Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coronary and myocardial angiography: angiographic assessment of both epicardial and myocardial perfusion.

Angiographic assessment of epicardial coronary artery blood flow has played a pivotal role in our understanding of the “time-dependent open artery hypothesis” and in the evaluation of reperfusion strategies over the past 2 decades.1–8 It has become increasingly apparent, however, that clinical outcomes are not only associated with angiographic flow in the epicardial artery, but also with angiographic flow in the myocardium.9–13 To this end, the goal of reperfusion therapies has shifted to include reperfusion downstream at the level of capillary bed, and it might be more appropriate that the hypothesis now be termed “the time dependent open artery and open microvascular hypothesis. ” The goal of this article is to review angiographic methods used to evaluate myocardial ischemia and infarction and to discuss the insights into the pathophysiology of acute coronary syndromes provided by these angiographic indexes of coronary artery blood flow and myocardial perfusion. For nearly 2 decades now, the Thrombolysis In Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) flow grade classification scheme has been successfully used to assess coronary blood flow in acute coronary syndromes1 (Table). It has been a valuable tool to compare angiographic outcomes following reperfusion, and the association of the TFGs with clinical outcomes (including mortality) has been well documented.2–8 The relationship between TFG and mortality does satisfy what some consider to be 3 criteria required to validate a surrogate end point for mortality, as follows: (1) There is an association between TIMI grade 3 flow and mortality, (2) an agent such as recombinant tissue plasminogen activator improves TIMI grade 3 flow by 22% over another agent such as streptokinase, and (3) the agent tissue plasminogen activator improves mortality 1.1% over streptokinase. View this table: Definitions of the TFG and the TMPG Systems On the basis of this relationship between TIMI flow and mortality observed in the GUSTO …
Simple Precision Creation of Digitally Specified, Spatially Heterogeneous, Engineered Tissue Architectures

Natural organs are spatially heterogeneous, both in material composition and in the cell types within. Engineered tissues, in contrast, remain challenging to create, especially if the goal is to spatially position multiple cell types in a heterogeneous pattern in three dimensions (3D). Here, we describe a simple, inexpensive, yet extremely precise method to create tissue architectures in a digitally specifiable fashion, with morphological and compositional tuning. Specifically, we pattern hydrogel crosslinking via a novel photolithographic process that can trap solutions of extracellular matrix (ECM) components, cells, and diffusible factors in defined 3D shapes, without requiring specialized expensive optics or robotics. By iterating this process with different patterns and different cellular compositions, engineered tissues of varying heterogeneity, size, and complexity can be designed and implemented with microscale precision, in a fashion practical for individual laboratories to perform. We demonstrate the power of this process by engineering tissue building blocks in defined geometries, creating engineered tissues that encapsulate different cells (e.g., primary neurons, embryonic stem cells (ESCs), human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), and fibroblasts) at specified locations throughout a single 3D tissue volume. We used the ability to rapidly synthesize tissue volumes of varying scale to examine how tissue volume governs neuron development.
Endotoxin and tumor necrosis factor-receptor levels in portal and hepatic vein of patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis receiving elective transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt

Background/aims In cirrhosis portal hypertension can promote bacterial translocation and increase serum endotoxin levels. Vice versa, endotoxin aggravates portal hypertension by induction of systemic and splanchnic vasodilation, and by triggering hepatic inflammatory response via tumor necrosis factor &agr; (TNF&agr;). However, the hepatic elimination of endotoxin in cirrhotic patients with severe portal hypertension, in the absence of acute complications, has not been investigated so far. Methods Twenty patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis received transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt at an event-free interval for either refractory ascites or recurrent bleeding. During the transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt procedure portal and hepatic venous blood samples were obtained and endotoxin levels were measured by a chromogenic limulus-assay. In 16 of these patients an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to measure levels of the soluble TNF&agr;-receptors sTNF-R55 and sTNF-R75. Results Portal venous endotoxin levels correlated with portal vein velocity (P=0.03) and arterial systolic blood pressure (P=0.007). Portal endotoxin levels correlated with portal venous sTNF-R75-levels (P=0.039; r=0.521) and hepatic venous sTNF-R55-levels (P=0.009; r=0.669). Hepatic venous levels of both sTNF-R55 and sTNF-R75 correlated directly with the model for end-stage liver disease-score, and inversely with cholinesterase. However, we did not find significant differences in endotoxin levels nor in sTNF-R55-levels and sTNF-R75-levels between portal and hepatic venous blood. Conclusion Endotoxin levels correlated with hemodynamic derangement in cirrhotic severe portal hypertension, and with levels of soluble TNF&agr;-receptors. Soluble TNF&agr;-receptor levels correlated with the severity of liver dysfunction. However, in this study an endotoxin concentration gradient across the liver was absent, suggesting negligible primary hepatic endotoxin elimination in the absence of complications.
Learned changes of feeding behavior in Aplysia in response to edible and inedible foods

Feeding behavior in Aplysia fasciata and A. oculifera is modified by pairing the behavior with reinforcing consequences. Successful and unsuccessful attempts to transfer food from the buccal cavity to the crop act as positive and negative reinforcers, respectively. A number of changes in feeding behavior occur as a result of pairing of feeding with the negative reinforcer: feeding responses become less effective in leading to the entry of food into the buccal cavity; when food does enter the buccal cavity, it exits sooner; swallowing responses after food entry are less likely to occur; Aplysia eventually cease responding to food. Pairing successful transfer of food into the crop with feeding behavior produces opposite effects. Behavioral change is specific to pairing, as shown by lack of change when reinforcement is explicitly unpaired with feeding behavior. Behavioral change is specific to foods with a particular taste and texture; generalization to alternate foods was not observed. In spite of cessation of feeding, animals remain aroused, as shown by low response latency to alternate foods. Memory of response change persists for at least 48 hr.
Induction and Flow Cytometry Identification of Tetraploids from Seed-Derived Explants through Colchicine Treatments in Catharanthus roseus (L.) G. Don

The tetraploid plants of Catharanthus roseus (L.) G. Don was obtained by colchicine induction from seeds explants, and the ploidy of the plants was identified by flow cytometry. The optimal treatment is 0.2% colchicine solution treated for 24 hours, and the induction rate reaches up to 30%. Comparing with morphological characteristics and growth habits between tetraploids and the control, we found that tetraploids of C. roseus had larger stoma and more branches and leaves. HPLC analysis showed tetraploidization could increase the contents of terpenoid indole alkaloids in C. roseus. Thus, tetraploidization could be used to produce higher alkaloids lines for commercial use. QRT-PCR results showed that the expression of enzymes involved in terpenoid indole alkaloids biosynthesis pathway had increased in the tetraploid plants. To our knowledge, this was the first paper to explore the secondary metabolism in autotetraploid C. roseus induced by colchicine.
Performance Evaluation of Beamformed Spatial Multiplexing Transmission in Millimeter-Wave Communication Channels

This article deals with the study on the performance of the hybrid transmission scheme combining both beamforming and spatial multiplexing. Specifically, the capacity of the hybrid scheme is evaluated and compared to that of the just beamforming scheme in line-of-sight and multi-path channels. Two kinds of the hybrid schemes are considered: the shared antenna architecture where each antenna processes all data streams and the split antenna architecture where each antenna processes only one data stream. The effects of the channel parameters such as the antenna spacing, the existence of reflecting paths, etc. on the capacity and the optimal beams and powers are examined. The frequency-selectivity property of the capacity and the optimal beams and powers is also investigated. In this study, a scenario is considered where the same analog RF beamformer is applied to all subcarriers but the digital baseband power allocation is executed individually at each subcarrier.
Groundwater transit time distribution and mean from streambed sampling in an agricultural coastal plain watershed, North Carolina, USA

We measured groundwater apparent age (τ) and seepage rate (v) in a sandy streambed using point‐scale sampling and seepage blankets (a novel seepage meter). We found very similar MTT estimates from streambed point sampling in a 58 m reach (29 years) and a 2.5 km reach (31 years). The TTD for groundwater discharging to the stream was best fit by a gamma distribution model and was very similar for streambed point sampling in both reaches. Between adjacent point‐scale and seepage blanket samples, water from the seepage blankets was generally younger, largely because blanket samples contained a fraction of “young” stream water. Correcting blanket data for the stream water fraction brought τ estimates for most blanket samples closer to those for adjacent point samples. The MTT estimates from corrected blanket data were in good agreement with those from sampling streambed points adjacent to the blankets. Collectively, agreement among age‐dating tracers, general accord between tracer data and piston‐flow model curves, and large groundwater age gradients in the streambed, suggested that the piston flow apparent ages were reasonable estimates of the groundwater transit times for most samples. Overall, our results from two field campaigns suggest that groundwater collected in the streambed can provide reasonable estimates of apparent age of groundwater discharge, and that MTT can be determined from different age‐dating tracers and by sampling with different groundwater collection devices. Coupled streambed point measurements of groundwater age and groundwater seepage rate represent a novel, reproducible, and effective approach to estimating aquifer TTD and MTT.
Construing religious experience

A model for exploring religious experience in the everyday lives of people has been proposed, using personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a theoretical base and source of methodology. One hundred and sixty three people participated in the exploration. They were interviewed about their religious background and current involvement in religious activities. The content and organisation of their constructs, in relation to the religious and secular aspects of their lives, were elicited using Repertory Grid and Implication Grid methods (Fransella & Bannister, 1977). Affective and interpersonal experience were assessed from content analyses of the participants' verbalisations about their lives. Religious constructs which were common within denominational groups were elicited from small groups of participants, using a Sociogrid technique (Shaw, 1980). Relationships between these dimensions of experience were hypothesised on the basis of the personal construct model. The results provided, not only support for the hypothesised relationships, but also validation for both a personal construct approach to human experience and the methodology adopted. The implications of the results for an understanding of religious experience, and also for the theory of personal constructs, have been discussed, together with implications for further research.
Perirhinal cortex and the neural basis of object memory in the rat

This thesis aimed to investigate the role of the perirhinal cortex in object memory in the rat. The first experiment tested the hypothesis that the perirhinal cortex is critical to memory for relationships between objects by testing postoperative learning of novel visual-visual stimulus associations following lesions of the perirhinal cortex. The hypothesis was not supported: postoperative performance was not impaired. Experiments 3.1-3.4 tested the hypothesis that perirhinal cortex is crucial to the integration of multiple features into a representation of an object using spontaneous object recognition with either reconfigured objects or multiple objects. The hypothesis was supported: perirhinal lesions caused disproportionate impairment on tasks involving feature ambiguity. Experiments 4.1-4.7 investigated the effects of, perirhinal, postrhinal or fornix lesions on aspects of memory for object-context associations. The hypothesis that postrhinal and fornix lesioned animals would be more impaired than perirhinal animals was confirmed. Postrhinal lesions impaired memory for object-context associations, as, less severely, did fornix lesions; perirhinal lesions impaired memory when another object was used as the context. Experiment 5.1 used a novel model for episodic-like memory and tested the hypothesis that postrhinal or fornix, but not perirhinal lesions would cause impairment. One of these predictions was supported: fornix but not postrhinal or perirhinal lesions caused severe impairment of episodic-like memory. The fornix impairment was not due to an impairment of memory for object-place associations (experiment 5.2). Finally, experiments 6.1-6.7 investigated the possible function of L-type calcium channels in perirhinal cortex. The dihydropyridine nimodipine was successfully used to reverse the effects of the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine on the spontaneous object recognition task. It is concluded that perirhinal lesions in the rat result in impairments of memory which involve the processing of objects and the relation of their constituent features to each other. They do not impair memory for the association either of distinct objects or of objects and background contexts or locations. This is contrasted with the impairment of memory for object-in-context which results from postrhinal lesions and the impairment of episodic- like memory which results from fornix lesions. The importance of the cholinergic system in object recognition is confirmed and the importance of L-type calcium channels to such memory is suggested.
Locking in OODBMS client supporting nested transactions

Nested transactions facilitate the control of complex persistent applications by enabling both fine-tuning of the scope of rollback and safe intra-transaction parallelism. We are concerned with supporting concurrent nested transactions on client workstations of an OODBMS. Use of the traditional design and implementation of a lock manager results in a high CPU overhead: in-cache traversals of the 007 benchmark perform, at best, 4.5 times slower than the same traversal achieved in virtual memory by a nonpersistent programming language. We propose a new design and implementation of a lock manager which cuts that factor down to 1.8. This lock manager supports nested transactions with both sibling and parent/child parallelisms, and provides object locking at a cost comparable to page locking. Object locking is therefore a better alternative due to its higher functionality. <<ETX>>
When should internal interfaces be promoted to public?

Commonly, software systems have public (and stable) interfaces, and internal (and possibly unstable) interfaces. Despite being discouraged, client developers often use internal interfaces, which may cause their systems to fail when they evolve. To overcome this problem, API producers may promote internal interfaces to public. In practice, however, API producers have no assistance to identify public interface candidates. In this paper, we study the transition from internal to public interfaces. We aim to help API producers to deliver a better product and API clients to benefit sooner from public interfaces. Our empirical investigation on five widely adopted Java systems present the following observations. First, we identified 195 promotions from 2,722 internal interfaces. Second, we found that promoted internal interfaces have more clients. Third, we predicted internal interface promotion with precision between 50%-80%, recall 26%-82%, and AUC 74%-85%. Finally, by applying our predictor on the last version of the analyzed systems, we automatically detected 382 public interface candidates.
Modeling collaborative information seeking processes: A preliminary study of team search tactics

This paper presents an investigation on collaborative information seeking process of team users from the aspect of search tactics. Through the investigation, we identified team search tactics as essential components of collaborative search process. In the study, theory from both information science and social psychology are explored in a preliminary user study to build a conceptual framework of team search tactics, which can be used to guide the design and evaluation of information systems in supporting collaborative information seeking.
A Pluripotency and Self-Renewal Program Controls the Expansion of Genetically Unstable Cancer Stem Cells in Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Tumors

Human germ cell tumors are often metastatic, presumably due to distal site tumor growth by cancer stem cells. To determine whether cancer stem cells can be identified in a transplantation model of testicular germ cell tumor we transplanted murine embryonic germ cells (EGCs) into the testis of adult severe combined immunodeficient (SCID) mice. Transplantation resulted in a locally invasive solid tumor, with a cellular component that generated secondary tumors upon serial transplantation. The secondary tumors were invariably metastatic, a feature not observed in the primary tumors derived from EGCs. In order to characterize the differences between EGCs and the tumor-derived stem cells, we performed karyotype and microarray analysis. Our results show that generation of cancer stem cells is associated with the acquisition of non-clonal genomic rearrangements not found in the originating population. Furthermore, pretreatment of EGCs with a potent inhibitor of selfrenewal, retinoic acid, prevented tumor formation and the emergence of these genetically unstable cancer stem cells. Microarray analysis revealed that EGCs and first and second-generation cancer stem cells were highly similar, however approximately 1,000 differentiallyexpressed transcripts could be identified corresponding to alterations in oncogenes and genes associated with motility and development. Combined, the data suggest that the activation of oncogenic pathways in a cellular background of genetic instability coupled with an inherent ability to self-renew are involved in the acquisition of metastatic behavior in the cancer stem cell population of tumors derived from pluripotent cells.
Frontiers of brain mapping using MRI

Over the past dozen years, the use of MRI techniques to map brain function (fMRI) has sparked a great deal of research. The ability of fMRI to image several different physiological processes concurrently (i.e., blood oxygenation, blood flow, metabolism) and noninvasively over large volumes make it the ideal choice for many different areas of neuroscience research in addition to countless applications in clinical settings. Furthermore, with the advent of high magnetic fields (and other hardware advancements, i.e., parallel imaging) for both human and animal research, spatial and temporal resolutions continue to be pushed to higher levels because of increases in the sensitivity as well as specificity of MR‐detectable functional signals. fMRI methodology continues to grow and has the ability to cater to many different research applications. There seems to be no foreseeable end in sight to the advancement of fMRI techniques and its subsequent use in basic research as well as in clinical settings. In this work, fMRI techniques and the ongoing development of existing techniques are discussed with implications for the future of fMRI. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Personalized Recommendation Meets Your Next Favorite

A comprehensive understanding of user's item selection behavior is not only essential to many scientific disciplines, but also has a profound business impact on online recommendation. Recent researches have discovered that user's favorites can be divided into 2 categories: long-term and short-term. User's item selection behavior is a mixed decision of her long and short-term favorites. In this paper, we propose a unified model, namely States Transition pAir-wise Ranking Model (STAR), to address users' favorites mining for sequential-set recommendation. Our method utilizes a transition graph for collaborative filtering that accounts for mining user's short-term favorites, jointed with a generative topic model for expressing user's long-term favorites. Furthermore, a user's specific prior is introduced into our unified model for better modeling personalization. Technically, we develop a pair-wise ranking loss function for parameters learning. Empirically, we measure the effectiveness of our method using two real-world datasets and the results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Quantum oscillations of the superconductor LaRu2P2: Comparable mass enhancement λ ≈ 1 in Ru and Fe phosphides

We have studied the angular-dependent de Haas-van Alphen oscillations of LaRu2P2 using magnetic torque in pulsed magnetic fields up to 60 T. The observed oscillation frequencies are in excellent agreement with the geometry of the calculated Fermi surface. The temperature dependence of the oscillation amplitudes reveals effective masses m*(α) = 0.71 and m*(β) = 0.99 me, which are enhanced over the calculated band mass by λ cyc of 0.8. We find a similar enhancement of λ γ ≈ 1 in comparing the measured electronic specific heat (γ = 11. 5m J/mol K 2 ) with the total density of states from band-structure calculations. Remarkably, very similar mass enhancements have been reported in other pnictides, LaFe2P2, LaFePO (Tc ≈ 4 K), and LaRuPO, independent of whether they are superconducting or not. This is contrary to the common perceptions that the normal-state quasiparticle renormalizations reflect the strength of the superconducting pairing mechanism and leads to new questions about pairing in isostructural and isoelectronic Ru- and Fe-pnictide superconductors.