Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mucin Production and Hydration Responses to Mucopurulent Materials in Normal versus Cystic Fibrosis Airway Epithelia

Rationale: Cystic fibrosis (CF) airways disease produces a mucoobstructive lung phenotype characterized by airways mucus plugging, epithelial mucous cell metaplasia/hyperplasia, chronic infection, and inflammation. Simultaneous biochemical and functional in vivo studies of mucin synthesis and secretion from CF airways are not available. In vitro translational models may quantitate differential CF versus normal mucin and fluid secretory responses to infectious/inflammatory stimuli. Objectives: We tested the hypothesis that CF airways exhibit defective epithelial fluid, but not mucin, secretory responses to bacterial/inflammatory host products. Methods: Well‐differentiated primary human bronchial epithelial cultures were exposed to supernatant from mucopurulent material (SMM) from human CF airways as a test of bacterial/inflammatory host product stimulus. Human bronchial epithelia (HBE) with normal CF transmembrane conductance regulator function were compared with &Dgr;F508/&Dgr;F508 CF HBE. Measurements and Main Results: Acute (up to 60 min) SMM exposure promoted mucin secretion, but mucins were degraded by the proteolytic enzymes present in SMM. Chronic SMM exposure induced upregulation of mucin synthesis and storage and generated absolute increases in basal and stimulated mucin release in normal and CF cultures. These responses were similar in normal and CF cultures. In contrast, SMM produced a coordinated CF transmembrane conductance regulator‐mediated Cl‐ secretory response in normal HBE, but not in CF HBE. The absence of the fluid secretory response in CF produced quantitatively more dehydrated mucus. Conclusions: Our study reveals the interplay between regulation of mucin and fluid secretion rates in inflamed versus noninflamed conditions and why a hyperconcentrated mucus is produced in CF airways.
Factors Related to the Development of Shunt-Dependent Hydrocephalus Following Subarachnoid Hemorrhage in the Elderly.

AIM Surgical procedures for aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) are increasing among the elderly as the population ages. Chronic shunt-dependent hydrocephalus is a recognized complication of SAH. The aim of this study was to identify predictive factors for the development of shunt-dependent hydrocephalus among elderly patients with SAH. MATERIAL AND METHODS We retrospectively studied 878 patients, including 275 patients ? 65 years old, with SAH treated between 2005 and 2015 to identify factors contributing to the development of shunt-dependent hydrocephalus. The relationships between shunt-dependent hydrocephalus and the causative factors were analyzed using univariate and multivariate analysis; the causative factors were based on the results of previous studies. RESULTS In the 878 patients with SAH, there was a significant difference in the incidence of shunt-dependent hydrocephalus between patients < 65 years old and those ? 65 years old (p=0.021). In the 275 patients ? 65 years old, the following were associated with shunt-dependent hydrocephalus on univariate analysis: 1) Hunt and Hess grade (p=0.005), 2) Fisher grade (p < 0.001), 3) intraventricular hemorrhage (p < 0.001), 4) acute hydrocephalus (p=0.003), 5) aneurysm location (p=0.001), and 6) external ventricular drain placement (p < 0.001). On multivariate analysis, only 1) intraventricular hemorrhage (p < 0.001) and 2) a ruptured aneurysm located in the distal posterior circulation (p=0.014) were related to an increased risk for the development of shunt-dependent hydrocephalus. CONCLUSION Evaluating risk factors can help identify patients at high risk of developing shunt-dependent hydrocephalus. Identifying these risk factors may help neurosurgeons to provide optimal therapy and improve outcomes in patients with SAH.
The Effect of Filler Loading on Curing and Mechanical Properties of Natural Rubber/recycled Rubber Powder Blends

ABSTRACT Curing characteristics and mechanical properties of carbon black– and silica-filled natural rubber (NR)/recycled rubber powder (RRP) blends were studied. Results indicate that the minimum torque and maximum torque increase with increasing filler loading in the compounds, whereas scorch time shows a decreasing trend. Cure time of carbon black–filled NR/RRP blends decreases with increasing filler loading whereas silca-filled NR/RRP blends show an opposite trend. Incorporation of filler loading has improved the tensile modulus, hardness, tear strength, and resistances toward swelling. However, elongation at break and resilience exhibit a different trend. For tensile strength, optimum values were obtained at 15 phr of both fillers. Overall results show that carbon black (N550) is more suitable to be used as a filler in natural rubber/recycle rubber powder blends compared to silica (Vulcasil S).
Analyzing semi‐competing risks data with missing cause of informative terminal event

Cancer studies frequently yield multiple event times that correspond to landmarks in disease progression, including non‐terminal events (i.e., cancer recurrence) and an informative terminal event (i.e., cancer‐related death). Hence, we often observe semi‐competing risks data. Work on such data has focused on scenarios in which the cause of the terminal event is known. However, in some circumstances, the information on cause for patients who experience the terminal event is missing; consequently, we are not able to differentiate an informative terminal event from a non‐informative terminal event. In this article, we propose a method to handle missing data regarding the cause of an informative terminal event when analyzing the semi‐competing risks data. We first consider the nonparametric estimation of the survival function for the terminal event time given missing cause‐of‐failure data via the expectation–maximization algorithm. We then develop an estimation method for semi‐competing risks data with missing cause of the terminal event, under a pre‐specified semiparametric copula model. We conduct simulation studies to investigate the performance of the proposed method. We illustrate our methodology using data from a study of early‐stage breast cancer. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Information and Communications Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals: State-of-the-Art, Needs and Perspectives

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly accepted the 2030 Development Agenda, which has included 92 paragraphs, and the Paragraph 91 defined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The goal of this paper is to discover the correlations among SDGs and information and communications technologies (ICTs). This paper discusses the roles and opportunities that ICTs play in pursuing the SDGs. We identify a number of research gaps to those three pillars, social, economic, and environmental perspectives, of sustainable development. After extensive literature reviews on the SDG-related research initiatives and activities, we find that the majority of contributions to SDGs recognized by the IEEE and ACM research communities have mainly focused on the technical aspects while there are lack of the holistic social good perspectives. Therefore, there are essential and urgent needs to raise the awareness and call for attentions on how to innovate and energize ICTs in order to best assist all nations to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
Analysing Data-To-Text Generation Benchmarks

A generation system can only be as good as the data it is trained on. In this short paper, we propose a methodology for analysing data-to-text corpora used for training Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. We apply this methodology to three existing benchmarks. We conclude by eliciting a set of criteria for the creation of a data-to-text benchmark which could help better support the development, evaluation and comparison of linguistically sophisticated data-to-text generators.
Design an evaluation of RoboCup humanoid goalie

In this article we describe the ethological inspired architecture we have developed and how it has been used to implement a humanoid goalkeeper according to the regulations of the two-legged Standard Platform League of the RoboCup Federation. We present relevant concepts borrowed from ethology that we have successfully used for generating autonomous behaviours in mobile robotics, such as the use of ethograms in robotic pets or the ideas of schemata, or the use of fixed actions patterns to implement reactivity. Then we discuss the implementation of this architecture on the Nao biped robot. Finally, we propose a method for its evaluation and validation and analyse the results obtained during RoboCup real competition, which allowed us to test first hand how it worked in a real environment.
Burdens of mental disorders : the approach of the World Mental Health ( WMH ) surveys

Introduction The concept of global burden of disease was first publicized in a landmark report commissioned by the World Bank (1993). The measure developed in that report to operationalize the definition of disease burden was designed to assess the gap in the health of a population, taking into account not only mortality but also the non-fatal consequences of injury and disease. This was accomplished by creating a single summary measure that combined the number of years lost due to premature mortality with the number of years “lost” due to living with disabling non-fatal conditions. As a continuation of that work, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Harvard University published the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study (Murray & López 1996) in an effort to provide systematic estimates of the leading causes of death globally and to combine these estimates with the leading causes of disability. The GBD study took exhaustive measurements of the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost due to more than 100 diseases and 19 risk factors. The first publication of the GBD study estimated that in 1990 unipolar major depression was the fourth leading cause of the loss of DALYs worldwide (3.7%), exceeded only by respiratory infections (8.2%), diarrheal diseases (7.2%), and perinatal conditions (6.7%). Projections estimate that unipolar major depression will be the number one leading cause of total disability worldwide by the year 2030 (World Health Organization 2008). The GBD made it very clear, almost for the first time, that mental disorders are a major challenge to global health. A totally renewed set of GBD estimates for the year 2010, with more conditions and risk factors, was released at the end of 2012 (Murray et al. 2012). A subsequent systematic review of epidemiological studies on mental disorders examined estimates of frequency (one-year prevalence), risk of mortality, and disability associated with 10 mental disorders (Eaton et al. 2007). In that review, the one-year prevalence of major depressive disorders (median of 42 studies) was 5.3% of the adult population, with a median excess risk of mortality of 70% (OR = 1.7) and a disability weighting between 0.35 (0 [worst] to 1 [best]) and a Sheehan Disability Score of 58 (0 [worst] to 100 [best]). Because of their high prevalence and associated significant disability, the review estimated that the cost of mental disorders in Western countries were huge. In Europe, the total cost of mental disorders in 2011 was estimated to be €461 billion (nearly €1,000 per inhabitant) (Gustavsson et al. 2011). Of those, 39% corresponded to direct medical costs (due to the use of professional services, medical interventions, and medication), 13% to other direct non-medical services, and almost half (48%) to indirect costs (those incurred due to sick leave, early retirement, and premature death) (Gustavsson et al. 2011). Affective disorders, and especially unipolar depression, alone accounted for more than half of the indirect costs, indicating the considerable toll such disorders place on European social productivity.
Efflux proteins at the blood–brain barrier: review and bioinformatics analysis

Abstract 1. Efflux proteins at the blood–brain barrier provide a mechanism for export of waste products of normal metabolism from the brain and help to maintain brain homeostasis. They also prevent entry into the brain of a wide range of potentially harmful compounds such as drugs and xenobiotics. 2. Conversely, efflux proteins also hinder delivery of therapeutic drugs to the brain and central nervous system used to treat brain tumours and neurological disorders. For bypassing efflux proteins, a comprehensive understanding of their structures, functions and molecular mechanisms is necessary, along with new strategies and technologies for delivery of drugs across the blood–brain barrier. 3. We review efflux proteins at the blood–brain barrier, classified as either ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters (P-gp, BCRP, MRPs) or solute carrier (SLC) transporters (OATP1A2, OATP1A4, OATP1C1, OATP2B1, OAT3, EAATs, PMAT/hENT4 and MATE1). 4. This includes information about substrate and inhibitor specificity, structural organisation and mechanism, membrane localisation, regulation of expression and activity, effects of diseases and conditions and the principal technique used for in vivo analysis of efflux protein activity: positron emission tomography (PET). 5. We also performed analyses of evolutionary relationships, membrane topologies and amino acid compositions of the proteins, and linked these to structure and function.
Primary B-Cell Mucosa-Associated Lymphoid Tissue Lymphoma of the Hard Palate and Parotid Gland: Report of One Case and Review of the Literature

A 61-year-old woman was admitted to our hospital with an ulcerated palate mass and swelling of the right parotid gland. Incisional biopsy from the hard palate revealed an extranodal marginal zone B-cell lymphoma, also called mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma. Final diagnosis was MALT lymphoma of the parotid gland with concomitant involvement of an extremely seldom site of involvement: the hard palate. To our knowledge, this report illustrates the first case of MALT lymphoma of the hard palate and parotid gland without an underlying autoimmune disease. Rituximab-based combination regimen (R-CHOP) provided complete remission with total regression of mass lesions at the hard palate and parotid gland. At 44-month follow-up, there is no disease relapse. We adressed the manifestations and management of MALT lymphoma patients with involvement of salivary gland and oral cavity.
Winners and losers of national and global efforts to reconcile agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation

Closing yield gaps within existing croplands, and thereby avoiding further habitat conversions, is a prominently and controversially discussed strategy to meet the rising demand for agricultural products, while minimizing biodiversity impacts. The agricultural intensification associated with such a strategy poses additional threats to biodiversity within agricultural landscapes. The uneven spatial distribution of both yield gaps and biodiversity provides opportunities for reconciling agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation through spatially optimized intensification. Here, we integrate distribution and habitat information for almost 20,000 vertebrate species with land‐cover and land‐use datasets. We estimate that projected agricultural intensification between 2000 and 2040 would reduce the global biodiversity value of agricultural lands by 11%, relative to 2000. Contrasting these projections with spatial land‐use optimization scenarios reveals that 88% of projected biodiversity loss could be avoided through globally coordinated land‐use planning, implying huge efficiency gains through international cooperation. However, global‐scale optimization also implies a highly uneven distribution of costs and benefits, resulting in distinct “winners and losers” in terms of national economic development, food security, food sovereignty or conservation. Given conflicting national interests and lacking effective governance mechanisms to guarantee equitable compensation of losers, multinational land‐use optimization seems politically unlikely. In turn, 61% of projected biodiversity loss could be avoided through nationally focused optimization, and 33% through optimization within just 10 countries. Targeted efforts to improve the capacity for integrated land‐use planning for sustainable intensification especially in these countries, including the strengthening of institutions that can arbitrate subnational land‐use conflicts, may offer an effective, yet politically feasible, avenue to better reconcile future trade‐offs between agriculture and conservation. The efficiency gains of optimization remained robust when assuming that yields could only be increased to 80% of their potential. Our results highlight the need to better integrate real‐world governance, political and economic challenges into sustainable development and global change mitigation research.
Multisensor Earth Observation Image Classification Based on a Multimodal Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

Many previous researches have already shown the advantages of multisensor land-cover classification. Here, we propose an innovative land-cover classification approach based on learning a joint latent model of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multispectral satellite images using multimodal latent Dirichlet allocation (mmLDA), a probabilistic generative model. It has already been successfully applied to various other problems dealing with multimodal data. For our experiments, we chose overlapping SAR and multispectral images of two regions of interest. The images were tiled into patches and their local primitive features were extracted. Then each image patch is represented by SAR and multispectral bag-of-words (BoW) models. The BoW values are both fed to the mmLDA, resulting in a joint latent data model. A qualitative and quantitative validation of the topics based on ground-truth data demonstrate that the land-cover categories of the regions are correctly classified, outperforming the topics obtained using individual single modality data.
Duration in Poverty-Related Programs and Number of Child Maltreatment Reports

This study examined the relationship of a family’s duration in poverty-related programs (i.e., Aid to Families with Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid) to the subject child’s number of maltreatment reports while considering race and baseline neighborhood poverty. Children from a large Midwestern metropolitan area were followed through a linked cross-sector administrative database from birth to age 15. Generalized multilevel models were employed to account for the multilevel structure of the data (i.e., nesting of families within neighborhoods). The data showed a unique and significant contribution of duration in poverty-related programs to the number of maltreatment reports. The predicted number of maltreatment reports increased by between 2.5 and 3.7 times, as duration in poverty-related programs increased from 0 to 9 years. This relationship was consistent between Whites and non-Whites (over 98% Black), but non-Whites showed a significantly lower number of total maltreatment reports while controlling for duration in poverty-related programs. We were unable to find a significant association between child maltreatment reports and baseline neighborhood poverty.
Ionizing radiation does not impair the mechanisms controlling genetic stability during T cell receptor gene rearrangement in mice

Abstract Purpose: To determine whether low dose/low dose rate radiation-induced genetic instability may result from radiation-induced inactivation of mechanisms induced by the ATM-dependent DNA damage response checkpoint. To this end, we analysed the faithfulness of T cell receptor (TR) gene rearrangement by V(D)J recombination in DNA from mice exposed to a single dose of X-ray or chronically exposed to low dose rate γ radiation. Materials and methods: Genomic DNA obtained from the blood or the thymus of wild type or Ogg1-deficient mice exposed to low (0.1) or intermediate/high (0.2–1 Gy) doses of radiation either by acute X-rays exposure or protracted exposure to low dose-rate γ-radiation was used to analyse by PCR the presence of illegitimate TR gene rearrangements. Results: Radiation exposure does not increase the onset of TR gene trans-rearrangements in irradiated mice. In mice where it happens, trans-rearrangements remain sporadic events in developing T lymphocytes. Conclusion: We concluded that low dose/low dose rate ionizing radiation (IR) exposure does not lead to widespread inactivation of ATM-dependent mechanisms, and therefore that the mechanisms enforcing genetic stability are not impaired by IR in developing lymphocytes and lymphocyte progenitors, including BM-derived hematopoietic stem cells, in low dose/low dose rate exposed mice.
Priority-based receiver-side relay election in wireless ad hoc sensor networks

Receiver-side relay election has been recently proposed as an alternative to transmitter-side relay selection in wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper we study different prioritization schemes among potential relay nodes to achieve a better delay and contention resolution performance. We consider a priority criteria based on least remaining distance to the destination and propose a generalized mapping function to introduce relative priority among the eligible relay nodes. We show that, a suitable mapping can be found to achieve an optimum relay election performance, which also outperforms the random forwarding approach. Our intuition is guided by an analytic framework and verified by network simulation.
The impact of CACNA1C gene, and its epistasis with ZNF804A, on white matter microstructure in health, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder1

Genome‐wide studies have identified allele A (adenine) of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs1006737 of the calcium‐channel CACNA1C gene as a risk factor for both schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) as well as allele A for rs1344706 in the ZNF804A gene. These illnesses have also been associated with white matter abnormalities, reflected by reductions in fractional anisotropy (FA), measured using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). We assessed the impact of the CACNA1C psychosis risk variant on FA in SZ, BD and health. 230 individuals (with existing ZNF804A rs1344706 genotype data) were genotyped for CACNA1C rs1006737 and underwent DTI. FA data was analysed with tract‐based spatial statistics and threshold‐free cluster enhancement significance correction (P < 0.05) to detect effects of CACNA1C genotype on FA, and its potential interaction with ZNF804A genotype and with diagnosis, on FA. There was no significant main effect of the CACNA1C genotype on FA, nor diagnosis by genotype(s) interactions. Nevertheless, when inspecting SZ in particular, risk allele carriers had significantly lower FA than the protective genotype individuals, in portions of the left middle occipital and parahippocampal gyri, right cerebellum, left optic radiation and left inferior and superior temporal gyri. Our data suggests a minor involvement of CACNA1C rs1006737 in psychosis via conferring susceptibility to white matter microstructural abnormalities in SZ. Put in perspective, ZNF804A rs1344706, not only had a significant main effect, but its SZ‐specific effects were two orders of magnitude more widespread than that of CACNA1C rs1006737.