Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relation between Pulmonary Function and Inflammatory Biomarkers in Hemodialysis Patients

The purpose of our study was to investigate the relationship between pulmonary function and serum levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), ferritin, albumin, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate, as inflammatory biomarkers, in hemodialysis patients. Ninety-eight patients, who were dialyzed at least for 3 months, were included in this study. Patients’ blood samples were collected and pulmonary function tests, forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV1), and peak expiratory flow (PEF) were measured and expressed as the %predicted using appropriate normal values for the patients’ sex, age, and height (%FVC, %FEV1, and %PEF), at the same time. The patients with CRP ≥ 10 μg/mL were significantly older and had lower values of %FEV1, %FVC and %PEF (p = 0.006, p = 0.001, and p = 0.016, respectively); whereas just %FEV1 (p = 0.025) and %FVC (p = 0.009) had significant differences between the patients with ferritin ≥ 100 μg/L and other patients. However, no other significant differences were found between inflammatory biomarkers and the pulmonary function tests. We concluded that inflammation has a close relation with pulmonary dysfunction in hemodialysis patients.
A particle smoothing implementation of the fully-adapted auxiliary particle filter: An alternative to auxiliary particle filters

The Fully Adapted Auxiliary Particle Filter (FA-APF) is a well known Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for computing recursively the filtering pdf in a Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) model. However, in most of cases, the FA-APF cannot be used directly because the required functions are unavailable. To cope with this issue, the Auxiliary Particle Filter (APF) uses Importance Sampling (IS) with two degrees of freedom. APF techniques need an importance distribution and also a reliable approximation of the predictive likelihood. In this paper, we propose a class of SMC algorithms which also try to mimic the FA-APF but which have the advantage not to require any approximation of the predictive likelihood. The performances of our solution as compared to the APF algorithm is provided by simulations.
Investigating center effects in a multi-center clinical trial study using a parametric proportional hazards meta-analysis model

Title of thesis: Investigating center effects in a multi-center clinical trial study using a parametric proportional hazards meta-analysis model Mathewos S. Demissie Master of Science, 2009 Thesis directed by: Professor Eric V. Slud Mathematical Statistics Program Department of Mathematics In this paper, we investigate meta-analysis of the overall treatment effect in the setting of a multi-center clinical trial study in which patient level data are available. We estimate the overall treatment effect using two methods: metaanalysis, which uses the summary statistics from each center and a unified combined analysis of patient level data. In the meta-analysis we use a random effects meta-analysis model and in both analyses we use a parametric proportional hazards model. In a randomized clinical trial study, subjects are recruited at multiple centers to accrue large enough samples within an acceptable period of time and to enhance the generalizability of study results. Heterogeneity between trials may arise from the center effects or treatment effect itself. To take into account the heterogeneities, random effects models are used. We performed a data analysis based on a multi-center clinical trial study in small-cell lung cancer conducted by the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group and then parallel data analysis within a simulation study. In the simulation study we vary the magnitude of the center and the treatmentby-center heterogeneity in the data generation and estimated the over all treatment effect using the two methods. We compared the two methods in terms of bias, mean square error and percentage of significant treatment effect. The simulation study shows that meta-analysis treatment effects estimate are slightly biased when covariates are included in the analysis. Investigating center effects in a multi-center clinical trial study using a parametric proportional hazards meta-analysis model
Involvement of Receptor Activity-Modifying Protein 3 (RAMP3) in the Vascular Actions of Adrenomedullin in Rat Mesenteric Artery Smooth Muscle Cells1

ABSTRACT CALCB, ADM, and ADM2 are potent vasodilators that share a seven-transmembrane GPCR, calcitonin receptor-like receptor (CALCRL), whose ligand specificity is dictated by the presence of one of the three receptor activity-modifying proteins (RAMPs). We assessed the relative pharmacologic potency of these peptides in mesenteric artery smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and the specific RAMP that mediates the effect of ADM in VSMCs. VSMCs, with or without RAMP knockdown, were treated with CALCB, ADM, or ADM2 in the presence or absence of their antagonists, CALCB8-37, ADM22-52, and ADM217-47, respectively, to assess the relative effect of peptides on cAMP production and their pharmacologic potency. Proximity ligation assay was used to assess the specific RAMP that associates with CALCRL to mediate the actions of ADM in VSMCs. All three peptides induced cAMP generation in VSMCs and the order of their potency is CALCB > ADM > ADM2. Effects of CALCB were blocked by CALCB8-37, ADM effects were blocked by CALCB8-37 and ADM217-47 but not ADM22-52, and ADM2 effects were blocked by all three antagonists. Knockdown of RAMP2 was ineffective, whereas knockdown of RAMP3 inhibited ADM-induced cAMP production in VSMCs, suggesting involvement of RAMP3 with CALCRL to mediate ADM effects. Absence of both RAMP2 and RAMP3 further increased CALCB-induced cAMP synthesis compared to control (P < 0.05). ADM increased CALCRL and RAMP3 association and RAMP3 knockdown inhibited the interaction of ADM with CALCRL.
Killing of intracellular Mycobacterium tuberculosis by receptor-mediated drug delivery

p-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS) conjugated to maleylated bovine serum albumin (MBSA) was taken up efficiently through high-affinity MBSA-binding sites on macrophages. Binding of the radiolabeled conjugate to cultured mouse peritoneal macrophages at 4 degrees C was competed for by MBSA but not by PAS. At 37 degrees C, the radiolabeled conjugate was rapidly degraded by the macrophages, leading to release of acid-soluble degradation products in the medium. The drug conjugate was nearly 100 times as effective as free PAS in killing the intracellular mycobacteria in mouse peritoneal macrophages infected in culture with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The killing of intracellular mycobacteria mediated by the drug conjugate was effectively prevented by simultaneous addition of excess MBSA (100 micrograms/ml) or chloroquine (3 microM) to the medium, whereas these agents did not affect the microbicidal action of free PAS. These results suggest that (i) uptake of the PAS-MBSA conjugate was mediated by cell surface receptors on macrophages which recognize MBSA and (ii) lysosomal hydrolysis of the internalized conjugate resulted in intracellular release of a pharmacologically active form of the drug, which led to selective killing of the M. tuberculosis harbored by mouse macrophages infected in culture. This receptor-mediated modality of delivering drugs to macrophages could contribute to greater therapeutic efficacy and minimization of toxic side effects in the management of tuberculosis and other intracellular mycobacterial infections.
Mining paths and transactions data to improve allocating commodity shelves in supermarket

How to deploy commodities for sale in different shelves in a supermarket in order to obtain better benefit for merchants with considering convenience for customers is an important topic in the retail area. In this paper, we present a new method for allocating commodity shelves in supermarket based on customers' shopping paths and transactions data mining. Therein, customers' shopping paths data can be obtained by shopping cart or basket, on which RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags located. And shopping transaction data can be obtained from POS (Point of Sales) machine. Through integrating and mining the frequent paths data and transactions data, See-Buy Rate, which refers to an approximate probability to purchase this commodity for customers when they see this commodity, can be calculated for each commodity. Based on SeeBuy Rate, we build benefit optimization model to obtain the optimal allocating solution with considering the profit, sales volume, and purchase probability of the commodity. At last, one computation example is illustrated to show how to apply this method to practice.
Leakage Minimization of SRAM Cells in a Dual-Vt and Dual-Tox Technology

Aggressive CMOS scaling results in low threshold voltage and thin oxide thickness for transistors manufactured in deep submicrometer regime. As a result, reducing the subthreshold and tunneling gate leakage currents has become one of the most important criteria in the design of VLSI circuits. This paper presents a method based on dual- V t and dual- T ox assignment to reduce the total leakage power dissipation of static random access memories (SRAMs) while maintaining their performance. The proposed method is based on the observation that read and write delays of a memory cell in an SRAM block depend on the physical distance of the cell from the sense amplifier and the decoder. Thus, the idea is to deploy different configurations of six-transistor SRAM cells corresponding to different threshold voltage and oxide thickness assignments for the transistors. Unlike other techniques for low-leakage SRAM design, the proposed technique incurs neither area nor delay overhead. In addition, it results in a minor change in the SRAM design flow. The leakage saving achieved by using this technique is a function of the values of the high threshold voltage and the oxide thickness, as well as the number of rows and columns in the cell array. Simulation results with a 65-nm process demonstrate that this technique can reduce the total leakage power dissipation of a 64 times 512 SRAM array by 33% and that of a 32 times 512 SRAM array by 40%.
Simple Preparation of Novel Metal-Containing Mesoporous Starches †

Metal-containing mesoporous starches have been synthesized using a simple and efficient microwave-assisted methodology followed by metal impregnation in the porous gel network. Final materials exhibited surface areas >60 m2 g−1, being essentially mesoporous with pore sizes in the 10–15 nm range with some developed inter-particular mesoporosity. These materials characterized by several techniques including XRD, SEM, TG/DTA and DRIFTs may find promising catalytic applications due to the presence of (hydr)oxides in their composition.
Parenteral bilirubin in healthy volunteers: a reintroduction in translational research

AIMS Preclinical results suggest therapeutic potential of mild hyperbilirubinemia in T2DM and cardiovascular disease. Translational data are limited, because an appropriate bilirubin formulation for parenteral human use is lacking. Considering its use in both clinical practice and medical research in the past, we explored the feasibility to reintroduce parenteral bilirubin for translational experiments. METHODS We developed a preparation method in accordance with good manufacturing practice and evaluated the parenteral applicability in healthy volunteers (n = 8). Explorative pharmacokinetic and safety data were compared to the results from a literature study on the former parenteral use of bilirubin. Bilirubin was administered intra-arterially to raise the local plasma concentration in the forearm vascular bed (n = 4) and intravenously to raise the systemic plasma concentration (n = 4). Finally, pharmacokinetic characteristics were studied following a single bolus infusion (n = 3). RESULTS During parenteral application, no side effects occurred. Adverse events mentioned during the two-week observation period were in general mild and self-limiting. Three more significant adverse events (appendicitis, asymptomatic cardiac arrhythmia and atopic eczema) were judged unrelated by independent physicians. A dose-concentration relationship appeared sufficiently predictable for both intra-arterial and intravenous administration. In line with existing knowledge, bilirubin pharmacokinetics could be described best according to a two-compartment model with a volume of distribution of 9.9 (±2.0) l and a total plasma clearance of 36 (±16) ml per minute. CONCLUSIONS Supported by previous reports, our data suggest that it is both feasible and safe to perform translational experiments with parenteral albumin bound bilirubin.
Blind Separation of Anechoic Under-determined Speech Mixtures using Multiple Sensors

This paper presents a novel technique for blind source separation (BSS) of anechoic speech mixtures in the underdetermined case. A demising algorithm that exploits the sparsity of the short time Fourier transform (STFT) of speech signals is proposed. The algorithm merges constrained optimization with ideas based on the degenerate unmixing estimation technique (DUET) (O. Yilmaz and S. Rickard, 2004). Thus, the novelty in the proposed approach is twofold. First, the algorithm utilizes all available mixtures in the anechoic scenario, where both attenuations and arrival delays between sensors are considered. Second, it is demonstrated that lq minimization with q < 1 outperforms the standard choice of q = 1. Experimental results on both synthetic and real mixtures indicate significant performance gains over other BSS algorithms reported in the literature
Learning knowledge bases for information extraction from multiple text based Web sites

We describe a learning approach to automatically building knowledge bases for information extraction from multiple text based Web pages. A frame based representation is introduced to represent domain knowledge as knowledge unit frames. A frame learning algorithm is developed to automatically learn knowledge unit frames from training examples. Some training examples can be obtained by automatically parsing a number of tabular Web pages in the same domain, which greatly reduced the time consuming manual work. This approach was investigated on ten Web sites of real estate advertisements and car advertisements and nearly all the information was successfully extracted with very few false alarms. These results suggest that both the knowledge unit frame representation and the frame learning algorithm work well, domain specific knowledge base can be learned from training examples, and the domain specific knowledge base can be used for information extraction from flexible text-based semi-structured Web pages on multiple Web sites.
What Makes a Visualization Memorable?

An ongoing debate in the Visualization community concerns the role that visualization types play in data understanding. In human cognition, understanding and memorability are intertwined. As a first step towards being able to ask questions about impact and effectiveness, here we ask: 'What makes a visualization memorable? ' We ran the largest scale visualization study to date using 2,070 single-panel visualizations, categorized with visualization type (e.g., bar chart, line graph, etc.), collected from news media sites, government reports, scientific journals, and infographic sources. Each visualization was annotated with additional attributes, including ratings for data-ink ratios and visual densities. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we collected memorability scores for hundreds of these visualizations, and discovered that observers are consistent in which visualizations they find memorable and forgettable. We find intuitive results (e.g., attributes like color and the inclusion of a human recognizable object enhance memorability) and less intuitive results (e.g., common graphs are less memorable than unique visualization types). Altogether our findings suggest that quantifying memorability is a general metric of the utility of information, an essential step towards determining how to design effective visualizations.
Polymer blends with spatially graded structures prepared by phase separation under a temperature gradient

Phase separation of poly(2-chlorostyrene)/poly(vinyl methyl ether) (P2CS/PVME) blends driven by a temperature gradient was investigated by phase-contrast optical microscopy combined with digital image analysis. The samples were set in a temperature gradient in such a way that the two ends of the gradient cover both sides of the critical point. When the high-temperature side of the gradient is increased with a constant rate, the interface that divides the miscible and the phase separated regions of the blend moves toward the low temperature side, leaving the phase separating region behind. It was found that in the vicinity of this interface, the phase separation takes place slowly via the spinodal decomposition process, giving interconnecting structures. In the region far from the newly growing interface, the droplet morphology appears as a result of the late stage of the spinodal decomposition. These droplets grow with time according to the power law ξ ∝ tβ, with β increasing from 0.30 to 0.44 along the temperature gradient. The phase separated blends with these graded morphologies show the broadened mechanical tanδ due to the graded structures distributed along the temperature gradient.
Accelerated versus conventional corneal collagen cross-linking in the treatment of mild keratoconus: a comparative study

Aim To evaluate the use of accelerated corneal collagen cross-linking in the management of mild and moderate progressive keratoconus in comparison with conventional cross-linking. Patients and methods Prospective randomized interventional case-control clinical trial. A total 25 eyes of 18 patients were randomly divided into two groups: group A included 14 eyes that received accelerated collagen cross-linking; and group B included eleven eyes that received conventional cross-linking (Dresden protocol). Cases with grade 1 and 2 keratoconus (Krumeich classification) with topographic evidence of progression were included. The uncorrected visual acuity and best spectacle-corrected visual acuity were recorded. Pentacam® corneal analysis imaging was used: The maximum and minimum keratometry and the central corneal thickness were recorded. Ocular Response Analyzer® (ORA) measurements were carried out to document the biomechanical parameters. Corneal hysteresis and corneal resistance factor were recorded. Postoperative evaluation included uncorrected visual acuity, best corrected visual acuity, and Pentacam and ORA measurements at 6 and 12 months. The follow-up period was 12 months. Results A progressive decrease in the flat keratometry, steep keratometry, and mean keratometry was noted throughout the follow-up period in both the accelerated and conventional groups. The improvement in keratometry was not statistically significant. The best spectacle-corrected visual acuity showed a statistically significant improvement in both groups by 1 year. The corneal hysteresis and corneal resistance factor showed nonsignificant improvement in both groups. The central corneal thickness showed a significant thinning at 6 months in both groups but approached baseline values by 12 months. Conclusion Accelerated corneal collagen cross-linking appears to show comparable results to conventional cross-linking in arresting the progression of mild keratoconus.
Restoration of images with optical aberrations and quantization in a transform domain

Digital images generally suffer from two main sources of degradations. The first includes errors introduced in imaging, such as blurring due to optical aberrations and sensor noise. The second includes errors introduced during the processing. One particular example is the quantization noise arising from lossy compression. While image restoration is concerned with the recovery of the object from these degradations, often we only deal with one type of the error at a time. In this paper, we present a restoration algorithm that handles images with optical aberrations and quantization in a transform domain. We show that it can be cast in a joint optimization setting, and demonstrate how it can be solved efficiently through alternating minimization. We also prove analytically that the algorithm is globally convergent to a unique solution when the restoration uses either H1-norm or TV-norm regularization. Simulation result asserts that this joint minimization produces images with smaller relative errors compared to a standard regularization model.
Cerebral vascular malformations adjacent to sensorimotor and visual cortex. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies before and after therapeutic intervention.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE It is not known how cerebral vascular malformations affect the function of the surrounding brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can provide information about normal functional neuroanatomy and its alteration by vascular lesions and therapeutic intervention. METHODS We performed fMRI studies in 24 patients harboring vascular malformations adjacent to primary somatosensory, motor, and visual cortex. The fMRI studies consisted of the acquisition of an image time series coupled with functional activation of motor, sensory, or visual cortex in both hemispheres. Activated voxels were identified using frequency domain analyses, and their number and anatomic location were compared between the affected and unaffected hemispheres. RESULTS Every patient capable of performing the desired task showed functional activation. Eight patients without neurological deficits showed a symmetrical pattern of activation between the hemispheres. Each had a vascular malformation located one or more gyri from the functional region imaged. Three patients showed hemispheric symmetry in the location of activated cortex but with a marked asymmetry in the number of activated voxels. Each harbored vascular malformations located within one gyrus of the functional region and showed either subtle or no neurological deficit. Eleven patients showed hemispheric asymmetry in the location of activated cortex. In 6, the anatomic displacement appeared to be due to a mass effect of the lesion. In 5, the activation occurred at a different anatomic locale, and the patients exhibited gross neurological deficit in the respective function. Posttherapeutic changes in functional activation reflected elimination of the mass effect or recovery of clinical function. CONCLUSIONS Systematic fMRI studies are possible in patients with vascular malformations in brain regions adjacent to primary somatosensory, motor, and visual cortex. Displacement of the activated region and hemispheric asymmetry in the number of activated voxels in the functional regions appear to reflect the anatomic and physiological impact of the vascular malformation. Changes in fMRI findings after intervention reflect the consequences of therapy and parallel clinical recovery.