Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design and Characterization of Protein E-PilA, a Candidate Fusion Antigen for Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae Vaccine

Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is a pathogen known for being a frequent cause of acute otitis media in children and respiratory tract infections in adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In the present study, a vaccine antigen based on the fusion of two known NTHi adhesive proteins, protein E (PE) and a pilin subunit (PilA), was developed. The quality of the combined antigen was investigated through functional, biophysical, and structural analyses. ABSTRACT Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is a pathogen known for being a frequent cause of acute otitis media in children and respiratory tract infections in adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In the present study, a vaccine antigen based on the fusion of two known NTHi adhesive proteins, protein E (PE) and a pilin subunit (PilA), was developed. The quality of the combined antigen was investigated through functional, biophysical, and structural analyses. It was shown that the PE and PilA individual structures are not modified in the PE-PilA fusion and that PE-PilA assembles as a dimer in solution, reflecting PE dimerization. PE-PilA was found to bind vitronectin by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, as isolated PE does. Disulfide bridges were conserved and homogeneous, which was determined by peptide mapping and top-down analysis of PE, PilA, and PE-PilA molecules. Finally, the PE-PilA crystal showed a PE entity with a three-dimensional (3D) structure similar to that of the recently published isolated PE, while the structure of the PilA entity was similar to that of a 3D model elaborated from two other type 4 pilin subunits. Taken together, our observations suggest that the two tethered proteins behave independently within the chimeric molecule and display structures similar to those of the respective isolated antigens, which are important characteristics for eliciting optimal antibody-mediated immunity. PE and PilA can thus be further developed as a single fusion protein in a vaccine perspective, in the knowledge that tethering the two antigens does not perceptibly compromise the structural attributes offered by the individual antigens.
Effective nutritional status screening in orthopaedic oncology patients and post-operative complications

Purpose: This study aims to determine the prevalence of malnutrition among orthopaedic oncology patients with malignant tumour during preoperative period. Methods: This is a prospective observational study involving patients from the orthopaedic oncology unit who were undergoing surgery. They were assessed with Patient Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA), Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST) and 3-minute Nutritional Screening (3MinNS) questionnaires. Anthropometric data such as body mass index, mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) and blood parameters such as serum albumin, total lymphocyte count and haemoglobin were also investigated. Patients were then followed up for 3 months. Post-operative complications were divided into infectious and non-infectious groups. Length of stay and unplanned readmission were also documented. Results: Prevalence of malnutrition ranged from 13.3% to 45.8% under different nutritional assessment methods. Patients who were determined as malnourished were significantly associated with both infectious and non-infectious post-operative complications (p < 0.001). PG-SGA and 3MinNS values were also significant in univariate and multivariate analysis, respectively. Low serum albumin (<35 g/L) was associated with post-operative infectious complications, especially surgical site infection (p < 0.001), prolonged hospital stay (p = 0.009) and unplanned readmission (p = 0.017). 3MinNS and Charlson Comorbidity Index were predictive of non-infectious complications, whereas serum albumin and the presence of metastasis were predictive of infectious complications. Conclusion: This pilot study of patients with soft tissue and bone sarcoma of upper and lower limbs showed that malnutrition is a significant independent factor related to infectious and non-infectious complications which leads to unplanned readmission and prolonged length of stay. Periodic screening using the PG-SGA or 3MinNS questionnaires, MUAC and evaluation of serum albumin levels is recommended during clinic session and pre-surgery assessment rounds to identify those predisposed to malnutrition and help in reducing incidence of post-operative complications.
Shift of leading pacemaker site during reflex vagal stimulation and altered electrical source‐to‐sink balance

Vagal reflexes slow heart rate and can change where the heartbeat originates within the sinoatrial node (SAN). The mechanisms responsible for this process – termed leading pacemaker (LP) shift – have not been investigated fully. We used optical mapping to measure the effects of baroreflex, chemoreflex and carbachol on pacemaker entrainment and electrical conduction across the SAN. All methods of stimulation triggered shifts in LP site from the central SAN to one or two caudal pacemaker regions. These shifts were associated with reduced current generation capacity centrally and increased electrical load caudally. Previous studies suggest LP shift is a rate‐dependent phenomenon whereby acetylcholine slows central pacemaker rate disproportionately, enabling caudal cells that are less acetylcholine sensitive to assume control. However, our findings indicate the LP region is defined by both pacemaker rate and capacity to drive activation. Shifts in LP site provide an important homeostatic mechanism for rapid switches in heart rate.
A Performance Predictor for Honors Students Based On Elman Neural Network

With the popularization of higher education, honors education has become an important work of research-oriented universities to cultivate excellent students. In order to evaluate the achievements of honors education and to make a guidance for honor educators, it is necessary to predict the performance of honors students effectively. This paper proposes a data-driven model to make predictions on students’ performances based on an adjusted Elman Neural Network (Elman NN). Moreover, to be more significant, we made a comparison between Elman NN and some other methods. The result shows that our model performs much better. The performance predictor may provide a reference for honor educators in the professional choices and enable them to provide appropriate suggestions or motivations for those of the honors students who are at an early stage of learning risk or have a potential of an out-standing talent.
A prospective, randomized, controlled clinical trial on the efficacy of a single‐use negative pressure wound therapy system, compared to traditional negative pressure wound therapy in the treatment of chronic ulcers of the lower extremities

Multicenter, phase‐4, randomized, comparative‐efficacy study in patients with VLUs or DFUs comparing for noninferiority the percentage change in target ulcer dimensions (area, depth, and volume) a single‐use negative pressure wound therapy (s‐NPWT) system versus traditional NPWT (t‐NPWT) over a 12‐week treatment period or up to confirmed healing. Baseline values were taken at the randomization visit. Randomized by wound type and size, 164 patients with non‐infected DFUs and VLUs were included. The ITT population was composed of 161 patients (101 with VLUs, 60 with DFUs) and 115 patients completed follow‐up (64 in the s‐NPWT group and 51 in the t‐NPWT group) (PP population). The average age for all patients was 61.5 years, 36.6% were women, and treatment groups were statistically similar at baseline. Primary endpoint analyses on wound area reduction demonstrated statistically significant reduction in favor of s‐NPWT (p = 0.003) for the PP population and for the ITT population (p < 0.001). Changes in wound depth (p = 0.018) and volume (p = 0.013) were also better with s‐NPWT. Faster wound closure was observed with s‐NPWT (Cox Proportional Hazards ratio (0.493 (0.273, 0.891); p = 0.019) in the ITT population. Wound closure occurred in 45% of patients in the s‐NPWT group vs. 22.2% of patients in the t‐NPWT group (p = 0.002). Median estimate of the time to wound closure was 77 days for s‐NPWT. No estimate could be provided for t‐NPWT due to the low number of patients achieving wound closure. Device‐related AEs were more frequent in the t‐NPWT group (41 AEs from 29 patients) than in the s‐NPWT group (16 AEs from 12 patients). The s‐NPWT system met noninferiority and achieved statistical superiority vs. t‐NPWT in terms of wound progression toward healing over the treatment period. When NPWT is being considered for the management of challenging VLUs and DFUs, s‐NPWT should be considered a first choice over other types of NPWT.
Treatment of a burn animal model with functionalized tridimensional electrospun biomaterials

Laminin-functionalized poly-d,l-lactic acid scaffolds were produced. Following this, mesenchymal stem cells and keratinocytes were seeded on biomaterials for the in vivo experiments, where the biomaterials with or without cells were implanted. The analysis is comprised of the visual aspect and mean size of the lesion plus the histology and gene expression. The results showed that the cells occupied all the structure of the scaffolds in all the groups. After nine days of in vivo experiments, the defect size did not show statistical difference among the groups, although the groups with the poly-d,l-lactic acid/Lam biomaterial had the lowest lesion size and presented the best visual aspect of the wound. Gene expression analysis showed considerable increase of tumor growth factor beta 1 expression, increased vascular endothelial growth factor and balance of the BAX/Bcl-2 ratio when compared to the lesion group. Histological analysis showed well-formed tissue in the groups where the biomaterials and biomaterials plus cells were used. In some animals, in which biomaterials and cells were used, the epidermis was formed throughout the length of the wound. In conclusion, these biomaterials were found to be capable of providing support for the growth of cells and stimulated the healing of the skin, which was improved by the use of cells.
Neverland: Lightweight Hardware Extensions for Enforcing Operating System Integrity

The security of applications hinges on the trustworthiness of the operating system, as applications rely on the OS to protect code and data. As a result, multiple protections for safeguarding the integrity of kernel code and data are being continuously proposed and deployed. These existing protections, however, are far from ideal as they either provide partial protection, or require complex and high overhead hardware and software stacks. In this work, we present Neverland: a low-overhead, hardware-assisted, memory protection scheme that safeguards the operating system from rootkits and kernel-mode malware. Once the system is done booting, Neverland's hardware takes away the operating system's ability to overwrite certain configuration registers, as well as portions of its own physical address space that contain kernel code and security-critical data. Furthermore, it prohibits the CPU from fetching privileged code from any memory region lying outside the physical addresses assigned to the OS kernel and drivers (regardless of virtual page permissions). This combination of protections makes it extremely hard for an attacker to tamper with the kernel or introduce new privileged code into the system -- even in the presence of kernel vulnerabilities. Our evaluations show that the extra hardware required to support these protections incurs minimal silicon and energy overheads. Neverland enables operating systems to reduce their attack surface without having to rely on complex integrity monitoring software or hardware.
3D Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image Using Adversarial Training

We address the task of 3D semantic scene completion, i.e., given a single depth image, we predict the semantic labels and occupancy of voxels in a 3D grid representing the scene. In light of the recently introduced generative adversarial networks (GAN), our goal is to explore the potential of this model and the efficiency of various important design choices. Our results show that using conditional GANs outperforms the vanilla GAN setup. We evaluate these architecture designs on several datasets. Based on our experiments, we demonstrate that GANs are able to outperform the performance of a baseline 3D CNN in case of clean annotations, but they suffer from poorly aligned annotations.
A Survey of Blocking and Filtering Techniques for Entity Resolution

Efficiency techniques are an integral part of Entity Resolution, since its infancy. In this survey, we organized the bulk of works in the field into Blocking, Filtering and hybrid techniques, facilitating their understanding and use. We also provided an in-dept coverage of each category, further classifying the corresponding works into novel sub-categories. Lately, the efficiency techniques have received more attention, due to the rise of Big Data. This includes large volumes of semi-structured data, which pose challenges not only to the scalability of efficiency techniques, but also to their core assumptions: the requirement of Blocking for schema knowledge and of Filtering for high similarity thresholds. The former led to the introduction of schema-agnostic Blocking in conjunction with Block Processing techniques, while the latter led to more relaxed criteria of similarity. Our survey covers these new fields in detail, putting in context all relevant works.
Study on the Genetic Differentiation of Geographic Populations of Calliptamus italicus (Orthoptera: Acrididae) in Sino-Kazakh Border Areas Based on Mitochondrial COI and COII Genes

Abstract Calliptamus italicus L. is an important pest on the desert and semidesert steppes along the Sino-Kazakh border. To elucidate the molecular mechanism of its continuous outbreaks, we studied 11 different geographic populations of C. italicus to determine: 1) the complete sequences of the entire mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) and mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit II (COII) genes, and 2) performed genetic diversity, differentiation, gene flow, and molecular variation analyses. Of the 11 populations, theYining County (YNX) population had the highest haplotype diversity and Pi values. There are significant differences in Tajima's D and Fu's Fs (P < 0.05). The fixation index Fst values of the total C. italicus population were 0.03352, and its gene flow Nm values of the total C. italicus population were 15.32. Taken together, there were five main findings: 1) the current genetic differentiation of C. italicus arose within populations; 2) genetic exchange levels were high between geographical populations; 3) genetic variation level was low; 4) C. italicus populations likely expanded in recently, and 5) there was no significant correlation between genetic distance and geographic distance for any geographic population. Findings from this study indicate that frequent gene exchange between populations may enhance the adaptability of C. italicus along the Sino-Kazakh border, leading to frequent outbreaks.
Kernel Mean Matching for Content Addressability of GANs

We propose a novel procedure which adds "content-addressability" to any given unconditional implicit model e.g., a generative adversarial network (GAN). The procedure allows users to control the generative process by specifying a set (arbitrary size) of desired examples based on which similar samples are generated from the model. The proposed approach, based on kernel mean matching, is applicable to any generative models which transform latent vectors to samples, and does not require retraining of the model. Experiments on various high-dimensional image generation problems (CelebA-HQ, LSUN bedroom, bridge, tower) show that our approach is able to generate images which are consistent with the input set, while retaining the image quality of the original model. To our knowledge, this is the first work that attempts to construct, at test time, a content-addressable generative model from a trained marginal model.
Optimising the Design of Offshore Wind Farm Collection Networks

Wind turbines have reached a stage of maturity such that their use in offshore applications is becoming common. A principal objective of the offshore wind farm developer is to implement the wind farm to give the lowest cost of energy over the lifetime of the project, thus ensuring the greatest return on investment. Economic performance of the turbines is paramount, but the performance of the electrical infrastructure can comprise a significant portion of total project costs, typically 10-20%. This paper reviews the principles of offshore wind farm collection system economics and outlines methods to optimise the turbine layout, location of offshore substations and the sizing and design of the wind farm collection network. It considers the economic impact of cable size selection and the potential benefits for using multiple offshore substations, with a view to minimising lifetime ownership costs of the scheme without compromising or operational technical requirements
Ovulation induction: comparing success rates between anovulatory and ovulatory cycles using different treatment protocols

Abstract The management of patients with sub-fertility, particularly unexplained sub-fertility, is a sensitive and complex matter. This was a prospective observational study conducted from October 2016 to March 2017 in Galway, Ireland, the aim of which was to identify the clinical pregnancy rates (CPR) in women undergoing ovulation induction (OI) with timed sexual intercourse (TSI) or intrauterine insemination (IUI) and to compare them across two groups: (1) Anovulatory women and (2) ovulatory women with unexplained subfertility. Patients undergoing OI were recruited consecutively and OI regimens were prescribed as per local clinical protocol. The main observation was a higher CPR in the anovulatory group (18%) compared with the ovulatory group (CPR = 10%) (p < 0.05). No difference was observed in the CPR between the TSI and IUI groups. There are many studies to support the use of OI in the treatment of women with anovulatory subfertility, though the use of OI in ovulatory women is a more controversial issue. The treatment options offered to these patients need to be individualized to each couple and should consider their length of infertility, age, and financial means. Due to the lower cost and the less invasive nature of OI-treatment we conclude that a short treatment course could be offered as an acceptable alternative prior to IVF.
Roadmap to functional cure of chronic hepatitis B: An expert consensus

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection continues to be a major public health issue worldwide. HBsAg loss is associated with functional remission and improved long‐term outcome, and is considered to be a ‘functional cure’ (also referred to as clinical or immunologic cure) for chronic hepatitis B. This ideal goal of therapy can be achieved using optimized combination regimens with direct‐acting antivirals [eg nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs)] and immunomodulators [eg pegylated interferon alpha2a (Peg‐IFN)] in selected patients with chronic hepatitis B. Among different combination therapies currently available, those with NA lead‐in followed by Peg‐IFN in virally suppressed patients has been demonstrated to be effective. This review provides an updated overview of the evidence supporting the use of combination therapies and summarizes expert consensus on the roadmap to attain functional cure for chronic hepatitis B patients.
Energy-Efﬁcient Resource Allocation for Phantom Cellular Networks with Imperfect CSI

—Multi-tier heterogeneous networks have become an essential constituent for next generation cellular networks. Mean-while, energy efﬁciency (EE) has been considered a critical design criterion along with the traditional spectral efﬁciency (SE) metric. In this context, we study power and spectrum allocation for a two-tier phantom cellular network, The optimization framework includes both EE and SE. We consider densely deployed phantom cellular networks and model the EE optimization problem taking into consideration the inevitable interference in this setup and imperfect channel estimation impairments. To this end, we pro-pose three resource allocation strategies aiming at optimizing this network EE performance metric. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of changing some system parameters on the performance of these strategies, such as phantom cells resource units share, number of deployed phantom cells within a macro cell , number of pilots, and the phantom cells transmission power budget. It is found that increasing the number of pilots will deteriorate the EE performance of the whole setup, while increasing phantom cells transmission power budget will not affect the EE of the whole setup signiﬁcantly. In addition, we observed that it is always useful to allocate most of the network resource units to the phantom cells tier.
The correlative study between CTSI and gastrocolic ligament involvement in acute pancreatitis involving

To investigate the CT findings of gastrocolic ligament involved by acute pancreatitis(AP) and study the correlation between CT findings and CT Severity Index (CTSI) of AP. Methods: Seventy-nine patients with AP were retrospectively reviewed. Balthazar's CT classification of all the patients' was C grade or more. Emphasis was placed on the following findings: the CTSI, the thickness and density of the gastrocolic ligament, fluid collection within the gastrocolic ligament and its scope. Results: Among the 79 patients, 21 patients' CTSI was 8-10, 29 patients' CTSI was 6-7, and 29 patients' CTSI was 4-5. The CT manifestations of gastrocolic ligament involvement in AP include density increasing, stripe shadow, thickness and fluid collection of the gastrocolic ligament. 21 patients showed fluid collection in the gastrocolic ligament. The incidence of gastrocolic ligament involvement was associated with CTSI (P<;0.05). Conclusion: MSCT can demonstrate the details of gastrocolic ligament involvement in AP, which may reflect the severity of AP in a certain extent.
Influence of Randomness in Rubber Materials Parameters on the Reliability of Rubber O-Ring Seal

The properties of materials directly affect the performance of the sealing structures, among which the rubber O-ring seal is one of the most commonly used. In addition, the performance of the O-ring seal is often influenced by the randomness in structure and working conditions, which greatly reduce the reliability of the sealing structure. This paper proposes a reliability-based method to analyze the influence of the randomness in rubber material parameters on the sealing performance of the O-ring. Based on the failure mechanism of the O-ring seal, the stochastic characteristics of the parameters in O-rings are determined through experiments, and the influences of these parameters on the reliability are subsequently analyzed. Moreover, the working conditions are also taken into account to analyze their influence on the performance and reliability of the O-ring seal. The proposed method provides easy access to estimate the reliability of the rubber O-ring seal considering the uncertainty in structure and operational conditions. It is revealed that the material and geometric parameters had greater influence on the reliability of the rubber O-ring.