are scarce in this nascent area of research. Our aim was to examine relationships among comprehensively measured lifetime stressors and two self‐reported MS outcomes: (1) disability and (2) relapse burden changes since COVID‐19 onset.
Knots and gravity

Abstract In the loop representation theory of non-perturbative quantum gravity, gravitational states are described by functionals on the loop space of a 3-manifold. In the order to gain a deeper insight into the physical interpretation of loop states, a natural question arises: to wit, how are gravitations related to loops? Some light will be shed on this question by establishing a definite relationship between loops and 3-geometries of the 3-manifold.
A reduced model for exact coherent states in h igh Reynolds number shear flows

We consider a shear flow driven in the streamwise direction by a sinusoidal body force varying in the wall normal direction and apply a lower branch scaling found by Wang et al. (2007) to reduce the dynamics to a set of two-dimensional PDEs valid at high Reynolds numbers. We then propose an iterative strategy to converge to lower branch exact coherent structures. This strategy only necessitates a two-dimensional projection of the streamwise velocity as initial condition and has been used to approach a stationary lower branch solution. Further strategies to find lower branch solutions are also proposed.
Assessing the Rosemount Icing Detector with In Situ Measurements

Abstract In situ measurements of microphysics conditions, obtained during 38 research flights into winter storms, have been used to characterize the performance of a Rosemount Icing Detector (RID). Characteristics of the RID were determined under a wide range of cloud environments, which included icing conditions within mixed phase, freezing rain, and freezing drizzle environments. Cloud conditions observed included temperatures between 0° and −29°C and liquid water contents (LWCs) up to 0.7 g m−3. The detection threshold for LWC was found to be 0.007 ± 0.010 g m−3 for the RID operated at an air speed of 97 ± 10 m s−1, which agrees well with theoretical predictions. A signal level of 0 ± 2 mV s−1 accounted for 99.6% of the measurements in clear air and 98.5% of the measurements in glaciated clouds, when the data were averaged over 30-s intervals. No significant response to glaciated clouds was found during any of the research flights, implying that the instrument can be used to segregate glaciated and mix.
Computer-aided diagnosis of abnormal breasts in mammogram images by weighted-type fractional Fourier transform

Abnormal breast can be diagnosed using the digital mammography. Traditional manual interpretation method cannot yield high accuracy. In this study, we proposed a novel computer-aided diagnosis system for detecting abnormal breasts. Our dataset contains 200 mammogram images with size of 1024 × 1024. First, we segmented the region of interest from mammogram images. Second, the fractional Fourier transform was employed to obtain the unified time–frequency spectrum. Third, spectrum coefficients were reduced by principal component analysis. Finally, both support vector machine and k-nearest neighbors were used and compared. The proposed “weighted-type fractional Fourier transform+principal component analysis+support vector machine” achieved sensitivity of 92.22% ± 4.16%, specificity of 92.10% ± 2.75%, and accuracy of 92.16% ± 3.60%. It is better than both the proposed “weighted-type fractional Fourier transform+principal component analysis+k-nearest neighbors” and other five state-of-the-art approaches in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The proposed computer-aided diagnosis system is effective in detecting abnormal breasts.
Cubosome-based thermosensitive in situ gelling system for intranasal administration of lamotrigine with enhanced antiepileptic efficacy

Abstract Lamotrigine (LTG) is a second-generation antiepileptic drug that belongs to Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) class II. LTG has a low probability of crossing the BBB if administered orally. This study was designed to fabricate LTG cubosomal dispersion that is further loaded in a thermosensitive in situ gel to increase nasal residence time and enhance drug absorption across the nasal mucosal membrane. LTG-loaded cubosomes exhibited an entrapment efficiency ranging from 24.83% to 60.13%, a particle size ranging from 116.2 to 197.6 nm, and a zeta potential ≤−25.5 mV. The selected LTG-loaded cubosomal formulation was loaded in a thermosensitive in situ gel (cubogel) employing different concentrations of poloxamer 407. In vitro release study revealed sustained drug release from cubosomal and cubogel compared with free drug suspension. In vivo studies revealed enhanced antiepileptic efficacy of LTG cubogel and LTG cubosomes compared with free drug in rats with pilocarpine-induced epilepsy by stimulating the release of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), total antioxidant capacity (TAC), and serotonin and by inhibiting the release of Ca2+, dopamine, acetylcholine (Ach), C-reactive protein (CRP), and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). LTG cubogel exhibited superior activity over LTG cubosomes. These findings reveal that the developed cubosomal thermosensitive in situ gel can enhance the antiepileptic efficacy of LTG via the intranasal route.
The role of principled engagement in public health policymaking: the case of Zambia’s prolonged efforts to develop a comprehensive tobacco control policy

ABSTRACT Background The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) requires countries to develop and implement multi-sectoral tobacco control strategies, including policies and legislation. Zambia, potentially faced by a rising problem of tobacco smoking, signed the FCTC in 2008 but has been unable to enact a tobacco policy for over a decade. Objective This study explores the role of ‘principled engagement’, a key element of the theoretical framework for collaborative governance, in Zambia’s delayed success to develop a comprehensive tobacco control policy. Methods This was a qualitative case study of key stakeholders in the collaborative process of trying to develop a tobacco policy in Zambia. Participan-ts were sampled from across various sectors, including government departments and civil society, comprising anti-tobacco activists and researchers. A total of 27 key informant interviews were undertaken. We supplemented the interview data with a document review of relevant policies and legislation. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results Several factors hindered efforts to attain principled engagement, including the adverse legal and socioeconomic environment in which the collaborative regime evolves; poor planning of meetings and frequent changes in tobacco focal point persons; lack of active and meaningful participation; and communication challenges among the key stakeholders. These collaborative dynamics, coupled with the opposition to tobacco control efforts from within some government departments, revealed the inadequacy of the current collaborative governance regime to facilitate enactment of a comprehensive tobacco control policy in Zambia. Conclusion Efforts to develop a comprehensive tobacco control policy in Zambia will require addressing challenges such as disagreements, communication, and leadership at engagement level across interested sectors. We further argue that principled engagement has a greater role to play in unlocking these efforts and should therefore be embraced by those entrusted to lead the process to develop tobacco policy in Zambia.
A FAST conic method for function minimization

Abstract A new algorithm for unconstrained minimization is presented, which is based on a conic model. The algorithm converges in (n + 1) iterations on conic functions of n variables and it does not require evaluation or estimation of tbe Hessian matrix. Numerical results on many general test functions indicate tbat the algorithm is very robust and very efficient.
Correlates of Intimate Partner Violence Among Young Women Engaged in Sex Work in Southern Uganda

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant global public health problem that results in high social and economic costs to individuals and communities. Compared to women in the general population, women engaged in sex work (WESW) are more likely to experience physical, emotional, and sexual IPV. This study examines the correlates of IPV among young WESW with their intimate partners in Southern Uganda. We used baseline data from the Kyaterekera project, a 5 year NIH-funded longitudinal study aimed at reducing HIV risks among 542 WESW in Southern Uganda. To examine the factors associated with IPV, we fitted three separate multi-level Poisson regression models for physical, emotional, and sexual IPV, respectively. Average age was 31.4 years, and 54% of the women reported being victims of at least one form of IPV from their intimate partners. Model one assessed correlates of sexual IPV. Being married women (β = .71, 95% CI [0.24, 1.17]), divorced/separated/widowed (β = .52, [0.02, 1.02]), depressed (β = .04, [0.02, 0.05]), and having any sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (β = .58, [0.14, 1.01]) were associated with sexual IPV. Model two assessed correlates of physical IPV. Experience of childhood sexual abuse (β = .12, [0.04, 0.19]) was associated with an increase in physical IPV, and increasing age reduced its occurrence (β = −.02, [−0.04, −0.001]). Finally, model three assessed emotional IPV. Women with higher education (β = .49, [0.14, 0.85]) and symptoms of depression (β = .02, [0.001, 0.04]) had higher risks for emotional IPV. For WESW, IPV presents an additional potential pathway for HIV and STIs acquisition and transmission through a lack of negotiating power for safe sex. Efforts to reduce violence against WESW should be prioritized as a strategy for enhancing the well-being of WESW.
Cytomegalovirus High-risk Kidney Transplant Recipients Show No Difference in Long-term Outcomes Following Preemptive Versus Prophylactic Management

Background. Following kidney transplantation (KT), cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection remains an important challenge. Both prophylactic and preemptive antiviral protocols are used for CMV high-risk kidney recipients (donor seropositive/recipient seronegative; D+/R–). We performed a nationwide comparison of the 2 strategies in de novo D+/R– KT recipients accessing long-term outcomes. Methods. A nationwide retrospective study was conducted from 2007 to 2018, with follow-up until February 1, 2022. All adult D+/R– and R+ KT recipients were included. During the first 4 y, D+/R– recipients were managed preemptively, changing to 6 mo of valganciclovir prophylaxis from 2011. To adjust for the 2 time eras, de novo intermediate-risk (R+) recipients, who received preemptive CMV therapy throughout the study period, served as longitudinal controls for possible confounders. Results. A total of 2198 KT recipients (D+/R–, n = 428; R+, n = 1770) were included with a median follow-up of 9.4 (range, 3.1–15.1) y. As expected, a greater proportion experienced a CMV infection in the preemptive era compared with the prophylactic era and with a shorter time from KT to CMV infection (P < 0.001). However, there were no differences in long-term outcomes such as patient death (47/146 [32%] versus 57/282 [20%]; P = 0.3), graft loss (64/146 [44%] versus 71/282 [25%]; P = 0.5), or death censored graft loss (26/146 [18%] versus 26/282 [9%]; P = 0.9) in the preemptive versus prophylactic era. Long-term outcomes in R+ recipients showed no signs of sequential era–related bias. Conclusions. There were no significant differences in relevant long-term outcomes between preemptive and prophylactic CMV-preventive strategies in D+/R– kidney transplant recipients.
ANMCO position paper on vericiguat use in heart failure: from evidence to place in therapy

Abstract In the growing therapeutic armamentarium for heart failure (HF) management, vericiguat represents an innovative therapeutic option. The biological target of this drug is different from that of other drugs for HF. Indeed, vericiguat does not inhibit neuro-hormonal systems overactivated in HF or sodium–glucose co-transporter 2 but stimulates the biological pathway of nitric oxide and cyclic guanosine monophosphate, which is impaired in patients with HF. Vericiguat has recently been approved by international and national regulatory authorities for the treatment of patients with HF and reduced ejection fraction who are symptomatic despite optimal medical therapy and have worsening HF. This ANMCO position paper summarises key aspects of vericiguat mechanism of action and provides a review of available clinical evidence. Furthermore, this document reports use indications based on international guideline recommendations and local regulatory authority approval at the time of writing.
Are We Looking at a Paradigm Shift in the Management of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis? Comprehensive Retrospective Analysis of 75 Patients of Nonfusion Anterior Scoliosis Correction with 2–5-Year Follow-up: A Single Center Experience

Study Design Retrospective cohort study. Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the clinical and radiological outcomes of nonfusion anterior scoliosis correction (NFASC) in patients with idiopathic scoliosis and comprehensively analyze its principles. Overview of Literature NFASC is a novel revolutionary motion-preserving surgery for idiopathic scoliosis. However, clinical data related to this procedure remain scarce, with no conclusive guidelines regarding case indications, proper technique, and possible complications. Methods This study included patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) who were treated with NFASC for a structural major curve (Cobb angle, 40°–80°) with more than 50% flexibility on dynamic X-rays. The mean follow-up was 26±12.2 months (range, 12–60 months). Clinical and radiological data such as skeletal maturity, curve type, Cobb angle, surgery details, and Scoliosis Research Society-22 revised (SRS-22r) questionnaire were collected. Statistically significant trends were examined by post hoc analysis following repeated measures analysis of variance test. Results A total of 75 patients (70 females, five males) were included, with a mean age of 14.96±2.69 years. The mean Risser and Sanders scores were 4.22±0.7 and 7.15±0.74, respectively. The mean main thoracic Cobb angles at the first and second follow-up (17.2°±5.36° and 16.92°±5.06°, respectively) were significantly lower than the preoperative Cobb angles (52.11°±7.74°) (p<0.05). Similarly, the mean thoracolumbar/lumbar Cobb angle significantly improved from the preoperative period (51.45°±11.26°) to the first follow-up (13.48°±5.11°) and last follow-up (14.24°±4.85°) (p<0.05). The mean preoperative and postoperative SRS-22r scores were 78.0±3.2 and 92.5±3.1, respectively (p<0.05). None of the patients had any complications until the most recent follow-up. Conclusions NFASC offers promising curve correction and curve progression stabilization in patients with AIS, with a low risk for complications and preservation of spinal mobility and sagittal parameters. Thus, it proves to be a favorable alternative to fusion modality.