Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of Arterial Stiffness Indices with Framingham Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score

Purpose : The new non-invasive arterial stiffness indices, arterial velocity pulse index (AVI) and arterial pressure volume index (API) are known to be associated with cardiovascular disease risk. The present study aimed to examine the “dose-response” associations between AVI, API and Framingham cardiovascular disease risk score (FCVRS). Methods : This survey included individuals with arterial stiffness indices collected at age 18 years and older. We used Pearson’s correlation coefficients and multivariate linear analyses to evaluate associations of AVI and API to other variables. The associations between FCVRS and AVI, API were analyzed by restrictive cubic spline. Results : 4311 people were included in the full study population, including 2091 males and 2220 females. In restricted cubic spline regression models, AVI or API had significant U-shaped associations with FCVRS, with the lowest risk score of cardiovascular disease was 8 units or 18 units, respectively. After AVI increased to 12 units, FCVRS increased rapidly until AVI was 27 units, and the FCVRS increased relatively flat afterward. For API, results were similar. When API increased to 23 units, the FCVRS increased rapidly, and after API was 52 units, FCVRS increased relatively flat. Conclusions : AVI or API had U-shaped associations with FCVRS. The associations may provide a new perspective for early treatment or lifestyle modifications to prevent cardiovascular diseases.
Total oxidizable precursors assay for PFAS in human serum.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of chemicals including over 4700 substances. As a limited number of PFAS is routinely analyzed in human serum, complementary analytical methods are required to characterize the overlooked fraction. A promising tool is the total oxidizable precursors (TOP) assay to look for precursors by oxidation to perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAA). The TOP assay was originally developed for large volumes of water and had to be adapted for 250 μL of human serum. Optimization of the method was performed on serum samples spiked with model precursors. Oxidative conditions similar to previous TOP assay methods were not sufficient for complete oxidation of model precursors. Prolonged heating time (24 h) and higher oxidant amount (95 mg of Na2S2O8 per 225 μL of serum) were needed for complete conversion of the model precursors and accomplishing PFAA yields of 35-100 %. As some precursors are not fully converted to PFAA, the TOP assay can only provide semi-quantitative estimates of oxidizable precursors in human serum. However, the TOP assay can be used to give indications about the identity of unknown precursors by evaluating the oxidation products, including perfluoroalkyl sulfonic acids (PFSA) and perfluoroalkyl ether carboxylic acids (PFECA). The optimized TOP assay for human serum opens the possibility for high-throughput screening of human serum for undetected PFAA precursors.
The Effect of High-Intensity Treadmill Training on Motor Function in Patients with a Stroke

The current study’s aim was to investigate the properties of treadmill training on the stroke-induced neurological deficit in both human and animal studies. Our searches identified 87 potentially suitable studies, of which 34 met our inclusion criteria for inclusion. Four were studies on humans and 30 on animals. We also considered studies with one or more independent variables (intensity and/or duration of treadmill training) and neurological scale as the dependent variable as well as studies with one or more independent variables and more than one dependent variable. Besides the given independent variables, body-weight support (BWS) during treadmill training (10 to 40% of body mass) was also regarded as an important bias for collected studies. This study displayed treadmill training regardless of intensity and volume/duration had significant greater recovery of motor function than did no-training (SMD= 0.601; 95% CI= 0.546 to 0.657; P=0.0001). The current study exhibited that low intensity (≤ 0.6 m/s) - high duration/volume (>500 minutes) treadmill training as a rehabilitation strategy had the highest SMD to ameliorate stroke-induced dysfunctions compared to the other strategies.
Coherent Visual Storytelling via Parallel Top-Down Visual and Topic Attention

Visual storytelling aims at producing a narrative paragraph for a given photo album automatically. It introduces more new challenges than individual image paragraph descriptions, mainly due to the difficulty in preserving coherent topics and in generating diverse phrases to depict the rich content of a photo album. Existing attention-based models that lack higher-level guiding information always result in a deviation between the generated sentence and the topic expressed by the image. In addition, these widely applied language generation approaches employing standard beam search tend to produce monotonous descriptions. In this work, a coherent visual storytelling (CoVS) framework is designed to address the above-mentioned problems. Specifically, in the encoding phase, an image sequence encoder is designed to efficiently extract visual features of the input photo album. Then, the novel parallel top-down visual and topic attention (PTDVTA) decoder is constructed via a topic-aware neural network, a parallel top-down attention model, and a coherent language generator. Concretely, visual attention focuses on the attributes and the relationships of the objects, while topic attention integrating a topic-aware neural network could improve the coherence of generated sentences. Eventually, a phrase beam search algorithm with $n$ -gram hamming diversity is further designed to optimize the expression diversity of the generated story. To justify the proposed CoVS framework, extensive experiments are conducted on the VIST dataset, which shows that CoVS can automatically generate coherent and diverse stories in a more natural way. Moreover, CoVS obtains better performance than state-of-the-art baselines on BLEU-4 and METEOR scores, while maintaining good CIDEr and ROUGH_L scores. The source code of this work can be found in https://mic.tongji. edu.cn.
Analysis of Financial Management and Decision-Making in Institution of Higher Learning Based on Deep Learning Algorithm

This study creates a model of financial management and decision-making in higher education institutions and implements financial early warning and decision-making in higher education institutions based on the DL algorithm and data-driven thinking. In addition to analyzing the causes of financial risks and creating an early warning system for financial risks, this study provides prevention strategies for financial risks in institutions of higher education. Concurrently, a high-precision early-warning model of shared financial risks is established using the early-warning index data that were obtained by screening and imported into the MATLAB training DL network. The main system modules are designed simultaneously using the timing diagram and flowchart of the model, which is based on model analysis and the modeling process. This model’s main objective is to boost the effectiveness of financial management and scientific judgment in higher education institutions. Finally, it is used for experimental analysis and result research, providing an early warning of financial project budget execution progress. Compared to the traditional model’s accuracy of 12.03 percent, the experimental results demonstrate that this model’s prediction accuracy can reach 95.78%. The financial management and decision-making analysis of a higher education institution are the subjects of this study’s application of the DL algorithm. Positive results were obtained, which can serve as a starting point for future research in the field.
To Die or Not to Die—Regulated Cell Death and Survival in Cyanobacteria

Regulated cell death (RCD) is central to the development, integrity, and functionality of multicellular organisms. In the last decade, evidence has accumulated that RCD is a universal phenomenon in all life domains. Cyanobacteria are of specific interest due to their importance in aquatic and terrestrial habitats and their role as primary producers in global nutrient cycling. Current knowledge on cyanobacterial RCD is based mainly on biochemical and morphological observations, often by methods directly transferred from vertebrate research and with limited understanding of the molecular genetic basis. However, the metabolism of different cyanobacteria groups relies on photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation, whereas mitochondria are the central executioner of cell death in vertebrates. Moreover, cyanobacteria chosen as biological models in RCD studies are mainly colonial or filamentous multicellular organisms. On the other hand, unicellular cyanobacteria have regulated programs of cellular survival (RCS) such as chlorosis and post-chlorosis resuscitation. The co-existence of different genetically regulated programs in cyanobacterial populations may have been a top engine in life diversification. Development of cyanobacteria-specific methods for identification and characterization of RCD and wider use of single-cell analysis combined with intelligent image-based cell sorting and metagenomics would shed more light on the underlying molecular mechanisms and help us to address the complex colonial interactions during these events. In this review, we focus on the functional implications of RCD in cyanobacterial communities.
An overview of orthodontic malpractice liability based on a survey and case assessment review

Background The purpose of this survey study and case review was to identify 1) the common causes related to filing a malpractice claim against an orthodontist and, 2) the factors mitigating against a potential malpractice claim in the United States (U.S). The objectives of the case review were to examine the current state of orthodontic malpractice litigation from a cause and mitigating point of view. Material and Methods Data for this research was collected and reviewed using the following two methods: 1) A survey questionnaire on aspects of malpractice liability was electronically distributed to 2,241 active U.S. members of the American Association of Orthodontists (AAO). 2) Legal cases were reviewed on the online legal research database Lexis Advance Research, and 35 cases were analyzed. Results Survey questionnaire results and legal case review results are as follows: 1) 77 orthodontists completed the survey. 9.1% of the respondents reported a malpractice claim having been filed against them with periodontal issues accounting for most of the claims. Survey participants reported good doctor-patient communication as being the most relevant contributory factor and most relevant mitigating factor in malpractice claims. 2) Negligence is the main reason patients sue a doctor for clinically related litigation, and failure to obtain a proper informed consent from the patient is the main cause of action for non-clinically related litigation. Conclusions Most respondents reported doctor-patient communication, periodontal issues, and a lack of informed consent as the main triggering elements of a lawsuit, which is similar to other studies and case review analysis. Good doctor-patient rapport was ranked as being most helpful in mitigating a potential claim, which is also similar to other studies. Another aspect of the survey questionnaire that was evaluated was whether a non-orthodontist can provide expert testimony against an orthodontist, with most respondents reporting that this is not possible. It has been ruled, though, that a general dentist can be an expert witness and provide expert testimony against an orthodontist in a lawsuit depending on the circumstances. Negligence was the most common cause of clinically related orthodontic litigation, and a failure of the practitioner to obtain a proper informed consent from the patient was the most common cause of non-clinically related orthodontic litigation. Key words:Orthodontist, malpractice, legal, lawsuit, liability, medicolegal.
From industry development to social influence: video games in Chinese newspaper coverage, 2010–2020

Abstract Through quantitative content analysis, this study outlines the media construction of video games in Chinese newspapers in the period 2010–2020 from four aspects: dominant themes, tones, benefits–threats, and stakeholders. The findings indicate that the dominant themes of game coverage shifted from the commercial and industrial fields to social concerns, while the tone toward gaming became more negative. Entertainment remained the most prominent benefit of gaming in media coverage, while media concerns about game addiction increased immensely. Notably, game developers increased their presence as information sources. They were also the dominant responsibility takers for the gaming impacts in 2010–2015, after which the media more frequently attributed responsibility to all stakeholders.
A Comparison of Four Notions of Isomorphism-Based Security for Graphs

A graph is a powerful abstraction for representing information. We address the problem of publishing a secure version of a graph that does not leak information to an adversary who may possess prior information about portions of the graph, and may have unbounded computational power. In this context, we revisit four notions of security, all of which are based on variants of graph isomorphism, that have been proposed in two different application contexts in the literature. We compare the four notions to one another, first from the standpoint of strength, i.e., whether meeting one notion implies meeting another, and then from the standpoint of computational hardness, i.e., what the exact computational complexity is for the problem of checking whether a graph meets a notion. For the latter, we identify that for two of the notions we consider, the problem is <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbf{NP}\text{-complete}$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mi mathvariant="bold">NP</mml:mi><mml:mtext>-complete</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="tripunitara-ieq1-3199326.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, and for the two others, it is <bold>ISO</bold>-complete, where <bold>ISO</bold> is the class of problems induced by graph isomorphism. We observe that strength is not necessarily correlated to computational hardness. In summary, our work makes contributions at the foundations of an important notion of security for graphs.
Simplicity of the principal eigenvalue for indefinite quasilinear problems

Given any domain Ω ⊆ RN , w ∈ L1 (Ω) and a differentiable function A : RN → [0, ∞) which is p-homogeneous and strictly convex, we consider the minimization problem inf Ω A( inf Ωu)/w(x)|u|q 1,: u ∈ D0 (Ω), w(x)|u|q < ∞ If the infimum is achieved and q = p > 1, without additional regularity assumptions on Ω or the weight function w, we show that the minimizer is unique up to a constant factor. The same conclusion holds when A is allowed to depend on x ∈ Ω and satisfies natural growth assumptions. Some of our results also hold when q < p
Monitoring Mixture Effects of Neurotoxicants in Surface Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluents with Neurite Outgrowth Inhibition in SH-SY5Y Cells

Cell-based assays covering environmentally relevant modes of action are widely used for water quality monitoring. However, no high-throughput assays are available for testing developmental neurotoxicity of water samples. We implemented an assay that quantifies neurite outgrowth, which is one of the neurodevelopmental key events, and cell viability in human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells using imaging techniques. We used this assay for testing of extracts of surface water collected in agricultural areas during rain events and effluents from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), where more than 200 chemicals had been quantified. Forty-one chemicals were tested individually that were suspected to contribute to the mixture effects among the detected chemicals in environmental samples. Sample sensitivity distributions indicated higher neurotoxicity for surface water samples than for effluents, and the endpoint of neurite outgrowth inhibition was six times more sensitive than cytotoxicity in the surface water samples and only three times more sensitive in the effluent samples. Eight environmental pollutants showed high specificity, and those ranged from pharmaceuticals (mebendazole and verapamil) to pesticides (methiocarb and clomazone), biocides (1,2-benzisothiazolin-3-one), and industrial chemicals (N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, 7-diethylamino-4-methylcoumarin, and 2-(4-morpholinyl)benzothiazole). Although neurotoxic effects were newly detected for some of our test chemicals, less than 1% of the measured effects were explained by the detected and toxicologically characterized chemicals. The neurotoxicity assay was benchmarked against other bioassays: activations of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor and the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor were similar in sensitivity, highly sensitive and did not differ much between the two water types, with surface water having slightly higher effects than the WWTP effluent. Oxidative stress response mirrored neurotoxicity quite well but was caused by different chemicals in the two water types. Overall, the new cell-based neurotoxicity assay is a valuable complement to the existing battery of effect-based monitoring tools.
Performance evaluation of a high‐resolution regional model over West Africa for operational use: A case study of August 2017

The frequency of flash floods resulting from heavy rainfall over West Africa has increased in recent years with serious socio‐economic consequences. Therefore, the need to utilize numerical weather prediction models to forecast heavy rainfall events reliably is also rising at many operational meteorological centres in West Africa. This paper evaluates the performance of the Consortium for Small‐scale Modelling (COSMO) model of the German Meteorological Services (DWD) in predicting rainfall over West Africa for high‐impact rainfall events that occurred between 19 and 26 August 2017. The paper aims to investigate the synoptic forcings modulating daily rainfall variability during that period. Results show that COSMO simulates adequately the spatio‐temporal variability of rainfall distribution over West Africa, though with inherent biases. COSMO displays a decreasing skill in producing spatial rainfall distribution as rainfall amounts tend to 30 mm and above. Additionally, areas of heavy rainfall, mostly about 100–300 km southwest of the core of the Africa Easterly Jet (AEJ), often coincide with areas of decreasing mean sea level pressure of at least 0.6 hPa and areas of increasing convective available potential energy of at least 500 J/kg. Although not in all cases, the trough of the Africa Easterly Wave (AEW) is always located to the east of these areas. We show that not every storm, especially east of the prime meridian, is associated with an AEW trough. COSMO is able to reproduce the atmospheric dynamics modulating the daily rainfall variability, in addition to capturing the daily propagation of the AEW trough, and the core of the AEJ. However, the reproducibility skill of the model in predicting atmospheric dynamics may not transform into the predictive skill of the model in producing rainfall. Nevertheless, operational forecasters may be able to determine likely areas of heavy rainfall by estimating the position of the AEJ core based on the position of areas of the least falling pressure from COSMO. Finally, the incorporation of the fractions skill score metric based on the neighbourhood approach could also assist operational forecasters to decide at which scale a severe weather alert can be issued.
Outcomes of Deep Sclerectomy following Failed XEN Gel Stent Implantation in Open-Angle Glaucoma: A Prospective Study

Background: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the outcome of deep sclerectomy (DS) as a secondary procedure following failed ab-interno XEN gel stent implantation in patients with open-angle glaucoma. Methods: Prospective, single-center, non-randomized, interventional study. Consecutive eyes that underwent mitomycin C (MMC) augmented XEN gel stent surgery, with uncontrolled intraocular pressure (IOP) or signs of disease progression, were included to undergo MMC-augmented DS. Primary efficacy outcome was surgical success, defined as complete when the unmedicated IOP was 12 mmHg or less, or 15 mmHg or less and 20% lower than at the timing of XEN failure and defined as qualified when the IOP fulfilled the same conditions with fewer medications than before deep sclerectomy. Secondary measures were mean reduction in IOP and in the number of medications, and the rates of complications. Results: Seventeen eyes were enrolled with a mean age of 72.1 ± 8.2 years (66.7% women). The mean follow-up was 20.1 ± 4.9 months, with more than 12-month data available from 15 eyes. Following DS, IOP decreased significantly from 22.6 ± 5.3 mmHg to 12.3 ± 5.5 (45.6%; p < 0.001). Antiglaucoma medications dropped from 1.1 ± 0.9 to 0.3 ± 0.7. Complete success was obtained in 40% of eyes using the threshold of 12 mmHg or less and a 20% decrease of IOP, and in 60% using the 15 mmHg or less threshold. Adverse events were observed in 20% of eyes (bleb leakage (13.3%); hypotony (6.7%)). No cases of choroidal detachment or hypotony maculopathy were reported. Conclusions: Failed XEN gel stent implantation does not seem to negatively affect the safety and efficacy of subsequent deep sclerectomy surgery.
Fathers’ stimulation of toddlers’ cognitive development contributes to children’s executive function skills at five years of age

ABSTRACT This multi-method study examined mothers’ and fathers’ cognitive stimulation during parent–child interactions and toddlers’ moral regulation (assessed via parent reports) as predictors of their executive functioning skills approximately 2½ years later. Forty children (23 girls and 17 boys) and their parents participated in both timepoints. Children’s moral regulation and fathers’ cognitive stimulation emerged as unique predictors of children’s performance on the Flexible Item Selection Task. For the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, a significant interaction was found for toddlers’ moral regulation and fathers’ cognitive stimulation such that children low in moral regulation were more greatly influenced by fathers’ parenting behaviour than children high in moral regulation. These findings suggest that fathers’ stimulation of children’s cognitive development works in combination with children’s moral behaviour to predict their executive functioning skills during early childhood. Future research on parenting should continue to include fathers given the important socializing role that they play in children’s development.